had an odd feeling and reached to touch the letter in his breast pocket. He felt as if a cold shadow had slipped out of the building the moment he opened the door, and he shivered. A night watchman roused from slumber when they entered, then stood groggily to attention when he saw three NKVD men walk in, two looking very threatening, and very well armed.
“As you were,” said Fedorov. “Go back to sleep. We’re just checking on a delivery, and we’ll leave by the rear entrance.”
“Very good, sir.” The man was more than happy to see them stride away, and then he settled back into the warmth of his chair, wrapping himself in a thin wool blanket.
It was not long before they found themselves in the cellar, and located Fedorov’s storage bin. He took out the letter, fishing out a pencil in his pocket so he could let the Admiral know the their fourth team member was not present. Fedorov hoped Bukin was still safe in the test bed center in the future. That would be one less life on my shoulders, he thought, and one less soul on the ledgers of time.
He opened the steamer trunk and slipped his freshly sealed white envelope into the breast pocket of his grandfather’s naval blazer. Again he had the strange thought that nearly eighty years on, a Marine was standing patiently in the cold empty cellar hallway, waiting for a telephone call from Admiral Volsky. Dobrynin must have just informed him, and he was about to make his call.
What he could not have imagined would be that another man was also waiting there, crouching low in the shadows beneath the stairway to the upper floors, his eyes peering wolf-like in the dark as he waited with a small pistol that would fire a drug-laden dart. A real revolver would be much too messy. How to explain the blood? No. He was waiting there with his dart gun, and the man he had shadowed to this strange place would soon be quite incapacitated. He watched him carefully, seeing him take something from the locker and then start back down the hall toward his position. Then he stood and fired, the crisp snap of the gun echoing in the empty corridor. He was unaware that another man had heard it on the open phone line, miles away in Fokino, his rising pulse chasing a hundred questions down that darkened hall.
But Fedorov knew nothing of this.
* * *
The shadow Fedorov thought he felt may have been nothing more than a strange intuition, but the man who had cast it was passing through that same door at that very moment, some eighty years on, as he left the Fleet Logistics Building on Svetlanskaya Street. A black limousine was parked just outside the main entrance to the building. The moon had risen hours earlier and was well up riding above a thin veil of misty fog and casting a wan diffused light over the scene. The man in a dark gray overcoat walked briskly from the yawning arched entry where a domed roof dating back to 1903 brooded over the walkway. He stepped quickly to the waiting limousine. The rear door opened as he arrived and he slipped into the shadowy interior.
Another man was seated in the back, and he tapped the soundproof glass partition screening off the driver’s compartment. The car pulled away from the curb and rolled quietly up the street, passing the Circus amusement building and then turning left off the main boulevard, along a winding road leading into a small residential district.
“Well?” the voice in the shadows spoke, the man’s face dark and unseen beneath the rim of his hat. The other man handed him a sealed plain white envelope.
“That was all?”
“I searched very carefully, sir.”
The other man studied the envelope in the dim light. “Very unusual,” he muttered, turning it over and seeing nothing of any note, just a blank envelope. Then he looked at his messenger, as if suddenly remembering something. “What did you do with the body?”
“As we planned. I put it in Bin 400. I will have men remove it within the hour. Don’t worry, he’ll wake up in the park tomorrow morning with a bad headache, and he won’t remember a thing. The drug is very effective.”
“Very well. Draw the shades, please.” They pulled down the black privacy shades on the side windows and driver compartment screen, then the man with the envelope reached slowly to the