Page 348 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

After a flurry of anxious activity--few people dropped by this place without a summons--he was directed through a metal detector and led up in the lift to an office on the top floor.

This was the highest building around and it had a fine view over the roofs of Moscow. Volodya welcomed Dimka and offered him tea. Dimka had always liked his uncle. Now in his midfifties, Volodya had silver-gray hair. Despite the hard blue-eyed stare, he was a reformer--unusual among the generally conservative military. But he had been to America.

"What's on your mind?" said Volodya. "You look ready to kill someone."

"I've got a problem," Dimka told him. "I've made an enemy."

"Not unusual, in the circles within which you work."

"This is nothing to do with politics. Nik Smotrov is a gangster."

"How did you come to fall foul of such a man?"

"I'm sleeping with his wife."

Volodya looked disapproving. "And he's threatening you."

Volodya had probably never been unfaithful to Zoya, his scientist wife, who was as beautiful as she was brilliant. But that meant he had scant sympathy for Dimka. Volodya might have felt differently if he had been so foolish as to marry someone like Nina.

Dimka said: "Nik kidnapped Grisha."

Volodya sat upright. "What? When?"

"Yesterday. We got him back. He was only shut in the cellar of Government House. But it was a warning."

"You have to give up this woman!"

Dimka ignored that. "There's a particular reason why I've come to you, Uncle. There's a way you could help me and do the army some good at the same time."

"Go on."

"Nik is behind a fraud that costs the army millions every year." Dimka explained about the TV sets. When he had finished he put the file on Volodya's desk. "It's all in there--including the names of the officers who are organizing the whole thing."

Volodya did not pick up the file. "I'm not a policeman. I can't arrest this Nik. And if he's bribing police officers, there's not much I can do about it."

"But you can arrest the army officers involved."

"Oh, yes. They will all be in army jails within twenty-four hours."

"And you can shut down the whole business."

"Very quickly."

And then Nik will be ruined, Dimka thought. "Thank you, Uncle," he said. "That's very helpful."

*

Dimka was in his apartment, packing for Czechoslovakia, when Nik came to see him.

The Politburo had approved Kosygin's plan. Dimka was flying with him to Prague to negotiate a nonmilitary solution to the crisis. They would find a way to allow the liberalization experiment to continue while at the same time reassuring the diehards that there was no fundamental threat to the Soviet system. But what Dimka hoped was that in the long term the Soviet system would change.

Prague in May would be mild and wet. Dimka was folding his raincoat when the doorbell rang.

There was no doorman in his building, and no intercom system. The street door was permanently unlocked and visitors walked upstairs to the apartments unannounced. It was not as luxurious as Government House, where his ex-wife was living in their old apartment. Dimka occasionally felt resentful, but he was glad Grisha was near his grandmother.

Dimka opened the door and was shocked to see his lover's husband standing there.

Nik was an inch taller than Dimka, and heavier, but Dimka was ready to take him on. He stepped back a pace and picked up the nearest heavy object, a glass ashtray, to use as a weapon.

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