Millions were being spent, tens of millions. Where was the mysterious cash coming from?

A task force was hastily formed, experts in finance and banking who peeked and prodded under all the usual rocks.

Nothing.

A team of computer forensics experts burgled Boris's campaign offices and combed the deepest crevices of every hard drive.

Not a trace.

Long, raucous meetings were held about what to do, with the usual backbiting, finger-pointing, and evasion of responsibility. This sneaky white knight, whoever he was, knew how to hide his fingerprints. Whatever he was doing to evade their most advanced techniques of snooping and detection had to be enormously clever. That level of sophistication raised interesting questions and dark misgivings. After much heated discussion, inevitably the preponderance of suspicion fell on foreign intelligence agencies. Surveillance of selected foreign embassies and known intelligence operatives was kicked up a notch and the squad of watchers increased threefold. Most of the foreign embassies were wired for sound anyway. And after seventy years of foreign spies lurking and sneaking around its capital, the KGB had a tight grip on every drop site and clandestine meeting place in Moscow.

More nada.

As Yeltsin's poll numbers climbed, frustration grew. The KGB was averse to mysteries-unsolved too long they turned into career problems. So the KGB chief of residency in Washington was ordered to kick the tires of his vast web of moles, leakers, and traitors in the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and any other alphabet-soup agency he had his devious fingers in. Money, cash, lucre-that was America's preferred weapon. And even if America wasn't the culprit, the CIA or NSA, with their massive, sophisticated arsenals of electronic snoops, probably knew who was.

More nada, nada, nada. More wasted time, more wasted effort, more millions of dollars flooding out of nowhere, with more supporters flocking to Yeltsin's banner.

Yutskoi observed, "Actually, it's a miracle we found out at all. Konevitch is very, very clever."

"How clever?"

"In the private construction business, nearly everything's done in cash. And nearly all of it under the table. Compounding matters, right now, we're a mix of two economies: communist and free-market. The free-market guys know we don't have a good handle on them. They're inventing all kinds of fancy new games we don't know how to play yet. It's-"

"And what game did he play?" Golitsin interrupted in a nasty tone, tired of excuses.

"Everything was done offshore. It was smuggled out in cash, laundered under phony names at Caribbean banks, and from there turned electronic. He moved it around through a lot of banks-Swiss, African, American-divided it up, brought it back together, and just kept it moving until it became untraceable and impossible to follow."

"And how did he hand it over to Yeltsin's people?"

"That's the beauty of it. Not a single ruble ever touched the Soviet banking system. That's why we never saw it." He smiled and tried to appear confident. "What we now hypothesize was that he smuggled it back in as cash and handed it over in large suitcases." The truth was, they still had no idea, though he wasn't about to confess to that.

"Then who helped him?" Golitsin immediately barked, with a sizzling stare. Another good, unanswerable question. Soviet citizens knew zilch about international banking, money laundering, electronic transactions, or how to elude detection. The Soviet banking system was backward and shockingly unsophisticated. Besides, nobody had enough money to dream of getting fancy.

Or almost nobody-the Mafiya had money by the boatload. And they were masterminds at financial shenanigans; they had tried and perfected all kinds of underhanded tricks and scams. In the most oppressive state on earth, their survival depended on keeping their cash invisible. Golitsin waved a finger at his aide's folder. "Any evidence of that?"

"None. Not yet, anyway. It doesn't mean their crooked fingers aren't in it, just that we haven't found it."

"Keep looking. It has to be there."

After a moment, and totally out of the blue, Yutskoi mentioned, "I read a term paper he wrote as a freshman, something to do with Einstein's theory of relativity."

His boss had moved back to the window, restlessly watching the loud, angry crowd down on the street. Only a few years before the whole lot would already be in windowless wagons, trembling with fear on their way to Dzerzhinsky Square. They'd be worked over for a while, then shipped off to a uranium mine in the Urals where their hair and teeth would fall out.

The old days: he missed them already.

Yutskoi interrupted the pleasant reverie. "At least I tried to read his paper, I should say. I barely understood a word," he mumbled. "And all those complicated equations…" He trailed off, sounding a little stunned.

"What about it?" Golitsin asked absently. The crowd below was now dancing and chanting and growing larger by the minute. He felt weary.

"I sent it off to the director of the thermonuclear laboratory at the Kurchatov Institute. He said it was one of the most brilliant treatises he had read in years. Wanted to get it published in a few very prestigious international journals. You know, show the international community Soviet science still has what it takes. When I told him an eighteen-year-old college sophomore wrote it, he called me a liar."

His boss glanced back over his shoulder. "You already told me he's smart."

"I know I did. Now I'm saying he's more than smart."

They stared at each other a moment. Golitsin said, "He's only twenty-two."

"Yes, and that's the whole point. He's not hamstrung by old ideas. Nor has he lived long enough to have his brains and ambitions squeezed into radish pulp like everybody over thirty in this country."

Lost on neither of them was the ugly irony that they and their thuggish organ had done that squeezing. The average Russian could barely haul himself out of bed in the morning. The only social superlatives their nation boasted were the world's highest rate of alcoholism and the shortest life span of any developed nation. What a fitting tribute.

Yutskoi cleared his throat and asked, "So what will you advise Gorbachev?" He began stuffing documents and photos back into his expandable file.

Golitsin acted preoccupied and pretended he didn't hear that question. Yutskoi was an inveterate snoop and world-class gossip; if he let the cat out of the bag now, the news would be roaring around Moscow by midnight. Then again, Golitsin thought, so what? This news was too big to contain anyway. One way or another, it would be on the tip of every tongue in the world by morning. What difference would a few hours make?

He moved away from the window and ambled back in the direction of his aide. "On Gorbachev's desk is a document abolishing the Soviet Union. That jerk Yeltsin had the Congress vote on it this afternoon."

"And it passed?"

"By a landslide. If Gorbachev signs it, the Soviet Union is toast. History. Kaput."

"And if he doesn't?" asked Yutskoi, fully enlightened now about the cause of Yeltsin's drunken celebration that night: this was bound to be a bender of historic proportions. His tenders would have to pour Boris into bed. "What then?" he asked.

"What do you think will happen, idiot? We'll disband the mutinous Congress and crack down." He pointed a crooked, veiny finger through the window in the direction of the unruly crowd below. "We'll collect a few million malcontents and dissidents. Throw a million or so into the gulags. Shoot or hang a hundred or two hundred thousand to get everybody's attention."

"Won't that be fun," the aide blurted.

Golitsin shrugged. "Leave that file on Konevitch. I'll want to study him further."

Yutskoi stood and started to leave when he felt the old man's grip on his arm. "And keep me informed of what you learn about Konevitch. Spare no resources. I want to know everything about this young wunderkind. Everything."