Snow Falcon

'I see.'

'All of you — do you see? All they need to do is to take and hold the centre. If they're sure of enough Army support from the other Military Districts. Then no one could touch them. The KGB swept away, and replaced by some military police organisation, and the Kremlin in the hands of the Marshals. It's easy — as long as it's the Army doing it!'

His face had gone bright with perspiration and effort. He wanted the best out of them. They were young, and the system was their safe, warm womb. He had to show them how unsafe the whole thing was when threatened by an army. The Red Army.

'But why would they want to do it?'

Vorontsyev paused, then looked at each face — each clean, scrubbed, confident face. They seemed so young, and incapable of being hurt, or believing themselves mortal. And a mental consideration that might have been going on beneath the conscious surface seemed to clarify, achieve a peroration. Those faces in front of him in the untidy room dazzled him with insight.

'You four — not one of you believes in anything — right?' They appeared puzzled, grins starting and fading like little glimpses of sunlight. Alevtina looked quizzical, but as if she teetered on the edge of his own realisation. 'You don't read Lenin, you don't read Lenin, you don't remember Stalin, or the War against the Fascists — think about being in Berlin, in the grounds where they found the petrol-soaked corpses — ' He felt the rhetoric whirl up, speaking through Gorochenko's experiences, and what he knew of his own father's life. If he could suddenly understand, perhaps they could, too. 'Or rinding the thousands of lime-decayed bodies in the mass graves — Babi Yar and all the other places the SS had been. Go further back, remember the Civil War against the Whites, the hungers, the billions who've died since 1917. Think about these things when you buy your next bottle of malt whisky in the shop across from the Centre, or eat your subsidised breakfasts in the Centre canteen, or order a new suit from imported Italian cloth. Silk scarves, fur coats — ' he added suddenly for the girl's benefit. 'It's a cushy number, brothers and sister. Without history. But these old buggers remember — and perhaps they still believe!

'Or maybe they're just not ready for their pensions, or to throw away their 88–22 toys and new bombers and reactor-driven aircraft-carriers. In the end, does it matter a toss whether they have a motive or not? They may be doing it — and that's all that should worry us!'

Slowly, they looked at each other, then to him. Each one of them, as if present at some ritual, nodded to him. He sat back again, relieved. Then the telephone rang in the lounge. He had not switched the extension through. Ilya got up, and he waved him out.

The others got up, stretched, and began to study the faces on the wall. Vorontsyev tried to relax into the satisfaction of authority, to attend with a complacent half-ear to their comments, often ribald, frequently irreverent. Yet it was a hard quietude. What he had told them, the emphases he had placed, had frightened him, too. It was no longer easy to think in terms of wall-charts, pictures taken with the power of secret surveillance. If the Army was really engaged on a coup, then there was no stopping them — not if they had the agreement, even acquiescence, of the majority of senior commanders. Like those men on the wall.

Moscow would be no safer than Luanda, or Beirut. Except that the struggle would be short, and bloody — and the Army could not lose it.

'I'll take that hatchet-faced bastard, Timochenko!' Maxim said with delight, tugging the photograph from the wall. 'He once gave my cousin the shaft — I owe him!' It was said with amusement, and with an underlying enthusiasm.

'Don't frame him,' Pyotr laughed.

'I shan't need to!'

Ilya came back into the room at that moment. Vorontsyev turned to receive the message, still smiling at the enthusiasm of Maxim as he now hunted for the files on Timochenko, one of the two members of the Secretariat he had pinned to the wall. His smile vanished when he saw Ilya's white face — as if, he thought, only at that moment had the danger come home to him.

'What is it, Ilya?'

'Sir, that report on Ossipov and his staff from Khabarovsk KGB Office-'

'Well?'

'They're all dead — the office was blown to smithereens early in the morning — the off-duty team were murdered at home. Bombs…'

'What?'

The silence of the room was stifling. 'The work of the Khabarov Separatist Movement — they say. They're all dead. Every KGB officer in the town.' And Vorontsyev understood. He would have to go to Khabarovsk himself. Ossipov had had them killed.

Seven: Winter Journeys

None of the Oriental carpets or embroidered sofas, not even the tall windows overlooking Dzerzhinsky Square from the third floor, nor the high ceiling, could disguise in spacious elegance the functional nature of Andropov's office. The furnishings displayed him as a connoisseur, as someone immensely privileged in his society — and the battery of telephones on his immense desk betrayed his position as Chairman of the KGB. Mahogany wall-panelling, brocaded curtains — he sat looking round the room for a few moments after Kapustin had left, then turned his gaze on the telephones. He shook his head, as if admitting a reality.

The line to the Kremlin, the line to the Politburo and Central Committee members, the lines that connected him with any, or every, KGB office in the Soviet Union. He stared at the bakelite that, through high-frequency circuits, allowed him to control his security machine.

Dial Khabarovsk, and see who answers…

He did not wish the thought, but now it had presented itself, he felt an anger stirring in him, shaking a frame unprepared for high emotion. He despised emotion — feared it because it had the unfamiliarily and danger of an infection.

Of course he had approved sending Major Vorontsyev to Khabarovsk, with a forensic team. The Major's supposition was not unsound, that Ossipov had had his men killed. There, the centre of the little storm he felt. There. All right, in the Ukraine, before now, KGB men had been stabbed in alleys, even been blown up in their cars; but to take out the whole team?

Something else. It meant it was close. They had nothing to fear.

Khamovkhin had left him in charge. The apparatus of State had moved to Dzerzhinsky Street, to the Centre. Andropov perceived no possible irony in the thought. This was now the State, he thought. Here. Because nothing else mattered but that they find, isolate, and remove the enemy. And only he, and his service, could do that.

Could they?

He stirred in his desk, a sudden cramp in his legs. He looked down at them, as if they had turned against him. He did not blame Khamovkhin — only a stupid man would do that. Everything had to be as normal. Which was the trouble — no one could be told. They were sitting in a restaurant with the rest of the world, but only they knew about the bomb — and most of the staff were sick, or untrustworthy, and only one or two could be sent to search it out, disarm it He put aside the analogy. It was too real, too sensuous. Feodor had left him to mind the house.

The file on his desk was leather-bound. In it was material not dissimilar to that which had been scattered over Vorontsyev's floor, pinned to his walls. Material that tired, and infuriated Andropov. Ridiculous not to have a perfectly dear idea of who might be involved — who had to be involved — and maddening, to be able to do nothing. He could not admit to impotence, not after the years of power. But he was aware that the State had shrunk to the size of this room, and that his hold upon things was as fragile as the connections made when he dialled numbers on the telephones in front of him.

He stood up, walked swiftly, as if possessed with purpose, to the windows, and looked down. The square in front of his office, sparkled below him. The people of Moscow were out in great numbers, as they always were when the snow fell, or the frost glinted. Winter people, the Russians. He felt detached from them, as he always did. He felt no sense of mission, no obligation.

He went back to his desk, and opened the file, flicking through the polythene-covered pages, seeing the