The two men, their lives once so tightly intertwined, had lost touch in recent years. Then came the cryptic message that an intermediary had passed along to Grunz just a few days earlier: someone named Soobzokov was looking for him. He wanted him to call as soon as possible. And it sounded urgent.

Tom Soobzokov? Looking for him? It had been many years—fifteen, maybe twenty—since they had last spoken. What could he want after all this time?

Soobzokov, nothing if not resourceful, had gotten a friend in Congress to find Grunz’s unlisted line and get the message to him. That wasn’t as simple as it sounded, since Grunz had a way of making himself hard to find. He was, after all, a CIA spy.

Soobzokov knew a bit about spying himself. That was how he knew Grunz. Soobzokov had once been spy himself for the CIA—not a particularly good one, but a spy nonetheless. Grunz had been his handler in the Middle East as they chased intelligence on the Soviets in the crazy Cold War days of the 1950s, two decades earlier. Soobzokov’s main mission was to recruit ex-Russians and ardent anti-Communists—people like him—who might be willing to spy on their former homeland for America. He was always on the verge of turning the next big Russian agent, or so he claimed. It was in the Middle East that Soobzokov had picked up his CIA code name: Nostril, an unflattering allusion to his prominent hooked nose. If he minded the moniker, he never let on. He loved the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the spy business. He also liked to brandish his agency credentials to friends and acquaintances with a reckless bravado; not a good quality in a spy. As his handler, Grunz sometimes had to clean up the mess left by Nostril’s indiscretions in far-flung places.

Whatever was going on, Grunz figured it couldn’t be good.

He picked up the phone and dialed a 201 area code: northern New Jersey, where Soobzokov had settled when he immigrated from Europe after World War II among a mass of war-torn refugees.

Pleasantries were few, despite their long estrangement. Soobzokov needed help, and he needed it now, he told Grunz. His life—the American life he had cultivated so assiduously for himself, his wife, and his five children in the hardscrabble town of Paterson in northern New Jersey—was collapsing around him. Amid the flurry of wild-sounding events, Grunz was finally able to parse out enough of the details to fully appreciate his panic.

Maybe he wasn’t so delusional after all.

It had started with the whispers. For years, a bunch of Soobzokov’s fellow immigrants in New Jersey who, like him, hailed from Russia’s rugged western borderland in the North Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, had been spreading malicious talk about him, he said. He practically spat the words. They were obviously jealous of him--jealous of the political connections he’d built among New Jersey Democrats; jealous of the plum county job he’d landed; jealous of the reputation he’d earned as a leader and “fixer” among local immigrants, a man who could make problems go away. When he walked in a room, people stood up out of respect. He was a man of stature, a man of influence, and his rivals in New Jersey obviously resented him for it.