It was nearly four o’clock in the morning and most of them had gone home or to bed.
The announcement would be made in the afternoon by which time Vassily would be embalmed and on view in a casket with his wounds concealed by clothing and the mortician’s art.
Sergei Bulygin found him pacing the veranda. “It will be a long time before anyone finds that vermin.”
“Thank you, Sergei. Did you find anything on him?”
“This-his invitation.” A faint aroma of the stables rolled off Sergei’s clothes. “Are there instructions?”
“Not tonight,” Alex said. “Sleep-there’ll be things to do today.”
Sergei nodded and made a half-turn, and paused. “I grieve with you for the General’s passing.”
“Yes…”
“I will mention him in my prayers.” Then Sergei left him.
A sweetness of honeysuckle flavored the air; the moon had come and gone, the stars made patchwork patterns among scudding cottonball clouds. He stared toward the mountains with preoccupied inattention.
A shadow fell through the doorway and he turned to find Prince Leon there. The Prince limped onto the veranda; he had an unlit cigar between his fingers and was nipping at the end with the blade of a brass-handled dagger. It was a knife the Prince had cherished for many years: Peter the Great had carried it at Azov in 1696.
“The question is, why did they kill him? What did they hope to gain?”
“Maybe they thought the scheme would die with him.”
“Presupposing they knew a great deal about the scheme. But if they knew that much would they not have known it was too big to be destroyed by one man’s death?”
“If you’d killed Lenin in nineteen-sixteen there might not have been an October Revolution.”
“It is not the same thing.”
“They’ve delayed the program. Maybe that’s all they expected to accomplish.”
“We have assumed the assassin was a paid hireling-a professional.” Leon laid the dagger on the stone rail and searched his pockets for matches. The dagger’s blade glinted dully. “It could have been the Germans you know.”
“How would they have found out about it?”
“How would anyone?” Leon got the cigar lighted. “Someone did-that is the sum of our knowledge. It leads to the conclusion we have a traitor among us.” His voice was very soft.
“Who knows about this besides those of us who were in that room?”
“Not many. The Americans-two or three of them. Deniken of course. The Grand Duke Dmitri and perhaps a few of his advisors in Switzerland. Churchill and a few of his people.”
Alex shook his head. “Then any one of them could have let something drop. A secret’s only a secret as long as one person knows it.”
“We can only hope the details of it do not reach the Kremlin.” Leon puffed on the cigar and took it away from his mouth. “Have you decided, Alex?”
He had tried to weigh it: tried to deal with the realities. But the guiding consideration was emotional, not susceptible to reason. The factors of history should have dominated his thinking: the opportunity to free the land of his birth from the evil of Stalin’s tyranny; the chance to help two hundred million people realize the dreams for which his father and millions of Russians had died; the possibility of making the gift of justice to a nation which had never in its history been free of despotism.
Against those he had tried to weigh the odds: the rocky instability of the coalition backing the scheme; the unlikelihood of prevailing with a small commando force where the mighty Wehrmacht of the Third Reich had not yet succeeded. The scheme was absurd from any objective vantage; Stalin’s armies numbered millions. In so many ways it had to be viewed as an exercise in fruitless and suicidal fantasy.
But it wasn’t any of those things that had decided him.
He said, “If you’ll trust me with it then I’m prepared to accept it.”
Leon said, “I don’t have any reservations about trusting you with the command. My reservations have to do with the practicality of continuing without Vassily-without what was in his head. It doesn’t seem possible for you to reconstruct his plan from the hints and clues he gave us-and even if it were, would we have enough time?”
Alex shook his head. “He was right about the time limit. If it isn’t done within a hundred days I doubt it can be done at all. But I wouldn’t like to waste five minutes trying to retrace Vassily’s plan. It wouldn’t have worked. If I take command the plan will be mine, not Vassily’s.”
Leon’s answer was a long time coming. “I think perhaps you had better tell me what it is that would not have worked.”
“The Kremlin’s a fortress. The rock underneath it is honey-combed with bunkers and tunnels-miles of them. The Soviet High Command uses those bunkers for its main headquarters because they’re protected from air raids. This is all common knowledge, Leon-it’s been in the press. The rooms underground are sealed off from one another by armored doors like the waterproof compartments in a modern freighter.”
“I am sure Vassily was aware of all this.”
“If he was it was a bad mistake to ignore it. The idea of storming the Kremlin with a regiment of shock troops just isn’t workable-they’d never get near Stalin. He’s too well protected.”
“He must have had more to his plan than that. More than he told us. He would not have made so obvious a mistake.”
“Probably not. I have an idea of what he had in mind.”
“Then I should like to hear it, Alex.”
“He’d have put his people in Red Army uniforms. Infiltrate them into the Kremlin like saboteurs. Take the chance a few of them would be caught out-count on some of them getting close enough to the Red leaders to be able to assassinate them before there’d been a general alarm.”
Leon watched him in surprise. “Are you clairvoyant, then?”
“It’s a plan he wanted to use once before. In a different context.”
“It sounds brilliant to me. Ingenious.”
“Any wild scheme may work. But that one overflows with risks. Vassily didn’t have much of a head for security-how can you expect to infiltrate a thousand men into one place and be confident that not a single one of them will be captured and reveal what he knows?”
“I see,” Leon said dubiously.
“His idea was to take the Kremlin. He told us that much. It wasn’t a sound objective-the Kremlin isn’t the White House or the Houses of Parliament. It’s an enormous place-a small city in itself, really. You’d have to expect a drawn-out pitched battle. It would take incredible luck to secure the fortress before Red reinforcements arrived. There are divisions-army corps-preparing defenses on the outskirts of Moscow. They could reach the Kremlin within half an hour of the first alarm.”
The cigar had grown a tall ash. Leon tapped it off. His eyes were half-closed, his lips pursed-the expression of a man formulating an argument.
Alex said, “There was a chance. The odds were against it but there was a long chance it might work. Vassily wanted to take that gamble.”
“Are there better odds to be found?”
“Yes.”
Leon said slowly, “You believe he knew this.”
“Yes. He wasn’t a fool.”
“Then why, Alex? You must tell me that.”
“Because if you do it the way it should be done, it won’t produce heroes.”
“You maintain he deliberately chose the less likely alternative because if it worked at all it would make him a hero.”
“I rather suspect it would have made him dictator of Russia in the end. I think he was willing to risk losing the whole packet for that.”
“That is a harsh judgment, Alex. He was arrogant, yes-he was in love with being in command. But I never knew him to show the slightest spark of political desire.”
“A dictator’s not a politician. He’s a conquering general.”
“Vassily’s favorite general,” Leon said slowly-pushing the words out with reluctance-“was Napoleon.”
There was a clatter of china from within-servants clearing up. It seemed to distract Leon; he put the cigar in his mouth and crossed the veranda to shut both doors. He returned slowly to the balustrade and Alex realized he had been using the time to compose his thoughts. He limped to the corner and stood there leaning on both palms, looking toward the dim heavy shadows of the mountains.
Alex said, “Vassily’s out of the picture-it serves no purpose to keep talking about him.”
After a while Leon nodded. “You have hardly had time to formulate a tactical scheme but I infer that you have a strategy in your head. Can you outline it for me?”
“I’ll try. We’ve got to remember we’re not going to war-we’re trying to effect a palace coup. Our objective isn’t military, it’s political. We need to keep the Russian army intact so that it can fight the Germans. What I’m saying is it’s no good trying to storm Moscow with a regiment of rangers armed to the teeth-we don’t want to lose the loyalty of the generals at the outset.”
“What is the alternative then?”
“Trick Stalin and his coterie into an entrapment. Draw them to a place where we can reach them.” He drew a breath. “Then blow them sky high.”
“How do you propose to get them in the open?”
“I’ll need the help of Oleg’s man inside the Kremlin. I can’t explain it better than that before I’ve talked with Oleg.”
“Then do so.” Leon turned to stare him in the eye. “Consider it settled, Alex. I will deal with the others. You will want to move very quickly.”
“I’ll have to start in the States then.”
“That is where the purse strings are. You have met this Colonel Buckner?”
“Yes.”
“You have rapport with him?”
“I think so. As long as our objective is the same.”
“Yes. Do not count on the Americans too much-they want us to do their fighting for them. They want to defeat Germany with their money and our blood. They are willing to fight to the last Russian, as Anatol puts it.” He changed the subject abruptly: “There is something else I must ask you to do. Last night I spoke of installing young Prince Felix on the figurehead throne. But the truth is that I am not sure he will accept.”
“I’m sure he will.”
“He has never had much love for pomp and ceremony.” Leon scraped ashes from the cigar against the stone. “Will you intercede for me with Felix? He has always respected you-he told me once he wished he could care about things the way you do.”
“Leon, it’s you who’s respected. By Felix and everyone else.”
“No-I am taken for granted. You are much closer to his own age. He can’t pretend to regard yours as grandfatherly demands.”
“I’m not a glib talker, you know that.”
“You measure your words. That makes them more valuable. He respects you for that-he will listen to you. Will you do it?”
“If you’re sure it’s best.”
“Thank you. Felix will be racing in Madrid tomorrow. You can be there by car in time to catch him at the end of the race. Then you can fly on from Madrid the following day-it should not delay your schedule.”