Icon by Frederick Forsyth Page A

turned traitor, Ames had had three postings outside Langley. In Turkey his Chief of Station deemed him to be a complete waste of space; the veteran Dewey Clarridge loathed and despised him from the start.
    In the New York office he had a lucky break that brought him kudos. Although the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, Arkady Shevchenko, had been working for the CIA before Ames arrived, and his final defection to the States in April 1978 was masterminded by another officer, Ames handled the Ukrainian in between. He was by then already becoming a very serious drinker.
    His third posting, in Mexico, was a fiasco. He was consistently drunk, insulted colleagues and foreigners, fell down and was helped home by the Mexican police, broke every standing operating procedure imaginable, and recruited nobody.
    On both the overseas postings Ames’s performance reports were appalling. In one wide-spectrum performance assessment he came 198th out of 200 officers.
    Normally such a career would go nowhere near the top. By the early eighties all the senior hierarchs—Carey Jordan, Dewey Clarridge, Milton Bearden, Gus Hathaway, and Paul Redmond—thought he was a useless article. But not Ken Mulgrew, who became his friend and protector.
    It was he who sanitized the dreadful performance and assessment reports, smoothed the path, and procured the promotions. As Ames’s senior he overrode the objections and, while heading up Personnel Allocations, slipped Ames into the Counterintelligence Group.
    Basically, they were drinking buddies, both serial boozers who with the self-pity of the alcoholic agreed with each other that the agency was grossly unfair to both of them. It was a judgmental error that would soon cost a lot of lives.
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    LEONID Zaitsev the Rabbit was dying but he did not know it. He was in great pain. This he knew.
    Colonel Grishin believed in pain. He believed in pain as persuasion, pain as example to the witnesses, and pain as punishment. Zaitsev had sinned and the colonel’s orders were that he should fully comprehend the meaning of pain before he died.
    The interrogation had lasted all day and there had been no call to use violence because he had told everything that was asked of him. Grishin had been alone with him most of the time, because he did not wish the guards to hear what had been stolen.
    The colonel had asked him, quite gently, to start at the beginning, so he had. He had been required to repeat the story over and over again until Grishin was satisfied no detail had been left out. There was not really much to tell.
    Only when he explained why he had done it was the colonel’s face masked in disbelief.
    “A beer? The English gave you a beer?”
    By midday Grishin was convinced he had it all. The chances were, he reckoned, that confronted with this scarecrow the young Englishwoman would throw the file away, but he could not be sure. He dispatched a car with four trusted men to stake out the embassy and wait for the little red car, then follow it to wherever she lived and reported back.
    Just after three he gave final orders to his Guards and left. As he drove out of the compound, an A-300 Airbus with British Airways livery on its tailfin turned toward northern Moscow and headed west. He did not notice. He ordered his driver to take him back to the dacha off Kiselny Boulevard.
    There were four of them. The Rabbit’s legs would have buckled, but they knew that so two of them held him up, fingers digging hard into his upper arms. The other two were one front, one back. They worked slowly and placed their punches diligently.
    The big fists were wrapped in heavy knobbed brass knuckles. The punches crushed his kidneys, tore his liver, and ruptured his spleen. A kick pulped his old testicles. The man at the front drove into the belly, then moved up to the chest. He fainted twice but a bucket of cold water brought him around and the pain returned. His legs ceased to function so they held his light frame on