"But why did you marry me?"

"I thought we could work it out."

"How?"

"I didn't know."

Thus, without a wife and without a job and with a useless technical degree, Walter Forbier vowed he would not mistime his future again. He would get into something that was going to last. He looked around, and the one profession that looked healthiest was fighting the cold war. Even if America lost, there would be even better employment under the Communists.

And so Walter Forbier joined the Central Intelligence Agency, and, for $427.83 a month extra, a hazard mission called Sunflower.

"It's beautiful. You see the world. You travel singly or in groups. You get your extra pay and all you have to do is stay in shape."

"Sunflower won't be disbanded?" Forbier asked cautiously.

"Can't be," said the officer in charge.

"Why not?"

"Because it's not up to us to disband it."

"Who is it up to?" Forbier asked.

"The Russians."

It was the Russians, the officer had explained, who had started the whole thing. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had had an excess of highly trained killer teams in Eastern Europe. They were not mass combat troops, but specialists in eliminating specific people. Most soldiers just fired away and advanced. These men could be given a name and could guarantee that the person, whoever he was or wherever he was, would be dead within a week. The Russian group was called Treska which meant cod.

The officer didn't know why the Russians had named their unit Treska any more than he knew why the CIA had named its counterunit Sunflower. The Treska had been crucial in the Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia, and even more crucial when the country had rebelled briefly. Their job was to make sure key leaders died just as the Russian tanks moved in.

"They're beautiful. Not one peep out of the Czechs. The tanks were only window dressing, sort of like a show of force. The Czechs lost because they had no leaders left living, nobody to tell the people to go to the hills."