Telefon [antikvár]

The Russians called the projectTELEFON_ "It was brilliant," Strelski insisted. "Hypnosis. We collected four hundred and thirty first-class English speakers who'd never been outside the country, drilled them in every detail of American life and then hand-picked the cream for drug-assisted hypnosis. When we were finished with them, every one believed he was the American whose papers he carried, and each was programmed to destroy a target in the U.S.A. when he received a coded phone message."It was a brilliant plan. But now, at the wrong time, it was being executed by the wrong man. Now the Russians must stop TELEFON by dispatching their own James Bond to the United States.1They had the whole house surrounded.In fact, they had the entire block surrounded.Gorki Street.Borisov Street.Nostamkin Boulevard, known for the excellent puppet theatre.Tashinevo Street, still adorned with some of the gracious buildings erected before the Revolution.There were armed men on all four, and on the nearby roofs. Certain units attached to the Committee for State Securitysuch as those twelve divisions of gray-clad frontier guardswear uniforms, but the thirty-one agents in this K.G.B. raiding party were in civilian clothes. They carried an assortment of weapons under their overcoatsStechkin machine pistols, Ka-lashnikov assault rifles (with the stocks folded down) and gas gunsand they were all fine shots. These were experienced professionals, hand-picked by Colonel Malchenko himself. They were his men from his section, the only ones he could trust for this delicate operation. As Deputy Director for Internal Security at K.G.B.-Moscow, it was Aleksei Malchenko's patriotic duty to be paranoid and he did his job well.Malchenko, a dark bulky man whose face looked older than his fifty-two years, peered down at his agents and saw that every man was in position. Polkovnik Malchenko was at his usual command post for such raids, a room on the top floor of the building across the street. In knowledgeable K.G.B. circles, this was as much Malchenko's trademark as the opening salvo of concussion grenades was Strelski's. Malchenko sometimes utilized the shock grenades himself, but he always 9