The Glendower Legacy Read Online Free Page A

sincere, unspoken praise of his fellows.
    They said their farewells in the grand lobby of the Athénée-Palace. Nat was checking out early in the morning. Some of his colleagues he’d be seeing in New York come spring, others—most particularly young Grigorescu—he would surely never see again. He slapped the Romanian on the back, shook his moist hand repeatedly, and tottered off to bed. Nat Underhill had never, all things considered, been happier than that winter night in Bucharest with the wind rattling the windows of his bedchamber and the radiators banging.

Moscow: February 1976

M AXIM PETROV, DIRECTOR OF THE Komitet Gossudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti, arrived for work in a good mood. The carburetor problem on his black Zil limousine, a car worth seventy-five thousand dollars which he felt justified in thinking should work regardless of the temperature outdoors, had at last been solved. His chauffeur was for once in a halfway decent mood, and his wife had been in an excellent frame of mind. She was going shopping at No. 2 Granovsky, The Bureau of Passes, where she had promised to pick him up a case of Courvoisier cognac and a new Louis Vuitton date-book. They were—all three of them—rested and fit, having spent a long weekend at the dacha forty miles from Moscow before returning late Sunday evening.
    Though Moscow was in the grip of a winter somewhat more ghastly than usual, Petrov’s mind was elsewhere. It was the same every year at this time and the Americans were to blame. He whistled “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” as he entered his private office with its snowbound view of Red Square. The New York Times was folded on his desk, alongside The Sporting News. As director of the KGB there were very few people to whom he had to answer; none of them knew about The Sporting News.
    Continuing to whistle he sat down behind his newish, antiseptic, glass-covered desk, took a sip of hot coffee from a cardboard cup, and nipped the Times open to the sports section. His mind was far from Moscow … in places like St. Petersburg, Orlando, Vero Beach, Tampa. Spring training was under way, the pitchers and catchers and rookies were in camp already. God, how long since he’d seen a ball game! He could close his eyes and watch the ball soaring against the blue Caribbean sky as the crack of the bat lingered like a gunshot trapped in a canyon.
    Baseball. It had all begun in the thirties when he’d been at Harvard and continued in New York when he’d worked toward his doctorate at Columbia. The Red Sox at tiny Fenway Park, later the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers … the Stadium, the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field. A ball game every day his studies or teaching assignments allowed. Baseball was the real reason he was so fond of Fidel, personally fond; the man had played the game, knew what it was all about.
    Petrov had no illusions about himself: he was a relatively lazy bureaucrat whose primary efforts had been aimed all along at preserving his job rather than at carrying off great espionage coups. He had come to intelligence work, both internal and external, during World War II, thereby avoiding as much of the unpleasantness in the West with the Germans as was possible. Beria had liked him, had mistakenly thought he was loyal and uninspired and no threat. In fact, Petrov thought Beria a beast and helped engineer his downfall. On the whole, he found the entire espionage establishment, East and West, a very dim business at the best of times. He had watched with detached amusement as it had grown exponentially, increasing its inefficiency in direct ratio to its size. After all, it was impossible to keep secrets of any kind if the other side really wanted to find out.
    In half the countries of the world the spies were falling all over each other. Singularly unimportant and frequently undesirable little men were getting killed in the course of one intelligence agency or another justifying its own existence. Yet the spy himself was outdated;