He stood up and walked over to the window, his reflection blurred by the double-glazed glass. The reflection in the window showed a paunchy middle-aged man in the gray suit that is the uniform of the eastern European bureaucrat. With his small dark eyes and jowly cheeks he looked like an intelligent bulldog. But those dark eyes showed nothing. They could have been made of glass.

He leaned closer to the window, his breath frosting its surface. Outside the inky blackness of night was broken only by a single lamp in the Alexandrovsky Gardens down below. Thick wet snowflakes fell through the feeble yellow lamplight, the wind swarming them like moths around the light. A black winter’s night, the wind howling around the cupolas of the Kremlin like … what was Mayakovsky’s line? “… as though the gargoyles of Notre Dame were howling.” Snowflakes wove a shroud of icy lace across the window. “Ice flowers,” his mother had called it, when he was still a boy and snow was something to play in.

He stared at his reflection. It looked like a ghost against the darkness of the winter night. Perhaps the earth itself would be a ghost when this was all over. He remembered how the frozen bodies were stacked like cordwood in the snow during the Great Patriotic War and an unaccustomed shudder trickled down his spine like a bead of sweat. Perhaps they were making a mistake. There was still time to call it off, he thought, knowing he wouldn’t.

He remembered when Svetlov first outlined the operation to him. They sat in front of the fireplace in Fyedorenko’s country dacha near Zhukovka, southwest of Moscow. Outside, birds chirped in the birch trees, as the dappled sunlight glittered off the icicles hanging from the branches. For a long moment, Fyedorenko didn’t say anything. They listened to the music of a pine log burning in the fireplace. The operation was characteristic of Svetlov, brilliant and ruthless. Svetlov played chess the same way. Although Fyedorenko was the best player at the Moscow Metropolitan Chess Club, Svetlov was the one man who could beat him consistently.

“Suppose something goes wrong,” Fyedorenko said at last.

“It makes no difference. All options lead to checkmate,” Svetlov said.

Fyedorenko peered curiously at Svetlov.

“It could mean nuclear war,” he said.

“Better sooner than later,” Svetlov smiled complacently.

Svetlov had an almost pathological hatred of the West, Fyedorenko remembered. Svetlov’s father, mother and twin brother had been wiped out by a shell from a British warship, covering the evacuation of Denikin’s army from Novorossisk during the last days of the Cossack revolt. An infant still in diapers, Svetlov had been staying with his grandmother at the time and she had raised him on the story.