Embassy, looking for asylum or work or trying to sell worthless information. She had seen it a hundred times.

Her defender-if you could call him that-was Boris Georgivich Dvornikov, formerly the Moscow bureau chief of the KGB and now a highlevel official with the Moscow City Police.

He was tall, with wavy gray hair, an infectious smile, and big, meaty hands. Dvornikov was sometimes a Communist Party member, most times not; sometimes heterosexual, sometimes not; sometimes credited with a bit of integrity; most times not. They met on an irregular basis, depending on what either of them- or both-needed from the other. Today he had called her.

"My apologies, Sharon Greenfield, for that corporal's crude and inelegant action. Times are difficult, but I'll handle his insolence later."

Of that, Sharon Greenfield had no doubt. Boris Dvornikov was known to be ruthless, even sadistic-traits that had served him well in the KGB and certainly would continue to do so in the new Commonwealth. "Thank you, Boris Georgivich," replied Greenfield, using the respectful custom of the Russian's first name with his father's.

"My pleasure," Dvornikov said, then motioned to the door behind her. "Pitiful sight, is it not, Miss Greenfield? Three hundred eighty-seven new souls out there today alone. The total is well over three thousand homeless and living in the Leningrad Rail Station."

"And how many are removed every night?" Greenfield asked. She knew that, with a wide-open press in Russia now, the squalor in Leningrad Station was a political eyesore for the Russian government, so the police had been charged with helping "clean it up." For Dvornikov, that meant carting away hundreds of lost souls, probably for a long train ride to the farthest reaches of the Russian Federation, and certain death.

"We must deal with the situation as best we can."

"The pity is that much of their suffering could be avoided."

"Ah. The noble offer by the United States and the so-called industrialized nations,"

Dvornikov sneered. "And all Russia must do is give up our right of self-determination, our national identity, condemn our economic system, and leave ourselves defenseless."

Greenfield said, "Free elections, free emigration, institute a market economy, and do away with your offensive nuclear weapons. Russia spends billions of dollars-dollars, Boris Georgivich, not rubles-every year in maintaining a three-million-man army, a stockpile of ten thousand nuclear warheads, and a fleet of intercontinental bombers."

"'It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright,'" Dvornikov quoted with his usual raconteur's flair. "Benjamin Franklin. Sometimes a nation needs something as awful as a military to help it stand upright. You have homeless in your country as well, Miss Greenfield, yet you too have bombers and nuclear warheads."

He paused, then smiled. "Why, you've even built and deployed a new aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter but cruises like an airplane Your Congress and your Secretary of Defense say you're going to cancel it, but here you've gone and built dozens of them, for the Air Force, for the Coast Guard, for the Marine Corps. I wonder who else?"