“And one of Gorbachev’s men: Vorotnikov is in Yugoslavia.”

“Still, that gives us a majority of three against two—for the next few hours.”

“Gorbachev must call a meeting of full members tonight. I’ll suggest he says it’s to plan the funeral. Having called the meeting, he can chair it. And once he’s chaired that meeting, it will seem automatic that he chairs all subsequent meetings and then becomes leader.”

Natalya frowned. “You’re right, but I’d like to nail it down. I don’t want the absentees to fly in tomorrow and say everything has to be discussed all over again because they weren’t here.”

Dimka thought for a minute. “I don’t know what else we can do,” he said.

Dimka called Gorbachev on the bedroom phone. Gorbachev already knew that Chernenko was dead—he, too, had his spies. He agreed with Dimka that he should call the meeting immediately.

Dimka and Natalya put on their heavy winter coats and boots and drove to the Kremlin.

An hour later the most powerful men in the Soviet Union were gathering in the Presidium Room. Dimka was still worrying. Gorbachev’s group needed a masterstroke that would make Gorbachev the leader irrevocably.

Just before the meeting, Gorbachev pulled a rabbit out of the hat. He approached his archrival, Viktor Grishin, and said formally: “Viktor Vasilyevich, would you like to chair this meeting?”

Dimka, standing close enough to hear, was astounded. What the hell was Gorbachev doing—conceding defeat?

But Natalya, right next to Dimka, was smiling triumphantly. “Brilliant!” she said with quiet elation. “If Grishin is proposed as chair the others will vote him down anyway. It’s a false offer, an empty gift box.”

Grishin thought for a moment and obviously came to the same conclusion. “No, comrade,” he said. “You should chair this meeting.”

And then Dimka realized, with growing jubilation, that Gorbachev had closed a trap. Now that Grishin had refused, it would be difficult for him to change his mind and demand the chairmanship tomorrow, when his supporters arrived. Any proposal to make Grishin chair would meet the argument that he had already turned down the position. And if he resisted that argument he would look like a ditherer anyway.

So, Dimka concluded, smiling broadly, Gorbachev would become the new leader of the Soviet Union.

And that was exactly what happened.

• • •

Tanya came home eager to tell Vasili her plan.

They had been more or less living together, unofficially, for two years. They were not married: once they became a legal couple they would never be allowed to leave the USSR together. And they were determined to get out of the Soviet bloc. Both felt trapped. Tanya continued to write reports for TASS that followed the party line slavishly. Vasili was now lead writer on a television show in which square-jawed KGB heroes outwitted stupid sadistic American spies. And both of them longed to tell the world that Vasili was the acclaimed novelist Ivan Kuznetsov, whose latest book, The Geriatric Ward—a savage satire on Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko—was currently a bestseller in the West. Sometimes Vasili said all that mattered was that he had written the truth about the Soviet Union in stories that were read all over the world. But Tanya knew he wanted to take credit for his work, proudly, instead of fearfully concealing what he had done like a secret perversion.