“What about Malenkov?” Frank asked.
“Bah. Puppet. The deputy premiers have the power, and they’ll be working to pull his strings,” Beam said.
Any further conversation was cut short as the somber ceremonial music changed to a slightly louder, more up-tempo melody when the current leadership of the Soviet Union entered the hall, led by Georgy Malenkov, the new premier — a round-faced, pudgy bureaucrat who looked for all the world like a harried accountant. Behind him was Molotov, Malenkov’s recently reappointed foreign minister, whose spectacles and mustache gave him the air of a college professor or cartoon supervillain, depending on your point of view, and whose idea of “diplomacy” boiled down to repeating what he wanted until he either got it or called off the talks. Stern-faced Nicolai Bulganin came in full Soviet Army regalia, which to Frank’s eye made him look like a tin-pot dictator of a banana republic somewhere. Lazar Kaganovich was a balding, mustachioed man with a sturdy frame who, frankly, was the only one who looked like any of the workers or peasants supposedly in charge of the Soviet Union.
And finally, there was Lavrentiy Beria — head of State Security and the infamous MGB and, apparently unbeknownst to the rest of the Soviet leadership, a Variant.
Frank’s eyes followed Beria as he proceeded down the hall, hoping that the man would catch a glimpse of him. It was unlikely — there were several hundred people in the hall, after all, and the American delegation had been exiled to a back corner of the room along with the other non-Communist officials, cordoned off from the rest by a wall of anonymous, stone-faced handlers.
They’d have to send their message later, then.
U.S. Navy Commander Danny Wallace pulled the collar of the woolen coat up around his face and adjusted the pageboy cap on his head to ward off the morning chill in Red Square. He was wearing the simple clothes of a factory worker — heavy overalls and a work shirt, steel-toed leather boots — and kept his gloves on lest someone discover the hands of an officer and desk worker rather than those of a laborer. Danny paused to look at his left hand briefly, flexing it. Nearly four years ago, that hand had been severely damaged in an experiment with a vortex phenomenon created by the bombing at Hiroshima and transported to a secret American facility — a kind of dimensional anomaly that was somehow connected to the advent of Variants worldwide. The Russians had stumbled upon and quarantined a vortex of their own as well, of course, because nothing was ever easy. The hand had gotten better, thanks to another Variant’s Enhancement, but Danny swore he could feel it still ache some days, a phantom pain that would never quite go away.
Shaking off the memory, Danny turned and opened his mind, stretching out with his senses for the unmistakable mental pull of other Variants. In addition to being the day-to-day commanding officer of the MAJESTIC-12 program, Danny himself was a Variant too. His only Enhancement was the ability to detect other Variants — a tool that proved extremely useful for the U.S. government as it was finding and collecting Enhanced individuals to recruit for the MJ-12 program.
It also made discovering Soviet Variants a hell of a lot easier. And today, Moscow was full of them.
Danny couldn’t see any Variants right now, but he felt no fewer than a dozen in the immediate area around Red Square. Three of them were well known to him — Frank and Maggie, of course, would be part of the procession from the House of the Unions to Red Square, where Stalin would take his place next to the body of Lenin. Then there was Tim Sorensen, a middle-aged Minnesota electrician who could turn invisible at will — one of the absolute best Enhancements a covert agent could have, frankly, even if a condition of his ability was that he had to remain silent, not touch anything, and make sure to dodge whoever was coming his way. Crowds made Sorensen’s job especially tough, which was why he was wandering the halls of the largely empty Kremlin now — a robust opportunity to gather intelligence straight from the source while nearly everyone else in Moscow was at the funeral. Danny smiled slightly at the thought of Sorensen invisibly rifling through filing cabinets in Beria’s office while the man himself was only a few hundred yards away.
Of course, there was Beria himself, whom Danny had met before on a plain in Kazakhstan, part of the mission to rescue Variants who’d been captured during a crapshoot of a mission in Syria in ’49. The Soviet spymaster was slowly entering Red Square now, among Stalin’s pallbearers. Frank and Maggie were trailing behind him — along with two others who were likely Beria’s own agents.
Yet another Variant seemed to flicker in and out of Danny’s senses; he figured it was another Russian he’d met before, one who could send a shadowy projection of himself to almost anywhere else in the world. It made sense that this other Variant would be checking out the funeral — running interference for Beria and keeping an eye on the crowds.
Danny pulled his coat collar up a little higher. Just in case.
The rest of the Variants Danny sensed were spread around the city. He felt the vague pull of others leading off toward Leningrad, home of the Bekhterev Institute — a front for Beria’s Soviet version of the MAJESTIC-12 program. Over the coming days, Danny would need to track down and visually identify the other Variants in the city. The palm-sized camera in his hand would help with that, and give the American Embassy and its staff of full-time spooks new persons of interest to track and tail.
As the first speaker of the day — Malenkov, the one who had taken Stalin’s place at the top of the Party — began his oration, someone bumped into Danny’s shoulder hard, prompting him to turn quickly and defensively. It was only a “fellow” worker, straining for a better view. “Izvini, tovarishch,” the man said absently. Sorry, Comrade.
“Ya v poryadeke,” Danny replied. I’m fine. Unlike Frank’s facility with languages, Danny’s Russian skills had been earned the hard way, through intensive classes at the Army’s language school in Monterey, California. But he was getting pretty good, and Frank humored him enough to practice regularly at their base in Mountain Home.
The man next to him then bent down and picked something up off the ground. “Dumayu, ty uronil eto, tovarishch,” the man said to Danny, handing him his wallet.
Danny immediately reached for his back pocket, and found that his wallet was indeed missing. “Oy! Spasibo!” Danny said, taking the wallet from the smiling “comrade” next to him, amazed at the skill that must have been used to lift the wallet from a deep pants pocket. The MGB wasn’t taking any chances today, it seemed — but neither was Danny, which was why his wallet contained perfectly doctored papers identifying him as Dmitry Alekandrovich Vavilov, late of the village of Gornyy, near Irkutsk in the far western part of Russia.
Really, it should’ve been Frank pulling crowd duty — his usefulness with language and culture was, of course, built on lifetimes of other people’s experiences. But Danny wanted the freedom to pursue other Variants, if necessary, whereas Frank’s insights into the new politics of the Soviet Union would be handier if he had a front-row seat.
The MGB man who had lifted Danny’s wallet smiled at him and then continued to push his way through the crowd. Another test passed, one of dozens through the years — though never here, in the very heart of Communism. Danny and his fellow Variants had been to Istanbul, Prague, Vienna, Damascus, Beirut, Kazakhstan, East Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina, Korea, and China — so many countries — since the MAJESTIC-12 program started up in 1947, but they’d never been sent to the U.S.S.R. itself until now. The power vacuum after Stalin’s death — and the unspoken but very real fear in Washington of Beria’s ascension — had paved the way for MAJESTIC-12’s position in the vanguard of this particular op.