He smiled as he saw the text. It had gone as far as it could go. There was one last task for Jason Monk, and then he should go to ground again until he could safely pull out. But even Irvine could not predict quite what the maverick Monk had in mind.
¯
WHILE Martti flew unseen over their heads, Igor Komarov and Anatoli Grishin sat in conference in the party leader’s office. The rest of the small mansion that formed his headquarters was deserted, except for the guards in their room on the ground floor. Outside in the darkness the killer dogs ran free.
Komarov sat behind his desk ashen in the lamplight. Grishin had just finished speaking, reporting to the leader of the Union of Patriotic Forces the news he had learned from the renegade priest.
As he spoke, Komarov had seemed to shrink. The former icy control seeped away, the unhesitating decisiveness appeared to bleed out of him. Grishin knew the phenomenon.
It happened to the most fearsome dictators when suddenly stripped of their power. In 1944, Mussolini, the strutting Duce, had become overnight a shabby, frightened little man on the run.
Business tycoons, when the banks foreclosed, the jet was confiscated, the limousines were impounded, the credit cards withdrawn, the senior executives quit, and the house of cards came tumbling down, actually diminished in size and the old incisiveness became empty bluster.
Grishin knew because he had seen generals and ministers huddled and fearful in his cells, once powerful masters of the apparat reduced to waiting for the party’s pitiless judgment.
Things were falling apart, the days of words were over. His own hour had come. He had always despised Kuznetsov, spinning his world of words and images, pretending that power came from an official communiqué. Power came from the barrel of a gun in Russia; always had and always would. Ironically, it had taken the man he hated most in all the world, the American scarlet pimpernel, to bring about the present situation, with a UPF president who seemed to have lost his will now almost ready to follow Grishin’s advice.
For Anatoli Grishin had no intention of conceding defeat to the militia of acting president Ivan Markov. He could not dispense with Igor Komarov, but he could save his neck and then rise to undreamed-of office.
Inside his own world Igor Komarov himself sat like Richard II, maundering over the catastrophe that had overtaken him in such a short time.
At the start of November it had seemed that nothing on earth could prevent his winning the January election. His political organization was twice as efficient as any in the country; his oratory mesmerized the masses. Opinion polls showed he would receive seventy percent of the national vote, enough for a clear win in the first round.
He literally could not understand the transformation, though he could just perceive how, step by step, it had come about.
“It was a mistake to try those four attempts at assassinating our enemies,” he said at last.
“With respect, Mr. President, it was tactically sound. Only the foulest luck decreed that three should not be in residence at the time.”
Komarov grunted. Bad luck it might be, but the reaction had been worse. Where did the press get the idea he might have been behind it? Who leaked? The media had always hung on his every word; now they were abusing him. The press conference had been a disaster. Those foreigners shouting impudent questions. He had never been subjected to such insolence. Kuznetsov had seen to that. Only private interviews had been allowed, where he had been treated with respect, his views listened to attentively, heads nodding in agreement. Then the young fool had proposed the press conference …
“Are you sure of your source, Colonel?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“You trust him?”
“Certainly not. I trust his appetites. He is venal and corrupt, but he lusts after preferment and the life of a voluptuary, both of which he has been promised. He revealed both visits to the Patriarch by the English spy, and both by the American agent. You read the transcript of the tape recording of the second meeting with Monk, the threats on which I based the decision to silence the opposition permanently.”
“But this time ... would they really have the nerve to strike at us?”
“I do not believe we can discount it. In boxing terms, the gloves are off. Our fool of an acting president knows he cannot win against you, but might against Zyuganov. The generals heading the militia realized just in time what kind of a purge you have in mind for them. Using the allegations of a financial link between the UPF and the mafia, they could cook up charges. Yes, I think they might try.”
“If you were they, as a planner, what would you do, Colonel?”
“Exactly the same. When I heard the priest say what the Patriarch discussed while he waited at table, I thought it could not be true. But the more I think it over, the more sense it makes. Dawn of January first is a brilliant time. Who is not hungover from the previous night? What guards are awake? Who can react with speed and decisiveness? Most Russians on New Year’s morning cannot even see straight—unless they are kept in a barracks without a drop of vodka. Yes, it makes sense.”
“What are you saying? That we are finished? That all we have done was for nothing, that the great vision will never happen, because of a panicky and ambitious politi
cian, a fantasist priest, and some over-promoted policemen?”
Grishin rose and leaned over the desk.
“We have come so far for this? No, Mr. President. The key to success is to know the enemy’s intentions. This we do. They leave us no choice but one. Preemptive strike.”
“Strike? Against whom?”
“Take Moscow, Mr. President. Take Russia. Both would have been yours in a fortnight. On New Year’s Eve our enemies will be celebrating the morrow, their troops locked in barracks until dawn. I can put together a force of eighty thousand men and take Moscow during the night. With Moscow comes Russia.”