the only constants left in Moscow. The only bits of the old days that had remained, by outward appearances, the same.
He walked across the square where he bought a bouquet of wilted flowers from an old babushka at a kiosk, and joined the line for Lenin’s tomb in front of the red brick History Museum opposite the entrance to the Alexandrovsky Garden. It took about twenty minutes until he got to the doors. Since he was obviously a foreigner, he had to show his passport. The people in line behind him stopped a respectful distance away as he approached Lenin’s embalmed body in its glass-topped coffin, studied the corpse’s surprisingly intact features, then laid his flowers with the others on the marble floor. As he turned to leave, one of the uniformed guards came over, smiled sadly, and shook his hand.
“Merci, monsieur,” he said gently.
“He was a great man. Many of us in Belgium admire what he stood for,” McGarvey said humbly. He glanced toward the broad marble stairs at the back. “It would be an honor to be allowed to stand on the balcony where so many great men have watched the May Day parades. Is it permitted?”
“For you we will make an exception,” the guard replied. He led McGarvey up to the wind-swept balcony.
When Tarankov made his triumphal entry to Moscow it would be to this place. McGarvey looked out across the square, apparently lost in a vision of what it would be like to stand in front of the soldiers and tanks and rockets parading through the square while a million people watched. Overcome with emotion, he turned away and raised his eyes to the heavens. The Kremlin’s brick walls rose above the mausoleum. McGarvey measured the firing angles and distances for a shooter placed somewhere on the wall above, and decided-the shot would be an easy one. The problem would be getting away afterward. It would be difficult, perhaps even impossible.
“Thank you,” he said turning back to the guard.
“Perhaps someday you will have greatness returned to you.”
The guard bridled, but then nodded. “We will, and sooner than those fools inside realize.”
Back outside, McGarvey turned left and walked up the hill to the Sobakina Tower pedestrian gate at the northern corner of the Kremlin, bought a ticket for the grounds and, taking out his guide book, went in. The walls beneath the one-hundred-eighty-foot tower were twelve feet thick to were a secret well and a passageway out of the fortress into the Neglinnaya River which flowed underground. He’d considered that a possible escape route. But access to the passageway was through a series of heavy steel gates in the tower, that on the day Tarankov made his triumphal entrance into Moscowwould likely be heavily guarded. It would be possible to take out the guards and blow the gates. In the noise and confusion of Tarankov’s appearance such activities might go unnoticed. But if he became trapped in the river passage it would be a simple matter for the authorities to wait at the Moscow River outlet for him to appear, and he would be captured. It would be impossible to take the underground river upstream.
But the Kremlin still intrigued him, because no one would expect Tarankov to be shot from behind. The problems here were threefold; getting past the heavy security, making the shot unobserved, possibly from the top of the Kremlin wall directly above and behind the speaker’s balcony atop Lenin’s mausoleum, easy if the only consideration were sight lines, and making good his escape for which he wanted several options. He didn’t think he could rely on one escape route no matter how foolproof it seemed.
The few people wandering around the Kremlin paid him little attention as he sauntered past the Arsenal to the Senate Building, which backed the wall directly behind Lenin’s tomb, to his left. From time to time he stopped, read from his tour book then looked up, as if he were trying to orient himself, while he studied the top floors of the building. The Senate was one of the few buildings in the Kremlin that were closed to the public. But with the proper credentials it would be possible to gain entrance to the building. He might be able to make his way to the roof from where a shot at Tarankov’s back would be possible. Assuming that guards would not be placed on the roof against just such a possibility, he would still be faced with his escape after the kill.
Once Tarankov was down and the direction of the shot established, which might only take seconds, the Kremlin would be sealed. His only hope at that point would be blending in until the confusion subsided and the gates were once again open. It would mean he’d have to come up with foolproof documents and a rock solid disguise — a shaky proposition at best. It left him no options, unless he had a set of papers and a disguise other than the one he used to gain entrance, or an alternate route over or beneath the walls.
There was something about this place that struck him more like a prison than the seat of government. It was a fortress which protected itself not only from without, but from within.
He looked at the problem from another direction as he continued past the Supreme Soviet building and headed toward the Spassky Tower gate which opened onto Red Square. If his objective was to get inside the Kremlin to assassinate someone, he would face the same problem: that of breaching the heavily guarded walls. He would have to come up with several alternatives to get inside, and then more options for getting out.
Stopping a moment to consult his guide book again, he studied the area between the Supreme Soviet and Senate buildings and the wall from which the Senate Tower rose. Lenin’s Tomb was just on the other side. He made his decision. The Kremlin’s walls, since they’d seen the last of Napoleon in 1812, had withstood every assault except those of a political nature. As intriguing as the possibility was taking Tarankov by surprise from behind, he dismissed it. He would kill Tarankov while the man made his speech atop Lenin’s Mausoleum, but it would have to be done from outside, somewhere around Red Square, somewhere within a range that would give him a reasonable shot. Say two to three hundred yards.
McGarvey walked through Spassky Tower Gate back out to Red Square, snow now falling in earnest. The wind had picked up so that visibility was restricted. But rising out of the swirling snowstorm less than three hundred meters away were the fantastical shapes and colors of me domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The building was to Russia what the Eiffel Tower was to France, a symbol of the nation’s ties with the past. Turning, he studied the line in front of Lenin’s Tomb and the speaker’s balcony above. Tarankov would come here not only to face the million people who would crowd into Red Square, but also to face Russia’s past. St. Basil’s..
Pocketing his guidebook, McGarvey made his way across the square to the main entrance of the church where he bought a ticket and went inside the antechamber which housed a museum. A dozen people, some of them foreigners, studied the displays which depicted the history of the cathedral and the story of its construction. A cutaway model showed the layout of the entire structure which consisted of nine main chapels — the tall slope- roofed one in the middle, four big onion domes on the four corners and four smaller ones in between. All of the chapels were linked by an elevated gallery, and all of the chapels had exits that led either out onto Red Square or into the rest of the cathedral complex and a small garden.
The church was built on bedrock at the south end of Red Square, its foundations driven deep underground in an area honeycombed with subterranean rivers all flowing down to the Moscow River. The lower levels held crypts which in the late seventeenth century were used to house Russia’s state treasury. Like the Kremlin, St. Basil’s had also been a fortress of sorts, with its own dark secrets and underground passageways and escape routes.
McGarvey left the museum and walked into the main tower which was a forest of scaffolding rising one hundred and seven feet into the darkness. Directly above were the covered galleries connecting the other eight chapels, and at the rear were iron gates which led below to the crypts. Two old women stood near the front of the main chapel, their heads bowed in prayer.
On the day Tarankov arrived in Moscow, St. Basil’s would be closed. The church had become too great a symbol of Russia’s deeply religious past for it to remain open when he was giving his message for the future. There could only be one god in Holy Russia, and the Tarantula meant to be that god.
McGarvey climbed the stairs to the gallery on his left, and followed it around in a large circle to each of the other eight chapels, descending into each where he searched for and found the various ways outside.
Two hours later he was back in the main tower where he studied the locks leading into the crypts. They were massive, but made out of soft iron and could easily be blown by a very small amount of plastic explosive, or cut with bolt-cutters.
He looked up through the scaffolding. There would be no problem climbing to the top, where from one of the openings he would have a clear shot at Tarankov standing on the balcony above Lenin’s Mausoleum.
From that point he would have a couple of minutes to make his way down out of the tower, where, depending on how organized the authorities were, he could descend into the crypts and make his escape through one of the underground passages, or make his way through one of the chapels and outside where he could lose himself in the confusion.
He had the where. Next he needed the when.
