A Matter of Honour Read Online Free PDF

of
the Chairman’s select team.
    Zaborski stepped out on to the pavement and
walked towards another door held open for him. He strode across the marble
floor and stopped only when he reached the lift gates. Several silent men and
women had also been waiting for the lift but when it returned to the ground
floor and the Chairman stepped into the little cage, none of them made any
attempt to join him. Zaborski travelled slowly up towards his office, never
failing to compare it unfavourably with the speed of the one American elevator
he had experienced. They could launch their rockets before you could get to
your office, his predecessor had warned him. By the time Zaborski had reached
the top floor and the gates had been pulled back for him, he had made up his
mind. It would be Valchek.
    A secretary helped him off with his long
black coat and took his hat. Zaborski walked quickly to his desk. The two files
he had asked for were awaiting him. He sat down and began to pore over Valchek’s
file. When he had completed it, he barked out an order to his hovering
secretary: “Find Romanov.”
    Comrade Romanov lay flat on his back, his
left arm behind his head and his opponent’s right over his throat preparing for
a double knee-thrust. The coach executed it perfectly and Romanov groaned as he
hit the floor with a thud.
    An attendant came rushing over to them and
bent down to whisper in the coach’s ear. The coach reluctantly released his
pupil who rose slowly as if in a daze, bowed to the coach and then in one
movement of right arm and left leg took the legs from under him and left him
flat on the gymnasium floor before making his way quickly to the off-the-hook
phone in the office.
    Romanov didn’t notice the girl who handed
him the phone. “I’ll be with him as soon as I have had a shower,” was all she
heard him say. The girl who had taken the call had often wondered what Romanov
looked like in the shower. She, like all the other girls in the office, had
seen him in the gymnasium a hundred times. Six foot tall with that long,
flowing blond hair – he resembled a Western film star. And those eyes, ‘piercing
blue’ the friend who shared her desk described them.
    “He’s got a scar on his...” the friend
confided.
    “How do you know that?” she had asked, but
her friend had only giggled in reply.
    The Chairman meanwhile had opened Romanov’s
personal file for a second time, and was still perusing the details. He began
to read the different entries that made up a candid character assessment which
Romanov would never see unless he became Chairman:
    Alexander Petrovich Romanov. Born Leningrad, March 12, 1937. Elected
full Party member 1958. Father: Peter Nicholevich Romanov, served on the Eastern Front in 1942. On returning to Russia in 1945 refused to
join Communist Party. After several reports of anti-State activities supplied
by his son he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Died in
jail October 20, 1948.
    Zaborski looked up and smiled – a child of
the State.
    Grandfather: Nicholai Alexandrovich Romanov,
merchant, and one of the wealthiest landowners in Petrograd. Shot and killed on
May 11, 1918, while attempting to escape from the forces of the Red Army.
    The Revolution had taken place between the
princely grandfather and the reluctant comrade father.
    Alex, as he preferred to be known, had
nevertheless inherited the Romanov ambition so he enrolled for the Party’s
Pioneer organisation at the age of nine. By the age of eleven, he had been
offered a place at a special school at Smolensk – to the disgust of some of the
lesser Party workers who considered such privileges should be reserved for the
sons of loyal Party officials, not the sons of those in jail. Romanov
immediately excelled in the classroom, much to the dismay of the Director who
had been hoping to disprove any Darwinian theories. And at fourteen he was
selected as one of the Party’s elite and made a member of the Komsomol.
    By the age of sixteen,