The Kremlin, Moscow, 1989
The knock on the door was peremptory, the knuckles that had rapped on the thick wood almost the very last part of the diplomatic attaché’s body to make it into the room, followed only by the final strands of long blonde hair which had come loose from the tight bun as she ran to deliver her news.
Few would dare to interrupt a Politburo meeting at all, let alone so brazenly. But then Nina Borisova frequently just did things, without even realising there was any daring involved. “Comrade President,” she said, her voice somewhere between excitement and amusement. “Something is happening in Berlin.”
She passed him a telegram. While he digested its contents, murmuring erupted around the table. The predictable voices were complaining that it was always Berlin, one way or another. One recently appointed member was expressing their displeasure at the attaché’s casual attitude, only to stop suddenly on being informed by their neighbour who her real father was.
“Thank you,” he said to her quietly. When he looked up, the table fell silent immediately. “Comrades, the wall is being taken down. From the Eastern side.”
“Did we authorise this?” It was the obvious question, and no surprise to hear it coming from the head of the KGB.
“Comrade, need I remind you that the German Democratic Republic is our valued ally, not some sort of vassal state?” A ripple of laughter at the far end of the table died quickly at his glare. “Apparently, their Department of Mathematical Security have determined that the security measures now being taken in the western part of the city meet the necessary standards, and as such the wall is no longer required. An orderly demolition is under way.”
A quiet voice, almost a whisper, from the far end of the table. “Our own analysts have been reaching similar conclusions.” The head of the Union’s true intelligence agency hardly ever spoke in these meetings, but always commanded attention on those rare occasions when she did intervene. She took the time to look round the table, meeting each of her comrades’ gazes with her piercing eyes in turn. “The West more generally has been coming round to our point of view on such matters rapidly, since the unfortunate events in New York two years ago.”
They had listened with respect, but now the whole table erupted with protests. Some pointed out the well-known prevalence in the West of the belief that it had somehow been a Soviet operation, intended to push the governments of the world in exactly that direction. Others opined that decades-long conflicts didn’t end so neatly and quickly, or that security measures enacted by inexperienced regimes shouldn’t be trusted. There was even a joke about the need for them to restructure their political and economic systems to be more opaque.
“Nina?” he said quietly as the discussion continued. “What do your … own sources tell you?”
“You know that we are approaching the end of the Fifty Year Plan, Comrade President. The uncertainties grow exponentially larger with every passing day.”
He couldn’t help but flinch slightly at the mention of “uncertainties”; the regime’s early attempts to damp these down had been a catastrophe on every level. Millions imprisoned or executed, on the off-chance that they might cause even the slightest deviation. And yet the original Planners Adept themselves must have known that it was doomed to failure, mustn’t they?
The new system was more humane, though still far from perfect. But better screening to identify actual Adepts, recruiting those who could be recruited to one or another institute, steering as many as possible of the rest towards becoming chess grandmasters (he still wasn’t sure how this worked, but apparently a “huge but fundamentally closed problem” was a useful dead end to park such a mind in) left a much smaller number who still had to be dealt with in the old-fashioned way.
“I didn’t ask you about the Plan,” he said in a stern whisper. “I asked you about your own sources.”
Her own response was equally stiff and equally quiet. Even most of the Politburo members were unaware of the extent to which the course of the nation’s destiny had been mapped out long before by a shadowy body that insisted its existence had to remain secret for its predictions-cum-diktats to be successful. “Comrade President, the protocols exist for a reason. No single Adept can ever perceive the whole, and so the Committee–“
“Damn the Committee,” he hissed, but the hubbub around the table was sufficiently loud now that no one seemed to pay any mind. “I trust you, Ninochka. What do you think?”
“I … don’t know,” she said. “But so far nothing has happened that falls completely outside the parameters.” She shrugged. “That’s all I can tell you, unless you have a week or so for me to derive an answer.”
He tapped the telegram she had given him. “Time is not on our side,” he said. “And besides, given a week the Committee will have come up with an official answer that will be of no use to me at all. Perhaps even this lot will have come to a consensus view by then.” He chuckled as Ninochka had to suppress a giggle. “But what’s your instinct?”
It was an unfair question: instinct was precisely what she’d spent years having trained out of her, to make her useful to the Committee. Objectivity was their watchword, emphasised above almost all else. But Ninochka was Ninochka, and he could always ask her the impossible.
She shrugged. “I really don’t know, Batya, but … somehow, something feels right about all this.”