message was the easiest to defend because in a way what he was saying had a grain of truth to it. Russia’s current problems were indeed being caused by the upheaval in changing from one form of economic system to another. The Russian economy was having growing pains. If the people stuck with the reformers long enough, there was a good chance they’d come out of their depression. Russia was finally joining the rest of the major nations of the world with ongoing financial defeats and triumphs. It was called a free market economy. Everyone took their chances.
But Tarankov was convincing the rank-and-file Russians that once he was leader of the nation he could solve all their problems by going back to the old ways. The people forgot what their lives had been like before Gorbachev. They had forgotten the repressions, the gulags, the shortages. They were being dazzled by the possibility of once again becoming a super power. It was a message that the people were taking to heart, and one that the industrial-military establishment embraced.
“Why do you want to talk to my father?” Elizabeth, asked.
Jacqueline glanced over at her. ” the personally or my government?”
“The government.” “Your father had a meeting with a “Russian intelligence officer who asked him to take an assignment. We’d like to know what that’s all about.”
“What if it has nothing to do with France?”
Jacqueline shrugged. “Then we have no problem.” She smiled wanly. “I don’t think your father knows that you work for the CIA. It’s going to come as a shock to him.”
“I’m sure it will,” Elizabeth said. “How about you? Do you want to talk to him?”
“Most certainly.”
“Why?” “I think for the same reason you do,” Jacqueline said. “Your father is probably going to assassinate someone for the Russians, which will place his life in grave danger. I don’t want that to happen. Or at the very least I want him to convince me that what he’s going to do is worthwhile. I don’t want him to throw his life away.”
“What if it was worthwhile?” Elizabeth asked.
Jacqueline didn’t answer at once, concentrating on her driving instead. She was having trouble keeping her emotions in check, and it showed on her face.
She turned finally and glanced at Elizabeth. “Then I would probably help him, for the same reason you came here to help him, and not merely find him for the CIA. I love him, and I’ll do whatever it takes to be at his side when he needs me.”
Elizabeth was touched to the bottom of her soul. “Even if it meant lying to your own government?”
Jacqueline smiled crookedly. “You’ve lied to protect him, and so have I.”
“How do I know that I can trust you?”
Jacqueline shook her head. “I can’t answer that for you Elizabeth, because I don’t even know if I can trust myself to do the right thing. Right now I don’t know what’s right or wrong. I only know that I love your father, and everything else is secondary. I’ll sell my soul for him, and if need be I’ll give my life. But I don’t want him to be destroyed. I want him to retire, so that I can have all of him all the time.” Elizabeth reached out and touched Jacqueline’s hand on the steering wheel. “My father will never retire.”
Jacqueline’s eyes began to fill. “That’s what I’m afraid of, my lovely man lying dead somewhere. I see it at night in my dreams and it frightens me so badly that sometimes I don’t know how I can go on.”
“I know what you mean,” Elizabeth said. “Believe me, I know.”
TWENTY-THREE
The interim president of Russia was a deeply troubled man. He turned away from his visitor across the desk and looked out the window at Spassky Tower rising into a leaden sky as he considered his options. Whatever action they took would seriously affect the nation’s future which was, at this moment in history, in more jeopardy than it had ever been. He was having a recurring dream in which he was flying over the charred, smoking remains of what had once been Moscow, a mammoth mushroom cloud roiling fifteen thousand meters above this very spot. Russia had fallen to Tarankov, who in his attempts to regain the old Soviet Union had brought on thermonuclear war. At the outskirts of the city the dead and dying lay in smoldering piles like cordwood that stretched for as far as the eye could see. The worst of the nightmare was the stench of scorched human flesh. Each morning he awoke with the horrible smell still in his nostrils, and the taste of it at the back of his throat.
“It was a mistake on my part, Mr. President,” the man behind him said.
Kabatov turned back to face Yuryn, whose normally florid complexion was even more red than normal this afternoon. “There were no survivors among the crews of those six helicopters?”
“None.”
“I hold you fully responsible—”
“I take the responsibility,” Yuryn interrupted. “I’d hoped to stop his train with the minimum use of force, and therefore the minimum loss of life before it reached Nizhny Novgorod. An estimated one million people showed up for his speech. Had we tried to arrest him, the carnage would have been beyond belief. The nation would never have survived such an attack. Neither would this government have emerged intact. I made a decision, and I was wrong.”
“Was he warned?”
“He may have been, but it would not have mattered had the attack come as a surprise, because his train is more heavily armed than we’d suspected. He has SS-N-6 missiles, and radar-guided rapid-fire cannons of some sort. I still don’t have all the details.”
“Next time use jet fighters with bigger missiles,” Kabatov said, keeping his voice in control.
“We’re working on several scenarios. But if your wish remains to take him alive so that he can be placed on trial, our options are severely restricted. Destroying the train poses no real problem. Stopping it without harming Tarankov will be difficult if not impossible.”
‘-“Nothing is impossible,” Kabatov shot back. “And yes I want him taken alive. It’s our only option. Anything else and we lose the nation.”
“In that case, Mr. President, we have another more serious, more immediate problem,” Yuryn said heavily.
“Well, what is it?”
“Viktor Yemlin has hired an assassin to kill Tarankov.”
It didn’t come as a complete surprise to Kabatov, still he found that he was shocked. “Is the SVR behind this?”
“No. Apparently Yemlin is working alone, but on the advice of Konstantin Sukhoruchkin and Eduard Shevardnadze.” “How do you know this?”
“I didn’t believe him when he said he went to Paris and Helsinki to do some shopping, so I arranged to place him in a position that he willingly told the truth.” Yuryn took a thin report from his briefcase and handed it to Kabatov. “If Yemlin does remember the encounter it’s not likely he’ll say anything to anybody.”
Kabatov opened the report and started to read, bile rising up in the back of his throat, making him almost physically ill. He looked up, unable to finish and unable to hide a look of disgust from his face. “Where is Yemlin at this moment?”
“At his office. He’s done nothing outwardly to indicate he remembers what happened to him, beyond the fact that he had a pleasant evening at the Magesterium.”
“We know the assassin’s name, and we know that he lives in Paris. I’ll instruct our people to grab him, or short of that, kill him.”
“That, Mr. President, might prove to be more difficult than capturing or killing Tarankov, who after all is nothing more than a soldier. But Kirk McGarvey is a very special man who has already done our country a great deal of harm.” “I’m not familiar with the name. He’s an American. What, mafia?”
“He’s a former CIA officer who killed General Baranov some years ago, which subsequently threw the entire KGB into a disarray that took us years to overcome.”
“We can arrest Yemlin, and force him to tell us how to find McGarvey. Or, Yemlin can call him off.”
