"Maybe more than one?"

"I heard you when you said "people," Gunther. I ain't so stupid that I think "people" means one guy. You just make sure some cops, maybe even some FBI guys are in there, yeah, I'll help kill all you want. One thing you need to know, though."

"What's that?"

"The other side ain't dumb. They got my brother, remember. They're serious dudes."

"We also are serious," Bock assured him.

"I seen that, man. What can you tell me about the job?"

"What do you mean, Marvin?" Bock asked as casually as he could.

"I mean I grew up there, man, remember? I know stuff that maybe you don't. Okay, you got security and all that, and you ain't gonna tell me anything now. Fine, that's no problem. But you might need my help later on. These guys here are okay, they're smart and all, but they don't know dick about America - I mean, not what you need to get around and stuff. You go huntin', you gotta know the ground. I know the ground."

"That is why we want your help," Bock assured him, as though he'd already thought that part all the way through. Actually he had not, and now he was wondering just how useful this man might be.

Andrey Il'ych Narmonov saw himself as the captain of the world's largest ship of state. That was the good news. The bad news was that the ship had a leaky bottom, a broken rudder, and uncertain engines. Not to mention a mutinous crew. His office in the Kremlin was large, with room to pace about, something he found himself doing all too much of late. That, he thought, was a sign of an uncertain man, and the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could not afford that, especially when he had an important guest.

Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, he thought. Though the official name-change had not yet been approved, that was how his people were starting to think. That's the problem.

The ship of state was breaking up. There was no precedent for it. The dissolution of the British Empire was the example that many liked to use, but that wasn't quite right, was it? Nor was any other example. The Soviet Union of old had been a unique political creation. What was now happening in the Soviet Union was also entirely without precedent. What had once been exhilarating to him was now more than frightening. He was the one who had to make the hard decisions, and he had no historical model to follow. He was completely on his own, as alone as any man had ever been, with a task larger than any man had ever faced. Lauded in the West as a consummate political tactician, he thought of it himself as an endless succession of crises. Wasn't it Gladstone? he thought. Wasn't it he who described his job as being the man on a raft in the rapids, fending off rocks with a pole ? How apt, how apt indeed. Narmonov and his country were being swept along by overwhelming forces of history, somewhere down that river was an immense cataract, a falls that could destroy everything but he was too busy with the pole and the rocks to look so far ahead. That was what being a political tactician meant. He devoted all his creative energy to day-to-day survival, and was losing sight of the next week even the day after tomorrow