quiet, though lights shone in many windows. Russians loved to stay up late talking. In the old days they fitted blackout curtains on their windows. These days they weren’t worried.
All that would change, Chernov thought as he drove around back and parked the Mercedes in a garage. Tarankov truly believed he had the answers for Russia. Likely as not, his revolution would bring them to war. But by then, Chernov intended on being long gone.
He waited for a couple of minutes in the darkness to make sure that he hadn’t been followed, then climbed the stairs to the third floor, his tread noiseless. He produced a key and opened the door of the front apartment, and let himself in.
The apartment was dark, only a dim light came from outside. It smelled faintly of expensive western perfumes and soap. Feminine smells. Music came softly from the bedroom.
Chernov took off his uniform blouse, loosened his tie and went into the kitchen where he poured a glass of white wine. Removing his shoes, he walked back to the bedroom, and pushed open the door.
“Can you stay long this time, Ivan,” Raya Dubanova asked softly in the darkness. She’d been a ballet dancer with the Bolshoi. Now she was an assistant choreographer of the corps de ballet. Her body was still compact and well muscled. She knew him only as Ivan.
“No,” Chernov said sitting beside her on the bed. He put the wine glass aside and took her in his arms. She was naked.
“Can you stay at least until morning?” she whispered in his ear.
“I can stay with you tonight if you promise to wake me at six sharp,” he teased. “But if you snore I’ll have to go to a hotel.”
“I don’t know if you’ll be capable of getting out of bed when I’m finished with you,” she said wickedly. “Now take off your clothes, and come to me.”
She’d been forced to be the escort of a Strategic Rocket Force general who Chernov was contracted to kill three years ago. He’d shot the man in his bed while Raya hid in the bathroom. When it was over she came out, looked at the general’s body, took the gun from Chernov and pumped three bullets into it, then spit in the general’s face.
She wouldn’t stay in the apartment so Chernov brought her to this one. He came to her as often as possible, sometimes able to stay for only an hour or two, other times staying an entire evening.
She knew what he was, but she never asked who he worked for, or if he’d killed again. She was simply grateful that he’d saved her from the old man. And each time he came to her bed she showed her appreciation.
Tarankov didn’t know about then-relationship. No one did.
He undressed and joined her in bed. “I need a couple of hours of sleep,” he said.
“We’ll see,” she said, straddling him. She raked her fingernails across his chest almost, but not quite with enough force to draw blood, and he immediately responded.
Maybe he wouldn’t need so much sleep as all that, he thought, a soft groan escaping from his lips as Raya began to bite the tender skin on the insides of his thighs.
At 8:00 a.m. the line in front of Lenin’s Mausoleum was already long even though visitors were not allowed inside until 10:00. Chernov, wearing a worn overcoat, black fur hat and shabby boots, stood near the end of the line, his hands stuffed deeply in his pockets. The morning was bitterly cold, made worse by a sharp wind blowing from the Moscow River. Most of the people in line were old women, but there were a few foreign tourists and several men not ashamed to show remorse for the father of Russian socialism. Rain or snow it was a rare day that there wasn’t a line in front of the mausoleum. It was the most anonymous spot in Red Square.
Two police cars, their blue lights flashing, came around the corner past the History Museum at a high rate of speed. They were immediately followed by four Zil limousines, and two final police cars.
Chernov waited for them to pass then slow down as they turned toward the Spassky gate. The first two police cars entered the Kremlin, and he pressed the button on the tiny transmitter in his pocket.
The third limousine erupted in a huge geyser of flame and debris. A second later the sound of the blast hammered off the Kremlin walls and boomed across Red Square.
Everybody in line instinctively fell back, raising their arms to shield themselves from falling debris. Even before the first siren began to sound, everyone scattered as fast as their legs could carry them.
Chernov allowed himself to be swept away, until he ducked around the corner on October 25th Street where he entered the metro station. He did not look back. He didn’t have to, because he knew for certain that if Boris Yeltsin had been in that limousine, he was now dead.
FOUR
Russian Prime Minister Yuri Kabatov entered the Crisis Management Center deep beneath the White House. The chamber and its communications center had been hacked out of the bedrock shortly after the Kremlin Coup in which Gorbachev had been ousted, but nobody this afternoon felt comforted knowing sixty meters of granite separated them from the real world above because all the security in Russia hadn’t been able to save the life of Boris Yeltsin. “I don’t think there can be any doubt who was behind this latest act of violence or why,” Kabatov said, taking his seat at the head of the long conference table. He was satisfied to see that nobody disagreed with him.
In addition to his own staff those around the table who had responded to his summons included Moscow Mayor Vadim Cheremukhin and St. Petersburg Mayor Dmitri Didyatev, both democratic reform moderates like himself. The meeting had been delayed so that both men, whom Kabatov considered crucial to Russia’s future, could be notified and make their way into the city; Cheremukhin from his dacha on the Istra River, and Didyatev from St. Petersburg.
Farther down the table were Militia Director General Mazayev and FSK Director General Yuryn. Yuryn sat erect, his thick hands folded in front of him on the table, a scowl on his gross features.
Some of Yeltsin’s shaken staff had also arrived, among them the President’s Chief of Staff Zhigalin, and his Chief Military Liaison Colonel Lykov.
Seventeen men in all, most of them moderates, had gathered to make what, Kabatov felt, would be the most important decision that had been made since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“Without proof, Mr. Prime Minister, there’s very little we can do if we are to continue as you wish under rule of law,” General Mazayev said thickly. He had dark circles under his red eyes. He looked like he’d just sobered up.
“We’re not going to have to worry about proof because the bastard won’t deny it,” Kabatov shot back. He was a terrier of a man, with a sharp, abrasive personality that matched his looks. “He’ll say that his actions are for the best of the nation. He destroyed Riga Power Station so effectively that my engineers tell me it will be at least a year before it’s back on line, maybe longer if there’s other damage beyond what we already know. And the stupid kulaks up there. cheered him. They actually cheered him. But this winter when they begin to freeze their asses off they won’t blame him, they’ll blame us.
“I’m also told that Yeltsin ordered his arrest in Nizhny Novgorod, and that Tarankov was tipped off. So he retaliated by having the president assassinated. This time if there are any leaks they will have to come from this room.”
Kabatov was ranting, he could hear himself but he couldn’t stop because he was deeply frightened. Yeltsin had been a drunken buffoon, but his security detail was simply the best in the entire world. They figured the explosive device had been placed’ beneath the back seat of the limousine. Supposedly no one outside the security detail, not even Yeltsin himself, knew which car that would be. And there were no early reports of any suspicious activity in or around the secured parking level beneath the Kremlin. Yet they were still cleaning his blood off the streets outside Spassky Tower with toothbrushes. “The monster has to be arrested and brought to trial. It’s as simple and as necessary as that if we’re going to survive as a democracy. Now, I want your ideas on how to do it.”
