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By the mid-nineties detection devices had become so sophisticated that they could even identify the non-smell variety. But warm rubber has its own very similar odor, hence the use of the tires as a transporting device. In fact the Volvo had not been subjected to that sort of test, but Sir Nigel believed in extreme caution, a quality of which Ciaran and Mitch totally approved.

The raid on the factory took place six days after Colonel Grishin received the Black Manifesto and the passport of Jason Monk.

The trusty Volvo, with its new front wheels and equally new and false Moscow license plates, was driven by Brian. If anyone stopped them, he was the Russian speaker.

They parked three streets away from their target and walked the rest of the way. The chain-link fence at the rear of the premises proved no match for the bolt cutters. The three men ran at a crouch across the intervening fifty feet of concrete and disappeared into the shadows cast by a pile of ink drums.

Fifteen minutes later the solitary night guard made his round. He heard a loud burp from a patch of shadow, spun around, and fixed his flashlight on the source. He saw a drunk, collapsed against the warehouse wall, clutching a bottle of vodka.

He had no time to work out how the man had got into the sealed compound, for having turned his back on the pile of drums he never saw the figure in black overalls who emerged from between them and hit him hard on the back of the head with a piece of lead pipe. So far as the guard was concerned there was a brief flash of fireworks and then darkness.

Brian cinched the man’s ankles, wrists, and mouth with heavy tape while Ciaran and Mitch took the padlock off the door. When it was open they dragged the senseless guard inside, laid him by the wall, and closed the door.

Inside the cavernous factory a string of night-lights burned among the girders of the roof, casting a dim glow over the interior. Much of the floor space was taken up by great reels of newsprint and stacked drums of ink. But the center of the factory contained what they had come for: three huge web-offset printing presses.

Somewhere near the front doors of the building they knew the second guard would be ensconced in his warm glass booth, watching the television or reading his newspaper. Brian slipped quietly between the machines to take care of him. Having done so he returned, went out the back, and stood guard over the exit route.

Ciaran and Mitch were no strangers to the three machines in front of them. They were Baker-Perkins presses, made in the United States and not replaceable in Russia. Re-supply would require a long sea journey from Baltimore to St. Petersburg. Provided the mainframes were distorted, not even a Boeing 747 could bring the needed components by air.

Posing as Finnish newspaper executives contemplating the reequipping of their plant with Baker-Perkins presses, both men had kindly been given a tour of the factory by a company in Norwich, England, which used the same machines. After that a retired engineer, handsomely rewarded, had completed their education.

Their targets were four in type. Each press was fed by giant reels of paper, and the feeders for these rolls of newsprint, the reel stands, were of sophisticated technology, capable of ensuring that as one reel ran out it was seamlessly replaced by another. The reel stands were the first target and there was one for each machine. Ciaran began to place his small bombs precisely where they would guarantee that the reel stands would never work again.

Mitch took care of the ink-supply mechanism. These were four-color presses, and the supply of the exact amounts of four different inks at the right moment in the press run depended on a mixer unit fed by four great drums containing different colors. With both these pieces of technology taken care of, the two saboteurs addressed the actual presses.

The parts they chose for their remaining bombs were the mainframes and the bearings of the impression cylinders, one per machine.

They spent twenty minutes inside the press shop. Then Mitch tapped his watch and nodded at Ciaran. It was one in the morning and the timers were set for one-thirty. Five minutes later they were back outside, dragging the guard, now awake but still helpless, behind them. He would be colder out there, but shielded from flying fragments. The guard at the front, lying on the floor of his office, was too far away to be hurt.

At ten past one they were in the Volvo and moving. At half past, they were too far away to hear the almost simultaneous series of booms and cracks as the presses, reel stands, and ink feeders crashed to the concrete floor.

So discreet were the explosions that the sleeping denizens of the Vorontsovo suburb were hardly roused. It was not until the guard lying outside had hopped laboriously around the building to the front gate and hit the alarm button with his elbow that the police were called.

The liberated guards found the phones were still working and called the factory foreman, whose home number was pinned up in the office. He arrived at half-past three and examined the devastation with horror. Then he called Boris Kuznetsov.

The Union of Patriotic Forces’ propaganda chief was there by five and listened to the factory manager’s tale of woe. At seven he phoned Colonel Grishin.

Before that hour the rented car and the Volvo had been abandoned just off Manege Square, where the rental would soon be found and returned to the agency. The Volvo, which was unlocked with its keys in the ignition, would certainly be stolen before then, and was.

The three former soldiers took their breakfast in the insalubrious café at the airport and boarded their flight to Helsinki, the first of the morning, an hour later.

As they flew out of Russia, Colonel Grishin was surveying the wrecked printing plant with black anger. There would be an inquiry; he would institute one, and woe betide anyone who had collaborated. But his professional eye told him the perpetrators were experts and he doubted he would find them.

Kuznetsov was distraught. Every week for the past two years the Saturday tabloid
Probudis!,
Russian for
“Awake!,”
had carried the words and policies of Igor Komarov to five million homes across Russia. The idea of establishing a major newspaper owned and run entirely by the UPF had been his, as had been the monthly magazine
Rodina, “Motherland.”

These two vehicles, a mixture of easy contests with big prizes, sex confessions, and race propaganda, had carried the words of the leader into every corner of the land and contributed enormously to his electoral popularity.

“When can you be back in production?” he asked the head printer. The man shrugged.

“When we have new presses,” he said. “These cannot be mended. Two months, perhaps.”

Kuznetsov was pale with shock. He had not yet told the leader himself It was Grishin’s fault, he assured himself, the place should have been better guarded. But one thing was certain: There would be no
Probudis!
this Saturday and no special edition of
Rodina
in a fortnight. Nor even for eight weeks at a minimum. And the presidential elections were in six.

It was not a very good morning for Detective Inspector Borodin either, though he had entered the office in the Homicide Division of the militia HQ on Petrovka in good humor. His geniality during the previous week had been noted by his colleagues, but had remained unexplained. In fact the explanation was simple: his delivery of two valuable documents to Colonel Anatoli Grishin after the still unexplained bomb explosion at the Metropol had brought him a very handsome bonus to his monthly retainer.

Privately he knew there was not the slightest point in continuing inquiries into the outrage at the hotel. Restoration work had already begun, the insurers were almost certainly foreigners who would pick up the tab, the American guest was dead, and the mystery was total. If he suspected that his own inquiries concerning the American, ordered by Grishin himself, had something to do with his almost immediate death, he, Borodin, was not going to make an issue of it.

Igor Komarov was certainly going to be the new president of the Russian Federation in less than two months, the second most powerful man in the country would be Colonel Grishin, and there would be rewards to almost dizzying heights for those who had served him well during the years of opposition.

The office was abuzz with news of the destruction during the night of the printing presses of the UPF Party. Borodin put it down to Zyuganov’s Communists or some paid hoodlums from one of the mafia gangs, motive obscure. He was just airing his theories when his phone rang.

“Borodin?” said a voice.

“Detective Borodin speaking, yes.”

“Kuzmin here.”

He rattled his memory but it stayed blank.

“Who?”

“Professor Kuzmin, forensic pathology lab, Second Medical Institute. Did you send me the specimens recovered from the Metropol bombing? The file has your name on it.”

“Ah, yes, I am the officer in charge of the case.”

“Well, you’re a bloody fool.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have just finished my examination of the remains of the body recovered from that hotel room. Along with a lot of bits of wood and glass that have nothing to do with me,” said the irascible pathologist.

“So what’s the problem, Professor? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

The voice on the phone was becoming shrill with rage.

“Of course he’s dead, poltroon. He wouldn’t be in bits in my lab if he was running around.”

“Then I can’t see the problem. I’ve been years in Homicide, and I’ve never seen anyone more dead.”

The voice from the Second Medical Institute took a grip on itself and dropped to the coaxing tone of one speaking to a small and rather dim child.

“The question, my dear Borodin, is,
Who
is dead?”

“Well, the American tourist of course. You have his bones there.”

“Yes, I have bones, Detective Borodin.” The voice stressed the word
detective
to imply the policeman would have trouble finding his way to the washroom without a guide dog. “I would also expect to have fragments of tissue, muscle, cartilage, sinew, skin, hair, nails, entrails—even a couple of grams of marrow. But what do I have? Bones, just bones, nothing but bones.”

“I don’t follow you. What’s wrong with the bones?”

The professor finally exploded. Borodin had to hold the phone away from his ear.

“There’s nothing wrong with the bloody bones. They’re lovely bones. They’ve been lovely bones for about twenty years, which is the period I estimate their former owner has been dead. What I am trying to get into your pin-size brain is that someone took the trouble to blow to bits an anatomical skeleton, the sort every medical student keeps in the corner of his room.”

Borodin’s mouth opened and shut like a fish’s.

“The American wasn’t in that room?” he asked.

“Not when the bomb went off,” said Dr. Kuzmin.

“Who was he anyway? Or, as he is presumably still alive, who is he?”

“I don’t know. Just a Yankee academic.”

“Ah, you see, another intellectual. Like myself. Well, you can tell him I like his sense of humor. Where do you want me to send my report?”

The last thing Borodin wanted was for it to land on his own desk. He named a certain major general in the militia Presidium.

The major general received it the same afternoon. He rang Colonel Grishin to give him the news. He did not get a bonus.

By nightfall Anatoli Grishin had mobilized his private army of informants, and it was a formidable force. Thousands of replicas of the photo of Jason Monk, the one taken from his passport, were circulated to the Black Guard and the Young Combatants, who were spewed onto the streets of the capital in the hundreds to search for the wanted man. The effort and the numbers were greater than during the hunt for Leonid Zaitsev, the missing office cleaner.

Other copies went to the clan chief of the Dolgoruki underworld mafia with orders to locate and hold. Informants in the police and immigration services were alerted. A reward of one hundred billion rubles was offered for the fugitive, a sum to take the breath away.

Against such a locust plague of eyes and ears there would be nowhere for the American to hide, Grishin advised Igor Komarov. This network of informants could penetrate every nook and cranny of Moscow, every hideaway and bolt-hole, every corner and crevice. If he did not lock himself inside his own embassy, where he could do no further harm, he would be found.

Grishin was almost right. There was one place his Russians could not penetrate the tightly sealed world of the Chechens.

Jason Monk was inside that world, in a safe apartment above a spice shop, protected by Magomed, Asian, and Sharif, and beyond them a screen of invisible street people who could see a Russian coming a mile away and communicate in a language no one else could understand.

In any case, Monk had already made his second contact.

CHAPTER 14

OF ALL THE SOLDIERS OF RUSSIA, SERVING OR RETIRED
, the one who in terms of prestige was worth any dozen others was General of the Army Nikolai Nikolayev.

At seventy-three and just a few days short of his seventy-fourth birthday, he was still an impressive figure. Six-feet one-inch tall, he carried himself bolt upright; a mane of white hair, a ruddy face weathered by a thousand bitter winds, and his trademark moustache jutting in two defiant points on either side of his upper lip marked him out in any gathering.

He had been a tank man all his life, a commander of mechanized infantry, had served in every theater and on every front over a fifty-year career, and to those who had served under him, numbering several millions in all by 1999, he had become a legend.

It was common knowledge that he would and should have retired with the rank of marshal, but for his habit of speaking his mind to the politicians and time servers.

Like Leonid Zaitsev, the Rabbit, whom he would never remember but whom he had once clapped on the back at a camp outside Potsdam, the general had been born near Smolensk, west of Moscow. But twelve years earlier, in the winter of 1925, the son of an engineer.