DON’T MISS THESE GRIPPING NOVELS BY FREDERICK FORSYTH THE DAY OF THE JACKAL THE ODESSA FILE THE DOGS OF WAR THE DEVIL’S ALTERNATIVE NO COMEBACKS THE FOURTH PROTOCOL THE NEGOTIATOR THE DECEIVER THE FIST OF GOD ICON AVAILABLE WHEREVER BANTAM BOOKS ARE SOLD PRAISE FOR FREDERICK FORSYTH’S ICON “Icon finds the master in world-class form. … [It’s] masterful blend of fact and fiction will have fans wondering if they are turning the pages of a novel or the morning paper.” —People Summer 1999. Russia stands on the threshold of anarchy. An interim president sits powerless in Moscow as his nation is wracked by famine and inflation, crime and corruption, and seething hordes of the unemployed roam the streets. For them, only one man holds out hope. The striking voice of Igor Komarov, waiting in the wings for the presidential election of January 2000, rings out over the airwaves, mesmerizing the masses with the promise of law, order, and prosperity—and the return to glory of their once great land. Then a document falls into the hands of British Intelligence. Quickly dubbed the Black Manifesto, it outlines Komarov’s secret plan for a regime as autocratic and evil as Hitler’s Third Reich. Officially the West can do nothing, but in secret a group of elder statesmen sends the only person who can expose the truth about Komarov into the heart of the inferno. Ex-CIA agent Jason Monk has a dual mission: to stop Komarov, whatever it takes, and to prepare the way for an icon worthy of the Russian people. But to do this, Monk must stay alive—and the forces allied against him are ruthless, the time frighteningly short. … Only Frederick Forsyth, the unparalleled master of the novel of international intrigue, could create this riveting thriller, as timely and unsettling as tomorrow’s headlines. BOOKS BY FREDERICK FORSYTH The Biafra Story The Day of the Jackal The Odessa File The Dogs of War The Shepherd The Devil’s Alternative No Comebacks The Fourth Protocol The Negotiator The Deceiver The Fist of God Icon FREDERICK FORSYTH ICON BANTAM BOOKS NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON SYDNEY AUCKLAND This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED. ICON A Bantam Book PUBLISHING HISTORY Bantam hardcover edition published November 1996 Bantam export edition /JuIy 1997 All rights reserved. Copyright © 1996 by Bantam Books. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-23434 No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books. If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.” ISBN 0-553-84012-6 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA OPM 0987654321 for Sandy ICON PART 1 CHAPTER 1 IT WAS THE SUMMER WHEN THE PRICE OF A SMALL LOAF OF bread topped a million rubles. It was the summer of the third consecutive year of wheat crop failures and the second of hyperinflation. It was the summer when in the back alleys of the faraway provincial towns the first Russians began dying of malnutrition. It was the summer when the president collapsed in his limousine too far from help to be saved, and an old office cleaner stole a document. After that nothing would ever be the same. It was the summer of 1999. ? IT was hot that afternoon, oppressively hot, and it took several blasts on the horn before the gatekeeper scurried from his hut to haul open the great timber doors of the Cabinet building. The presidential bodyguard dropped his window to call to the man to shape up as the long black Mercedes 600 eased under the arch and out into Staraya Ploshad. The wretched gatekeeper threw what he hoped passed for a salute as the second car, a Russian Chaika with four more bodyguards, followed the limousine. Then they were gone. In the back of the Mercedes President Cherkassov sat alone, slumped in thought. In the front were his militia driver and the personal bodyguard assigned to him from the Alpha Group. As the last drab outskirts of Moscow gave way to the fields and trees of the open countryside, the mood of the president of Russia was one of profound gloom, as well it might be. He had been three years in the office he had won after stepping in to replace the ailing Boris Yeltsin, and as he watched his country crashing into destitution, they had been the three most miserable years of his life. Back in the winter of 1995 when he had been the prime minister, appointed by Yeltsin himself as a “technocrat” premier to lick the economy into shape, the Russian people had gone to the polls to elect a new Parliament, or Duma. The Duma elections were important but not vital. In the preceding years more and more power had passed from the Parliament to the presidency, most of this process the work of Boris Yeltsin. By the winter of 1995 the big Siberian, who four years earlier had straddled a tank in the attempted coup of August 1991, earned the admiration of not only Russia but also the West as the great fighter for democracy, and seized the presidency for himself, had become a broken reed. Recovering from a second heart attack in three months, puffing and bloated by medications, he watched the parliamentary elections from a clinic in the Sparrow Hills, formerly the Lenin Hills, northeast of Moscow, and saw his own political protégés hammered into third place among the delegates. That this was not as crucial as it might have been in a western democracy was largely due to the fact that because of Yeltsin, the great majority of actual power lay in the hands of the president himself. Like the United States, Russia had an executive presidency, but unlike the United States, the web of checks and balances that the Congress can impose upon the White House did not exist. Yeltsin could in effect rule by decree, and did. But the parliamentary elections did at least show which way the wind was blowing and give an indication of the trend for the much more important presidential elections slated for June 1996. The new force on the political horizon in the winter of 1995 was, ironically enough, the Communists. After seventy years of Communist tyranny, five years of Gorbachev reforms, and five years of Yeltsin, the Russian people began to look back with nostalgia to the old days. The Communists, under their leader Gennadi Zyuganov painted a rosy picture of the way things used to be guaranteed jobs assured salaries affordable food and law and order. No mention was made of the despotism of the KGB the Gulag archipelago of slave labor camps the suppression of all freedom of movement and expression. The Russian voters were already in a state of profound disillusion with the two once-heralded saviors capitalism and democracy. The second word was uttered with contempt. For many Russians looking around at the all-embracing corruption and pandemic crime it had all been a big lie. When the parliamentary votes were counted, the crypto-Communists had the biggest single bloc of deputies in the Duma and the right to appoint the speaker. At the other extreme were their apparently diametric opposites, the neo-Fascists of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leading the ironically named Liberal Democratic Party. In the 1991 elections this crude demagogue with his taste for bizarre behavior and scatological expressions had done amazingly well, but his star was falling. Nevertheless it had not fallen enough to rob him of the second largest bloc of deputies. In the middle were the political center parties, clinging to the economic and social reforms they had introduced. They came in third. But the real effect of those elections was to prepare the ground for the presidential race of 1996. There had been forty-three separate parties contesting the Duma elections and most of the leaders of the main parties realized that they would be best served by a program of coalescence. Before the summer the crypto-Communists allied with their natural friends, the Agrarian or Peasants’ Party, to form the Socialist Union, a clever title inasmuch as it employed two of the initials of the old USSR. The leader remained Zyuganov. In the ultra-right-wing moves for unification were also afoot, but were fiercely resisted by Zhirinovsky. Vlad the Mad reckoned he could win the presidency without help from the other right-wing factions. Russian presidential elections, like the French, are held in two parts. In the first round all candidates compete against one another. Only those candidates coming in first and second qualify for the runoff vote of the second round. Coming in third is no use. Zhirinovsky came in third. The smarter political thinkers on the extreme right were furious with him. The dozen parties of the center united, more or less, into the Democratic Alliance, with the key question throughout the spring of 1996 whether Boris Yeltsin would be fit enough to stand for, and win, the presidency again. His downfall would later be ascribed by historians to a single word—Chechnya. Exasperated to the breaking point twelve months earlier, Yeltsin had launched the full might of the Russian army and air force against a small, warlike mountain tribe whose self-appointed leader was insisting on complete independence from Moscow. There was nothing new about trouble from the Chechens—their resistance went back to the days of the czars and beyond. They had somehow survived pogroms launched against them by several czars, and by the cruelest tyrant of them all, Josef Stalin. Somehow they had survived the repeated devastation of their tiny homeland, the deportations and genocide, and continued to fight back. Launching the full might of the Russian armed forces against the Chechens was an impetuous decision that led not to a quick and glorious victory but to the utter destruction—on camera and in glorious Technicolor—of the Chechen capital of Grozny and to the endless train of Russian soldiers in body bags coming back from the campaign. With their capital reduced to rubble, but still armed to the teeth with weapons largely sold to them by corrupt Russian generals, the Chechens took to the hills they know so well and refused to be flushed out. The same Russian army that had met its inglorious Vietnam in attempting to invade and hold Afghanistan had now created a second one in the wild foothills of the Caucasus Range. If Boris Yeltsin had launched his Chechen campaign to prove he was a strong man in the traditional Russian mold it became a gesture that had failed. All through 1995 he lusted for his final victory and always it eluded him. As they saw their young sons coming back from the Caucasus in sacks, the Russian people turned viciously anti-Chechen. They also turned against the man who could not deliver them a victory. By early summer, after grueling personal effort, Yeltsin re-won his presidency after a runoff. But a year later he was gone. The mantle passed to the technocrat Josef Cherkassov, leader of the Russian Homeland Party, by then part of the broad Democratic Alliance. Cherkassov seemed to have started well. He had the benign good wishes of the West and, more important, its financial credits to keep the Russian economy in some kind of shape. Heeding Western advice, he negotiated at last a peace deal with Chechnya, and although the vengeful Russians hated the idea of the Chechens getting away with their rebellion, bringing the soldiers home was popular. But things began to go wrong within eighteen months. The causes for this were twofold: first, the depredations of the Russian mafia simply became too burdensome at last for the Russian economy to bear, and second, there was yet another foolish military adventure. In late 1997 Siberia, home of ninety percent of Russian wealth, threatened to secede. Siberia was the least tamed of all Russia’s provinces. Yet under her permafrost, barely even exploited, were oil and gas deposits that made even Saudi Arabia look deprived. Added to that were gold, diamonds, bauxite, manganese, tungsten, nickel, and platinum. By the late nineties, Siberia was still the last frontier on the planet. The problem began with reports reaching Moscow that some Japanese but mainly South Korean underworld emissaries were circulating in Siberia urging secession. President Cherkassov, ill-advised by his circle of sycophants and seemingly oblivious of his own predecessor’s mistakes in Chechnya, sent the army east. The move provoked a double catastrophe. After twelve months without a military solution he had to negotiate a deal granting the Siberians far more autonomy and control over the proceeds of their own wealth than they had ever had. Second, the adventure triggered hyperinflation. The government tried to print its way out of trouble. By the summer of 1999 the days of five thousand rubles to the dollar of the mid-nineties were a memory. The wheat crop from the black earth country of the Kuban had failed twice, in 1997 and 1998, and the crop from Siberia was delayed until it rotted because the partisans blew away the railroad tracks. In the cities bread prices spiraled. President Cherkassov clung to office but was clearly no longer in power. In the countryside, which should at the least have been growing enough food to feed itself, the conditions were at their worst. Underfunded, undermanned, their infrastructure collapsing, the farms stood idle, their rich soil producing weeds. Trains stopping at wayside halts were besieged by peasants, mainly elderly, offering furniture, clothes, and bric-a-brac to the carriage windows for money or, even better, food. There were few takers. In Moscow, the capital and showcase of the nation, the destitute slept out on the quays along the Moskva and in the back alleys. The police—called the militia in Russia—having virtually abandoned the struggle against crime, tried to pick them up and hustle them onto trains heading back where they came from. But more kept arriving, seeking work, food, relief. Many of them would be reduced to begging and dying on the streets of Moscow. In the early spring of 1999 the West finally gave up pouring subsidies into the bottomless pit, and the foreign investors, even those in partnership with the mafia, pulled out. The Russian economy, like a war refugee raped too many times, lay down by the side of the road and died of despair. This was the gloomy prospect that President Cherkassov contemplated as he drove that hot summer’s day out to his weekend retreat. The driver knew the road to the country dacha, out beyond Usovo on the banks of the Moskva River, where the air was cooler under the trees. Years ago the fat cats of the Soviet Politburo had had their dachas in the woods along this bend of the river. Much had changed in Russia, but not that much. Traffic was light because gasoline was expensive and the trucks they passed belched great plumes of pure black smoke. After Archangelskoye they crossed the bridge and turned along the road beside the river, which flowed quietly in the summer haze toward the city behind them. Five minutes later President Cherkassov felt himself to be short of breath. Although the air conditioning was at full blast he pushed the button to open the rear window next to his face and let nature’s air blow over him. It was hotter, and made his breathing little better. Behind the partition screen neither driver nor bodyguard had noticed. The turnoff to Peredelkino came up on the right. As they passed it, the president of Russia leaned to his left and fell sideways across his seat. The first thing the driver noticed was that the president’s head had disappeared from his rearview mirror. He muttered something to the bodyguard, who turned his torso around to look. In a second the Mercedes slewed into the side of the road. Behind, the Chaika did the same. The head of the security detail, a former colonel of Spetsnaz, leaped from the front passenger seat and ran forward. Others came out from their seats, guns drawn, and formed a protective ring. They did not know what had happened. The colonel reached the Mercedes, where the bodyguard had the rear door open and was leaning in. The colonel yanked him backward to see better. The president was half on his back, half on his side, both hands clutching at his chest, eyes closed, breathing in short grunts. The nearest hospital with top-of-the-line intensive care facilities was the Number One State Clinic miles away in the Sparrow Hills. The colonel got into the rear seat beside the stricken Cherkassov and ordered the driver to hang a U-turn and head back for the Orbital Beltway. White-faced, the driver did so. From his portable phone the colonel raised the clinic and ordered an ambulance to meet them halfway. The rendezvous was half an hour later in the middle of the divided highway. Paramedics transferred the unconscious man from the limousine to the ambulance and went to work as the three-vehicle convoy raced to the clinic. Once there the president came under the care of the senior cardiac specialist on duty and was rushed to the ICU. They used what they had, the latest and the best, but they were still too late. The line across the screen of the monitor refused to budge, maintaining a long straight line and a high-pitched buzz. At ten minutes past four the senior physician straightened up and shook his head. The man with the defibrillator stood back. The colonel punched some numbers into his mobile phone. Someone answered at the third ring. The colonel said: “Get me the office of the prime minister.” ? SIX hours later far out on the rolling surface of the Caribbean, the Foxy Lady turned for home. Down on the afterdeck Julius the boatman hauled in the lines, detached the wire traces and stowed the rods It had been a fill-day charter and a good one. While Julius wound the traces and their brilliant plastic lures into neat circles for storing in the tackle box the American couple popped a couple of cans of beer and sat contentedly under the awning to slake their thirst. In the fish locker were two huge wahoo close to forty pounds each and half a dozen big dorado that a few hours earlier had been lurking under a weed patch ten miles away. The skipper on the upper bridge checked his course for the islands and eased the throttles forward from trolling speed to fast cruise. He reckoned he would be sliding into Turtle Cove in less than an hour. The Foxy Lady seemed to know her work was almost over and her berth in the sheltered harbor up the quay from the Tiki Hut was waiting for her. She tucked in her tail, lifted her nose, and the deep-V hull began to slice through the blue water. Julius dunked a bucket in the passing water and sluiced the afterdeck yet again. ? WHEN Zhirinovsky had been leader of the Liberal Democrats the party headquarters were in a shabby slum of a building in Fish Alley, just off Sretenka Street. Visitors not aware of the strange ways of Vlad the Mad had been amazed to discover how tawdry it was. The plaster peeling, the windows displaying two flyblown posters of the demagogue, the place had not seen a wet mop in a decade. Inside the chipped black door, visitors found a gloomy lobby with a booth selling T-shirts with the leader’s portrait on the front and racks of the requisite black leather jackets worn by his supporters. Up the uncarpeted stairs, clothed in gloomy brown paint, was the first half-landing, with a grilled window where a surly guard asked the caller’s business. Only if this was satisfactory could he then ascend to the tacky rooms above where Zhirinovsky held court when he was in town. Hard rock boomed throughout the building. This was the way the eccentric fascist had preferred to keep the headquarters, on the grounds that the image spoke of a man of the people rather than one of the fat cats. But Zhirinovsky was long gone now, and the Liberal Democratic Party had been amalgamated with the other ultra-right and neo-fascist parties into the Union of Patriotic Forces. Its undisputed leader was Igor Komarov, and he was a completely different kind of man. Nevertheless, seeing the basic logic of showing the poor and dispossessed whose votes he sought that the Union of Patriotic Forces permitted itself no expensive indulgences, he kept the Fish Alley building, but maintained his own private offices elsewhere. Trained as an engineer, Komarov had worked under Communism but not for it, until halfway through the Yeltsin period he had decided to enter politics. He had chosen the Liberal Democratic Party, and though he privately despised Zhirinovsky for his drunken excesses and constant sexual innuendo, his quiet work in the background had brought him to the Politburo, the inner council of the party. From here, in a series of covert meetings with leaders of other ultra-right parties, he had stitched together the alliance of all the right-wing elements in Russia into the UPF. Presented with an accomplished fact, Zhirinovsky grudgingly accepted its existence and fell into the trap of chairing its first plenum. The plenum passed a resolution requiring his resignation and ditched him. Komarov declined to take the leadership but ensured that it went to a nonentity, a man with no charisma and little organizational talent. A year later it was easy to play upon the sense of disappointment in the Union’s governing council, ease out the stopgap, and take the leadership himself. The career of Vladimir Zhirinovsky had ended. Within two years after the 1996 elections the crypto-Communists began to fade. Their supporters had always been predominantly middle-aged and elderly and they had trouble raising funds. Without big-banker support the membership fees were no longer enough. The Socialist Union’s money and its appeal dwindled. By 1998 Komarov was undisputed leader of the ultra-right and in prime position to play upon the growing despair of the Russian people, of which there was plenty. Yet along with all this poverty and destitution there was also ostentatious wealth to make the eyes blink. Those who had money had mountains of it, much of it in foreign currency. They swept through the streets in long stretch limousines, American or German, for the Zil factory had gone out of production, often accompanied by motorcycle outriders to clear a path and usually with a second car of bodyguards racing along behind. In the lobby of the Bolshoi, in the bars and banquet halls of the Metropol and the National, they could be seen each evening, accompanied by their hookers trailing sable, mink, the aroma of Parisian scent, and glittering with diamonds. These were the fat cats, fatter than ever. In the Duma the delegates shouted and waved order papers and passed resolutions. “It reminds me,” said an English foreign correspondent, “of all I ever heard of the last days of the Weimar Republic.” The one man who seemed to offer a possible ray of hope was Igor Komarov. In the two years since he had taken power in the party of the right, Komarov had surprised most observers, both inside and outside Russia. If he had been content to remain simply a superb political organizer, he would have been just another apparatchik. But he changed. Or so observers thought. More probably he had a talent he had been content to keep hidden. Komarov made his mark as a passionate and charismatic popular orator. When he was on the podium those who recalled the quiet, soft-spoken, fastidious private man were amazed. He seemed transformed. His voice increased and deepened to a rolling baritone, using all the many expressions and inflections of the Russian language to great effect. He could drop his tone almost to a whisper so that even with microphones the audience had to strain to catch the words, then rise to a ringing peroration that brought the crowds to their feet and had even the skeptics cheering. He quickly mastered the area of his own specialty, the living crowd. He avoided the televised fireside chat or television interview, aware that though these might work in the West, they were not for Russia. Russians rarely invited people into their homes, let alone the entire nation. Nor was he interested in being trapped by hostile questions. Every speech he made was stage-managed, but the technique worked. He addressed only rallies of the party faithful, with the cameras under the control of his own filmmaking team commanded by the brilliant young director Litvinov. Cut and edited, these films were released for nationwide television viewing on his own terms, to be aired complete and unabridged. This he could achieve by buying TV time instead of relying upon the vagaries of newscasters. His theme was always the same and always popular—Russia, Russia, and again Russia. He inveighed against the foreigners whose international conspiracies had brought Russia to her knees. He clamored for the expulsion of all the “blacks,” the popular Russian way of referring to Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, and others from the south, many of whom were known to be among the richest of the criminal profiteers. He cried out for justice for the poor downtrodden Russian people who would one day rise with him to restore the glories of the past and sweep away the filth that clogged the streets of the motherland. He promised all things to all men. For the out-of-work there would be employment a fair day’s wage for a good day’s work, with food on the table and dignity again. For those with obliterated life savings there would be honest currency again and something to put by for a comfortable old age For those who wore the uniform of the Rodina, the ancient motherland, there would be pride again to wipe out the humiliations visited upon them by cravens elevated to high office by foreign capital. And they heard him. By radio and television they heard him across the wide steppes. The soldiers of the once-great Russian army heard him, huddled under canvas, expelled from Afghanistan, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in an endless series of retreats from empire. The peasants heard him in their cottages and izbas, scattered across the vast landscape. The ruined middle classes, heard him among the bits of furniture they had not pawned for food on the table and a few coals in the hearth. Even the industrial bosses heard him and dreamed that their furnaces might one day roar again. And when he promised them that the angel of death would walk among the crooks and gangsters who had raped their beloved Mother Russia, they loved him. In the spring of 1999, at the suggestion of his PR adviser, a very clever young man who had graduated from an American Ivy League college, Igor Komarov granted a series of private interviews. Young Boris Kuznetsov picked the candidates well, mainly legislators and journalists of the conservative wing across America and Western Europe. The purpose of the reception was to calm their fears. As a campaign, it worked brilliantly. Most arrived expecting to find what they had been told they would find: a wild-eyed ultra-right demagogue, variously dubbed racist or neo-Fascist or both. They found themselves talking to a thoughtful, well-mannered man in a sober suit. As Komarov spoke no English, it was his PR aide who sat by his side, both guiding the interview and interpreting. Whenever his adored leader said something he knew might be ill-interpreted in the West, Kuznetsov simply translated it into something much more acceptable in English. No one noticed, for he had ensured that none of the visitors understood Russian. Thus Komarov could explain that, as practicing politicians, we all have constituencies and we cannot needlessly offend them if we wish to be elected. Thus we may on occasion have to say what we know they want to hear, even though to achieve it may be much harder than we pretend. And the senators nodded understandingly. He explained that in the older western democracies people broadly understood that social discipline began with oneself, so that externally imposed discipline, by the state, might be the lighter. But where all forms of self-discipline had broken down, the state might have to be firmer than would be acceptable in the West. And the MPs nodded understandingly. To the conservative journalists he explained that the restoration of a sound currency could simply not be achieved without some draconian measures against crime and corruption in the short term. The journalists wrote that Igor Komarov was a man who would listen to reason on matters economic and political, such as cooperation with the West. He might be too far right for acceptance in a European or American democracy, and his powerful demagoguery too frightening for western palates, but he might well be the man for Russia in her present straits. In any case he would almost certainly win the presidential election in June 2000 The polls showed that The farsighted would be wise to support him In chancelleries embassies ministries and boardrooms across the West the cigar smoke rose to the ceilings and heads nodded. ? IN the northern sector of the central area of Moscow just inside the Boulevard Ring road and halfway down Kiselny Boulevard, is a side street. Midway along the west side of the street there is a small park, about half an acre in size, surrounded on three sides by windowless buildings and protected at the front by ten-foot-high green steel sheets, over the top of which the tips of a line of conifers can just be seen. Set in the steel wall is a double gate, also steel. The small park is in fact the garden of a superb pre-revolutionary town house or mansion, exquisitely restored in the mid-1980s. Although the interior is modern and functional, the classic facade is painted in pastel shades, the plasterwork over doors and windows picked out in white. This was the real headquarters of Igor Komarov. A visitor at the front gate would be in full view of a camera atop the wall and would announce himself via an intercom. He would be talking to a guard in a hut just within the gate, who would check with the security office inside the dacha. If the gates opened, a car could roll forward for ten yards before stopping at a row of spikes. The steel gates, sliding sideways on rollers, would close automatically behind it. The guard would then emerge to check identification papers. If these were in order, he would retire to his hut and press an electric control. The spikes would recede and the car could go forward to the gravel forecourt where more guards would be waiting. From either side of the dacha chain-link fencing ran to the edges of the compound, bolted firmly to the surrounding walls. Behind the chain-link were the dogs. There were two teams, and each responded only to one dog handler. The handlers worked alternate nights. After dark, gates in the fencing were opened and the dogs had the run of the whole compound, front and back. Thereafter the gate guard stayed inside his hut, and in the event of a late visitor he would have to contact the handler to call off the dogs. In order to avoid losing too many of the staff to the dogs, there was an underground passage at the rear of the building, leading to a narrow alley which itself led to Kiselny Boulevard. This passage had three keypad doors: one inside the dacha, one at the street, and one midway. This was the access and egress for deliveries and staff. At night, when the political staff had left and the dogs prowled the grounds, two security men remained on duty inside the dacha. They had a room of their own, with a TV and facilities for snacks, but no beds because they were not supposed to sleep. Alternately, they prowled the three floors of the dacha until relieved by the day shift arriving at the breakfast hour. Mr. Komarov came later. But dust and cobwebs are no respecters of high office, and every night except Sunday, when the buzzer from the rear alley sounded, one of the guards would let in the cleaner. In Moscow most cleaners are women but Komarov preferred an all-male environment around him, including the cleaner, a harmless old soldier called Leonid Zaitsev. The surname means rabbit in Russian and because of his helpless manner, threadbare ex-army greatcoat worn winter and summer, and the three stainless steel teeth that gleamed at the front of his mouth—Red Army dentistry used to be pretty basic—the guards at the dacha just called him Rabbit. The night the president died they let him in as usual at 10:00 P.M. It was one in the morning when, with bucket and duster in hand dragging the vacuum cleaner behind him he reached the office of N. I. Akopov the personal private secretary of Mr. Komarov. He had only met the man once, a year ago, when he had arrived to find some of the senior staff working very late. The man had been extremely rude to him, ordering him out with a stream of invective. Sometimes, since then, he had got his own back by sitting in Mr. Akopov’s comfortable leather swivel chair. Because he knew the guards were downstairs, the Rabbit sat in the swivel chair and reveled in the lush comfort of the leather. He had never had a chair like that and never would. There was a document on the desk blotter, about forty pages of typescript bound at the edge with a spiral binding and covered front and back with heavy black paper. The Rabbit wondered why it had been left out. Normally Mr. Akopov put everything away in his wall safe. He must have, for the Rabbit had never seen a document before and all the desk drawers were always locked. He flicked open the black cover and looked at the title. Then he opened the file at random. He was not a good reader, but he could do it. His foster mother had taught him long ago, and then the teachers at the state school and finally a kindly officer in the army. What he saw troubled him. He read one passage several times; some of the words were too long and complex, but he understood the meanings. His arthritic hands trembled as he turned the pages. Why should Mr. Komarov say such things? And about people like his foster mother whom he had loved? He did not fully understand, but it worried him. Perhaps he should consult the guards downstairs? But they would just hit him about the head and tell him to get on with his work. An hour went by. The guards should have patrolled but they were glued to their television where the extended news program had informed the nation that the prime minister, in accordance with Article Fifty-nine of the Russian constitution, had taken over the duties of president, per interim, for the prescribed three months. The Rabbit read the same few passages over and over until he understood their meaning. But he could not grasp the meaning behind the meaning. Mr. Komarov was a great man. He was going to become the next president of Russia, was he not? So why should he be saying such things about the Rabbit’s foster mother and people like her, for she was long dead? At two in the morning the Rabbit stuffed the file inside his shirt, finished his work, and asked to be let out. The guards reluctantly left their TV screen to open the doors and the Rabbit wandered off into the night. He was a bit earlier than usual, but the guards did not mind. Zaitsev thought of going home, but decided he had better not. It was too early. The buses, trams, and subways were all shut down as usual. He always had to walk home, sometimes in the rain, but he needed the job. The walk took an hour. If he went now he would wake his daughter and her two children. She would not like that. So he wandered through the streets wondering what to do. By half past three he found himself on the Kremlevskaya Quay beneath the southern walls of the Kremlin There were tramps and derelicts sleeping along the quay, but he found a bench with some space, sat down, and stared out across the river. ? THE sea had calmed down as they approached the island as it always did in the afternoon as if telling the fisherman and the mariners that the contest for the day was over and the ocean would call a truce till tomorrow. To right and left the skipper could see several other boats heading for the Wheeland Cut the northwestern gap in the reef that gave access from the open sea to the flat lagoon. To starboard Arthur Dean in his open Silver Deep raced past making eight knots better than the Foxy Lady. The islander waved a greeting and the American skipper waved back. He saw two divers in the back of the Silver Deep and reckoned they had been exploring the coral off Northwest Point There would be lobster in the Dean household tonight. He slowed the Foxy Lady to navigate the cut, for on either side the razor-tipped coral was barely inches below the surface, and once through they settled down for the easy ten minutes down the coast to Turtle Cove. The skipper loved his boat, his livelihood and mistress all in one. She was a ten-year-old thirty-one-foot Bertram Moppie—originally so named after designer Dick Bertram’s wife—and though not the biggest nor the most luxurious charter fishing vessel in Turtle Cove, her owner and skipper would match her against any sea and any fish. He had bought her five years earlier when he moved to the islands, secondhand from a yard in South Florida via a small ad in the Boat Trader, then worked on her himself night and day until she was the sassiest girl in all the islands. He had not regretted a dollar of her, even though he was still paying off the finance company. Inside the harbor he eased the Bertram into her slot two down from fellow American Bob Collins on the Sakitumi, switched off, and came down to ask his clients if they had had a good day. They had indeed, they assured him, and paid his fee with a generous gratuity for himself and Julius. When they had gone he winked at Julius, let him keep the entire tip and the fish, took off his cap, and ran his fingers through his tousled blond hair. Then he left the grinning islander to finish cleaning off the boat, fresh-water rinsing all the rods and reels and leaving Foxy Lady shipshape for the night. He would come back to close her up before going home. In the meantime he felt a straight lime daiquiri coming on, so he strolled down the boardwalk to the Banana Boat, greeting all he met as they greeted him. CHAPTER 2 TWO HOURS AFTER SITTING ON HIS RIVERSIDE BENCH, Leonid Zaitsev still had not worked out his problem. He wished now he had not taken the document. He did not really know why he had. If they found out, he would be punished. But then, life always seemed to have punished him and he could not really understand why. The Rabbit had been born in a small and poor village west of Smolensk in 1936. It was not much of a place, but one like tens of thousands scattered across the land—a single rutted street, dusty in summer, a river of mud in autumn, and rock-hard with frost in winter. Thirty or so houses, some barns, and the former peasants now herded into a Stalinist collective farm. His father was a farm worker and they lived in a hovel just off the main road. Down the road, with a small shop and a flat above it, lived the village baker. His father told him he should not have anything to do with the baker, because he was “yevrey.” He did not know what that meant, but clearly it was not a good thing to be. But he noticed his mother bought her bread there, and very good bread it was. He was puzzled that he should not talk to the baker, for he was a jolly man who would sometimes stand in the doorway of his shop, wink at Leonid, and toss him a bulochka, a warm sticky bun fresh from the oven. Because of what his father said, he would run behind the cattle shed to eat the bun. The baker lived with his wife and two daughters, whom he could sometimes see peeping out from the shop, though they never seemed to come out and play. On a day in late July 1941 death came to the village. The little boy did not know it was death at the time. He heard the rumbling and growling and ran out of the barn. There were huge iron monsters coming from the main road up to the village. The first one came to a halt right in the middle of the houses. Leonid stood in the street to have a better look. It seemed enormous, as big as a house itself, but it rolled on tracks and had a long gun sticking out in front. At the very top, above the gun, a man was standing with his upper half in the open. He took off a thick padded helmet and laid it beside him. It was very hot that day. Then he turned and looked down at Leonid. The child saw that the man had almost white-blond hair and eyes of a blue so pale that it was as if the summer sky was shining straight through the skull from the back. There was no expression in the eyes, neither love nor hatred, just a sort of blank boredom. Quite slowly the man reached to his side and pulled a handgun from a pouch. Something told Leonid all was not well. He heard the whump of grenades thrown through windows, and screams. He was frightened, turned and ran. There was a crack and something fanned through his hair. He got behind the cattle shed, began to cry, and kept running. There was a steady chattering sound behind him and the smell of burning timber as the houses flamed. He saw the forest ahead of him and kept running. Inside the forest he did not know what to do. He was still crying and calling for his mommy and his daddy. But they never came. They never came again. He came upon a woman, screaming about her husband and her daughters, and recognized the baker’s wife, Mrs. Davidova. She seized him and hugged him to her bosom, and he could not understand why she should do that, and what would his father think, because she was yevrey! The village had ceased to exist and the SS-Panzer unit had turned and gone. There were a few other survivors in the forest. Later they met some partisans, hard, bearded men with guns who lived there. With a partisan guide a column of them set off, eastward, always eastward. When he became tired, Mrs. Davidova carried him, until at last weeks later they reached Moscow She seemed to know some people there, who gave them shelter food and warmth. They were nice to him and looked like Mr. Davidov with ringlets from their temples to their chins and broad-brimmed hats. Although he was not yevrey, Mrs. Davidova insisted she adopt him and she looked after him for years. After the war the authorities discovered he was not her real son and separated them, sending him to an orphanage. He cried very much when they parted and so did she but he never saw her again. At the orphanage they taught him that yevrey meant Jewish. The Rabbit sat on his bench and wondered about the document under his shirt. He did not fully comprehend the meaning of phrases like “total extermination” or “utter annihilation.” The words were too long for him, but he did not think they were good words. He could not understand why Mr. Komarov should want to do that to people like Mrs. Davidova. There was a hint of pink in the east. In a big mansion across the river on Sofiskaya Quay a Royal Marine took a flag and began to climb the stairs toward the roof. ? THE skipper took his daiquiri, rose from the table, and wandered to the wood rail. He looked down at the water, then up across the darkening harbor. Forty-nine, he thought, forty-nine and still in hock to the company store. Jason Monk, you’re getting old and past it. He took a swig and felt the lime and rum hit the spot. What the hell, it’s been a pretty good life. Eventful, anyway. It had not started that way. It started in a humble timber-frame house in the tiny town of Crozet in south-central Virginia, just east of the Shenandoah, five miles off the highway from Waynesboro to Charlottesville. Albemarle County is farming country, steeped in memorials of the War Between the States, for eighty percent of that war was fought in Virginia and no Virginian ever forgets’ it. At the local county grade school most of his schoolmates had fathers who raised tobacco, soybeans, or hogs, or all three. Jason Monk’s father, by contrast, was a forest ranger working in the Shenandoah National Park. No one ever became a millionaire working for the Forestry Service, but it was a good life for a boy, even if dollars were short. Vacations were not for lazing around but for finding opportunities to do extra work to make some money and help out in the home. He recalled how his father would take him as a child up into the park that covered the Blue Ridge Mountains to show him the difference between spruce, birch, fir, oak, and loblolly pine. Sometimes they would meet the game wardens and he would listen round-eyed to their tales of black bear and deer, and their hunts for turkey, grouse, and wild pheasant. Later he learned to use a gun with unerring accuracy, to track and trail, make camp and hide all traces in the morning, and when he was big and strong enough he got vacation work in the logging camps. He attended the county grade school from age five until twelve, and just after his thirteenth birthday enrolled at County High in Charlottesville, rising every morning before dawn to commute from Crozet to the city. It was at the high school that something was to happen that would change his life. Back in 1944 a certain GI sergeant had, with thousands of others, hauled himself off Omaha Beach and struck into the hinterland of Normandy. Somewhere outside Saint-Lo, separated from his unit, he had come into the sights of a German sniper. He was lucky; the bullet grazed his upper arm. The twenty-three-year-old American crawled into a nearby farmhouse where the family tended his wound and gave him shelter. When the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house put the cold compress on his wound and he looked into her eyes, he knew he had been struck harder than any German bullet would ever do. A year later he returned from Berlin to Normandy, proposed, and married her in the orchard of her father’s farm with a U.S. Army chaplain officiating. Later, because the French do not marry in orchards, the local Catholic priest did the same in the village church. Then he brought his bride back to Virginia. Twenty years later he was deputy principal of Charlottesville County High, and his wife, with their children off their hands, suggested she might teach French there. Mrs. Josephine Brady was pretty and glamorous and French, so her classes quickly became very sought after. In the fall of 1965 there was a newcomer in her first-year class, a rather shy youth with an untidy shock of blond hair and a fetching grin, called Jason Monk. Within a year she could avow she had never heard a foreigner speak French like him. The talent had to be natural; it could not be inherited. But it was there, not just a mastery of the grammar and the syntax, but an ability to copy the accent to perfection. In his last year at County High, he would visit her house and they would read Mairaux, Proust, Gide, and Sartre (who was incredibly erotic for those days) but their mutual favorites were the older romantic poets, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and De Vigny. It was not intended to happen but it did. Perhaps the poets were to blame, but despite the age gap, which worried neither of them, they had a brief affair. By the time he was eighteen Jason Monk could do two things unusual in teenagers of Southern Virginia; he could speak French and make love, each with considerable skill. At eighteen he joined the army. In 1968 the Vietnam War was very much in full flow. Many young Americans were trying to avoid serving there. Those who presented themselves as volunteers, signing on for three years, were welcomed with open arms. Monk did his basic training and somewhere along the line he filled in his résumé. Under the question “foreign languages” he filled in “French.” He was summoned to the office of the Camp Adjutant. “You really speak French?” asked the officer. Monk explained. The adjutant called Charlottesville High and spoke with the school secretary. She contacted Mrs. Brady. Then she rang back. This took a day. Monk was told to report again. This time there was a major from G2, Army Intelligence, present. Apart from speaking Vietnamese, most people of a certain age in this former French colony spoke French. Monk was flown to Saigon. He did two tours, with a gap in between back in the States. On the day of his release, the C.O. ordered him to report to his office. There were two civilians present. The colonel left. “Please, sergeant, take a seat,” said the older and more genial of the two men. He toyed with a briar pipe while the more earnest one broke into a torrent of French. Monk replied in like vein. This went on for ten minutes. Then the French speaker gave a grin and turned to his colleague. “He’s good, Carey, he’s damn good.” Then he too left. “So, what do you think of Vietnam?” asked the remaining man. He was then about forty, with a lined, amused face. It was 1971. “It’s a house of cards, sir,” said Monk. “And it’s falling down. Two more years and we’ll have to get out of there.” Carey seemed to agree. He nodded several times. “You’re right, but don’t tell the army. What are you going to do now?” “I haven’t made up my mind, sir.” “Well, I can’t make it up for you. But you have a gift. I don’t even have it myself. My friend out there is as American as you and me, but he was raised in France for twenty years. If he says you’re good, that’s enough for me. So why not continue? “You mean college, sir?” “I do. The G.I. Bill will pick up most of the tab. Uncle Sam feels you’ve earned it. Take advantage.” During his years in the army Monk had sent most of his spare cash home to his mother to help raise the other children. “Even the G.I. Bill requires a thousand dollars in cash,” he said. Carey shrugged. “I guess a thousand dollars can be raised. If you’ll major in Russian.” “And if I do?” “Then give me a call. The outfit I work for might be able to offer you something.” “It could take four years, sir.” “Oh, we’re patient folk where I work.” “How did you know about me, sir?” “Down in Vietnam, some of our people in the Phoenix Program spotted you and your work. You got some good tips on the VC. They liked that.” “It’s Langley, isn’t it, sir? You’re the CIA.” “Oh, not all of it. Just a small cog.” Carey Jordan was actually much more than a small cog. He would go on to become Deputy Director (Operations), that is, head of the whole espionage arm. Monk took the advice and enrolled at the University of Virginia, right back in Charlottesville. He drank tea with Mrs. Brady again, but just as friends. He studied Slavonic languages and majored in Russian at a level his senior adviser, himself a Russian, termed “bilingual.” He graduated at the age of twenty-five in 1975 and just after his next birthday was accepted into the CIA. After the usual basic training at Fort Peary, known in the agency simply as “the Farm,” he was assigned to Langley, then New York, and back to Langley. It would be five years, and many, many courses later, before he would get his first posting abroad, and then it was to Nairobi, Kenya. ? CORPORAL Meadows of the Royal Marines did his duty that bright morning of July 16. He snap-locked the reinforced edge of the flag to the hoisting cord and ran the banner up the pole to the top. There it fluttered open in the dawn breeze to tell all the world who dwelt beneath it. The British government had actually bought the handsome old mansion on Sofia Quay from its previous owner, a sugar magnate, just before the revolution, turned it into the embassy, and had stayed there through thick and thin ever since. Josef Stalin, the last dictator to live in the State Apartments of the Kremlin, used to rise each morning, throw back his curtains, and see the British flag fluttering right across the river. It made him extremely angry. Repeated pressure was brought to persuade the British to move. They refused. Over the years the mansion became too small to house all the departments required by the mission to Moscow, so that subsections were scattered all over the city. But despite repeated offers to house all the sections in one compound, London politely replied that it would prefer to stay on Sofia Quay. As the building was sovereign British territory, there it stayed. Leonid Zaitsev sat across the river and watched the flag flutter open as the first rays of dawn tipped the hills to the east. The sight brought back a distant memory. At eighteen the Rabbit had been called up for the Red Army and after the usual minimal basic training he had been posted with the tanks to East Germany. He was a private, tagged by his instructors as not even corporal material. One day in 1955, on a routine march outside Potsdam, he had become separated from his company in dense forest. Lost and afraid, he blundered through the woods until he stumbled out on a sandy track. There he halted, rooted to the spot, paralyzed with fear. Ten yards away was an open jeep containing four soldiers. They had evidently paused for a break while on patrol. Two were still in the vehicle, two were standing beside it, smoking cigarettes. They had bottles of beer in their hands. He knew at once they were not Russians. They were foreigners, Westerners, from the Allied Mission at Potsdam, set up under the Four-Power Agreement of 1945, of which he knew nothing. He knew only, because he had been told, that they were the enemy, come to destroy Socialism and, if they could, to kill him. They stopped talking when they saw him and stared at him. One of them said: “ ‘Ello, ‘ello. What have we got ‘ere? A bleeding Russky. Allo, Ivan.” He did not understand a word. He had a tommy gun slung over his shoulder but they did not seem afraid of him. It was the other way around. Two of them wore black berets, with shining brass cap badges and behind the emblems a cluster of white-and-red feathers. He did not know it, but he was looking at the regimental hackle of the Royal Fusiliers. One of the soldiers next to the vehicle peeled himself away and sauntered toward him. He thought he was going to wet himself. The man was also young, with red hair and a freckled face. He grinned at Zaitsev and held out a bottle. “Come on, mate. ‘Ave a beer.” Leonid felt the chill of the cold glass in his hand. The foreign soldier nodded encouragingly. It would be poisoned of course. He put the neck of the bottle to his lips and tilted. The cold liquid hit the back of his throat. It was strong, better than Russian beer, and good, but it made him cough. Carrot-hair laughed. “Go on, then. ‘Ave a beer,” he said. To Zaitsev it was just a voice making sounds. To his amazement the foreign soldier turned his back and sauntered the few feet to his vehicle. The man was not even afraid of him. He was armed, he was the Red Army, and the foreigners were grinning and joking. He stood by the trees, drinking the cold beer and wondered what Colonel Nikolayev would think. The colonel commanded his squadron. He was only about thirty, but he was a decorated war hero. Once he had stopped and asked Zaitsev about his background, where he came from. The private had told him: an orphanage. The colonel had patted him on the back and told him that now he had a home. He adored Colonel Nikolayev. He was too frightened to throw their beer back at them, and anyway it tasted very good, even if it was poisoned. So he drank it. After ten minutes the two soldiers on the ground climbed into the rear and pulled on their berets. The driver started up and they drove away. No hurry, no fear of him. The one with red hair turned and waved. They were the enemy, they were preparing to invade Russia, but they waved at him. When they had gone he threw the empty bottle as far into the woods as he could, and ran through the trees until eventually he saw a Russian truck, which brought him back to camp. The sergeant gave him a week’s kitchen duty for getting lost, but he never told anyone about the foreigners or the beer. Before the foreign vehicle drove off he noticed that it had some sort of regimental insignia on the front right wing and a wasp aerial high above the back. On the aerial was a flag, about a foot square. It had crosses: one upright in red and two diagonal, red and white. All on a blue background. A funny flag in red, white, and blue. Forty-four years later, there it was again, fluttering above a building across the river. The Rabbit had solved his problem. He knew he should not have stolen the file from Mr. Akopov, but he could not take it back now. Perhaps no one would notice it was missing. So he would give it to the people with the funny flag who gave him beer. They would know what to do with it. He rose from his bench and began to walk down the riverbank toward the Stone Bridge across the Moskva to the Sofia Quay. Nairobi, 1983 WHEN the little boy developed a headache and a slight temperature his mother thought at first it was a summer chill. But by nightfall the five-year-old was screaming that his head hurt and he kept both parents awake all night. In the morning their neighbors in the Soviet diplomatic compound, who had not slept too well either because the walls were thin and the windows open in the heat, asked what was wrong. That morning the mother took her son to the doctor. None of the Soviet Bloc embassies merited a doctor all to themselves, but they shared one. Dr. Svoboda was at the Czech Embassy but he ministered to the whole Communist community. He was a good and conscientious man and it took him only a few moments to assure the Russian mother that her boy had a touch of malaria. He administered the appropriate dose of one of the niviquine/paludrine variants used by Russian medicine at that time, with further tablets to be taken daily. There was no response. In two days the child’s condition worsened. The temperature and the shivers increased, and he screamed from his headache. The ambassador had no hesitation in granting permission for a visit to Nairobi General Hospital. Because the mother could speak no English, her husband, Second Secretary (Trade) Nikolai Ilyich Turkin, went with her. Dr. Winston Moi was also a fine physician and he probably knew the tropical diseases better than the Czech doctor. He did a thorough diagnosis and straightened up with a smile. “Plasmodium falciparum,” he decreed. The father leaned forward with a puzzled frown. His English was good, but not that good. “It is a variant of malaria, but alas resistant to all the chloroquine-based drugs such as those prescribed by my good colleague Dr. Svoboda.” Dr. Moi administered an intravenous injection of a strong broad-spectrum antibiotic. It seemed to work. At first. After a week, when the drug course ceased, the condition returned. By now the mother was hysterical. Denouncing all forms of foreign medicine, she insisted she and her son be flown back to Moscow and the ambassador agreed. Once there, the boy was admitted to the exclusive KGB clinic. This was possible because Second Secretary (Trade) Nikolai Turkin was in fact Major Turkin of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. The clinic was good, and it had a fine tropical medicine department, because KGB men can be posted all over the world. Because of the intractable nature of the small boy’s case, it went right to the departmental head, Professor Glazunov. He read both the files from Nairobi and ordered a series of CT and ultrasound scans then the last word in technology unavailable just about anywhere else in the USSR. The scans worried him badly. They revealed a series developing internal abscesses on various organs inside the boy. When he asked Mrs. Turkin into his office his face was grave. “I know what it is, at least I am sure I do, but it cannot be treated. With heavy use of antibiotics your boy may survive a month. More unlikely I am very sorry.” The weeping mother was escorted out. A sympathetic assistant explained to her what had been found. It was a rare disease called melioidosis, very uncommon indeed in Africa but more common in Southeast Asia. It was the Americans who had identified it during the Vietnam war. U.S. helicopter pilots had been the first to produce symptoms of a new and usually fatal illness. Research discovered that their rotor blades, hovering over the rice paddies, whipped up a fine aerosol spray of paddy water that some of them had breathed in. The bacillus, resistant to all known antibiotics, was in the water. The Russians knew this because although they shared none of their own discoveries at that time, they were like a sponge when it came to absorbing Western knowledge. Professor Glazunov would automatically receive every single Western technical publication in his field. In a long telephone call punctuated by sobbing, Mrs. Turkin told her husband their son was going to die. From melioidosis. Major Turkin wrote it down. Then he went to see his superior, the KGB Head of Station, Colonel Kuliev. He was sympathetic but adamant. “Intervene with the Americans? Are you crazy?” “Comrade Colonel, if the Yanks have identified it, and seven years ago at that, they may have something for it.” “But we can’t ask them that,” protested the colonel. “There is a question of national prestige here.” “There is a question of my son’s life here,” shouted the major. “That is enough. Consider yourself dismissed.” Taking his career in his hands Turkin went to the ambassador. The diplomat was not a cruel man but he too could not be moved. “Interventions between our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Department are rare and confined to matters of state,” he told the young officer. “By the way, does Colonel Kuliev know you are here?” “No, Comrade Ambassador.” “Then for the sake of your future prospects, I shall not tell him. And neither will you. But the answer is no.” “If I were a member of the Politburo …” Turkin began. “But you are not. You are a junior major of thirty-two serving his country in the middle of Kenya. I am sorry for your boy, but there is nothing that can be done.” As he went down the stairs Nikolai Turkin reflected bitterly that First Secretary Yuri Andropov was daily being kept alive by medications flown in from London. Then he went out to get drunk. ? GETTING into the British Embassy was not that easy. Standing on the pavement across the quay Zaitsev could see the big ocher-colored mansion and even the top of the pillared portico that shielded the giant carved-timber doors. But there was no way of just wandering in. Along the frontage of the still-shuttered building ran a wall of steel, penetrated by two wide gates for cars, one for “in” and one for “out.” Also made of corrugated steel, they were electrically operated and firmly closed. To the right-hand side was an entrance for pedestrians, but there were two barred grilles. At pavement level two Russian militiamen were posted to check on anyone trying to walk in. The Rabbit had no intention of presenting himself to them. Even past the first grille there was a passage and a second barred gate. Between the two was the hut of the embassy security, itself manned by two British-employed Russian guards. Their business was to ask entrants what they wanted, and then check inside the embassy. Too many seeking visas had tried to wangle their way into the building via that gate. Zaitsev wandered aimlessly around to the back where, in a narrow street, was the entrance to the visa section. It was seven in the morning and the door would not open for another three hours, but already there was a queue a hundred meters long. Clearly many had waited all night. To join the line now would mean almost two days of waiting. He ambled back to the front. This time the militiamen gave him a long and searching look. Frightened, Zaitsev shuffled off down the quay to wait until the embassy opened for business and the diplomats arrived. Just before ten, the first of the British began to appear. They came in cars. The vehicles paused at the “in” gate but clearly each one was expected and the gate rumbled open to let the car in before sliding closed again. Zaitsev, watching down the quay, thought of trying to approach a car, but they all had the windows closed and the militiamen were only feet away. The people in the cars would think he was a petitioner of some kind and would keep their windows closed. Then he would be arrested. The police would find out what he had done and tell Mr. Akopov. Leonid Zaitsev was not accustomed to complex problems. He was puzzled but he was also fixated. He just wanted to give his pieces of paper to the people with the funny flag. So through that long hot morning he watched and he waited. Nairobi, 1983 LIKE all Soviet diplomats Nikolai Turkin had a limited resource of foreign exchange and that included Kenyan currency. The Ibis Grill, Alan Bobbe’s Bistro, and the Carnivore were a mite expensive for his pocket. He went to the open-air Thorn Tree Café at the New Stanley Hotel on Kimathi Street, took a table in the garden not far from the big old acacia tree, ordered a vodka and a beer chaser, and sat sunk in despair. Thirty minutes later a man of about his own age who had sipped half a beer at the bar eased himself off his stool and walked over. Turkin heard a voice say in English: “Hey, lighten up, old pal, it may never happen.” The Russian looked up. He recognized the American vaguely. Someone from their embassy. Turkin worked in Directorate K of the First Chief Directorate, the counterintelligence wing. His job was not only to monitor all the Soviet diplomats and protect the local KGB operation from penetration, but also to keep a sharp eye open for a vulnerable Westerner who might be recruited. As such he had the freedom to mix with other diplomats, including Westerners, a freedom denied to any ordinary Russian on the staff. The CIA suspected, precisely from his freedom of movement and contact, what Turkin really did, and had a slim file on him. But there was no handle to grip. The man was a copper-bottomed child of the Soviet regime. For his part Turkin suspected the American was probably CIA, but he had been taught that all American diplomats were probably CIA; a fond illusion but an error on the side of caution. The American sat down and held out a hand. “Jason Monk. You’re Nik Turkin, right? Saw you at the British garden party last week. You look like you just got posted to Greenland.” Turkin studied the American. He had a shock of corn-colored hair that fell over his forehead and an engaging grin. There seemed to be no guile in his face; perhaps he was not CIA after all. He seemed the sort of man one could talk to. On another day Nikolai Turkin would have leaned back on all those years of training and remained polite but noncommittal. This was not another day. He needed to talk to someone. He started, and poured his heart out. The American was concerned and sympathetic. He noted the word melioidosis on a beer coaster. They parted long after dark. The Russian went back to the guarded compound and Monk to his apartment off Harry Thuku Road. ? CELIA Stone was twenty-six, slim, dark, and pretty. She was also Assistant Press Attaché at the British Embassy, Moscow, on her first foreign posting since being accepted into the Foreign Office two years earlier after graduating in Russian from Girton College, Oxford. She was also enjoying life. That July 16 she came out of the embassy’s big front doors and glanced down at the parking area where her small but functional Rover was parked. From inside the embassy compound she could see what Zaitsev could not, because of the steel wall. She stood at the top of the five steps leading down to the blacktop parking area, punctured by tonsured lawns, small trees, bushes, and a blaze of flower beds. Looking over the steel wall, she could see across the river the towering bulk of the Kremlin, pastel lime, ocher, cream, and white with the gleaming golden onion domes of the various cathedrals jutting above the crenellated red stone wall that encircled the fortress. It was a magnificent sight. On either side of her the raised entrance was reached by two ramps, up which only the ambassador was allowed to drive. Lesser mortals parked below and walked. Once a young diplomat had done his career a power of no good by driving his VW Beetle up the ramp in sheeting rain and parking beneath the portico. Minutes later the ambassador, arriving to find his access blocked, had to get out of his Rolls-Royce at the bottom, and walk the rest of the way. He was soaked and not amused. Celia Stone tripped down the steps, nodded at the gate man, got into the bright red Rover, and started up. By the time she had pulled to the “out” gate the steel sheets were sliding back. She rolled out onto Sofia Embankment and turned left toward the Stone Bridge, heading for her lunch date with a reporter from Sevodnya. She did not notice a scruffy old man shuffling frantically after her. Nor did she realize hers was the first car to leave the embassy that morning. The Kamenny Most, or Stone Bridge, is the oldest permanent bridge across the river. In olden days pontoon bridges were used, erected in spring and dismantled in winter when the ice became hard enough to ride over. Because of its bulk, it not only spans the river but jumps over Sofia Quay as well. To gain access from the quay by road, a driver has to turn left again for a hundred yards until the bridge returns to ground level, then hang a U-turn and drive up the slope of the bridge. But a walker can run up the steps direct from the quay below to the bridge above. That is what the Rabbit did. He was on the pavement of the Stone Bridge when the red Rover came by. He waved his arms. The woman inside gave a startled look and drove on. Zaitsev set off in hopeless pursuit. But he had noted the Russian number plate, and saw that on the northern side of the bridge the Rover pulled half left into the traffic maelstrom of Borovitskaya Square. Celia Stone’s destination was Rosy O’Grady’s Pub on Znamenka Street. This unlikely Muscovite tavern is actually Irish, and the watering hole where the Irish ambassador is likely to be found on New Year’s Eve if he can get away from the stuffier parties of the diplomatic circuit. It also serves lunch. Celia Stone had chosen to meet her Russian reporter there. She found a parking space without difficulty just round the corner, for fewer and fewer Russians could afford cars or the petrol to run them, and began to walk back. As always when an obvious foreigner approached a restaurant the derelicts and beggars hauled themselves out of their doorways and off the pavement to intercept and ask for food. As a young diplomat, she had been briefed at the Foreign Office in London before her posting, but the reality always shocked her. She had seen beggars in the Underground of London and in the alleys of New York, the bag people who had somehow slid down the ladder of society to take up residence on its bottom rung. But in Moscow, the capital of a country experiencing the onset of real famine, the wretches with their hands out for money or food had once, and not long ago, been farmers, soldiers, clerks, and shopkeepers. She was reminded of TV documentaries of the Third World. Vadim, the giant doorman of the Rosy O’Grady, saw her several yards away and ran forward, clouting several begging fellow Russians out of the way in order to secure safe passage for a vital hard-currency patron of his employers’ restaurant. Offended by the spectacle of the supplicants’ humiliation at the hands of another Russian, Celia protested feebly, but Vadim swept a long, muscular arm between her and the row of extended hands, swept open the restaurant door, and ushered her inside. The contrast was immediate, from the dusty street and the hungry beggars to the convivial chatter of fifty people who could afford meat and fish for lunch. Being a good-hearted young woman, she always had trouble when lunching or dining out, trying to reconcile the food on her own plate with the hunger outside. The genial Russian reporter who waved to her from a corner table had no such problem. He was studying the list of zakuski starters and settled for Archangel prawns. Zaitsev the Rabbit, still plodding on his quest, scoured Borovitskaya Square for the red Rover, but it had gone. He checked all the streets leading off to the left and right for a flash of red paintwork, but there was none. Finally he chose the main boulevard on the far side of the square. To his amazement and joy he saw it two hundred yards further on, just round a corner from the pub. Indistinguishable from the others waiting with the patience of the utterly cowed, Zaitsev took up position near the Rover and started to wait again. Nairobi, 1983 IT had been ten years since Jason Monk had been a sophomore at the University of Virginia and he had lost touch with many of the students he had known. But he still recalled Norman Stein. Theirs had been an odd friendship, the medium-height but hard-muscled football player from the farm country and the unathletic son of a Jewish doctor from Fredericksburg. It was a shared and mocking sense of humor that had made them friends. If Monk had had the talent for languages, Stein was the near genius in the Biology Department. He had graduated summa cum laude one year before Monk and gone straight to medical school. They had kept in touch the usual way, by Christmas cards. Crossing a restaurant lobby in Washington two years earlier, just before his Kenyan posting came through Monk had seen his friend lunching alone. They had had half an hour together before Stein’s lunch partner had showed. That had enabled them to catch up on each other’s news, though Monk had had to lie and say he worked for the State Department. Stein had become a doctor then taken a Ph D in tropical medicine and was even then rejoicing in his new appointment to the research facility at Walter Reed Army Hospital. From his apartment in Nairobi, Jason Monk checked his address book and made a call. A blurred voice answered at the tenth ring. “Yeah.” “Hi, Norm. It’s Jason Monk.” Pause. “Great. Where are you?” “In Nairobi.” “Great. Nairobi. Of course. And what time is it there?” Monk told him. Midday. “Well it’s five in the fucking morning here and my alarm is set for seven. I was up half the night with the baby. It’s teething, for God’s sake. Thanks a lot, pal.” “Calm down, Norm. Tell me something. You ever heard of something called melioidosis?” There was a pause. The voice that came back had lost all trace of sleep. “Why do you ask?” Monk spun him a story. Not about a Russian diplomat. He said there was a kid of five, son of a guy he knew. Seemed the boy was likely to die. He had heard vaguely that Uncle Sam had had some experience with that particular illness. “Give me your number,” said Stein. “I have to make some calls. I’ll get back to you.” It was five in the afternoon when Monk’s phone rang. “There is—may be—something,” said the physician. “Now listen, it’s completely revolutionary, prototype stage. We’ve done some tests, they seem good. So far. But it hasn’t even been submitted to the FDA yet. Let alone cleared. We’re not through testing yet.” What Stein was describing was a very early cephalosporin antibiotic with no name in 1983. It would later be marketed in the late eighties as ceftazidime. Then it was just called CZ-1. Today it is the standard treatment for melioidosis. “It may have side effects,” said Stein. “We don’t know.” “How long to develop these side effects?” asked Monk. “No idea.” “Well, if the kid’s going to be dead in three weeks, what’s to lose?” Stein sighed heavily. “I don’t know. It’s against all the regulations.” “I swear, no one will ever know. C’mon, Norm, for all those chicks I used to pull for you.” He heard the roar of laughter coming all the way from Chevy Chase, Maryland. “You ever tell Becky and I’ll kill you,” said Stein, and the line went dead. Forty-eight hours later a package arrived for Monk at the embassy. It came via an international freight express company. It contained a vacuum flask with dry ice. A short, unsigned note said the ice contained two vials. Monk made a call to the Soviet embassy and left a message with the Trade Section for Second Secretary Turkin. Don’t forget our beer at six tonight, he said. The message was reported to Colonel Kuliev. “Who is this Monk?” he asked Turkin. “He’s an American diplomat. He seems disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy in Africa. I am trying to develop him as a source.” Kuliev nodded heavily. That was good work, the sort of thing that went well on the report to Yazenevo. At the Thorn Tree Café Monk handed over his package. Turkin looked apprehensive in case anyone from his own side had seen them. The package could contain money. “What is it?” he asked. Monk told him. “It might not work, but it can do no harm. It’s all we have.” The Russian went stiff, his eyes cold. “And what do you want for this … gift?” It was obvious there would be a payback. “You were on the level about your kid? Or just acting?” “No acting. Not this time. Always we act, people like you and me. But not this time.” In fact Monk had already checked with the Nairobi General Hospital. Dr. Winston Moi had confirmed the basic facts. Tough, but this is a tough world, he thought. He rose from the table. According to the rules he should twist this man into passing something over, something secret. But he knew the story of the small son was not a con, not this time. If he had to behave that way he might as well be a street sweeper in the Bronx. “Take it, pal. Hope it works. No charge.” He walked away. Halfway to the door a voice called him. “Mr. Monk, you understand Russian?” Monk nodded. “A bit.” “I thought you would. Then you will understand the word spassibo.” ? SHE came out of Rosy O’Grady’s just after two and approached the driver’s side of her car. The Rover has central locking. As she unlocked the driver’s door, the passenger door also unlocked. She was in her seat belt, engine started and ready to go, when the passenger door opened. She looked up, startled. He was standing there, stooping to the open door. Threadbare old army coat, four soiled medals clinging to the lapel, stubbled chin. When he opened his mouth three steel teeth glinted at the front. He tossed a file into her lap. She easily understood enough Russian to repeat later what he said. “Please, give to Mister Ambassador. For the beer.” The sight of him frightened her. He was clearly mad, perhaps schizophrenic. People like that can be dangerous. White-faced, Celia Stone pulled out into the street, the open door flailing until it was closed by the car’s momentum. She tossed the ridiculous petition, or whatever it was, onto the floor of the front passenger area and drove back to the embassy. CHAPTER 3 IT WAS JUST BEFORE NOON ON THE SAME DAY, JULY 16, that Igor Komarov, sitting in his office on the first floor of the dacha off Kiselny Boulevard, contacted his chief personal assistant by intercom. “The document I lent you yesterday, you have had a chance to read it?” he asked. “I have indeed, Mr. President. Quite brilliant, if I may say so,” Akopov replied. All of Komarov’s staff referred to him as Mr. President, meaning president of the executive committee of the Union of Patriotic Forces. They were in any case convinced that within twelve months he would still be Mr. President but for a different reason. “Thank you,” said Komarov. “Then please return it to me.” The intercom went dead. Akopov rose and went to his wall safe. He knew the combination by heart and spun the central dial the required six times. When the door swung open he looked inside for the black-bound file. It was not there. Puzzled, he emptied the safe, paper by paper and file by file. A cold fear, part panic and part disbelief, gripped him. Taking a hold on himself, he began again. The files on the carpet around his knees were sorted out and examined, sheet by sheet and one by one. No black file. A light sweat beaded his forehead. He had worked contentedly in the office all morning, convinced that before leaving the previous evening he had put every confidential document safely away. He always did; he was a creature of habit. After the safe, he began on the drawers of his desk. Nothing. He searched the floor under the desk, then every cupboard and closet. Just before one he knocked on Igor Komarov’s door, was admitted, and confessed he could not find it. The man who most of the world presumed would be the next president of Russia was a highly complex personality who, behind his public persona, preferred to keep much of himself intensely private. He could not have been a greater contrast to his predecessor, the ousted Zhirinovsky, whom he now openly referred to as a buffoon. Komarov was of medium height and build, clean-shaven, with neatly trimmed iron-gray hair. Among his two most evident fetishes were an absorption with personal cleanliness and a deep dislike of physical contact. Unlike most Russian politicians, with their back-slapping, vodka-toasting, arms-around-the-shoulders bonhomie, Komarov insisted on formal dress and manner of speech in his personal entourage. He rarely if ever donned the uniform of the Black Guard and was usually to be found in a double-breasted gray suit with collar and tie. After years in politics none but a very few could claim to be on close personal terms with him, and no one dared pretend to be an intimate. Nikita Ivanovich Akopov had been his confidential private secretary for a decade but the relationship was still one of master and slavishly devoted servant. Unlike Yeltsin, who had raised staff members to the rank of drinking and tennis-playing buddies, Komarov would, so far as was known, only permit one man to refer to him by first name and patronymic. That was his Head of Security, Colonel. Anatoli Grishin. But like all successful politicians, Komarov could play the chameleon when he had to. To the media, on the rare occasions when he deigned to meet them personally, he could become the grave statesman. Before his own rallies, he became transformed in a manner that never ceased to evoke Akopov’s utter admiration. On the podium the precise former engineer vanished as if he had never been. In his place appeared the orator, a pillar of passion, a sorcerer of words, a man of all the people enunciating their hopes, fears, and desires, their rage and their bigotry, with unerring accuracy. To them and only them would he play the figure of geniality with the common touch. Beneath both personae there was a third, the one that frightened Akopov. Even the rumor of the existence of the third man beneath the veneer was enough to keep those around him—staff, colleagues, and guards—in a permanent state of the deference he demanded. Only twice in ten years had Nikita Akopov seen the demonic rage inside the man well up and spew out of control. On another dozen occasions he had seen the struggle to control that rage and witnessed the effort succeed. On the two occasions when the control had failed, Akopov had seen the man who dominated fascinated and controlled him the man he followed and worshipped turn into a screaming raging demon. He had hurled telephones, vases, and ink-stands at the trembling servant who had offended him, reducing one senior Black Guard officer to a blubbering wreck. He had used language more foul than Akopov had ever heard, broken furniture, and once had to be restrained as he belabored a victim with a heavy ebony ruler lest he actually kill the man. Akopov knew the sign that one of these rages in the president of the UPF was coming to the surface. Komarov’s face went deathly pale, his manner became even more formal and courteous, and two bright red spots burned high on each cheekbone. “Are you saying you have lost it, Nikita Ivanovich?” “Not lost, Mr. President. Apparently mislaid.” “That document is of a more confidential nature than anything you have ever handled. You have read it. You can understand why.” “I do indeed, Mr. President.” “There are only three copies in existence, Nikita. Two are in my own safe. No more than a tiny group of those closest to me will ever be allowed to see it. I even wrote it and typed it myself. I, Igor Komarov, actually typed all the pages myself rather than entrust it to a secretary. It is that confidential.” “Very wise, Mr. President.” “And because I count ... counted you as one of that tiny group, I permitted you to see it. Now you tell me it is lost.” “Mislaid, temporarily mislaid, I assure you, Mr. President.” Komarov was staring at him with those mesmeric eyes that could charm skeptics into collaboration or terrify backsliders. On each cheekbone the red spot burned bright in the pale face. “When did you last see it?” “Last night, Mr. President. I stayed late in order to read it in privacy. I left at eight o’clock.” Komarov nodded. The night-duty guards’ register would confirm or deny that. “You took it with you. Despite my orders, you permitted the file to leave the building.” “No, Mr. President, I swear it. I locked it in the safe. I would never leave a confidential document lying around, or take it with me.” “It is not in the safe now?” Akopov swallowed, but he had no saliva. “How many times have you been to the safe before my call?” “None, Mr. President. When you called, that was the first time I went to the safe.” “It was locked?” “Yes, as usual.” “It had been broken into?” “Apparently not, Mr. President.” “You have searched the room?” “From top to bottom and end to end. I cannot understand it.” Komarov thought for several minutes. Behind his blank face he felt a rising panic. Finally he called the security office on the ground floor. “Seal the building. No one enters, no one leaves. Contact Colonel Grishin. Tell him to report to my office. Immediately. Wherever he is, whatever he is doing, I want him here within the hour.” He lifted his forefinger from the intercom and gazed at his white-faced and trembling assistant. “Return to your office. Communicate with nobody. Wait there until further notice.” ? AS an intelligent single and thoroughly modern young woman Celia Stone had long decided that she had the right to take her pleasures whenever and with whomsoever she fancied. At the moment she fancied the hard young muscles of Hugo Gray who had arrived from London barely two months earlier and six months after herself. He was Assistant Cultural Attaché and the same grade as she, but two years older and also single. Each had a small but functional apartment in a residential block assigned to British Embassy staff off Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a square building with a central courtyard useful for parking, and with Russian militiamen posted at the entrance barrier. Even in modern Russia everyone presumed that goings in and out were noted, but at least the cars remained unvandalized. After lunch she drove back inside the protective screen of the embassy on Sofia Quay and wrote up her report of lunch with the journalist. Much of their talk had been about the death of President Cherkassov the previous day and what was likely to happen now. She had assured the journalist of the continuing deep interest of the British people in Russian events, and hoped he believed her. She would know when his article appeared. At five she drove back to her apartment for a bath and a short rest. She had a dinner date with Hugo Gray at eight, after which she intended they both return to her own flat. She did not wish to do much sleeping during the night. ? BY four in the afternoon Colonel Anatoli Grishin had convinced himself the missing document. was not within the building. He sat in Igor Komarov’s office and told him so. In four years the two men had become interdependent. It had been in 1994 that Grishin had resigned his career with the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB with the rank of full colonel. He had become thoroughly disillusioned. Since the formal ending of Communist rule in 1991 the former KGB had become in his view a whited sepulchre. Even before then, in September 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev had broken up the world’s biggest security apparatus and farmed out its various wings into different commands. The external intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate, had remained at its old headquarters at Yazenevo, out beyond the ring road, but had been renamed the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR. That was bad enough. What was worse was that Grishin’s own division, the Second Chief Directorate, hitherto responsible for all internal security, the exposure of spies, and the suppression of dissent, had been emasculated, renamed the FSB, and ordered to reduce its own powers to a travesty of what they had once been. Grishin regarded this with contempt. The Russian people needed discipline, and firm and occasionally harsh discipline, and it was the Second Chief Directorate that had provided it. He stuck with the reforms for three years, hoping to make major general, then quit. A year later he had been engaged as personal security chief by Igor Komarov, then still just one of the Politburo of the old Liberal Democratic Party. The two men had risen to prominence and power together, and there was more, much more, to come. Over the years Grishin had created for Komarov his own utterly loyal close-protection squad, the Black Guards, now numbering six thousand fit young men whom he personally commanded. Supporting the Guard was the League of Young Combatants, twenty thousand of them, the teenage wing of the UPF, all imbued with the correct ideology and fanatically loyal, which he also commanded. He was one of the few men who called Komarov by his first name and patronymic. The humblest street shouter could yell “Igor Alexeivitch” at Komarov, but that was part of the man-of-the-people camaraderie expected in Russia. In his private entourage Komarov demanded the formality of “Mr. President” from all but a few intimates. “You are sure the file is no longer in this building?” asked Komarov. “It cannot be, Igor Alexeivitch. In two hours we have practically taken the place apart. Every cupboard, every locker, every drawer, every safe. Every window and windowsill has been examined, every yard of the grounds. There was no break-in. “The expert from the safe manufacturers has just finished. The safe was not forced. Either it was opened by someone who knew the combination, or the file was never in it. The garbage of last night has been impounded and searched. Nothing. “The dogs were running free from seven P.M. No one entered the building after that—the night guards had relieved the day shift at six and the day shift left ten minutes later. Akopov was in his office until eight. The dog handler for last night has been brought back. He swears he restrained the dogs three times yesterday evening, to allow three late-working staff to leave by car, and Akopov was the last. The night log confirms that.” “So?” asked Komarov. “Human error or human malice. The two night guards have been collected from their barracks. I expect them any moment. They had the run of the building from Akopov’s departure at eight until the arrival of the day shift at six this morning. Then the day shift was here alone until the office staff arrived around eight. Two hours. But the day guards swear that on their first patrol all office doors on this floor were locked. Everyone working on this floor, including Akopov, confirms that.” “Your theory, Anatoli?” “Either Akopov took it with him, by accident or design, or he never locked it up and one of the night shift took it. They had master keys to the office doors.” “So, it is Akopov?” “First suspect, certainly. His private apartment has been ransacked. In his presence. Nothing. I thought he might have taken it with him, then lost his attaché case. That happened once at the Ministry of Defense. I was in charge of the investigation. It turned out not to be espionage but criminal negligence. The person responsible went to the camps. But Akopov’s briefcase is the same he always uses. It has been identified by three people.” “So, he did it deliberately?” “Possibly. But I have a problem with that. Why did he come in this morning and wait around to be caught? He had twelve hours to disappear. I may wish to ... um … interrogate him at greater length. To establish elimination or confession.” “Permission granted.” “And after that?” Igor Komarov turned in his swivel chair to face the window. He mused for a while. “Akopov has been a very good personal secretary,” he said at length. “But after this a replacement will be required. My problem is he has seen the document. Its contents are extremely confidential. If he is retained in a diminished capacity or dismissed he might feel a sense of resentment, even be tempted to divulge what he knows. That would be a pity, a great pity.” “I understand completely,” said Colonel Grishin. At that point the two bewildered night guards arrived and Grishin went downstairs to question them. By 9:00 P.M. the night guards’ quarters at the Black Guard barracks outside the city had been searched, revealing nothing more than the expected toiletries and porn magazines. Inside the dacha the two men were separated and interviewed in different rooms. Grishin questioned them personally. They were clearly terrified of him, as well they might be. His reputation preceded him. Occasionally he shouted obscenities in their ears, but for the two sweating men the worst ordeal was when he sat close and whispered the details of what awaited those caught lying to him. By eight he had a complete picture of what had happened during their shift the previous night. He knew their patrols had been erratic and irregular, that they had been glued to the TV screen for details of the president’s death. And he learned for the first time of the presence of the cleaner. The man had been let in at ten. As usual. Via the underground passage. No one had accompanied him. Both guards had been needed to open the three doors, because one had the keypad combination to the street door, the other to the innermost door, and both to the middle door. He knew the guards had seen the old man start on the top floor. As usual. He knew the guards had then broken from their TV watching to open the offices of the middle floor, the vital executive suite. He knew that one had stood in the doorway while the cleaning of Mr. Komarov’s personal office had been accomplished and the door then relocked, but that both men had been downstairs when the cleaner completed the remainder of the middle floor. As usual. So ... the cleaner had been alone in Akopov’s office. And he had left earlier than usual, in the small hours. At nine Mr. Akopov, extremely pale, was escorted from the building. His own car was used but one of the Black Guard drove. Another sat beside the disgraced secretary in the rear. The car did not drive to Akopov’s apartment. It headed out of the city to one of the sprawling camps housing the Young Combatants. By nine Colonel Grishin had finished reading the file from the staff and personnel office containing the employment details of one Zaitsev, Leonid, aged sixty-three, office cleaner. There was a private address, but the man would have left. He was due at the dacha at ten. He did not appear. At midnight Colonel Grishin and three Black Guards left to visit the old man’s residence. ? AT that hour Celia Stone rolled off her young lover with a happy smile and reached for a cigarette. She smoked little, but this was one of those moments. Hugo Gray, on his back in her bed, continued to pant. He was a fit young man who kept himself in shape with squash and swimming, but the previous two hours had required most of his stamina. Not for the first time he wondered why God had so arranged things that the appetites of a love-hungry woman would always exceed the capacities of a male. It was extremely unfair. In the darkness Celia Stone took a long pull, felt the nicotine hit the spot, leaned over her lover, and tousled his dark brown curls. “How on earth did you get to be a cultural attaché?” she teased. You wouldn’t know Turgenev from Lermontov.” “I’m not supposed to,” grumbled Gray. “I’m supposed to tell the Russkies about our culture—Shakespeare, Brontë, that sort of thing.” “And is that why you have to keep going into conference with the Head of Station?” Gray came off the pillow fast gripped an upper arm, and hissed into her ear: “Shut up, Celia. This place could be bugged.” In a huff Celia Stone left to make coffee. She didn’t see why Hugo should be so picky about a little tease. Anyway what he did in the embassy was a pretty open secret. She was right of course. For the previous month Hugo Gray had been the third and junior member of the Moscow Station of the Secret Intelligence Service. Once it had been much bigger in the good old days at the height of the Cold War. But times change and budgets diminish. In its collapsing state Russia was seen as a small enough threat. More important, ninety percent of things that had once been secret were openly available or of minimal interest. Even the former KGB had a press officer, and across the city in the U.S. Embassy the CIA was down to a football team. But Hugo Gray was young and keen, and convinced most diplomatic apartments were still bugged. Communism might have gone, but Russian paranoia was doing fine. He was correct, of course, but the FSB agents had already tagged him for what he was and were quite happy. ? THE weirdly named Enthusiasts’ Boulevard is probably the most decrepit, shabbiest, and meanest quarter in the city of Moscow. In a triumph of Communist planning it was situated downwind of the chemical warfare research establishment, which had filters like tennis nets. The only enthusiasm ever noted among its inhabitants was possessed by those slated to move out. According to the records Leonid Zaitsev lived with his daughter, her truck-driver husband, and their child in a flat just off the main street. It was half-past twelve and still a warm summer’s night when the sleek black Chaika, its driver’s head stuck out of the window to read the grimy street names, pulled up outside. The son-in-law’s name was different of course, and they had to check with a roused and drowsy neighbor on the ground floor to establish that the family lived on the fourth. There was no elevator. The four men clumped up the stairs and hammered on the peeling door. The woman who answered, sleepy and bleary-eyed, must have been in her mid-thirties but looked a decade older. Grishin was polite but insistent. His men pushed past and fanned out to search the flat. There was not much to search; it was tiny. Two rooms in fact, with a fetid lavatory and a curtained cooking alcove. The woman had been sleeping with her six-year-old in the one family-sized bed in one of the rooms. The child now woke and began to whimper, the whine rising to a cry when the bed was turned over to see if anyone hid beneath it. The two miserable plywood cupboards were opened and ransacked. In the other room Zaitsev’s daughter pointed helplessly at the cot along one wall where her father slept, and explained that her husband was miles away on a trip to Minsk and had been for two days. By now weeping helplessly, a cue taken up by the child, she swore her father had not returned the previous morning. She was worried but had taken no steps to report him missing. He must have fallen asleep on a park bench, she thought. In ten minutes the Black Guards had established that no one was hidden in the flat, and Grishin was convinced the woman was too terrified and ignorant to lie. Within thirty minutes they were gone. Grishin directed the Chaika not back into central Moscow but to the camp forty miles away where Akopov was being held. For the rest of the night he questioned the hapless secretary himself. Before dawn the sobbing man admitted that he must have left the vital document consigned to his care lying on his desk. He had never done such a thing before. He could not understand how he had forgotten to lock it up. He begged for forgiveness. Grishin nodded and patted him on the back. Outside the barracks block he summoned one of his inner-core deputies. “It is going to be a stinking hot day. Our friend in there is distressed. I think a predawn swim is in order.” Then he drove back to the city. If the vital file had been left lying on Akopov’s desk, he reasoned, it had either been wrongly thrown out, or the cleaner had taken it. The former theory did not work. Trash from party headquarters was always retained for several days, then incinerated under supervision. The paper trash of the previous night had been sifted sheet by sheet. Nothing. So, the cleaner. Why a semiliterate old man should want to do such a thing, or what he had done with it, Grishin could not fathom. Only the old man could explain. And explain he would. Before the normal hour of breakfast he had put two thousand of his own men, all in civilian clothes, onto the streets of Moscow to search for an old man in a threadbare ex-army greatcoat. He had no photograph, but the description was precise, even down to the three steel teeth at the front of the mouth. However, the job was not that easy, even with two thousand searchers. There were ten times that number of derelicts crowding the back alleys and parks, of all ages and sizes, and all shabbily dressed. If, as he suspected, Zaitsev was now living on the streets, everyone would have to be examined. One of them would have three steel teeth and a black-covered file. Grishin wanted both and without delay. His bewildered but obedient Black Guards, in ordinary pants and shirts for the day was hot, fanned out through Moscow. Langley, December 1983 JASON Monk rose from his desk, stretched, and decided to go down to the commissary. A month back from Nairobi, he had been told his performance reports were good and in some cases extremely so. Promotion was in the pipeline and the head of the Africa Division was pleased but would be sorry to lose him. Monk had arrived back to find himself assigned to the Spanish language course on which he would begin just after the Christmas and New Year break. Spanish would constitute his third foreign language, but more, it would open up the whole Latin American Division to him. South America was a big territory and an important one, for not only was it within the American backyard, as prescribed by the Monroe Doctrine, it was also a prime target for the Soviet bloc, which had targeted it for insurrection, subversion, and Communist revolution. As a result the KGB had a big operation south of the Rio Grande, one the CIA was determined to head off. For Monk at thirty-three South America was a good career move. He was stirring his coffee when he felt someone standing in front of his table. “Great suntan,” said a voice. He looked up. Monk recognized the man who was smiling down at him. He rose, but the man gestured him to stay seated, one of the aristocracy being nice to the peasants. Monk was surprised. He knew the speaker was one of the key men in the Ops Directorate, for someone had pointed him out in the corridor, the newly appointed head of the Soviet Branch, Counterintelligence Group of the Soviet/East European Division. What surprised Monk was how nondescript the man appeared. They were much the same height, two inches under six feet, but the other man, though nine years older, was well out of condition. Monk noticed the greasy hair slicked back straight from the forehead, the thick moustache covering the upper section of a weak and vain mouth, the owlish myopic eyes. “Three years in Kenya,” he said to explain the tan. “Back to wintry Washington, eh?” said the man. Monk’s antennae were giving him bad vibes. Behind the eyes there was a mockery. I’m a lot smarter than you, they seemed to be saying I m extremely smart indeed. “Yes, sir,” replied Monk. A heavily nicotine-stained hand came out. Monk noticed this and the maze of tiny capillaries round the base of the nose that often betrayed the heavy boozer. He rose and flashed a grin, the one the girls in the typing pool called among themselves the Redwood Special. “And you must be ... ?” said the man. “Monk. Jason Monk.” “Good to know you, Jason. I’m Aldrich Ames.” ? NORMALLY, the embassy staff would not have been working on a Saturday—least of all, on a hot summer Saturday when they could have been off on a sylvan weekend—but the president’s death had produced a welter of extra work and weekend labors were required. If Hugo Gray’s car had started that morning, many men who later died would have stayed alive and the world would have taken a different course. But ignition solenoids are a law unto themselves. After frantically trying to get a reaction, Gray ran after the red Rover as it neared the barrier of the enclave and tapped on the window. Celia Stone gave him a lift. He sat beside her as she swerved out into Kutuzovsky Prospekt and headed past the Ukraina Hotel toward the Arbat and the Kremlin. His heels scuffed something on the floor. He stooped and retrieved it. “Your takeover bid for Izvestia?” he asked. She looked sideways and recognized the file he was holding. “Oh, God, I was going to trash it yesterday. Some old lunatic threw it into the car. Nearly frightened the life out of me.” “Another petition,” said Gray. “They never stop. Usually it’s for visas, of course.” He flicked open the black cover and glanced at the title page. “No, it’s more political.” “Great. I’m Mister Bonkers and here is my master plan to save the world. Just give it to the ambassador.” “Is that what he said? Give it to the ambassador?” “Yep. That, and thanks for the beer.” “What beer?” “How should I know? He was a nutcase.” Gray read the title page and turned over several more. He grew quiet. “It is political,” he said. “It’s some kind of manifesto.” “You want it, you have it,” said Celia. They left the Alexandrovsky Gardens behind and turned toward the Stone Bridge. Hugo Gray was going to give the unwanted gift a quick skim and then ease it into the wastepaper basket. But he read ten pages, rose, and sought an interview with the Head of Station, a shrewd Scot with a mordant wit. The Head’s office was swept daily for bugs, but really secret conferences were always held in the bubble. This strange confection is usually a conference chamber suspended from reinforced beams so that it is surrounded on all sides by an air-filled gap when the doors are closed. Regularly swept inside and out, the bubble is deemed unbuggable by hostile intelligence. Gray did not feel confident enough to ask they adjourn to the bubble. “Yes laddie?” said the Head “Look Jock I don’t know whether I m wasting your time. Probably am. Sorry. But something odd happened yesterday. An old man threw this into the car of Celia Stone. You know? That press attaché girl. It may be nothing …” He petered out. The Head regarded him over the top of his half-moons. “Threw it into her car?” he asked gently. “She says. Just tore the door open, threw it into the car asked her to give it to the ambassador and was gone.” The Head of Station put out his hand for the black-covered file with Gray’s two footprints on it. “What kind of man?” he asked. “Old, shabby, stubbled. Like a tramp. Frightened the hell out of her.” “A petition, perhaps.” “That’s what she thought. She was going to throw it away. But she gave me a lift in this morning. I read some of it on the way. It seems more political. The inside title page has the stamp of the logo of the UPF. It reads as if written by Igor Komarov.” “Our president-to-be. Odd. All right, laddie, leave it with me.” “Thanks, Jock,” said Gray, and rose. The intimacy of first names even between juniors and senior mandarins is encouraged inside the British Secret Intelligence Service. It is deemed to encourage a sense of camaraderie, of family, underlining the us-and-them psychology common to all services in this strange trade. Only the chief himself is referred to as Chief or Sir. Gray had reached the door when his boss caused him to pause, his hand on the doorknob. “One thing, laddie. Apartments in the Soviet era were shoddily built and the walls were thin. They remain thin. Our Third Trade Secretary this morning is red-eyed with lack of sleep. Fortunately his lady wife is in England. Next time, could you and the delightful Miss Stone be just a wee bit quieter?” Hugo Gray went as red as the Kremlin walls and left. The Head of Station put the black document to one side. He faced a busy day and the ambassador wanted to see him at eleven. His Excellency was a busy man and would not wish to be troubled with objects thrown into staff cars by tramps. It would not be until that night, working late in his office, that the spymaster would read what would later come to be known as the Black Manifesto. Madrid, August 1984 BEFORE it moved to a new address in November 1986, the Indian Embassy in Madrid was situated in an ornate turn-of-the-century building at 93 Calle Velasquez. On Independence Day 1984 the Indian ambassador held, as customary, a large reception for leading members of the Spanish government and for the diplomatic corps. As always, it was on August 15. Because of the extreme heat of Madrid in that month, and the fact that August is usually chosen for governmental, parliamentary, and diplomatic vacations, many senior figures were away from the capital and were represented by more junior officers. From the ambassador’s point of view it was regrettable, but the Indians can hardly rewrite history and change their Independence Day. The Americans were represented by their chargé d’affaires supported by the second trade secretary one Jason Monk. The chief of the CIA station within the embassy was also away, and Monk, elevated to the number-two slot in the station, was standing in for him. It had been a good year for Monk. He had passed the six-month Spanish course with flying colors, and earned a promotion from GS-12 to GS-13. The Government Schedule (GS) tag might mean little to those in the private sector because it is the pay scale for federal civil servants, but within the CIA it indicated not only salary but rank, prestige, and the progress of a career. More to the point, in a shuffle of top officers, CIA Director William Casey had just appointed a new Deputy Director (Operations) to replace John Stein. The DD(O) is the head of the entire intelligence-gathering arm of the agency and therefore in charge of every agent in the field. The new man was Monk’s original spotter and recruiter, Carey Jordan. Finally, on completing the Spanish course, Monk had been assigned not to the Latin America Division but to Western Europe, which had only one Spanish-speaking country, Spain itself. Not that Spain was a hostile territory—quite the contrary. But for a single thirty-four-year-old CIA officer the glamorous Spanish capital beat the hell out of Tegucigalpa. Because of the good relations between the United States and her Spanish ally, much of the CIA work was not spying on Spain but collaborating with the Spanish counterintelligence people and keeping an eye on the large Soviet and East European community, which was riddled with hostile agents. Even in two months, Monk had created some good relationships with the Spanish domestic agency, most of whose senior officers dated back to the days of Franco and were intensely anti-Communist. Having a problem pronouncing “Jason,” which comes out in Spanish as “Xhasson,” they had dubbed the young American El Rubio, Blondie, and liked him. Monk had that effect on people. The reception was hot and typical; groups of people circulating slowly, sipping the Indian government’s champagne, which became warm in the fist in ten seconds, and making polite but desultory conversation that they did not mean. Monk, having estimated he had done his bit for Uncle Sam, was about to leave when he spotted a face he knew. Sliding through the throng he came up behind the man and waited until the dark gray suit had finished talking to a lady in a sari and was alone for a second. From behind, he said in Russian: “So, my friend, what happened with your son?” The man stiffened and turned. Then he gave a smile. “Thank you,” said Nikolai Turkin, “he recovered. He is fit and well.” “I’m glad,” said Monk, “and by the look of it your career survived as well.” Turkin nodded. Taking a gift from the enemy was a serious offense and had he been reported he would never have left the USSR again. But he had been forced to throw himself on the mercy of Professor Glazunov. The old physician had a son of his own and privately believed his country should cooperate with the best research establishments in the world on matters medical. He had decided not to report the young officer and had modestly accepted his colleagues’ plaudits for the remarkable recovery. “Thankfully, yes, but it was close,” he replied. “Let’s have dinner,” said Monk. The Soviet looked startled. Monk held up his hands in mock surrender. “No pitch, I promise.” Turkin relaxed. Both men knew what the other did. The fact that Monk spoke such perfect Russian indicated he could not possibly be in the Trade Section at the U.S. Embassy. Monk knew that Turkin had to be KGB, probably in Line KR, the counterintelligence branch, because of his liberty to be seen talking to Americans. The word Monk had used gave the game away, and the fact that he would use it in a joking fashion indicated he was suggesting a brief truce in the Cold War. A “pitch” or “cold pitch” is a term used when one intelligence officer simply proposes to someone from the other side that they change teams. Three nights later the two men came separately to a 4 small back street in the old quarter of Madrid called Calle de los Cuchilleros, the street of the knife grinders. Halfway down what is hardly more than an alley is an old wooden door leading to steps into a basement of brick arches, formerly an old wine store dating back to the Middle Ages. For many years it has served traditional Spanish dishes under the name Sobrinos de Botin. The old arches form booths with a table in the center, and Monk and his guest had one to themselves. The meal was good. Monk ordered a Marquès de Riscal. They stayed off shop talk out of courtesy, but talked of wives and children—Monk admitted he still had neither. Little Yuri was now at school but staying with his grandparents during the summer vacation. The wine flowed, a second bottle came. Monk failed to realize at first that behind Turkin’s affable facade he entertained a seething rage: not at the Americans, but at the system that had so nearly killed his son. The second bottle of the Marquès was nearly gone when he suddenly asked: “Are you happy, working for the CIA?” Is this a pitch? Monk wondered. Is the idiot trying to recruit me? “Pretty good,” he said lightly. He was pouring wine, watching the bottle, not the Russian. “If you have problems, do they support you, your people?” Monk kept his eyes on the falling wine, the hand steady. “Sure. My people will always go to the wire for you, if you need help. It’s part of the code.” “It must be good to work for people who live in such freedom,” said Turkin. Finally Monk put down the bottle and looked across the table. He had promised no pitch, but it was the Russian who had made it—to himself. “Why not? Look, my friend, the system you work for is going to change. Soon now. We could help it change faster. Yuri will grow up to live as a free man.” Andropov had died, despite the medications from London. He had been succeeded by another geriatric, Konstantin Chernenko, who had to be held up under the armpits. But there was talk of a fresh wind blowing in the Kremlin, a younger man called Gorbachev. By the coffee Turkin was recruited; from henceforth he would stay “in place” at the heart of the KGB but work for the CIA. Monk’s luck was in that his superior, the Chief of Station. was away on vacation. Had he been in place Monk would have had to hand Turkin over to others to handle. Instead it fell to him to encode the top secret cable to Langley describing the recruitment. Of course there was initial skepticism. A major of Line KR right in the heart of the KGB was a top prize. In a series of covert meetings throughout Madrid for the rest of the summer, Monk learned about his Soviet contemporary. Born in Omsk, western Siberia, in 1951, the son of an engineer in the military industry, Turkin had not been able to get into the university he wanted at the age of eighteen and had gone into the army. He was assigned to Border Guards, nominally under the control of the KGB. There he was spotted and posted to the Dservinsky High School, counterintelligence department, where he learned English. He shone. With a small group he was transferred to the KGB foreign intelligence training center, the prestigious Andropov Institute. Like Monk, on the other side of the world, he had been tagged as a high-flier. On graduating with distinction Turkin was permitted to join Directorate K of the First Chief Directorate—counter-intelligence within the intelligence-gathering arm. Still only twenty-seven, Turkin also married in 1978 and had a son, Yuri, the same year. In 1982 he got his first foreign posting, to Nairobi; his primary task was to try to penetrate the CIA Station in Kenya and recruit agents either there or throughout the Kenyan establishment. It was a posting to be cut short prematurely by his son’s illness. Turkin delivered his first package to the CIA in October. Knowing that a complete covert communications system had been set up, Monk took the package back to Langley personally. It turned out to be dynamite. Turkin blew away just about the entire KGB operation in Spain. To protect their source, the Americans would release what they had bit by bit to the Spanish, ensuring that each roundup of Spaniards spying for Moscow would appear as a fluke, or good detection by the Spanish. In each case the KGB was permitted to learn (via Turkin) that the agent himself had made a silly mistake leading to his own capture. Moscow suspected nothing, but lost its whole Iberian operation. In his three years in Madrid Turkin rose to become deputy Rezident, which gave him access to just about everything. In 1987 he would transfer back to Moscow and after a year became head of the entire Directorate K Branch within the KGB’s huge apparat in East Germany until the final pullout after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and then of Communism and the reunification with West Germany in 1990. In all that time, although he passed hundreds of messages and packages of intelligence through dead drops and cutouts, he insisted that he be handled by only one man, his friend-across-the-Wall, Jason Monk. It was an unusual arrangement. Most spies have several handlers, or “controllers,” in a six-year career, but Turkin insisted and Langley had to put up with it. When Monk got back to Langley that. fall of 1986 he was summoned to the office of Carey Jordan. “I’ve seen the stuff,” said the new DDO. “It’s good. We thought he might be a double, but the Spanish agents he has blown away are Grade A. Your man’s on the level. Well done.” Monk nodded his appreciation. “There is just one thing,” said Jordan. “I didn’t get into this game five minutes ago. Your report on the recruitment strategy is adequate, but there’s something else, isn’t there? What were his real reasons for volunteering?” Monk told the DDO what he had not put in the report, the illness of the son in Nairobi and the medications from the Walter Reed. “I ought to can your ass,” said Jordan at length. He rose and walked to the window. The forest of birch and beech running down to the Potomac was a blaze of red and gold, the leaves just about to fall. “Jesus,” he said after a while. “I don’t know any guy in the agency who would have let him get away without a favor for those drugs. You might never have seen him again. Madrid was a fluke. You know what Napoleon said about generals?” “No, sir.’’ “He said I don’t care if they’re good; I want ‘em lucky. You’re weird, but you’re lucky. You know we’ll have to transfer your man to SE Division?” At the very top of the CIA was always the Director. Under him came the two main Directorates, Intelligence and Operations. The first, headed by the Deputy Director (Intel), or DDI, had the task of collating and analyzing the great mass of raw information pouring in, and to produce from it the intelligence digests that would go out to the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, Pentagon, et al. The actual gathering was done by Operations, headed by the DDO. Ups Directorate subdivided into divisions according to a global map—Latin American Division, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and so forth. But for forty years of the Cold Wan, from 1950 to 1990 and the collapse of Communism, the key division was Soviet/East European, known as SE. Officers in other divisions were often resentful that even though they might cultivate and recruit a valuable Soviet asset in Bogotá or Djakarta, he would after recruitment be transferred to the control of SE Division, which would handle him from then on. The logic was that the recruit would be transferred one day from Bogotá or Djakarta anyway, probably back to the USSR. Because the Soviet Union was the main enemy, SE Division became the star unit in Ops Directorate. Places were sought after. Even though Monk had majored in Russian at college, and spent years perusing Soviet publications in a back room, he had still served a tour in African Division and was even then assigned to Western Europe. “Yes, sir,” he said. “You want to go with him?” Monk’s spirits leaped. “Yes, sir. Please.” “Okay, you found him, you recruited him, you run him.” Monk was transferred to SE Division within a week. He was tasked to run Major Nikolai Ilyich Turkin, of the KGB. He never returned to Madrid to reside, but he visited, meeting Turkin covertly at picnic sites high in the Sierra de Guadarrama, where they would talk of a thousand things as Gorbachev came to power and the twin programs of perestroika and glasnost began to relax the rules. Monk was glad, because apart from an asset he regarded Turkin as a friend. Even by 1984 the CIA was becoming, and some would say had already become, a vast and creaking bureaucracy, dedicated more to paperwork than pure intelligence gathering. Monk loathed bureaucracy and despised paperwork, convinced that what was written down could be stolen or copied. At the ultra-secret heart of the paperwork of the SE Division were the 301 files, which listed the details of every Soviet agent working for Uncle Sam. That fall Monk “forgot” to list all the details of Major Turkin, code-named GT Lysander, in the 301 files. ? JOCK Macdonald, Head of Station for the British SIS in Moscow, had a dinner he could not avoid on the night of July 17. He returned briefly to his office to deposit some notes he had made during dinner—he never trusted his apartment not to be burgled—and his eye fell on the black-covered file. Idly he flicked it open and began to read. It was in Russian, of course, and typed, but he was bilingual. In fact he never went home that night. Just after midnight he called his wife to explain, then returned to the file. There were some forty pages, divided into twenty subject headings. He read the passages concerning the reestablishment of a one-party state and the reactivation of the chain of slave-labor camps for dissidents and other undesirables. He perused the tracts dealing with the final solution of the Jewish community and the treatment of the Chechens in particular plus all the other racial minorities. He studied the pages concerning the nonaggression pact with Poland to buffer the western border and the re-conquest of Belarus the Baltic States and the southern republics of the former USSR, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova. He ingested the paragraphs dealing with the reestablishment of the nuclear arsenal and the targeting of the surrounding enemies He pored over the pages describing the destiny of the Russian Orthodox Church and all other religious denominations. According to the manifesto the shamed and humiliated armed forces now brooding sullenly in tents, would be rearmed and reequipped, not as a force for defense but for re-conquest. The populations of the reacquired territories would work as serfs to produce food for the Russian masters. Control over them would reside in the ethnic Russian populations in the outer territories, under the aegis of an imperial governor from Moscow. National discipline would be assured by the Black Guard, increased to a force of 200,000 men. They would also handle the special treatment of the anti-socials—liberals, journalists, priests, gays, and Jews. The document also purported to reveal the answer to one enigma that had already puzzled Macdonald and others: the source of the Union of Patriotic Forces’ limitless campaign wealth. In the aftermath of 1990, the criminal underworld of Russia had been a vast patchwork of gangs who, in the early days, conducted vicious turf wars, leaving scores of their own dead on the streets. Since 1995, a policy of unification had been in progress. By 1999, all Russia from the western border to the Urals was the fiefdom of four great consortia of criminals, chief among them the Dolgoruki, based in Moscow. If the document before him was true, it was they who were funding the UPF, to earn their reward in the future, the elimination of all other gangs and the supremacy of their own. It was five in the morning when, after the fifth rereading, Jock Macdonald closed the Black Manifesto. He sat back and stared at the ceiling. He had long ago given up smoking, but now he longed for a drag. Finally he rose, locked the document in his safe, and let himself out of the embassy. On the pavement, in the half light, he gazed across the river at the walls of the Kremlin beneath whose shadow an old man in a threadbare greatcoat had sat forty-eight hours earlier and stared at the embassy. Spymasters are not generally conceived to be religious people, but appearances and professions can be misleading. In the Highlands of Scotland there is a long tradition among the aristocracy of devout adherence to the Roman Catholic faith. These were the earls and barons who rallied with their clansmen to the banner of the Catholic Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, to be wiped out a year later at the field of Culloden. The Head of Station came from the heart of that tradition. His father was a Macdonald of Fassifern, but his mother had been a scion of the house of Fraser of Lovat and had brought him up in the faith. He began to walk. Down the embankment to the next bridge, the Bolshoi Most, then across toward the Orthodox St. Basil’s Cathedral. He skirted the onion-domed edifice and wended his way through the waking city center toward New Square. It was as he was leaving New Square that he saw the first early-morning queues for the soup kitchens beginning to form. There was one just behind the square, where once the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR had held sway. A number of foreign charitable organizations were involved in the relief aid to Russia, as was the United Nations on a more official basis; the West had donated as generously as earlier to Romanian orphanages and Bosnian refugees. But the task was formidable, for the destitute from the countryside poured toward the capital, were rounded up and expelled by the militia, and reappeared again either as the same people or their replacements. They stood in the predawn half light, the old and ragged, the women with babies at their breasts, the peasantry of Russia unchanged since Potemkin in their ox-like passivity and patience. In late July the weather was warm enough to keep all alive. But when the cold came, that bitter cutting cold of the Russian winter. ... The previous January had been bad, but as for the next ... Jock Macdonald shook his head at the thought and marched on. His path brought him to Lubyanskaya Square, formerly known as Dzerzhinski. Here for decades had stood the statue of Iron Feliks, Lenin’s founder of the original terror machine, the Cheka. At the back of the square stood the great gray and ocher block known simply as Moscow Center, headquarters of the KGB. Behind the old KGB building lies the infamous Lubyanka jail where confessions too