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Grishin heard the tray being placed on the desk, then a muffled voice saying, “Don’t bother.”

There was an equally muffled response as Father Maxim knelt on the carpet, presumably picking up the dropped sugar lumps.

The sound quality improved as the recorder was slipped under the desk. The voice of the Patriarch was clear enough saying to Father Maxim: “Thank you, Father, that will be all.”

There was silence until the sound of a door closing, the withdrawal of the informer. Then the Patriarch said:

“Now, perhaps you will explain what you have come to tell me.”

Monk began to speak. Grishin could distinguish the slight nasal twang of the American speaking fluent Russian. He began to take notes.

He listened to the forty-minute conversation three times before he began to write a verbatim transcript. This was not a job for a secretary, however trusted.

Page after page was covered in his neat Cyrillic script. Sometimes he paused, played back, craned to hear the words, and then resumed writing. When he was certain he had every word, he stopped.

There was the sound of a chair moving back, then Monk’s voice saying, “I don’t suppose we shall meet again, Your Holiness. I know you will do the best you can for this land and people you love so much.”

Two sets of footsteps moved across the carpet. More faintly, as they reached the door, Grishin heard Alexei’s reply: “With God’s good grace, I shall try.”

The door evidently closed behind Monk. Grishin heard the sound of the Patriarch resuming his seat. Ten seconds later the tape ran out.

Grishin sat back and mulled over what he had heard. The news was as bad as it could conceivably be. How one man, he reflected, could cause such systematic damage was hard to understand. The key of course was that damnable act of stupidity by the late N. I. Akopov in leaving the manifesto lying around to be stolen. The damage caused by that single leak was already incalculable.

Monk clearly had done most of the talking. The earlier interventions by Alexei II had been to indicate that he understood and approved. His own contribution came toward the end.

The American had not been idle. He revealed that immediately after the New Year a concerted campaign would begin to destroy the electoral chances of Igor Komarov across the country by a process of discreditation and massive publicity.

General Nikolai Nikolayev, it seemed, would resume a series of newspaper, radio, and television interviews in which he would denounce the UPF, calling on every soldier and ex-soldier to repudiate the party and vote elsewhere. There were 20 million veterans among the 110 million enfranchised voters. The damage that one man would do could scarcely be contemplated.

The shutdown of all publicity for Igor Komarov being exercised by both commercial TV channels was the work of the bankers, three out of four of them Jewish, and the leader and inspirator of them all Leonid Bernstein of the Moskovsky Federal. That constituted two scores that would have to be settled.

Monk’s third contribution concerned the Dolgoruki mafia. Grishin had long regarded all of them as scum concentration camp fodder for the future. But for the moment their financial backing was crucial.

No politician in Russia could hope to aspire to the presidency without a nationwide campaign costing trillions of rubles. The secret deal with the most powerful and richest mafia west of the Urals had provided that treasure chest, which vastly exceeded anything available to other candidates. Several had already folded their tents, unable to keep up with the expenditure of the UPF.

The six raids of the previous day in the small hours had been disastrous for the Dolgoruki, but none more so than the discovery of the financial records. There were few sources from which the GUVD could have learned such details. A rival mafia was the obvious choice, but in the closed world of the gangsters no one, despite the internecine rivalry, would inform to the hated GUVD. Yet here was Monk informing the Patriarch of the source of the leak—a disgusted and turncoat senior officer of Grishin’s own Black Guards.

If the Dolgoruki ever proved such a thing—and Grishin knew rumors were flying around the streets, rumors he had passionately denied—the alliance would be over.

To make matters worse, the tape revealed that a team of skilled accountants had already begun work on the papers found beneath the casino and were confident that by the New Year they would be able to prove the funding link between the mafia and the UPF. Those findings would be delivered directly to Acting President Markov. During the same period, Major General Petrovsky of the GUVD, who could be neither bribed nor intimidated, would keep up the pressure on the Dolgoruki gang with raid after raid.

If he did so, Grishin calculated, there was no way the Dolgoruki gang would continue to accept his assurances that a Black Guard source was not behind the GUVD.

The Patriarch’s intervention, coming as it did toward the end of the tape, was perhaps the most potentially damaging of all.

The acting president would be spending the New Year celebrations with his family away from Moscow. He would return on January 3. On that day he would receive the Patriarch, who intended to make a personal intercession, urging Markov to invalidate the candidature of Igor Komarov as an “unfit person,” based upon existing evidence.

With the proof of gangster linkage provided by Petrovsky and the personal intervention of the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias, Markov would be extremely likely to do just that. Apart from anything else, he was himself a candidate and did not want to face Komarov at the polls.

Four traitors, Grishin brooded. Four traitors to the New Russia that was destined to come into existence after January 16, with himself at the head of an elite corps of 200,000 Black Guards ready to carry out the orders of the leader. Well, he had spent his life rooting out and punishing traitors. He knew how to deal with them.

He personally typed out a copy of his handwritten transcript and asked for an uninterrupted two hours of President Komarov’s time that evening.

¯

JASON Monk had moved from the flat by Sokolniki Park and was installed in another from whose windows he could see the crescent atop the mosque where he had first met Magomed, the man now sworn to protect him but who on that day would just as easily have killed him.

He had a message to send to Sir Nigel Irvine in London, according to his schedule the second-from-last, if all went according to the old man’s plan.