The Cambridge Theorem

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Book: Read The Cambridge Theorem for Free Online
Authors: Tony Cape
shifted his weight again on the hard chair and felt nervously for the carbon copy of his memo in his inside pocket. It was unnecessary, since he knew its contents by heart, but he wanted to be prepared if a particular word or phrasing were queried. He had met the chairman many times during the fourteen years of his tenure, but not usually alone, and not usually in the famous third floor office of the Lubianka. He was aching for a cigarette, but forced his attention elsewhere, to survey the conference room that formed an outer office of the chairman’s suite. At intervals along the green baize of the huge table were small crystal goblets, each containing a sheaf of perfectly sharpened pencils. On the wall opposite the windows was the large, mandatory portrait of Lenin. Above the double walnut doors by which he had entered was a modern, rectangular clock, also of walnut. The time was almost ten twenty. The only other persons in the room were the uniformed guard at attention by the double doors and the rodent-faced assistant seated impassively at the small desk just outside the door to the private office.
    He touched the memo with his fingertips and cleared his throat. He was proud of it. He had always had a mature ease with written expression, and had begun and ended his career in the West as a journalist. He had taken considerable pains to learn the nuance of Russian prose, and could now write better in his adopted language than many native officers. He had long dispensed with translators, and now employed only Rufa to review his grammar and syntax. He looked at the handsome panelled door to the chairman’s private office and smiled. When the chairman had taken charge in the late sixties, the only means of entry to his inner sanctum was through a shkaf , a contraption that resembled an antique wardrobe. The entrant stepped into the shkaf and total darkness, then an assistant activated the mechanism that opened the panel into the inner office. His first order as KGB chairman had been to have the shkaf demolished, and replaced with an ordinary door. It had been a symbolic beginning, for in the ensuing years the KGB had been transformed from a backward troupe of louts and criminals into an elite corps that now attracted the most talented of Moscow’s graduates. For all the puzzling contradictions of his character, the chairman was a man of vision, a vision which might yet work a profound transformation on Soviet society.
    The assistant responded to a barely audible buzz on his handset and rose to open the panelled door. The ugly little man turned and silently gestured for the old spy to enter.
    His nervousness left him as he strode quickly to accept the proferred handshake from the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union. The tall, stooped figure in a dark business suit smiled slightly as he stood behind the huge desk and indicated a chair with a courteous hand. The men sat down in silence, and the chairman resumed his contemplation of the memorandum in front of him. The Englishman crossed his legs and looked around the room.
    The office was a reflection of the enigma of the man himself. The only adornments were the large portrait of Feliks Dzerzhinsky above the marble mantel, and a beautiful wooden statue of Don Quixote on his desk. Side by side, the images of the fearsome founder of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, and the hopelessly pure chevalier , the emblem of humanity’s unquenchable idealism. Is this how the chairman saw himself, a fabulous knight tilting against endless brutish realities of the police state? He was compounded of contradictions; daring and conservative, enlightened and pitiless, a man who wrote poetry to his friends and family and imprisoned dissidents in psychiatric hospitals. The silver hair and black-rimmed glasses made him seem kindly and professorial, but his reputation for cruelty made him universally feared. He stopped reading and looked up.
    â€œYou present an eloquent

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