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by Frederick Forsyth

  “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 a
ctually 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.