me to do that?" "The same way you get information to our friends in Washington. You know the unmonitored schedules; we all protect ourselves from ourselves. IVs. one of our more finely honed talents." "That's through Stockholm. We bypass Helsinkil" Maletkin flushed; his state of agitation and the rapid infusion of alcohol had made him careless. He had not meant to reveal the Swedish connection. It wasift done, even among fellow defectors.
Nor could Vasili use Stockholm. The cable would then be under American scrutiny. There was another way.
"How often do you come down here to the Ligovski headquarters for sector conferences?" The traitor pursed his lips in embarrassment. "Not often. Perhaps three or four times during the past year." "You're going over there now," said Taleniekov.
"I'm what? You've lost your headl" "You'll lose yours if you don't. Don't worry, Colonel. Rank still has its privileges and its effect. You are sending an urgent cable to a Vyborg man in Helsinki. White line, nonduplicated traffic. However, you must bring me a verifying copy." "Suppose they check with Vyborg?" "Who on duty up there now would interfere with the second-in-command?" Maletkin frowned nervously. "There will be questions later." Vasili smiled, the promise of untold riches in his voice. "Take my word for it, Colonel. When you return to Vyborg there won't be anything you cannot have... or command." The traitor grinned, the sweat on his chin glistening. "Where do I bring the verifying copy? Where will we meet? When?" Taleniekov held the bandage in place over the wound on his neck and unrolled a strip of tape, the end in his teeth. "Tear it," he said to Maletkin. It was done and Vasili applied it, ripping off another strip as he spoke. "Stay the night at the Evropeiskaya Hotel on Brodsky Street. I'll contact you there." "They'll demand identification." "By all means, give it to them. A colonel of the KGB will no doubt get a better room. A better woman, too, if you go down to the lounge." "Both cost money." "My treat," Taleniekov said.
It was the dinner hour. The huge reading rooms of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library with their tapestried walls and the enormously high ceilings were nowhere near as crowded as usual. A scattering of students sat at the long tables, a few groups of tourists strolled about studying the tapestries and the oil paintings, speaking in hushed whispers, awed by the grandeur that was the Shchedrin.
As Vasili walked through the marble hallways toward the complex of offices in the west wing he remembered the months he had spent in these rooms--that roomawakening his mind to a world he had known so little about. He had not exaggerated to Lodzia; it was here, through the enlightened courage of one man, that he had learned more about the enemy than in all the training he had later received in Moscow and Novgorod.
The Saltykov-Shchedrin was his finest school, the man he was about to see after so many years his most accomplished teacher. He wondered whether the school or the teacher could help him now. If the Voroshin family was bound to the new Matarese there would be no revealing information in the intelligence data banks, of that he was certain. But was it here? Somewhere in the thousands of volumes that detailed the events of the revolution, of families and vast estates banished and carved up, all documented by historians of the time because they knew the time would never be seen again, the explosive beginnings of a new world. It had happened here in Leningrad--St. Petersburg-and Prince Andrei Voroshin was a part of the cataclysm. The revolutionary archives at the SaltykovShchedrin were the most extensive in all Russia; if there was a repository for any information about the Voroshins, it would be here. But being here was one thing, finding it something else again. Would his old teacher know where to look?
He turned left into the corridor lined with glass-paneled office doors, all dark except one at the end of the hallway. There was a dim light on inside, intermittently blocked by the silhouette of a figure passing back and forth in front of a desk lamp. It was Mikovsky's office, the same room he had occupied for more than a quarter of a century, the slow-moving figure beyond the rippled glass unmistakably that of the scholar.
He walked up to the door and knocked softly; the dark figure loomed almost instantly behind the glass.