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Page 175
He went back into the cluttered office without looking at Anna in the bedroom. He turned on the television set, searching for news. He finally found it on a cable station, mostly national news, and not much of that. He could have recited it in his sleep. The President was still at Camp David. Prime Minister Ian Halloran would leave Ottawa tonight for a brief visit to Washington. A plane was down in the mountains of Utah. The stock market was up in New York.
After the commercial, which featured a singing toilet seat, the talking head announced that Russian National Day had been a great success. A series of clips showed children marching through Red Square in the freezing rain before President Cherny and the other Russian leaders. They still stood atop the mausoleum, only it was no longer called Lenin's Tomb. It was only an ambiguous monument to a failed system. How long would it be before they dismantled it? The papery corpse of Lenin had been put in the ground next to his mother long ago, as he had asked. Odd to think of Lenin as such a devoted child. The crowd in Red Square seemed listless, smaller than Morgan remembered from parades in the past. The people on the sidelines looked as cold and threadbare now as they had then.
As a sidebar to the Russian National Day story, the network ran a CNN clip of a Soyuz demonstration on Arbat Street. Here was the enthusiasm missing in the official celebration in Red Square. The screen was full of angry demonstrators shouting slogans, shaking clenched fists, waving banners with the emblem of St. George. When the militia tried to break up the ranks, the people resisted, charging the riot police with staves and rocks. According to the commentary from Moscow Television, the Soyuz people were trying to reach Red Square and disrupt the official ceremonies. Two policemen went down under the onslaught and were rescued by Internal Security Black Beret troops, So, Morgan thought, the Black Berets are back in Moscow. There was no sound from the bedroom.
Morgan checked the time carefully. It was 1322 hours in

 
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