“He told the American people to prepare for war.”

So that was the emergency.

They were called to board. Dimka said to Filipov: “What did Kennedy say, exactly?”

“Speaking of Berlin, he said: ‘An attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all.’ The full transcript is in your envelope.”

They went on board, Dimka still wearing his holiday shorts. The plane was a Tupolev Tu-104 jetliner. Dimka looked out of the window as they took off. He knew how aircraft worked, the curved upper surface of the wing creating an air-pressure difference, but all the same it seemed like magic when the plane lifted into the air.

At last he tore his gaze away and opened the envelope.

Filipov had not exaggerated.

Kennedy was not merely making threatening noises. He proposed to triple the draft, call up reservists, and increase the American army to a million men. He was preparing a new Berlin airlift, moving six divisions to Europe, and planning economic sanctions on Warsaw Pact countries.

And he had increased the military budget by more than three billion dollars.

Dimka realized that the strategy Khrushchev and his advisers had mapped out had failed catastrophically. They had all underestimated the handsome young president. He could not be bullied, after all.

What could Khrushchev do?

He might have to resign. No Soviet leader had ever done that—both Lenin and Stalin had died in office—but there was a first time for everything in revolutionary politics.

Dimka read the speech twice and mulled it for the rest of the two-hour journey. There was only one alternative to Khrushchev’s resignation, he thought: the leader could sack all his aides, take on new advisers, and reshuffle the Presidium, giving his enemies more power, as an acknowledgment that he had been wrong and a promise to seek wiser counsel in the future.

Either way, Dimka’s short career in the Kremlin was over. Perhaps it had been too ambitious, he thought dismally. No doubt a more modest future awaited him.

He wondered whether the voluptuous Nina would still want to spend a night with him.

The flight landed at Tbilisi and a small military aircraft shuttled Dimka and Filipov to an airstrip on the coast.

Natalya Smotrov from the Foreign Ministry was waiting for them there. The humid seaside air had curled her hair, giving her a wanton air. “There’s bad news from Pervukhin,” she said as she drove them away from the plane. Mikhail Pervukhin was the Soviet ambassador to East Germany. “The flow of emigrants to the West has turned into a flood.”

Filipov looked annoyed, probably because he had not received this news before Natalya. “What numbers are we talking about?”

“It’s approaching a thousand people a day.”

Dimka was flabbergasted. “A thousand a day?”

Natalya nodded. “Pervukhin says the East German government is no longer stable. The country is approaching collapse. There could be a popular uprising.”

“You see?” Filipov said to Dimka. “This is what your policy has led to.”