Romanov Succession Part 8

"He told me that."

"You'd better go up then. But hold me first, Alex-I need to borrow your strength."

He pressed her against him. After a moment she drew herself up and moved away. "I'll be all right. Go on."

Sergei threw the dead man across his shoulder and carried him upstairs. Alex caught up at the landing.

A few of them were trickling out into the gallery from the drawing room-Oleg and General Savinov and Anatol. They looked dazed but a fierce gleam of enraged satisfaction illuminated Oleg's face when he recognized Sergei's burden.

Alex stooped to retrieve the bust of Peter the Great. It was intact except for a chip out of the base. He found the chip against the moulding and pocketed it; and carried the bust back to its stand.

Old Prince Michael stood bewildered in the door. "What are we to do?"

Alex shook his head, putting them off; he said sotto voce to Sergei, "Are you willing?"

"Of course."

"Are there back stairs you can use?"

"No one will see me."

"Search him first. Then bury him where no one will find him."

"In the stable, I think. And cover the grave with straw."

"All right-but keep it private, Sergei."

"I have no love for the Guardia," the big man replied, and turned toward the rear of the hall.

Alex went into the drawing room. They had one of the nurses there but it was no good; Alex had known by the way Va.s.sily fell back that he was dead.

The others crowded into the room behind him. Anatol was visibly shaken. Prince Leon seemed to be in command of himself but he said quietly to Alex, "What shall we do?"

The rest of them stared at Alex and he saw they were putting it up to him: they expected an instant solution from him. Only Oleg looked as if his mental machinery was unimpaired by shock.

Alex said, "Don't let anyone in." General Savinov was just inside the door; he kicked it shut.

The nurse was a stocky woman with brown hair and a pleasant face. She was watching Prince Leon as if for a sign. Alex said to her, "Would you leave us for a bit?"

"The doctor must be brought," she said in awkward Russian; she was English, he remembered.

"We'll send down for him. Please wait in the Grand Duke's room."

She left them-trembling with fear.

Oleg said to Leon, "Can she be trusted?"

"I believe so. But for what?"

"You believe so? You're not sure? This thing is too important for suppositions, Leon."

Count Anatol burst out with sudden sarcasm, "What would you do, Oleg-murder her to guarantee her silence?"

Oleg remained stubbornly calm. "We must have a.s.surances. She is in love with this doctor, is she not?"

"Yes."

"Then we must have the doctor sign a certificate that Va.s.sily died of natural causes. Everyone knows he has been under a great strain. A heart attack-everyone will believe that. And once the doctor's signature is on the certificate the nurse cannot reveal the truth without betraying him."

"You are too clever by half sometimes," Anatol snarled.

Prince Leon said cautiously, "I see no need to be devious, Oleg. We must simply tell the truth."

Alex said, "No."

They looked at him.

"Too many people would be hurt. We're not in a country where you can trust the police."

One of them-perhaps the nurse-had laid Va.s.sily out and covered him with a blanket from one of the adjoining chambers. But he was there in the center of the room, a mute macabre focal point, and they cl.u.s.tered near the door to be away from him. Oleg said vigorously, "We cannot have all our plans-the fate of Russia herself-founder on this murder. Leon, I fail to see how you could even entertain a notion of going to the Spanish police. Among the seven of us don't you think they'd soon worm it out of at least one? What we were discussing here, what we were planning?"

"It would appear," said Count Anatol, "that our enemies know our plans already. Otherwise why was Va.s.sily killed?"

Alex tried to steady them. "We've got to take up one thing at a time. The first matter's the doctor. I'll fetch him." He turned to the door, his heart still chugging.

Prince Leon said, "Before you go, Alex."

He turned and waited for it.

Leon said, "Va.s.sily half-expected this. They tried to kill him before."

"I know."

"It was Va.s.sily's wish that you succeed him."

"He told me that. Obviously it is up to the rest of you."

"There is no question in our minds."

Count Anatol said, "I should not accept it too eagerly if I were you. It puts you at the top of their list, whoever these killers are."

Alex didn't reply to any of them; he needed time. He left the room and went down into the villa in search of the doctor.

It was nearly four o'clock in the morning and most of them had gone home or to bed.

The announcement would be made in the afternoon by which time Va.s.sily would be embalmed and on view in a casket with his wounds concealed by clothing and the mortician's art.

Sergei Bulygin found him pacing the veranda. "It will be a long time before anyone finds that vermin."

"Thank you, Sergei. Did you find anything on him?"

"This-his invitation." A faint aroma of the stables rolled off Sergei's clothes. "Are there instructions?"

"Not tonight," Alex said. "Sleep-there'll be things to do today."

Sergei nodded and made a half-turn, and paused. "I grieve with you for the General's pa.s.sing."

"Yes ..."

"I will mention him in my prayers." Then Sergei left him.

A sweetness of honeysuckle flavored the air; the moon had come and gone, the stars made patchwork patterns among scudding cottonball clouds. He stared toward the mountains with preoccupied inattention.

A shadow fell through the doorway and he turned to find Prince Leon there. The Prince limped onto the veranda; he had an unlit cigar between his fingers and was nipping at the end with the blade of a bra.s.s-handled dagger. It was a knife the Prince had cherished for many years: Peter the Great had carried it at Azov in 1696.

"The question is, why did they kill him? What did they hope to gain?"

"Maybe they thought the scheme would die with him."

"Presupposing they knew a great deal about the scheme. But if they knew that much would they not have known it was too big to be destroyed by one man's death?"

"If you'd killed Lenin in nineteen-sixteen there might not have been an October Revolution."

"It is not the same thing."

"They've delayed the program. Maybe that's all they expected to accomplish."

"We have a.s.sumed the a.s.sa.s.sin was a paid hireling-a professional." Leon laid the dagger on the stone rail and searched his pockets for matches. The dagger's blade glinted dully. "It could have been the Germans you know."

"How would they have found out about it?"

"How would anyone?" Leon got the cigar lighted. "Someone did-that is the sum of our knowledge. It leads to the conclusion we have a traitor among us." His voice was very soft.

"Who knows about this besides those of us who were in that room?"

"Not many. The Americans-two or three of them. Deniken of course. The Grand Duke Dmitri and perhaps a few of his advisors in Switzerland. Churchill and a few of his people."

Alex shook his head. "Then any one of them could have let something drop. A secret's only a secret as long as one person knows it."

"We can only hope the details of it do not reach the Kremlin." Leon puffed on the cigar and took it away from his mouth. "Have you decided, Alex?"

He had tried to weigh it: tried to deal with the realities. But the guiding consideration was emotional, not susceptible to reason. The factors of history should have dominated his thinking: the opportunity to free the land of his birth from the evil of Stalin's tyranny; the chance to help two hundred million people realize the dreams for which his father and millions of Russians had died; the possibility of making the gift of justice to a nation which had never in its history been free of despotism.

Against those he had tried to weigh the odds: the rocky instability of the coalition backing the scheme; the unlikelihood of prevailing with a small commando force where the mighty Wehrmacht of the Third Reich had not yet succeeded. The scheme was absurd from any objective vantage; Stalin's armies numbered millions. In so many ways it had to be viewed as an exercise in fruitless and suicidal fantasy.

But it wasn't any of those things that had decided him.

He said, "If you'll trust me with it then I'm prepared to accept it."

Leon said, "I don't have any reservations about trusting you with the command. My reservations have to do with the practicality of continuing without Va.s.sily-without what was in his head. It doesn't seem possible for you to reconstruct his plan from the hints and clues he gave us-and even if it were, would we have enough time?"

Alex shook his head. "He was right about the time limit. If it isn't done within a hundred days I doubt it can be done at all. But I wouldn't like to waste five minutes trying to retrace Va.s.sily's plan. It wouldn't have worked. If I take command the plan will be mine, not Va.s.sily's."

Leon's answer was a long time coming. "I think perhaps you had better tell me what it is that would not have worked."

"The Kremlin's a fortress. The rock underneath it is honey-combed with bunkers and tunnels-miles of them. The Soviet High Command uses those bunkers for its main headquarters because they're protected from air raids. This is all common knowledge, Leon-it's been in the press. The rooms underground are sealed off from one another by armored doors like the waterproof compartments in a modern freighter."

"I am sure Va.s.sily was aware of all this."

"If he was it was a bad mistake to ignore it. The idea of storming the Kremlin with a regiment of shock troops just isn't workable-they'd never get near Stalin. He's too well protected."

"He must have had more to his plan than that. More than he told us. He would not have made so obvious a mistake."

"Probably not. I have an idea of what he had in mind."

"Then I should like to hear it, Alex."

"He'd have put his people in Red Army uniforms. Infiltrate them into the Kremlin like saboteurs. Take the chance a few of them would be caught out-count on some of them getting close enough to the Red leaders to be able to a.s.sa.s.sinate them before there'd been a general alarm."

Leon watched him in surprise. "Are you clairvoyant, then?"

"It's a plan he wanted to use once before. In a different context."

"It sounds brilliant to me. Ingenious."

"Any wild scheme may work. But that one overflows with risks. Va.s.sily didn't have much of a head for security-how can you expect to infiltrate a thousand men into one place and be confident that not a single one of them will be captured and reveal what he knows?"

"I see," Leon said dubiously.

"His idea was to take the Kremlin. He told us that much. It wasn't a sound objective-the Kremlin isn't the White House or the Houses of Parliament. It's an enormous place-a small city in itself, really. You'd have to expect a drawn-out pitched battle. It would take incredible luck to secure the fortress before Red reinforcements arrived. There are divisions-army corps-preparing defenses on the outskirts of Moscow. They could reach the Kremlin within half an hour of the first alarm."

The cigar had grown a tall ash. Leon tapped it off. His eyes were half-closed, his lips pursed-the expression of a man formulating an argument.

Alex said, "There was a chance. The odds were against it but there was a long chance it might work. Va.s.sily wanted to take that gamble."

"Are there better odds to be found?"

"Yes."

Leon said slowly, "You believe he knew this."

"Yes. He wasn't a fool."

"Then why, Alex? You must tell me that."

"Because if you do it the way it should be done, it won't produce heroes."

"You maintain he deliberately chose the less likely alternative because if it worked at all it would make him a hero."