The instant the light turned green Aza threw the car into gear and, racing past the line of tanks, sped toward Usovo. On the outskirts of Moscow, the buildings gave way to fields with ornate entrances to collective farms or factories set back from the road. Gorki-9, just before Usovo, was deathly still when she drove down the single paved street and turned onto a dirt lane and braked to a stop in front of a walled compound. The two soldiers on duty, country boys from the look of them, were dozing in the guardhouse when she rapped on the window. One of them recognized her and hurried out to open the gate.

"Kind of early for you, isn't it, little lady?" he said.

"I wanted to put Moscow behind me before traffic jammed the streets," she replied.

"If I had a car," the soldier remarked, "wouldn't bother me none being caught in traffic. I'd listen to American rock 'n roll music on the radio."

Parking around the side of the ill-proportioned wood-and-brick dacha, Aza made her way to the back door inside the screened-in porch. In the woods around the house, the birds had still not started to chirp. She took the skeleton key from its hiding place under a pot of geraniums and let herself into the kitchen. Climbing the wooden steps with the painted bal.u.s.ters, she went down the hallway and knocked softly on the door at the end of it. When there was no response she rapped more insistently. A gruff voice called from inside, "What the devil is going on?"

"Boris Nikolayevich, it's me, Azalia Isanova. I absolutely must speak to you."

Down the hall, several doors opened and Yeltsin's daughters, Lena and Tanya, quite frightened to be awakened at this hour, stuck their heads out. "What is happening?" asked Tariya, the younger of the two.

Yeltsin, wearing trousers with the suspenders dangling and a nightshirt, carrying a large-bored pistol in one hand, pulled open the door of the room. "Go back to bed," he called over Aza's head to his daughters. "Come in," Yeltsin told Aza. He knew that it wasn't good news that had brought her out from Moscow at dawn. He set the pistol down on the night table next to a nearly empty bottle of cognac. Pointing to a chair, pulling another over to it, he sat down facing her. "So you've had word from your informant?" he demanded.

Aza nodded. "He came to see me around one-thirty," she said, and she repeated what Yevgeny had told her: the putsch was underway, Gorbachev had refused to cooperate and was being held prisoner in the Crimea, Army and paratroop units had been ordered to take up positions in the capitol. She had seen one of them, a long line of giant tanks, heading into Moscow with her own eyes.

Yeltsin threaded the three thick fingers of his left hand through a shock of graying hair and stared at the floor, brooding. Then he shook his head several times, as if he were arguing with himself. "How did you get out here?" he asked.

"I borrowed a Lada from a neighbor."

He looked away, a preoccupied frown pasted on his face; Aza knew him well enough to realize that he was sorting through scenarios. "It is essential for me to return to the White House," he finally said, thinking out loud. "I'm sure to be on the KGB's list of those to be arrested. By now they'll have set up roadblocks around Moscow. If I go back in my limousine, surrounded by bodyguards, they are bound to recognize me and that will be the end of it. I have a better chance of getting through the checkpoints if I drive back with you. It could be dangerous-are you willing to take the risk?"

"I am, Boris Nikolayevich."

"You are a s.p.u.n.ky woman, Azalia Isanova."

Yeltsin jumped to his feet and switched on a small radio tuned to an all-night Moscow station. It was playing a recording of Swan Lake, which was a sinister sign; Soviet stations always switched to Swan Lake in times of trouble. Then an announcer, his voice quivering with nervousness, interrupted the music to read a news bulletin: "Mikhail Gorbachev has stepped down for reasons of health. At this grave and critical hour, the State Committee for the State of Emergency has a.s.sumed power to deal with the mortal danger that looms over our great Motherland." Hearing the commotion, Lena and Tanya came flying into their father's bedroom. Yeltsin waved for them to be quiet. "The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail Gorbachev's initiative and designed to insure the country's dynamic development," the voice on the radio was saying, "has entered into a blind alley. The country is sinking into the quagmire of violence and lawlessness. Millions of people are demanding measures against the octopus of crime and glaring immorality."

Yeltsin snapped off the radio. "Millions of people are demanding democratization, not a new dictatorship of the proletariat," he declared. Peeling the nightshirt off over his head, he began to strap on a bullet-proof vest. He put on a white shirt and adjusted the suspenders, slipped into a brown suit jacket and dropped the pistol into a pocket. Turning to his daughters, he instructed them to phone their mother in the family's apartment in the city. "The line is certain to be tapped," he told them. "Say only that I heard the radio and left immediately by car for Sverdlovsk. Nothing more."

Outside, a particularly large shooting star etched a fiery path through Ursa Major. "Make a wish," Yeltsin ordered his daughters. He himself was not a religious man but he did believe in destiny; clearly the moment was at hand to fulfill his. Gazing up at the cloudless August sky he made a wish, then settled into the pa.s.senger's seat ofAza's Lada.

"Papa, only keep calm," Lena said as she closed the car door. "Remember that everything depends on you."

At first the ringing seemed far away and Jack McAuliffe integrated it into his dream; through a haze of memory, he could see himself handcuffing Leo Kritzky to a radiator as a bicycle bell reverberated through a dilapidated wooden hulk of a building to remind everyone that coffee and doughnuts were available in the hallway. Surfacing with infinite languidness from the depths of the dream, Jack realized where he was and what was ringing. In the darkness he groped for the telephone on the nightstand. Millie got to it first.

"Yes?"... "Who did you say you were?"... Out of long habit she murmured, "I'll see if he's here."

She smothered the mouthpiece in the pillow and whispered to Jack, "Its the Langley night duty officer, Jack. Are you here?"

Jack, breaking the surface, grumbled, "Where else would I be in the middle of the night except in bed with my wife." He found Millie's shoulder, then followed the arm to her hand and the telephone. Taking it from her, he growled, "McAuliffe speaking."

Wide awake now, Jack sat up in bed and shifted the phone to his other ear. "Jesus H. Christ, when did this come in?".. ."Okay, dispatch an Action Immediate to Moscow Station ordering all hands off the streets until the situation stabilizes. We don't want any of our people killed in crossfires. Sign my name to it. Next, track down Director Ebbitt-he's on a sailboat named Gentleman Rankers Gentleman Rankers somewhere off Nantucket."... "Alert the Coast Guard if you can't raise him on the radio. Also notify the DD/0, Manny Ebbitt. Tell him to come straight in to the situation room. I'll be there in three quarters of an hour. I'll decide then whether we wake the President immediately or hold it for a morning briefing." somewhere off Nantucket."... "Alert the Coast Guard if you can't raise him on the radio. Also notify the DD/0, Manny Ebbitt. Tell him to come straight in to the situation room. I'll be there in three quarters of an hour. I'll decide then whether we wake the President immediately or hold it for a morning briefing."

Jack felt around in the dark until he found the light switch. The sudden brightness blinded him and he covered his eyes with a forearm as he hung up the phone. "Balloon's gone up in Russia," he told Millie. "Leo got it wrong. G.o.dd.a.m.n plotters launched their putsch twelve days ahead of schedule. Russian Army's occupying strategic positions in Moscow. Gorbachev's either dead or under arrest in the Crimea."

"Maybe I ought to go in with you, Jack, to get the public relations angle sorted out-Washington TV'll be breaking down our door in the morning to know why we didn't give the President some advance warning of a coup.

"As usual we can't tell them we did." He glanced at Millie-she looked every bit as appetizing as the day he first laid eyes on her in the Cloud Club. "Anyone ever told you you're one h.e.l.l of a beautiful broad?" he asked.

"You have, Jack." She reached over and smoothed his disheveled mustache with the tips of her fingers. "Tell me one more time, I might begin to believe it."

"Believe it," he said. "It's gospel truth." Frowning in preoccupation, he pushed himself out of the bed. "f.u.c.king Russians," he groaned. "If this coup succeeds it'll put them right back into the Bolshevik ice age."

Curled up on the couch in the living room, Tessa slept through the sound of Leo's alarm and the flushing of the toilet and the water cascading through the pipes in the wall. She finally opened an eye when the odor of percolating coffee reached her nostrils.

"Rise and shine, baby," Leo called from the kitchenette. "We want to get on the road at a decent hour if we're going to go to Zagorsk."

"I can handle the rise part," Tessa moaned. "Shine is beyond my diminished capacities."

The two of them had been covering Moscow like a blanket (as Tessa liked to say), visiting every nook and cranny of the Kremlin, St. Basils Cathedral, the labyrinthian halls of GUM, the Novodievitchi Monastery and cemetery (where Manny Ebbitt had been nabbed seventeen years ago this month), the Pushkin Museum. In the waning light of the late afternoons, they had explored lengths of the Moscow River embankment and segments of the Sadovaya Ring. Leo, at sixty-four, seemed to have a bottomless well of energy to draw on; it was Tessa, at thirty-seven, who ultimately cried uncle and asked if they couldn't put off seeing the rest of Moscow until tomorrow.

"Three more days," Leo said now, b.u.t.tering a toasted bun (he did all his shopping at a special KGB store whose shelves were filled to overflowing) and handing it across to his daughter.

"I'll be back, Daddy"

"Will you?"

"You know I will. Maybe next time I can convince Vanessa... " She let the sentence trail off.

"I'd like that," Leo said quietly. "I'd like it a lot."

The telephone in the living room rang and Leo got up to answer it. Tessa could hear him talking to someone in urgent tones when a low throaty rumble rose from the street. She went over to the open window and parted the curtains and looked out to see the most startling sight of her life: a long column of monstrously large tanks lumbering down Frunzenskaya Embankment.

Behind her Leo was almost shouting into the phone. "What happened to the first of September, for G.o.d's sake? Twelve days ahead of schedule will throw any plans Torriti may have made into the garbage heap."

On the avenue, the tanks were splitting up into smaller formations and wheeling off in different directions. Two of the tanks remained behind at an intersection, the barrels of their cannons twitching as if they were searching for something to shoot at.

Leo could be heard saying, "How do they know Yeltsin fled to Sverdlovsk?" Then: "Without Yeltsin the democratic forces will have no one to lead them." Coming back into the kitchen, he heard the coughing of diesel motors on the Embankment and joined Tessa at the window.

"What's going on, Daddy?" she asked anxiously.

Shaking his head in disgust, he took in the scene. "The putsch has begun," he said.

It wasn't lost on Tessa that her father seemed to be extremely well informed. "Who's rebelling against whom?" she asked.

"The KGB, the military-industrial interests, the Army want to get rid of Gorbachev and set the clock back."

Tessa retrieved the 35-mm Nikon from her canvas carryall, fitted on a telescopic lens and took several shots of the two tanks at the intersection. People heading for work had gathered around them and seemed to be arguing with the commanders who stood in the turrets. "Hey, let's go down there," Tessa said, throwing some rolls of film and her camera in the carryall.

"The smartest thing would be for us to stay put."

"Daddy, I work for an American news magazine. I'm not about to hide in a closet if there's a real live coup d'etat going on."

Leo looked out the window again; he, too, was curious to see what was happening. "Well, as long as n.o.body's shooting, I suppose we could take a look."

Muscovites were streaming into the streets when Leo and Tessa emerged from Number 50 into the brilliant August sunlight. Knots of people had gathered at corners to exchange information. A large group swarmed around the two tanks at the intersection. Students bending under the weight of backpacks filled with textbooks kicked at the treads. "Make a U-turn and go back to your barracks," one of them cried.

"We have been given orders and we are obliged to follow them," the young officer in the turret tried to explain, but he was shouted down.

"How can you carry out orders to shoot at your own people?" pleaded a young woman balancing an infant on her hip.

"Answer if you can," an old woman challenged.

"Yes, Yes, answer!" others cried in chorus.

An old man shook his cane at the tanks. "Shame on you, shame on the parents who raised you," he called hoa.r.s.ely.

"Pozor! Pozor!" the crowd chanted.

"Shame! Shame on anyone who shoots Russian bullets at Russian citizens," someone else shrieked.

"We are shooting at no one," declared the officer, visibly shaken.

Tessa circled the crowd, snapping pictures of the officer in the turret and the students shaking their fists at the tank. She reloaded her camera and, tugging at her father's elbow, headed in the direction of the Kremlin walls. At another intersection soldiers had formed a circle around two trucks and a Jeep, their Kalashnikovs slung under their arms. Three young girls wearing short summer skirts that swirled around their bare thighs spiked the stems of roses into the barrels of the rifles, to the cheers of the bystanders. At the Kremlin tower, a soldier could be seen hauling down the Russian tricolor from a flagpole and raising the red hammer-and-sickle standard in its place. A bearded man in a wheelchair watched with tears streaming down his cheeks. "We thought we'd seen the last of the Communists," he complained to everyone within earshot. A teenage boy on roller skates balanced a portable radio on a fire hydrant and turned up the volume. People cl.u.s.tered around. The distinctive voice of Boris Yeltsin's filled the air. "...soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior Ministry! At this difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against them. The days of the conspirators are numbered. The elected government is alive and well and functioning in the White House. Our long-suffering ma.s.ses will find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour you will make the right decision. The honor of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people."

Leo pulled his daughter to one side and said breathlessly, "Yeltsin didn't run away to Sverdlovsk! He's broadcasting from the White House. There still may be a shred of hope."

"What is the White House, Daddy?"

"The Russian parliament building on the Moscow River."

"Then that's where we ought to go."

Around them others were beginning to get the same idea. "To the White House," a girl with pigtails cried excitedly. As if drawn by a magnet, dozens drifted in the direction of the Arbat, the broad artery that led to the Kalinin Bridge and the Moscow River. With rivulets of Russians streaming into the Arbat, the march to the river thickened to hundreds. By the time the ma.s.sive white Parliament building at the end of the Arbat came into view, the crowd had swelled to thousands. Leo, bobbing in currents of people, had the sensation of being caught up in a maelstrom; his feet didn't seem to touch the ground as he was carried along with the horde. All of a sudden protecting Yeltsin and the last bastion of democratization, the White House, seemed like a sacred mission, one that would vindicate his life-long allegiance to the Soviet Union.

At the White House, Afghan veterans wearing bits of their old uniforms and armed with anything that came to hand-kitchen knives, socks filled with sand, occasionally a pistol-were directing the students in the construction of barricades. Some were overturning automobiles and a city bus, others were felling trees or dragging over bathtubs stolen from a nearby building site, still others were prying up cobblestones with crowbars. The crewmen of the ten Taman Guard tanks drawn up in a semicircle around the White House sat on their vehicles, smoking and watching but not intervening. Minutes after bells in the city pealed the noon hour, a cheer rose from the hot asphalt and gradually grew louder until it appeared as if the ground itself was erupting. "Look," Leo yelled, pointing to the front doors of the Parliament building. The bulky figure of a tall man with a shock of gray hair could be seen standing on the top step, his arms thrust high over his head, his fingers splayed into v-for-victory signs. "It's Yeltsin," Leo shouted into his daughter's ear.

Scrambling onto the hood of a car, Tessa took several photographs, then elbowed her way through the crowd to get a closer look. Leo trailed after her. At the White House, Yeltsin descended the steps and clambered onto a T-72 with the number 110 stenciled on the side of the turret. The crowd grew silent. Journalists held out microphones to capture what he said. "Citizens of Russia," he bellowed, his voice booming over the heads of the demonstrators, "they are attempting to remove the legally elected president of the country from power. We are dealing with a right-wing anti-const.i.tutional coup d'etat. Accordingly we proclaim all decisions and decrees of this State Committee to be illegal."

Yeltsin's short speech was greeted with wild applause. He climbed down from the tank and chatted for a moment with one of the Taman Guard officers. Surprisingly, the officer snapped off a smart salute. Beaming, Yeltsin made his way up the steps, through supporters who thumped him on the back or pumped his hand, and disappeared into the building.

The motors on the ten Taman Guard tanks revved and black fumes belched from their exhausts. And to everyone's utter astonishment, the gunners in the tanks swiveled their cannons away from the Parliament building. A raw cry of pure joy rose from the ma.s.ses as people realized that the Taman tankers, moved by Yeltsin's speech, had decided to defend the White House, not attack it.

As the afternoon wore on, thousands more spilled into the plaza around the Parliament building. Estimates picked up from bulletins on portable radios put the crowd at fifteen thousand, then twenty thousand, then twenty-five thousand. The Taman officers and the Afghan veterans began to impose order on what many were calling the counterrevolution. The barricades grew higher and thicker and st.u.r.dier. Students on motorcycles were sent out to reconnoiter the city and report back with news of troop movements. Girls, some of them prost.i.tutes who worked the underground pa.s.sages near the Kremlin, hauled cartons of food and drink and distributed them to the demonstrators blocking the approaches to the White House with their bodies.

At one point Tessa noticed antennas on the roof of the building. "Do you think the phones are still working?" she asked.

Leo looked up at the antennas. "The ones that work off satellites probably are."

"If I could get to a phone, I might be able to call Washington and give my editors a first-hand account of what's happening here. It could help turn world opinion against the coup."

Leo immediately saw the advantages in what she was suggesting. "It's worth a try."

Pushing through the crowd, the two of them went around to entrance number twenty-two at the side of the building. The doors were guarded by some tough-looking Afghan veterans armed with two machine guns and a handful of pistols. One of the veterans was peering through binoculars at the hotel across the street. "Stay alert-there are snipers taking up positions in the upper windows," he called. Leo quickly explained in Russian that the young woman with him was an American journalist. One of the guards glanced at Tessa's press card, which he was unable to read, and waved them through.

Inside, couriers scurried through the corridors delivering messages attached to clipboards. Secretaries pushed carts loaded with Molotov c.o.c.ktails or sheets ripped into strips to make bandages. Young guards from private security companies were teaching university students how to load and fire Kalashnikovs. In one room on the third floor, down the hall from Yeltsin's command bunker, they found a woman faxing Yeltsin's denunciation of the putsch to Party organizations and factories and local governments around the country. Leo explained that the American journalist with him needed a telephone to call out the story of the counterrevolution. The woman stopped what she was doing and took them into a smaller office with a phone on a table. "This one works off a satellite," she told Tessa in careful English. "If you get through to America keep the line open. When we are attacked, you must lock yourself in and let the world know what is happening."

The woman turned to stare out a window, a faraway look in her eyes. "I have always disliked summers," she remarked in Russian. "This one is no exception." She looked back at Leo. "What is your name?"

"Kritzky," he replied. "She is my daughter."

"Mine is Azalia Isanova Lebowitz. An a.s.sault could come at any moment. We are short of guards for Yeltsin's office. Will you volunteer?"

"Of course I will."

Leo left Tessa dialing a number and went down the corridor to the double door leading to Yeltsin's command bunker. From inside, phones could be heard ringing insistently. From time to time Yeltsin's booming voice echoed through the rooms. "The Ukrainian KGB chief, Golushko, phoned to say he didn't support the coup," he cried. In the hallway, Leo helped himself to a Kalashnikov and several clips of ammunition from a carton on the floor and joined a heavy man standing sentry duty at the door, an AK-47 in his strong hands.

"Do you know how to work that thing?" the man inquired in Russian.

"Not really," Leo answered.

"Here, I'll show you. It's not very complicated. You drive home the clip until you hear a solid click. If you intend to shoot you must work the first round into the barrel. Then there is nothing left but to aim and squeeze the trigger. I'll put it on single action firing so the gun won't climb up on you, which is what happens when you shoot in bursts. Do you think you have it?"

"Work the first round into the barrel, aim, squeeze the trigger."

The man smiled warmly. "Pity the counterrevolution that relies on the likes of us to defend it." He held out his hand. "Rostropovich, Mstislav," he said, bowing slightly as he introduced himself.

Leo took the hand of the world-famous Russian cellist. "Kritzky, Leo," he said.

"It all comes down to this moment in this place-the struggle to change Russia," Rostropovich remarked.

Leo nodded in fervent agreement. The two of them turned and, planting their backs against the wall, surveyed the traffic in the corridor.

Wedged into a folding aluminum garden chair in the rooftop solarium, one empty and one full bottle of Scotch within arm's reach on the deck, Harvey Torriti enjoyed a bird's-eye view of the events unfolding in the streets around the White House, across the river from the Hotel Ukraine. He had swapped his Swatch for a pair of Red Army binoculars before taking the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor late in the afternoon and hauling his carca.s.s up the last staircase, an exertion that left him vowing to start smoking again since he couldn't see what stopping had done for his respiration. Moscow had cooled down once the sun dipped below the industrial haze on the horizon and the lights of the city had flickered on peacefully enough. It was only when the Sorcerer peered through the binoculars that the scene began to look more ominous. The concierge at the desk in the lobby had been vague about what was going on outside. There was some sort of military exercise under way, he guessed. Certainly nothing to be alarmed about. Russia, after all, was a civilized country where the rule of law prevailed. What about the mob at that white building on the other side of the river? Torriti had asked. Pensioners, the concierge had explained with a contemptuous wave of his hand, b.i.t.c.hing about inflation.

The pensioners b.i.t.c.hing about inflation, some fifty thousand strong if you believed the British journalists in the lobby, had settled down for the night around the white building. Through the binoculars Torriti could make out cl.u.s.ters of them huddled around dozens of campfires. The light from the flames illuminated shadowy figures who were laboring to pile desks and park benches and potbellied stoves onto the already towering barricades.

Torriti uncapped the last bottle of Scotch and treated himself to one for the road even though he had no intention of hitting the road. It was a crying shame-a few more days and his gnomelike friend Rappaport, surrounded by Uighur guardian angels, might have been able to fulfill the contracts that Torriti had put out on ten of the leaders of the uprising. No plotters, no putsch. The Sorcerer wondered what had pushed them to advance D-day. He'd probably never know. Well, what the h.e.l.l-you win some, you lose some, in the end it pretty much evened out.

He brought the binoculars back up to his red-rimmed eyes. Near the Kremlin, on the Lenin Hills, along several of the wider boulevards visible from the Ukraine's roof, long lines of hooded headlights could be seen snaking in one direction or another. "Tanks," the Sorcerer muttered to himself. He wondered where Leo Kritzky was at this moment. Probably locked himself in his apartment until the tempest pa.s.sed. It crossed the Sorcerer's mind that he might not be safe here on the roof-he remembered Ebbitt telling him once how Soviet tanks invading Budapest in '56 had shot out the lower floors of buildings to bring the upper floors crashing down on them. Torriti had gotten off to a sour start in Berlin with Ebbitt-Jesus, that was a lifetime ago!-but he'd turned out to be a good brick after all. And when it came to Russian tanks, Ebbitt knew what he was talking about-he'd witnessed the Budapest fiasco with his own eyes. Still, if the tanks attacked, it wouldn't be the Hotel Ukraine with all the foreigners inside. It would be the white building across the street. But to get close enough to shoot out the bottom floors the tanks would have to crush a lot of warm bodies blocking the streets.