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He had hurled telephones, vases, and ink-stands at the trembling servant who had offended him, reducing one senior Black Guard officer to a blubbering wreck. He had used language more foul than Akopov had ever heard, broken furniture, and once had to be restrained as he belabored a victim with a heavy ebony ruler lest he actually kill the man.

Akopov knew the sign that one of these rages in the president of the UPF was coming to the surface. Komarov’s face went deathly pale, his manner became even more formal and courteous, and two bright red spots burned high on each cheekbone.

“Are you saying you have lost it, Nikita Ivanovich?”

“Not lost, Mr. President. Apparently mislaid.”

“That document is of a more confidential nature than anything you have ever handled. You have read it. You can understand why.”

“I do indeed, Mr. President.”

“There are only three copies in existence, Nikita. Two are in my own safe. No more than a tiny group of those closest to me will ever be allowed to see it. I even wrote it and typed it myself. I, Igor Komarov, actually typed all the pages myself rather than entrust it to a secretary. It is that confidential.”

“Very wise, Mr. President.”

“And because I count ... counted you as one of that tiny group, I permitted you to see it. Now you tell me it is lost.”

“Mislaid, temporarily mislaid, I assure you, Mr. President.”

Komarov was staring at him with those mesmeric eyes that could charm skeptics into collaboration or terrify backsliders. On each cheekbone the red spot burned bright in the pale face.

“When did you last see it?”

“Last night, Mr. President. I stayed late in order to read it in privacy. I left at eight o’clock.”

Komarov nodded. The night-duty guards’ register would confirm or deny that.

“You took it with you. Despite my orders, you permitted the file to leave the building.”

“No, Mr. President, I swear it. I locked it in the safe. I would never leave a confidential document lying around, or take it with me.”

“It is not in the safe now?”

Akopov swallowed, but he had no saliva.

“How many times have you been to the safe before my call?”

“None, Mr. President. When you called, that was the first time I went to the safe.”

“It was locked?”

“Yes, as usual.”

“It had been broken into?”

“Apparently not, Mr. President.”

“You have searched the room?”

“From top to bottom and end to end. I cannot understand it.”

Komarov thought for several minutes. Behind his blank face he felt a rising panic. Finally he called the security office on the ground floor.

“Seal the building. No one enters, no one leaves. Contact Colonel Grishin. Tell him to report to my office. Immediately. Wherever he is, whatever he is doing, I want him here within the hour.”

He lifted his forefinger from the intercom and gazed at his white-faced and trembling assistant.

“Return to your office. Communicate with nobody. Wait there until further notice.”

¯

AS an intelligent single and thoroughly modern young woman Celia Stone had long decided that she had the right to take her pleasures whenever and with whomsoever she fancied. At the moment she fancied the hard young muscles of Hugo Gray who had arrived from London barely two months earlier and six months after herself. He was Assistant Cultural Attaché and the same grade as she, but two years older and also single.

Each had a small but functional apartment in a residential block assigned to British Embassy staff off Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a square building with a central courtyard useful for parking, and with Russian militiamen posted at the entrance barrier. Even in modern Russia everyone presumed that goings in and out were noted, but at least the cars remained unvandalized.

After lunch she drove back inside the protective screen of the embassy on Sofia Quay and wrote up her report of lunch with the journalist. Much of their talk had been about the death of President Cherkassov the previous day and what was likely to happen now. She had assured the journalist of the continuing deep interest of the British people in Russian events, and hoped he believed her. She would know when his article appeared.

At five she drove back to her apartment for a bath and a short rest. She had a dinner date with Hugo Gray at eight, after which she intended they both return to her own flat. She did not wish to do much sleeping during the night.

¯

BY four in the afternoon Colonel Anatoli Grishin had convinced himself the missing document. was not within the building. He sat in Igor Komarov’s office and told him so.

In four years the two men had become interdependent. It had been in 1994 that Grishin had resigned his career with the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB with the rank of full colonel. He had become thoroughly disillusioned. Since the formal ending of Communist rule in 1991 the former KGB had become in his view a whited sepulchre. Even before then, in September 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev had broken up the world’s biggest security apparatus and farmed out its various wings into different commands.

The external intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate, had remained at its old headquarters at Yazenevo, out beyond the ring road, but had been renamed the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR. That was bad enough.

What was worse was that Grishin’s own division, the Second Chief Directorate, hitherto responsible for all internal security, the exposure of spies, and the suppression of dissent, had been emasculated, renamed the FSB, and ordered to reduce its own powers to a travesty of what they had once been.

Grishin regarded this with contempt. The Russian people needed discipline, and firm and occasionally harsh discipline, and it was the Second Chief Directorate that had provided it. He stuck with the reforms for three years, hoping to make major general, then quit. A year later he had been engaged as personal security chief by Igor Komarov, then still just one of the Politburo of the old Liberal Democratic Party.

The two men had risen to prominence and power together, and there was more, much more, to come. Over the years Grishin had created for Komarov his own utterly loyal close-protection squad, the Black Guards, now numbering six thousand fit young men whom he personally commanded.

Supporting the Guard was the League of Young Combatants, twenty thousand of them, the teenage wing of the UPF, all imbued with the correct ideology and fanatically loyal, which he also commanded. He was one of the few men who called Komarov by his first name and patronymic. The humblest street shouter could yell “Igor Alexeivitch” at Komarov, but that was part of the man-of-the-people camaraderie expected in Russia. In his private entourage Komarov demanded the formality of “Mr. President” from all but a few intimates.

“You are sure the file is no longer in this building?” asked Komarov.

“It cannot be, Igor Alexeivitch. In two hours we have practically taken the place apart. Every cupboard, every locker, every drawer, every safe. Every window and windowsill has been examined, every yard of the grounds. There was no break-in.

“The expert from the safe manufacturers has just finished. The safe was not forced. Either it was opened by someone who knew the combination, or the file was never in it. The garbage of last night has been impounded and searched. Nothing.

“The dogs were running free from seven
P.M.
No one entered the building after that—the night guards had relieved the day shift at six and the day shift left ten minutes later. Akopov was in his office until eight. The dog handler for last night has been brought back. He swears he restrained the dogs three times yesterday evening, to allow three late-working staff to leave by car, and Akopov was the last. The night log confirms that.”

“So?” asked Komarov.

“Human error or human malice. The two night guards have been collected from their barracks. I expect them any moment. They had the run of the building from Akopov’s departure at eight until the arrival of the day shift at six this morning. Then the day shift was here alone until the office staff arrived around eight. Two hours. But the day guards swear that on their first patrol all office doors on this floor were locked. Everyone working on this floor, including Akopov, confirms that.”

“Your theory, Anatoli?”

“Either Akopov took it with him, by accident or design, or he never locked it up and one of the night shift took it. They had master keys to the office doors.”

“So, it is Akopov?”

“First suspect, certainly. His private apartment has been ransacked. In his presence. Nothing. I thought he might have taken it with him, then lost his attaché case. That happened once at the Ministry of Defense. I was in charge of the investigation. It turned out not to be espionage but criminal negligence. The person responsible went to the camps. But Akopov’s briefcase is the same he always uses. It has been identified by three people.”

“So, he did it deliberately?”

“Possibly. But I have a problem with that. Why did he come in this morning and wait around to be caught? He had twelve hours to disappear. I may wish to ... um … interrogate him at greater length. To establish elimination or confession.”

“Permission granted.”

“And after that?”

Igor Komarov turned in his swivel chair to face the window. He mused for a while.

“Akopov has been a very good personal secretary,” he said at length. “But after this a replacement will be required. My problem is he has seen the document. Its contents are extremely confidential. If he is retained in a diminished capacity or dismissed he might feel a sense of resentment, even be tempted to divulge what he knows. That would be a pity, a great pity.”

“I understand completely,” said Colonel Grishin.

At that point the two bewildered night guards arrived and Grishin went downstairs to question them.

By 9:00
P.M.
the night guards’ quarters at the Black Guard barracks outside the city had been searched, revealing nothing more than the expected toiletries and porn magazines.

Inside the dacha the two men were separated and interviewed in different rooms. Grishin questioned them personally. They were clearly terrified of him, as well they might be. His reputation preceded him.

Occasionally he shouted obscenities in their ears, but for the two sweating men the worst ordeal was when he sat close and whispered the details of what awaited those caught lying to him. By eight he had a complete picture of what had happened during their shift the previous night. He knew their patrols had been erratic and irregular, that they had been glued to the TV screen for details of the president’s death. And he learned for the first time of the presence of the cleaner.

The man had been let in at ten. As usual. Via the underground passage. No one had accompanied him. Both guards had been needed to open the three doors, because one had the keypad combination to the street door, the other to the innermost door, and both to the middle door.

He knew the guards had seen the old man start on the top floor. As usual. He knew the guards had then broken from their TV watching to open the offices of the middle floor, the vital executive suite. He knew that one had stood in the doorway while the cleaning of Mr. Komarov’s personal office had been accomplished and the door then relocked, but that both men had been downstairs when the cleaner completed the remainder of the middle floor. As usual. So ... the cleaner had been alone in Akopov’s office. And he had left earlier than usual, in the small hours.

At nine Mr. Akopov, extremely pale, was escorted from the building. His own car was used but one of the Black Guard drove. Another sat beside the disgraced secretary in the rear. The car did not drive to Akopov’s apartment. It headed out of the city to one of the sprawling camps housing the Young Combatants.

By nine Colonel Grishin had finished reading the file from the staff and personnel office containing the employment details of one Zaitsev, Leonid, aged sixty-three, office cleaner. There was a private address, but the man would have left. He was due at the dacha at ten.

He did not appear. At midnight Colonel Grishin and three Black Guards left to visit the old man’s residence.

¯

AT that hour Celia Stone rolled off her young lover with a happy smile and reached for a cigarette. She smoked little, but this was one of those moments. Hugo Gray, on his back in her bed, continued to pant. He was a fit young man who kept himself in shape with squash and swimming, but the previous two hours had required most of his stamina.

Not for the first time he wondered why God had so arranged things that the appetites of a love-hungry woman would always exceed the capacities of a male. It was extremely unfair.

In the darkness Celia Stone took a long pull, felt the nicotine hit the spot, leaned over her lover, and tousled his dark brown curls.

“How on earth did you get to be a cultural attaché?” she teased. You wouldn’t know Turgenev from Lermontov.”

“I’m not supposed to,” grumbled Gray. “I’m supposed to tell the Russkies about our culture—Shakespeare, Brontë, that sort of thing.”

“And is that why you have to keep going into conference with the Head of Station?”

Gray came off the pillow fast gripped an upper arm, and hissed into her ear:

“Shut up, Celia. This place could be bugged.”

In a huff Celia Stone left to make coffee. She didn’t see why Hugo should be so picky about a little tease. Anyway what he did in the embassy was a pretty open secret.

She was right of course. For the previous month Hugo Gray had been the third and junior member of the Moscow Station of the Secret Intelligence Service. Once it had been much bigger in the good old days at the height of the Cold War. But times change and budgets diminish. In its collapsing state Russia was seen as a small enough threat.

More important, ninety percent of things that had once been secret were openly available or of minimal interest. Even the former KGB had a press officer, and across the city in the U.S. Embassy the CIA was down to a football team.

But Hugo Gray was young and keen, and convinced most diplomatic apartments were still bugged. Communism might have gone, but Russian paranoia was doing fine. He was correct, of course, but the FSB agents had already tagged him for what he was and were quite happy.