meeting him in Honduras. He liked people with mud on their boots, and he personally arranged Harry’s assignment to Moscow to make him a real case officer so that he wouldn’t have to take shit from the Career Trainee prima donnas anymore.
Harry did what the old man wanted. He shook up Moscow station and got it back in the operations business. He developed new tradecraft for doing the simple things—shaking KGB surveillance, checking radio propagation, finding good drop sites. He and Adrian even worked together servicing an agent the Brits and Americans had recruited jointly in Germany. For a man who’d just left a shooting war in the jungles of Nicaragua, the risks of running agents in Moscow seemed small indeed.
The two young officers watched each other’s backs. They weren’t supposed to do that, either. But CIA and SIS were “cousins,” and it all flowed together back at headquarters, so they figured, What the hell? When Pappas had to travel on operations, Winkler would look in on Andrea and Alex; Pappas would do the same for Susan and the girls.
Winkler didn’t have a son of his own, so he sort of adopted Alex. When it was finally time to leave Moscow, Alex was referring to the British man as “Uncle Adrian.” Winkler sent him gifts every year at Christmas. They were always books—adventure stories like Captains Courageous and Horatio Hornblower at first, and then later, real war stories about real wars. That was all that ever interested Alex, other than sports.
When Alex died, Pappas and Winkler were both in Iraq, as chiefs of their respective stations. They had that in common, too; they had watched a catastrophic mistake unfolding, tried fitfully to stop it, and failed. But on the day Alex died, it stopped being a policy problem. When Pappas heard the news, he went to Winkler’s liaison office in a half-destroyed building near the palace that served as the CIA station, closed the door, and started to cry. He couldn’t stop. He kept saying, “It’s my fault.” Winkler sat with him. This was a house of grief he couldn’t enter. Eventually he drove Pappas to BIAP and put him on a plane back home to Andrea. A sadder man he had never seen. Winkler flew to Washington several days later, to be with his friend when the body arrived at Dover, and to help put Alex in the ground. Nothing was the same after that, for either of them.
Pappas met Winkler at the antiseptic SIS headquarters known as “Vauxhall Cross,” on the Albert Embankment along the south side of the Thames. Winkler was a certified big shot now. He was chief of staff, which was perhaps a stepping-stone to becoming head of the service. Pappas took the elevator up to the top floor where Winkler had his office, just down the hall from Sir David Plumb, the knight of the realm who was the current custodian of the famous initial “C.” In the corridor were sharp-eyed young men in gaudily striped shirts who noted the presence of the visiting American.
Winkler beckoned Pappas into his office and closed the door. The room was decorated with African masks and spears, which seemed odd if you didn’t know that Winkler had grown up in Uganda. He’d lived on a farm in the bush, until his father was killed. Relatives had arranged for him to go to school at Rugby, and then he had won a scholarship to Corpus Christi. What brought him to the attention of the dons, who in those days still acted as spotters for SIS, was that Winkler spoke the Niger-Congo dialects of Uganda with uncommon fluency. In addition to the facility with languages, they noted that he was a young man who needed a father. He might as well have had SIS stamped on his forehead.
Winkler’s office had a view across the Thames toward Victoria Station and Pimlico and in the distance downstream, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. He motioned for Pappas to sit down on the couch and pulled up a chair for himself. The bulky gray corridor of Whitehall, the SIS version of “downtown,” was concealed behind the riverfront buildings a mile away.
“You look like you got hit by a truck,” said Winkler. It was true. Pappas had deep ruts under his eyes and an unhealthy pallor to his skin.
“Up all night on the plane,” said Pappas. “I thought I could drink myself to sleep, but it didn’t work.”
Pappas was too tired for small