The Cardinal of the Kremlin

“IT says a lot about the man that the first thing he did was to get to the embassy and send the telex,” Ritter said at last. The Ambassador delivered his protest note to their Foreign Ministry before they went public on the arrest ‘for conduct incompatible with diplomatic status.’ ”

“Some consolation,” Greer noted gloomily.

“We ought to have her back in a day or less,” Ritter went on. “They’re already PNG’d, and they’re going on the next Pan Am flight out.”

Ryan squirmed in his chair. What about CARDINAL? he wondered. Jesus, they tell me about this superagent, and a week later ... They sure as hell don’t have a Supreme Court over there that makes it hard to execute people.

“Any chance we can do a trade for him?” Jack asked.

“You are kidding, boy.” Ritter rose and walked to the window. At three in the morning, the CIA parking lot was nearly empty, only a loose handful of cars sitting among the piles of plowed snow. “We don’t even have anybody big enough to trade for a mitigation of sentence. No way in hell they’ll let him out, even for a chief of station, which we don’t have.”

“So he’s dead and the data is lost with him.”

“That’s what the man’s saying,” Judge Moore agreed.

“Help from the allies?” Ryan asked. “Sir Basil might have something hopping that can help us.”

“Ryan, there is nothing we can do to save the man.” Ritter turned to take out his anger on the nearest target of opportunity. “He’s dead—sure, he’s still breathing, but he’s dead all the same. A month, or two, or three from now, the announcement will be made, and we’ll confirm it through other assets, and then we’ll pry open a bottle and have a few to his memory.”

“What about Dallas?” Greer asked.

“Huh?” Ryan turned.

“You don’t need to know about that,” Ritter said, now grateful to have a target. “Give her back to the Navy.”

“Okay.” Greer nodded. “This is likely to have some serious consequences.” That earned the Admiral a baleful look from Judge Moore. He now had to go to the President.

“What about it, Ryan?”

“On the arms-control talks?” Jack shrugged. “Depends on how they handle it. They have a wide range of options, and anybody who tells you he can predict which one they’ll choose is a liar.”

“Nothing like an expert opinion,” Ritter observed.

“Sir Basil thinks Gerasimov wants to make a move on the top spot. He could conceivably use this toward that end,” Ryan said coolly, “but I think Narmonov has too much political clout now that he has that fourth man on the Politburo. He can, therefore, choose to go forward toward the agreement and show the Party how strong he is by moving forward for peace, or if he senses more political vulnerability than I see in the picture, he can consolidate his hold on the Party by trashing us as the incorrigible enemies of Socialism. If there’s a way to put a probability assessment on that choice that’s anything more than a wild-ass guess, I haven’t seen it yet. ”

“Get to work on it,” Judge Moore ordered. “The President’ ll want something hard enough to grab hold of before Ernie Allen starts talking about putting SDI on the table again.”

“Yes, sir.” Jack stood. “Judge, do we expect the Sovs to go public on CARDINAL’s arrest?”

“There’s a question,” Ritter said.

Ryan headed for the door and stopped again. “Wait a minute.”

“What is it?” Ritter asked.

“You said that the Ambassador delivered his protest before their Foreign Ministry said anything, right?”

“Yeah, Foley worked real fast to beat them to the punch.”

“With all due respect to Mr. Foley, nobody’s that fast,” Ryan said. “They should have had their press release already printed before they made the pickup.”

“So?” Admiral Greer asked.

Jack walked back toward the other three. “So the Foreign Minister is Narmonov’s man, isn’t he? So’s Yazov at the Defense Ministry. They didn’t know,” Ryan said. “They were as surprised as we were.”

“No chance,” Ritter snorted. “They don’t do things like that.”

“Assumption on your part, sir.” Jack stood his ground. “What evidence backs up that statement?”

Greer smiled. “None that we know of right now.”

“Damn it, James, I know he’s—”

“Keep going, Dr. Ryan,” Judge Moore said.

“If those two ministers didn’t know what was going down, it puts a different spin on this case, doesn’t it?” Jack sat on the back of a chair. “Okay, I can see cutting Yazov out—CARDINAL was his senior aide—but why cut out the Foreign Minister? This sort of thing, you want to move fast, catch the newsies with the breaking story—for damned sure you don’t want the other side to get the word out first.”

“Bob?” the DCI asked.

The Deputy Director for Operations never had liked Ryan very much—he thought that he’d come too far too fast—but, for all that, Bob Ritter was an honest man. The DDO sat back down and sipped at his coffee for a moment. “Boy may have a point. We’ll have to confirm a few details, but if they check out ... then it’s as much a political operation as a simple ‘Two’ case.”

“James?”

The Deputy Director for Intelligence nodded agreement. “Scary.”

“We may not be talking about just losing a good source,” Ryan went on, speculating as he spoke. “KGB might be using this for political ends. What I don’t see is his power base. The Alexandrov faction has three solid members. Narmonov now has four, counting the new guy, Vaneyev—”

“Shit!” This was Ritter. “We assumed that when his daughter was picked up and let go that they either didn’t break her—hell, they say she looks okay—or her father was too important for them to—”

“Blackmail.” Now it was Judge Moore’s turn. “You were right, Bob. And Narmonov doesn’t know. You have to hand it to Gerasimov, the bastard has some beautiful moves ... If all this is true, Narmonov is outnumbered and doesn’t know it.” He paused for a frown. “We’re speculating like a bunch of amateurs.”

“Well, it makes for one hell of a scenario.” Ryan almost smiled until he reached the logical conclusion. “We may have brought down the first Soviet government in thirty years that wanted to liberalize their own country.” What will the papers make of that? Jack asked himself. And you know that it’ll get out. Something like this is too juicy to stay secret long ...

“We know what you’ve been doing, and we know how long you’ve been doing it. Here is the evidence.” He tossed the photographs onto the table.

“Nice pictures,” Mary Pat said. “Where’s the man from my embassy?”

“We don’t have to let anyone talk with you. We can keep you here as long as we wish. Years, if necessary,” he added ominously.

“Look, mister, I’m an American, okay? My husband is a diplomat. He has diplomatic immunity and so do I. Just because you think I’m a dumb American housewife, you think you can push me around and scare me into signing that damned-fool confession that I’m some kind of idiot spy. Well, I’m not, and I won’t, and my government will protect me. So as far as I’m concerned you can take that confession and spread mustard on it and eat it. God knows the food over here is so bad you could use the fiber in your diet,” she observed. “And you’re saying that that nice old man I was taking the picture to was arrested too, eh? Well, I think you’re just crazy.”

“We know that you have met him many times.”

“Twice. I saw him at a game last year, too—no, excuse me, I met him at a diplomatic reception a few weeks ago. That’s three times, but only the hockey matters. That’s why I brought the picture. The boys on the team think he’s good luck for them—ask them, they all signed the picture, didn’t they? Both times he came, we won big games and my son scored a couple of goals. And you think he’s a spy just because he went to a junior-league hockey game? My God, you guys must think American spies are under every bed.”

She was actually enjoying herself. They treated her carefully. Nothing like a threatened pregnancy, Mary Pat told herself, as she broke yet another time-honored rule in the spy business: Don’t say anything. She jabbered on, as would any outraged private citizen—with the shield of diplomatic immunity, of course—at the rank stupidity of the Russians. She watched her interrogator closely for a reaction. If there was anything Russians hated, it was to be looked down on, and most of all by the Americans, to whom they had a terminal inferiority complex.

“I used to think the security people at the embassy were a pain,” she huffed after a moment. “Don’t do this, don’t do that, be careful taking pictures of things. I wasn’t taking a picture, I was giving him a picture! And the kids in it are Russian kids—except for Eddie.” She turned away, looking into the mirror. Mary Pat wondered if the Russians had thought that touch up themselves or if they had gotten the idea from American cop shows.

“Whoever trained that one knew his business,” Vatutin observed, looking through the mirror from the next room. “She knows we’re here but doesn’t let on. When are we turning her loose?”

“Late this afternoon,” the head of the Second Chief Directorate answered. “Holding her isn’t worth the effort. Her husband is already packing up the apartment. You should have waited a few more seconds,” the General added.

“I know.” There was no point in explaining the faulty door lock. The KGB didn’t accept excuses, even from colonels. That was beside the point in any case, Vatutin and his boss knew. They’d caught Filitov—not quite in the act, but he was still caught. That was the objective of the case, at least so far as they were concerned. Both men knew the other parts of it, but treated them as though they didn’t exist. It was the smartest course for both.

“Where is my man!” Yazov demanded.

“He is in Lefortovo Prison, of course,” Gerasimov answered.

“I want to see him. At once.” The Defense Minister hadn’t even paused to take off his cap, standing there in his calf-length greatcoat, his cheeks still pink from the chilly February air—or perhaps with anger, Gerasimov thought. Maybe even with fear ...

“This is not a place to make demands, Dmitri Timofeyevich. I, too, am a Politburo member. I, too, sit on the Defense Council. And it may be that you are implicated in this investigation.” Gerasimov’s fingers played with a file on the desktop.

That changed Yazov’s complexion. He went pale, definitely not from fear. Gerasimov was surprised that the soldier didn’t lose control, but the Marshal made a supreme effort and spoke as though to a new draftee:

“Show me your evidence here and now if you have the balls for it!”

“Very well.” The KGB Chairman flipped open the folder and removed a series of photographs, handing them over.

“You had me under surveillance?”

“No, we’ve been watching Filitov. You just happened to be there.”

Yazov tossed the prints back with contempt. “So what? Misha was invited to a hockey game. I accompanied him. It was a good game. There is an American boy on the team—I met the mother at some reception or other—oh, yes, it was in George Hall when the American negotiators were last over. She was at this game, and we said hello. She is an amusing woman, in an empty-headed sort of way. The next morning I filled out a contact report. So did Misha.”

“If she is so empty-headed, why did you bother?” Gerasimov inquired.

“Because she is an American, and her husband is a diplomat of some kind or other, and I was foolish enough to allow her to touch me, as you see. The contact report is on file. I will send you a copy of mine, and Colonel Filitov’s.” Yazov was speaking with more confidence now. Gerasimov had miscalculated somewhat.

“She is an agent of the American CIA.”

“Then I am confident that Socialism will prevail, Nikolay Borissovich. I didn’t think that you employed such foots—not until today, that is.”

Defense Minister Yazov allowed himself to calm down. Though new to the Moscow scene—until very recently he’d been commander of the Far East Military District, where Narmonov had spotted him—he knew what the real struggle here was all about. He did not, could not believe that Filitov was a traitor—did not believe because of the man’s record; could not believe because the scandal would destroy one of the most carefully planned careers in the Soviet Army. His.

“If you have real evidence against my man, I want my own security people to review it. You, Nikolay Borissovich, are playing a political game with my Ministry. I will not have KGB interference in the way I run my Army. Someone from GRU will be here this afternoon. You will cooperate with him or I will take this to the Politburo myself.”

Gerasimov showed no reaction at all as the Defense Minister left the room, but realized that he’d made an error of his own. He’d overplayed his hand—no, he told himself, you played it a day too soon. You expected Yazov to collapse, to bend to the pressure, to accept a proposal not yet made.

And all because that fool Vatutin hadn’t gotten positive evidence. Why couldn’t he have waited one more second!

Well, the only thing to do is to get a full confession from Filitov.

Colin McClintock’s official job was in the commercial office at Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy, just across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, a location that predated the revolution and had annoyed the Soviet leadership since Stalin’s time. But he, too, was a player in the Great Game. He was, in fact, the case officer who “ran” Svetlana Vaneyeva and had seconded her to the CIA for a purpose which had never been explained, but the orders for which had come direct from London’s Century House, the headquarters of the SIS. At the moment, he was taking a group of British businessmen through GOSPLAN, introducing them to some of the bureaucrats with whom they’d have to negotiate the contracts for whatever they hoped to sell to the local barbarians, McClintock thought. An “Islander” from Whalsay off the Scottish coast, he regarded anyone from south of Aberdeen as a barbarian, but worked for the Secret Intelligence Service anyway. When he spoke in English, he used a lilting accent laced with words spoken only in Northern Scotland, and his Russian was barely comprehensible, but he was a man who could turn accents on and off as though with a switch. And his ears had no accent at all. People invariably think that a person who has trouble speaking a language also has trouble hearing it. It was an impression that McClintock assiduously cultivated.

He’d met Svetlana this way, had reported her to London as a possible target for recruitment, and a senior SIS officer had done just that in the second-floor dining room of Langan’s Brasserie on Stratton Street. Since then McClintock had seen her only on business, only with other British subjects and Russians around. Other SIS officers in Moscow handled her dead-drops, though he was actually responsible for her operations. The data that she’d gotten out was disappointing but occasionally useful in a commercial sense. With intelligence agents you tended to take what you got, and she did forward insider gossip that she picked up from her father.

But something had gone wrong with Svetlana Vaneyeva. She’d disappeared from her desk, then returned, probably after interrogation at Lefortovo, the CIA had said. That made little sense to McClintock. Once they got you into Lefortovo, they had you for more than a day or two. Something very strange had happened, and he’d waited for a week to figure a way to find out exactly what it might have been. Her drops were untouched now, of course. Nobody from SIS would ever go near them except to see if they’d been disturbed, from a discreet distance.

Now, however, he had his chance, taking his trade delegation across the room that held the textile section of the planning agency. She looked up and saw the foreigners walking by. McClintock gave the routine interrogation signal. He didn’t know which reply he’d get, nor what the reply would really mean. He had to assume that she’d been broken, totally compromised, but she had to react some way. He gave the signal, a brush of his hands against his hair as natural as breathing, as all such signals were. Her reply was to open a desk drawer and extract either a pencil or a pen. The former was the “all clear” signal, the latter a warning. She did neither, and merely returned to the document she was reading. It almost surprised the young intelligence officer enough to stare, but he remembered who and where he was, and turned away, scanning other faces in the room as his hands fluttered nervously about, doing various things that could have meant anything to whoever was watching.

What stuck in his mind was the look on her face. What had once been animated was now blank. What had once been lively was now as emotionless as any face on a Moscow street. The person who’d once been the privileged daughter of a very senior Party man was different now. It wasn’t an act. He was sure of it; she didn’t have the skill for that.

They got to her, McClintock told himself. They got to her and let her go. He didn’t have a clue why they’d let her go, but that wasn’t his concern. An hour later he drove the businessmen back to their hotel and returned to his office. The report he dashed off to London was only three pages long. He had no idea of the firestorm it would ignite. Nor did he know that another SIS officer had sent another report the same day, in the same pouch.

“Hello, Arthur,” the voice on the phone said.

“’Morning—excuse me, good afternoon, Basil. How’s the weather in London?”

“Cold, wet, and miserable. Thought I might come over to your side of the pond and get some sun.”

“Be sure to stop over to the shop.”

“I planned to do that. First thing in the morning?”

“I always have room on the calendar for you.”

“See you tomorrow, then.”

“Great. See ya.” Judge Moore hung up.

That was some day, the Director of Central Intelligence thought. First we lose CARDINAL, now Sir Basil Charleston wants to come over here with something he can’t talk about over the most secure phone system NSA and GCHQ ever came up with! It was still before noon and he’d already been in his office for nine hours. What the hell else is going wrong?

“You call this evidence?” General Yevgeniy Ignat’yev was in charge of the counterespionage office of the GRU, the Soviet military’s own intelligence arm. “To these tired old eyes it looks as though your people have jumped onto thin ice looking for a fish.”

Vatutin was amazed—and furious—that the KGB Chairman had sent this man into his office to review his case.

“If you can find a plausible explanation for the film, the camera, and the diary, perhaps you would be so kind as to share it with me, Comrade.”

“You say you took it from his hand, not the woman’s.” A statement, not a question.

“A mistake on my part for which I make no excuses,” Vatutin said with dignity, which struck both men as slightly odd.

“And the camera?”

“It was found attached magnetically to the inside of the service panel on his refrigerator.”

“You didn’t find it the first time you searched the apartment, I see. And it had no fingerprints on it. And your visual record of Filitov does not show him using it. So if he tells me that you planted both the film and the camera on him, how am I supposed to convince the Minister that he’s the one doing the lying?”

Vatutin was surprised by the tone of the question. “You believe that he is a spy after all?”

“What I believe is of no importance. I find the existence of the diary troubling, but you would not believe the breaches of security I have to deal with, especially at the higher levels. The more important people become, the less important they think the rules are. You know who Filitov is. He’s more than just a hero, Comrade. He is famous throughout the Soviet Union—Old Misha, the Hero of Stalingrad. He fought at Minsk, at Vyasma, outside Moscow when we stopped the fascists, the Kharkov disaster, then the fighting retreat to Stalingrad, then the counterattack—”

“I have read his file,” Vatutin said neutrally.

“He is a symbol to the entire Army. You cannot execute a symbol on evidence as equivocal as this, Vatutin. All you have are these photographic frames, with no objective evidence that he shot them.”

“We have not yet interrogated him.”

“And you think that will be easy?” Ignat’yev rolled his eyes. His laugh was a harsh bark. “Do you know how tough this man is? This man killed Germans while he was on fire! This man looked at death a thousand times and pissed on it!”

“I can get what I want out of him,” Vatutin insisted quietly.

“Torture, is it? Are you mad? Keep in mind that the Taman Guards Motor-Rifle Division is based a few kilometers from here. You think the Red Army will sit still while you torture one of its heroes? Stalin is dead, Comrade Colonel, and so is Beriya.”

“We can extract the information without doing physical harm,” Vatutin said. That was one of KGB’s most closely guarded secrets.

“Rubbish!”

“In that case, General, what do you recommend?” Vatutin asked, knowing the answer.

“Let me take over the case. We’ll see to it that he never betrays the Rodina again, you can be sure of that,” Ignat’yev promised.

“And save the Army the embarrassment, of course.”

“We would save embarrassment for everyone, not the least you, Comrade Colonel, for fucking up this so-called investigation.”

Well, that’s about what I expected. A little bluster and a few threats, mixed with a little sympathy and comradeliness. Vatutin saw that he had a way out, but that the safety it promised also promised to end his advancement. The handwritten message from the Chairman had made that clear enough. He was trapped between two enemies, and though he could still win the approval of one, the largest goal involved the largest risk. He could retreat from the true objective of the investigation, and stay a colonel the rest of his life, or he could do what he’d hoped to do when he began—without any political motives, Vatutin remembered bleakly—and risk disgrace. The decision was paradoxically an easy one. Vatutin was a “Two” man—

“It is my case. The Chairman has given it to me to run, and I will run it in my way. Thank you for your advice, Comrade General.”

Ignat’yev appraised the man and the statement. It wasn’t often that he encountered integrity, and it saddened him in a vague, distant way that he could not congratulate the man who demonstrated this rarest of qualities. But loyalty to the Soviet Army came first.

“As you wish. I expect to be kept informed of all your activities.” Ignat’yev left without another word.

Vatutin sat at his desk for a few minutes, appraising his own position. Then he called for his car. Twenty minutes later he was at Lefortovo.

“Impossible,” the doctor told him before he had even asked the question.

“What?”

“You want to put this man into the sensory-deprivation tank, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“It would probably kill him. I don’t think you want to do that, and I am sure that I will not risk my project on something like this.”

“It’s my case, and I’ll run it—”

“Comrade Colonel, the man in question is over seventy years old. I have his medical file here. He has all the symptoms of moderate cardiovascular disease—normal at this age, of course—and a history of respiratory problems. The onset of the first anxiety period would explode his heart like a balloon. I can almost guarantee it.”

“What do you mean—explode his heart—”

“Excuse me—it’s difficult to explain medical terms to the layman. His coronary arteries are coated with moderate amounts of plaque. It happens to all of us; it comes from the food we eat. His arteries are more blocked than yours or mine because of his age, and also, because of his age, the arteries are less flexible than those of a younger person. If his heart rate goes too high, the plaque deposits will dislodge and cause a blockage. That’s what a heart attack is, Colonel, a blockage of a coronary artery. Part of the heart muscle dies, the heart stops entirely or becomes arrhythmic; in either case it ceases to pump blood, and the whole patient dies. Is that clear? Use of the tank will almost certainly induce a heart attack in the subject, and that attack will almost certainly be fatal. If not a heart attack, there is the somewhat lesser probability of a massive stroke—or both could happen. No, Comrade Colonel, we cannot use the tank for this man. I do not think that you wish to kill him before you get your information.”

“What about other physical measures?” Vatutin asked quietly. My God, what if I can’t ... ?

“If you’re certain that he’s guilty, you can shoot him at once and be done with it,” the physician observed. “But any gross physical abuse is likely to kill the patient.”

And all because of a goddamned door lock, Colonel Vatutin told himself.

It was an ugly rocket, the sort of thing that a child might draw or a fireworks company might build, though either would know better than to put it on top of an airplane instead of its proper place, underneath. But it was atop the airplane, as the runway’s perimeter lights showed in the darkness.

The airplane was the famous SR-71 Blackbird, Lockheed’s Mach-three reconnaissance aircraft. This one had been flown in from Kadena Air Force Base on the western rim of the Pacific two days before. It rolled down the runway at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, before the twin flames of its afterburning engines. Fuel that leaked from the SR-71’s tanks—the Blackbird leaked a lot—was ignited by the heat, much to the entertainment of the tower crew. The pilot pulled back on the stick at the appropriate time, and the Blackbird’s nose came up. He held the stick back for longer than usual, pointing the bird into a steep forty-five-degree climb on full burner, and in a moment all that was left on the ground was a thundering memory. The last view the people had was of the twin angry dots of the engines, and soon these disappeared through the clouds that wafted by at ten thousand feet.

The Blackbird kept going up. The air-traffic controllers at Las Vegas noted the blip on their screens, saw that it was barely moving laterally, though its altitude readout was changing as rapidly as the wheels of the slot machines on the airport concourse. They shared a took—another Air Force hot dog—then they went back to work.

The Blackbird was now passing through sixty thousand feet, and leveled off to head southeast toward the White Sands Missile Range. The pilot checked his fuel—there was plenty—and relaxed after the exhilarating climb. The engineers had been right. The missile sitting on the aircraft’s back hadn’t mattered at all. By the time he’d gotten to fly the Blackbird, the purpose of the back mount had been overtaken by events. Designed to hold a single-engine photoreconnaissance drone, the fittings had been removed from nearly all the SR-71s, but not this one, for reasons that were not clear from the aircraft’s maintenance book. The drone had originally been designed to go places the Blackbird could not, but it had become redundant on discovery of the fact that there was nowhere the SR-71 could not go in safety, as the pilot regularly proved on flights from Kadena. The only limit on the aircraft was fuel, and that didn’t play today.

“Juliet Whiskey, this is Control. Do you read, over,” the sergeant said into the headset.

“Control, this is Juliet Whiskey. All systems go. We are nominal to profile.”

“Roger. Commence launch sequence on my mark. Five, four, three, two, one: mark!”

A hundred miles away, the pilot punched burners again and hauled back on the stick. The Blackbird performed as beautifully as always, standing on her tail and rocketing into the sky before nearly a hundred thousand pounds of thrust. The pilot’s eyes were locked on his instruments as the altimeter spun around like a maddened clock. His speed was now thirteen hundred miles per hour and increasing, while the SR-71 showed her contempt for gravity.

“Separation in twenty seconds,” the systems operator in the back seat told the pilot. The Blackbird was now passing through a hundred thousand feet. The target was one-twenty. The controls were already mushy. There wasn’t enough air up here to control the aircraft properly, and the pilot was being even more careful than usual. He watched his speed hit nineteen hundred several seconds early, then:

“Standby for separation ... breakaway, breakaway!” the man in back called. The pilot dropped the nose and started a gentle turn to the left that would take him right across New Mexico before heading back to Nellis. This was much easier than flying along the Soviet border—and, occasionally, across it.... The pilot wondered if he could drive down to Vegas to catch a show after he landed.

The target kept going up for a few more seconds, but surprisingly did not ignite its rocket motor. It was now a ballistic object, traveling in obedience to the laws of physics. Its oversized fins provided enough aerodynamic drag to keep it pointed in the proper direction as gravity began to reclaim the object for its own. The rocket tipped over at one hundred thirty thousand feet, reluctantly pointing its nose at the earth.

Then its motor fired. The solid-fuel engine burned for only four seconds, but that was enough to accelerate its conical nose to a speed that would have terrified the Blackbird’s pilot.

“Okay,” an Army officer said. The point-defense radar went from standby to active. It immediately saw the inbound. The target rocket was pushing itself down through the atmosphere at roughly the same speed as an ICBM warhead. He didn’t have to give a command. The system was fully automated. Two hundred yards away a fiberglass cover exploded off a concrete hole drilled in the gypsum flats, and a FLAGE erupted skyward. The Flexible Lightweight Agile Guided Experiment looked more like a lance than a rocket, and was nearly that simple. Millimeter-wave radar tracked the inbound, and the data was processed through an onboard microcomputer. The remarkable part of this was that all the parts had been taken off the shelf from existing high-tech weaponry.

Outside, men watched from behind a protective earthen berm. They saw the upward streak of yellow light and heard the roar of the solid rocket motor, then nothing for several seconds.

The FLAGE homed in on its target, maneuvering a few fractions of degrees with tiny attitude-control rockets. The nosecap blew off, and what unfolded would have looked to an outsider like a collapsing umbrella’s framework, perhaps ten yards across ...

It looked just like a Fourth of July rocket, but without the noise. A few people cheered. Though both the target and the FLAGE “warhead” were totally inert, the energy of the collision converted metal and ceramic to incandescent vapor.

“Four for four,” Gregory said. He tried not to yawn. He’d seen fireworks before.

“You’re not going to get all the boosters, Major,” General Parks chided the younger man. “We still need the midcourse systems, and the terminal-defense ones.”

“Yes, sir, but you don’t need me here. It works.”

For the first three tests, the target rocket had been fired from a Phantom fighter, and people in Washington had claimed that the test series had underestimated the difficulty of intercepting the inbound warheads. Using the SR-71 as the launch platform had been Parks’s idea. Launching the drone from higher altitude, and with a higher initial speed, had made for a much faster reentry target. This test had actually made things slightly harder than was expected, and the FLAGE hadn’t cared a bit. Parks had been a little worried about the missile-guidance software, but, as Gregory had noted, it worked.

“Al,” Parks said, “I’m starting to think that this whole program is going to work.”

“Sure. Why not?” If those Agency pukes can get us the plans for the Russian laser ...

CARDINAL sat alone in a bare cell, one and a half meters wide, two and a half meters long. There was a bare light bulb overhead, a wooden cot with a bucket underneath, but not a window except the spy hole in the rusted iron door. The walls were solid concrete, and there was no sound at all. He couldn’t hear the pacing of the corridor guard, nor even the rumble of traffic on the street outside the prison. They’d taken his uniform blouse, and belt, and his polished boots, replacing the last with cheap slippers. The cell was in the basement. That was all he knew, and he could tell from the damp air. It was cold.

But not so cold as his heart. The enormity of his crime came to him as it never had. Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, three times Hero of the Soviet Union, was alone with his treason. He thought of the magnificent, broad land in which he lived, whose distant horizons and endless vistas were peopled with his fellow Russians. He’d served them all his life with pride and honor, and with his own blood, as the scars on his body proclaimed. He remembered the men with whom he’d served, so many of whom had died under his command. And how they had died, defiantly cursing the German tanks and guns as they burned alive in T-34s, retreating only when forced to, preferring to attack even when they knew it to be doomed. He remembered leading his troops in a hundred engagements, the frantic exhilaration that accompanied the roar of the diesel engines, the reeking clouds of smoke, the determination even unto the death that he had cheated so many times.

And he’d betrayed it all.

What would my men say of me now? He stared at the blank concrete wall opposite his cot.

What would Romanov say?

I think we both need a drink, my Captain, the voice chimed in. Only Romanov could be both serious and amused at the same time. Such thoughts are more easily considered with vodka or Samogan.

Do you know why? Misha asked.

You’ve never told us why, my Captain. And so Misha did. It took but a brief flicker of time.

Both your sons, and your wife. Tell me, Comrade Captain, for what did we die?

Misha didn’t know that. Even during the shooting he hadn’t known. He’d been a soldier, and when a soldier’s country is invaded, the soldier fights to repel the enemy. So much the easier when the enemy is as brutal as the Germans were ...

We fought for the Soviet Union, Corporal.

Did we, now? I seem to remember fighting for Mother Russia, but mainly I remember fighting for you, Comrade Captain.

But—

A soldier fights for his comrades, my Captain. I fought for my family. You and our troop, they were my only family. I suppose you also fought for your family, the big one and the little one. I always envied you that, my Captain, and I was proud that you made me part of both in the way that you did.

But I killed you. I shouldn’t have—

We all have our destiny, Comrade Captain. Mine was to die young at Vyasma without a wife, without children, but even so I did not die without a family.

I avenged you, Romanov. I got the Mark-IV that killed you.

I know. You avenged all the dead of your family. Why do you think we loved you? Why do you think we died for you?

You understand? Misha asked in surprise.

The workers and peasants may not, but your men will. We understand destiny now, as you cannot.

But what shall I do?

Captains do not ask such questions of corporals. Romanov laughed. You had all the answers to our questions.

Filitov’s head jerked up as the latch slipped on the door of his cell.

Vatutin expected to find a broken man. The isolation of the cell, the prisoner stripped of identity and alone with his fears and his crimes, always had the proper effect. But while he looked at a tired, crippled old man, he saw the eyes and mouth change.

Thank you, Romanov.

“Good morning, Sir Basil,” Ryan said as he reached for the man’s bags.

“Hello, Jack! I didn’t know they were using you as a gofer.”

“Depends on who I’m going-fer, as they say. The car’s over this way.” He waved. It was parked fifty yards away.

“Constance sends her love. How is the family?” Sir Basil Charleston asked.

“Fine, thanks. How’s London?”

“Surely you haven’t forgotten our winters already.”

“No.” Jack laughed as he wrenched open the door. “I remember the beer, too.” A moment later both doors were closed and locked.

“They sweep the wheels every week,” Jack said. “How bad is it?”

“How bad? That’s what I came over here to find out. Something very odd is happening. You chaps had an op go wrong, didn’t you?”

“I can say yes to that, but the rest’ll have to come from the Judge. Sorry, but I was just cleared for part of it.”

“Recently, I’ll wager.”

“Yep.” Ryan shifted up as he took the turn off the airport road.

“Then let’s see if you can still put two and two together, Sir John.”

Jack smiled as he changed lanes to pass a truck. “I was doing the intelligence estimate on the arms talks when I broke into it. Now I’m supposed to be looking at Narmonov’s political vulnerability. Unless I’m wrong, that’s why you’ve flown over.”

“And unless I’m very far off the mark, your op has triggered something very serious indeed.”

“Vaneyev?”

“Correct.”

“Jesus.” Ryan turned briefly. “I hope you have some ideas, ’cause we sure as hell don’t.” He took the car to seventy-five. Fifteen minutes later he pulled into Langley. They parked in the underground garage and took the VIP elevator to the seventh floor.

“Hello, Arthur. It’s not often I have a knight chauffeur me about, even in London.” The head of SIS took a chair while Ryan summoned Moore’s department chiefs.

“Hi, Bas’,” Greer said on entering. Ritter just waved. It was his operation that had triggered this crisis. Ryan took the least comfortable chair available.

“I’d like to know exactly what went wrong,” Charleston said simply, not even waiting for the coffee to be passed around.

“An agent got arrested. A very well-placed agent.”

“Is that why the Foleys are flying out today?” Charleston smiled. “I didn’t know who they were, but when two people get ejected from that delightful country, we generally assume—”

“We don’t know what went wrong yet,” Ritter said. “They should be landing at Frankfurt right about now, then ten more hours till we have them here for the debrief. They were working an agent who—”

“Who was an aide to Yazov—Colonel M. S. Filitov. We’ve deduced that much. How long have you had him?”

“It was one of your folks who recruited him for us,” Moore replied. “He was a colonel, too.”

“You don’t mean ... Oleg Penkovskiy ... ? Bloody hell!” Charleston was amazed for once, Ryan saw. It didn’t happen often. “That long?”

“That long,” Ritter said. “But the numbers caught up with us.”

“And the Vaneyeva woman we seconded to you for courier service was part of that—”

“Correct. She never came close to either end of the chain, by the way. We know that she was probably picked up, but she’s back at work. We haven’t checked her out yet, but—”

“We have, Bob. Our chap reported that she’d—changed somehow. He said it was hard to describe but impossible to miss. Like the hoary tales of brainwashing, Orwell and all that. He noted that she was free—or what passes for it over there—and related that to her father. Then we learned of something big in the Defense Ministry—that a senior aide to Yazov had been arrested.” Charleston paused to stir his coffee. “We have a source inside the Kremlin that we guard rather closely. We have learned that Chairman Gerasimov spent several hours with Alexandrov last week and under fairly unusual circumstances. This same source has warned us that Alexandrov has a considerable urge to sidetrack this perestroika business.

“Well, it’s clear, isn’t it?” Charleston asked rhetorically. It was quite clear to everyone. “Gerasimov has suborned a Politburo member thought to be loyal to Narmonov, at the very least compromised the support of the Defense Minister, and been spending a good deal of time with the man who wants Narmonov out. I’m afraid that your operation may have triggered something with the most unpleasant consequences.”

“There’s more,” the DCI said. “Our agent was getting us material on Soviet SDI research. Ivan may have made a breakthrough.”

“Marvelous,” Charleston observed. “A return to the bad old days, but this time the new version of the ‘missile gap’ is potentially quite real, I take it? I am awfully old to change my politics. Too bad. You know, of course, that there is a leak in your program?”

“Oh?” Moore asked with a poker face.

“Gerasimov told Alexandrov that. No details, unfortunately, except that KGB think it highly important.”

“We’ve had some warnings. It’s being looked at,” Moore said.

“Well, the technical matters can sort themselves out. They generally do. The political question, on the other hand, has created a bit of a bother with the PM. There’s trouble enough when we bring down a government that we wish to bring down, but to do so by accident ...”

“We don’t like the consequences any more than you do, Basil,” Greer noted. “But there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it from this end.”

“You can accept their treaty terms,” Charleston suggested. “Then our friend Narmonov would have his position sufficiently strengthened that he might be able to tell Alexandrov to bugger off. That, in any case, is the unofficial position of Her Majesty’s government.”

And that’s the real purpose of your visit to us, Sir Basil, Ryan thought. It was time to say something:

“That means putting unreasonable restrictions on our SDI research and reducing our warhead inventory in the knowledge that the Russians are racing forward with their own program. I don’t think that’s a very good deal.”

“And a Soviet government headed by Gerasimov is?”

“And what if we end up with that anyway?” Ryan asked. “My estimate is already written. I recommend against additional concessions.”

“One can always change a written document,” Charleston pointed out.

“Sir, I have a rule. If something goes out with my name on the front, it says what I think, not what somebody else tells me to think,” Ryan said.

“Do remember, gentlemen, that I am a friend. What is likely to happen to the Soviet government would be a greater setback to the West than a temporary restriction on one of your defense programs.”

“The President won’t spring for it,” Greer said.

“He might have to,” Moore replied.

“There has to be another way,” Ryan observed.

“Not unless you can bring Gerasimov down.” It was Ritter this time. “We can’t offer any direct help to Narmonov. Even if we assume that he’d take a warning from us, which he probably wouldn’t, we’d be running an even greater risk by involving ourselves in their internal politics. If the rest of the Politburo got one whiff of that ... I suppose it might start a little war.”

“But what if we can?” Ryan asked.

“What if we can what?” Ritter demanded.