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That had been long before the reforms. Rehabilitation had come later, too late to matter, and a small state pension with it. At the time, he had been lucky to escape the camps. They had taken his job, of course, and his apartment. He had been reduced to sweeping the streets.

If he survived at all, it was because of a man of his own age who had stood beside him one day in the street, talking in reasonable but English-accented Russian. He never knew Nigel Irvine’s name; he just called him
Leeka,
The Fox. Nothing much, really, said the spy from the embassy. Just a helping hand now and again. Small things, little risk. He had suggested the hobby the Russian professor should adopt, and the hundred-dollar bills had kept body and soul together.

That winter’s night twenty years later, he stared at the younger man in the door and said,
‘Da?’

“I have a tidbit for the Fox,” said Monk.

The old man nodded and held out his hand. Monk put the tiny cylinder into his palm, and the man stepped backward and closed the door. Monk turned and walked back to the car.

At midnight little Martti, with the cylinder strapped to one of his legs, was released. He had been brought to Moscow weeks earlier by Mitch and Ciaran on their long drive from Finland, and delivered by Brian Vincent, who could read Russian street maps and find the obscure dwelling.

Martti stood on his ledge for a moment, then spread his wings and rose in spirals high into the freezing night above Moscow. He rose to a thousand feet, where the cold would have reduced a human being to a frostbitten hulk.

By chance one of the InTelCor satellites was beginning its track across the frozen steppes of Russia. True to its instructions, it began to beam its “Are you there, baby?” ciphered message downward to the city, unaware that it had previously destroyed its electronic child.

Outside the capital, the listeners of the FAPSI network scanned their computers for the telltale blip that would mean the foreign agent sought by Colonel Grishin had transmitted, so the triangulators could fix the source of the transmission to a single building.

The satellite drifted away and there was no blip.

Somewhere in his tiny head an impulse told Martti that his home, the place where three years earlier he had hatched as a blind and helpless chick, was to the north. To the north he turned, into the bitter wind, hour after hour through the cold and dark, pulled only by the desire to return home where he belonged.

No one saw him. No one saw him leave the city or cross the coast with the lights of St. Petersburg to his right. He flew on and on with his message, and sixteen hours after leaving Moscow, chilled and exhausted, he fluttered into a loft on the outskirts of Helsinki. Warm hands took the message off his leg and three hours later Sir Nigel Irvine was reading it in London.

He smiled as he saw the text. It had gone as far as it could go. There was one last task for Jason Monk, and then he should go to ground again until he could safely pull out. But even Irvine could not predict quite what the maverick Monk had in mind.

¯

WHILE Martti flew unseen over their heads, Igor Komarov and Anatoli Grishin sat in conference in the party leader’s office. The rest of the small mansion that formed his headquarters was deserted, except for the guards in their room on the ground floor. Outside in the darkness the killer dogs ran free.

Komarov sat behind his desk ashen in the lamplight. Grishin had just finished speaking, reporting to the leader of the Union of Patriotic Forces the news he had learned from the renegade priest.

As he spoke, Komarov had seemed to shrink. The former icy control seeped away, the unhesitating decisiveness appeared to bleed out of him. Grishin knew the phenomenon.

It happened to the most fearsome dictators when suddenly stripped of their power. In 1944, Mussolini, the strutting Duce, had become overnight a shabby, frightened little man on the run.

Business tycoons, when the banks foreclosed, the jet was confiscated, the limousines were impounded, the credit cards withdrawn, the senior executives quit, and the house of cards came tumbling down, actually diminished in size and the old incisiveness became empty bluster.

Grishin knew because he had seen generals and ministers huddled and fearful in his cells, once powerful masters of the
apparat
reduced to waiting for the party’s pitiless judgment.

Things were falling apart, the days of words were over. His own hour had come. He had always despised Kuznetsov, spinning his world of words and images, pretending that power came from an official communiqué. Power came from the barrel of a gun in Russia; always had and always would. Ironically, it had taken the man he hated most in all the world, the American scarlet pimpernel, to bring about the present situation, with a UPF president who seemed to have lost his will now almost ready to follow Grishin’s advice.

For Anatoli Grishin had no intention of conceding defeat to the militia of acting president Ivan Markov. He could not dispense with Igor Komarov, but he could save his neck and then rise to undreamed-of office.

Inside his own world Igor Komarov himself sat like Richard II, maundering over the catastrophe that had overtaken him in such a short time.

At the start of November it had seemed that nothing on earth could prevent his winning the January election. His political organization was twice as efficient as any in the country; his oratory mesmerized the masses. Opinion polls showed he would receive seventy percent of the national vote, enough for a clear win in the first round.

He literally could not understand the transformation, though he could just perceive how, step by step, it had come about.

“It was a mistake to try those four attempts at assassinating our enemies,” he said at last.

“With respect, Mr. President, it was tactically sound. Only the foulest luck decreed that three should not be in residence at the time.”

Komarov grunted. Bad luck it might be, but the reaction had been worse. Where did the press get the idea he might have been behind it? Who leaked? The media had always hung on his every word; now they were abusing him. The press conference had been a disaster. Those foreigners shouting impudent questions. He had never been subjected to such insolence. Kuznetsov had seen to that. Only private interviews had been allowed, where he had been treated with respect, his views listened to attentively, heads nodding in agreement. Then the young fool had proposed the press conference …

“Are you sure of your source, Colonel?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“You trust him?”

“Certainly not. I trust his appetites. He is venal and corrupt, but he lusts after preferment and the life of a voluptuary, both of which he has been promised. He revealed both visits to the Patriarch by the English spy, and both by the American agent. You read the transcript of the tape recording of the second meeting with Monk, the threats on which I based the decision to silence the opposition permanently.”

“But this time ... would they really have the nerve to strike at us?”

“I do not believe we can discount it. In boxing terms, the gloves are off. Our fool of an acting president knows he cannot win against you, but might against Zyuganov. The generals heading the militia realized just in time what kind of a purge you have in mind for them. Using the allegations of a financial link between the UPF and the mafia, they could cook up charges. Yes, I think they might try.”

“If you were they, as a planner, what would you do, Colonel?”

“Exactly the same. When I heard the priest say what the Patriarch discussed while he waited at table, I thought it could not be true. But the more I think it over, the more sense it makes. Dawn of January first is a brilliant time. Who is not hungover from the previous night? What guards are awake? Who can react with speed and decisiveness? Most Russians on New Year’s morning cannot even see straight—unless they are kept in a barracks without a drop of vodka. Yes, it makes sense.”

“What are you saying? That we are finished? That all we have done was for nothing, that the great vision will never happen, because of a panicky and ambitious politician, a fantasist priest, and some over-promoted policemen?”

Grishin rose and leaned over the desk.

“We have come so far for this? No, Mr. President. The key to success is to know the enemy’s intentions. This we do. They leave us no choice but one. Preemptive strike.”

“Strike? Against whom?”

“Take Moscow, Mr. President. Take Russia. Both would have been yours in a fortnight. On New Year’s Eve our enemies will be celebrating the morrow, their troops locked in barracks until dawn. I can put together a force of eighty thousand men and take Moscow during the night. With Moscow comes Russia.”

“Coup d’état?”

“It has happened before, Mr. President. All Russian and European history is a story of men of vision and determination who have seized the moment and taken the state. Mussolini took Rome and all Italy. The Greek colonels took Athens and all Greece. No civil war. Just a fast strike. The defeated flee, their supporters lose their nerve and seek an alliance. By New Year’s Day, Russia can be yours.”

Komarov thought. He would take the television studios and address the nation. He would claim he had acted to prevent an anti-people conspiracy canceling the election. They would believe him. The generals would be arrested; the colonels would seek promotion by changing to his side.

“Could you do it?”

“Mr. President, everything in this corrupt country is for sale. That is why the Motherland needs Igor Komarov, to scour the pigpen. With money I can buy all the troops I will need. Give me the word and I will put you in the state apartments of the Kremlin at noon of New Year’s Day.”

Igor Komarov rested his chin on his steepled hands and gazed at the blotter. After several minutes he raised his gaze to meet that of Colonel Grishin.

“Do it,” he said.

¯

IF Grishin had been required to organize an armed force to capture the city of Moscow, and to do so starting from scratch in four days, he would never have been able to do it.

But he was not starting from scratch. He had known for months that in the immediate aftermath of Igor Komarov’s presidential victory the program for the transfer of all state powers to the UPF would begin.

The political side, the formal abolition of opposition parties, would be for Komarov. His own task would be the subjugation or disarming and disbanding of all the state’s armed units.

In preparing for this task, he had already decided which would be his natural allies and which his obvious enemies. Chief among the latter was the Presidential Security Guard, a force of thirty thousand armed men of which six thousand were based inside Moscow and a thousand in the Kremlin itself Commanded by General Korin, successor to Yeltsin’s notorious Alexander Korzhakov, they were all officered by nominees of the late President Cherkassov. They would fight for the legitimacy of the state and against the putsch.

After them came the Interior Ministry with its own army of 150,000 men. Fortunately for Grishin, most of this enormous force was scattered the length and breadth of Russia, with only five thousand in and around the capital. The generals of the Presidium of the MVD would not be long working out that they would be among the first on the cattle trucks for the Gulag, aware like the Presidentials that there could be no room in the New Russia for them and the Black Guard of Grishin.

Third in line, and a nonnegotiable demand from the Dolgoruki mafia, was the arrest and internment of the two gang-buster divisions, the Federal unit ruled from the MVD’s national headquarters at Zhitny Square and the Moscow City unit, the GUVD, run by Major General Petrovsky from Shabolovka Street. Both divisions, and their rapid reaction forces, the OMON and the SOBR, would be in no doubt that the only place for them in Grishin’s Russia would be a labor camp or the execution courtyard.

Yet in the cauldron of departmental or private armies that abounded in the collapsing Russia of 1999, Grishin knew he also had natural or purchasable allies. The key to victory was to keep the army unaware, confused, at odds with itself, and finally impotent.

His own immediate forces were his six thousand Black Guards and the twenty thousand teenaged Young Combatants.

The former was an elite force he had created over the years. The officer corps was comprised entirely of battle-trained former special forces, paratroopers, marines, and MVD men, required to prove in savage initiation ceremonies both their ruthlessness and their dedication to the ultra-right.

Yet somewhere in the top forty among them must be a traitor. Someone, clearly, had been in touch with the authorities and the media to denounce the four attempted assassinations of December 21 as Black Guard work. The deduction had been too fast to be unprompted.

He had no choice but to detain and isolate those top forty men, and this was done on December 28. Intensive interrogation and the unmasking of the traitor would have to come later. To preserve morale, the junior officers were simply promoted to fill the gaps and told their commanders were away on a training course.

Poring over a large-scale map of the Moscow Oblast, Grishin prepared his battle plan for New Year’s Eve. His great advantage was that the streets would be almost empty.

Virtually no work is possible on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve as the Muscovites drift away with their stocks of booze to the private homes or group parties where they intend to spend the night. Darkness comes by half-past three in the afternoon and after that only those desperate to replenish inadequate liquor supplies venture into the freezing night.

Everyone celebrates, including the unfortunate night watchmen and skeleton staffs forbidden to take time off and go home. They bring their own supplies to work.

By six, Grishin calculated, he would have the streets to himself. By six every major ministry and government building would be empty apart from the night staff, and by ten even they and the soldiers still in barracks would be unable to defend themselves.