Page 417 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

He felt a loser. His life had once seemed full of promise. He had been a star student at school and university, and his first job had been in the White House. Then it had all gone wrong. He was determined not to let his life be blighted by Nixon. But he needed a success. He wanted to be top of the class again.

Instead he went to parties.

Embassy staff who had wives and children were happy to go home in the evenings and watch American movies on videotape, so the single men got to go to all the less important receptions. Tonight Cam was heading to the Egyptian embassy for a gathering to welcome a new deputy ambassador.

When he started the Polski, the radio came on. He kept it tuned to the SB wavelength. Reception was often weak, but sometimes he could hear the secret police talking as they tailed people around the city.

Sometimes they were tailing him. The cars changed but it was usually the same two men, a swarthy one he called Mario and a fat guy he thought of as Ollie. There seemed to be no pattern to the surveillance, so he just assumed he was more or less always being watched. That was probably what they wanted. Maybe they deliberately randomized their surveillance precisely in order to keep him permanently on edge.

But he, too, had been trained. Surveillance should never be avoided in an obvious way, he had learned, for that is a signal, to the other side, that you are up to something. Form regular habits, he had been told: go to Restaurant A every Monday, Bar B every Tuesday. Lull them into a false sense of security. But look for gaps in their watchfulness, times when their attention lapses. That will be when you can do something unobserved.

As he drove away from the U.S. embassy he saw a blue Skoda 105 tuck into the traffic two cars behind him.

The Skoda trailed him across the city. He saw Mario at the wheel and Ollie in the front passenger seat.

Cam parked in Alzacka Street and saw the blue Skoda pull up a hundred yards past him.

He was sometimes tempted to talk to Mario and Ollie, as they were so much part of his life, but he had been warned never to do that, for then the SB would switch personnel and it would take him time to recognize the new people.

He entered the Egyptian embassy and took a cocktail from a tray. It was so dilute he could hardly taste the gin. He talked to an Austrian diplomat about the difficulty of buying comfortable men's underwear in Warsaw. When the Austrian drifted away, Cam looked around and saw a blond woman in her twenties standing alone. She caught his eye and smiled, so he went to speak to her.

He swiftly found out that she was Polish, her name was Lidka, and she worked as a secretary in the Canadian embassy. She was wearing a tight pink sweater and a short black skirt that showed off her long legs. She spoke good English, and listened to Cam with an intensity of concentration that he found flattering.

Then a man in a pin-striped suit summoned her peremptorily, making Cam think he must be her boss, and the conversation broke up. Almost immediately Cam was approached by another attractive woman, and he began to think it was his lucky day. This one was older, about forty, but prettier, with short pale-blond hair and bright blue eyes enhanced by blue eye shadow. She spoke to him in Russian. "I've met you before," she said. "Your name is Cameron Dewar. I'm Tanya Dvorkin."

"I remember," he said, glad of the chance to show off his fluency in Russian. "You're a reporter for TASS."

"And you're a CIA agent."

He certainly would not have told her that, so she must have guessed. Routinely, he denied it. "Nothing so glamorous," he said. "Just a humble cultural attache."

"Cultural?" she said. "Then you can help me. What kind of painter is Jan Matejko?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "Impressionist, I think. Why?"

"Art really not your thing?"

"I'm more a music person," he said, feeling cornered.

"You probably love Szpilman, the Polish violinist."

"Absolutely. Such technique with the bow!"

"What do you think of the poet Wislawa Szymborska?"

"I haven't read much of his work, sadly. Is this a test?"

"Yes, and you failed. Szymborska is a woman. Szpilman is a pianist, not a violinist. Matejko was a conventional painter of court scenes and battles, not an impressionist. And you're no cultural attache."

Cam was mortified to have been found out so easily. What a hopeless undercover agent he was! He tried to brush it off with humor. "I might just be a very bad cultural attache."

She lowered her voice. "If a Polish army officer wanted to talk to a representative of the USA, you could arrange it, I guess."

Suddenly the conversation had taken a serious turn. Cam felt nervous. This could be some kind of trap.

Or it could be a genuine approach--in which case, it might represent a great opportunity for him.

He answered cautiously. "I can arrange for anyone to talk to the American government, naturally."

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