Icon by Frederick Forsyth Read Free Book Online Page A

is likely to be found on New Year’s Eve if he can get away from the stuffier parties of the diplomatic circuit. It also serves lunch. Celia Stone had chosen to meet her Russian reporter there.
    She found a parking space without difficulty just round the corner, for fewer and fewer Russians could afford cars or the petrol to run them, and began to walk back. As always when an obvious foreigner approached a restaurant the derelicts and beggars hauled themselves out of their doorways and off the pavement to intercept and ask for food.
    As a young diplomat, she had been briefed at the Foreign Office in London before her posting, but the reality always shocked her. She had seen beggars in the Underground of London and in the alleys of New York, the bag people who had somehow slid down the ladder of society to take up residence on its bottom rung. But in Moscow, the capital of a country experiencing the onset of real famine, the wretches with their hands out for money or food had once, and not long ago, been farmers, soldiers, clerks, and shopkeepers. She was reminded of TV documentaries of the Third World.
    Vadim, the giant doorman of the Rosy O’Grady, saw her several yards away and ran forward, clouting several begging fellow Russians out of the way in order to secure safe passage for a vital hard-currency patron of his employers’ restaurant.
    Offended by the spectacle of the supplicants’ humiliation at the hands of another Russian, Celia protested feebly, but Vadim swept a long, muscular arm between her and the row of extended hands, swept open the restaurant door, and ushered her inside.
    The contrast was immediate, from the dusty street and the hungry beggars to the convivial chatter of fifty people who could afford meat and fish for lunch. Being a good-hearted young woman, she always had trouble when lunching or dining out, trying to reconcile the food on her own plate with the hunger outside. The genial Russian reporter who waved to her from a corner table had no such problem. He was studying the list of zakuski starters and settled for Archangel prawns.
    Zaitsev the Rabbit, still plodding on his quest, scoured Borovitskaya Square for the red Rover, but it had gone. He checked all the streets leading off to the left and right for a flash of red paintwork, but there was none. Finally he chose the main boulevard on the far side of the square. To his amazement and joy he saw it two hundred yards further on, just round a corner from the pub.
    Indistinguishable from the others waiting with the patience of the utterly cowed, Zaitsev took up position near the Rover and started to wait again.
    Nairobi, 1983
    IT had been ten years since Jason Monk had been a sophomore at the University of Virginia and he had lost touch with many of the students he had known. But he still recalled Norman Stein. Theirs had been an odd friendship, the medium-height but hard-muscled football player from the farm country and the unathletic son of a Jewish doctor from Fredericksburg. It was a shared and mocking sense of humor that had made them friends. If Monk had had the talent for languages, Stein was the near genius in the Biology Department.
    He had graduated summa cum laude one year before Monk and gone straight to medical school. They had kept in touch the usual way, by Christmas cards. Crossing a restaurant lobby in Washington two years earlier, just before his Kenyan posting came through Monk had seen his friend lunching alone. They had had half an hour together before Stein’s lunch partner had showed. That had enabled them to catch up on each other’s news, though Monk had had to lie and say he worked for the State Department.
    Stein had become a doctor then taken a Ph D in tropical medicine and was even then rejoicing in his new appointment to the research facility at Walter Reed Army Hospital. From his apartment in Nairobi, Jason Monk checked his address book and made a call. A blurred voice answered at the tenth