“Foreign intelligence keeps track of their old agents,” he said by way of proving his story. “Take the case of Engelbert Broda, for example.”
For ten years, from 1938 to 1948, a Soviet spy code-named Eric had sent Britain’s nuclear secrets to the Soviets, Danforth said. During that time, he’d been the Soviets’ main source for information on Britain’s atomic- bomb research.
“MI Five suspected him for years,” Danforth told me. “They opened his mail and watched his every move.”
But they had never caught him, and so it wasn’t until a full seventy years later, when KGB files were finally opened, that the British found out they’d been right all along.
“Bertie Broda had even given the Russians the blueprint for the early nuclear reactor used in the Manhattan Project,” Danforth said. “He single-handedly allowed the Soviets to catch up with the West and in so doing changed the face of foreign policy for decades to come.” He smiled. “So you see, what you’d call a large geopolitical purpose can be brought about by a little spy.”
“What happened when they caught Broda?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Danforth answered. “He was already dead. And he died a very respected scientist. He has a special grave in an honored section of a Vienna cemetery.” He seemed suddenly to drift into some colder region. “Odd, what a cemetery can reveal.” For a moment he remained in that distant place. Then, as he had so many times during our talk, he abruptly returned to the present.
“Anyway, Broda was never discovered,” he said.
“Too bad,” I said, almost lightly, as if treason were a mist easily wiped from a window. “Very clever to have outsmarted everyone for so long.”
“Clever?” Danforth asked. “Perhaps. But the curious thing I’ve discovered about spies is that they must trust so many to keep their secrets. They have handlers, but who handles the handlers? No Soviet spy was ever handled by Stalin personally. There were layers and layers of people who knew this agent or that one, people whose identity the agent never knew.” The irony of what Danforth said next clearly did not escape him. “A spy may never be uncovered, Paul, but he can never be completely hidden either. Deceit always leaves a trail.”
“Which Solotoff was now pursuing?” I asked.
“Undoubtedly,” Danforth said. He looked at me in a way that let me know he’d read my mind. “Ah, you are looking for that big dramatic ending. Perhaps a chase over the rooftops? Or some final scene of two old men grappling with each other, like Holmes and Moriarty slugging it out at Reichenbach Falls? Is that what you want, Paul, at the end of my tale?”
“Frankly, yes,” I said. “And why not? If Rache is a traitor, he deserves to die.”
“Yes, of course,” Danforth said. “And if vengeance cannot be exacted on Rache, perhaps there is someone else. At any rate, I end up the hero, don’t I?”
“Yes,” I said. “And we all need to be heroes.” I glanced toward the open wound of Lower Manhattan. “Especially now.”
“Indeed that’s true, Paul,” Danforth said. “With one small caveat.”
“Which is?”
Danforth looked at me almost sadly, like a man who’d expended great effort in an unworthy cause. “That the need to be a hero is not a hero’s need.”
I felt that I had proved myself to be as young and callow at the end of his story as I had been at the beginning.
“So, tell me, then,” I asked with a sincerity that surprised me. “What is truly heroic?”
“Facing the complexity of things,” Danforth said solemnly. He looked at me as if he were making a final evaluation, a judgment that would determine whether or not I would hear the final chapters of his tale. “Collateral damage is inevitable,” he said, almost to himself. He drew in a disturbingly tense breath, held it for a moment, then released it slowly; it seemed to carry with it the last full measure of his strength. “The letter that finally came from the general was in Russian, of course. It said simply 
Which means ‘Do with him as you wish.’” Just below it, the old general had written a name and address. Danforth drew in yet another slow, ponderous breath that seemed to carry with it the full weight of murder.
“And so I set off to find a man I had never seen,” he said. He twisted to the side, opened the drawer of the little table that rested between us, and took out an old service revolver. “And, if he had betrayed Anna, to kill him.”
~ * ~
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983
He had vaguely expected to find Rache living in Krakow or Budapest, or perhaps even the old spy haven of Vienna, where Rache could sit with his pastry and afternoon tea and stare at the Plague Monument and recall the sweet days of his treachery, the best triple agent in the world because he’d gotten away with it.
But once Solotoff had provided the man’s address, along with, surprisingly, a German name, Danforth had changed his earlier notion, and on the flight from New York he imagined him as all such figures had been imagined since the war: sitting on some cool veranda, listening to the call of tropical birds, the smell of fresh mango rich in the air around them; these men who had brought winter to the world safe in their sunlit splendor.
That his purpose still burned so brightly surprised him, for in every other way he felt the steady weathering of time, death’s unyielding approach. Life, at last, was a stalker, waiting for the moment, and he knew that his would come soon. Perhaps this was his true freedom, he thought, that he could murder in certain knowledge that whatever followed would be short-lived.
And so, if Rache was a traitor, this he would do . . . for Anna.
He took a cab to his hotel on Avenida Florida, unpacked, then lay down on the bed for a fitful night’s sleep. In dreams, he returned to his many ages: the callow youth, the shallow adventurist, the amateur assassin, the tormented romantic obsessive, and now this lonely man on his last mission, this hate-filled man who might at last personify the thing he sought: vengeance.
