"There's a cab waiting out front. It'll be easy to spot. It's the only one at the moment."
"I'll be down in a few minutes."
Polyakov hung up and hurried out to the cab, not forgetting to nod to the concierge again.
"Any luck?"
"Enough. Thank you."
He slipped into the cab and closed the door. His heart was pounding. My God, he thought, I'm like a teenager waiting for a girl!
Before long the door opened. Immediately Polyakov was awash in .the Dancer's scent. He extended his hand in the Western fashion. "Dr. Tachyon, I presume."
The driver was a young Uzbek from the Embassy whose professional specialty was economic analysis, but whose greatest virtue was his ability to keep his mouth shut. His total lack of interest in Polyakov's activities and the challenge of navigating London's busy streets allowed Polyakov and Tachyon some privacy.
Polyakov's wild card had no face, so he had never been suspected of being an ace or joker. That, and the fact that he had only used his powers twice:
The first time was in the long, brutal winter of 1946-47, the winter following the release of the virus. Polyakov was a senior lieutenant then, having spent the Great Patriotic War as a zampolit, or political officer, at the munitions factories in the Urals. When the Nazis surrendered, Moscow Center assigned him to the counterinsurgency forces fighting Ukrainian nationalists-the "men from the forests" who had fought with the Nazis and had no intentions of giving up. (In fact they continued fighting until 1952.)
Polyakov's boss there was a thug named Suvin, who confessed drunkenly one night that he had been an executioner in the Lubiyanka during the Purge. Suvin had developed a real taste for torture; Polyakov wondered if that was the only possible response to a job that daily required one to shoot a fellow Party member in the back of the neck. One evening Polyakov brought in a Ukrainian teenager, a boy, for questioning. Suvin had been drinking and began to beat a confession out of the kid, which was a waste of time: the boy had already confessed to stealing food. But Suvin wanted to link him to the rebels.
Polyakov remembered, mostly, that he had been tired. Like everyone in the Soviet Union in that year, including those at the very highest levels, he was often hungry. It was the fatigue, he thought shamefully now, not human compassion, that made him leap at Suvin and shove him aside. Suvin turned on him and they fought. From underneath the other man, Polyakov managed to get his hands on his throat. There was no chance he could choke him ... yet Suvin suddenly turned red-dangerously red-and literally burst into flames.
The young prisoner was unconscious and knew nothing. Since fatalities in the war zone were routinely ascribed to enemy action, the bully Suvin was officially reported to have died "heroically" of "extreme thoracic trauma" and "burns," euphemisms for being fried to a cinder. The incident terrified Polyakov. At first he didn't even realize what had happened; information on the wild card virus was restricted. But eventually he realized that he had a power... that he was an ace. And he swore never to use the power again.
He had only broken that promise once.
By the autumn of 1955, Georgy Vladimirovich Polyakov, now a captain in the "organs," was using the legend of a junior Tass reporter in West Berlin. Aces and jokers were much in the news in those days. The Tass men monitored the Washington hearings with horror-it reminded some of them of the Purge-and delight. The mighty American aces were being neutralized by their own countrymen!
It was known that some aces and their Takisian puppet master (as Pravda described him) had fled the U.S. following the first HUAC hearings. They became high-priority targets for the Eighth Directorate, the KGB department responsible for Western Europe. Tachyon in particular was a personal target for Polyakov. Perhaps the Takisian held some clue to the secret of the wild card virus ... something to explain it ... something to make it go away. When he heard that the Takisian was on the skids in Hamburg, he was off.
Since Polyakov had made prior "research" trips to Hamburg's red-light district, he knew which brothels were likely to cater to an unusual client such as Tachyon. He found the alien in the third establishment he tried. It was near dawn; the Takisian was drunk, passed out, and