Ten days later a Russian airliner landed after a long flight at Vnukovo Airport, Moscow.
Winter was retreating. The temperature had risen several degrees above zero and the sun shone. From the birch and pine woods behind the small airport reserved for special flights came an odor of damp earth and new beginning.
In front of the terminal Markov led a large delegation containing the Speaker of the Duma, the leaders of all the main parties, the combined Chiefs of Staff, and the Patriarch Alexei.
From the aircraft stepped the man the Duma had invited, the fifty-seven-year-old prince of the English House of Windsor.
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FAR away in the west, in a former coach house outside the village of Langton Matravers, Sir Nigel Irvine watched the ceremony on television.
In the kitchen Lady Irvine was washing the breakfast dishes, something she always did before Mrs. Moir came in to clean.
“What are you watching, Nigel?” she called as she let the soapy water out of the sink. “You never look at television in the mornings.”
“Something going on in Russia, my dear.”
It had been, he thought, a close-run thing. He had followed his own principles for the destruction of a richer, stronger, and more numerous adversary by the use of minimum forces, a destruction that could only be accomplished by guile and deception.
His first stage had been to require Jason Monk to create a loose alliance of those liable to fear or despise Igor Komarov after seeing the Black Manifesto. In the first category came those destined for destruction by the Russian Nazi—the Chechens, Jews, and police who had persecuted Komarov’s ally, the Dolgoruki mafia. In the second came the church and the army, represented by the Patriarch and the most prestigious living general, Nikolai Nikolayev.
The next task had been to insert an informer into the enemy camp, not to bring out reliable information but to insert disinformation.
While Monk was still training at Castle Forbes, the spymaster had made his first unnoticed visit to Moscow to reactivate two long-time low-level sleeper agents he had recruited years earlier. One was the former Moscow University professor whose homing pigeons had proved useful in the past.
But when the professor had lost his job for proposing democratic reforms under the Communists, his son had also lost his high school place and any chance of going to a university. The young man had drifted into the church, and after undistinguished sojourns in various parishes had finally been taken on as valet and butler to Patriarch Alexei.
Father Maxim Klimovsky had been authorized to accomplish four separate betrayals of Irvine and Monk to Colonel Grishin. This was simply to establish his reliability as an informer for the Black Guard commander in the heart of the enemy camp.
Twice Irvine and Monk had been allowed to escape before Grishin appeared, but on the last two occasions that had not been possible, and they had had to fight their way out.
Irvine’s third precept was not to try to persuade his enemy there was no campaign against him, which would have been impossible, but to convince him the danger lay somewhere else and, having been coped with, had therefore ceased to exist.
Following his second visit to the residence, Irvine had been forced to stay on to give Grishin and his thugs time to raid his room in his absence, discover his briefcase, and photograph the incriminating letter.
The letter was a forgery, created in London on real Patriarchate writing paper and with calligraphy samples of the Patriarch’s own hand, obtained by Father Maxim and handed to Irvine on the previous visit.
In the letter, the Patriarch apparently told his correspondent that he warmly supported the idea of a restoration of the monarch of Russia (which was not true, since he was only considering it), and would urge that the receiver of the letter be the man chosen for the post.
Unfortunately it was addressed to the wrong prince. It bore the name of Prince Semyon, living in his stone farmhouse with his horses and girlfriend in Normandy. Of necessity, he had been deemed expendable.
It was Jason Monk’s second visit to the Patriarch that had unleashed stage four—the encouragement to the enemy to overreact violently to a perceived but nonexistent threat. This had been achieved by the tape recording of the supposed conversation between Monk and Alexei II.
Genuine voice samples of the Patriarch had been obtained during Irvine’s first visit, because his interpreter Brian Vincent had been wired for sound. Monk had recorded hours of tape in his own voice while at Castle Forbes.
In London a Russian mimic and actor had provided the words that Alexei II apparently spoke on the tape. With computerized sound technology the tape had been created, right down to the stirring of coffee cups. Father Maxim, to whom Irvine had palmed the tape as he passed in the hall, had simply played it from one recorder into the one given him by Grishin.
Everything on the tape was a lie. Major General Petrovsky could not have continued his raids on the Dolgoruki gang because all the knowledge Monk had gleaned from the Chechens about the rival mafia had already been passed to him. Moreover the papers from beneath the casino contained no evidence of Dolgoruki funding of the UPF election campaign.
General Nikolayev had no intention of continuing to denounce Komarov in a series of interviews after New Year’s Day. He had said his piece, and once was enough.
Most important, the Patriarch had not the slightest intention of intervening with the acting president to urge that Komarov be declared an unfit person. He had made it quite clear that he would not intervene in politics.
But neither Grishin nor Komarov knew this. Believing they had the opponents’ intentions in their grasp and faced a fearful danger, they overreacted badly and launched four assassination attempts. Suspecting they were coming, Monk could warn all four targets. Only one refused to heed the warning. Until the night of December 21, and possibly even later, Komarov could still have won the election with a handsome majority.
After December 21 came stage five. The overreaction was exploited by Monk to broaden the hostility against Komarov from the tiny few who had seen the Black Manifesto into a raging torrent of criticism from the media. Into this exploitation Monk filtered disinformation to the effect
that the source for all Komarov’s growing discreditation was a senior officer of the Black Guard.