Komarov arose from his desk, took up a heavy cylindrical ebony ruler, and began to tap it into the palm of his left hand. As he spoke his voice began to rise.
“Then find them, and suppress them, Anatoli. Find out what the next stage is, and prevent it. Now listen to me carefully. On January sixteenth, in just a few short weeks, one hundred and ten million Russian voters will have the right to cast their ballot for the next president of Russia. I intend that they shall vote for me.
“On a seventy percent poll, that means seventy-seven million votes cast. I want forty million of those votes. I want a first-round win, not a runoff. A week ago I could have counted on sixty million. That fool of a general has just cost me at least ten.”
The word ten came out close to a scream. The ruler was rising and falling, but Komarov was now hammering the desktop with it. Without warning he began to shriek his rage at his persecutors, using the ruler to hit his own telephone until the plastic cracked and shattered. Grishin stood rigid; down the corridor there was utter silence as the office staff froze where they were.
“Now some demented priest has started a new hare running, calling for the return of the czar. There will be no czar in this land other than me, and when I rule they will learn the meaning of discipline such that Ivan the Terrible will seem like a choirboy.”
As he shouted, he brought the ebony ruler down again and again on the wreckage of the telephone, staring at the fragments as if the once-useful tool was itself the disobedient Russian people, learning the meaning of discipline under the knout.
The last scream of choirboy died away and Komarov dropped the ruler back on his desk. He took several deep inhalations and resumed his grip on himself His voice returned to normal levels but his hands were shaking, so he placed all ten fingertips on the desk to steady them.
“Tonight I will address a rally at Vladimir, the greatest of the whole campaign. It will be broadcast, nationwide, tomorrow. After that I shall address the nation every night until the election. The funds have been arranged. That is my business. The publicity belongs to Kuznetsov.”
From behind his desk he reached out an arm and pointed his forefinger straight at Grishin’s face.
“Your business, Anatoli Grishin, is one and one only. Stop the sabotage.”
The last sentence was also a shout. Komarov slumped into his chair and waved his hand in dismissal. Grishin, without a word, crossed the carpet to the door and let himself out.
¯
IN the days of Communism there was only one bank, the Narodny, or People’s Bank. After the fall, and with the onset of capitalism, banks sprang up like mushrooms until there were over eight thousand of them.
Many were blink-and-you-miss-it affairs that quickly folded, taking their depositors’ money with them. Others vaporized in the night, with the same effect. The survivors learned their banking almost as they went along, for such experience in the Communist state was sparse.
Nor was banking a safe occupation. In ten years over four hundred bankers had been assassinated, usually for failing to see eye to eye with gangsters on the matter of unsecured loans or other forms of illegal cooperation.
By the late nineties the business had settled down to a basic four hundred reasonably reputable banks. With the top fifty of these the West was prepared to do business.
Banking was centered in St. Petersburg and Moscow, mainly in the latter. In an ironic mirror of organized crime, banking too had amalgamated, with the so-called Top Ten doing eighty percent of the business. In some cases, the level of investment was so high that the enterprise could only be undertaken by consortia of two or three banks acting together.
Chief among the major banks in the winter of 1999 were the Most Bank, the Smolensky, and biggest of all, the Moskovsky Federal.
It was to the head office of the Moskovsky that Jason Monk addressed himself in the first week of December. The security was like Fort Knox.
Because of the dangers to life and limb the chairmen of the major banks had private protection squads that would make the personal security of an American president look puny. At least three had long since removed their families to London, Paris, and Vienna respectively, and commuted to their Moscow offices in private jets. When inside Russia their personal protectors ran into the hundreds. It took thousands more to protect the bank’s branches.
To achieve a personal interview with the chairman of the Moskovsky Federal without an appointment made days ahead was at the very least unheard of. But Monk managed it. He brought with him something equally unheard of.
After a body search and an inspection of his leather briefcase on the ground floor of the tower building, he was allowed to go up under escort to the executive reception, three floors below the chairman’s personal suite.
There the letter he offered was examined by a smooth young Russian who spoke perfect English. He asked Monk to wait and disappeared through a stout wooden door that opened only to a code in a keypad. Two armed guards watched Monk as the minutes dragged by. To the surprise of the receptionist behind the desk, the personal aide returned and asked Monk to follow him. Beyond the door he was frisked again and an electronic scanner was run over him as the smooth Russian apologized.
“I understand,” said Monk. “Times are hard.”
Two floors further up he was shown into another anteroom, and then ushered into the private office of Leonid Grigoreivitch Bernstein.
The letter he had brought lay on the blotter of the desk. The banker was a short, broad man with crinkly gray hair, sharp, questioning eyes, and a beautifully cut charcoal-gray suit from Savile Row. He arose and held out his hand. Then he waved Monk to a chair. Monk noticed that the smooth one sat at the back of the room, complete with the bulge under his left armpit. He might have attended Oxford University but Bernstein had ensured he also completed his studies on the range at Quantico.
The banker gestured to the letter.
“So, how are things in London? You have just arrived, Mr. Monk?”
“Some days ago,” said Monk.
The letter was on very expensive paper of cream linen weave, topped by the five splayed arrows that recall the five original sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild of Frankfurt. The stationery itself was perfectly genuine. Only the signature of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild at the bottom of the text was a forgery. But it is a rare banker who will not receive a personal emissary from the chairman of N. M. Rothschild of St. Swithin’s Lane, City of London.