A Matter of Honor

He then picked up the second envelope from the side table. The words “Colonel Gerald Scott” were written in a faded bold script across it.

Adam removed a comb from his inside pocket and wedged it into the corner of the envelope. Slowly he began to slit it open. He hesitated for a moment before extracting two pieces of paper, both yellowed with agc. One appeared to be a letter while the other seemed to be a document of some sort. The crest of the Third Reich was embossed at the head of the letter paper above the printed name of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. Adam’s hands began to tremble as he read the first line.

It began, Sehr geehrter Herr Oberst Scott:

CHAPTER THREE

AS THE BLACK Chaika limousine drove out under the Spasskaya Bashnya and on to Red Square, two Kremlin guards in khaki uniforms sprang to attention and presented arms. A shrill whistle sounded, which ensured that Yuri Efimovich Zaborski would experience no delays on his route back to Dzerzhinsky Square.

Zaborski touched the corner of his black felt hat in automatic acknowledgment of the salute although his thoughts were elsewhere. As the car rumbled over the cobbled stones, he didn’t even glance at the long snakelike line that stretched from Lenin’s Tomb to the edge of Red Square. The first decision he had to make would undoubtedly be the most important. Which of his senior operatives should be charged with the task of heading the team to find the Czar’s icon? He continued to ponder the problem as his driver took him across Red Square, passing the gray facade of the GUM department store away to his left before driving along Neitsa Kuibysheva.

Within moments of leaving his leader, the Chairman of State Security had formed in his own mind a shortlist of two, but which of those two, Valchek or Romanov, should be given the nod still taxed him. In normal circumstances he would have spent at least a week making such a decision, but the General Secretary’s deadline of June 20 left him with no such freedom. He knew he would have to make the choice even before he reached his office. The driver cruised through another green light past the Ministry of Culture and into Cherkasski Bolshoi Pereulok, lined with its imposing blocklike, gray buildings. The car remained in the special inside lane that could be used only by senior party officials. In England, he was amused to learn, they had plans for such a traffic lane—but it would only be for the use of buses.

The car came to an abrupt halt outside KGB headquarters. It hadn’t helped that they had been able to cover the three-kilometer journey in less than four minutes. The driver ran around and opened the back door to allow his master to step out, but Zaborski didn’t move. The man who rarely changed his mind had already done so twice on the route back to Dzerzhinsky Square. He knew he could call on any number of bureaucrats and academics to do the spade work, but someone with flair was going to have to lead them and be responsible for reporting back to him.

His professional intuition told him to select Yuri Valchek, who had proved over the years to be a trusty and reliable servant of the State. He was also one of the Chairman’s longest-serving heads of department. Slow, methodical and reliable, he had completed a full ten years as an agent in the field before confining himself to largely a desk job.

In contrast, Alex Romanov, who had only recently become head of his own section, had shown flashes of brilliance in the field, but they had been so often outweighed by a lack of personal judgment. At twenty-nine, he was the youngest and without question the most ambitious of the Chairman’s select team.

Zaborski stepped out on to the pavement and walked toward another door held open for him. He strode across the marble floor and stopped only when he reached the lift gates. Several silent men and women had also been waiting for the lift, but when it returned to the ground floor and the Chairman stepped in to the little cage, none of them made any attempt to join him. Zaborski traveled slowly up toward his office, never failing to compare it unfavorably with the speed of the one American elevator he had experienced. They could launch their rockets before you could get to your office, his predecessor had warned him. By the time Zaborski had reached the top floor and the gates had been pulled back for him, he had made up his mind. It would be Valchek.

A secretary helped him off with his long black coat and took his hat. Zaborski walked quickly to his desk. The two files he had asked for were awaiting him. He sat down and began to pore over Valchek’s file. When he had completed it he barked out an order to his hovering secretary: “Find Romanov.”

Comrade Romanov lay flat on his back, his left arm behind his head and his opponent’s right over his throat, preparing for a double knee-thrust. The coach executed it perfectly, and Romanov groaned as he hit the floor with a thud.

An attendant came rushing over to them and bent down to whisper in the coach’s ear. The coach reluctantly released his pupil, who rose slowly as if in a daze, bowed to the coach, and then in one movement of right arm and left leg took the legs from under him and left him flat on the gymnasium floor before making his way quickly to the off-the-hook phone in the office.

Romanov didn’t notice the girl who handed him the phone. “I’ll be with him as soon as I have had a shower,” was all she heard him say. The girl who had taken the call had often wondered what Romanov looked like in the shower. She, like all the other girls in the office, had seen him in the gymnasium a hundred times. Six feet tall with that long, flowing blond hair—he resembled a Western film star. And those eyes, “piercing blue,” the friend who shared her desk described them.

“He’s got a scar on his …” the friend confided.

“How do you know that?” she had asked, but her friend had only giggled in reply.

The Chairman meanwhile had opened Romanov’s personal file for a second time and was still perusing the details. He began to read the different entries that made up a candid character assessment that Romanov would never see unless he became Chairman:

Alexander Petrovich Romanov. Born Leningrad, 12 March 1937.

Elected full party member 1958.

Father: Petr Nikolayevich Romanov, served on the Eastern Front in 1942. On returning to Russia in 1945 refused to join Communist party. After several reports of anti-state activities supplied by his son he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Died in jail 20 October 1948.

Zaborski looked up and smiled—a child of the State.

Grandfather: Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, merchant, and one of the wealthiest landowners in Petrograd. Shot and killed on 11 May 1918, while attempting to escape from the forces of the Red Army.

The revolution had taken place between the princely grandfather and the reluctant Comrade father.

Alex, as he preferred to be known, had nevertheless inherited the Romanov ambition, so he enrolled for the party’s Pioneer organization at the age of nine. By the age of eleven, he had been offered a place at a special school at Smolensk—to the disgust of some of the lesser party workers, who considered such privileges should be reserved for the sons of loyal party officials, not the sons of those in jail. Romanov immediately excelled in the classroom, much to the dismay of the director, who had been hoping to disprove any Darwinian theories. And at fourteen he was selected as one of

the party’s elite and made a member of the Komsomol.

By the age of sixteen, Romanov had won the Lenin language medal and the junior gymnastics prize, and despite the director’s attempts to undermine young Alex’s achievements, most members of the school board recognized Romanov’s potential and ensured that he was still allowed to take a place at a university. As an undergraduate he continued to excel in languages, specializing in English, French, and German. Natural flair and hard work kept him near the top of every subject he specialized in.

Zaborski picked up the phone by his side. “I asked to see Romanov,” he said curtly.

“He was completing his morning workout at the gymnasium, Comrade Chairman,” replied the secretary. “But he left to change the moment he heard you wanted to see him.”

The Chairman replaced the phone, and his eyes returned to the file in front of him. That Romanov could be found in the gymnasium at all hours came as no surprise: the man’s athletic prowess had been acknowledged far beyond the service.