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  Epishev was silent. From his long association with Greshko, he knew that the old man’s questions were not intended to be simply rhetorical. Greshko had no time for verbal sophistry. When he asked questions, he wanted answers. The correct answers. It was really that simple. Romanenko had gone to Edinburgh to deliver a message. Greshko needed to know what had happened to it. A great deal depended on finding out. Epishev placed his palms together, rubbed them. There must have been a look of some uncertainty on his face because Greshko said, “You still haven’t overcome your fear, have you, Viktor? You’re still unconvinced, aren’t you?”

  Greshko reached for a small bottle on the bedside table. He opened it and held it up to his mouth. It contained Brezhnev’s old remedy for all illnesses, valerian root and vodka flavoured with zubravka grass. Greshko was convinced that it was the only thing that kept him alive.

  “I’m not afraid, General,” Epishev replied. But he wasn’t absolutely sure.

  “Everybody feels fear at some time or other, Viktor. There’s no shame in saying so. I know you, Viktor, and I know what runs through your mind. Romanenko was an enemy of the State. He was involved in a conspiracy against our beloved country. Right? And since you are being asked to take part in this same conspiracy against a State you’ve served so faithfully for most of your life, the words treachery and sedition pop into your mind, don’t they, Viktor? But that’s muddled thinking! The State you served no longer exists, Colonel. The Russia you love is being dismantled in front of our eyes – and if something isn’t done quickly, it will cease to exist in any recognisable way.” Greshko paused and snatched a couple of deep breaths, his shrunken lungs filling to their inadequate capacity.

  “Viktor,” Greshko said, and his hand went out once more to touch the back of Epishev’s wrist, a chill connection of flesh that made Epishev want to shudder. “Any major blow against this new regime has a damned good chance of destroying it and that should be a cause for rejoicing. Romanenko’s conspiracy can only hasten the end of those charlatans who’ve seized power. They’ve encouraged certain freedoms. They’ve told those ethnic minorities that their rights are to be respected, haven’t they? They’ve manufactured a climate in which every dissident moron feels it his duty to argue and squabble with the State. So let them suffer the consequences of what they’ve created in this country. The quicker they’re booted out of office, the better. The means don’t matter a damn.”

  Greshko paused a moment. “And the beauty of it is that there are no files on Romanenko in any KGB office! There’s nothing on any of the computers! There’s absolutely no trace of Romanenko’s association with this conspiracy! We’ve been watching Romanenko for years, and we’ve known what he’s been planning because he lived in our damned pockets and never suspected a thing because we were always careful …” And he laughed, because his own foresight delighted him. When he’d seen the changes coming after the death of Brezhnev, and then later the demise of the hapless Chernenko, he’d taken the trouble to remove all kinds of information from the KGB, knowing a day would come when it would be useful to him. And that day, Epishev thought, had arrived with a vengeance.

  “Are you with me, Viktor? Are you still loyal to me?”

  Epishev replied, “I’ve never been disloyal to you, have I?”

  “There’s a first time for everything, Colonel.”

  “Not where you and I are concerned, General.” The idea of disloyalty would never have entered Epishev’s mind. It was more than just the fact of his gratitude to the old man and the years of their alliance, it was a question of shared beliefs. Like Greshko, Epishev thought that the Soviet Union was heading hurriedly toward disintegration. As if it were some massive star whose course has been suddenly changed, the republic was doomed to explode from internal pressure. Those fresh winds everyone said were blowing through the country were as poisonous as radioactive clouds. And Epishev, like Greshko, had absolutely no desire to breathe them.

  “Then we’re agreed, Viktor. Romanenko’s plan must be carried through to the end. Regardless. We may not like the idea, but we have no choice except to go along with it if we want to see our country restored to what it was. In other words – the plan must succeed.”

  Epishev knew what was coming now. He had known it ever since Greshko had announced Romanenko’s murder.

  “When you go back to Moscow tonight, you’ll see the Printer,” Greshko said.

  It might have been routine, except for the fact that Greshko had absolutely no authority any more, save for what he bestowed on himself. It might have been standard operating procedure. But it wasn’t. Greshko though, like a great actor, was able to create the illusion of all his old power.

  “When the Printer has your papers ready, you leave the country.” Greshko was buzzing now, barely able to keep his hands still. “You have that authority. You don’t need a written order. You’ll find out what has happened to Romanenko’s message. If it fell into the right hands, then we have nothing to worry about. If it’s in the possession of the wrong party, and the outcome of the whole scheme is threatened, you will eliminate that threat. It’s simple, Viktor. There are no ambiguities.”

  Eliminate that threat. Epishev wondered if he still had the heart for that kind of task. When he was younger, it had come easily to him. Now, even though he enjoyed such tasks as interrogation, even if he didn’t object to rubber-stamping papers that condemned people to imprisonment or death, he wasn’t sure about killing somebody directly, somebody whose breathing you could hear, whose eyes you could look into, whose fear you could smell. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Perhaps Romanenko’s paper had arrived at the appropriate destination. Perhaps everything was already in its rightful place and Greshko’s precautions were, although understandable, nevertheless unnecessary.

  He stood up, stepped away from the bed. He looked a moment at Volovich, but it was impossible to tell what Dimitri was thinking. After all the years together, he still couldn’t read Volovich with any ease. Was Dimitri going along with this? Greshko, with all his old arrogance, had obviously assumed so, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so open. Dimitri hadn’t been made privy to everything because Greshko had insisted on limiting the Lieutenant’s knowledge as a matter of routine security, but he knew enough to understand what he was involved in.

  “We’re not alone, you know,” Greshko said. “There are hundreds of us, Viktor. Thousands. I’m in daily contact with men, some of them in positions of great authority, who feel exactly as we do. And these men are ready to take over the reins of power at a moment’s notice. Some of these men are known to you by name. Some of them you can call on for help overseas. You know who I mean. Others prefer to remain anonymously in the background. I mention all this to make you feel less … solitary, shall we say? We’re all dedicated to the same thing. We’re all patriots.”

  Epishev went a little closer to Dimitri Volovich. He caught the sickly citric scent of Volovich’s Italian hair oil. It was awful, but anything was better than the odour surrounding Greshko’s bed.

  “This is the most patriotic thing you have ever been asked to do,” Greshko said. “If it helps, think of yourself as a loyal officer of a small, elite KGB that operates secretly inside the larger one. Think, too, of how this elite KGB is connected to some of the most powerful figures in the country, men who are just as discontented as ourselves.”

  Epishev was already thinking of the drive through darkness back to Moscow and the visit to the Printer. He was thinking of identification papers, a passport, airline tickets.

  “Remember this,” Greshko said. “If there are complications and you’re delayed outside the country, I want to be informed. I want news, no matter how trivial it may seem. Don’t call me directly on my telephone. Volovich here will be the liaison. Every day, Viktor. I expect that much. But let’s be optimistic. Let’s hope the business is straightforward and our worries needless.”

  There was a sound from the bedroom door. The nurse stepped into the room, carrying a tray
which held small medicine bottles. “I need my patient back,” she said, and she smiled cheerfully.

  “It’s feeding time at the zoo,” Greshko remarked. He winked at Epishev, who turned away and, without looking back, left the bedroom.

  On the road to Moscow a fog rolled out of the fields, clinging to the windshield of the car. Volovich drove very slowly even when he’d turned on the yellow foglamps. Epishev sat hunched in the passenger seat. He blinked at the layers of fog, which parted every now and then in the severe glare of the yellow lights, only to come rushing in again.

  “Does it constitute treason, Dimitri?”

  Volovich stared straight ahead, looking grimly into the fog. “I never think about words like that.”

  “I’m asking you to think about them now.”

  Volovich shrugged. “I take my orders directly from you. Always have done. I’m a creature of habit, and I’m not about to change at this stage of my life. If you’re asking whether I’m loyal, the answer is yes. Besides, I never think about politics.”

  Epishev leaned back in his seat. He closed his eyes. Politics. This was no mere matter of politics. If Volovich chose to simplify it for himself, that was fine. But it came down to something that was far beyond the ordinary course of Party personalities and rituals. What was going on here was a struggle between the old ways and the new, and Epishev – who loved his country as fiercely as Greshko – knew where his own heart lay. There were flaws in the old ways, but it was a system that worked in its own fashion, one that people had come to accept. And if there were failings, they were temporary, and inevitable, because the road to Communism wasn’t exactly smooth – or even straight. The Revolution had never promised an easy path. Epishev, who had been a Party member for more than thirty years, and before that a dedicated child of the Komsomol, knew what the Revolution had intended. Like an ardent suitor with a faithful passion, he had committed his life to this one mistress. He tolerated all her failings and loved all her glories. And sometimes, when he thought about the Revolution – which he saw as an ongoing process, unlimited, as demanding as it was endless – he experienced an extraordinary sense of iron purpose. He was in the slipstream of history. Everything he did, every task he carried out, no matter how distasteful, had been shaped by the historic forces that had overthrown the Romanovs in 1917.

  But to toss all this away! To open windows and throw the old system out! To change the purpose of the Revolution! And to do all this with such indecent haste! Heresy was hardly the word.

  Epishev stared into the fog and sighed. He had absolutely no choice but to go along with Greshko. Anything else would have been complete hypocrisy. It didn’t matter if Greshko was motivated by pure patriotism, or the promptings of a dying man’s monumental ego, because Epishev knew his own reasons were good. He was, as Greshko had correctly pointed out, a patriot. He knew no other way to be.

  The fog was thinning now. Epishev glanced at Volovich. “When I need to telephone, I’ll contact you at your home. I’ll use the East Berlin link. It’s safer.”

  Volovich switched off the foglamps. The car began to gather speed. Between thin pine trees, a half-moon had appeared, suspended in a way that struck Epishev as forlorn. He was thinking now of Romanenko, the First Secretary of the Communist Party in the Estonian Soviet Republic, and trying to imagine a shadowy gunman in a railway station. When he’d first heard Greshko speak of the organisation that called itself the Brotherhood of the Forest and how this old association of Baltic freedom fighters had been the driving-force behind Romanenko’s plan, when Greshko had patiently explained the merits of the conspiracy and how it might be used against Birthmark Billy and his cronies, Epishev’s first instinct had been to distrust the entire undertaking. Romanenko was an Estonian, a Bait, and Epishev trusted absolutely nothing that originated in any of the Baltic countries.

  More than fifteen years ago he had spent nine months in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where he’d been sent from Moscow to purge the city of Estonian nationals with suspect sympathies. The Baits were a clannish crew, annoyingly supercilious at times, and they tended to protect one another from the common enemy, which they saw as Russia. He remembered Viru Street now, and Tsentralnaya Square, and the 5th October Park. A handsome city, a little too Western perhaps and its native population too irreverent, but there was a pleasant atmosphere, at times almost a buoyancy, in the cafés – places like the Gnome and the Pegasus – that one found nowhere else in the Soviet Union.

  More than buoyancy, though. There was defiance throughout the Baltic. One encountered it in Latvia and Lithuania as well. There were strikes, and well-organised protests, and various groups babbling publicly about their rights and singing forbidden national anthems. It was as if all three Baltic nations still believed themselves to be independent of Russia. So many Baltic nationals even now resisted – and loathed – the absorption of their so-called ‘republics’ into the Soviet Union. And they were encouraged in their dreams by émigré communities overseas, mainly America. He thought of the social clubs in Los Angeles and Chicago and New York where old men played cards or shuffled dominoes and wrote angry letters to their Congressmen about ‘prisoners of conscience’ behind the Iron Curtain. All that was harmless enough. All that was empty noise and the fury of frustration. Dominoes and cards and folk-festivals and national costumes amounted to nothing. Conscience, after all, was cheap.

  But now it had gone beyond simple conscience. The Baits had engineered a plot which had been in the planning a long time and, if Greshko had his way, stood every chance of success. And if it did succeed, it would release all kinds of turmoil, all manner of ancient frustrations and ethnic demands for sovereignty and self-determination throughout the Baltic. What Greshko hoped for was an apocalypse – a popular uprising inspired by the success of the plot and unified by its symbolism, mobs in the streets, tanks and soldiers of the Red Army fighting the local populations of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius, the disintegration of Soviet influence in satellite republics, a decomposition that might spread beyond the Soviet Union itself and into Poland and East Germany and Czechoslovakia, an anarchic state of affairs that would doom the upstart brigade who ruled these days from the Kremlin. What Greshko desired was nothing less than a new Revolution, one that would replace the bastard liberalisation of the Politburo with an older, more reassuring socialism. What Greshko really wanted was yesterday.

  Epishev put a finger inside his mouth and finally located the sliver of apple that had been stuck between his back teeth for the past hour or so. He examined it on the tip of his finger. He had a way of staring at things that suggested the concentration of a coroner inspecting an unusual corpse. He wiped the pellet from his fingertip and sighed, looking out at the moon, which had a curiously hollow appearance, as if it were simply an empty sphere. And he had a sense of uneasiness for a moment, because he felt he’d become exactly the kind of person he’d spent most of his life hunting down and destroying. He had become an enemy of the State.

  But the uneasiness passed as quickly as it had come, and Epishev watched the fog return, spreading like acid across the face of the moon.

  When the nurse had gone Greshko lay alone in the darkened bedroom. On certain nights, his fiery pain was beyond any of the opiates the nurse administered. And then there were other nights – and this was one of them – when he felt free of the burden of his cancer. There was calm and stillness and even the prospect of a future to anticipate.

  He stared at the window. Outside, the night was completely quiet, and the quiet was that of his own death. But he could hold it at bay, he could keep it from entering this bedroom, he was too busy, too curious to die. Besides, his hatred would not allow him to expire. He needed only to live long enough to hear the noises of chaos and destruction. He needed only to live for five short days, if the Baltic scheme ran according to its own timetable. And Viktor would make sure that it did.

  He turned his thoughts to Epishev. A good man, a good Communist, if perhaps a little too rum
inative at times. But there was also an element of brutality to Epishev and he’d go to the ends of the world for Vladimir Greshko. What more could you ask for?

  Epishev would probably use a Hungarian or West German passport and leave Eastern Europe through Berlin, perhaps passing himself off as a commercial traveller or, as he’d once done many years ago, as a piano tuner. A piano tuner! Sometimes Epishev could be inventive. And if that wasn’t always a desirable quality, there were times when it was admirable, especially when you combined it with a streak of ruthlessness and complete commitment to the class-struggle of Leninism – something Greshko himself had come long ago to regard with utter cynicism.

  More important than imagination, though, was the fact of Epishev’s bottomless loyalty, which Greshko had bought cheaply years ago with a simple lie about how Joe Stalin wanted to purge Viktor from the KGB and the Party. Stalin hadn’t been remotely interested in Epishev. Indeed, the old vozhd hadn’t even heard of the young man. But Greshko had dreamed up the fiction, thus presenting himself as Epishev’s saviour, as the man who had intervened personally on Epishev’s behalf. From that time on, Viktor had never questioned a single order issued by his deliverer. A lie, but justifiable within a system where power depended on a network of unquestioning loyalties you forged in any way you could.

  Greshko smiled. The idea of setting in motion events that would alter the self-destructive course of this great empire delighted him. He shut his eyes and stuck his hand out to touch the surface of the bedside telephone. He knew he hadn’t been given the privilege of a phone out of charity or kindness. He had a telephone for one reason only – so that his conversations could be eavesdropped, his intentions monitored. But Greshko also knew that only a token attempt was made to record his messages because he had called in an old debt from a certain I. F. Martynov, Chief of the Internal Security Directorate, who also happened to be a closet homosexual with a dangerous liking for those lean and lovely teenage boys of the Bolshoi School of Ballet. There were choice tidbits about Martynov’s life in Greshko’s possession, unsavoury items that Martynov, a married man with overwhelming political ambitions, could not afford to have made public. A little mutual backscratching, a couple of unspecified threats, and Martynoy had agreed that only a small proportion of Greshko’s conversations would be monitored strictly for appearance’s sake, and that even these would be sanitised by Martynov himself.