that their knees almost touched.
Even though it was stifling in the room, Pekkala had not taken off his coat. It was cut in the old style: black and knee-length, with a short collar and concealed buttons which fastened on the left side of his chest. He sat unnaturally straight, like a man with an injured back. This was caused by the gun which he kept strapped across his chest.
The gun was a Webley .455 revolver, with solid brass handles and a pin-sized hole drilled into the barrel just behind the forward sight to stop the pistol from bucking when it fired. The modification had been made not for Pekkala but for the Tsar, who received it as a gift from his cousin King George V. The Tsar had then issued the Webley to Pekkala. “I have no use for such a weapon,” the Tsar had told him. “If my enemies get close enough for me to need this, it will already be too late to do me any good.”
“The question I wanted to ask you, Inspector,” Nagorski said to Pekkala, “is why you think I would give away the secret of my own invention to the same people we might have to use it against?”
Pekkala opened his mouth to reply, but he did not get the chance.
“You see, I know why I’m here,” continued Nagorski. “You think I am responsible for breaches of security in the Konstantin Project. I am neither so naive nor so uninformed that I don’t know what’s going on around me. That’s why every stage of development has taken place in a secure facility. The entire base is under permanent lockdown and under my own personal control. Everyone who works there has been cleared by me. Nothing happens at the facility without my knowing about it.”
“Which brings us back to your reason for being here today.”
Now Nagorski leaned forward. “Yes, Inspector Pekkala. Yes, it does, and I could have saved you some time and myself a very expensive meal if you had simply let me tell your errand boy—”
“That ‘errand boy,’ as you call him, is a major of Internal Security.”
“Even NKVD officers can be errand boys, Inspector, if their bosses are running the country. What I could have told your major is the same thing I’m going to tell you now—which is that there has been no breach of security.”
“The weapon you are calling the T-34 is known to our enemies,” said Pekkala. “I’m afraid that is a fact you can’t deny.”
“Of course, its existence is known! You can’t design, build, and field-test a machine weighing thirty tons and expect it to remain invisible. But its existence is not what I’m talking about. The secret lies in what it can do. I admit it’s true that there are members of my design team who could tell you pieces of this puzzle, but only one person knows its full potential.” Nagorski sat back and folded his arms. Sweat was running down his polished face. “That would be me, Inspector Pekkala.”
“There is something I don’t understand,” said Pekkala. “What is so special about your invention? Don’t we already have tanks?”
Nagorski coughed out a laugh. “Certainly! There is the T-26.” He let one hand fall open, as if a miniature tank were resting on his palm. “But it is too slow.” The hand closed into a fist. “Then there is the BT series.” The other hand fell open. “But it doesn’t have enough armor. You might as well ask me why we are building weapons at all when there are plenty of stones lying around to throw at our enemies when they invade.”
“You sound very confident, Comrade Nagorski.”
“I am more than confident!” Nagorski barked in his face. “I am certain, and it is not merely because I invented the T-34. It is because I have faced tanks in battle. Only when you have watched them lumbering towards you, and you know you are helpless to stop them, do you understand why tanks can win not only a battle but a war.”
“When did you face tanks?” Pekkala asked.
“In the war we fought against Germany, and God help us if we ever have to fight another. When the war broke out in the summer of 1914, I was in Lyon, competing in the French Grand Prix. Back then, racing automobiles was my entire life. I won that race, you know, the only automobile race our country has ever won. It was the happiest day of my life, and it would have been perfect if my chief mechanic hadn’t been struck by one of the other race cars, which skidded off the track.”
“Was he killed?” asked Pekkala.
“No,” replied Nagorski, “but he was badly injured. You see, racing is a dangerous game, Inspector, even if you’re not behind the wheel.”
“When did you first become interested in these machines?”
As the topic turned to engines, Nagorski began to relax. “I got my first look at an automobile in 1907. It was a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which had been brought into Russia by the Grand Duke Mikhail. My father and he used to go hunting each year, for Merganser ducks up in the Pripet Marshes. Once, when the Grand Duke stopped by our house in his car, my father asked to see the inner workings of the machine.” Nagorski laughed. “That’s what he called them.
“What did happen to you in the war?” interrupted Pekkala.
“I couldn’t get back to Russia, so I enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. There were men from all over the world, caught in the wrong country when the war broke out and with no way to return home. I had been with the Legion almost two years when we came up against tanks near the French village of Flers. We had all heard about these machines. The British first used them against the Germans at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. By the following year the Germans had designed their own. I had never even seen one until we went into action against them. My first thought was how slowly they moved. Six kilometers an hour. That’s a walking pace. And nothing graceful about them. It was like being attacked by giant metal cockroaches. Three of the five broke down before they even reached us, one was knocked out with artillery and the last managed to escape, although we found it two days later burned out by the side of the road, apparently from engine malfunction.”
“That does not sound like an impressive introduction.”
“No, but as I watched those iron hulks being destroyed, or grinding to a halt of their own accord, I realized that the future of warfare lay in these machines. Tanks are not merely some passing fad of butchery, like the crossbow or the trebuchet. I saw at once what needed to be done to improve the design. I glimpsed technologies that had not even been invented yet, but which, in the months ahead, I created in my head and on any scrap of paper I could find. When the war ended, those scraps were what I brought back with me to this country.”
Pekkala knew the rest of that story—how one day Nagorski had walked into the newly formed Soviet Patent Office in Moscow with more than twenty different designs, which ultimately earned him the directorship of the T-34 project. Until that time he had been eking out a living on the streets of Moscow, polishing the boots of men he would later command.
“Do you know the limits of my development budget?” asked Nagorski.
“I do not,” replied Pekkala.
“That’s because there aren’t any,” said Nagorski. “Comrade Stalin knows exactly how important this machine is to the safety of our country. So I can spend whatever I want, take whatever I want, order whomever I choose to do whatever I decide. You accuse me of taking risks with the safety of this country, but the blame for that belongs with the man who sent you here. You can tell Comrade Stalin from me that if he continues arresting members of the Soviet armed forces at the rate he is doing, there will be no one left to drive my tanks even if he does let me finish my work!”
Pekkala knew that the true measure of Nagorski’s power was not in the money he could spend but in the fact that he could say what he’d just said without fear of a bullet in the brain. And Pekkala himself said nothing in reply, not because he feared Nagorski but because he knew that Nagorski was right.
Afraid that he was losing control of the government, Stalin had ordered mass arrests. In the past year and a half, over a million people had been taken into custody. Among them were most of the Soviet high command, who had then either been shot or sent out to the Gulags.
“Perhaps,” Pekkala suggested to Nagorski, “you have had a change of heart about this tank of yours. It might
