The Company: A Novel of the CIA Read Online Free PDF

about his mission."
    "What was the name of the KGB agent who came to Stockholm?"
    "Zhitkin, Markel Sergeyevich."
    "I would like to help you but I must have more than that to nibble on..."
    The Russian agonized about it for a moment. "I will give you the microphone that went dry."
    The Sorcerer, all business, returned to his seat, opened his notebook, uncapped a pen and looked up at the Russian. "Okay, let's talk turkey."

    Part 2
    52:34
    The hand-lettered sign taped to the armor-plated door of the Sorcerer's Berlin Base sanctum, two levels below ground in a brick building on a quiet, tree-lined street in the upper-crust suburb of Berlin-Dahlem, proclaimed the gospel according to Torriti: "Territory needs to be defended at the frontier, sport." Silwan II, his eyes pink with grogginess, his shoulder holster sagging into view under his embroidered Tyrolean jacket, sat slumped on a stool, the guardian of the Sorcerers door and the water cooler filled with moonshine slivovitz across from it. From inside the office came the scratchy sound of a 78-rpm record belting out Bjorling arias; the Sorcerer, who had taken to describing himself as a certified paranoid with real enemies, kept the Victrola running at full blast on the off chance the Russians had succeeded in bugging the room. The walls on either side of his vast desk were lined with racks of loaded rifles and machine pistols he'd "liberated" over the years; one desk drawer was stuffed with handguns, another with boxes of cartridges. A round red-painted thermite bomb sat atop each of the three large office safes for the emergency destruction of files if the balloon went up and the Russians, a mortar shot away, invaded.

    Hunched like a parenthesis over the message board on his blotter, the Sorcerer was putting the finishing touches on the overnight report to Washington. Jack, back from emptying the Sorcerer's burn bag into the incinerator, pushed through the door and flopped onto the couch under some gun racks. Looking up, Torriti squinted at Jack as if he were trying to place him. Then his eyes brightened. "So what did you make of him, sport?" he called over the music, his trigger finger absently stirring the ice in the whiskey glass.
    "He worries me, Harvey," Jack called back. "It seems to me he hemmed and hawed his way through his biography when you put him through the wringer. Like when you asked him to describe the street he lived on during his first KGB posting in Brest-Litovsk. Like when you asked him the names of the instructors at the KGB's Diplomatic Institute in Moscow."
    "So where were you raised, sport?"
    "In a backwater called Jonestown, Pennsylvania. I went to high school in nearby Lebanon."
    "And then, for the paltry sum of three-thousand-odd dollars per, which happens to be more than my secretary makes, you got what the hoi polloi call a higher education at Yale U."
    Jack smoothed back the wings of his Cossack mustache with his forefingers. "'Hoi' already means the,' Harvey. So you don't really need to put a 'the' before 'hoi polloi' because there's already..." His voice trailed off as he spotted the pained expression lurking in the creases around the Sorcerers eyes.
    "Stop busting my balls, sport, and describe the street your high school was on."
    "The street my high school was on. Sure. Well, I seem to recall it was lined with trees on which we used to tack dirty Burma-Shave limericks."
    "What kind of trees were they? Was it a one-way street or a two-way street? What was on the corner, a stop sign or a stoplight? Was it a no-parking zone? What was across the street from the school?"
    Jack examined the ceiling. "Houses were across the street. No, it must have been the public school in Jonestown that had houses across the street. Across from the high school in Lebanon was a playground. Or was that behind the school? The street was—" Jack screwed up his face. "I guess I see what you're driving at, Harvey."
    Torriti took a swig of whiskey. "Let's say for