Death of a Tyrant Read online

  Death of a Tyrant

  Christopher Nicole

  © Christopher Nicole 1997

  Christopher Nicole has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1997 by Severn House.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: The Trap

  Chapter One: The Spring

  Chapter Two: The Trigger

  Chapter Three: The Bullet

  Chapter Four: The Wound

  Part Two: The Pit

  Chapter Five: The Question

  Chapter Six: The Victim

  Chapter Seven: The Quest

  Chapter Eight: The Conspiracy

  Part Three: Death of a Tyrant

  Chapter Nine: The Chase

  Chapter Ten: The Fugitives

  Chapter Eleven: The Death of a Tyrant

  Chapter Twelve: The End of an Era

  Epilogue

  Ruffians, pitiless as proud,

  Heav’n awards the vengeance due;

  Empire is on us bestow’d,

  Shame and ruin wait for you.

  William Cowper

  Prologue

  Big Ben chimed the hour, it seemed immediately above his head, as Halstead entered the room. “Always punctual,” Lawrence said. “Seat.”

  Halstead sat down, carefully, knees together. He was a careful man. He dressed with careful exactitude, in unremarkable suits, and his face was a study in anonymity. Lawrence sometimes felt even the moustache was anonymous. His one eccentricity might be thought the red carnation in his buttonhole. But in London in 1946 a great many businessmen wore carnations in their buttonholes. “Pretty good shots, those.” Lawrence gave him several large photographs.

  Halstead studied the mushroom-shaped cloud. “Not something to be underneath.”

  “They make the United States the greatest force in history. Oh, we shall have one of our own, soon enough. But we’re on the same side. So they say. Uncle Joe is no doubt feeling something of an inferiority complex at this moment.”

  “Has he nothing on at all?”

  “He has quite a lot on, but so far it’s been low priority, in Russia. Now the shooting has stopped, they can think about other things. Our information is that without help they could be ten years away from the Bomb. With help, well…could be two or less.”

  Halstead nodded. “And they’re obtaining help.”

  “They are certainly working on it. In the States, mainly, but also here. Now the Yanks, and us, are monitoring the situation, but we need to know just how much they have, and how much they need. It won’t be easy, but with your special contacts inside the Soviet Union…”

  Halstead nodded. “I’ll need cover. And time.”

  “Just tell us what you want. But time…that’s in short supply. I need to have it on record that you volunteer.”

  Halstead smiled. “I volunteer, Mr Lawrence.”

  “Will you work alone?”

  Halstead shook his head. “It’s too big for that. I have someone in mind. Someone who worked for me during the war. Is there anything else?”

  “You have carte blanche.” Lawrence waited. He had known Halstead for many years, and sure enough, Halstead took the carnation from his buttonhole, looked at it, then crumpled it between his fingers and dropped it into the waste basket.

  Lawrence smiled. “Then I shall wish you good fortune.”

  Part One: The Trap

  Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

  For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

  Sir John Harington.

  Chapter One: The Spring

  The underground gymnasium was redolent of sweat and resin, anxious humanity and eager endeavour. There were three men in the room, one wearing uniform, the other two singlets and shorts; they all snapped to attention as the door opened. The man who entered also wore uniform. He was tall, well built, and utterly bald. His features were large, and bland; pince-nez sat on his nose. His eyes were permanently opaque.

  He acknowledged the men with a nod, advanced to the table which was the only furniture in the room, apart from the vaulting horse against the far wall, the rings hanging from the ceiling. On the table there was an automatic pistol. But the newcomer ignored this in favour of watching the woman running round and round the room. She was, he knew, twenty-three years old. She was tall, and strongly built. As she also wore only a singlet and shorts, and these were wet with sweat, her figure was displayed for him to appreciate. She had heavy breasts, bobbing beneath the thin material, tight buttocks and thighs, long, powerful legs. Her hair was as black as her eyes; tied in a ponytail which reached the centre of her back, it flopped up and down as she ran. Her features were quite beautiful.

  And for all her youth, she was a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, a woman who had killed, time and again. Killing was in her blood. She was a treasure. The question was, whose treasure would she turn out to be?

  The woman had not stopped running when the man had entered, nor did she stop now. Round and round the gymnasium she went, bare feet leaving damp imprints on the polished floor, sweat scattering out of her hair. The man waited until she came abreast of the table for the fourth time since his entry, then he said, loudly, “Now, Tatiana!” Instantly the woman stopped, turned towards him, and snatched the pistol from the table before turning away from him again. Behind her, on the far wall, a target in the shape of a man had appeared. With only the slightest hesitation to take aim, and for all her gasping breath and twitching muscles, she squeezed the trigger four times. The noise reverberated in the confined space.

  Slowly the woman lowered the pistol, standing still as the two uniformed men went forward. “They all go deaf, eventually,” the instructor commented. “Even I shall go deaf, eventually, Comrade Beria.” Lavrenty Beria ignored the complaint, stood in front of the target. It had been pierced by all four of the bullets. “This would have been the first,” the instructor said, indicating the hole on the right arm. “Lacking accuracy, although effective in disarming. But the second struck here…” He touched the target’s groin. “That would have incapacitated him. And the third and fourth…” He touched the target’s chest and his forehead. “Gosykinya is about the best we have, Comrade Commissar. She is a true daughter of her father.”

  Beria glanced at him, and he gulped. “I meant as regards skill, Comrade Commissar. Not politics.” Tatiana Gosykinya’s father had been executed during the Great Purges of the previous ten years. Beria walked back towards the table, and the woman, still motionless, save for her heaving chest. “You work her very hard, Comrade Commissar,” the instructor ventured. “I assume there is a reason?”

  Beria gave him another glance, and he gave another gulp. It did not pay to be too inquisitive about anything that went on inside the Lubyanka Prison…or anything that emanated from it. “The best,” Beria remarked, “must be the best, at everything.” He nodded to Tatiana Gosykinya. “Shower.”

  Tatiana placed the pistol on the table, and left the gymnasium. Beria followed, as she knew he would. The changing room was unisex, but there was no one else there at the moment. She stripped off her soaked clothing, let it lie on the floor; an attendant would remove it later. As she stepped into the shower stall she heard the door close. Thus she did not draw the curtain. She knew he had come to watch her bathe. But she also knew that he would not touch her, however much he liked to look at her. The hot water bounced off her skin, and she sighed with relief, and soaped, slowly and sensuously. She had released the pony tail on her way in, and when she had finished with her body she shampooed her hair, again slowly
and luxuriously.

  “Smerdov says you are the best,” Beria remarked, leaning against the wall.

  “At killing? I was that, Comrade Commissar, before I joined the KGB.”

  “Killing Germans with machine-guns and grenades is not the same thing as killing a specific target, at a specific time and place, with a single weapon,” he pointed out.

  Tatiana stepped from the shower stall into a puddle of water. She wrapped her hair in a towel, and began drying her body. “I look forward to it, Comrade,” she said, softly. “Will it be soon?”

  “It will be when I am ready. You may go home now. Take three days off. I am leaving Moscow for three days.” Beria’s great moon-face split into a cold smile. “Enjoy yourself.”

  *

  Tatiana wore the uniform of an officer in the Red Army, save that as she was not on active service she used a skirt and khaki stockings instead of trousers. That she was not actually a serving officer in the Red Army was apparent to no one; members of the KGB did not wear any special insignia. Thus enlisted men she passed on the street saluted her; civilians, men and women, gazed at her with admiration. With her looks, and her carriage, and her uniform, she exemplified all that was noble in the Soviet Union. Tatiana, who actually did have a sense of humour, could not help but reflect that these people would probably still admire her even if they knew she was a trained assassin: they were conditioned to admire whatever measures the State deemed necessary for their well-being.

  The doorman at the block of flats known as the Government Building saluted, and she climbed the stairs to her mother’s apartment. “I’ve put the kettle on,” Jennie Ligachevna called as she opened the door. Although the Government Building was a showpiece of Soviet architecture, it was still jerry-built, and she had heard her daughter’s footsteps on the stairs. Now she bustled into the small living room, drying her hands on a towel.

  The two women made a strong contrast. Both were tall, true Bolugayevskas, even if that name was long buried in Russia. But Jennie, now approaching forty, had put on weight since the end of the Great Patriotic War; even her always big features seemed to have grown, while her once magnificent auburn hair was streaked with grey. It would have been difficult for any outsider to pick her as Tatiana’s mother, for Tatiana took after her father, the dead agent Andrei Gosykin, with her more delicate features and her raven hair. “What did you do today?” Jennie asked, chattily.

  “Train.” Tatiana took off her cap and sat down. “That is all I ever do, train.”

  “You will get an assignment eventually,” Jennie said, and poured tea.

  Tatiana wondered just how much her mother knew about the workings of the state within the state that was the KGB? She did know that Mother had been married to Father for a dozen years before she found out that he was a government assassin. And she had only found out then when the time had come for him to be executed. Tatiana had been twelve then, and she had been just as shocked as had Jennie. That traumatic incident in her youth had fashioned her entire life. That her beloved father should have turned out to be an enemy of the state that had employed him had been the shock, not the sudden knowledge that he had killed for a living. She had never doubted the truth of what she had been told, because it had been Uncle Josef himself who had told her, and she worshipped the ground on which Uncle Josef walked. She knew there were all manner of rumours about the thousands, perhaps millions, of people who had died during the thirties when Uncle Josef had been restructuring the nation. But she had no doubt it had all been necessary.

  And it was Uncle Josef’s determination and leadership that had defeated the Germans in the War. No one could argue with that. Thus if she was directed to kill for him, she would do so without hesitation, as she had during the War. Unlike her father, she would never be a traitor to the Motherland.

  “Will you be going out, later?” Jennie asked, a trifle wistfully. She and her daughter had so little in common she valued their rare moments together,

  “I am meeting Gregory,” Tatiana explained.

  Jennie snorted. “I do not see what you find in him. He is younger than you.”

  “We were comrades,” Tatiana said simply. “We are still comrades. He is all I have left, from the war.”

  *

  The Ilyushin transport drooped low as it came down from the mountains. In front of it the Caspian Sea glimmered in the noonday sun, while beneath it, as it turned into the wind, lay the delta of the Volga, a mass of rivers, streams and marshes emanating from the mighty flow that was the greatest river in European Russia. At the head of the delta lay the city of Astrakhan.

  The airport was some distance north-west of the city itself, and Lavrenty Beria released his seat belt with a sigh of contentment as the Ilyushin touched down. Although from the outside the aircraft looked like an ordinary transport of the Red Army, inside it was luxuriously fitted out as a travelling home for the Commander of the KGB, as he pursued his duties of ruling Russia with an iron hand in the name of his master, Josef Stalin. But he came to Astrakhan more often than anywhere else; he had a dacha here, from whence he could go fishing as he chose. That it was a place seldom visited by other members of the Politburo suited him very well. He considered it an ideal base for a man who had a personal empire in mind; in past centuries, Astrakhan had been the capital of the Golden Horde, that fearsome offshoot of the Mongol legions of Genghis Khan, which had for so many years dominated Russia. Now it was possible to call it the Venice of Asia, for it was built on several islands, and was a mass of bridges and shallow waterways. It actually was a seaport of some importance, although because the northern Caspian had become so shallow in recent years, deep-draft vessels had to approach via a dredged canal.

  The Commissar was greeted by his representative in Astrakhan Province, Georgei Polkov. “Did you have a good flight, Comrade?” Polkov asked politely.

  “Yes, thank you. Is all well here?”

  Polkov shrugged. “The water level continues to drop. In another hundred years, Comrade Commissar, we will be able to walk on this sea.”

  “In another hundred years, Comrade Polkov, we will be dead,” Beria pointed out. He seated himself in the back of the black limousine for the drive. “I was thinking of another matter.”

  Polkov was one of his most trusted aides, a man who knew that should the Commissar ever fall, he would fall with him. Therefore he had been trusted with the most important secret in Lavrenty Beria’s life. “The lady is well, Comrade,” Polkov assured him.

  Beria glanced at him. Polkov was an obedient, unimaginative man, small in both body and spirit, with a long nose and shifty eyes. But all human beings were curious. “Do you speak with her?” Beria asked.

  “It is necessary, from time to time,” Polkov conceded. “She keeps very much to herself.”

  “And how do you address her?” Beria asked.

  “By her name, Comrade. Sonia Cohen, is it not?”

  Beria wondered what Polkov would say if he knew the truth, that the woman who resided at the Commissar’s dacha, and had done so since the end of the War, carefully guarded — and who Polkov obviously supposed was nothing more than the Commissar’s mistress, regardless of her age — was actually the erstwhile Princess Bolugayevska? More important, she was also the erstwhile mistress of Leon Trotsky, a man she had, oddly, Beria thought, loved. And waited to avenge? That was what she claimed. And that was what he wanted of her.

  *

  The dacha was situated outside the town, to the north-east, on the banks of one of the rivulets which flowed into the sea, here only a mile away. There was enough movement in the water to limit the mosquitoes, and in any event the house was screened. The car pulled to a halt at the foot of the front steps, and a waiting manservant opened the door for the Commissar. Beria went up the steps, and the front door was opened for him by another servant. He did not speak to any of them, but walked straight through the house and up the stairs. At the top a woman servant gave a quick curtsey. Beria turned left on the landing, and
opened the first door. This was a separate apartment, within the building. It consisted of a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Meals were sent up from the kitchen on the lower floor. As prison cells went, with its views out over the delta and the sea, it was luxurious. But there were bars on the windows. It was a prison cell.

  Sonia Bolugayevska stood by the window, looking out. She had obviously heard him arrive. Now she turned to face him. Lavrenty Beria was always surprised when he first saw this woman after an absence. He knew that she was all but seventy years old, yet she stood as straight and as tall as a girl a third of that age, as Tatiana Bolugayevska, her step-grandniece. The pair had never met, so far as he knew, but Sonia had been beside Tatiana’s grandmother, Patricia Bolugayevska-Cromb, when she had died. Violently. Sonia Bolugayevska had been close, innocently, to so many people when they had died, violently.

  He also knew that in the days when she had been the wife of Prince Alexei Bolugayevski, and therefore Princess of Bolugayen, in that heady time just before the First World War, she had been about the most omnipotent woman in Russia, after the empress and the grand duchesses. Her omnipotence had rested on the love of her husband, and when Prince Alexei had realised that the military and political advancement he wanted, and had reckoned was his due as the premier non-royal prince in Russia, would never be forthcoming as long as he was married to a Jewess, her power and prestige had come to an abrupt end with her divorce. Yet Beria still could discern traces of that age-old arrogance, in her look, her manner, even the way she stood. And why not? She was alive, where Prince Alexei and all of her detractors were now dead.

  She had survived by embracing the Revolution. Literally. She had fallen into the clutches, and then the arms, of perhaps the greatest revolutionary of them all, Leon Trotsky. Now he too was dead, struck down at her side. And still she had survived. And now she had fallen into his arms. A woman to be nurtured. A woman to be used, when the time came, to complete his ambition. A woman everyone else in the world thought was dead herself, executed by his own KGB! “I had not expected you today,” she said, her voice soft. “Is it time?”