VI

Early Monday Evening

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) … Diplomatic relations were severed today between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria when those nations’ ambassadors were recalled from Washington.

The White House had no immediate comment.

The announcement came this morning at about 11:15 A.M. (EST) in a joint communiqué delivered simultaneously at the United Nations and the State Department.

It had somehow become night again. Yuri Zamyatin sat straight in his chair, turned away from his desk and stared out the window of his office. The city was dark, or nearly dark, with only a few lights showing here and there besides the patterns of the few streetlights.

The rain was still falling although the mist had cleared with the dropping temperature. It would snow by morning, probably, either that or the rain would turn to ice, and they would have trouble with the power again.

Zamyatin was tired, but there was still something remaining for him to do this night before he could go home to his children, his bath, and his bed.

At fifty-four Zamyatin was in very good physical shape. Every day or nearly every day he worked out in the officers’ gymnasium in the basement of the prison next door, and despite his cigarette habit, he could jog a mile or more without becoming seriously out of breath.

Part of this, he was certain, was due to the fact that he was a small man. He stood less than five-feet-seven and weighed around 165 pounds. He had not developed a paunch, nor had his face wrinkled yet. His hair had begun to turn gray at the sides, but his oldest daughter swore it made him look distinguished, not old.

“Papa, you look like a high Party Secretary now,” his daughter Sandra had told him six months earlier when he had finally broken down to her insistence that he purchase a new suit.

When he came home from the foreign currency store, where he purchased the Finnish-made suit, his daughters immediately made him put it on, and they had hemmed the cuffs to the correct length, while his son Aleksei polished his brown shoes.

“Mama would be so proud of you,” Sandra said, and she stood on tiptoes to hug him and kiss him on the cheek.

Aleksei had been too embarrassed to show any emotion, but Lara cried, and Zamyatin had been very touched and at that moment, closer to his wife, now dead eleven years, than he had ever been when she was alive.

He had read once that a person’s capacity to love had little or nothing to do with the person he loved, but rather it had more to do with his own state of maturity and development.

The more mature you happened to be, and the more your life had developed, the greater was your capacity to understand and to feel compassion and therefore the greater your ability to love.

In the eleven years since his wife had died giving birth to Aleksei, Zamyatin had matured, had grown, had learned much of compassion, and subsequently was more in love with his wife, or the personification of his wife that he saw daily in his three children, than he had ever been when she was alive.

It was a dream world he lived in, he knew that. And he supposed it could be argued that he was unbalanced. It was his intense love that over the year had softened him, had ground away the rough edges from his personality, had transformed his energy and drive to softer, more refined pursuits.

The telephone on the desk behind him buzzed and Zamyatin turned slowly, pressed the correct button and picked up the receiver.

“Four-three-one,” he said softly into the phone, giving only his office telephone extension number.

“Colonel, this is General Barynin’s staff calling.”

“Yes, comrade,” Zamyatin said, stiffening slightly in his chair.

“You’ve been given the go-ahead to convene an action order board. Immediately.”

“Yes, comrade. Will you require a minutes-of-the-proceedings annotation to the jacket?”

“That won’t be necessary. We will want the proceedings taped, but not transcribed. The tape will be included with the jacket.”

“Yes, comrade. Are there any other special instructions?”

“None,” the caller said and rang off leaving Zamyatin holding the telephone to his ear, the dial tone humming flatly.

He continued listening to the tone for several seconds, using it as a point of reference while he went out of himself. It was almost as if he were sleepwalking, and yet he could turn around and look at himself as another person sitting behind his desk in the tiny, cramped office, stupidly holding the telephone to his ear.

The call from General Barynin’s staff had not been unexpected. As a matter of fact Zamyatin had, by his own actions, precipitated the contact. And yet it had still taken him by surprise.

He slowly put the telephone down and fingered the stack of file folders in front of him on his desk. It was strange, he thought, how irrefutable facts of nature were sometimes surprising. It had something to do with a person’s state of mind. How receptive one was.

A Japanese study on suicides had revealed that the last conscious thought a person had before certain death was surprise. A man jumped off a tall building in a depressed state of mind. The fall brought with it fear, a certain perverse curiosity, and in some, even a summing up of life’s foibles. But at the moment of impact, it was surprise. Surprise that this then was the end. That it was about to be final. That there were no longer possibilities of second thoughts.

The study had been based, of course, on case histories of suicides who had failed. Unfortunates who had somehow survived their attempts.

Zamyatin had precipitated a course of action, had begun a chain of events, and at this moment he was surprised, much the same as a suicide was surprised.

He sighed tiredly, picked up the phone, and dialed an outside number. A moment later the Center security operator answered.

“Your call, comrade?”

Zamyatin gave the operator the outside number he had just dialed. “First department chief.”

“Authorization?”

Calls to telephones outside of the Center could be made only by department chiefs or above. Each department chief was issued an authorization calendar each month. Zamyatin’s calendar was opened to the proper date and he read the corresponding code, which was unique to the date and to him personally.

“Alpha-seven-seven-one-baker.”

A moment later the telephone clicked, and his call went through. Major Balachov answered it on the first ring.

“Yes.”

“Need you home for an A.O. conference at 1900 hours.”

“Right,” Balachov said and hung up.

Zamyatin held the button down on the telephone for a full minute until it rang. He released the button.

“Four-three-one,” he said.

“Confirming,” Major Balachov’s voice came softly over the line.

“Nineteen hundred hours,” Zamyatin said, then he hung up. He made three other calls, these all within the Center, one after the other, and then he sat back again in his chair and stared out the window at the city below him. In forty-five minutes the conference that had been authorized by General Barynin’s office would begin. In forty-five minutes his decision would either be confirmed or denied. And if confirmed, the considerable might of the Komitet would be used as a gigantic lever stretching from Moscow to the United States and back again.

December 20, 1917, was the key date. On that day the Council of the People’s Commissars established the Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, with Felix Dzerzhinsky as its chief.

Dzerzhinsky was an austere man whom many considered absolutely merciless. He had come from a Polish family of aristocratic background and therefore knew well, and could use to great advantage, the powers of command.

The People’s Commissars had established the Cheka originally as nothing more than an investigative body. A detective agency, so to speak, that would watch over the backlash of lawlessness that follows revolution.

But under Dzerzhinsky’s hands the Cheka became much more than that. Its avowed purpose became the extermination of all opponents to Communism, with powers of execution without trial.

The terror had begun.

Zamyatin slowly got to his feet and, moving closer to the window, leaned forward, placing his forehead on the cool glass. His breath fogged the window in front of his eyes so that he could not see outside, but it didn’t matter to him. He closed his eyes and tried to marshal his thoughts, to justify what he was doing.

In its little more than four years of existence the Cheka grew from a tiny nucleus of ruthless men to an organization of more than 31,000 zealots. Virtually every aspect of Soviet society was controlled from such divisions as the Secret Political Department, which watched over the general population; the Special Department, which watched the military; and other units that watched transportation and communications, newspapers, religion, concentration and labor camps, and even Soviet citizens who happened to be abroad.

But with the end of the civil war, and with the firm establishment of Communist power, the Cheka was abolished. It had become too much of a good thing. In its place, on February 6, 1922, the State Political Directorate, known simply as the GPU, was founded as a subordinate division of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs: the NKVD.

From the very beginning, Zamyatin thought tiredly, his life had been nothing but a series of trade-offs. The war had to be fought, so don’t get married and have children until later. The war had to be ended swiftly, so become efficient and ruthless.

He opened his eyes, and the lights from outside were soft and blurred through the fogged glass.

“If you work for us,” Zamyatin’s first chief had told him, “the rewards will be great, but every aspect of your personal life will be under constant scrutiny. Our country is too young, our aims too high, to risk having traitors among us.”

A trade-off.

“Colonel Zamyatin, we were able to save your son’s life, but not the life of your wife. I am sorry,” the doctor had said.

A trade-off.

“Comrade Colonel, I am afraid that because you are a good man we will have to call on your time to a much greater degree than might be wished for. We cannot allow your transfer. Your children will learn to understand.”

A trade-off.

In 1923 the GPU became the OGPU, or the Unified State Political Directorate and was detached from the NKVD for administrative reasons.

Of course, all of those changes were mostly window dressing, because Dzerzhinsky himself continued to control the State Security apparatus until his death in 1926 when he was succeeded by the equally tough Vyacheslav Menzhinsky.

Under the new leader the OGPU flourished with an innovative network of informants that honeycombed every aspect of Soviet life.

Menzhinsky died in 1934, and Stalin reorganized the OGPU into the GUGB—the Chief Directorate for State Security—and again made it a part of the NKVD, which itself rapidly became the primary organization.

The NKVD not only controlled the State Security Service, it also controlled the conventional police, the border guards, the internal troops, and a new host of concentration camps for political criminals.

Until this point, however, there was still one segment of the Soviet population that had managed to defy total control: the peasantry. It was the same segment of the population that had defied the earlier control of the czars. And it was to this task that Stalin set the considerable resources of the NKVD under the direction of Menzhinsky’s chief deputy Genrikh Yagoda.

Yagoda slaughtered peasants by the thousands, but failed to control them. And two years later, in 1936, Yagoda himself was tried and found guilty of insufficient vigor in the task and was shot. His replacement was Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, a man just over five feet tall who truly earned his nickname, “the bloody dwarf.”

Zamyatin finally turned away from the window, withdrew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and rubbed his eyes. He gathered up the stack of file folders from the center of his desk and, squaring his shoulders, headed out the door of his office.

He did not want to do this, but the move was logical. It was correct. It would accomplish the purpose he had been assigned.

Most of his staff was still there, and would remain at their desks until he dismissed them, and a few of the men looked up as he crossed the large room toward the corridor door. No one said anything to him. He had a look in his eyes that precluded any comment from a subordinate.

In 1936, with Yezhov’s appointment to head the purges, the Soviet State Security apparatus evolved in a series of stunning, dramatic, and oftentimes bloody transformations.

Tens of thousands of artists, Jews, Catholics, peasants, doctors, military men—men, women, and children from all walks of life—were systematically murdered.

“The Communist Sate must be pure. The purification process merciless.”

By 1941 the NKVD under the leadership of Lavrenti Beria was controlling so much of the Soviet Union, its responsibilities so great, that the GUGB was again detached from its parent organization, and the State Security Service was renamed the NKGB, the People’s Commissariat for State Security.

In 1946 the NKGB was elevated to the status of a government ministry in charge of State Security. The NKVD, also elevated to ministry status, was charged with handling internal affairs.

One year later, in 1947, the Soviet government finally began to look outward from its own borders, especially toward the United States. And its first clandestine operations were begun under a new, independent department: the Committee of Information, known as the KI. The cold war had begun.

The KI took over many of the functions of the NKVD and NKGB. Until Stalin’s death in 1953 several administrative changes were made in the three security organizations until March 13, 1954, when the present-day KGB was formed.

Beria had been shot as a spy, as were many of the other State Security leaders. And under Krushchev, Malenkov, and Molotov, the KGB took over nearly all the functions of all its predecessor organizations, with virtually hundreds of thousands of employees in nearly every country in the world.

But basically nothing had changed. The KGB was as ruthless as its parent organizations. Its leaders acted as surely and as terribly as their predecessors. Only now there had come to the service a certain sophistication, a certain pervasive organization.

*   *   *

The Second Chief Directorate’s staff conference room was located on the fourth floor of the Center in a tiny, square cubicle. A single light globe hung from the plaster ceiling over a cheap wooden table around which were positioned a half-dozen chairs. The dirty, cracked plaster walls were unadorned except for a small portrait of Lenin, and the single window was covered with a fine wire mesh. The same wire mesh was also embedded in the ceiling, walls, and floor, and was charged with a high frequency, low voltage that served as an antisurveillance measure. The door, similarly protected, was locked.

The room was, in the parlance, clean.

The conference technician, a young second lieutenant, had arrived moments earlier and had set up a tape recorder that was encased in a steel box with remote controls. Without that protection the only sounds that could have been recorded on tape would have been the electronic interference coursing through the steel mesh.

Zamyatin sat at the head of the table. To his right was Major Balachov, who still wore his wet raincoat, and Valentin Stanislav Kuzin, who was Zamyatin’s chief analyst, and second in command of the Second Directorate’s Political Service Division.

Across the table from them was Major Portini Pavlovich Yashchenko, from the First Chief Directorate’s Executive Action Department V.

Everyone in the room was nervous in Major Yashchenko’s presence.

The technician donned a set of earphones, pushed the record buttons on the table machine, and then nodded his head slightly. Zamyatin began tiredly.

“This is a Second Chief Directorate, Political Service Division, action order conference. Classification, most secret. Key line, urgent. Operation, CLEAN SWEEP.”

He looked at the others, but no one said anything as they waited for him to continue.

“Convening at 1900 hours, conference room four-one-three. Present are, Zamyatin, Yuri Petrovich. Colonel, Political Service Division.” He nodded toward Kuzin, who, in a low-pitched, gravel-throated voice, gave his name, civilian rank, and position.

Kuzin went back a long way, even before Zamyatin himself, and yet he had never begrudged Zamyatin’s promotions.

“I don’t want administrative responsibilities,” Kuzin had told him years ago when Zamyatin’s first daughter was born. “But you now with a child to consider, you need the new apartment and increased rations.”

Kuzin had never married, although at one time he had been a tall, square-shouldered, handsome man.

“It’s my voice,” he laughed, the sound much like two boulders grating together just before an avalanche. “Old women take pity on me. Middle-aged women are ashamed. And the young girls are frightened.”

Zamyatin had learned from a man who knew Kuzin from a few years after the Revolution, that his vocal cords had been all but completely destroyed when he had eaten some black bread that had been left in a back alley behind a Moscow hospital that treated high Party officials.

Kuzin had been starving to death, and had not even tasted the rat poison in which the bread had been soaked until it was too late. Several hundred starving people had died in the hospital’s efforts to control its rat population.

After Zamyatin had learned that, he was able to understand and appreciate Kuzin’s often-repeated answer to the question: Were the post-Revolution days tough?

“More people than rats died in those days,” he would growl.

Balachov was next, and he gave his name, rank, and position within the Second Chief Directorate, and all of them held their breaths as Yashchenko spoke his name, rank, and position for the tape recorder.

The man was a mystery. It was the one word that described nearly every aspect of him.

Yashchenko was huge, standing well over six-feet-six, and weighing, Zamyatin estimated, at least 280 pounds. But there was no fat on the man. His arms were like gigantic battering rams, his legs like pillars of stone, his body like a gigantic statue and his neck and massive head merging into a single solid unit atop his soccer-field-sized shoulders.

Yashchenko, the Second Chief Directorate chief once told Zamyatin, cried at poetry readings and was a habitué at the Bolshoi, yet he rode roughshod over the Executive Action Department V, the department within the Komitet that engineered and carried out assassinations, kidnapings, and other mokrie delas, which was the terminology for actions in which blood would probably be spilled.

Yashchenko, despite his size, had a pleasant and somewhat cultured voice that was never raised in anger. And yet he had probably murdered more people than any other man presently employed within the Komitet.

Zamyatin had once been a hard man. Yashchenko held that title now.

“If we are to implement your action order, Colonel,” Yashchenko said respectfully, “we must first begin the conference.”

Zamyatin looked up out of his thoughts and nodded. “Yes,” he said, and he opened the first of the file folders in front of him. For an instant he wished he had never remembered Mahoney’s name. But he had. And there was nothing to do for it now.

Action orders were just that. An order for a specific, one-time action, such as the blackmail of a foreign newsman, or an assassination, or the sabotage of some particular target.

Each action order was supported by three things: first were pertinent documents, such as the intended victim’s complete dossier; second was a record of all inter-and intradepartmental discussions; and lastly was an analysis of the necessity for such an action and a prognostication of probable results.

“Major Yashchenko,” Zamyatin began, resigning himself to it, “I will first outline briefly the steps which have led to these proposed action orders, and then we can go over everything in whatever detail you may require.”

“Fair enough, Comrade Colonel. Please continue.”

“Number one. Operation CLEAN SWEEP activities have uncovered excessive activity over the past thirty-six hours at the United States Embassy here in Moscow.

“Number two. Those activities were and are being directed by the CIA chief of station Farley Carlisle, under the guise of routine preparations for the American president’s visit here on Thursday.

“Number three. It is our studied opinion that the Americans indeed may have engineered the kidnaping of Professor Doctor Sahkarhov and the laser.

“Number four. It is further our studied opinion that the Americans may—and, Major, I must emphasize the word may—be planning the assassination of their own president on Soviet soil.

“Number five. It is finally our opinion that the Americans plan to place the blame for the assassination of their own president on us.

“And number six. The possibility for the conversion of a high-ranking CIA employee within the embassy exists. If this were accomplished within the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, the American plans to assassinate their own president could either be stopped or converted for our own use.”

Kuzin and Balachov were unmoved by Zamyatin’s summation, which was not surprising since Kuzin had analyzed the data that Balachov had supplied.

But Yashchenko had not blinked an eye. Either the man had no soul, or he was harder than even Zamyatin had given him credit for being.

“There is more than one action order?” Yashchenko finally asked.

“Two of them,” Zamyatin answered.

“They are to be used as a lever to convert your target?”

“Yes.”

The big man thought a moment. “And these are internal or external?”

“External,” Zamyatin said carefully. “In the United States.”

“I see,” Yashchenko said pleasantly. He looked across the table at Balachov, who fidgeted somewhat uncomfortably under the man’s gaze. “And Major Balachov. I would assume your department’s routine surveillance turned up point one. Is that correct?”

“Sunday morning we noticed an increase in activity. All of it apparently stemming from Carlisle himself.”

“And this did not occur on Saturday morning, or even Saturday afternoon, before the kidnaping occurred?”

“That may not have been necessary,” Kuzin’s voice rasped.

Yashchenko turned his almost hypnotic gaze toward the older man. “And so?”

“If the Americans kidnaped Sakharov, and the possibility seems valid, they could have planned this months ago, their sudden activity on Sunday morning nothing more than the final stages or perhaps the aftermath of their action.”

“But not merely a reaction to our own sudden activity?” the Department V chief asked softly, turning to Balachov.

“I don’t understand,” Balachov said, and Zamyatin could see that his Department One director was not only nervous, he was lost.

But Yashchenko was patient. “Your job, Major, is to watch the American embassy. Do you understand that there is a man who is your counterpart? A man watching us?”

Balachov nodded uncertainly. “Switt.”

“Just so. And do you further understand that very early Sunday morning, when activities are normally at their minimum here, our entire upper echelon leadership was called in?”

“The Americans detected that activity and had to meet to figure out what we were up to,” Zamyatin said. He was tired, but he wondered if his weariness was not just a mental trick to insulate him from a task he considered exceedingly distasteful.

“Yes, Colonel.”

“We thought of that, but our primary directive is one of assumption. Assume that someone from our area of surveillance has kidnaped Sakharov and the laser. The Americans are the only ones in Political Service Division who fulfill the requirement. Do you understand that, Major?”

“Yes, Colonel,” Yashchenko said straight-faced.

“And do you further understand, Major, that your presence here is merely advisory in nature to your department?”

“Yes, Colonel,” Yashchenko said, still with the straight face.

Zamyatin stared at him for a long moment before he continued. “Very well,” he said. “Point one, excessive activities at the American embassy. Any question?”

“None.”

“Point two, the activities are of an intelligence nature because of the presence of Farley Carlisle. Question?”

“Yes,” Yashchenko said. “Is that confirmed information?”

Zamyatin nodded toward Balachov.

“Yes it is, Major. We have a low-level embassy staffer who confirmed the information for us.”

“A State Department employee, or a physical plant staff member?”

“A cook, actually,” Balachov said. He sat back. “Someone from your own directorate converted him some time ago in the States.”

“Don’t play silly little word games with me, Boris Aleksandrovich,” Yashchenko said, leaning forward slightly.

Balachov blanched. “I am sorry, Major … I did not mean to … that is…”

“Points three, four, and five,” Zamyatin forcefully interrupted. Yashchenko looked his way but said nothing. “The Americans kidnaped Sakharov and the laser with which they will assassinate their own president when he arrives here in Moscow on Thursday. The laser, from my understanding, is powerful enough to do the job. Professor Doctor Sakharov would be found dead at the controls of the device, thus proving to the world that the Soviet government engineered and carried out the assassination.”

“Insanity,” Yashchenko said softly, but Balachov had recovered enough to challenge the assessment.

“Not so,” he said. Yashchenko looked his way and was about to speak, but Zamyatin interrupted again.

“Enough,” he said. He was sick to death of the entire affair and wanted nothing more now than to end it and go home to his children. Soon it would be their bedtime, and he wanted to have some time with them first. “It is insanity. But so was the Bay of Pigs. So was the Cuban blockade. And certainly so were the assassinations of the Kennedys and of King. We are not here to judge rationality. We are here for an action order conference.”

For the first time Yashchenko and Balachov both seemed to realize that their squabble with each other was all recorded on tape, and both of them seemed somewhat contrite for it.

In a way Zamyatin felt some pity for Balachov, who had done a very good job over the past few years. But the man’s career would be finished within a dozen months. Yashchenko was not a man to treat roughly unless you had the rank or the position. Balachov would learn that the hard way, because he had neither.

“This insanity, as you term it, Major Yashchenko, if true, must at all costs be stopped. To that end I personally will attempt to convert the CIA employee I mentioned earlier. Through that man we will learn about their plans.”

“Shall we know his name?” Yashchenko asked respectfully.

“Wallace Leonard Mahoney,” Zamyatin said. “He is the CIA’s senior intelligence evaluator—they call them analysts.”

“Yes,” Yashchenko smiled. “And the action orders?”

Zamyatin flipped open the two thin file folders which were both marked with a red action tag. In each folder was a single document, the action order itself, which required the signature of an officer grade thirteen or higher. Zamyatin was a fourteen. He signed both documents, closed the file folders, and handed them across the table to Yashchenko. Then he gathered up the supporting documents in two other file folders and handed them to Yashchenko as well.

“The tape will go with these jackets,” he said. “But the entire package will have to first be cleared through General Barynin’s staff before the authorization number and budget line are assigned. I will count on you to expedite that, Major.”

“Yes, Colonel,” Yashchenko said, making no move to open the files.

Zamyatin got to his feet but did not move away from the table. “Mahoney has two children. One of them, named Michael, is a plant pathologist with the Forest Products Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. He is not married, and as far as archives knew, he lives alone.” Zamyatin took a deep breath and closed his burning eyes against the harshness of the single light.

“Mahoney’s other child, John, is married to a woman by the name of Mary. They have three children, Carl, John Junior, and Cindy. All quite young. They live in Los Angeles, California, where John works as a chemical engineer for Monsanto.”

And now it came, Zamyatin thought. A picture of his own three children flashed through his mind. “I want John, his wife and three children, and Michael picked up and held. And I want confirmation of that action within twenty-four hours.”

“Excellent,” Yashchenko said, smiling.

Zamyatin was suddenly sick, but he held himself in check. “Then if there is no further discussion, comrades…” he said, pausing a moment.

No one said anything, and he nodded to the recording technician who switched off the tape recorder then jumped up and unlocked the door.

Without a word to anyone Zamyatin strode out the door, went back to his office where he dismissed his remaining staff, got his coat, and left the Center alone, thoughts of Mahoney’s children and grandchildren intermingled with thoughts of his own children hammering through his head like a dull but insistent headache.

Monday Evening

Leonid Sakharov opened his eyes, and a light bulb encased in a wire cage on the ceiling above him slowly swam into focus. It had happened like this how many times before? Twice? Three times? Four times?

His stomach was rumbling, and he closed his eyes again against the glare, trying with all his will to maintain his consciousness. His biological time clock had emptied the food he had eaten. He had slept. Now he was hungry again. Six hours, perhaps eight. But he could not remember how many times he had eaten since the two men had taken him away in the car.

He opened his eyes again, slowly swung his legs over the edge of the cot he lay on and attempted to sit up. A wave of dizziness and nausea swept through him, and he slumped down on his side, his feet just touching the bare concrete floor.

It was a problem of focus. One part of his mind dispassionately examined the situation. He had been cut off from the outside world in the tiny, windowless room for twenty-four hours or more. He no longer had the change from morning to afternoon to night to focus on.

Pi, the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. A transcendental number. Approximately 3.14159.

Sakharov tried to make his mind work on that problem. The square of pi. One … carry the eight. Five times nine is forty-five, add the eight makes fifty-three, carry the five.

At sixty Sakharov was a gnome of a man, barely five feet tall, stoop-shouldered, thinning, stark white hair, bulbous nose, sagging jowls. But his mind was almost as sharp as it had been when, as a young man, he had entered the mathematical physics department at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and his intuitive genius was sharper because of his experience.

As one part of his mind worked on the problem of squaring pi, another part of him catalogued his body. He was hungry. He was dirty. And deep inside his gut his bowels were rumbling. He had always had problems with diarrhea, but at this moment the pressure against his sphincter muscle was growing. Soon he would have to relieve himself.

As he slowly, patiently, carefully worked out the problem, a digit at a time, he could feel his mind coming back to the present, assigning some reality to his situation.

Finally he sat up and opened his eyes, an almost beatific expression on his features.

“Pi,” he said aloud. “The square of pi is 9.8695877281.”

The room he was in was tiny, barely ten feet on a side, furnished only with the cot and across the room, a toilet without a seat or a lid. The walls were bare concrete relieved only by a metal door on one side and a small ventilating grille high near the ceiling on the opposite side. The floor was bare concrete as was the ceiling with its single, caged light bulb. He felt that he was underground, perhaps in a basement.

Saturday evening he had been working late at the university when the telephone call came. Two men from the People’s Ministry of Science, a euphemism for the KGB’s Directorate T, would be coming for him. It was a matter of utmost importance that had to be discussed. Utmost military importance.

Sakharov raised a hand to his mouth. They had come for him. Had taken him away in a car. As soon as they had left the university grounds the man who sat with him in the back seat had placed a cloth over his nose and mouth. It had been chloroform.

He shook his head slowly. When he had wakened for the first time, he had found himself here in this room, lying on the cot, still in his topcoat, hat, and shoes.

But why?

Suddenly it came to him. It was as if a veil had been lifted from in front of his eyes and he could see again. Suddenly he knew exactly why they had come for him. Why he was being kept prisoner in this place.

“Mayn Got,” he said softly in Yiddish, and he lay all the way down on the cot.

Sakharov had, all of his life, kept three secrets that until this very moment he had been sure no one knew anything about.

The first was that his name wasn’t really Sakharov, it was Zakhreim. He was a Jew. He had managed to change his name during the confusion of the war.

The second was that he hated the Soviet Union, what it was, what it stood for, and what it was doing to his people. All these years he had been living a lie. Too timorous to speak out.

And the third was that for some time he had been funneling information to a scientific friend of his who was a professor of physics at the Polytechnic in Zurich. At least once a year he was allowed out of the Soviet Union to meet at the Zurich Congress of Light Physicists. Each year he and his friend collaborated on their studies.

Sakharov had never defected, despite his feelings about the Soviet Union, because he was a frightened man. Frightened of the KGB which had ears everywhere. He also remained in Moscow because his friend in Zurich said he was more valuable to their science where he was.

But now he was not so sure his secrets were indeed secret. He was a prisoner and soon, he supposed, the interrogation would begin.

He had no family. His parents had long since died. He had never married. Had no brothers or sisters that he knew of. No cousins or aunts or uncles. Most of them had been killed by the Germans during the war.

There was no one except for himself, and a few colleagues and students at the university. But they would not raise the alarm. One did not raise such alarms in the Soviet Union.

Alone. He was alone.

Sakharov could feel his legs trembling, and he began to cry like a frightened baby as he urinated in his trousers. Across the room was the toilet, but he could not even raise his head that far to see it.

After a time he let himself go completely, babbling like a complete idiot as a hot gush of semi-liquid rushed from his bowels, soiling his trousers.