Snow Falcon

in order to dial without making a mistake in the number. The telephone had been freed of bugs; it was the first of his secure lines, in a flat in a northern workers' suburb, part of a grey block of cement with tiny, slitted windows.

His breath smoked in the room. He sat at a rickety table which was smeared with the marks of mugs and plates, and gritty with sugar, on one of the two upright chairs that constituted the remaining furniture. It was an apartment that was officially occupied, but in fact had been empty for some weeks, and the superintendent of the block of flats had kept it so at his instruction.

Kutuzov was there to make one telephone call. He had travelled by metro from his house, smug in the confirmation that even now, with Andropov and the KGB so desperate and short of time, he was not being followed. Naturally, he had planned that it would be so; but the relief was still very real. and the sense of success — omen of greater success — warming as he had ridden the metro.

His finger was icy. He dialled the number — only he possessed it. The central switchboard at Moscow Military District HQ outside the city would register the number, and the call would be diverted to Valenkov, commandant of the Moscow Garrison regiments. Moscow Garrison was cut off from the outside world — but it would accept his call.

Finger numb — he fumbled the glove back on to his thick hand, the telephone tucked between cheek and shoulder. He wanted action, quick, vivid decision, as he listened to the sputter and clicking of the connection. Valenkov had to be handled carefully, he told himself. Carefully 'Good afternoon, sir.' Valenkov himself, twenty years younger and knowing who must be his caller.

'Dmitri. Good afternoon. I'm still here, as you can hear.' He held his breath, trying to sense telephathically the mood of a younger man. The heavy joke seemed to delay in the wire, as if too indigestible to travel down its gut.

'Yes, sir.' Nothing. No commitment.

'I need cheering up, Dmitri,' he tried again. 'So I called you.'

'Sir.'

He was angry — Valenkov was behaving like a stubborn, idiot corporal. He had expected the call, since it was part of his agreement with Valenkov that he should report his safety at intervals before the final call at six on the twenty-fourth.

So that Valenkov would know he was still alive, he thought with contempt.

'Tell me again — your final decision.'

'Airborne assault on the Kremlin, at oh-six hundred. Tank assault on Dzerzhinsky Street, special squads to round up the designated targets.' Valenkov sounded as if he were reciting a lesson — one that bored him.

'Excellent, excellent!' Kutuzov enthused, watching his breath curling up to the low ceiling — seeing the ring of smoke-stain round the light-fitting — and noticing the ice forming diamonds on the windows. 'How long do you estimate the whole operation will take, Dmitri?'

'Forty minutes.'

'Excellent. Dmitri — ?'

'Sir?'

'When it's over, promise me one thing?'

'What — would that be?'

'That you will smile! Show a little enthusiasm for our great enterprise.'

He waited for the reply, listening almost as if he could hear the man wrestling with his conscience, hear its grunts as he twisted it to what he thought of as treasonable shape; all for him, for Kutuzov, he reminded himself. He was the talisman, the ikon.

'If you give me the word, personally, to move against the Kremlin the day after tomorrow — then I will smile, sir. As I have said, sir, I will make no move against the Politburo or the KGB without knowing you are safe and will assume control after the operation.'

'Very well, Dmitri — !' he spluttered angrily. Then, more calmly: 'Very well. You will hear from me. Goodbye, Dmitri!'

When he put down the telephone, his hand was shaking. The weight of the promise he had given Valenkov seemed heavy on him. It was as if he had promised to run far and fast, or be young once more He slapped his hands on his thighs, and thought of the long underwear beneath the trousers of the formal suit, looked down at the high boots he had taken to wearing since he had slipped on ice-bound Ministry steps last winter and broken an ankle. And he hated it.

He could hear his teeth grinding, in the room and inside his head, in the blank silence. Freezing outside the grimy windows, the dirty diamonds of the ice thick on the panes. He was a monarch in exile, the forgotten hero about to return.

The fictions comforted him. His surroundings were not epical, but his purpose was. And though it was linked by a piece of wire to a frightened soldier, by his very voice he could change the world. Valenkov would obey, when the time came.

He fiddled with a loose button on his overcoat, looking down at the garment as it swelled over his ample stomach. It had once been a hard body. Now all that was left was the hard mind, the stubborn, dedicated clinging to an ideal.

He remembered the death of Lenin — the grief of young manhood. The great leader had never recovered from the assassination attempt by Churchill's agent. Then the years of Stalin the pig, the death of Trotsky in exile, murdered by the NKVD in the hands of the butcher-king, Beria. Socialism in one country, the filthiness of the Purges — the point of counterrevolution being reached — and the Fascist invasion saving Stalin from what he deserved at the hands of the people. Pig-Stalin had used, relied on, the greatness of the Russian people to save him while they saved their country.

And since then only the decline offeree, the collapse of will. Trading with the capitalists for the trinkets, the worthless things — the Soviet Union being bought like a whore.

The rush of thoughts was like volcanic activity, or the gases of indigestion. They discomfited him, even as they filled him with a shallow rage. He could hardly control himself while the procession of his own history, the history of his country and his ideology, passed through his awareness.

Look, his hands were quivering now. He clenched them, and banged them on his thighs as if they were the witnesses of senility, of imbecility. He breathed deeply, the exhalations seeming to roar in his ears in the room's silence.

Nothing could stop them — whatever had gone wrong, whatever was known — nothing could stop it.

Vorontsyev.

He was dangerous — though he knew nothing, knew nothing.

Frightening. Because, in the last few days, it had come down to a few old men — Ossipov, Praporovich, Dolohov, Pnin and the other generals. And a young man — two young men, he corrected himself. One in Helsinki, and the other flying back from the Far East.

He was thankful that Vorontsyev knew nothing about him, in no way threatened him. He knew about Ossipov's exercises, and guessed the invasion. But he did not know about the coup, and he did not know about Kutuzov. He was grateful for that. He was only an old man in a dirty bare room, and feeling very old, as he did at that moment, he could not but be afraid that the young man would find him.

Which was why Vassiliev would kill him, aboard the airliner.

Thirty-nine hours seemed a very long time to wait — to hide.

'What height are we at now, Boris?' the voice asked him softly, insistently. 'What does the altimeter read? Are we low enough for you to survive the fall?' And the voice chuckled in his ear, a dry, pitiless sound. Boris was even able to perceive how the menace of the voice had grown during the last — how long? And that was not the quality of the voice; it was his fear. He was hunched in a forced, doubled position on the cold floor of the baggage compartment. His buttocks were numb already, and the cold had ascended to his stomach, his genitals. He desperately wanted to urinate. The SID officer had held him at the closed hatch opposite the galley, in first class, until he was shivering with fear — then they had blindfolded him. Down the aisle, brushing past the rough curtain, its material against his face, through second class. The dick of locks, and the door closing behind them. Their breath, eagerly harsh — his own, barely controlled.