Templar was joyously introduced to a wide array of lower-middle-class apartment dwellers, most of them exceptionally pleasant and delightfully hospitable.
He played a few hands of gin rummy with the enchanting Olya from Chelyabinsk, a natural beauty who was on her way to becoming a consummate cardsharp.
“Watch out for that one,” warned Frankie with a giddy laugh. “She graduated with honors from Language Lycee ninety-three, and someday she will marry my cousin!”
“Gin!” exclaimed Olya.
“Warn your cousin,” advised Templar.
They ate, they laughed, they sipped tea and enjoyed each other’s company. For those few brief hours Simon Templar allowed himself to escape into a world he had only seen from the outside — a world of honest friends and unselfish sharing.
When the last members of the impromptu dinner party had eaten their fill and returned to their own subdivided cubicles, Frankie finished her tea and eyed Templar quizzically.
“Okay, we all ate. Now what?”
Templar chuckled and sat down opposite her. “I had a marvelous time.”
“Yeah. Me, too. When do you see the president?”
Back to business.
“Oh, that’s easy,” replied Templar. “When I break into the Kremlin.”
“You’d have to be world’s best burglar to do that...”
“True,” agreed Templar.
Frankie narrowed her eyes and stared at him.
“What exactly do you do?”
“Let me put it this way, Frankie: Scotland Yard says I can break into anywhere. They don’t like me much. They don’t know my name, but they call me the Saint.”
Frankie smirked. “I don’t see halo over your head,” she said. “The police are looking for you everywhere, this is true?”
“They won’t find me here, now, will they?”
“Scotland Yard doesn’t come here very often,” she said with a nonchalant shrug. “Besides, you don’t seem like criminal to me. Tretiak is criminal.”
“Well, Frankie, I guess I was a criminal. I’ve had somewhat of a change of heart, or modification of career, or reorientation of identity.” He laughed aloud as if he was enjoying a marvelous joke.
She looked at him curiously.
“Someone tell a funny story and I missed it?”
“Yes,” continued Templar enthusiastically, “it’s the funniest story of my life, a grand and glorious adventure. Consider me a finely tempered sword slowly becoming unsheathed.”
“No unsheathing around me, please,” admonished Frankie with a wag of her finger. “We just friends. Now, you plan to stop Tretiak’s takeover or you going to have more dessert?”
The Saint had more dessert. Frankie stared at him.
“I don’t rush into things, Frankie. I plan, and I plan well. And you are a very lucky woman.”
“I am?”
“Indeed,” replied Templar happily. “You are about to see a world-class expert at the top of his form.”
“Hoo-boychic,” she said wearily. “I hope you as wonderful as you think.”
2
Any doubts lingering in Frankie’s mind concerning Simon Templar’s abilities evaporated in the heat of first-hand experience. The next several hours were the busiest and most memorable of her life.
It was Frankie who emptied Templar’s locker at the train station, and she managed to suppress an audible gasp when she saw the quantity of cash, diversity of passports, and high-tech toys stashed therein.
It was Frankie who then sought out the self-sacrificing Sofiya. Perched on her high-heels and eyeing the street for her next cash customer, the plucky teenager’s first response to Frankie’s approach was polite but firm.
“No ladies,” she said with a shake of her head.
“That’s not what this is about,” Frankie assured her and handed over an envelope.
“Take this upstairs before you open it, and don’t tell anyone how you got it.”
Sofiya accepted it with curiosity, took it to her apartment, and tore open the clasp.
Inside was more money than she had ever seen in her life and a small scrap of paper containing two words: thank you.
“Mama,” called out Sofiya, “I just retired!”
It was Frankie who nervously drove the mirror-windowed minivan — she didn’t have the nerve to ask Templar where it came from — while the Saint snapped photos of the Kremlin through the silvered panes.
“Kremlin no savings bank or museum like you usually rob. Famous Templar,” advised Frankie. “The word Kremlin means ‘fortified stronghold.’ ”
“I’ve done my homework,” murmured Templar as he snapped more photos. “Karpov’s Kremlin is ninety acres enclosed by a 1.4-mile brick wall built during the reign of Grand Duke Ivan the Third back in the mid 1400s. The Kremlin stopped being a fortress in the seventeenth century.”
“Tell that to the guards, motion sensors, and surveillance cameras,” suggested Frankie. “I like that Karpov,” she added seriously. “He tried to do good things. Too bad politics such dirty business.”
“A universal problem. Partisan politics is, by its very nature, divisive. Tretiak wants to divide it all into his pocket, his power, and he doesn’t care who freezes in the process.”
The van’s windshield wipers sloshed aside a fresh layer of icy snow.
“Why you taking all these pictures when you can buy postcards like any other tourist?”
“A mental exercise,” explained Templar. “I always take pictures of the target.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have a map of Stalin’s bunker?”
Simon stopped his index finger in mid-snap.
“Did you say...?”
Frankie smiled.
“I told you before, I am the Russian underground.”
Within the Kremlin walls, the oldest ensemble was centered around the Cathedral Square. It consisted of the Assumption Cathedral, where rulers were crowned, the Annunciation Cathedral, private church of the tsars, the Archangel Cathedral, burial place of the royal family until Tsar Peter I, the Hall of the Facets with a magnificent vaulted throne room, and the 266-foot Bell Tower of Ivan III.
None of these astonishing structures, rich in history and packed with priceless artifacts, were of significant interest to Simon Templar. He was far more concerned with the labyrinth of tunnels below ground — tunnels detailed in the dozens of maps spread out in Frankie’s underground art lair.
The authentic replicas, fabricated artifacts, and other bits of fakery were shoved out of the way. One hundred percent of their concentration was focused on finding a way into Stalin’s bunker.
“Look. Lead-lined door reinforced with eight feet of concrete,” explained Frankie, poking her finger at a particular illustration. “Maybe you take nuclear weapon with you in tunnel and blow yourself up inside?”
“Not a practical solution.” Simon Templar sighed. “But if there is a door, that means there is a way for the door to open.”
“Sure. See that sensor on the entrance hatch?”
Templar squinted in the yellow light from the lair’s oil lamps. “More or less.”
“It’s a radiation detector. It will only open the door after dissipation of nuclear fallout,” she explained, as if such details were common knowledge. “It’s very sophisticated, very intelligent. It was updated during Gorbachev’s time. The idea is that if you hide in there during nuclear war, when fallout goes away, the door opens.”
Templar marveled at the concept.
“Put this in a penny-dreadful pot-boiler and no one would swallow it for a second.”
Frankie had no idea what Templar was talking about.
“That means you’re cooked? You giving up this crazy idea?”
He smiled his most seraphic and illuminating smile. “Of course not. If this system is intelligent, that means it can think. If it can think, it can be fooled.”