diddle and waver, even though they had to know that delay was a waste of time and air. Even Marxism-Leninism couldn’t alter human nature. Sad, but true. The New Soviet Man, like the New Polish Man, was, in the end, still a man.
The ballet being played out now was as stylized as any performed by the Kirov troupe in Leningrad. The recipient even imagined he could hear the music playing. He actually preferred Western jazz to classical, but in any case the music at the ballet was just the garnish, the system that told the dancers when to leap together like pretty, trained dogs. The ballerinas were far too slender for Russian tastes, of course, but real women were far too heavy for those little fairies they called men to toss about.
Why was his mind wandering? He resumed his seat, falling back slowly into his leather chair as he unfolded the letter. It was written in Polish, and he didn’t speak or read Polish, but affixed to it was a translation in literate Russian. Of course, he’d have his own translators go over it, plus two or three psychiatrists to consider the mental state of the drafter and to compose their own multipage analysis, which he’d have to read, time waster though that would be. Then he’d have to report on it, to provide his political superiors—no, his political
The Chairman wondered if this Polish colonel realized how easy his own political bosses had had it. In the end, all they’d had to do was forward it to their own political masters for action, bucking the decision up the tree of responsibility as government functionaries all do, regardless of place or philosophy. Vassals were vassals the world over.
The Chairman looked up at him. “Comrade Colonel, thank you for bringing this to my attention. Please extend my greetings and my respects to your commander. Dismissed.”
The Pole snapped to attention, saluted in the curious Polish way, did his best parade-ground about face, then headed off to the door.
Yuriy Andropov watched the door close before turning his attention back to the message and its appended translation.
“So, Karol, you threaten us, eh?” He clucked his tongue and shook his head before going on as quietly as before. “You are brave, but your judgment needs adjustment, my cleric comrade.”
He looked up again, pondering. The office had the usual artwork covering the walls, and for the same reason as in any other office—to avoid blankness. Two were oil paintings by Renaissance masters, borrowed from the collection of some long-dead czar or nobleman. A third portrait, rather a good one, actually, was of Lenin, the pale complexion and domed forehead known to millions all around the world. A nicely framed color photograph of Leonid Brezhnev, the current General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, hung near it. The photo was a lie, a picture of a young and vigorous man, not the senile old goat who now sat at the head of the Politburo table. Well, all men grew old, but in most places, such men left their jobs for honorable retirement. But not in his country, Andropov realized… and looked down at the letter. And not this man, either. This job, too, was for life.
Danger?
The consequences were unknown, and that was danger enough. His Politburo colleagues would see it the same way, old, cautious, and frightened men that they were.
And so he had not merely to report the danger. He must also present a means of dealing with it effectively.
The portraits that ought to have been on his wall right now were of two men who were semiforgotten. One would have been Iron Feliks—Dzerzhinskiy himself, the founder of the Cheka, the antecedent of the KGB.
The other ought to have been Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. The leader had once posed a question that was relevant to the very situation that faced Andropov now. Then, it had been 1944. Now—now maybe it was even more relevant.
Well, that remained to be seen. And he’d be the man to make that determination, Andropov told himself. All men could be made to disappear. The thought should have surprised him when it leapt into his head, but it didn’t. This building, built eighty years earlier to be the palatial home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company, had seen a lot of that, and its inhabitants had issued orders to cause many, many more deaths. They used to have executions in the basement. That had ended only a few years before, as KGB expanded to include all the space in even this massive structure—and another on the inner ring road around the city—but the cleanup crew occasionally whispered about the ghosts to be seen on quiet nights, sometimes startling the old washerwomen with their buckets and brushes and witch-like hair. The government of this country didn’t believe in such things as spirits and ghosts any more than it believed in a man’s immortal soul, but doing away with the superstitions of the simple peasants was a more difficult task than getting the intelligentsia to buy into the voluminous writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Karl Marx, or Friedrich Engels, not to mention the turgid prose attributed to Stalin (but actually done by a committee formed of frightened men, and all the worse because of it), which was, blessedly, no longer much in demand except to the most masochistic of scholars.
But by then, they knew better. The politically aware members professed their belief at Party meetings because they had to do that to get ahead. In the same way, the smart courtiers in pharaonic Egypt kneeled and shielded their eyes from the bright-light-emanating face, lest they be blinded—they held up their hands because, in Pharaoh, in the person of their Living God, was personal power and prosperity, and so they knelt their obeisance and denied their senses and their sensibility and got ahead. So it was here. Five thousand years, was it? He could check a history book. The Soviet Union turned out some of the world’s foremost medieval historians, and doubtless some competent antiquarians as well, because that was one area of scholarship where politics didn’t matter much. The facts of ancient Egypt were too distant from contemporary reality to matter to the philosophical speculation of Marx or the endless ramblings of Lenin. And so some fine scholars went into that field. More went into the pure sciences, because pure science was pure science and a hydrogen atom had no politics.
But agriculture did. Manufacturing did. And so the best and brightest stayed away from those areas, opting instead for political studies. Because there success was to be found. You didn’t have to believe it any more than you believed that Ramses II was the living son of the sun god, or whatever the hell god he was supposed to have issued from. Instead, Yuriy Vladimirovich figured, the courtiers saw that Ramses had numerous wives and even more numerous progeny, and that, on the whole, wasn’t a bad life for a man to have. The classical equivalent of a dacha in the Lenin Hills and summers on the beach at Sochi. So, did the world ever really change?
Probably not, the Chairman of the Committee for State Security decided. And his job was largely to protect against change.
And this letter threatened change, didn’t it? It was a threat, and he might have to do something about the threat. That meant doing something about the man behind it.
It had happened before. It could happen again, he decided.
Andropov would not live long enough to learn that in considering this action, he would set in motion the demise of his own country.
Chapter 1.
Rumblings and Dreams
“When do you start, Jack?” Cathy asked in the quiet of their bed.
And her husband was glad it was their bed. Comfortable as the New York hotel had been, it is never the same, and besides, he’d had quite enough of his father-in-law, with his Park Avenue duplex and immense sense of self-importance. Okay, Joe Muller had a good ninety million in the bank and his diversified portfolio, and it was
