The door opened. A man with a neatly trimmed beard and red scarf tucked into a dark grey wool overcoat stepped in, signalled the waitress for a coffee, and took the chair opposite Ilya.
‘News from the front?’ asked Terentev.
‘None of it good, I’m afraid, Colonel.’
Terentev counted his good fortune. At least he felt could rely on his men’s loyalty. Sticking together in an organisation as large and amorphous as the KGB was the first rule of survival.
‘Our lot have the general secretary holed up in his dacha at Peredelkino. I sent Vasily there to check it out. Have you ever been there, Colonel?’
‘Many times, with my wife. My friend has a dacha there.’
Terentev pictured its woods, small well-tended gardens and evening gatherings when dissident artists rubbed shoulders with the political elite.
‘The Emergency Committee has not done itself any favours holding the general secretary so close to Moscow. How many men?’
‘Forty… fifty… maybe more. No one gets in or out… under the direct command of the KGB chairman himself.’
‘And General Marov?’
‘General Volkov visited him this afternoon… came away furious apparently. It doesn’t look like Volkov got what he wanted.’
‘Support, I would guess,’ said Terentev. Safety in numbers. Yuri would be a perfect addition to the list of conspirators. ‘I doubt General Marov is going to be rushing to the cause.’
Volkov was clearly not as confident as he appeared. Terentev doubted if the new colonel general could rely on the undivided loyalty of every district general. Yuri might just give him the credibility he needed with the outriders.
‘Are you reporting this up?’
Terentev shook his head. Where? If anyone found out that he was conducting a surveillance operation in Peredelkino he would land up in the same place as Yuri. The question was what could he do about it, if anything? The answer was plain enough, not very much. The deputy general secretary, secretary of defence, even his own boss were all complicit. Rumblings had not converted to people on the street… not yet, but then it had been less than forty-eight hours since the general secretary had disappeared from public view. The average citizen wanted to believe the Emergency Committee, but that confidence would soon evaporate if there were no sightings of the general secretary soon, and then what?
His junior officer sat waiting for instructions, staring out the window at the queue Terentev had been studying ten minutes before.
‘Just keep me informed; any change, let me know immediately.’
For now, he would just have to wait.
Chapter 60
MOSCOW, LUBYANKA
Yuri relieved himself in the hole that excused itself as a toilet in the corner of his small cell, zipped up his jeans and pulled on the overhead chain. He needed more water; the jug by the table had run dry an hour ago.
Through a gap in the hatch he counted four cells opposite and, if he stood sideways, the solid reinforced door giving on to the narrow corridor.
‘Derevenko… Yev!’ he shouted. Silence. If they wanted to isolate him, he thought, they had done a good job.
He went back and lay on the bed and wondered whether Anatoly had got through to Leningrad and what Viktoriya would make of it all if he had.
He thought back to Smolensk. It felt like a lifetime ago when Viktoriya and he had wandered the streets in that early first winter snow, of how he had kissed her under the prying eyes of an elderly woman who sat on a chair at the end of her hotel corridor. He remembered how Viktoriya had looked at him with a mixture of suspicion and amusement. You remind me of a wolf, she had said randomly, looking at him with those icy-blue eyes. How off guard he had been caught by that remark and how much he had thought about it since: predator, instinctual, powerful animal, threatening were all epithets one could attach to the word wolf. When he asked her what she had meant, she had just shrugged. Maybe she was right, but he wasn’t sure he entirely liked it either, not in the way she felt about him, anyway. But how else would he want to be perceived: a snake, a lamb…?
Neither of them had made any promises to each other when they had set off for their respective destinations the following morning: she to Leningrad, he eventually to Moscow; it had all been left hanging in the air, suspended, unresolved. If they ever met again, he wondered if she would pretend it never happened.
Yuri’s mind turned to Volkov again and the other district generals. Had they thrown their lot in with the new chief of staff? Presumably they had by what he had witnessed in Migalovo, or was it an intended consequence of a general mobilisation, with no time for introspection or dissent. All the same, Yuri didn’t think they would all be happy with it either. Ghukov was respected, but he did not believe Zhakov of the Far East district or Ivchenko of the Urals – who he got on with personally – would be eager to support a revived Communist government, not after the debacle of Afghanistan. General Alyabyev of Central Command Moscow, though, was that much harder to read. Older, no doubt approaching retirement, Yuri had little to do with him personally apart from staff meetings in Moscow. Alyabyev gave little away.
The sudden jangling of keys in the door made him sit up. The defence minister entered, followed by a guard with a jug of water, a bowl of something and a piece of rye bread. Were they trying to kill him with kindness now, he thought?
‘General, please eat.’
The defence minister gestured at the bowl.
‘May I say, General, I am deeply sorry to meet you under these circumstances.’
‘Well that makes two of us, Comrade Dubnikov.’
Yuri had met the defence minister, Viktor Dubnikov, on several occasions, although it was Ghukov as chief of staff who met with him mostly. He was definitely communist old guard. In his sixties, Dubnikov had served Brezhnev before the present general secretary. Yuri guessed he was part of the political balancing act that the general secretary had needed to perform in the Politburo. Neatly dressed in a black suit, white shirt and red tie, the minister took the only chair and sat down. He removed a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mopped his face.
‘As I said, I am sorry to see you under these circumstances,’ he repeated.
‘We could take this conversation to a café,’ Yuri countered.
‘Well that would be awkward, I’m sure you will appreciate. Colonel, General Volkov has, I understand, been to see you. I just wanted to reassure you personally that should you decide to support the Emergency Committee, you would be well rewarded. You may have your personal difficulties with Volkov, but he does respect your military ability, he has told me so, as I do, I might add. We need talent like yours, General… How would second in command to the colonel general sound?’
‘Comrade Dubnikov, I’m truly flattered, but all this can be easily solved. Let me see the general secretary. If he is ill, as you say he is, I will certainly reconsider.’
‘I’m afraid that will not be possible. The general secretary is not receiving visitors, he is too unwell.’
‘Why did I think you would say that?
‘Comrade, I said this to someone quite recently, do you want to be on the wrong or the right side of history? Do you, Comrade Dubnikov?’
Dubnikov stood up, blue in the face, and banged on the door for the guard.