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to his life, but to his high opinion of the State. To that end, the principle of three overlapping teams, each tasked with the same objective, was to inject a competitive element into the operation as well as factoring in redundancy—should one team fail, another would pick up the slack. The extraordinary precautions underscored the importance of Austin’s visit.
    They’d been given the use of a car. It was only a short drive from Lubyanka Square, the headquarters of the secret police, to Serafimovich Street and the exclusive residential complex where Austin was staying. It had been expected that he’d take a room in the Moskva Hotel, on the fifteenth floor with a view over Red Square, but he’d declined, stating his desire to stay in one of the communal housing projects, preferably with another family if there was a spare bedroom. He wanted to be
neck deep in reality.
    The request had caused great anxiety, since the teams’ role was to ensure that Austin was shown a projected vision of Communist society, a representation of its potential, rather than the reality of that society as it stood now. A principled idealist, Leo reconciled the dishonesty by rationalizing that the revolution was still very much a work in progress. The time of plenty was only a few years away. Right now, a spare bedroom was unheard of in a city suffering from a chronic housing shortage. As for the idea of living with a Russian family, it was too much of a risk. Aside from the conditions, which were typically cramped, they might speak out of turn. Creating an idealized family for the benefit of Austin was too difficult to stage-manage at this short notice. Mr. Austin had only requested the change on the way from the airport.
    In panicked improvisation they’d put him here, at No. 2 Serafimovich Street. It was an outlandish notion, passing off a housing project designed for the political elite at the cost of over fourteen million rubles as typical of the many communal housing projects being built. In contrast to the layout of most apartment blocks, with small rooms side by side, shared cooking facilities, and outside toilets, this apartment block had only two large apartments on each floor. The living room alone covered one hundred and fifty square meters—a space that would normally have been home to several families. In addition to the extra space, the apartments were furnished to the highest specification, equipped with gas cookers, running hot water, telephones, radios. There were antiques and silver candlesticks. For a guest sensitive to inequality, Leo was troubled by the proximity of an extensive network of servants who provided residents with everything from laundry to cooking and cleaning. He had managed to persuade the other residents to allow the servants time off during Austin’s visit. They’d agreed, for no matter how powerful or wealthy a citizen, they feared the secret police as much as the poordid, if not more. The previous occupants had hardly been ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union, including Communist theoretician Nikolay Bukharin and Stalin’s own children, Vasily Stalin and Svetlana Alliluyeva. The life expectancy of the occupants was perhaps even less than those living in the worst kind of deprivation. Luxury was no protection from the MGB. Leo had himself arrested two men from this building.
    Having parked the car, Leo and Grigori hurried through the snow toward the grand entrance. Stepping inside, Leo unbuttoned his jacket, showing his identity papers, which were checked against a list of those granted access to the building. They headed downstairs, into the basement, where a cellar housed a team of agents maintaining twenty-four-hour surveillance, technology that had been in place long before Austin arrived. Since these apartments were home to some of the most important people in Soviet society, it was essential that the State knew how they behaved and what they spoke about. Austin was staying five floors above, in