The United States had nothing to do with it. I hope they all understand that.”
“I’ll make sure they do.” It could affect their decisions; it might even cool them from the plan, if that seemed necessary. He felt handcuffed by ignorance: he had to contain his anger.
Buckner produced a typed letter-order. “You’re officially on thirty-day furlough as of now. Go to Europe, talk to them, get it all settled among you. Then come back and tell me what you’ve decided and we’ll get to work.” He handed it across the desk. “Don’t waste time. The war isn’t standing still for us. I’m going to book you on the diplomatic plane to Lisbon tomorrow afternoon.”
“You’d better make it two seats.”
It caused a momentary freeze. Buckner’s expression inquired of him; then it changed before Alex could speak. “The Countess. Sorry, I forgot.”
It was Irina’s mother who was the Countess but he didn’t take the trouble to set Buckner straight. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
Buckner had an ingratiating grin that showed a great many teeth. “Not when it counts. That’s what the President pays me for.”
Alex found himself liking the American despite his suspicions. Buckner didn’t have the secretive trappings that usually went with positions like his.
Buckner seemed to sense the line of his thinking. “You’re coming into this dead cold, aren’t you? It’s all brand new to you. I gather the Countess couldn’t tell you much about it.”
“No.”
“That’s a hell of a woman.” He was turning pages over; he paused at one. “This is your letter of resignation. You’ll decide whether you want to sign it-it’ll be waiting here when you get back from Europe.”
“You’re pretty confident. Otherwise you wouldn’t have had it typed up.”
“You’ll take the job,” Buckner said. “You’d be crazy not to.”
But Buckner didn’t know Vassily Devenko.
PART TWO:
August 1941
1
The assassin stood in shadow just within the fringe of the oaks. He could not be seen out of the sunlight-he was merely another dark vertical shape in the forest shadows with the heavier mass of the mountains looming above and behind him.
It was his last chance. He’d tried it and miffed it twice before. Blow it again and his employers would have his head in a basket. But he didn’t feel nervous on that account. If you had nerves you didn’t go into this game in the first place.
He held the 8x Zeiss glasses casually by their strap. At intervals he fitted the reticles to his eye sockets and studied the long motorcars arriving by ones and twos.
The villa a thousand meters below him was a restored seventeenth century ducal summer palace, erected recklessly in the foothills of the Pyrenees by an insensitive Bourbon during a time of Spanish decline and retrenchment. Its builder’s wealth obviously had exceeded his grasp of architectural unities: from the assassin’s angle of view it resembled a village of semidetached buildings haphazardly assembled at different times.
He had never been inside it but he had seen photographs of the interior and had committed a draftsman’s schematic plans to memory. Its rooms were constructed on an awesomely grand scale-made possible by the mild Spanish climate which minimized the need to contain heat. The ceilings were very high, most of them arched or vaulted; there were floors of marble and walls of Alhambra tile; floors of inlaid wood and walls of common plaster covered with murals and extensive bas-relief. There were enough stately bedchambers to accommodate a score of royal hunting guests and courtesans; and plain quarters sufficient to contain fifty-two servants. Many of these were unoccupied now.
The assassin knew that the king’s chamber-the four balconied windows directly above the porte cochere — was occupied by the villa’s present owner-of-record, the Grand Duke Feodor Vladimirovitch-one of the three Romanov Pretenders to the throne of St. Petersburg and a leading member of the last ruling family of Imperial Russia.
But the Grand Duke was an old man and infirm. It was his first cousin, Prince Leon Kirov, who managed the Grand Duke’s villa-as well as his widespread business affairs, his social and familial obligations and his life.
Feodor’s estate was maintained by twelve house servants, five gardeners, two grooms and four chauffeurs. On the grounds they kept a string of jumpers and thoroughbred pleasure horses, seven automobiles and a flock of ducks and geese on the man-made pond. The Romanovs and Kirovs took their exercise on bridle paths or playing tennis on the lawn or practicing archery against targets stuffed with straw. There were garden parties all summer long and none of the motorcars parked below the porte cocehre was below the rank of Duesenberg or Hispano- Suiza.
The thick green lawn stretched away from the house two hundred yards down a wide swath bordered by formal woods. The main gate at the foot of the lawn, just visible to the assassin, was made of heavy wrought iron and it was guarded by two liveried sentries who wore sidearms. Beyond the gate waited a ravenous pack of tattletale journalists from international gossip rags; now and then when a stately car drew up a photographer would rush forward and crouch to get a picture but that was all right so long as they remained outside the gate.
The assassin watched a silver-grey Rolls approach the gate. He focused his field glasses on it until he could read the number plate. It hardly paused; it swept grandly through the portals and up the driveway. The assassin lowered his glasses. He had watched long enough to know the security procedures and that was all he needed. It was inside the villa that he’d have to do the job. He glanced at the sky, slung the field glasses and walked back through the wood.
He opened the boot of the gleaming black Packard. He seated the Zeiss binoculars in their case and changed from his scuffed climbing shoes into a pair of elegant black pumps-a better match for his evening clothes.
The Packard moved slowly down the rutted dirt track toward its intersection with the road that ran past the gate of the villa.
2
Within the villa the gathering of elegant people sprawled through more than half a dozen of the building’s public rooms on two stories. In the vaulted main ballroom-a spaciously proportioned chamber of seventeenth century grandeur, hung with old masters and ornate tapestries-a string orchestra played saccharine music and guests nibbled tidbits from an immense Louis XIV table set with crystal and silver and candelabra and vased blossoms from the villa’s greenhouse.
Toward the rear of the villa in the high arched gallery which gave out through glass panes onto formal gardens a separate balalaika orchestra provided accompaniment to a band of hired Cossack dancers who entertained inexhaustibly, squatting and leaping, grunting and shouting ferociously. Now and then a noble White Russian general would get swept up in the spirit of it and join the dancers.
Upstairs in the great drawing room the more sedate and elderly guests sat talking after each in turn had made the ritual pilgrimage into the bedchamber that contained the Grand Duke Feodor, confined to his canopied bed by a painful S-curved spine, the result of degenerative disc ailments that had afflicted him for more than a decade. The Grand Duke was sixty-three-not very old by Romanov standards of longevity-but the athletic strength of his St. Petersburg youth had been mocked by two decades of malaise, and what once had been a splendid towering physique was now twisted and cadaverous. A palsy of alarming intensity afflicted his long-fingered hands, mottled with cyanotic spots; his eyes blinked rapidly and his jaws worked and he looked at least eighty; his mind
