His sergeant came crashing through the olive grove.
“Well done, laddie!” he shouted. “You got ’em.”
Munro looked down at the bodies of the boys who would never marry or have children, never dance to a bouzouki or feel the warmth of sun and wine again. One of them was still clutching the black stick; it was a sausage. A piece of it hung out of the body’s mouth. He had been having breakfast Munro turned on the sergeant.
“You don’t own me!” he shouted. “You don’t bloody own me! Nobody owns me but me!”
The sergeant put the outburst down to first-kill nerves and failed to report it. Perhaps that was a mistake. For authority failed to notice that Adam Munro was not completely, not one hundred percent, obedient. Not ever again.
Six months later he was urged to consider himself as potential officer material and extend his time in the Army to three years so as to qualify for a short-service commission. Tired of Cyprus, he did so and was posted back to England, to the Officer Cadet Training Unit at Eaton Hall. Three months later he got his “pip” as a second lieutenant.
While form-filling at Eaton Hall, he had mentioned that he was fluent in French and German. One day he was casually tested in both languages, and his claim proved to be correct. Just after his commissioning, it was suggested he might like to apply for the Joint Services Russian language course, which in those days was situated at a camp called Little Russia at Bodmin in Cornwall. The alternative was regimental duties at the barracks in Scotland, so he agreed. Within six months he emerged not merely fluent in Russian but virtually able to pass for a Russian.
In 1957, despite considerable pressure from the regiment to stay on, he left the Army, for he had decided he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. He had seen a few of them in Cyprus and thought he would prefer the job to office work. At the age of twenty-one he joined The Scotsman in his native Edinburgh as a cub reporter, and two years later moved to London, where he was taken on by Reuters, the international news agency with its headquarters at 85 Fleet Street.
In the summer of 1960 his languages again came to his rescue; he was twenty-four, and he was posted to the Reuters office in West Berlin as second man to the then bureau chief, Alfred Kluehs. That was the summer before the Wall went up, and within three months he had met Valentina, the woman he now realized to have been the only one he had ever really loved in his life. ...
A man sat down beside him and coughed. Munro jerked himself out of his reverie. Teaching tradecraft to sprogs one week, he told himself, and forgetting the basic rules a fortnight later. Never slacken attention before a meet.
The Russian looked at him uncomprehendingly, but Munro wore the necessary polka-dot tie. Slowly the Russian put a cigarette in his mouth, eyes on Munro. Corny, but it still worked. Munro took out his lighter and held the flame to the cigarette tip.
“Ronald collapsed at his desk two weeks ago,” he said softly and calmly. “Ulcers, I’m afraid. I am Michael. I’ve been asked to take over from him. Oh, and perhaps you can help me. Is it true that the Ostankino TV tower is the highest structure in Moscow?”
The Russian officer in plainclothes exhaled smoke and relaxed. The words were exactly the ones established by Lessing, whom he had known only as Ronald.
“Yes,” he replied. “It is five hundred forty meters high.”
He had a folded newspaper in his hand, which he laid on the seat between them. Munro’s folded raincoat slipped off his knees to the ground. He retrieved it, refolded it, and placed it on top of the newspaper. The two men ignored each other for ten minutes, while the Russian smoked. Finally he rose and stubbed the butt into the ground, bending as he did so.
“A fortnight’s time,” muttered Munro. “The men’s toilet under G Block at the New State Circus. During the clown Popov’s act. The show starts at seven-thirty.”
The Russian moved away and continued strolling. Munro surveyed the scene calmly for ten minutes. No one showed interest. He scooped up the mackintosh, newspaper, and buff envelope inside it and returned by Metro to Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The envelope contained an up-to-date list of Red Army officer postings.
WHILE ADAM MUNRO was changing trains at Revolution Square shortly before eleven A.M. that morning of June 10, a convoy of a dozen sleek black Zil limousines was sweeping through the Borovitsky Gate in the Kremlin wall a hundred feet above his head and thirteen hundred feet southwest of him. The Soviet Politburo was about to begin a meeting that would change history.
The Kremlin is a triangular compound, with its apex, dominated by the Sobakin Tower, pointing due north. On all sides it is protected by a fifty-foot wall studded by eighteen towers and penetrated by four gates.
The southern two thirds of this triangle is the tourist area, where docile parties troop along to admire the cathedrals, halls, and palaces of the long-dead tsars. At the midsection is a cleared swath of tarmacadam, patrolled by guards, an invisible dividing line across which tourists may not step. But the cavalcade of custom-built limousines that morning purred across this open space toward the three buildings in the northern part of the Kremlin.
The smallest of these is the Kremlin Theater to the east. Half exposed and half hidden behind the theater stands the building of the Council of Ministers, seemingly the home of the government, inasmuch as the ministers meet here. But the real government of the USSR lies not in the Council of Ministers but in the Politburo, the tiny, exclusive group who constitute the pinnacle of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or CPSU.
The third building is the biggest. It lies up along the western facade, just behind the wall’s crenelations, overlooking the Alexandrovsky Gardens down below. In shape it is a long, slim rectangle running north. The southern end is the old Arsenal, a museum for antique weaponry. But just behind the Arsenal the interior walls are blocked off. To reach the upper section, one must arrive from outside and penetrate a high, wrought-iron barrier that spans the gap between the Ministers Building and the Arsenal. The limousines that morning swept through the wrought-iron gates and came to rest beside the upper entrance to the secret building.
In shape, the upper Arsenal is a hollow rectangle; inside is a narrow courtyard running north and south, and dividing the complex into two even narrower blocks of apartments and offices. There are four stories, including the attics. Halfway up the inner, eastern office block, on the third floor, overlooking the courtyard only and screened from prying eyes, is the room where the Politburo meets every Thursday morning to hold sway over 250 million Soviet citizens and scores of millions more who like to think they dwell outside the boundaries of the Russian empire.
For an empire it is. Although in theory the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic is one of fifteen republics that make up the Soviet Union, in effect the Russia of the tsars, ancient or modern, rules the other fourteen non-Russian republics with a rod of iron. The three arms Russia uses and needs to implement this rule are the Red Army, including as it always does the Navy and Air Force; the Committee of State Security, or KGB, with its 100,000 staffers, 300,000 armed troops, and 600,000 informers; and the Party Organizations Section of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee, controlling the Party cadres in every place of work, thought, abode, study, and leisure from the Arctic to the hills of Persia, from the fringes of Brunswick to the shores of the Sea of Japan. And that is just inside the empire.
The room in which the Politburo meets in the Arsenal Building of the Kremlin is about fifty feet long and twenty-five wide, not enormous for the power enclosed in it. It is decorated in the heavy, marbled decor favored by the Party bosses, but dominated by a long table topped with green baize. The table is T-shaped.