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Page 354
spilled some of its contents on the lace cloth. "I want you present when Suvorov, Aleyev, and Kalinin are questioned further, particularly when we examine Kondratiev," Cherny said, enunciating very carefully. "He must be under no delusions about your loyalty and the loyalty of our state security forces. Is that clear?"
Yulin nodded, trying to conceal his fears. When asked, he had refused to join the Soyuz conspiracy formally, but he had made no attempt to betray it. That single fact, that prior knowledge, of which Piotr Kondratiev was well aware, could cost him his life. In these circumstances, he, Ivan Yulin, must be more orthodox than the Metropolitan of Moscow, more chaste than the Virgin Mary. Death was ghosting through the Kremlin.
"Colonel Zenobiev" Cherny began to issue an order. Yulin, startled, turned to see the provost colonel of the Thirtieth Shock Army in the room. "Are the prisoners here?"
"They are, Your Excellency." The colonel's voice echoed and reechoed harshly in Yulin's ears. The motherland had come far since the days when Stalinist gunmen stalked the corridors of power in the Kremlin. Nathan Abramov, now in a cell at Lefortovo (perhaps he would be released immediately?), often said about Russia that she took two steps into the light, then one and a half back into the darkness, wracked with suspicion about what the light would illuminate. Cherny, the almost foolishly benign liberal, was becoming a new Stalin before Yulin's very eyes. Somehow, some way, he must be placated.
To Yulin, Cherny said, "Are you aware that there are Soyuz street demonstrations in St. Petersburg and Gorkiy? A few thousand people, the militia say."
"I have not seen today's internal security precis, Your Excellency," Yulin said apologetically. It was true; he always left such things to his subordinates. What one did not know, one could not act upon. He was, after all, only a caretaker, not a policeman. Aleksandr Cherny himself had stated that his

 
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