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“Who are you?” he growled.
“Someone who needs to talk to you, General.”
“From Moscow?”
“Just now, yes.”
“Well, since you’ve come, better get on with it.” The general nodded at the briefcase. “Papers from the Ministry?”
“Not quite. Papers, yes. From somewhere else.”
“Cold outside. Better sit down. Well, spit it out. What’s your business?”
“Let me be perfectly frank. This uniform was to persuade you to receive me. I am not in the Russian Army, I am not a colonel, and I am certainly not on anyone’s general staff. In fact I am an American.”
Across the fireplace the Russian stared at him for several seconds as if he could not believe his ears. Then the points of his bristling moustache twitched in outrage.
“You’re an impostor,” he snapped. “You’re a damned spy. I’m not having impostors and spies in my house. Get out.”
Monk remained where he was.
“All right, I will. But as six thousand miles is a long way to come for thirty seconds, will you answer me one single question?”
General Nikolayev glowered at him.
“One question. What?”
“Five years ago when Boris Yeltsin asked you to come out of retirement and command the attack on Chechnya and the destruction of the capital Grozny, rumor has it you looked at the plans and told the then Defense Minister Pavel Grachev: ‘I command soldiers, not butchers. This is a job for slaughterers.’ Is that true?”
“What of it?”
“Was it true? You allowed me a question.”
“All right, yes. And I was right.”
“Why did you say it?”
“That’s two questions.”
“I’ve still got six thousand more miles to get home.”
“All right. Because I don’t believe genocide is a job for soldiers. Now get out.”
“You know that’s a rotten book you’re reading?”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve read it. It’s bunk.”
“True. So what?”
Monk slipped a hand into his briefcase and extracted the Black Manifesto. He opened it at a page he had tagged. Then he held it out across the fire.
“Since you have the time to read rubbish, why not glance at something really unpleasant?”
The general’s anger vied with his curiosity.
“Yankee propaganda?”