“January first. New Year’s Day. They think everyone will have celebrated as usual to such a point that they will be incapable of concerted action.”
“What everyone? What action? Explain yourself, man!”
“Your everyone. Everyone you command. The action of defending yourselves. They are putting together a force of forty thousand men. The Presidential Guard, the rapid reaction forces of the SOBR and the OMON, some Spetsnaz units, the cream of the Interior Ministry troops based in the city.”
“To what end?”
“To arrest you all. Charges of conspiracy against the state. To crush the Black Guard, arrest or destroy them in their barracks.”
“They can’t. They have no evidence.”
“Apparently there is a Black Guard officer prepared to testify. I heard the secretary make the same point, and that was the Patriarch’s answer.”
Colonel Grishin stood as if he had been hit by an electric charge. Part of his brain told him these gutless freaks could not have the nerve to do any such thing. Another part told him it could be true. Igor Komarov had never deigned to descend into the bearpit of the Duma. He had remained party leader, but not a member, so he had no parliamentary immunity. Neither did he, Anatoli Grishin.
If there was really a senior Black Guard officer prepared to testify, the Moscow State Prosecutor could issue the warrants, at least long enough to hold them in detention until the election
.
As an interrogator, Grishin had seen what men were prepared to do when driven by panic; throw themselves from buildings, run in front of trains, charge barbed wire fences.
If the acting president and those around him, his own Praetorian Guard, anti-gang police generals, militia commanders, had all realized what awaited them if Komarov won, they might indeed be in that state of panic.
“Go back to the residence, Father Maxim,” he said at length, “and remember what I said. You are too far gone to seek redemption under the present regime. For you, the UPF has to win. I want to know everything that happens, all that you hear, every development, every meeting, every conference. From now until New Year’s Day.”
Gratefully the terrified priest scuttled away. Within six hours his aging mother had developed a serious case of pneumonia. He asked for and received from his kindly Patriarch leave of absence until she was recovered. By nightfall he was on the train to Zhitomir. He had done his best, he reasoned. He had done all that was asked of him, and more. But Michael and all his angels would not have kept him in Moscow a moment longer.
That night Jason Monk wrote his last message to the West. Without his computer he wrote it slowly and carefully in block capitals until it covered two sheets of foolscap paper. Then, using a table lamp and the tiny camera bought for him by Umar Gunayev, he photographed both pages several times before burning the sheets and flushing the ashes down the toilet.
In darkness he removed the unexposed film and inserted it into the tiny canister in which it was sold. It was no larger than the top joint of his little finger.
At half-past nine Magomed and his two other bodyguards drove him to the address he gave them. It was a humble dwelling, a detached cottage, or izba, far in the southeastern suburbs of Moscow in the district of Nagatino.
The old man who answered the door was unshaven, a wool cardigan wrapped around his thin body. There was no reason for Monk to know that once he had been a revered professor at Moscow University until he had broken with the Communist regime and published a paper for his students that called for democratic government.
That had been long before the reforms. Rehabilitation had come later, too late to matter, and a small state pension with it. At the time, he had been lucky to escape the camps. They had taken his job, of course, and his apartment. He had been reduced to sweeping the streets.
If he survived at all, it was because of a man of his own age who had stood beside him one day in the street, talking in reasonable but English-accented Russian. He never knew Nigel Irvine’s name; he just called him Leeka, The Fox. Nothing much, really, said the spy from the embassy. Just a helping hand now and again. Small things, little risk. He had suggested the hobby the Russian professor should adopt, and the hundred-dollar bills had kept body and soul together.
That winter’s night twenty years later, he stared at the younger man in the door and said, ‘Da?’
“I have a tidbit for the Fox,” said Monk.
The old man nodded and held out his hand. Monk put the tiny cylinder into his palm, and the man stepped backward and closed the door. Monk turned and walked back to the car.
At midnight little Martti, with the cylinder strapped to one of his legs, was released. He had been brought to Moscow weeks earlier by Mitch and Ciaran on their long drive from Finland, and delivered by Brian Vincent, who could read Russian street maps and find the obscure dwelling.
Martti stood on his ledge for a moment, then spread his wings and rose in spirals high into the freezing night above Moscow. He rose to a thousand feet, where the cold would have reduced a human being to a frostbitten hulk.
By chance one of the InTelCor satellites was beginning its track across the frozen steppes of Russia. True to its instructions, it began to beam its “Are you there, baby?” ciphered message downward to the city, unaware that it had previously destroyed its electronic child.
Outside the capital, the listeners of the FAPSI network scanned their computers for the telltale blip that would mean the foreign agent sought by Colonel Grishin had transmitted, so the triangulators could fix the source of the transmission to a single building.
The satellite drifted away and there was no blip.
Somewhere in his tiny head an impulse told Martti that his home, the place where three years earlier he had hatched as a blind and helpless chick, was to the north. To the north he turned, into the bitter wind, hour after hour through the cold and dark, pulled only by the desire to return home where he belonged.
No one saw him. No one saw him leave the city or cross the coast with the lights of St. Petersburg to his right. He flew on and on with his message, and sixteen hours after leaving Moscow, chilled and exhausted, he fluttered into a loft on the outskirts of Helsinki. Warm hands took the message off his leg and three hours later Sir Nigel Irvine was reading it in London.