Stalin did not shout. He didn’t respond at all. He played with his empty pipe, which Beria knew from long experience was infinitely more worrying.

Finally he spoke. “And the last of them, the Negro woman. You knew about her inserts. Did you not?”

“Yes, we knew,” he cried. “And we tried to remove them. I have written authorization from you, approving the procedure. Nevertheless, it was no easy thing to dig such a device out of a woman’s spine. Little wonder that she died on the table.”

“For which you jailed the doctors, if I remember correctly,” Stalin replied. “They failed and they were punished.

“You failed. So?”

A grin slithered across Malenkov’s ugly face, like an eel, but Beria concentrated on bargaining with the Vozhd. “The bomb we dropped on Lodz did not fail. It wiped the city from the map and sent the Germans into full retreat toward the Oder.”

“Yes. And where are the follow-up attacks?” Stalin asked. “I was assured that we would pave the way to Berlin with these weapons.”

“And we shall. We shall,” he declared, using a cuff to wipe away the sweat that was leaking from the top of his head, plastering down what was left of his hair. It was a warm summer’s day outside, but the heavy purple drapes in the room remained drawn, on his own recommendation. He had read about sound guns that could be pointed at a window to pick up the conversations being conducted within. Presumably the heavy drapes would act as a baffle.

“How shall we?” Stalin asked. “How shall we press the advantage, when you tell us you cannot deliver the weapons?”

“That is not what I am saying,” Beria replied. “We have three more warheads under construction right now, as we speak. But these are not gasoline bombs. They are horribly complicated devices. One slip and the entire facility could be destroyed. And where would we be then? At the mercy of Churchill, who wants to use his own bombs on us. At the mercy of Truman, soon enough, who has proven in the other world that he will act with utter ruthlessness, when the occasion calls for it.

“We already know that the Allies are planning war with the Soviet Union. They will not allow history to take its course. If we strike, and our assault is a failure, they will sense weakness and they will act. Have no doubt about it. They…will…act.

“We must have enough warheads to smash the Nazis with one blow, and to hold what gains we make in the next few weeks.” With that he stopped and glanced around the room to see if his words had had any effect.

He couldn’t believe it. They were actually listening. Stalin’s frozen glare had thawed, just slightly, as a hint of real interest entered his expression.

Beria, desperate to save his hide, summoned all his energies.

“The struggle against the fascists will not be the end of this war, comrades. Do we want the imperialists, the bankers and merchants, back in this room a hundred years from now? Because that is exactly what will happen if we miscalculate. We know the Allies are not capable of absorbing punishment of the sort we have endured. Can they live with ten million, twenty million dead? Can they shrug off thirty million bodies and continue to fight? No! We know they cannot. They are weak and squeamish about the true nature of conflict. They are not meant to succeed.

“But they will succeed, through pure chance, if we do not execute our next moves perfectly. The shock of Lodz has paralyzed them-for a moment. Another single warhead will not frighten them. But three, or four, or five delivered in one mighty blow? That will be too much for them to endure. They will collapse before us.”

As he paused to draw breath, Marshal Timoshenko, the defense minister, interrupted. “Comrade, you sound as if you are already making war on the Allies. But we are not at war with them. We fight the Nazis.”

“For now. For now!” Beria replied, exasperated. “But only for now. I am not talking about an atomic strike against the Allies, Marshal. They will have their own bomb program, and if we hit them they will strike back at us. But a coordinated atomic assault on the Germans, a wall of atomic fire along the Oder, to open the way for Konev and Zhukov, that will stun the Allies, paralyzing them with fear.”

He turned back to Stalin, whom he noted was filling his pipe.

“We have always understood that the ends of this war are political, not military,” Beria said, more calmly now. “The destruction of the Wehrmacht is a precondition for final victory, but it is not the victory itself. How many times have you yourself said that, Comrade General Secretary?”

Stalin shrugged, but a grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. His arbitrary nature could be fatal, but it might save a man’s life, too.

Beria was still sweating, but it was with excitement now, as he sensed his escape. Perhaps even victory. The sour odor of panic was abating, just a little.

Malenkov looked ill again.

“Kurchatov has thousands of technicians working on production at the Vanguard site. Thousands more are racing to stay abreast of him at Kamchatka. I cannot say that he will have four or five warheads available at the stroke of three this afternoon. But he assures me we are close. Very close.”

Stalin leaned back and lit his pipe. Puffing on it, he raised a thick cloud of gray, acrid smoke. “Marshal Timoshenko,” he said, pointing the stem at his defense minister. “Do you need Beria’s bombs to break through at the Oder? What latest news have you from there?”

The cavalryman’s bald head shone in the lamplight. His hooded, slightly Asiatic eyes remained dark pools. He had been surpassed in Stalin’s affection by Zhukov, but he remained a formidable figure. The purges of the late 1930s and the post-Emergence period had come nowhere near him. Nothing in the electronic files incriminated him, and Beria had to admit that he had done sterling work mechanizing the Red Army in preparation for its return to combat. When he spoke he betrayed no fear of the secret policeman. All the more reason for Beria to be wary of him.

“Zhukov reports that the Nazis are increasingly using the nerve agent to seal their eastern borders. At first we thought it was simply gas, but the British and Americans have relayed to us their suspicions that some Emergence weapon is more likely. It is being delivered by artillery shell and aircraft, and once contaminated, a piece of ground remains impassable for an indeterminate length of time.”

Beria leapt on the possible weakness. “Well, perhaps you could devote yourself to determining how long that might be, Marshal.”

Timoshenko’s lips curled back from his teeth. “We are doing just that, Comrade Beria. At the moment we have no good news to report. The entire northern advance, more than six million men, has been held up as we search for a way through. While we waste time, the Germans are reinforcing with divisions stripped from the west.”

The foreign minister, Molotov, spoke up. “I have been in constant contact with the British and Americans via their embassies, but I cannot gauge whether they are letting the Germans in front of them escape because they are incompetent, or because they wish us to do their fighting for them.”

“No,” Stalin said. “They wish us to do their dying for them. Churchill thinks like us in many ways. He does not have our power, but he sees the same basic truths. This war is no longer about defeating Germany. It is about dismembering the carcass of Europe. I do not think we can expect much relief from them. Marshal Timoshenko, they have not yet come to our aid in the Pacific, have they?”

Timoshenko shook his head and looked over at the people’s commissar of the navy, Admiral Kuznetsov, a relatively young man in this group of aging party members.

Beria felt confident enough in the change of dynamics to quietly take his seat again. It felt like slipping into a hideout.