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The tape began with the sound of a door opening—Father Maxim entering the room with a tray of coffee. The sounds were muffled because at that point the recorder had been in the side pocket of his cassock.

Grishin heard the tray being placed on the desk, then a muffled voice saying, “Don’t bother.”

There was an equally muffled response as Father Maxim knelt on the carpet, presumably picking up the dropped sugar lumps.

The sound quality improved as the recorder was slipped under the desk. The voice of the Patriarch was clear enough saying to Father Maxim: “Thank you, Father, that will be all.”

There was silence until the sound of a door closing, the withdrawal of the informer. Then the Patriarch said:

“Now, perhaps you will explain what you have come to tell me.”

Monk began to speak. Grishin could distinguish the slight nasal twang of the American speaking fluent Russian. He began to take notes.

He listened to the forty-minute conversation three times before he began to write a verbatim transcript. This was not a job for a secretary, however trusted.

Page after page was covered in his neat Cyrillic script. Sometimes he paused, played back, craned to hear the words, and then resumed writing. When he was certain he had every word, he stopped.

There was the sound of a chair moving back, then Monk’s voice saying, “I don’t suppose we shall meet again, Your Holiness. I know you will do the best you can for this land and people you love so much.”

Two sets of footsteps moved across the carpet. More faintly, as they reached the door, Grishin heard Alexei’s reply: “With God’s good grace, I shall try.”

The door evidently closed behind Monk. Grishin heard the sound of the Patriarch resuming his seat. Ten seconds later the tape ran out.

Grishin sat back and mulled over what he had heard. The news was as bad as it could conceivably be. How one man, he reflected, could cause such systematic damage was hard to understand. The key of course was that damnable act of stupidity by the late N. I. Akopov in leaving the manifesto lying around to be stolen. The damage caused by that single leak was already incalculable.

Monk clearly had done most of the talking. The earlier interventions by Alexei II had been to indicate that he understood and approved. His own contribution came toward the end.

The American had not been idle. He revealed that immediately after the New Year a concerted campaign would begin to destroy the electoral chances of Igor Komarov across the country by a process of discreditation and massive publicity.

General Nikolai Nikolayev, it seemed, would resume a series of newspaper, radio, and television interviews in which he would denounce the UPF, calling on every soldier and ex-soldier to repudiate the party and vote elsewhere. There were 20 million veterans among the 110 million enfranchised voters. The damage that one man would do could scarcely be contemplated.

The shutdown of all publicity for Igor Komarov being exercised by both commercial TV channels was the work of the bankers, three out of four of them Jewish, and the leader and inspirator of them all Leonid Bernstein of the Moskovsky Federal. That constituted two scores that would have to be settled.

Monk’s third contribution concerned the Dolgoruki mafia. Grishin had long regarded all of them as scum concentration camp fodder for the future. But for the moment their financial backing was crucial.

No politician in Russia could hope to aspire to the presidency without a nationwide campaign costing trillions of rubles. The secret deal with the most powerful and richest mafia west of the Urals had provided that treasure chest, which vastly exceeded anything available to other candidates. Several had already folded their tents, unable to keep up with the expenditure of the UPF.

The six raids of the previous day in the small hours had been disastrous for the Dolgoruki, but none more so than the discovery of the financial records. There were few sources from which the GUVD could have learned such details. A rival mafia was the obvious choice, but in the closed world of the gangsters no one, despite the internecine rivalry, would inform to the hated GUVD. Yet here was Monk informing the Patriarch of the source of the leak—a disgusted and turncoat senior officer of Grishin’s own
Black Guards.

If the Dolgoruki ever proved such a thing—and Grishin knew rumors were flying around the streets, rumors he had passionately denied—the alliance would be over.

To make matters worse, the tape revealed that a team of skilled accountants had already begun work on the papers found beneath the casino and were confident that by the New Year they would be able to prove the funding link between the mafia and the UPF. Those findings would be delivered directly to Acting President Markov. During the same period, Major General Petrovsky of the GUVD, who could be neither bribed nor intimidated, would keep up the pressure on the Dolgoruki gang with raid after raid.

If he did so, Grishin calculated, there was no way the Dolgoruki gang would continue to accept his assurances that a Black Guard source was not behind the GUVD.

The Patriarch’s intervention, coming as it did toward the end of the tape, was perhaps the most potentially damaging of all.

The acting president would be spending the New Year celebrations with his family away from Moscow. He would return on January 3. On that day he would receive the Patriarch, who intended to make a personal intercession, urging Markov to invalidate the candidature of Igor Komarov as an “unfit person,” based upon existing evidence.

With the proof of gangster linkage provided by Petrovsky and the personal intervention of the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias, Markov would be extremely likely to do just that. Apart from anything else, he was himself a candidate and did not want to face Komarov at the polls.

Four traitors, Grishin brooded. Four traitors to the New Russia that was destined to come into existence after January 16, with himself at the head of an elite corps of 200,000 Black Guards ready to carry out the orders of the leader. Well, he had spent his life rooting out and punishing traitors. He knew how to deal with them.

He personally typed out a copy of his handwritten transcript and asked for an uninterrupted two hours of President Komarov’s time that evening.

¯

JASON Monk had moved from the flat by Sokolniki Park and was installed in another from whose windows he could see the crescent atop the mosque where he had first met Magomed, the man now sworn to protect him but who on that day would just as easily have killed him.

He had a message to send to Sir Nigel Irvine in London, according to his schedule the second-from-last, if all went according to the old man’s plan.

He typed it carefully into his laptop computer, as he had done all the others. When he was finished, he pressed the ‘encode’ button and the message vanished from the screen, safely encrypted into the jumbled blocks of numbers of the one-time pad and logged inside the floppy disk to await the next pass of the InTelCor satellite.

He did not need to attend the machine. Its batteries were fully charged and it was switched on, waiting for the handshake from the comsat rolling in space.

He never heard of Ricky Taylor of Columbus, Ohio, never met him and never would. But the pimply teenager probably saved his life.

Ricky was seventeen and a computer freak. He was one of those dysfunctional young men bred by the computer age, most of whose life was spent gazing into a dully fluorescent screen.

Having been given his first PC at the age of seven, he had progressed through the various stages of expertise until the legitimate challenges ran out and only the illegal ones created the necessary buzz, the required periodic “high” of the true addict. Not for Ricky the gentle rhythm of the passing seasons outside, nor the camaraderie of his fellows or even the lust for girls. Ricky’s fix was to hack into the most jealously guarded databanks.

By 1999 InTelCor was not only a major player in global communications for strategic, diplomatic, and commercial use; it was also preeminent as deviser and marketer of the most complex of computer games. Ricky had surfed the Internet until he was bored, and had mastered every known and freely available game sequence. He yearned to pit himself against InTelCor’s Ultra programs. The problem was, to log in to them legitimately cost a fee. Ricky’s allowance did not run to that fee. So he had tried for weeks to enter the InTelCor mainframe by the back door. After so much effort he figured he was almost there.

Eight time zones west of Moscow his screen read, for the thousandth time:
ACCESS CODE PLEASE
. He tapped in what he thought might do it. Again the screen told him:
ACCESS DENIED
.

Somewhere south of the mountains of Anatolia the InTelCor comsat was drifting through space on its heading north for Moscow.

When the technicians of the multinational had devised Monk’s coded sender/receiver they had, on instructions, included a total wipeout code of four digits. These were the numbers Danny had him memorize at Castle Forbes, and were intended to protect Monk in the event of capture, provided he could punch in the code before he was taken.

But if his machine was captured intact, so reasoned the chief encoder, a former CIA cryptographer from Warrenton brought out of retirement for the job, the bad guys could use the machine to send false messages.

So to prove his authenticity, Monk had to include certain harmless words, all in sequence. If a transmission took place without those words, the ex-CIA man would know that whoever was out there was off the payroll. At that point he could use the Compuserve mainframe to log in to Monk’s PC via the satellite and use the same four digits to obliterate its memory, leaving the bad guys with a useless tin can.

Ricky Taylor was already into InTelCor’s mainframe when he hit those four digits. The satellite rolled over Moscow and sent down its “Are you there, baby?” call. The laptop replied “Yes, I am,” and the satellite, obedient to its instructions, wasted it.

The first Monk knew about it was when he went to check his machine and found his message, in clear, back on the screen. That meant it had been rejected. He negated the message manually, aware that, for reasons beyond his comprehension, something had gone wrong and he was out of contact.

There was an address Sir Nigel Irvine had given him just before he left London. He did not know where it was or who lived there. But it was all he had. With economy he could compress his last two messages into one, something the spymaster would have to know. That might work for getting a message out. Receiving any more was out of the question. For the first time, he was completely on his own. No more progress reports, no more confirmations. of action taken, no more instructions.

With the billion-dollar technology down, he would rely on the oldest allies in the Great Game: instinct, nerve, and luck. He prayed they would not let him down.

¯

IGOR Komarov finished the last page of the transcript and leaned back. He was never a man of high color, but now, Grishin noted, his face was like a sheet of paper.

“This is bad,” said Komarov.

“Very bad, Mr. President.”

“You should have captured him before now.”

“He is being sheltered by the Chechen mafia. This we now know. They live like rats in their own subterranean world.”

“Rats can be exterminated.”

“Yes, Mr. President. And they will be. When you are undisputed leader of this country.”

“They must be made to pay.”

“They will. Every last one of them.”

Komarov was still staring at him with those hazel eyes, but they were unfocused, as if their owner were looking to another time and another place, a time in the future, a place of settlement of accounts with his enemies. The two red spots were bright upon the cheekbones.

“Retribution. I want retribution. They have attacked me, they have attacked Russia, attacked the Motherland. There can be no mercy for scum like this. …”

His voice was rising, the hands starting to tremble as the rage cracked his habitual self-control. Grishin knew that if he could argue his point with enough skill he would win his argument. He leaned forward over the desk, forcing Komarov to look him in the eyes. Slowly the rage subsided and Grishin knew he had his attention.

“Listen to me, Mr. President. Please listen. What we now know enables me to turn the tables completely. You will have your revenge. Just give me the word.”

“What do you mean, Anatoli Grishin?”

“The key to counter-intelligence, Mr. President, is knowledge of the enemy’s intentions. This we now have. From that stems prevention. It is already taking place. In a few days, there will be no selected candidate for the throne of All the Russias. Now we have a second revelation of their intentions. Once again I must propose both prevention and retribution, all in one.”

“All four men?”

“There can be no choice.”

“Nothing must be traced back. Not yet. It is too early for that.”

“Nothing will be traced back. The banker? How many bankers have been killed in the past ten years? Fifty? At least. Armed and masked men, a settlement of accounts. It happens all the time.

“The policeman? The Dolgoruki gang will be happy to take the contract. How many cops have been wasted? Again, it happens all the time.

“As for the fool of a general, a burglary that went wrong. Nothing could be more common. And for the priest, a house servant caught ransacking his study during the night. Shot down by the Cossack guard, who in turn is killed by the thief as he dies.”

“Will anyone believe that?”

“I have a source inside the residence who will swear to it.”

Komarov looked at the papers he had finished reading and the tape beside them. He smiled thinly.

“Of course you do. I need to know no more about all this. I insist I know nothing more of all this.”

“But you do wish the four men bent upon your destruction to cease to function?”

“Certainly.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. That is all I need to know.”

¯

THE room at the Spartak Hotel had been booked in the name of Mr. Kuzichkin, and a man of that name had indeed checked in. Having done so he then walked out again, slipping his room key to Jason Monk as he did so. The Chechen guards filtered through the lobby, the stairwell, and the access to the elevators as he went upstairs. It was as safe a way as any of having twenty minutes on a telephone which, if traced, would reveal only a room in a non-Chechen-owned hotel far from the center of town.