At eight o’clock one of the two men Grishin had posted in the lobby came out. He nodded across the road to his colleagues in the nearest car, then drifted off.
Minutes later two figures in heavy winter coats and fur hats emerged. Grishin could see wisps of white hair escaping from under one of the hats. The men turned left, up the street toward the Bolshoi Theatre.
Grishin called up his thief.
“He’s left the hotel. The room is vacant.”
One of Grishin’s cars began to crawl slowly after the walking men. Two more of the watchers, who had been in the National’s ground-floor café, came out and turned after the Englishmen. There were four walkers on the street, four more watchers in two cars. Grishin’s driver sp
oke.
“Shall we pick them up, Colonel?”
“No, I want to see where they go.”
There was a chance Irvine would make contact with the American, Monk. If he did, Grishin would have them all.
The two Englishmen paused at the lights where Tverskaya Street leaves the square, waited for the green, and crossed. Seconds later the thief came around the corner from Tverskaya.
He was a thoroughly experienced man and always looked the part of a foreign executive, almost the only breed who could still afford the top Moscow hotels. His coat and suit were from London, both stolen, and his air of self-confident ease would fool almost all hotel employees.
Grishin watched him push at the revolving doors of the hotel and disappear inside. Nigel Irvine, the colonel had been happy to notice, carried no attaché case. If he had one, it would be in his room.
“Move,” he told his driver. The Mercedes eased away from the curb and closed to within a hundred yards of the walking men.
“You know we are being followed,” said Vincent conversationally.
“Two walkers up ahead, two behind, a crawling car on the opposite side of the street,” said Sir Nigel.
“I’m impressed, sir.”
“My dear boy, I may be old and gray, but I hope I can still spot a tail when it’s that big and clumsy.”
Because of its supreme power, the old Second Chief Directorate had seldom bothered to dissimulate on the streets of Moscow. Unlike the FBI in Washington or MI5 in London, the cult of the unspottable tail was never really its specialty.
After passing in front of the illuminated splendor of the Bolshoi Theatre and then the smaller Maly Theatre, the two walkers approached a narrow side street, Theatre Alley.
There was a doorway just before the turning, and a bundle of rags trying to sleep there despite the biting cold. Sir Nigel stopped.
Ahead and behind him the Black Guards tried to pretend they were studying empty shop windows.
In the doorway, dimly lit by the streetlamps, the bundle stirred and looked up. He was not drunk, but old, the tired face beneath the woolen comforter pinched and lined with years, hard work, and deprivation. On the lapel of the threadbare greatcoat hung an array of faded medal ribbons. Two deep-set, exhausted eyes looked up at the foreigner.
Nigel Irvine, when based in Moscow, had taken the time to study Russian medals. There was one in the stained row of ribbons he recognized.
“Stalingrad?” he asked softly in Russian. “You were at Stalingrad?”
The bundle of wool around the old head nodded slowly.
“Stalingrad,” croaked the old man.
He would have been less than twenty then, in that freezing winter of 1942, fighting Von Paulus’s Sixth Army for every brick and cellar of the city on the Volga.
Sir Nigel dug into the pocket of his trousers and came up with a banknote. Fifty million rubles, about thirty U.S. dollars.
“Food,” he said. “Hot soup. A slug of vodka. For Stalingrad.”
He straightened up and walked on, stiff and angry. Vincent caught up. The followers moved away from their shop windows and resumed the patrol.