"I've got something to tell you that will probably make you conclude I have finally really gone over the edge."
"Frankly, Charley, that wouldn't be hard."
"I'm emotionally involved with Svetlana Alekseeva," Castillo said.
Torine looked at him intensely, his eyes wary, but otherwise there was no expression on his face at all.
"To prevent any possible misinterpretation of that, Jake, let me rephrase: I am in love with her, and that emotion, I believe, is reciprocated."
"I'm really glad to hear you say that, Ace," Delchamps said.
Castillo instantly decided he had not correctly heard what Delchamps had said.
"Excuse me?"
"If you had said anything but almost exactly that, we would have had, added to our other burdens, the problem of protecting you from the lady's big brother. In my brief association with him, I have learned he is one smart, tough sonofabitch, and protecting you from him might not have been possible."
Castillo thought he saw a look of disbelief in Susanna Sieno's eyes, then wondered if it was disbelief or contempt.
Paul Sieno and Sparkman had their eyes fixed on the floor.
"Charley," Torine said finally, "I hope you weren't crazy enough to tell Montvale about this."
Castillo shook his head.
There was another long pause before Torine went on: "Insofar as reciprocity is concerned, would this explain Colonel Berezovsky's otherwise baffling sudden change of attitude?"
Castillo first noticed the near-stilted formality of Torine's question, then realized: He's thinking out loud. Not as good ol' Jake, but as Colonel Jacob D. Torine, USAF, a senior officer subconsciously doing a staff study of a serious problem and, specifically, right now, doing the Factors Bearing on the Problem part of the study.
"Pevsner told him that I was almost family. . . ."
"Supported," Torine went on, "by Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva's statement, which I thought was odd: 'So far as I am concerned, before God and the world, he is family.' "
"That's what she said," Castillo agreed.
Delchamps put in: "If I'm to believe Polkovnik Berezovsky--and truth being stranger than fiction, I do--the whole family, including the infamous Aleksandr Pevsner, is deeply religious folk with quote family values unquote that would satisfy the most pious Southern Baptist. Make that Presbyterian; they do like their booze."
He looked at Alex Darby.
"That's my take," Darby said, nodding gently.
Susanna Sieno looked like she was going to say something but changed her mind.
"Following which," Torine went on almost as if he was in a daze and hadn't heard Delchamps, "Colonel Berezovsky began not only to answer questions he had previously answered evasively and ambiguously--if at all--and began not only to answer such questions fully, but also to volunteer intelligence bearing on the questions."
"One explanation for the change in attitude," Susanna Sieno said more than a little sarcastically, "might be Charley repeating his offer of two million dollars for the information."
Delchamps looked at her coldly but didn't challenge her.
He respects her, Castillo thought.
Susanna may look like a sweet young housewife in a laundry detergent advertisement, but she's a good spook who has more than paid her dues in the agency's Clandestine Services.
"No, Susanna, that wasn't his motivation," Castillo said. "They asked me for two million on the train to establish a credible motive for their defection. But they don't need money. They brought out with them--it's in various banks around the world--far more than two million. So much money I have trouble believing how much."
Torine, deep in thought, looked out the quincho's doors.
"That is the belief of their interrogator," he went on in the military bureaucrat cant of the staff study, which sounded even more stilted when spoken. "Inevitably raising the question of the soundness of the interrogator's judgment, inasmuch as the interrogator in his admission of romantic involvement has also admitted he has abandoned the professional code he has followed throughout his adult life."