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Starcher's age ought to have outgrown it, he knew. Most agents burned out quickly and looked forward to working behind a desk.
    Riesling, for instance. The man had been a good agent, cautious, experienced, and smart, but his nerve was giving out. During the past few months, Riesling had acquired small mannerisms—grinding his teeth, taking fits of shivering chills—that worried Starcher. And now Riesling's judgment was going, too.
    God, he'd love to replace Riesling himself. That'd give a laugh to the administrators at Langley. A sixty-six-year-old man ... No, he thought, sighing. He belonged right where he was. Standing in a glass house for every first-year KGB agent in Moscow to see. The grand old spymaster, directing the movement of others, while he himself remained helpless, rooted, respectable, impotent.
    "I just never thought I'd be the one who was being watched," he said quietly.
    "Beg your pardon?" Corfus said.
    His voice snapped Starcher back to reality.
    "Never mind," he said, drawing the draperies.
    "Is Nichevo a branch of the KGB?" Corfus asked.
    "No. Nichevo’s not a branch of anything anymore, except maybe Stalin's ghost. It started out as one, though. Small work. Blackmailing diplomats with prostitutes, paying ex-CIA men to write exposes of the Company, convincing the state to pump hormones into Soviet athletes, minor things to make the West look bad."
    "Kind of a Department of Dirty Tricks," Corfus said with a smile. He had always liked the old man.
    "You could say that. After Stalin bullied his way into becoming a Russian legend, though, he didn't want to be associated with the low-life antics of the group anymore, so he put his nephew in charge." He blew a perfect smoke ring toward the ceiling. "The story goes that when the nephew asked Stalin about the name of the organization he was going to run, Stalin answered, 'Who cares?' and sent him away. Nichevo ?"
    Corfus laughed. "Doesn't sound too dangerous to me."
    "Ah," Starcher said, holding up a bony finger. "But the nephew turned out to be sharper than Stalin expected. He kept the group small, but over the years he replaced Stalin's thugs with a half-dozen of the best brains in Russia and the satellite states. He chose them himself, from the universities, the military, even from the civil service, but never from Intelligence, never from the KGB. From what I've been able to dig up, he worked with the Soviet spy apparatus, but he distrusted the bastards like poison."
    He coughed, and his face registered pain. Cigars had been forbidden to him since a bullet in East Berlin pierced his left lung. That had been Starcher's last field assignment. A field career ended honorably, according to the boys at headquarters. It was small consolation for the constant pain that signaled the end of his life's work.
    "Sit down," Corfus said, as he stepped over to Starcher to lead him to the leather banquette.
    Starcher pushed him aside. "Don't patronize me," he said acidly. "I'm not the doddering old fool I look like." Corfus backed off, and, feeling guilty, Starcher harrumphed and sat down anyway. "At any rate, he found these men and women and gave them a chance to grow with Nichevo, dirty tricks and all, while the organization grew. By the time Khrushchev got booted out of office, Nichevo was in charge of planning big stuff. The invasion of neutral countries, the infiltration of propagandists into every undeveloped nation receiving aid from the United States, Soviet subs in enemy waters, the buildup of military bases hidden in a hundred obscure spots around the world, you name it." He spread his arms.
    "Where is he now, this nephew of Stalin's?"
    "His name was Zharkov. He died four, five years ago. Bleeding ulcers."
    Corfus looked up. "Oh. Well, then ..."
    "He had a son during the war," Starcher said, making circles with his cigar in the ashtray. "A very bright boy, brains right off the charts. Alexander Zharkov. Graduated with top honors from Moscow University,