“What did it get you, after all these years?”
“A moral challenge. A chance to sit here with you tonight. Life itself.”
Anna picked up the half bottle of champagne and found that it was empty. She called the waiter and ordered another.
“Tell me you’ll do it,” said Margaret.
“Will it make you happy if I say I’ll think about it?”
“Yes. Very happy.”
“Okay,” said Anna. “I’ll think about it. But we both know what the answer will be.”
Author’s Note
This book is a novel, drawn from the author’s imagination. Readers will search in vain for real counterparts to the events and people described. They do not exist. This is not a roman à clef or a veiled description of real events. It is a work of fiction, as will be evident to those who know the true details of the period I have described.
I would like to thank those who helped nurture this book: my wife and once again my first reader, Eve Ignatius; my parents, Paul and Nancy Ignatius, and my sister, Sarah Ignatius, who read and commented on the manuscript; my friends Garrett Epps and Lincoln Caplan; my peerless agent, Raphael Sagalyn, and especially my editor, Linda Healey, whose encouragement and wise advice helped shape every page of this book. She is the sort of editor writers dream about.
Thanks finally to my guides across the terrain of this novel: in Istanbul, Thomas Goltz and Stephanie Capparell; in Moscow, Yerevan, Tashkent and Samarkand, a series of Soviet and American friends who helped me see the nationalist revolution that swept the Soviet republics in 1990. I am also grateful to Rusi Nasar of Central Asian Affairs Consultants for sharing his knowledge of Uzbekistan and to Colonel Barney Oldfield for his store of Armenian Radio jokes. Special thanks to three Ottoman historians: Sukru Hanioglu, who described his research into the Ibrahim Temo papers, and Serif Mardin and Yvonne Seng, who were kind enough to read and critique the manuscript but are in no way responsible for its errors and biases. I am also grateful to many others unnamed, who generously shared some of their insights into the Great Game.
Praise for
SIRO
By David Ignatius
“This is neither a dose of jamesbonderie, filled with heroes, villains and derring-do, nor another of those exposés of the C.I.A. that shows its employees to be democracy’s worst enemies. The moral environment Mr. Ignatius describes is much too devious—and yet, somehow, obvious—for such easy judgments.”
—Robin W. Winks, New York Times
“Gnawing suspense.… In Ignatius’s universe the political ends—and complications—of spying are never forgotten.” —Scott Turow,
author of Burden of Proof
“Ignatius, the foreign editor of The Washington Post, has an insider’s grasp of recent world crises and an unusual talent for inserting CIA operatives into those events.”
—Richard Gid Powers,
Entertainment Weekly
“Exceptionally good. The characters are wonderfully attractive and intelligent, the southwestern Asian shenanigans sadly believable. It’s all very funny—and quite sad.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Fast-paced, accurate, and suspenseful; the characters are memorable … so realistic that it is difficult to believe it is fiction. First-rate.”
—Dolores M. Steinhauer, School Library Journal
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by David Ignatius
First published as a Norton paperback 2013
“Our Gods” from
Poems 1959–2009
by Frederick Seidel.
Copyright © 2009 by Frederick Seidel. Reprinted
by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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ALSO BY DAVID IGNATIUS
Agents of Innocence
A Firing Offense
The Bank of Fear
Bloodmoney
The Sun King
Body of Lies
The Increment
