warn him." "About what?" 'That anyone prowling around Leningrad looking for information about an illustrious old St. Petersburg family named Voroshin will probably get his head blown off." Bray started the car. "It's wild," he said. "We're going after the inheritors--or we think we are-because we've got their names. But there's someone else, and I don't think any of them mean much without him." "Who is that?" "A shepherd boy. He's the one we've really got to find, and I don't have the vaguest idea of how to do it."
Taleniekov walked to the middle of the block on Helsinki's Itli Kaivopuisto, noting the lights of the American Embassy down the street.
The sight of the building was appropriate; he had been thinking of Beowulf Agate off and on for most of the day.
It had taken him most of the day to absorb the news in Scofield's cable.
The words themselves were innocuous, a salesman's report to an executive of a home office regarding Italian imports of Finnish crystal, but the new information was startling and complex. Scofield had made extraordinary progress in a very short time.
He had found the first connection; it was a Scozd-the first name on the guest list of Guillaume de Matareseand the man was dead, killed by those who controlled him. Therefore, the American's assumption in Corsica that the members of the Matarese council were not born, but selected, proved accurate. The Matarese had been taken over, a mixture of descendants and usurpers. It was consistent with the dying words of Aleksie Krupskaya in Moscow.
The Matarese was dormant for years. No one could make contact. Then It came back, but it was not the same. Killings... without clients, senseless butchery without a pattern... governments paralyzed.
This was, indeed, a new Matarese and infinitely more deadly than a cult of fanatics dedicated to paid political assassination. And Beowulf had added a warning in his cable. The Matarese now assumed that the guest list had been found; the stalking of the Voroshin family in Leningrad was infinitely more complicated than it might have been only days ago.
Men were waiting in Leningrad for someone to ask questions about the Voroshins. But not the men---or man -he would reach, thought Taleniekov, stamping his feet against the cold, looking for a sign of the automobile and the man who was to meet him and drive him east along the coast past Hamina toward the Soviet border.
Scofield was on his way to Paris with the girl, the American to continue on to England after setting up procedures in France. The Corsican woman had passed whatever tests Beowulf Agate had created; she would live and be their conduit. But, as Vasili was beginning to learn, Scofield rarely operated on a simple line; there was a third party, the manager of the Tavastian Hotel in Helsinki.
Once in Leningrad, Taleniekov was to cable the manager with whatever particulars he could put into ciphers and the man, in turn, would wait for direct telephone calls from Paris and relate the codes received from Leningrad. It was then up to the woman to reach Scofield in England. Vasili knew that monitoring cable traffic was a particular talent of the KGB; the only sure way to eliminate it was to use KGB equipmenL Somehow, he would find a way to do that.
An automobile pulled up to the curb, the headlights dimming once, the driver wearing a red muffler, one end draped over a dark leather jacket.
Taleniekov crossed the pavement and got in the front seat beside the driver. He was on his way back to Russia.
The town of Vainikala was on the northwest shore of the lake; across the water was the Soviet Union, the southeast banks patroled by teams of soldiers and dogs plagued more often by ennui than by threats of penetra- tion or escape. When the KGB first knew about it, prolonged exposure to the freezing winds during winter months made it simply too dangerous to use as an escape route; and in summer the interminable flow of tourist visas in and out of Tallin and Riga, to say nothing of Leningrad itself, made those cities the easiest avenues to freedom. As a result the northwest garrisons along the Finnish border were staffed by the least motivated Russian military personnel, often a collection of misfits and drunks commanded by men being punished for errors of judgment. Checkpoint Vainikala was a logical place to cross into Russia; even the dogs were third rate.