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There was a long pause, then Ilse said: "Yes, I will."
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Volodya Peshkov was glad to be home. Moscow was at its summery best, sunny and warm. On Monday, June 30, he returned to Red Army Intelligence headquarters beside the Khodynka airfield.
Both Werner Franck and the Tokyo spy had been right: Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22. Volodya and all the personnel at the Soviet embassy in Berlin had returned to Moscow, by ship and train. Volodya had been prioritized, and made it back faster than most: some were still traveling.
Volodya now realized how much Berlin had been getting him down. The Nazis were tedious in their self-righteousness and triumphalism. They were like a winning soccer team at the after-match party, getting drunker and more boring and refusing to go home. He was sick of them.
Some people might say that the USSR was similar, with its secret police, its rigid orthodoxy, and its puritan attitudes to such pleasures as abstract painting and fashion. They were wrong. Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.
Anticipating the outbreak of war, Volodya had long ago equipped his Berlin spies with clandestine radios and codebooks. Now it was more vital than ever that the handful of brave anti-Nazis should continue to pass information to the Soviets. Before leaving he had destroyed all records of their names and addresses, which now existed only in his head.
He had found both his parents fit and well, although his father looked harassed. It was his responsibility to prepare Moscow for air raids. Volodya had gone to see his sister, Anya, her husband, Ilya Dvorkin, and the twins, now eighteen months old: Dmitriy, called Dimka, and Tatiana, called Tania. Unfortunately their father struck Volodya as being just as ratlike and contemptible as ever.
After a pleasant day at home, and a good night's sleep in his old room, he was ready to start work again.
He passed through the metal detector at the entrance to the intelligence building. The familiar corridors and staircases touched a nostalgic chord, even if they were drab and utilitarian. Walking through the building he half-expected people to come up and congratulate him: many of them must have known he had been the one to confirm Barbarossa. But no one did; perhaps they were being discreet.
He entered a large open area of typists and file clerks and spoke to the middle-aged woman receptionist. "Hello, Nika--are you still here?"
"Good morning, Captain Peshkov," she said, not as warmly as he might have hoped. "Colonel Lemitov would like to see you right away."
Like Volodya's father, Lemitov had not been important enough to suffer in the great purge of the late thirties, and now he had been promoted to fill the place of an unlucky former superior. Volodya did not know much about the purge, but he found it hard to believe that so many senior men had been disloyal enough to merit such punishment. Not that Volodya knew exactly what the punishment was. They could be in exile in Siberia, or in prison somewhere, or dead. All he knew was that they had vanished.
Nika added: "He has the big office at the end of the main corridor now."
Volodya walked through the open room, nodding and smiling at one or two acquaintances, but again he got the feeling that he was not the hero he had expected to be. He tapped on Lemitov's door, hoping the boss might shed some light.
"Come in."
Volodya entered, saluted, and closed the door behind him.
"Welcome back, Captain." Lemitov came around his desk. "Between you and me, you did a great job in Berlin. Thank you."
"I'm honored, sir," said Volodya. "But why is this between you and me?"
"Because you contradicted Stalin." He held up a hand to forestall protest. "Stalin doesn't know it was you, of course. But all the same, people around here are nervous, after the purge, of associating with anyone who takes the wrong line."
"What should I have done?" Volodya said incredulously. "Faked wrong intelligence?"
Lemitov shook his head emphatically. "You did exactly the right thing, don't get me wrong. And I've protected you. But just don't expect people around here to treat you like a champion."
"Okay," said Volodya. Things were worse than he had imagined.
"You have your own office, now, at least--three doors down. You'll need to spend a day or so catching up."
Volodya took that for dismissal. "Yes, sir," he said. He saluted and left.
His office was not luxurious--a small room with no carpet--but he had it to himself. He was out of touch with the progress of the German invasion, having been busy trying to get home as fast as possible. Now he put his disappointment aside and began to read the reports of the battlefield commanders for the first week of the war.
As he did so, he became more and more desolate.
The invasion had taken the Red Army by surprise.
It seemed impossible, but the evidence covered his desk.
On June 22, when the Germans attacked, many forward units of the Red Army had had no live ammunition.
