"Eh?"
"Our home and our life should be here. In Russia. The New Russia that
we'll have shortly."
He scoffed at her. "Live here when there's California? Ana, Ana, you
don't know what living is. Why--"
"But, Paul, I'm a Russian. If the United States is a more pleasant place
to live than Russia will be, when we have ended the police state, then
it is part of my duty to improve Russia."
It suddenly came to him that she meant it. "But I was thinking, all
along, that after this was over we'd be married. I'd be able to show you
_my_ country."
"And, I don't know why, I was thinking we both expected to be making a
life for ourselves here."
They were silent for a long time in mutual misery.
Paul said finally, "This is no time to make detailed plans. We love each
other, that should be enough. When it's all over, we'll have the chance
to look over each other's way of life. You can visit the States with
me."
"And I'll take you on a visit to Armenia. I know a little town in the
mountains there which is the most beautiful in the world. We'll spend a
week there. A month! Perhaps one day we can build a summer dacha there."
She laughed happily. "Why practically everyone lives to be a hundred
years old in Armenia."
"Yeah, we'll have to go there sometime," Paul said quietly.
* * * * *
He'd been scheduled to see Leonid that night but at the last moment the
other sent Ana to report that an important meeting was to take place. A
meeting of underground delegates from all over the country. They were
making basic decisions on when to move--but Paul's presence wasn't
needed.
He had no feeling of being excluded from something that concerned him.
Long ago it had been decided that the less details known by the average
man in the movement about Paul's activities, the better it would be.
There is always betrayal and there are always counter-revolutionary
agents within the ranks of an organization such as this. What was the
old Russian proverb? When four men sit down to discuss revolution, three
are police spies and the third a fool.
Actually, this had been astonishingly well handled. He had operated for
over a year with no signs that the KGB was aware of his activities.
Leonid and his fellows were efficient. They had to be. The Commies had
been slaughtering anyone who opposed them for forty years now. To
survive as a Russian underground you had to be good.
No, it wasn't a feeling of exclusion. Paul Koslov was stretched out on
the bed of his king-size Astoria Hotel room, his hands behind his head
and staring up at the ceiling. He recapitulated the events of the past
months from the time he'd entered the Chief's office in Washington until
last night at the dacha with Leonid and Ana.
The whole thing.
And over and over again.
There was a line of worry on his forehead.
[Illustration]
He swung his feet to the floor and approached the closet. He selected
his most poorly pressed pair of pants, and a coat that mismatched it. He
checked the charge in his .38 Noiseless, and replaced the weapon under
his left arm. He removed his partial bridge, remembering as he did so
how he had lost the teeth in a street fight with some Commie union
organizers in Panama, and replaced the porcelain bridge with a typically
Russian gleaming steel one. He stuffed a cap into his back pocket, a
pair of steel rimmed glasses into an inner pocket, and left the room.
He hurried through the lobby, past the Intourist desk, thankful that it
was a slow time of day for tourist activity.
Outside, he walked several blocks to 25th of October Avenue and made a
point of losing himself in the crowd. When he was sure that there could
be no one behind him, he entered a _pivnaya_, had a glass of beer, and
then disappeared into the toilet. There he took off the coat, wrinkled
it a bit more, put it back on and also donned the cap and glasses. He
removed his tie and thrust it into a side pocket.
He left, in appearance a more or less average workingman of Leningrad,
walked to the bus station on Nashimson Volodarski and waited for the
next bus to Petrodvorets. He would have preferred the subway, but the
line didn't run that far as yet.
The bus took him to within a mile and a half of the dacha, and he walked
from there.
By this time Paul was familiar with the security measures taken by
Leonid Shvernik and the others. None at all when the dacha wasn't in use
for a conference or to hide someone on the lam from the KGB. But at a
time like this, there would be three sentries, carefully spotted.
This was Paul's field now. Since the age of nineteen, he told himself
wryly. He wondered if there was anyone in the world who could go through
a line of sentries as efficiently as he could.
He approached the dacha at the point where the line of pine trees came
nearest to it. On his belly he watched for ten minutes before making the
final move to the side of the house. He lay up against it, under a bush.
From an inner pocket he brought the spy device he had acquired from
Derek Steven's Rube Goldberg department. It looked and was supposed to
look considerably like a doctor's stethoscope. He placed it to his ears,
pressed the other end to the wall of the house.
Leonid Shvernik was saying, "Becoming killers isn't a pleasant prospect
but it was the Soviet who taught us that the end justifies the means.
And so ruthless a dictatorship have they established that there is
literally no alternative. The only way to remove them is by violence.
Happily, so we believe, the violence need extend to only a small number
of the very highest of the hierarchy. Once they are eliminated and our
transmitters proclaim the new revolution, there should be little further
opposition."
Someone sighed deeply--Paul was able to pick up even that.
"Why discuss it further?" somebody whose voice Paul didn't recognize,
asked. "Let's get onto other things. These broadcasts of ours have to be
the ultimate in the presentation of our program. The assassination of
Number One and his immediate supporters is going to react unfavorably at
first. We're going to have to present unanswerable arguments if our
movement is to sweep the nation as we plan."
A new voice injected, "We've put the best writers in the Soviet Union to
work on the scripts. For all practical purposes they are completed."
"We haven't yet decided what to say about the H-Bomb, the missiles, all
the endless equipment of war that has accumulated under the Soviets, not
to speak of the armies, the ships, the aircraft and all the personnel
who man them."
Someone else, it sounded like Nikolai Kirichenko, from Moscow, said.
"I'm chairman of the committee on that. It's our opinion that we're
going to have to cover that matter in our broadcasts to the people and
the only answer is that until the West has agreed to nuclear
disarmament, we're going to have to keep our own."
Leonid said, and there was shock in his voice, "But that's one of the
most basic reasons for the new revolution, to eliminate this mad arms
race, this devoting half the resources of the world to armament."
"Yes, but what can we do? How do we know that the Western powers won't
attack? And please remember that it is no longer just the United States
that has nuclear weapons. If we lay down our defenses, we are capable of
being destroyed by England, France, West Germany, even Turkey or Japan!
And consider, too, that the economies of some of the Western powers are
based on the production of arms to the point that if such production
ended, overnight, depressions would sweep their nations. In short, they
can't afford a world without tensions."
"It's a problem for the future to solve," someone else said. "But
meanwhile I believe the committee is right. Until it is absolutely
proven that we need have no fears about the other nations, we must keep
our own strength."
Under his hedge, Paul grimaced, but he was getting what he came for, a
discussion of policy, without the restrictions his presence would have
put on the conversation.
"Let's deal with a more pleasant subject," a feminine voice said. "Our
broadcasts should stress to the people that for the first time in the
history of Russia we will be truly in the position to lead the world!
For fifty years the Communists attempted to convert nations into
adopting their system, and largely they were turned down. Those
countries that did become Communist either did so at the point of the
Red Army's bayonet or under the stress of complete collapse such as in
China. But tomorrow, and the New Russia? Freed from the inadequacy and
inefficiency of the bureaucrats who have misruled us, we'll develop a
productive machine that will be the envy of the world!" Her voice had
all but a fanatical ring.
Someone else chuckled, "If the West thought they had competition from us
before, wait until they see the New Russia!"
Paul thought he saw someone, a shadow, at the side of the clearing. His
lips thinned and the .38 Noiseless was in his hand magically.
False alarm.
He turned back to the "conversation" inside.
Kirichenko's voice was saying, "It is hard for me not to believe that
within a period of a year or so half the countries of the world will
follow our example."
"Half!" someone laughed exuberantly. "The world, Comrades! The new
system will sweep the world. For the first time in history the world
will see what Marx and Engels were _really_ driving at!"
* * * * *
Back at the hotel, toward morning, Paul was again stretched out on the
bed, hands under his head, his eyes unseeingly staring at the ceiling as
he went through his agonizing reappraisal.
There was Ana.
And there was even Leonid Shvernik and some of the others of the
underground. As close friends as he had ever made in a life that
admittedly hadn't been prone to friendship.
And there was Russia, the country of his birth. Beyond the underground
movement, beyond the Soviet regime, beyond the Romanoff Czars. Mother
Russia. The land of his parents, his grandparents, the land of his
roots.
And, of course, there was the United States and the West. The West which
had received him in his hour of stress in his flight from _Mother_
Russia. Mother Russia, ha! What kind of a mother had she been to the
Koslovs? To his grandfather, his father, his mother and brother? Where
would he, Paul, be today had he as a child not been sent fleeing to the
West?
And his life work. What of that? Since the age of nineteen, when a
normal teenager would have been in school, preparing himself for life.
Since nineteen he had been a member of the anti-Soviet team.
A star, too! Paul Koslov, the trouble-shooter, the always reliable,
cold, ruthless. Paul Koslov on whom you could always depend to carry the
ball.
Anti-Soviet, or anti-Russian?
Why kid himself about his background. It meant nothing. He was an
American. He had only the faintest of memories of his family or of the
country. Only because people told him so did he know he was a Russian.
He was as American as it is possible to get.
What had he told such Westerners, born and bred, as Lord Carrol and
Derek Stevens? _If he wasn't a member of the team, there just wasn't a
team._
But then, of course, there was Ana.
Yes, Ana. But what, actually, was there in the future for them? Now that
he considered it, could he really picture her sitting in the drug store
on Montez Street, Grass Valley, having a banana split?
Ana was Russian. As patriotic a Russian as it was possible to be. As
much a dedicated member of the Russian team as it was possible to be.
And as a team member, she, like Paul, knew the chances that were
involved. You didn't get to be a star by sitting on the bench. She
hadn't hesitated, in the clutch, to sacrifice her favorite brother.
* * * * *
Paul Koslov propped the Tracy, the wristwatch-like radio before him,
placing its back to a book. He made it operative, began to repeat,
"Paul calling. Paul calling."