Free The Company: A Novel of the CIA by Robert Littell Page A

HA'MERCI ON SUCH AS WE,
    BAA! YAH! BAH!

    "We're all mad here, Ebby." Jack had to holler to be heard over the riotous applause. "I'm mad. You're mad. Question is: How the hell did I end up in this madhouse?"
    "From what you told me back at the Cloud Club," Ebby shouted, "your big mistake was saying yes when the coach offered you and your rowing pal that Green Cup down at Mory's."

    Part 4

PART ONE
    PRIMING THE GUN

    In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
    Snapshot: a three-by-five-inch black-and-white photograph turned sepia with age. Hand-printed across the scalloped white border is a faded caption: "Jack and Leo de Stella after The Race but before The Fall. " There is a date but it has been smudged and is illegible. In the photograph two men in their early twenties, brandishing long oars draped with the shirts they won off the backs of the Harvard crew, are posing in front of a slender racing shell. Standing slightly apart, a thin woman wearing a knee-length skirt and a man's varsity sweater has been caught brushing the hair out of her wide, anxious eyes with the splayed fingers of her left hand. The two young men are dressed identically in boating sneakers, shorts, and sleeveless undershirts, each with a large Y on the chest. The taller of the young men, sporting a Cossack mustache, clutches an open bottle of Champagne by its throat. His head is angled toward the shirt flying like a captured pennant from the blade of his oar but his eyes are devouring the girl.

    NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT, SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1950

    RACING NECK AND NECK BETWEEN THE BUOYS, THE TWO SLEEK-SCULLED coxed eights skidded down the mirror-still surface of the Thames. Languid gusts impregnated with the salty aroma of the sea and the hoarse shrieks from the students on the bank of the river drifted across their bows. Rowing stroke for Yale, Jack McAuliffe feathered an instant too soon and caught a grab and heard the cox, Leo Kritzky, swear under his breath. At the four-fifths mark Leo pushed the pace to a sprint. Several of the oarsman crewing behind Jack started punctuating each stroke with rasping grunts. Sliding on the seat until his knees grazed his armpits, Jack made a clean catch and felt the blade lock onto a swell of river water. A splinter of pain stabbed at the rib that had mended and broken and mended again. Blinking away the ache in his rib cage, he hauled back on the haft of the oar slick with blood from a burst blister. Slivers of sunlight glancing off the river blinded him for an instant. When he was able to see he caught a glimpse of the Harvard eight riding on its inverted reflection, its oars catching and feathering and squaring in flawless synchronization. The cox must have decided the Harvard boat was slipping ahead because he notched up the strokes to forty-eight per minute. Balanced on the knife edge of the keel, coiling and uncoiling his limbs in long fluid motions, Jack abandoned himself to the cadence of pain. When the Yale scull soared across the finish line just ahead of the Crimson's hull, he slumped over his oar and tried to recollect what whim of craziness had pushed him to go out for Crew.
    "Rowing," Skip Waltz shouted over the din of the New Haven railroad station, "is a great training ground for real life in the sense that you're taking something that is essentially very simple and perfecting it."
    "In your view, Coach Waltz, what's the most difficult moment of a race?" called the reporter from the Yale student newspaper.
    Waltz screwed up his lips. "I'd say it's when you reach for the next stroke, because you're actually going in one direction and the hull's going in the opposite direction. I always tell my men that rowing is a metaphor for life. If you're not perfectly balanced over the keel the boat will wobble and the race will slip through your fingers." The coach glanced at the station clock and said, "What do you say we wrap this up, boys," and