The Glendower Legacy Read Online Free Page B

in his place, the technicians and the clerks—the fellows with the high-sensitivity microphones and the long-distance cameras, the scientists who fired the satellites into place overhead, the fellows who read and clipped the newspapers—the boring people with safe, sane, secure jobs were the spies who mattered. The responsibilities of the KGB were so vast that he occasionally wondered how anyone imagined they got it all done, even with the half million employees … Which was the more difficult task, he’d asked himself, keeping our citizens inside the borders or keeping an eye peeled on the rest of the world? Maintaining surveillance of the forty-two thousand miles of Soviet borders was, for one example, an absurd responsibility on the face of it. Well, at least they no longer had to keep track of the nuclear warheads …
    He sighed, glanced out the wide thermal-pane window at the ridiculous line of people, thousands of them, snaking across the Square, half obscured by snow which seemed to hang from the low gray clouds like a curtain. Every day the line was there, the KGB lads keeping them quiet and orderly and frisking them for bombs. He winced at the thought: some nut blowing Lenin and his tomb to pieces … Talk about a public relations problem! The unnerving thing was, the friskers found a bomb of one kind or another about once a month. On the other hand, Petrov supposed that a maniac’s exploding device might be the only way he’d ever find out for sure if it really was Lenin or a wax figure … It looked like wax but you never knew. And he’d never had the nerve to come right out and ask anyone who might know.
    He finished Red Smith’s column and folded the paper back to the entertainment section. He was dying to see A Chorus Line, thought for a moment of taking up the possibility of an exchange program with the snotty bastards in Cultural Affairs. He sipped the coffee which was growing cold and beginning to taste of cardboard. It was Monday morning. He frowned at his gold Rolex. Fifteen minutes yet.
    It was a boring age and the Monday morning meetings added immeasurably to his boredom. His mind wandered back to spring training. Arden Sanger, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was a good friend but he could take baseball or leave it, a state of mind Petrov deplored. They did occasionally correspond during the football season since Arden was, predictably, an enthusiastic fan of the Washington Redskins. Like old jocks the world over, they did not shrink from the occasional practical jokes. It fit their natures.
    As Petrov walked down the hallway to his meeting, he wondered what new absurdities would come flickering his way like hot smashes to third: that’s what he felt like as he approached the large conference room, an old third-sacker whose ultimate responsibility was to get in front of those hot smashes down the line like Red Rolfe at Yankee Stadium so long ago. Well, God help Mother Russia if one ever got past him.
    Petrov tried at all times, and usually with considerable success, to keep his sense of history, perspective, and humor intact and on call. But the Monday morning staff meetings were his severest tests. Dull, very serious men each bearing a crumb and the earnest hope of an approving glance or word from Petrov himself. He tried to pass his approval around evenhandedly, tried to present a solid, interested visage upon which they might gaze admiringly for a few hours and from which they might draw some strength. But it was just plain murder as they used to say in Brooklyn, no other word for it.
    Midway into the third hour a case officer caught his attention with a report from a fieldman in Bucharest called Grigorescu.
    “I search my brain,” Petrov said, rolling a very ripe cigar between his broad spatulate fingertips, “and I find nothing about this Grigorescu.”
    “No, no, Comrade Director, you would have no reason—he’s a new man, very junior. Very, very junior,