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at Earnshaw, who at that moment was doing a convincing job of panning slowly sideways to record the view with his camera. He lowered the instrument from his face to let the shoulder strap take the weight, and looked around casually, if anything seeming slightly bored, like someone passing a slow Sunday afternoon at the city museum. But as always, his eyes were constantly mobile, missing nothing, checking everything. She tried to tell herself that if there had been anything unsound about this mission, someone like him would never have let himself be talked into coming on it.
    “. . . transportation around the ring, as we shall see later. Good. Well, if there are no further questions for the time being, we will board the elevators again and complete our descent to the central concourse, and from there come out into the central square of Turgenev. Actually it’s not square really, but an irregular polygon, as you’ll see. I suppose we call it that through convention. So, if you would follow the stewards at the back, ladies and gentlemen . . .”
    And then they were all moving back inside the tower. One of the voices around her commented that the place was artistic as well as functional, showing spontaneity and individualism. Surprising. Not at all the staid, crushing conformity you came to expect from Russian bureaucracies. Another voice explained it was because the Russians had copied it from a Japanese design.
    Despite her resolve, Paula found her chest thumping. Now it would be only a matter of minutes.

CHAPTER FOUR

    Russians had been mistrusting and spying on each other for centuries, long before the abdication of the czar in March 1917 and the subsequent seizure of power by Lenin in November. Largely as a result of this kind of tradition, their officials worried about anything they couldn’t predict. They worried especially about behavior by their subordinates that they couldn’t explain to their superiors. Hence, all the way down the lines of command, the overriding formula for survival came to be: follow orders, don’t ask questions, never volunteer, and always behave predictably. One consequence was the stifling of innovation and creativity. Another was that they never—well, hardly ever—deviated from precedent. The operations analysts in Bernard Foleda’s covert section of the UDIA had established from records of previous tours of Valentina Tereshkova that the schedule, the route, and the procedures followed were always the same. This fact had been of great help in drawing up the mission plan.
    As the party of a hundred or so visitors assembled from the elevators in the main central concourse at ground level, the guides divided it into a number of special-interest groups according to preferences which had been indicated in advance. Thus, all the visitors would be able to see what they wanted to without being wearied by overload and without taxing any one location unduly. Furthermore, in a way that was uncharacteristically flexible for Russians, people were allowed to change their minds and switch groups at the last moment. Invariably some did. On this particular tour it was certain that quite a few would, because they had been asked to. They didn’t have to know why.
    Hence, for a while the compositions and sizes of the various groups would be uncertain. The Russians could have kept track precisely if they wanted to, of course, but not without subjecting the visitors to a lot of cattle-like herding and head-counting, which on previous occasions they had refrained from doing. It was certain, however, that the total would be verified when the whole party came together again for lunch two hours later. Thus, Paula and Earnshaw would have somewhere in the region of an hour and three quarters to complete their task and reappear by the time the groups reassembled in the central concourse before proceeding through to the restaurant.
    The plan required them to leave the zone that visitors were free to move in, and