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“Of course.”

“And the church has the right to seek to protect itself from destruction, and from those who would seek to destroy her and her mission on earth?”

“Beyond doubt.”

“Then the church may speak to urge the faithful against a course of action that would help evil and hurt the church?”

“If the church speaks out against Igor Komarov, and still he wins the presidency, the church will have accomplished her own destruction,” said Alexei II. “That is how the hundred bishops will see it, and they will vote overwhelmingly to stay silent. I will be overruled.”

“But there is possibly another way,” said Sir Nigel. For several minutes he outlined a constitutional reform that caused the Patriarch’s jaw to drop.

“You cannot be in earnest, Sir Nigel,” he said at length. “Restore the monarchy, bring back the czar? The people would never encompass it.”

“Let us look at the picture before you,” suggested Irvine. “We know that the choice before Russia is more bleak than can be imagined. On the one hand lies continuing chaos, possible disintegration, even civil war in the Yugoslav style. There can be no prosperity without stability. Russia is rocking like a ship in a gale with no anchor and no rudder. Soon she must founder, her timbers split apart, and her people perish.

“Or there is dictatorship, a terrible tyranny to match anything your long-suffering country has ever seen. Which would you choose for your people?”

“I cannot,” said the Patriarch. “Both are too terrible.”

“Then remember that a constitutional monarch is always a bulwark against single-tyrant despotism. The two cannot coexist, one has to go. All nations need a symbol, human or not, to which they can cleave when times are bad, that can unite them across barriers of language and clan. Komarov is building himself into that national symbol, that icon. No one will vote against him and in favor of vacuum. There must be an alternative icon.”

“But to preach for restoration ...” protested the Patriarch.

“Would not be preaching against Komarov, which is what you fear to do,” argued the Englishman. “It would be preaching for a new stability, an icon above politics. Komarov could not accuse you of meddling in politics, of being against him, even though he might privately suspect what is afoot. And there are the other factors. …”

Skillfully Nigel Irvine trailed the temptations before the Patriarch. The union of church and throne, the full restoration of the Orthodox Church in all its panoply, the return of the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias to his palace within the Kremlin walls, the resumption of credits from the West as stability returned.

“What you say has much logic, and it appeals to my heart,” said Alexei II when he had thought it over. “But I have seen the Black Manifesto. I know the worst. My brothers in Christ, the convocation of bishops, have not seen it and would not believe it. Publish it, and half of Russia might even agree with it. ... No, Sir Nigel, I do not overestimate my flock.”

“But if another voice were to speak? Not yours, Holiness, not officially, but a strong and persuasive voice, with your silent backing?”

He meant the maverick Father Gregor Rusakov, to whom the Patriarch had, with considerable moral courage, given his personal authority to preach.

Father Rusakov had been turned down in his youth by seminary after seminary. He was far too intelligent for the KGB’s taste and far too passionate. So he had withdrawn to a small monastery in Siberia and taken holy orders before becoming a wandering priest, with no parish, preaching where he could before moving on ahead of the secret police.

They caught him of course, and he got five years in a labor camp for anti-State utterances. In court he had refused the state’s paid-off defense counsel, defending himself with such brilliance that he forced the judges to admit they were raping the Soviet constitution.

Liberation under Gorbachev’s amnesty for priests showed he had lost none of his fire. He resumed preaching, but also castigated the bishops for their timidity and corruption, so offending most of them that they ran to Alexei to beg him to have the younger man locked up again.

In the robes of a parish priest Alexei II went to one of his rallies to listen. If only, he thought as he stood unrecognized in the crowd, I could turn all that fire, all that passion, all that oratory into the service of the Church.

The point was, Father Gregor packed them in. He talked the language of the people, in the syntax of the workers. He could pepper his sermon with barracks-room language learned in the labor camp; he could talk the language of the young, knew their pop idols by name and group, knew how hard it was for a housewife to make ends meet, knew how vodka could blunt the hardship.

At thirty-five he was celibate and ascetic but knew more of the sins of the flesh than any seminary could teach. Two popular teen magazines had even proposed him to their readers as a sex symbol.

So Alexei II did not run to the militia asking for an arrest. He invited the wild one to dinner. In the Daniovsky Monastery where they ate a frugal supper at a wooden table. Alexei served. They talked through the night. Alexei explained the task before him, the slow reform of a church too long the servant of dictatorship, trying to find its way back to a pastoral role among the one hundred forty million Christians of Russia.

By dawn he had his compact. Father Gregor agreed to urge his listeners to seek God in their homes and their work, but also to return to the church, flawed though it might be. The silent hand of the Patriarch enabled many things. A major TV station carried weekly coverage of Father Gregor’s hugely attended rallies, and his sermons were thus watched by millions whom he could never have addressed in the flesh. By the winter of 1999 this single priest was widely considered to be the most powerful orator in Russia, even including Igor Komarov.

The Patriarch was silent for a while. Finally he said, “I will speak with Father Gregor on the matter of the return of a czar.”

CHAPTER 15

AS ALWAYS IN LATE NOVEMBER, THE WIND BORE THE FIRST
snows of winter whipping across Slavyansky Square, harbinger of the bitter chill to come.

The tubby priest bowed his head toward the wind and scurried through the outer gates, across the small yard, and into the warmth of All Saints of Kulishki, redolent of damp clothing and incense.

Once again he was watched from a parked car, and when the watchers were certain no one was tailing him, Colonel Grishin followed him inside.

“You called,” he said as they stood side by side away from the few worshipers, apparently contemplating the icons on the wall.

“Last night. There was a visitor. From England.”

“Not America? You are sure, not America?”

“No, Colonel. Just after ten His Holiness told me to receive a gentleman from England and let him in. He came with his interpreter, a much younger man. I let them in and escorted them to the study. Then I brought a tray of coffee.”

“What did they say?”

“When I was in the room, the elderly Englishman was apologizing that he spoke poor Russian. The younger man translated everything. Then the Patriarch told me to put the coffee down and dismissed me.”

“You listened at the door?”

“I tried to. But the younger
Anglichanin
seemed to have hung his scarf over the knob. It blocked my vision and most of what I could hear. Then someone came, the Cossack on his rounds, and I had to get away.”

“He mentioned his name, this elderly Englishman?”

“No, not while I was there. Perhaps when I was away making the coffee. Because of the scarf I could see nothing and hear very little. What I did hear did not make sense.”

“Try me, Father Maxim.”

“The Patriarch only raised his voice once. I heard him say ‘Bring back the czar?’ He seemed amazed. Then they dropped their voices.”

Colonel Grishin stood staring at the paintings of the Madonna holding her Child as if he had been slapped in the face. What he had heard might make no sense to the stupid priest, but it made sense to him.

With a constitutional monarch as head of state, there would be no post of president. The head of government would be the prime minister, leader of the government party but still subject to parliament, the Duma. That was a thousand miles from Igor Komarov’s scenario for a one-party dictatorship.

“His appearance?” he asked quietly.

“Medium height, spare, silver hair, early to mid-seventies.’’

“No idea where he came from?”

“Ah, he was different from the young American. He came by car and it waited for him. I showed them out. The car was still there. Not a taxi, but a limousine. I took its number as it drove away.”

He passed a slip of paper to the colonel.

“You have done well, Father Maxim. This will not be forgotten.”

Anatoli Grishin’s detectives did not take long. A call to the Bureau of Automobiles had the number within an hour—the limousine belonged to the National Hotel.

Kuznetsov the propaganda chief was the errand boy. His near-perfect American English could persuade any Russian clerk that he was indeed American. He turned up at the National just after lunch and approached the concierge.

“Hi, sorry to ask, but do you speak English?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Great. Look, I was dining in a restaurant not far from here last night and there was this English gentleman at the next table. We got talking. When he left, he forgot this on the table.”

He held up a lighter. It was gold and expensive, a Cartier. The concierge was puzzled.

“Yes, sir?”

“Anyway, I ran after him, but I was too late. He was driving away ... in a long black Mercedes. But the commissionaire thought it might be one of yours. I managed to grab the number.”

He passed over a slip of paper.

“Ah, yes, sir. One of ours. Excuse me.”

The concierge checked his log for the previous evening.

“That must have been Mr. Trubshaw. Shall I take the lighter?”

“No problem. I’ll just hand it in to reception and they can put it in his cubbyhole.”

With a cheery wave, Kuznetsov strolled over to the reception desk. He pocketed the lighter.

“Hi there. Could you give me Mr. Trubshaw’s room number?”

The Russian girl was dark and pretty and occasionally moonlighted with Americans. She flashed a smile.

“One moment, sir.”

She punched the name into her desktop computer and shook her head.

“I’m sorry. Mr. Trubshaw and his companion left this morning.”

“Oh, damn. I hoped to catch him. Do you know if he has left Moscow?”

She punched in more figures.

“Yes, sir, we confirmed his flight this morning. He returned to London on the midday plane.”

Kuznetsov was not really aware of the reason why Colonel Grishin wanted to trace the mysterious Mr. Trubshaw but he reported what he had found. When he had gone, Grishin used his contact in the visa applications section of the Immigration division of the Interior Ministry. The details were faxed to him, and the photo that had accompanied the application through the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, London, came by messenger.

“Blow that photo up to a eight-by-ten,” he told his staff. The face of the elderly Englishman meant nothing to him, but he thought he might know a man to whom it would.

Three miles down Tverskaya Street, at a point where the highway to Minsk has already changed its name twice, is the great Victory Arch, and just to one side lies Maroseyka Street. Here two big apartment houses are dedicated entirely to senior retirees of the old KGB, pensioners of the state, living out their retirement in reasonable comfort.

Among them in the winter of 1999 was one of the most formidable of Russia’s old spymasters, General Yuri Drozdov. In the high days of the Cold War he had run all KGB operations on the eastern seaboard of America, before being recalled to Moscow to head the ultra-secret Illegals Directorate.

“Illegals” are those who go into enemy territory without any diplomatic cover, burrowing into the alien society as businessmen, academics, whatever, to run the indigenous assets they have recruited. If caught, they face not expulsion but arrest and trial. Drozdov had trained and sent out the KGB’s illegals for years.

Grishin had come across him briefly when Drozdov in his last days as an active officer had headed the small and discreet group at Yazenevo assigned to analyze the tidal wave of product being sent across by Aldrich Ames. Grishin had been the chief interrogator of the spies thus betrayed.

Neither man had taken to the other. Drozdov preferred skill and subtlety to brute force, while Grishin, who had never left the USSR apart from one brief and inglorious expedition to East Berlin, despised those in the First Chief Directorate who had spent years in the West and become infected by foreign mannerisms. Nevertheless, Drozdov agreed to see him at his apartment on Maroseyka Street. Grishin placed the enlarged photograph in front of him.

“Have you ever seen him before?” he asked.

To his horror the old spymaster threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“Seen him? Not personally, no. But that face is stamped on the mind of everyone my age who ever worked at Yazenevo. Don’t you know who he is?”

“No. Or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Well, we called him The Fox. Nigel Irvine. Ran operations against us for years through the sixties and seventies, then became chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service for six years.”

“A spy.”

“A master of spies, a runner of spies,” Drozdov corrected him. “Not the same thing. And he was one of the best ever. Why are you interested?”

“He came to Moscow yesterday.”

“Good God. Do you know why?”

“No,” lied Grishin. Drozdov stared at him intently. He did not believe the answer.

“What’s it got to do with you, anyway? You’re out of it now. You run those black-uniformed thugs for Komarov, don’t you?”

“I am the Head of Security for the Union of Patriotic Forces,” said Grishin stiffly.

“Same difference,” muttered the old general. He escorted Grishin to the door.