Warren Murphy: Last Call

137

"Dammit, Arkov," he roared. "I've got to go."

"Just a moment, sir," Arkov said.

"Another moment and you're going to have to send out to get me new pants."

The two KGB men left the bathroom and the premier shoved them aside, hurrying inside.

He read the newspaper carefully, from front to back. Stubbornly, he rubbed his fingertips over the ink of the pages and, when he was done, his fingers were stained black with the oily gum of the ink.

He washed his hands.

"Did you check the soap to see if it's poisoned?" he yelled out.

"No," called back Arkov. The premier heard men scurrying toward the bathroom door. He leaned over and locked it.

"Good," he said.

When he was done washing his hands, he dropped the newspaper into the waste basket in the bathroom and went outside. Three agents were dismantling the overhead light.

"Looking for a death ray gun, I suppose," the premier said.

"Or a bomb," Arkov said.

"Idiot. Did it ever occur to you that our three ambassadors have been killed by humans? By people close to them? Why should I be different? Why should I be killed by a device or a machine?"

"I cannot take chances, Excellency," the general said.

"And I can't take this nonsense. I'm going home. Call me when the proletariat throws off its chains. Or you find an assassin lurking in my

138

desk drawer or my inkwell. Whichever comes first."

General Arkov insisted upon riding in the back seat of the limousine with the premier. The KGB chief kept his holster unbuttoned and his right hand on the butt of his gun, and a watchful eye on the man who had been the premier's driver for almost ten years.

Three KGB men rode in a car in front of the premier and four more in a car following them. At Arkov's direction, the road leading out of Moscow had been sealed to all other traffic and the premier did not see another moving car during the entire thirty-minute drive to the small house in the countryside outside Moscow.

The large wall surrounding the small house was a new addition, but the rest of the house was much as it had been when the premier was young and still working his way up through the Communist Party ranks, when it had been him and Nina, just him and Nina, and a hope that he would survive the Stalin purges and the Khrushchev counter-purges and the continuous plotting in the KGB and the Army.

He had survived them all. And now he led. There were party congresses and committees and the secret police and the military and the more-bread-and-butter factions, all the groups who were trying to impress on Mother Russia their own blueprint for the future. But there was only one premier and his hand was the hand on the nuclear button.

Odd that he should think of that, he realized. With America laying back all over the world af-

139

ter it declined to fight for victory in Vietnam, the Russian program for the world was proceeding on schedule. Black Africa was slowly coming under Communist control. All the Americans had left in Africa was South Africa and they seemed intent upon destroying that.

Every time he read an American press report condemning South Africa, he had to stifle a laugh. The previous week, he had read one respected paper lamenting the injustice that in South Africa, only whites could vote. Apparently it had never occurred to them that in the rest of Africa, nobody could vote.

But that was a picture of America lying down and dying, and this was something different. There were assassins about, assassins bought and paid for in some mysterious way by America twenty years earlier, and three ambassadors had been killed and he was the next target.

Would he start a nuclear war to save his own life? The premier wondered. No matter how powerful a man was, no matter what responsibilities he had to history and to his homeland, he never came easily to the idea of death. At the advice of his secretariat, the premier had not yet accused the United States publicly of the embassy murders. It would be an easy matter to get most of the world to believe that the U.S. had plotted and carried them out. All the American newspapers would believe the story. And while that might serve Russia's short-term interests, it would also point out, even to the stupid, that the United States had somehow infiltrated the personal staffs of three of the Soviet's top diplomats.

140

And that did not at all look like the picture of a country playing dead. It would look like a CIA on the move and he was not sure he wanted to encourage that picture. The Third World followed power.

The KGB men made him wait in the car while they went inside and searched the house and a few minutes later when he was allowed to enter, he was met inside the door by Nina.

The premier's wife was a dozen years younger than he was. She had been beautiful, but now, in her early fifties, her legs were blooming into telephone poles and her hips into a hassock. But her face was still vibrant and pretty with the peasant shrewdness in it that she had always had. American politicians' wives always seemed to get thinner as their husbands got more successful. He wondered why Russian wives tended to imitate haystacks, but he had no chance to ponder the question because Nina was stamping her sizable foot and demanding, "Who are these lunatics and what are they doing in my house?"

"Security, dear," he said.

"Well, your precious security has just destroyed a cake I have been baking for over an hour. It will be a lump of lead now."

"Talk to General Arkov about it, Nina. He is in charge of complaints today. He has ignored all mine; maybe you'll be luckier."

He began to walk into the kitchen but was stopped by one of the agents who went inside, checked it all first, finishing up his inspection by sticking his head into the refrigerator, apparently to make sure no clever American assas-

141

sin, disguised as an ear of corn, was hiding in there.

The premier lost his temper. Finally it was decided that he and Nina could be alone in the kitchen. General Arkov would guard the door to the rest of the house. Two agents would stand outside the door leading to the rear yard and the other five agents would stand outside each of the windows, to make sure there was no attack through the windows.

"Fine," said the premier.

"Yes," said Arkov. "One thing."

"What?"

"Keep your heads down."

Nina poured the premier a glass of vodka and herself a glass of white wine, then sat facing him across the kitchen table.

"This is bad," she said.

He shrugged. "Three ambassadors of ours have been killed. I am supposed to be next."

"Who is supposed to kill you?"

"No one knows. A secret American spy."

She clinked glasses with him and he drank deeply from his water glass.

"It is bad," she said.

"Things have been bad before," he said. He slumped back in the chair and looked around the kitchen. "Things were bad when we bought this house. We did not know if we would live or die. I lost my place in the Politburo in one of the purges. Still you managed to make do."

"We always did."

"No," he corrected. "You always did." He reached across the table and touched her hand.

142

"Without a job, you fed us. When I had no money, somehow you furnished this house and made it home for us. When I had no prospects, you made sure that I always wore new clothes and shiny shoes."

"So what did you expect?" Nina asked with a smile that illuminated her face and showed off her once-upon-a-time beauty. "Some kind of American wife that if you want a piece of bread toasted, you have to go out and buy her two new machines? And a lifetime membership in cooking school?"

"No. You are not that," the premier said. "You could always make do. You even had meat on the table when no one else had meat. How do you do it?"