Designated Targets

Natalya’s father nodded, and the change came over him. He stood up, patted her on the head, and apologized for leaving before dinner was over. “I have important work,” he explained, and he shrugged.

“I know, Papochka,” she said. “Do not worry about me. I shall help clean up, and then I shall study my Gorky some more.”

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and premier of the Soviet Union, pushed back his chair and smiled absently. “I sometimes miss Gorky,” he said. “He was a great loss. Study hard, Natalya. You will have to make your way alone in this world when I am gone.”

He shrugged on a heavy trench coat and walked out of the apartment.

The office was located in the same building as Stalin’s apartment, in the old Senate building, sometimes called the Yellow Palace. In the time line from which the Multinational Force had arrived, it remained the center of Russian power. The Cabinet still met there, where the Politburo had reigned. Presidents Putin and Dery had both governed from the same building; Putin’s chief of staff and Dery’s national security adviser actually working at the same desk in the same converted corridor that had once housed Stalin.

Beria was privy to all this information. As were Malenkov, Poskrebyshev, and, of course, Stalin himself. The researchers who had compiled the data from the Vanguard’s computers also knew, of course. Or rather, they had known. They were all dead now.

As Beria waited in the anteroom, he wondered idly at his own fate. The air between him and Malenkov, who sat in another armchair as far away as possible, was frozen with malice. It was a fact that Malenkov would betray him, conspiring with Khrushchev and Molotov to charge him with anti-state activities. Beria would have been executed in 1953.

Well, Khrushchev was no longer an issue, and before long, Malenkov and Molotov would join him. Just as soon as Beria could convince the Vozhd to lift his halt on the great purges that had consumed the state since the discovery of the British vessel. It was like 1937 all over again. No, it was worse. Because now there was real evidence. And all that evidence pointed to a great tumor of fear and paranoia feeding on itself. It seemed sometimes, from the electronic files they’d found, that apart from maybe half a dozen stalwarts, there was nobody in this damned traitors’ nest of a country who wouldn’t turn on them, given half a chance.

Even Stalin’s closest family.

Beria’s face was a cast-iron mask, but his gut burned with acid at the memory of that discovery. What a dark day that had been, discovering Natalya’s “memoirs.” What an ocean of blood had been spilled to cover them over.

Malenkov, he noted with bleak satisfaction, appeared to be no more comfortable than he. The fat faggot looked even more like a weeping wheel of cheese than normal. Like an old woman with her rosaries, he fingered that stupid little notebook that was labeled Comrade Stalin’s Instructions. Beria cracked open an icy smile for him, and was rewarded amply when Malenkov blanched.

It was getting late, which meant that Stalin would soon arrive at the Little Corner to begin work. He lived nocturnally, and had done so for years. It didn’t bother Beria. As a secret policeman, he preferred the darkness. He considered opening his flexipad and doing some file work, but neither he nor Malenkov had moved since they’d arrived, and it seemed as if to do so now would be to give away an important advantage. So Lavrenty Beria sat in the funereal waiting room, with its shoulder-high dark wood panels, its polished floors and dreary drapes, its worn red and green carpets and, of course, its guardian, the unchanging Poskrebyshev, sitting at his immaculate desk, scratching at papers with his fountain pen.

Beria wondered if it was significant that Stalin’s secretary did not have a flexipad. They were precious instruments, rare and valued, not just for their near magical powers, but for the status they conferred on those chosen few who were authorized to possess them.

Stalin had three, but he almost never used them. He still carried his most important documents around wrapped up in newspaper, and filled his pockets with scraps of paper covered in crayon scrawl—everything from the number of T-34s produced last month to the latest results of the never-ending search for traitors, and they pored through the enormous library of the British warship.