Icon

by Frederick Forsyth

  There were only four men sent to the lonely cottage out along the Minsk Highway. They came out of their car and while one approached the door the other three waited in the darkness of the trees.

  It was old Valodya who answered. He was shot in the chest and the four men poured into the house. The wolfhound came at them across the floor of the sitting room and went for the throat of the leading Black Guard. He threw up an arm and the hound’s teeth went deeply into it. A companion blew its head off.

  By the embers of the log fire an old man with bristling white whiskers pointed a Makarov at the group in the doorway and fired twice. One bullet lodged in the door-jamb and the other hit the man who had just killed his dog.

  Then three bullets in quick succession struck the old general in the chest.

  ¯

  UMAR Gunayev called shortly after ten in the morning.

  “I just drove to my office. There’s all hell going on.”

  “In what way?”

  “Kutuzovsky Prospekt is blocked off. Militia all over the place.”

  “Why?”

  “Some kind of attack last night on a building inhabited by senior militia officers.”

  “That was quick. I’m going to need a safe phone.”

  “What about the one where you are?”

  “Traceable.”

  “Give me half an hour. I’ll send some men for you.”

  By eleven Monk was installed in a small office in a warehouse full of contraband liquor. A telephone engineer was just finishing.

  “It’s linked to two cutouts,” he said to Monk, gesturing at the phone. “If anyone tries to trace a call on it, they’ll end up in a café two miles away. It’s one of our joints. If they get past that, they’ll be led to a phone booth down the street. By then we’ll know.”

  Monk started with the private number of General Nikolayev. A male voice answered.

  “Give me General Nikolayev,” said Monk.

  “Who is that?” asked the voice.

  “I could ask the same thing.”

  “The general is not available. Who are you?”

  “General Malenkov, Defense Ministry. What’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry, General. This is Inspector Novikov, Homicide Division, Moscow militia. I’m afraid General Nikolayev is dead.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “There was an attack. Last night. Burglars, it seems. Killed the general and his valet. Plus the dog. The cleaning woman found them just after eight.”

  “I don’t know what to say. He was a friend of mine.”

  “I’m sorry, General Malenkov. The times we live in …”

  “Get on with your job, Inspector. I’ll tell the Minister.”

  Monk put the phone down. So, Grishin had finally lost his head. It was what Monk had been working toward, but he cursed the obstinacy of the old general. Then he rang the headquarters of the GUVD in Shabolovka Street.

  “Put me through to Major General Petrovsky.”

  “He is busy. Who is that?” said the telephone operator.

  “Interrupt him. Tell him it is about Tatiana.”

  Petrovsky came on the phone ten seconds later. There was an edge of fear in his voice.

  “Petrovsky.”

  “It’s me, the late-night visitor.”

  “Damn you, I thought something had happened to my child.”

  “Are they both out of town, she and your wife?”

  “Yes, miles away.”

  “I believe there was an attack.”

  “Ten of them, all masked and armed to the teeth. They killed four OMON guards and my own steward.”

  “They were looking for you.”

  “Of course. I took your advice. I’m living inside the barracks. Who the hell were they? Bloody gangsters.”

  “They weren’t gangsters. They were Black Guard.”

  “Grishin’s thugs. Why?”

  “I think because of those papers you confiscated. They are probably afraid you’ll prove there’s a link between the Dolgoruki mafia and the UPF.”

  “Well, they don’t. They’re trash, mostly casino receipts.”

  “Grishin doesn’t know that, General. He fears the worst. Have you heard about Uncle Kolya?”

  “The tank general. What about him?”

  “They got him. A similar killer squad. Last night.”

  “Shit. Why?”

  “He denounced Komarov. Remember?”

  “Of course. But I never thought they’d go that far. Bastards. Thank God politicals aren’t my territory. I do gangsters.”

  “I know. You have contacts in the Militia Collegium?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why not tell them? You got it from an underworld contact.”

  Monk replaced the receiver and rang the Moskovsky Federal.

  “Ilya. Mr. Bernstein’s personal assistant. Is he there?”

  “One moment, caller.”

  Ilya came on the line.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Let’s say you nearly put a bullet in my back the other day,” said Monk in English.

  There was a low laugh.

  ‘‘Yes, I did.”

  “Is the boss safe?”

  “Miles away.”

  “Advise him to stay there.”

  “No problem. His private house was attacked last night.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Four of our people dead, two of theirs, we think. They ransacked the place.”

  “You know who they were?”

  “We think so.”

  “Grishin’s Black Guard. And the reason was clearly retribution. The shutdown of Komarov’s propaganda broadcasts.”

  “They may pay for that. The boss has a lot of clout.”

  “The key lies in the commercial TV companies. Their reporters should have a word with a couple of senior generals of the militia. Ask if they have any intention of interviewing Colonel Grishin concerning widespread rumors, etc., etc.”

  “They’d better have some proof.”

  “That’s what newshounds are for. They sniff, they dig. Can you get in touch with the boss?”

  “If I have to.”

  “Why not put it to him?”

  His next call was to the national newspaper Izvestia.

  “Newsroom.”

  Monk affected a gruff accent.

  “Get me senior reporter Repin.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Tell him General of the Army Nikolai Nikolayev needs to speak to him urgently. He will remember.”

  Repin was the one who had done the interview in the Frunze Officers’ Club. He came on the line.

  “Yes, General. Repin here.”

  “This is not General Nikolayev,” said Monk. “The general is dead. He was murdered last night.”

  “What? Who are you?”

  “Just a former tank man.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Never mind. Do you know where he lived?”

  “No.”

  “He had a house just off the Minsk Highway. Near the village of Kobyakovo. Why not take a photographer and get the hell out there? Ask for Inspector Novikov.”

  He put the phone down. The other major newspaper was Pravda, the former organ of the Communist Party, which politically supported the renascent neo-Communist Socialist Union Party. But to prove its new non-Communist credentials the party had been trying to woo the Orthodox Church. Monk had studied the paper enough to have memorized the name of the chief crime reporter.

  “Put me through to Mr. Pamfilov, please.”

  “He’s out of the office right now.”

  Reasonable. He was almost certainly up at Kutuzovsky Prospekt with the rest of the press pack clamoring for details of the attack on Petrovsky’s flat.

  “He has a mobile?”

  “Of course. But I can’t give you the number. Can he call you back?”

  “No. Contact him and say one of his sources in the militia needs to speak to him
urgently. A major tip-off. I need his mobile number. I’ll call you back in five.”

  On the second call he obtained the number of Pamfilov’s mobile phone and reached him in his car outside the senior police officers’ apartment building.

  “Mr. Pamfilov?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “I had to lie to get your phone number. We don’t know each other. But I may have something for you. There was another attack last night. On the residence of the Patriarch. An attempt to assassinate him.”

  “You’re crazy. An attempt on the Patriarch? Rubbish. There’d be no motive.”

  “Not for the mafia, no. Why not get over there?”

  “The Danilovski Monastery?”

  “He doesn’t live there. He lives at Number Five Chisti Pereulok.”

  Pamfilov sat in his car listening to the whine of the disconnected phone. He was stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened in his career. If it was half true, it was the biggest story he would ever handle.

  When he arrived at the side street he found it blocked off. Normally he could flash his press pass and walk past the cordon. Not this time. Fortunately he spotted a militia detective inspector whom he knew personally and called out to him. The man walked over to the cordon.

  “What’s going on?” asked the reporter.

  “Burglars.”

  “You’re Homicide.”

  “They killed the night watchman.”

  “The Patriarch. Alexei, is he safe?”

  “How the fuck do you know he lives here?”

  “Never mind. Is he safe?”

  “Yes, he’s away at Zagorsk. Look, it was just a burglary that went wrong.”

  “I have a tip they were after the Patriarch.”

  “Bullshit. Just robbers.”

  “What’s to rob?”

  The detective looked worried.

  “Where did you get that from?”

  “Never mind. Could it be true? Did they steal anything?”

  “No. Just shot the guard, searched the house, and ran.”

  “So they were looking for someone. And he wasn’t there. Boy, what a story.”

  “You be bloody careful,” warned the detective. “There’s no evidence.”

  But the detective was becoming worried. He became even more so when a militiaman beckoned him over to his car. On the phone was a full general of the Presidium. Within a few sentences he began to hint at the same thing as the reporter.

  ¯

  ON December 23, the media were in uproar. In the early editions each newspaper concentrated on the particular story to which Monk had directed it. As the journalists read one another’s stories, there were copious rewrites that knitted the four attacks together.

  The morning television news carried composite accounts of four separate assassination attempts, one of them successful. In the other three cases, they reported, only extreme luck had saved the intended victims.

  No credence was being given to the notion of burglaries that went wrong. Analysts were at pains to point out that there would be no point in a burglary at the home of a pensioned-off general, nor the apartment of a single senior police officer while ignoring all the other flats in the building, nor on the home of the Patriarch.

  Burglary might be the justification for raiding the home of the hugely wealthy banker Leonid Bernstein, but his surviving guards testified that the onslaught had all the hallmarks of a military attack. Moreover, they reported, the attackers had been looking specifically for their employer. Kidnapping was also a possibility, or murder. But in two cases there was no point in a kidnap and in the case of the general it had not been attempted.

  Most pundits speculated that the perpetrators must have been the all-pervading gangster underworld, long since the cause of hundreds of murders and kidnappings. Two commentators went further, however, pointing out that while organized crime might well have reason to hate Major General Petrovsky of the gang-busting GUVD, and some might have a score to settle with the banker Bernstein, who could hate an old general who was a triple-Hero to boot, or the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias?

  The editorial writers deplored for the thousandth time the astronomical crime levels in the country and two called on Acting President Markov to do precisely that—act—to forestall a total breakdown of law and order in the countdown to the crucial elections in twenty-four days’ time.

  Monk began his second day of anonymous telephoning in the late morning, when the hacks, exhausted from their labors of the previous day, began to trickle into their offices.

  A rolled-up tissue in each cheek disguised his voice sufficiently for it not to be recognized as the caller of the day before. To each of the possessors of the major bylines in the seven morning and evening newspapers who had carried the four-assassinations story, he conveyed the same message, starting with Pamfilov of Pravda and Repin of Izvestia.

  “You don’t know me, and I cannot give you my name. It is more than my life is worth. But as one Russian to another I ask you to trust me.

  “I am a very senior officer in the Black Guard. But I am also a practicing Christian. For many months now I have been more and more distressed by the increasing anti-Christ, anti-Church sentiments being expressed in the inner heart of the UPF, mainly by Komarov and Grishin. Behind what they say in public, they hate the church and democracy, intend to set up a one-party state and rule like the Nazis.

  “Now I have had enough. I have to speak out. It was Colonel Grishin who sentenced the old general to die because Uncle Kolya saw through the facade and denounced Komarov. The banker because he too was not fooled. You may not know this, but he used his influence to force the TV stations to cut off the propaganda broadcasts. The Patriarch because he feared the UPF and was about to go public. And the GUVD general because he raided the Dolgoruki mafia who are the paymasters of the UPF. If you don’t believe me, check out what I say. It was the Black Guard who mounted those four attacks.”

  With that he put the phone down, leaving seven Moscow journalists traumatized. When they recovered, they began to check.

  Leonid Bernstein was out of the country, but the two commercial television channels quietly leaked that the change in editorial policy had come from the banking consortium to whom they were in hock.

  General Nikolayev was dead, but Izvestia carried extracts of the earlier interview under the banner headline: “WAS THIS WHY HE DIED?”

  The six early-hours raids by the GUVD on the warehouses, arsenals, and casino of the Dolgoruki gang were common knowledge. Only the Patriarch remained cloistered in the Zagorsk Monastery and unable to confirm that he too might be targeted as an enemy of the UPF.

  By midafternoon the headquarters dacha of Igor Komarov off the Kiselny Boulevard was under siege. Inside, there was an atmosphere close to panic.

  In his own office Boris Kuznetsov was in shirtsleeves, damp patches under each arm, chain-smoking cigarettes he had given up two years earlier and trying to cope with a battery of phones that never stopped ringing.

  “No, it is not true,” he shouted at inquiry after inquiry. “It is a foul lie, a gross libel, and action will be taken in the courts against anyone who gives it further currency. No, there is no link between this party and any mafia gang, financial or otherwise. Mr. Komarov has gone on record time and again as the man who is going to clean up Russia. ... What papers now being investigated by the GUVD? ... We have nothing to fear. ... Yes, General Nikolayev did express reservations about our policies, but he was a very old man. His death was tragic but utterly unrelated. ... You just cannot say that; any comparison between Mr. Komarov and Hitler will be greeted with immediate litigation. ... What senior officer of the Black Guard? …”

  In his own office Colonel Anatoli Grishin was wrestling with his own problem. As a lifelong officer of the Second Chief Directorate, KGB, it had been his job to hunt down spies. That Monk had caused trouble, massive trouble, he had no doubt. But these new allegations were worse: a senior officer of his own elite, ult
ra-loyal, fanatical Black Guard turned renegade? He had selected every one of them, all six thousand. The senior officers were his personal appointees. One of them a practicing Christian, a wimp with a conscience when the very pinnacle of power was within sight? Impossible.

  Yet he recalled reading once of something the Jesuits used to say: Give me the boy until the age of seven and I will give you the man. Could one of his best men have reverted to the altar boy of years ago? He would have to check. Every single résumé of every senior officer would have to be gone through with a fine-tooth comb.

  And what did “senior” mean? How senior? Down two ranks—ten men. Down three ranks, forty men. Down five ranks, almost one hundred. It would be a time-consuming task, and there was no time. In the short term he might have to purge his entire upper echelon, sequester them all in a safe place and forfeit his most experienced commanders. One day, he promised himself, those responsible for this catastrophe would pay, and how they would pay. Starting with Jason Monk. The very thought of the American agent’s name caused his knuckles to whiten on the edge of his desk.

  Just before five, Boris Kuznetsov secured an interview with Komarov. He had been asking for two hours for a chance to see the man he hero worshiped in order to propose what he felt should be done.

  As a student in America Kuznetsov had studied and been deeply impressed by the power of slick and proficient public relations to generate mass support for even the most meretricious nonsense. Apart from his idol Igor Komarov, he worshiped the power of words and the moving image to persuade, delude, convince, and finally overcome all opposition. That the message was a lie was irrelevant.

  Like politicians and lawyers, he was a man of words, convinced there was no problem that words could not resolve. The idea that a day might come when the words ran out and ceased to persuade; when other, better words might outmaneuver and trounce his own; when he and his leader might no longer be believed—such a day was unimaginable to Kuznetsov.

  Public relations, they had called it in America, the multibillion-dollar industry that could make a talentless oaf a celebrity, a fool a sage, and a base opportunist a statesman. Propaganda, they called it in Russia, but it was the same tool.

  With this tool and with Litvinov’s brilliant- film imagery and studio editing he had helped transform a former engineer with the gift of oratory into a colossus, a man on the threshold of the greatest prize in Russia, the presidency itself.