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end.
    “We lose track of him for the next fifteen years,” Haverford said. “No one knows where he was or what he was doing, but it’s a pretty fair bet that he was involved in the Trotsky assassination in Mexico as well as Stalin’s staged murder of Sergei Kirov as a pretext for his great purges of the 1930s.”
    The purge turned on Voroshenin himself. The dictator’s paranoia led him to imprison and execute his most gifted and ruthless subordinates, especially those who had stories to tell, and Yuri was tossed into Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison.
    Voroshenin’s career should have ended there, with a bullet in the back of his head. But, as noted, he was a survivor who used all his craft, guile, and courage to survive his interrogations. He became a source of information too valuable to kill, and he sat in his cell for three long years, listening to the screams of less talented men, hearing their executions, and waiting for a moment of opportunity.
    “Prison teaches you patience,” Voroshenin later said.
    “It does,” Nicholai agreed, to Haverford’s blush.
    Hitler opened the prison door when he invaded Russia. Faced with destruction, Stalin could no longer afford to keep his best people locked up. Voroshenin was quickly rehabilitated and released.
    Yuri landed on his feet again.
    Rather than be sent to the killing grounds of the war against Germany, he used his former connection to the Kuomintang to be assigned back to China, and found himself reunited with Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing. His assignment was not to help the Generalissimo fight the Japanese, but to track down Mao and his Communists, whom Stalin accurately viewed as a potential future rival.
    Voroshenin had no problem fighting against his brother Marxists. No longer a true believer, he had lost his faith in Lubyanka, and was now a hardened cynic, believing in the advance of nothing except Yuri Voroshenin. To that end, he would ally himself with anyone, and as easily betray them.
    Haverford showed Nicholai another photograph of a khaki-clad Voroshenin standing outside a Daoist temple with Chiang. Bareheaded, his hairline receding into a widow’s peak, his skin pale and drawn from the years in prison, there was still a vitality about him. His shoulders were wide, if a little stooped, and he had certainly put on no weight since his youth. A handsome man, powerful, he loomed over Chiang as both men pretended to study a map for the benefit of the photographer.
    “Our man Yuri stayed with the Nats through the whole war and then some,” Haverford said. “When Stalin called all his agents back from China, he was afraid they’d been contaminated by Mao, so he had them purged.”
    Again Voroshenin’s head should have been the first on the block, but he was the first to inform on his comrades and became the supervisor, rather than the prime victim, of the purge. Voroshenin personally conducted the interrogations, directed the torture, supervised the executions, in some cases pulling the trigger himself.
    And now he was back in China.
    “This is the man,” Haverford said, “that Stalin chose to represent him in China.”
    It was a deliberate slap in the face, but what could Mao do about it? Isolated abroad, struggling to create a government and a viable economy at home, he needed Russian aid. If that meant swallowing his pride, the Chairman was willing to smile and bow and do it.
    For the time being.
    Nicholai listened to the biographical sketch of the Russian murderer and torturer, but much of it was redundant. From his mother, the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna, he already knew a great deal about Yuri Andreovitch Voroshenin.
    The question was how to accomplish the mission.
    Beijing at the start of 1952 was perhaps the most tightly guarded city in the world. The Chinese secret police were everywhere, and the “Order Keeping Committees” — volunteer snitches and informers — were on every block and in every factory.
    Worse, foreigners were a rarity