ng his feet to the floor and approached the closet. He selected
his most poorly pressed pair of pants, and a coat that mismatched it. He
checked the charge in his .38 Noiseless, and replaced the weapon under
his left arm. He removed his partial bridge, remembering as he did so
how he had lost the teeth in a street fight with some Commie union
organizers in Panama, and replaced the porcelain bridge with a typically
Russian gleaming steel one. He stuffed a cap into his back pocket, a
pair of steel rimmed glasses into an inner pocket, and left the room.

He hurried through the lobby, past the Intourist desk, thankful that it
was a slow time of day for tourist activity.

Outside, he walked several blocks to 25th of October Avenue and made a
point of losing himself in the crowd. When he was sure that there could
be no one behind him, he entered a _pivnaya_, had a glass of beer, and
then disappeared into the toilet. There he took off the coat, wrinkled
it a bit more, put it back on and also donned the cap and glasses. He
removed his tie and thrust it into a side pocket.

He left, in appearance a more or less average workingman of Leningrad,
walked to the bus station on Nashimson Volodarski and waited for the
next bus to Petrodvorets. He would have preferred the subway, but the
line didn't run that far as yet.

The bus took him to within a mile and a half of the dacha, and he walked
from there.

By this time Paul was familiar with the security measures taken by
Leonid Shvernik and the others. None at all when the dacha wasn't in use
for a conference or to hide someone on the lam from the KGB. But at a
time like this, there would be three sentries, carefully spotted.

This was Paul's field now. Since the age of nineteen, he told himself
wryly. He wondered if there was anyone in the world who could go through
a line of sentries as efficiently as he could.

He approached the dacha at the point where the line of pine trees came
nearest to it. On his belly he watched for ten minutes before making the
final move to the side of the house. He lay up against it, under a bush.

From an inner pocket he brought the spy device he had acquired from
Derek Steven's Rube Goldberg department. It looked and was supposed to
look considerably like a doctor's stethoscope. He placed it to his ears,
pressed the other end to the wall of the house.

Leonid Shvernik was saying, "Becoming killers isn't a pleasant prospect
but it was the Soviet w