The Saint

1

“As the number of deaths from freezing mounts, the mood here is increasingly ominous,” stated CNN correspondent Jan Sharp broadcasting from an improvised canopy outside the Kremlin. “A bankrupt Russian government — unable to provide the heating oil its people so desperately need — claims to be working on some mysterious solution to the crisis.”

The street was strewn with broken bottles, charred trashcans, torn clothes, spent teargas cartridges, and Tretiak placards.

“Meanwhile,” continued Sharp, “what Ivan Tretiak’s Oktober Party bills as rallies are turning into nightly riots...”

Detailing the debris and disorder prevalent in Moscow, the newscaster paid no notice to the rain-slickered businessman edging past the clutter, folding his umbrella, and entering a small side-street shop.

Dark and narrow, the counters were crammed with cheap copies of Russian Orthodox art, cardboard icons, plastic chalices, tin pendants, and other low-rent replicas similar to the more authentic-looking items Templar had seen in the Moscow underground.

The owner, wearing an overcoat indoors and pacing the small space to stay warm, was the same woman who dealt in higher-priced but equally bogus items below ground.

“Excuse me,” said the businessman with a New Orleans accent, “but I’m looking for either an authentic relic from the estate of the late Prince von Oldenburg who was married to a sister of the czar, or a genuine Madonna icon...”

Frankie brightened, sensing a score.

“With an American dollar deposit, we could meet somewhere else. I can show you rare objects. Prince von Oldenburg” — she gave the name serious thought — “very rare, very famous. His grandson was a movie star, did you know that? See him on pirate videotapes from America. Old black and white.” Frankie made a motion with her hands as if turning a combination lock. “Breaking open the bad guy’s safe; breaking the women’s hearts, yes? A true Russian!”

She laughed, crinkling her eyes in a devilish smile.

“We’ll see what we can find from royalty formerly known as Prince. As for Madonna, Madonna costs a bit extra—”

“That’s fine,” he replied seriously. “But she’s gotta be wearing the cone-shaped bra.”

Frankie blinked in disbelief, then took a good look at the customer.

“Hey. Mr. Bulgari Chronograph. Real funny. Didn’t you make it out?”

“Almost, but I decided to stay.”

She squinted suspiciously. “Then, why’re you back, Bulgari?”

It was time for some truth telling. “My name is Templar, Simon Templar.”

He put out his hand in friendship, but Frankie didn’t take it. She glanced dubiously from his hand to his face.

“The men looking for you were crawling all over the tunnels like rats. They roughed me up, but I laughed in their faces. I said I didn’t know anything...”

Templar started to smile in appreciation, but it was cut short by her next remark.

“... so they shot Toli.”

Simon put his hand down. “I’m sorry, really. In a way, it’s partially my fault...”

“No, Tretiak’s fault,” insisted Frankie. “They would have killed you and your girlfriend, too. Where is she?”

“The American Embassy. She’s safe, for now, but this entire country is in danger.”

Frankie forced a rueful laugh. “No surprise. No justice.”

“ ‘The best beloved of all things in my sight is justice,’ ” said Templar, and he meant it.

“Wrong time, wrong town.”

Templar took a breath.

“I need your help to stop Tretiak.”

She stepped back defensively.

“Hey, it’s a big country — big country — and you’re saying I’m your best friend here?”

“I’m saying you’re my only friend.”

She looked away, pretending to examine a cardboard replica of the Kremlin. She was, in reality, reexamining her own personal commitment to an ethical standard above and beyond the selfishness, corruption, and materialism devouring her homeland.

“Sometimes a person has to look the other way,” she said softly, “and other times a person can’t look away at all.”

She turned back toward him, shrugged as if her important thoughts were of little consequence, and smiled

“Just don’t get me killed, okay?”

They shook hands.

Frankie then offered him bitter instant coffee in a plastic cup, locked the front door, and put the closed sign in the window.

“What happens now?” she asked, rubbing her hands together in conspiratorial glee.

A light seemed to glow in Templar’s sapphire eyes.

“We light a fire under Ivan Tretiak.”

“Hoo-boy! I can picture that.” Frankie liked the plan so far.

“We’re going to get a rise out of that would-be tin-pot dictator, Frankie. In fact, believe that he’ll rise like a loaf overloaded with young and vigorous yeast.”

She found his delivery amusing, his material adequate.

“When he’s finished rising,” elaborated Templar, “he’ll have such an altitude that he’ll have to climb a ladder to take off his shoes.”

Frankie laughed for the first time since Toli’s death, and color came into her cheeks. “Very funny picture in my head about that!”

“Frankie,” said Templar as he toyed with a Kremlin replica, “there are three things Tretiak can do in the current social/political situation. He must either a, take over the country, b, go out and get hit by a bus, or c, be put out of business by the two of us. If he does a, everyone except him will be miserable. If he does b, we’ll be saved a great deal of trouble and hard work.”

“I vote for b,” she interjected, “and the sooner the better.”

“I don’t believe we can count on b as a realistic expectation,” commented Templar politely.

She drained the dark bottom of her plastic coffee cup and eyed her visitor.

“What makes you think c is more realistic? Toli said one word and—” Her voice caught in her throat and she clenched her jaw.

Simon came around the counter and put a warm and welcome hand on her shoulder.

“Put your faith in me, Frankie. We can do it.”

She wanted to believe him, wanted to pin her hopes and dreams on this charismatic buccaneer who offered no assurances beyond his own dynamic personality.

“Other men have tried,” commented Frankie as if she were attempting to tease, “stronger men, braver men...”

“Assuming for the moment that such men ever existed,” interrupted Templar with slightly forced joviality, “you’ve never met anyone luckier or more daring than I. With your help, we can melt Tretiak’s plot like last year’s snow.”

She ordered her lips to smile while her eyes glistened. “We make it hot for that rat, Tretiak?”

“Absolutely,” confirmed Simon.

“You got some secret rat remover formula or something?”

Templar smiled and patted his coat pocket. “As a matter of fact, Frankie, my secret formula arrived a half-hour ago by fax. Pm being straight with you. This is a country under reconstruction. Together we’ll make a positive contribution to the collective effort of remodeling and beautification.”

The mansion of Ivan Tretiak was the only comfortably heated home in Moscow, and it, too, was under construction. A daily army of workers, staff, and cleaning women swarmed over the estate while Tretiak, Ilya, and their crooked compatriots plotted the overthrow of the government.

Despite the depleted coal supplies, the tragic and supposedly inexplicable demise of Russia’s hydroelectric plants, the lack of natural gas hues except in the most prestigious diplomatic neighborhoods, and the much touted oil shortage, Tretiak enjoyed all the comforts of a well-heated domicile.

He also enjoyed the taste of black caviar and the aroma of impending victory while discussing strategies with the edgy General Sklarov. Ilya attempted appearing important, mostly by barking orders at the cleaning crew.

“I can count on my troops,” asserted the general, “but I was led to believe you’d soon unveil a great miracle to galvanize the mob.”

Tretiak waved his hand as if all of this were of no concern. He crunched a cracker smeared with dark fish roe and spoke with his mouth full.

“Like the Miracle of Communism, the Miracle of Cold Fusion failed.” He moistened his mouth with a gulp of vodka. “But it doesn’t matter. We have duped Karpov one way or another. If our recent ruse worked, we will get billions out of him before we strike. The stink of failure will be all over him, not me. Before he can scrub it off, you mobilize the army and together we take over.”

Tretiak brushed crumbs from his shirt as the general helped himself to more caviar.

Sklarov’s many years in Russia’s military had taught him all manner of duplicity and corruption. His clandestine support of Tretiak, coupled with a dedicated legion of Special Forces within the military itself, placed him in a delicate yet powerful position.

“You realize that once the coup is attempted, it must be swift and victorious, not like that botched attempt a few years back,” insisted Sklarov.

Tretiak chewed and gloated. He had it all figured out.

“I promised Karpov that the opposition would cease if he funded cold fusion.” Tretiak laughed. “But once the billions are in my pocket, what can he do? Every night the demonstrations become bigger, more violent, and the citizens are too cold to think clearly. When the time is right, we will synchronize a massive rally and media event with the sudden strike of your Special Forces.” Tretiak’s voice boomed with confidence and megalomania. “Within an hour or less, all of Russia and its vast resources and power will be ours!”

Tretiak halted his diatribe when a stooped old babushka from the cleaning crew shuffled in and waved a feather duster over an antique loveseat.

Ilya immediately asserted his illusory authority.

“Not now, old witch! We’re working! Git before I boot your ancient ass outa here!”

She turned and humbly scooted out, but not before dropping a subminiature microphone-transmitter not much bigger than a dust mote onto the bookshelf behind the conspirators.

With the mission accomplished, the stooped and disguised Simon Templar hurried down the hall, ducked into a doorway, and concealed himself in what was obviously Ilya’s room.

Hip-Hop CDs, porno magazines, and “white power” propaganda were scattered across the floor. In the corner, leaning against the wall, was Ilya’s walking stick.

Templar stared at it, remembering Tretiak’s pompous warning:

“We could kill you and stroll away, even here in this transit lounge...”

A quick, careful examination of the tapered tip revealed a retractable needle which, if augmented with poison, would be discreetly lethal.

“Walking death,” murmured the Saint.

Returning his concentration to the tasks at hand. Templar stole a peek out the doorway. He saw a newly delivered shipment of chemicals being carried upstairs by a liveried servant.

As for Ilya, he stood in the foyer sniffing the air like a dog. There was something about the old woman that unnerved him, something naggingly familiar.

Templar striped off his rags. Beneath them he wore a painter’s outfit. He stuffed the babushka disguise in a formerly concealed gallon paint can and reemerged into the main area of the mansion. When the servant descended the stairs and Ilya had moved on. Templar went up to Botvin’s lab.

The little scientist was dispiritedly hooking a length of palladium wire to a electrolyte cell when he heard the creak of the opening door.

“You’re not allowed in here,” Botvin told the painter in Russian. “All the work is out there.”

“The work could be in here, you know,” said Templar in English as he maneuvered to get a better look at Botvin’s setup.

“You better go quick, whoever you are,” advised the nervous physicist, attempting to block Templar’s view.

“You’re not really doing anything up here except playing with lightbulbs. This is a sham — a bad Tretiak joke on the same folks who’ve pinned their hopes on him. You know it and I know it.”

Botvin was close to tears. He didn’t know what to say, or to whom he would be saying it.

“Nothing but props,” continued Templar evenly. “But you wish they worked with all your heart, don’t you? Isn’t that what you really want?”

“My heart? No... with all my dusha, my soul... people are freezing to death, you know.”

“Not in this house, I notice,” remarked Templar. He held up the faxed printout of Emma’s cold fusion formula.

“Look at this and tell me if it means anything to you.”

Botvin squinted at the paper. His glasses began to fog.

He answered, and his voice was a constricted whisper.

“It clarifies Dr. Russell’s seven cards... How did you get this? Who are you?”

Templar’s eyes seemed to pierce Botvin’s lenses.

“A friend of Dr. Russell’s, which also means I’m no friend of your boss — and neither are you. In truth, you’re a man of science, not brute force.”

Botvin gingerly took the printout and began reading it carefully. When he spoke, it was in subdued, awed tones.

“For the first time, I think I understand what she was getting at...”

Botvin’s pure heart pounded in his chest. He thought not of fame or glory, but only of his freezing countrymen.

“Will you try to make it work?”

“Every hour of every day!” insisted the scientist. “To think, a future free from the tyranny of winter!” He quickly turned to his computer, his mind racing. “I’ll need some time alone...”

“Work well and work fast,” advised the Saint. “Your boss plans to discredit Karpov with cold fusion’s failure at a Red Square rally.”

Both men heard the noise of someone ascending the staircase.

Templar quickly handed Botvin a two-way transmitter-receiver not much larger than the bug he left on Tretiak’s bookshelf.

“Now that we’re friends,” asserted Templar, “let’s stay in touch.”

Botvin nodded and placed it in his pocket just as the door opened and Ilya entered. He barely noticed the busy painter slipping past, calling out details of paint requirements in a deep Russian baritone.

“Botvin, you useless intellectual,” snapped Ilya, “have you seen a filthy old babushka?”

“It is not my job to keep track of your women. Little Ilya,” remarked Botvin coldly. “Now, please, I have had enough interruptions for one day. I am doing important work for your father, for Russia.”

Ilya’s Doc Martens stomped out of the room and back down the stairs.

Tretiak continued his conspiratorial conversation in the library, unaware that every incriminating morsel of conversation was being clearly transmitted and recorded, including an unexpected telephone call from President Karpov.

Informed by Vereshagin that Karpov was on the line, Tretiak began to gloat.

“I can almost feel my bank account straining under the weight of all those billions,” he joked before picking up the receiver.

“Because you came to me with these cold fusion plans as a patriot,” began Karpov warmly, “and because you have the best interests of Russia at heart...”

Tretiak smiled broadly, cradled the phone against his shoulder, and spread himself a caviar-covered celebratory cracker.

“Yes, true, true,” agreed Tretiak before taking a bite.

“I propose, as a patriot, also,” continued the president, “that you sell your cold fusion to the Chinese — it would be good fun to watch those old farts lose eighty-two billion yen!”

Tretiak stopped chewing mid-bite.

“According to my experts who’ve reviewed your data,” continued Karpov in the same tone, “I’d do as well to buy blueprints for a perpetual-motion machine. Or better yet, a skyhook!”

Tretiak spit his mouthfull of cracker and caviar into a napkin.

“Your experts lead you down a path of weakness, of feminine submission,” countered Tretiak angrily. “Soon Mother Russia will be gang-raped by Western Europe while America looks on, giggling... her corpse picked cleaner than by Napoleon and Hitler combined!”

Karpov, unruffled, replied.

“You have a gift for the mixed malign metaphor, but as a salesman, you’re a failure.”

“History is littered with would-be leaders who failed to act at the decisive moment...” Tretiak ranted.

“Oh, I’m decisive,” interrupted President Karpov. “I’ve decided to terminate this conversation.”

Tretiak was left holding a silent telephone.

He hung up, shrugged, and poured himself a fresh drink.

“No matter,” he said with a smile. “After the coup, the billions will be ours anyway.”

Vereshagin, Sklarov, and Tretiak raised their glasses in a toast to their glorious, victorious future.

Simultaneously Templar, appearing no different than any number of painters and workmen swarming over the mansion, took the liberty of exploration. He cheerfully let himself into every room of Tretiak’s domicile, and contented himself that he had cased the joint with thoroughness and professionalism.

Then, in Tretiak’s private master suite, he was struck by inspiration. Unlike other Russians, Tretiak had heat. He also had hot water.

He actually did it — he walked casually into the master bath and turned on the tap. Ten minutes later, while Tretiak and his co-conspirators were revealing all to a hidden microphone, Simon Templar was stretched full length in a steaming bathtub, innocently playing submarine with the sponge and a bar of soap.

Later, towel dried and freshly scrubbed, the paint crew’s extra man simply exited the mansion and rendezvoused with Frankie. Together, they listened to the recorded conversation crackling over a cheap tape recorder speaker in her sparse, barracks-like apartment, to Tretiak’s voice:

“Karpov is such a fool. No one’s guessed the simple truth of where the heating oil went.” Tretiak laughed as he clinked fresh ice into his drink. “Those ‘in the know’ think I sold it abroad. The liberal press has been hunting for a paper trail that doesn’t exist.”

The gloating distorted laughter was too much for even the Templar to stomach. He reached past Frankie and flicked off the machine.

“Tretiak’s morals are lamentably defective from whatever angle they’re viewed,” muttered Templar. “I need a moment with President Karpov. The old KGB must’ve built tunnels under the president’s home, and I bet someone as clever as you would have the map.”

Frankie emitted a harsh laugh, then crossed to the window where she’s stuffed fresh, dry newspaper into the cracks to keep out the bitter Russian wind. She uncrumpled page one of Ekho Moskvy and translated the headline. “ ‘Embattled President Retreats Behind Kremlin Walls. Under siege from critics and freezing populace, Karpov has moved today from his home to a sanctuary behind barricades.’ ”

Templar seemed unconcerned.

“Then I’ll break into the Kremlin.”

Frankie’s jaw dropped in stunned incredulity.

“That’s crazy! You kid, yes?”

“I have a highly refined sense of humor,” he acknowledged, “but I kid you not.”

Frankie gulped and shook her head.

“You amaze me. I don’t know if you brave or crazy or both.”

“Probably both,” said Templar pleasantly. “You drive, yes?”

“Better than any cabbie,” she bragged. “I even have a classic Zhiguli motorcycle complete with sidecar.”

“Sounds a bit chilly for this weather.”

“So, you got a car?”

“Frankie, my dear,” said Templar as he placed a warm hand on her shoulder, “I’m the man who has everything.”

“You rich or something?”

Simon sat down at her worn table. They could see their breath in the air.

“Sit down, Frankie. I have something to tell you.”

She regarded him warily.

“No, really it’s fine, sit down.”

She sat.

“I’m rich. Very rich. Ridiculously rich.”

Frankie’s smile increased in expansion with each repetition of the word rich.

“How very very ridiculous rich?”

“How rich is rich to you, Frankie?”

She looked around the simple and frigid apartment.

“With all my hustle, all my icons and replicas and tourists, this is the best I can do. And I don’t do it all for me, you know. And not just Toll, may God rest his soul, but...”

The smile in her eyes was betrayed by the tear in her voice.

“There are others in this building we care, I mean... without Toll... I care for...”

She became shy at the topic of her own generosity.

“I’m not such a big tough cookie as I pretend sometimes, yes?”

Templar recalled her returning the Bulgari Chronograph.

“So, you ask me how rich is rich to me,” she said thoughtfully. Frankie stroked her chin as if she had a beard, which she certainly did not.

“A million dollars American money would be more than anyone I know could imagine. You have that much?” The lilt in her voice was admittedly hopeful.

Templar smiled, for Frankie had only a veneer of guile, a slick outer coating of opportunism. She was, by her own reluctant admission, selfless.

“Let me take you to dinner, Frankie. And I mean the fanciest restaurant in all of Moscow.”

“Oh, I am so sure of that! I could not. Not me.”

Templar laughed and his breath made warm clouds in the air. “Why not?”

“I might like it or think I deserved it, for one thing,” she explained. “Or you may think you get more than friendship and justice, no?”

“No,” clarified Templar, “my motives are pure, really. Besides, my appetite is coming back.”

She looked at him in a way that caught him off guard, for her eyes seemed to read his very soul.

She took his hand. “I think you are a very rich man, like you say. And maybe that’s more than a million American dollars, or two million—”

“Or fifty million plus mounting compound interest.”

“Wow! Fifty million. Plus interest mounting. Well, no matter,” continued Frankie. “I believe you because you don’t know, or maybe forgot, about being poor.”

“I’ve been poor, Frankie. I was raised in a Hong Kong orphanage until I was thirteen.”

“You Chinese? Part, at least I think, yes?”

“I think, yes. Some. I don’t look very Chinese, but you’ve heard of Mendel’s Law?”

“I probably broke that one, too,” said Frankie, and Templar suppressed a smile. “But the point, Mr. Templar Rich Man is this: For what you spend on two meals at fancy place in Moscow, I could feed the famines in this building. You buy me big meal, I would choke on it thinking of the people here. You understand?”

“Let’s order out,” chirped Templar.

“Order what?”

Templar stood with an expansive gesture. “I hear that in Russia, everything is unavailable. Unless you have money. Then, everything is very available. True?”

Frankie rolled her eyes. It was too true.

“I provide the money, you go shopping. We’ll have a big meal and invite the neighbors — we feed them all. If you can find an electric space heater, buy a few of those, too.”

Frankie’s eyes grew larger and larger. “You’re not kidding?”

Templar tossed an absurd amount of cash in her lap. “I trust you, Frankie. Let’s eat.”

Simon Templar knew he was fumbling at friendship. At worst, he was buying it. At best, he was practicing it.

The thick flakes fell in hefty blankets over the city of Moscow, and it was not long after Templar extended his offer that they returned to her apartment building from a thrill-packed visit to a decidedly clandestine supermarket.

Bag after bag of groceries and goodies were hauled in, much to the delight of the many invited guests.

Doors between apartments were propped ajar, and soon the heady aroma of sizzling meat, cooking cabbage, and sautéed onions blended with the laughter and camaraderie of the about-to-be well fed.

Samovars were heated, tea was brewed, and Templar basked in a warmth beyond coal or oil. He had not allowed himself the luxury of honest companionship in decades, and the pleasure of its simplicity ignited a spark within him.

Frankie resisted showing off her rich friend as one would a carnival prize, and instead introduced him as a long-time acquaintance and occasional business partner. She said that they made a lucrative sale to a busload of wealthy tourists.

The resultant feast was, according to Frankie, a celebration of capitalistic family values.

“I hear that phrase from jerk Tretiak when he gave big speech in Red Square,” she said with a wink.

Templar was joyously introduced to a wide array of lower-middle-class apartment dwellers, most of them exceptionally pleasant and delightfully hospitable.

He played a few hands of gin rummy with the enchanting Olya from Chelyabinsk, a natural beauty who was on her way to becoming a consummate cardsharp.

“Watch out for that one,” warned Frankie with a giddy laugh. “She graduated with honors from Language Lycee ninety-three, and someday she will marry my cousin!”

“Gin!” exclaimed Olya.

“Warn your cousin,” advised Templar.

They ate, they laughed, they sipped tea and enjoyed each other’s company. For those few brief hours Simon Templar allowed himself to escape into a world he had only seen from the outside — a world of honest friends and unselfish sharing.

When the last members of the impromptu dinner party had eaten their fill and returned to their own subdivided cubicles, Frankie finished her tea and eyed Templar quizzically.

“Okay, we all ate. Now what?”

Templar chuckled and sat down opposite her. “I had a marvelous time.”

“Yeah. Me, too. When do you see the president?”

Back to business.

“Oh, that’s easy,” replied Templar. “When I break into the Kremlin.”

“You’d have to be world’s best burglar to do that...”

“True,” agreed Templar.

Frankie narrowed her eyes and stared at him.

“What exactly do you do?”

“Let me put it this way, Frankie: Scotland Yard says I can break into anywhere. They don’t like me much. They don’t know my name, but they call me the Saint.”

Frankie smirked. “I don’t see halo over your head,” she said. “The police are looking for you everywhere, this is true?”

“They won’t find me here, now, will they?”

“Scotland Yard doesn’t come here very often,” she said with a nonchalant shrug. “Besides, you don’t seem like criminal to me. Tretiak is criminal.”

“Well, Frankie, I guess I was a criminal. I’ve had somewhat of a change of heart, or modification of career, or reorientation of identity.” He laughed aloud as if he was enjoying a marvelous joke.

She looked at him curiously.

“Someone tell a funny story and I missed it?”

“Yes,” continued Templar enthusiastically, “it’s the funniest story of my life, a grand and glorious adventure. Consider me a finely tempered sword slowly becoming unsheathed.”

“No unsheathing around me, please,” admonished Frankie with a wag of her finger. “We just friends. Now, you plan to stop Tretiak’s takeover or you going to have more dessert?”

The Saint had more dessert. Frankie stared at him.

“I don’t rush into things, Frankie. I plan, and I plan well. And you are a very lucky woman.”

“I am?”

“Indeed,” replied Templar happily. “You are about to see a world-class expert at the top of his form.”

“Hoo-boychic,” she said wearily. “I hope you as wonderful as you think.”

2

Any doubts lingering in Frankie’s mind concerning Simon Templar’s abilities evaporated in the heat of first-hand experience. The next several hours were the busiest and most memorable of her life.

It was Frankie who emptied Templar’s locker at the train station, and she managed to suppress an audible gasp when she saw the quantity of cash, diversity of passports, and high-tech toys stashed therein.

It was Frankie who then sought out the self-sacrificing Sofiya. Perched on her high-heels and eyeing the street for her next cash customer, the plucky teenager’s first response to Frankie’s approach was polite but firm.

“No ladies,” she said with a shake of her head.

“That’s not what this is about,” Frankie assured her and handed over an envelope.

“Take this upstairs before you open it, and don’t tell anyone how you got it.”

Sofiya accepted it with curiosity, took it to her apartment, and tore open the clasp.

Inside was more money than she had ever seen in her life and a small scrap of paper containing two words: thank you.

“Mama,” called out Sofiya, “I just retired!”

It was Frankie who nervously drove the mirror-windowed minivan — she didn’t have the nerve to ask Templar where it came from — while the Saint snapped photos of the Kremlin through the silvered panes.

“Kremlin no savings bank or museum like you usually rob. Famous Templar,” advised Frankie. “The word Kremlin means ‘fortified stronghold.’ ”

“I’ve done my homework,” murmured Templar as he snapped more photos. “Karpov’s Kremlin is ninety acres enclosed by a 1.4-mile brick wall built during the reign of Grand Duke Ivan the Third back in the mid 1400s. The Kremlin stopped being a fortress in the seventeenth century.”

“Tell that to the guards, motion sensors, and surveillance cameras,” suggested Frankie. “I like that Karpov,” she added seriously. “He tried to do good things. Too bad politics such dirty business.”

“A universal problem. Partisan politics is, by its very nature, divisive. Tretiak wants to divide it all into his pocket, his power, and he doesn’t care who freezes in the process.”

The van’s windshield wipers sloshed aside a fresh layer of icy snow.

“Why you taking all these pictures when you can buy postcards like any other tourist?”

“A mental exercise,” explained Templar. “I always take pictures of the target.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have a map of Stalin’s bunker?”

Simon stopped his index finger in mid-snap.

“Did you say...?”

Frankie smiled.

“I told you before, I am the Russian underground.”

Within the Kremlin walls, the oldest ensemble was centered around the Cathedral Square. It consisted of the Assumption Cathedral, where rulers were crowned, the Annunciation Cathedral, private church of the tsars, the Archangel Cathedral, burial place of the royal family until Tsar Peter I, the Hall of the Facets with a magnificent vaulted throne room, and the 266-foot Bell Tower of Ivan III.

None of these astonishing structures, rich in history and packed with priceless artifacts, were of significant interest to Simon Templar. He was far more concerned with the labyrinth of tunnels below ground — tunnels detailed in the dozens of maps spread out in Frankie’s underground art lair.

The authentic replicas, fabricated artifacts, and other bits of fakery were shoved out of the way. One hundred percent of their concentration was focused on finding a way into Stalin’s bunker.

“Look. Lead-lined door reinforced with eight feet of concrete,” explained Frankie, poking her finger at a particular illustration. “Maybe you take nuclear weapon with you in tunnel and blow yourself up inside?”

“Not a practical solution.” Simon Templar sighed. “But if there is a door, that means there is a way for the door to open.”

“Sure. See that sensor on the entrance hatch?”

Templar squinted in the yellow light from the lair’s oil lamps. “More or less.”

“It’s a radiation detector. It will only open the door after dissipation of nuclear fallout,” she explained, as if such details were common knowledge. “It’s very sophisticated, very intelligent. It was updated during Gorbachev’s time. The idea is that if you hide in there during nuclear war, when fallout goes away, the door opens.”

Templar marveled at the concept.

“Put this in a penny-dreadful pot-boiler and no one would swallow it for a second.”

Frankie had no idea what Templar was talking about.

“That means you’re cooked? You giving up this crazy idea?”

He smiled his most seraphic and illuminating smile. “Of course not. If this system is intelligent, that means it can think. If it can think, it can be fooled.”

“Well, you have me fooled,” agreed Frankie, and took a peek at Simon’s Bulgari Chronograph. “Can you trick the door of Stalin’s bunker, get into the Kremlin, and warn Karpov before General Sklarov’s Special Forces help Tretiak take over?”

A serious question.

“That has been a primary concern,” acknowledged the Saint.

“Maybe you should just call Karpov on the telephone. That be easier.”

Templar laughed and ran his hands through his hair. “Why Frankie, what adventure is there in that? Besides, President Karpov has an unlisted number. Crawling around under the Kremlin will be good exercise for both of us.”

Frankie gulped.

“Both...?”

“Of course, I treasure your companionship.”

“Am I supposed to say thank you?”

“You’re supposed to brew some warm tea while I perform high-tech miracles and assemble my wardrobe.”

“Wardrobe?”

“The play’s the thing, Frankie,” said Templar happily, pulling digital toys out of a knapsack, “and I have a costume for every occasion.”

She put a kettle on the small propane stove and shook her head in amazement. She had already seen the rather astonishing contents of his garment bag.

“You’re a different kind of man, all right. Maybe you should go into politics.”

“Heaven forbid,” admonished Templar playfully as he scanned portions of the Kremlin ground-plan onto a three-inch square card. “Besides, Tretiak might hear you, and you know what he thinks of competition.”

She shrugged and poured the hot water. “Tretiak big rat. Sklarov big rat. Karpov... I don’t know... maybe a mouse — a democratic mouse. But up there, outside, the people getting more mad; army getting more scary.”

She paused as if remembering something, then reached under the counter and lifted up a tiny black-and-white portable television.

“Runs on handful of D batteries,” Frankie explained, switching it on. “Reception not great, but...”

She stood in the lamplight, shadows of concern casting lines across her face, listening to the news report of another of Tretiak’s Oktober Party rallies.

General Sklarov’s voice crackled over the small speaker while the on-screen image wavered back and forth.

“... three great empires have dominated the world: Rome, Constantinople, and Russia. All three have fallen. Only one can be restored, and only one man can restore it — Ivan Tretiak!”

A thunderous response of stamping feet drowned out Sklarov’s shouted repetition of Tretiak’s name.

“When the world going to learn?” asked Frankie. “One more crook. One more dictator. One more liar. How many people die to make one more rich man even more rich?”

The crowd cheered as Tretiak himself took the microphone.

“You know me, I am Ivan Tretiak — a lunatic, a dreamer, a poet — a lunatic because I’m haunted by the fantasy of an empire that reclaims her former might, a dreamer beset by nightmares of the West cackling as it castrates us in the name of democracy, a poet spinning rhymes of Russia not cut off at the knees, but armed to the teeth! Not ridiculed, but revered!”

The crowd erupted in abject cacophonia.

“No, more than revered,” shouted Tretiak, “feared!”

Pandemonium. Tretiak continued, speaking over the clamor, his voice rising steadily.

“President Karpov will hand you over, weak and frozen, to the Western liberals, foreigners, and one-worlders, but it is not too late. We do not need to recreate Russia, we need to re-arm Russia! Russia is not a sweet old babushka who’s seen better days. No! Soon the babushka will rip off her rags, rear up, and reveal that she is Mother Russia, roaring bear!”

The crowd was in a frenzy.

“The world had better cringe from her claws!”

The hoarse, frenzied howl rising from the maddened crowd seemed to throb with a horrible blood lust.

Then came the music, the rhythm, and the synchronized juggernaut tramp of marching men.

Frankie shuddered and turned down the volume.

“It’s horrible,” she said sadly, “horrible.”

Templar set his jaw for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was curiously low. Frankie could almost hear the rumble of iron on the streets above.

“You understand, Frankie, but millions don’t. Whole nations that call themselves intelligent human beings are perfectly willing to exchange their brains for a brass band and tax themselves to starvation to buy bigger and better bombs. Were that not the case, criminals like Tretiak would never get anywhere. Brass and drums, Frankie, brass and drums and the thunder of marching feet — that’s what this country is about to succumb to, and that’s a fate colder and more deadly than any oil shortage.”

“Where does this all lead, Simon. What if we can’t stop it?”

“I’ll tell you exactly where it leads — streets swarming with uniformed militia, neighbors betraying neighbors, midnight arrests, the third degree, secret tribunals, forced confessions, kangaroo courts, concentration camps, firing squads.”

Frankie sat down wearily. “Sounds familiar.”

“Too familiar,” agreed Templar. “It’s the description of a world gone mad — a world divided against itself.”

Frankie managed something resembling a hopeful smile.

“Hey, you sound like one of those one-world people Tretiak doesn’t like, either.”

Templar smiled back. “Well, if you don’t like the idea of one world, how many worlds do you want, and how would you like them divided? By race? By religion? By income? Unless you have a spare planet in your pocket, one world is all we have.”

“And you think you can save the world, Simon Templar?”

At that moment, had he answered in the affirmative, she would have believed him without question. There was a strange fire in his ice-blue eyes, and a rakish line to his features that bespoke confidence and victory.

“No. Not the world. Not today, Frankie,” said Templar, “but you and I together are going to do our best to save this one little part of it.”

“One frozen part of it,” added Frankie, pulling her collar up around her chin. She pointed up toward the ceiling. “Going to be pretty hot in Red Square tomorrow.”

Frankie’s prophetic utterance was based on simple logical deduction of available facts — the same facts reiterated less than twenty-four hours later to their respective audiences by CNN’s Jan Sharp and UPN’s Chet Rogers, both broadcasting from Red Square.

“As freezing temperatures and fuel shortages continue to take their lethal toll,” reported Sharp, “and rumors sweep Moscow that many more deaths are unreported — troops under the command of right-wing General Leo Sklarov have begun to ring the Russian capital.”

Rogers, situated more precariously amidst the throng than Sharp, spoke with an edge of self-concern in his manly baritone. “Angry, frightened citizens are flocking to Red Square at this hour, but this time they are not braving the bitter cold for another political rally turned riot — they’ve been drawn here by the promise of a ‘revelation’ to be displayed on these colossal video screens...”

The video screens to which the reporter referred were the same shimmering technological marvels utilized by Tretiak in all his previous rallies — screens that made him seem larger than life and transformed him into an enormous, electronically enhanced champion of the people.

“This has become a life-and-death struggle,” exclaimed the hyperbole-laced reporter, “an intense drama played out on a very large stage whose final curtain is yet to come!”

Accompanying the intense drama were equally intense sound effects. The thunderous roar of stomping feet on concrete rumbled through the ground and vibrated the earth above Templar and Frankie, who were making their way through the dark and dismal tunnels beneath Red Square.

“Eek,” squeaked Frankie, and she waved her flash-light wildly.

“Eek? I can’t believe you actually said ‘Eek.’ ”

Frankie sidestepped another enormous rodent.

“How these rats get so big! There’s nothing down here but dirt, rats, and bigger rats — well, and you and me.”

Simon smiled in the darkness, his steady flashlight beam shining on the three-inch square card onto which he had scanned a detailed multilevel Kremlin ground-plan.

“That gizmo should be right around here somewhere,” he remarked as he tucked the card into his breast pocket, “and it should be pretty obvious.”

“As obvious as that?” Frankie’s beam found a massive set of concrete slabs.

Templar examined the detection unit. It was encased in steel mesh and recessed in the concrete. He knelt down, unshouldered his backpack, and removed a Plexiglas box and cordless bolt-driver.

“Here’s where we play ‘fool the gizmo,’ Frankie. This box has two compartments — one empty and one with radon gas...”

He began bolting it over the radiation detector. With the box snugly in place, he turned a little knob, which opened the divider between the compartments.

Frankie strained to see every detail.

“The gas is released, the sensor will sense it, and you and I will pray that it can’t tell the difference between radon and plutonium,” said Templar.

“Oh.” Frankie was not sure she understood. “Well, I don’t know the difference, if that helps.”

The detector’s emergency light began blinking.

“The gizmo thinks it just survived a nuclear attack,” explained Templar happily as he used the bolt driver to loosen the box. “Now it thinks it’s several months later... Moscow is rebuilding from the rubble...” He pulled the box away, dissipating the gas. “... and the radiation is gone.”

The emergency light stopped blinking, there was a low rumble, and the concrete slab slid open. Behind it was a simple, old-fashioned padlocked door.

The Saint chuckled. “I could open this thing with a stickpin.”

He didn’t have a stickpin, but he did have his multipurpose penknife.

Templar and Frankie eased themselves into the dank, dusty compartment, unchanged since World War II. There was even an old strategic map tacked to the wall.

“Stalin’s bunker,” whispered Frankie in awe. “It sure is dirty.”

“Well, places like this are hard to keep up,” offered Templar. He squinted at his square card. “The stairs should be...”

“There,” said Frankie with finality. “The stairs leading to the artesian well are right there.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence passed between them.

“Thank you, Frankie. Honestly, I couldn’t have made it this far without you.”

“Don’t get killed, Mr. Famous Templar.”

He gave her a hug and it was awkward for both of them.

“With any luck,” joked the Saint, “I’ll never see you again. And if my luck is bad...”

Frankie laughed and touched his shoulder before she turned back toward the tunnel.

“I’ll be waiting on the edge of Red Square with a souped-up motorcycle — vintage 1953,” said Frankie with a laugh. “And you know what, Mr. Templar? You’re a sentimental fool after all.”

Her light disappeared.

Templar turned his attention to the stairs. He took a deep breath and steeled himself. He was in his element — the odds were against him, the stakes were high, and he was all confidence.

3

The Kremlin’s sooty basement contained a multitude of machines dating from the Industrial Revolution slaving away with more noise than efficiency, humming and throbbing like the bowels of some mechanical behemoth.

It was from between these gear-grinding, steam-emitting relics that Simon Templar emerged. He had scaled the stairs, pulled himself up through the well opening, and became fairly sooty himself in the process.

He stripped off his darkly stained overcoat, revealing a perfectly starched and gleaming Kremlin guard uniform.

“Just like in the movies,” said Templar to himself as he tossed the overcoat down the well. “Now it’s time to meet and mingle.”

If Templar was on schedule, so was the attempted coup. From a hastily acquired vantage point in an above-ground corridor, he saw Sklarov’s Special Forces penetrating the grounds without opposition — proof that Sklarov had allies within the Kremlin guard itself. Soon General Sklarov would enter the Presidential Residence unhindered.

Templar quickly oriented himself on his ground-plan card, and began marching toward Karpov’s apartments as if he were following orders. There would be authentic Kremlin guards to deal with, but he had come well prepared.

Approaching the apartments. Templar slid behind a baroque pillar and waited — he didn’t wait long.

A genuine Kremlin guard rounded the corner. As he passed the pillar, Templar quickly seized him from behind and pressed an ether-soaked rag over the man’s face. He collapsed, unconscious, as a second guard came into view.

Templar called out in Russian as he hurried farther down the hall. “He’s had a seizure! I’ll get help!”

It took the second guard a moment to realize that he had never seen Templar before. Once the realization hit, his sidearm was aimed at the Saint.

“Sdavaites!”

Templar paid no heed to the guard’s call for surrender, but whirled around brandishing a pistol of his own. He shot one perfectly aimed round at the chandelier above the guard’s head. It shattered in a barrage of falling crystal, and the guard ducked for cover.

Alerted by the shot, a squadron of guards ran toward the sound. By the time they arrived, Simon Templar had daringly thrown himself into President Karpov’s private bedroom.

Startled awake, Karpov shielded his terrified wife with his own body. His eyes strained to focus on the man barricading the door.

Simon switched on the lights and held up his open palms toward the shocked and agitated president.

“I’m here to warn you, Mr. President, not harm you. You’re in danger, but not from me.”

“Get out!” yelled Karpov. “I could have you killed!”

“Sklarov’s Special Forces have mounted a coup,” explained Templar. “He’s on his way here right now.”

The president sat bolt upright while his wife pulled the sheets back up under her chin.

“Why wasn’t I—”

“Warned? Because many of your own Kremlin guards take orders from Sklarov,” declared Templar.

Muffled orders could be heard from the hall outside.

“I’m unhurt,” shouted Karpov, fearing his intruder was telling the truth. “Back off and leave us alone. If I need you, I’ll call you. Go away.”

His guards, reluctantly obedient, complied.

The Saint moved closer. His voice was even and nonthreatening.

“It’s all Tretiak’s work, Mr. President. How do you think this heating crisis came to exist?”

Karpov hid his head in his hands; his wife hid under the covers.

“It’s a nightmare, a dreadful combination of natural disasters, worker rebellion, and treachery by Tretiak!”

Templar sat down pleasantly on the edge of the bed.

“Natural disasters? Worker rebellion? President Karpov, you and I both know that Russia is richer in natural resources than any other country on earth — the world’s largest coal fields are here, as are vast deposits of petroleum...”

“Our coal processing abilities were crippled by the severe damage of earthquakes, and that damn Tretiak sold off our oil reserves to the West! If I could only find proof...”

Templar shook his head in negative sympathy.

“The coal crisis happened, conveniently enough, when Tretiak was minister of energy. He’s been planning this ruse for a long time, and I’m positive that he hasn’t sold a drop of oil to anyone. He’s been hoarding it himself.”

Karpov looked intently at the Saint, studying his face.

“Mr. President, the time is short,” insisted the Saint. “The coup is on, and Tretiak intends to humiliate you.”

Karpov’s face blanched; his wife trembled so hard it shook the bed.

“You didn’t force your way in here to tell me something I can do nothing about,” said Karpov, his plaintive expression far from presidential. “Do you have a brilliant suggestion?”

Templar smiled his most luminous smile, and his bright blue eyes gleamed with almost childlike mischief.

“Now that you mention it, a good-hearted scientist named Lev Botvin and I were discussing your dilemma only recently. You’re going to stand trial before the world in Red Square tonight. Whatever Tretiak accuses you of, admit to it.”

The president of Russia and the man at the top of Inspector Teal’s “Most Wanted” list had an intense and productive meeting of the minds. It would have gone on longer, but the bedroom door being suddenly blown off its hinges was a loud and effective interruption.

It was Sklarov. His Special Forces had overwhelmed the Kremlin guards by force of numbers and significant internal collusion. Not a shot was fired.

The gloating renegade general, his chest puffed out and his head held high, walked triumphantly into the president’s bedroom accompanied by two of his larger and more ominous men.

“My, my, my,” declared Sklarov, “what an interesting sight — the president, his wife, and a Kremlin guard. Too bad I forgot my camera.”

Karpov attempted sounding authoritative, but his reclining position and bedtime attire undermined his effort.

“What you’re attempting is illegal! The people won’t stand for it!”

Sklarov hacked out a rude laugh. “The people are too cold to stop it.” He snapped instructions. “Leave Mrs. Karpov here under guard, detain the former president downstairs, but let him get dressed first. He’d look too sympathetic and pathetic standing outside in his pajamas.”

Sklarov turned to appraise Simon Templar. “Who are you?”

“I’m Edmund Campion,” he replied, “named for the saint tried on false charges of treason.”

Sklarov ripped the epaulets from Templar’s uniform. “Isn’t a saint someone who dies horribly?”

“That’s a martyr,” said Templar helpfully. “A saint is someone who can be linked to three miracles.”

Mrs. Karpov peeked out over the bedspread.

Sklarov snorted and gave orders to his Special Forces. “He wants a miracle. Make him disappear!”

Not content to simply drag Templar from the room, the two Special Forces thugs gave him several body blows from their rifle butts before hauling him out the door.

“Your boss didn’t say anything about hitting me,” insisted Templar. “Who gave you guys the latitude to improvise?”

They ignored him.

As they roughly escorted Templar down the corridor, they came face-to-face with Ilya.

Templar was as surprised to see him as he was to see the Saint.

“What are you doing here?” Ilya was incredulous. “Why are you meddling in our politics when you could be out stealing something?”

“It’s not politics,” stated Templar flatly, “it’s personal.”

Sklarov was approaching, and Ilya wanted to appear powerful. After all, he had outfitted himself in full blackshirt regalia in honor of the triumphant coup.

“Let’s drag him out with the former president,” ordered Ilya. He escorted the heavily guarded captive down the hall, gloating with every step. “In a few minutes, the mob will tear you and the president limb from limb. And then, with busybodies and do-gooders done away with, Russia belongs to us.”

Templar begged to differ.

“No, Russia belongs to Daddy.”

If the Saint was baiting, Ilya wasn’t biting.

“True, Ivan Tretiak will rule with a mightier hand than any Russian tsar since Ivan the Terrible.”

“Interesting analogy,” said the Saint. “You know Ivan the Terrible killed his own son.”

Ilya, proudly striding, missed a step.

“Yes, by his own hand,” Templar continued conversationally. “The boy was just about your age, I believe...”

“Shut up!”

Simon smiled, Ilya scowled, and the soldiers led Templar out toward Red Square.

“Get ready for your final minutes of fame. Templar,” spat Ilya. “You’re going to be a featured player in our final big show.”

The “big show” to which Ilya referred was another one of Tretiak’s choreographed media events. Only the addition of a juggler spinning plates, trained seals tooting horns, or dancing bears doing the Lambada could have made it more viewer-friendly.

The two giant video screens were filled with inflammatory Oktober Party propaganda, and Red Square itself was crowded with the irate, the curious, and the soon-to-be condemned.

International news correspondents from the major networks cupped their ears and rattled details into their open microphones, bringing every rumor and unconfirmed charge to their world-wide audiences.

“In an emergency measure approved by the Russian Senate, all documents in President Karpov’s Kremlin office have been seized,” declared CCI’s Anea Bergen, beating CNN’s Jan Sharp and UPN’s Chet Rogers to the story by a full fifteen seconds.

Rogers, not to be outdone, was the first to detail the spectacular arrival of Ivan Tretiak.

“Not since Lenin’s arrival at Finlandia Station,” intoned the seasoned reporter, “has such a transformative leader made such an auspicious entrance.”

Tretiak, standing victorious atop a tank turret, greeted the cheering crowd. Every gesture and expression was amplified and exaggerated by the state-of-the-art sound system and diamond-bright video screens.

If the previous Tretiak rallies were equal to rock concerts, this one was pure theater. Tretiak may have ranted against the evils of Hollywood, but this Red Square production — complete with cast, sets, props, lighting, heroes, and villains — was as lavish as any celluloid adventure.

“Friends! Countrymen! Russians!”

The crowd screamed approval.

“You’ve no doubt heard of this morning’s Senate-ordered inquiry into the shocking affairs of President Karpov,” began Tretiak, “and recovered from his secret files, locked within his private safe...” On cue a spotlight hit the actual safe — an important visual aid adding further authenticity to Tretiak’s dramatic presentation.

“The secret documents, soon to be published for all to read, prove the evil profiteer Karpov was about to squander over forty trillion of our precious Russian rubles in a crooked scheme to save his corrupt hide!”

The crowd bellowed like electric bulls, and a spot-light illuminated a second platform that looked like a gallows. On the platform, standing tall and retaining his dignity, was President Karpov.

Another roar swelled in the crowd’s throat, impressed and excited by Tretiak’s multimedia approach to seizing power by brazen will.

Another spotlight splashed its light on the platform, highlighting none other than Simon Templar.

“To add insult, Karpov was going to pay a king’s ransom to this international criminal!”

Tretiak pointed dramatically at the Saint while the video screens showed the surveillance photo of Templar fleeing through the corridor of Tretiak Industries.

“Yes! There he is, running for his life after an attempted robbery right here in Moscow! International police are searching everywhere for him, but we’ve captured him — the notorious Simon Templar, alias the Saint — thief, terrorist, scoundrel, and a man who, this very evening, was found in President Karpov’s bedroom!”

The crowd had some difficulty visualizing the scene as implied by Tretiak, but they managed to hiss, boo, and hurl verbal insults.

Watching the telecast inside the American Embassy, Emma sat mesmerized and half-crazed with fear for Simon’s safety.

Templar, mindful of the theatrical element of the presentation, offered a polite and efficient stage bow to the audience. He followed that with a warm smile and friendly wave.

Tretiak almost choked.

“This criminal and your corrupt president were going to bankrupt our national treasury!” he yelled in mock astonishment. “And for what? Let me show you!”

Yet another spotlight came to life, hitting the pièce de résistance — the bedraggled array of beakers, tubes, and a lightbulb from Botvin’s lab, now displayed on the back of a flatbed truck.

“Look! Look and laugh... laugh to keep from crying.” Tretiak was laying it on with a trowel. “This sad science project was supposed to rescue Russia from a frigid, freezing death. Do you deny this, Mr. Karpov?”

Karpov threw a glance at Templar, then responded with resonant self-assurance.

“Absolutely not! I proudly admit it!”

This was not the answer Tretiak expected, and he felt a sudden unease in the pit of his stomach.

The crowd looked from Tretiak to Karpov, from Karpov to Tretiak, but no one was looking at Simon Templar. He leaned his head down to his chest and spoke into the third button of his guard uniform.

“Send the signal — do it now!”

Miles away in Tretiak’s mansion. Dr. Lev Botvin sent a remote activation signal via microwave transmission. In response, the cold fusion apparatus slowly came to life, setting chemicals bubbling in their beakers.

“Sitting stupidly on that truck,” continued Tretiak, regaining his authoritative demeanor, “is a fairy tale called cold fusion. You pass electrical current into the apparatus and there is supposed to be a chemical reaction. But just watch! It is supposed to heat this huge, cold, continent — but it can’t even light up a measly lightbulb!”

He paused so as to not step on the audience’s outburst of laughter. The laugh did not come. Instead, there was a mass murmur.

What the audience could see, and Tretiak could not, was the lightbulb beginning to glow.

The would-be dictator continued his anti-West diatribe.

“From the same, sick culture that gave us crack, unemployment, AIDS, gangster rap...” Tretiak was fighting to regain his rhythm, but he had already lost his audience to the astonishing image on the screen — the bulb glowing brighter, hotter. The flatbed truck began to sag, its tires melting under the intense heat of cold fusion.

The crowd surged forward as the bulb reached critical mass, the truck’s windows shattered, and a magnificent white-hot column erupted into the dark night sky like a true beacon of hope.

The visuals were astonishing.

Tretiak, stunned, felt as if he were shrinking.

The crowd was amazed, amused, aghast, agog. Children were hoisted onto adult shoulders to witness this modem miracle of power and light, and several entrepreneurial members of the audience wished they had made arrangements for concession rights.

“It works! Karpov’s cold fusion works!” The cry came from the crowd, repeated and rephrased again and again with mounting enthusiasm.

“The light gives off heat!”

Templar winked at Karpov.

“Miracle number one,” said the Saint slyly.

Back at the American Embassy, the now-crowded room erupted in cheers. Emma wept for joy.

Three hundred thousand Muscovites stared at an exceedingly nervous Ivan Tretiak.

“All right, I grant that it seems to work to some extent... but who knows whether in the long run, the cost outweighs...”

No one was listening anymore. All attention reverted back to the glorious column of light, growing taller and brighter.

The crowd, caught up in a carnival mood, began to shout its allegiance to Karpov, their beloved president.

“Karpov! Karpov! Karpov!”

Then they said it again.

“Kar-pov! Kar-pov! Kar-pov!”

General Sklarov, rapidly assessing his future prospects in the Russian military as decidedly dim, hastily approached his president.

“A thousand apologies, Mr. President, there was obviously a miscommunication somewhere in the chain of command. I intend to conduct a strenuous inquiry right away.”

“Really? From where — prison?”

Sklarov was afraid Karpov would say something like that, and he was not tremendously surprised to find his fears were well founded. He decided it was best to ignore Karpov’s comment and press on patriotically.

“We’ll get that traitor, Mr. President,” insisted Sklarov, and he began waving signals to his troops.

“Hey, Sklarov!” yelled Templar as he fanned the air with a friendly wave. “When do I get my epaulets back?”

From his vantage point on the scaffold, Simon could see the tanks begin to roll backward out of Red Square, the drivers hoping their anonymity would remain intact until they got back to the barracks. None of them would ever admit to being in Red Square the night the coup failed.

The amazing turn of events generated a maelstrom of chaos. The crowd, caught up in the energy of the moment, could have either torn Tretiak to shreds or ignored him completely.

Fearing the former, Tretiak slid from the tank, discarded his microphone, and was immediately shielded by Ilya and a phalanx of thugs.

“Get me the hell out of here,” barked Tretiak, and made for his awaiting limo before the crowd could take action.

Ilya waved his Smith & Wesson, intimidating the locals and aggravating the loyal military. As for the Saint, he was already off the scaffold and pushing his way through the throng.

The crowd backed off in fear at the sight of Ilya’s weapon, but the military and Sklarov’s Special Forces took a threatening stance. Ilya impulsively opened fire, blasting away at anyone in uniform, and three men fell dead in the street.

Panic and pandemonium. The military launched a close-range firefight with Tretiak’s goons. Parents threw themselves atop their children, and the air was filled with screams and gunfire.

Flack-jacketed reporters and fearless journalists continued their five converge, detailing the action for an entranced worldwide audience.

“In an unexpected reversal of fortune, the Tretiak coup has suddenly collapsed,” explained a breathless Jan Sharp. “It is not clear what role General Sklarov is playing in this media event turned violent — his Special Forces first seized the president. Now they are freeing him and turning on Tretiak!”

Back at Tretiak’s mansion, Vereshagin watched Sklarov’s reversal on television. He suddenly felt sick to his stomach. Everything had gone wrong. He had envisioned himself riding a rocket named Tretiak to power and influence in the New Russia. His self-aggrandizing hopes were now as shattered as the broken bottles in Red Square.

He quickly drank three glasses of vodka, smoked as many cigarettes, and began to shiver as if all the doors and windows were thrown wide to the winter cold.

He pondered fact upon fact, formed and reviewed and discarded plan after plan, until his weary brain shaped a plot with which he could find no fault.

It was, of course, a rather wild and desperate scheme, the kind a man such as Vereshagin forms after too many drinks taken in fear, but it was the only answer he could devise.

He stood as if in a stupor and scuffed his way across the mezzanine’s highly polished floor. All around him was conspicuous luxury and grotesque overstatement. Above him hung the elaborate dual-tiered chandelier, suspended between twin towers as if it were a hangman suspended from a gallows.

“Gallows,” whispered Vereshagin.

He pulled a black Berreta from the holster on his hip, placed the barrel against his temple, and watched the mansion slowly spin around him. He was the center of a dying universe.

His finger jerked the trigger.

The room stopped spinning.

In Red Square, Ilya and Tretiak dived into the limo. Hot lead slammed into the bulletproof windshield.

“Drive! Drive!” Ilya was yelling, his voice cracking with desperation.

The limo’s tires screamed on pavement, the car careened wildly down the street, arid Tretiak’s foot soldiers were left stranded to fend for themselves.

Templar, disregarding the mayhem swirling around him, watched the limo’s taillights disappear in the distance. There was only one place Tretiak could go — back to his mansion for the cold fusion formula.

A microphone was suddenly thrust into Templar’s face, and he found himself staring into a camera lens.

“Simon Templar, ahas the Saint, wanted by Scotland Yard!” It was Chet Rogers, angling for an exclusive. “Mr. Templar, what’s your involvement with Karpov, Tretiak, cold fusion, and this failed coup?”

Templar’s piratical visage filled television screens around the globe. One such TV set was situated in the communal living room of a large boardinghouse in the Gloucester Road area of London where three floors had been converted for that purpose. A motherly landlady provided breakfast and an occasional supper for her residents, among them being Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard.

He had not caught the earlier portions of the broadcast, but joined the coverage about the moment the camera first focused on the tanned and devilish features of Simon Templar.

Teal almost swallowed his gum, and soon his rotund nose was virtually pressed against the television screen.

Intimidated neither by Tretiak’s plot nor uneven odds. Templar was even less cowed by electronic media. He felt much as he did re-entering London at Heathrow Airport, sensing that Teal himself was on the other side of the glass — which, of course, he was.

“Tretiak is a power-mad criminal attempting to kill democracy and establish a new dictatorship in Russia.”

Rogers, thrilled with these sound bites, felt a rush of professional adrenaline.

“But what about you — why are you here? Are you a criminal or a hero?”

Teal yelped at his television. “Criminal, dammit!”

The Saint’s eyes scanned the crowd’s perimeter, searching for signs of Frankie.

“If I can stop Tretiak and rescue cold fusion, let the world decide if I deserve praise or punishment.”

“Simon!”

It was Frankie piloting a Zhiguli motorcycle, complete with vintage sidecar.

“Excuse me; time to play hero,” said Templar to the reporter as he climbed in. “Oh. One more thing.” The Saint could not resist an admirable addendum, intoned in his most authentic and unquestionably sincere British accent: “God Save the Queen!”

Across the U.K., the cheers and acclaim were, with a singular exception, unanimous. Claude Eustace Teal, had he not been so reserved, would have wept.

4

Frankie negotiated through the chaos with breathtaking confidence.

“Nice to see you again!” exclaimed Templar. “You’re right, this is a classic.”

“Yeah, and my timing’s good, too!” yelled Frankie over the cycle’s roar. “How’d you pull off that stunt in Red Square?”

“Botvin and I have been in close communication ever since I visited his lab and wired him up. It was a close call, but Karpov, Botvin, and I cooked up that little miracle before Sklarov came crashing in.”

Frankie shook her helmeted head in amazement. “That was quite a miracle, even for a Saint.”

“I’ll need a couple more before this is over, Frankie. All hell is going to break loose at Tretiak’s.”

Simon should have used the present tense. The gates of Tretiak’s estate were already flung wide open, and the staff was fleeing like proverbial rats.

Ilya and Tretiak, out of the limo and into the mansion, were racing about wildly. The younger was yelping orders at Igor and Vlad.

“Clean out the safes! Jewels, cash, passports! Hurry!”

Ilya dashed into his room, retrieved a gram vial of Methadrine, and grabbed his walking stick.

Tretiak almost stumbled over the body of Vereshagin at the foot of the winding staircase. The chief operating officer lay dead. Half his head was missing, but the weapon responsible was easily found in Vereshagin’s hand.

“Suicide! You damned coward!”

Tretiak kicked the corpse before continuing up the stairs.

Frankie’s motorbike-and-sidecar combination raced over the icy road to Tretiak’s mansion, slush and snow spraying from the spinning tread. Above them, Simon heard the distinctive sound of helicopters — an airborne armada of news choppers en route to document the adventure’s climax.

She pushed the bike full throttle, and the wind lashed them with invisible whips. The iced air stung Templar’s cheeks and almost froze his lungs. Holding his two-way communicator close to his lips, he shouted a warning to Botvin.

“I’m on my way. Watch out for Tretiak!”

He had no way of knowing if Botvin could hear him or understand him over the engine’s roar and the whipping wind, but he at least owed him the effort.

Botvin could hear him, but making out every word was more than difficult. He sat at his computer, fogged glasses in his lap, downloading the cold fusion formula onto disk.

He turned when he heard the door creak.

“Mr. Templar,” said Botvin to the blurry silhouette, “I make a disk for you, of full cold fusion formula.”

“Templar? You said Templar?!”

Tretiak was enraged.

Botvin put on his glasses. A lump rose in his throat and his stomach sank.

“You traitor!” Tretiak screamed as he pulled out his gun.

“No, I’m not a traitor,” insisted Botvin proudly. “I have given my talents for the future of Russia.”

“You’ve also given your life,” snarled Tretiak, and he shot Botvin point blank in the forehead. The scientist pitched backward in his chair, then slumped lifeless to the floor.

Tretiak pocketed his gun, sat down in the bloodstained chair, and swiveled toward the computer. The formula was almost finished downloading.

“I may have lost the Kremlin,” said Tretiak triumphantly to Botvin’s dead body, “but to control cold fusion gives me more power than the president of any country.”

He ejected the priceless disk and spun the chair away from the computer. As the chair swiveled, he found himself facing Ilya. His son was pointing a gun at him.

“Gee, Dad, I was just thinking the same thing.”

Tretiak laughed nervously. “What an absurd situation! My own son holding a gun on me! Don’t be ridiculous, Ilya, put that away.”

He did not put it away.

“A son must annihilate a father, one way or another,” stated Ilya dispassionately, “if he’s to be a man...”

Tretiak attempted looking deeply into his son’s eyes. They were not that deep. All Tretiak saw was madness fueled by Methadrine.

The universe seemed to tilt out of kilter, and the floor rumbled from approaching loyalist tanks — heavy firepower under the direction of returned turncoat General Sklarov.

As the first tank rolled up catty-corner to the mansion, Frankie’s motorcycle skidded to the main gate.

The Saint leaped from the sidecar.

“Wait here, and keep the motor running.”

Two gunshots rang out from inside the mansion.

Templar and Frankie exchanged looks, and he was immediately sprinting for the front door. He was almost there when Vlad and Igor, eager to escape, erupted from the entrance.

The tank gunner opened fire. Vlad and Igor died in a hail of bullets, and another salvo of shells chased Templar into the vestibule. He slammed the massive door behind him as more bullets splintered the entrance frame, but he was already well inside.

He sidestepped Vereshagin’s body and ascended the stairs to the mezzanine. Resting atop an expensive antique end table was Ilya’s meth vial and the deadly walking stick.

Templar crept to Botvin’s office. The door ajar, he stole a silent glimpse.

Two men lay dead — Botvin and Tretiak.

Ilya was bent over his father’s corpse, straining to pry the diskette from Tretiak’s death grip — a grip so unrelenting that Ilya had to set down his precious gun and pull on the disk with both hands.

“C’mon Pop, give it up,” growled Ilya. “Even with a bullet in the brain, you still want the world.”

With a firm yank, he finally pulled the disk free.

“Sorry, Dad. You can’t be a billionaire and a Communist at the same time.”

“Or a rap star and Russian tsar,” commented the Saint, “Fine way for a son to talk to his departed father.”

Ilya’s face flushed with surprise. He turned, knowing he would dread the sight of Simon Templar alive, unforgiving, and armed with Ilya’s own gun.

“Hey, have pity on me,” said Ilya, smiling stupidly. “I’m an orphan.”

“That’s the only thing we have in common,” answered Templar coldly.

The arriving tanks’ low frequency rumble vibrated the mansion’s steel bones and timber sinews. No less taut was the tension between Ilya and Templar as Simon backed him out onto the beautifully appointed mezzanine.

The men could feel the artillery-generated vibrations increasing in intensity.

“You shouldn’t be messin’ with me. Templar,” Ilya spat as if he were in a position to make threats. The mad Russian then stood firm as if his boots were Super-Glued to the highly polished parquet floor. He threw back his head and laughed.

“I could be runnin’ this country by morning.”

“You’re standing on shaky ground. Sonny Boy,” drawled Templar casually. He pointed the massive Smith & Wesson at Ilya’s chest. “Simon says: ‘Give me the disk.’ ”

Ilya brayed like an ass and squared his shoulders.

“You’re good with those cute little Santa’s Workshop sort of gadgets, but that’s not one of your high-tech electronic toys, Templar, that’s my goddam Smith and Wesson — a man’s gun — no modems, no microchips. You can’t handle it.”

Simon understood he was in the presence of a lunatic.

Gunfire from the courtyard suddenly shattered the window, and both men dived to the floor. Glass shards shredded the velvet curtains as the bullets drilled smoking pockmarks into the wall.

When the shooting stopped, Ilya cautiously raised his eyes. Templar was aiming the weapon’s gleaming steel barrel directly at his forehead.

“I can handle this better than you can handle cold fusion,” insisted Templar evenly.

“They’re shooting at us, for God’s sake!” Ilya barked.

Templar’s grip tightened on the trigger.

“Perhaps killing scoundrels has replaced freezing to death as the national pastime.”

Ilya’s eyes banged back and forth in their sockets as if seeking some overlooked avenue of escape.

“The disk,” hissed Ilya through clenched teeth, his voice dripping with desperation. “I’ll slide you the damn disk, you slide me the gun, we’ll both get the hell out of here. A promise, a pact, a treaty.”

He held the blue plastic nervously between his fingers, placed it on the floor, and prepared to propel it toward Templar.

“On the count of three?” He was almost begging.

Templar nodded agreement

“One, two...”

The Smith & Wesson clattered across the floor as the disk did the same. Both men were on their feet in an instant.

Several more shots screamed in from outside, but Ilya ignored them. He pointed his weapon directly at the Saint.

“The disk, Templar. Give back the disk.”

All things considered. Templar shouldn’t have been surprised.

“But we traded,” he objected, “disk for gun. A treaty, a pact, a promise.”

“A Magnum outweighs promises,” insisted Ilya, “especially when I’m the one holding it.”

Templar shrugged and twirled the disk between his fingers. “An empty weapon makes for an equally empty threat,” he noted coolly. “You said that was a six-shooter. I may not be a college graduate, but my math skills are adequate. You fired four times in Red Square, two here.”

Ilya swore.

“I have cold fusion,” said Templar, tucking the blue disk into his shirt pocket. “Your future is all used up.”

A high-pitched wail sliced the air, and both men froze where they stood, disbelieving but decoding the sound’s source: the metallic scream of incoming artillery.

The massive concussion as the first missile broad-sided the steel dome rocked the mansion into a dizzying maelstrom of falling plaster and raining crystal. Molten shards splattered onto the freshly varnished parquet, transforming it into a lake of fire. Long sheets of flame swept greedily over the draperies while smaller flames leaped with fierce eagerness up the blackening banisters of the wide spiral staircase rising from the mezzanine toward the scaffolding above.

The second blast came quickly, accompanied by additional gunfire from the courtyard. The room shuddered with heat, chaos, and confusion.

Templar ran for the stairs, grabbing Ilya’s walking stick in the process. With the ground floor and mezzanine afire, there was no where to go but up. Templar took the stairs four at a time with Ilya directly behind him.

The third rocket blast rippled the staircase as if it were an amusement park ride, and the two men gripped the banisters, battling for balance.

At the top of the stairs Templar leaped to the scaffold as another shock wave shook the mansion. He stumbled, sprawled headlong, and the walking stick flew from this grip. Plaster showered down around him. Dust and debris were everywhere.

Ilya, armed and triumphant, mounted the scaffold and edged closer.

The two men locked eyes.

“Maybe I’m better at math than you,” mocked Ilya. “I shot three men in Red Square, not four.”

“I admit you’re a master of division,” offered Templar, his right hand searching under the plaster. His fingers found the tapered form of Ilya’s walking stick.

“You will give me the disk and I will shoot you,” stated Ilya flatly as he raised the weapon. “Or, if you prefer, I will shoot you and take the disk. Either way you are a failure and a fool.”

“Fool?” Templar hoped Ilya would move even closer. His hopes were not disappointed.

“You allowed yourself to be influenced by a woman. I, myself, have never allowed a woman to influence me.”

“I bet that broke her heart,” said Simon Templar, and he swung the stick with astonishing force into Ilya’s right wrist. The Russian screamed in pain, and the gun spat flame as it plummeted to the inferno below.

“You were right,” said Templar. “There was one bullet left.”

Another missile rocked the mansion’s foundation. Templar stood and steadied himself, brandishing the walking stick as if it were a sword.

Ilya’s eyes widened in shocked realization — the gun was gone, Simon had the disk, flames were rapidly mounting, and missiles were blasting the mansion to rubble.

Templar thrust the stick repeatedly at Ilya, forcing him backward. “Tell me again about being a fool and a failure.”

“Bastard!” yelled Ilya. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Templar stopped. That was a good question. He hadn’t know the answer for decades. But now, in this precise moment, he knew exactly who he was.

“My name is Templar, Simon Templar,” he recited, saying it with the same exuberant self-assurance as he had to little Agnes those many years ago, “crusading Saint and hero of a thousand adventures.”

“Spare me,” groaned Ilya, and blindsided Templar with a roundhouse kick. The walking stick dropped from Templar’s grip as he flailed backward over the scaffold. He clutched desperately at the struts, his strong fingers clamping like iron. He hung there, helpless, suspended over searing flames and suffocating smoke.

Ilya realized only moments remained before Templar could no longer hold on. When he fell, the cold fusion disk would be lost forever. He leaned over, quickly lifted the disk from Templar’s pocket, and placed it in his own. Ilya grabbed the walking stick and began a frantic climb upward toward the domed ceiling, where a row of windows offered his only chance of escape.

He was starting to scale the scaffolding when Templar, summoning astonishing strength born of pure will, somersaulted back onto the platform.

Ilya whirled at Templar’s unexpected reappearance, and what he saw unnerved him more than the renewed whine of incoming ordinance or the increased heat of rising flames.

He had left his adversary dangling above a pit of fiery death, but now Simon Templar stood before him radiating confidence and victory.

“I’m not done with you yet, Sonny Boy!” Templar shouted over the roar of flame and scream of firepower.

Ilya threw a wild look at him, and saw Templar holding aloft what appeared to be computer disk.

“I won’t be suckered!” yelled Ilya. “I saw you...”

“The hand is quicker than the eye, my friend,” said Templar proudly. “It’s the first thing you learn in my line of work.”

Ilya stopped cold, searching Templar’s masklike face for any clue to the truth.

“That’s a blank disk from Botvin’s lab,” stated Ilya, and he hoped he was right.

“Or is yours...?”

The Russian paused only a moment to consider the possibilities. He was going out the window with his disk, right one or not. Reaching the top, Ilya crawled to a bracing strut that led to one of the windows. As deft as he was daft, he gingerly stepped along the plank leading to freedom.

He was halfway to his goal when incoming firepower hit the roof. The shattering explosion demolished Ilya’s escape hatch and blasted him back through the air.

In a move both desperate and inventive, Ilya saved himself from plummeting into the flames by hooking the crook of his walking stick onto the lower ring of the massive chandelier suspended from the mansion’s dome.

He hung there, helpless and terrified, while flames swept over the scaffold.

Templar felt the structure on which he stood ominously shift. Having only moments before the entire tower collapsed upon him, his options for action were decidedly limited.

He leaped off the crashing scaffold, clamped his grip around Ilya’s ankles, and swayed over the inferno like a spider dangling from a thread.

Ilya screamed, Simon held tight, and the rope supporting the chandelier strained and stretched.

“No! Let go!” Ilya tried to kick, but his legs were locked in Simon’s grip.

The wildly rocking chandelier shed a blizzard of crystal as Templar literally climbed up the screaming Russian. Templar planted his heel firmly on Ilya’s head as he reached the chandelier itself.

The rope, never meant to support the additional weight of two men, began to slip. The chandelier lurched and dropped sickeningly, swaying even more precariously as Ilya shimmied up onto it, also.

The pair balanced on opposite sides, suspended over the pit of hell.

The roar of flames was loud on every side. The stifling heat drenched their brows with sweat; acrid smoke stung their nostrils and burned their lungs.

“Damn you,” rasped Ilya. “Cold fusion will die with me!”

“Not exactly,” insisted Templar as he again held up the disk. “I told you I had the real one, and I still do.”

Infuriated, confused, and frustrated, Ilya snatched the disk from Templar’s hand. It crumbled under his grip — it was nothing more than Templar’s card of the Kremlin ground-plan.

In the instant of distraction Templar grabbed between Ilya’s knees for the walking stick still hooked on the steel ring.

Ilya swore and his heart pounded madly in his chest.

Templar thrust the point at him, the needle-sharp tip less than an inch from the assassin’s neck.

“You got it backward. Templar!” yelled Ilya. “You’re the thief... a very good one, okay? But you don’t kill people, not even people like me.”

“You’re the exception that proves the rule,” said Templar coldly. “People like you are greatly improved by death.”

With awesome dexterity, speed, and nerve, Ilya grabbed the stick’s shaft and twisted it from Templar’s hand.

“I’m the killer here!” yelled Ilya victoriously as he jabbed the point repeatedly at the Saint, “I’m the killer.”

His triumphant grin faded when he realized what Templar had done — in the instant Ilya regained the stick, Templar plucked the cold fusion disk from the wily Russian’s breast pocket.

In Templar’s left hand was the disk, in his right hand was a little penknife.

The chandelier spun dizzily and Ilya laughed hysterically. The contrast between his three-foot weapon and Simon’s three-inch knife made him roar with mirth.

“And what do you plan to do with that?”

Templar secured the disk before offering an explanation. “You broke the law, Ilya.”

“So what! You’re a thief!”

Ilya punctuated his pronouncement with another easily avoided thrust.

“I don’t mean that kind of law — not rules and regulations,” said Templar as he climbed higher, pulling himself up the thick rope from which the opulent light fixture was suspended.

Ilya didn’t understand.

“Gravity, Ilya... not just a good idea, it’s the law.”

Above the swaying chandelier. Templar reached down and sliced cleanly through the rope with his penknife’s razor-sharp blade.

Ilya, riding the chandelier down into the inferno, screamed all the way to his death.

The chandelier crashed through the foyer and beyond, smashing through a second fire-engulfed wooden floor, then plummeting another forty feet into a hidden substructure below the mansion.

Ilya’s death ride ended on a solid block of concrete, the chandelier shattering like a crystal bomb.

Templar swayed over the scene, momentarily awestruck by the revelation of the mansion’s massive underground. He turned to climb his lifeline in a desperate bid to reach the cupola itself. A glance upward confirmed the rope’s security — it was threaded through a large pully welded tightly to the ceiling and firmly attached to a winch on the far side of the dome’s base.

Every muscle straining, he pulled himself up, hand over hand, higher and higher. Then he heard it — the distinctive screech of another incoming shell.

The entire mansion rocked from the impact. The winch mechanism was torn asunder, the rope blasted loose, and Templar was failing to the same fiery fate as Ilya.

The rigging angrily lashed through the pully as he plunged helplessly downward. Faster and faster he fell, the flaming parquet floor rising up to meet him.

Still clinging to the useless rope, he dropped through the gapping hole created by Ilya’s death-fall. His only hope of survival was the handful of hemp clutched in his powerful grip.

The dome-top pulley rattled its bolts as the rope wildly ran through, whipping and snapping in heated fury to its massive, knotted conclusion. The oversize endpiece hit the pulley full force, wedging itself intractably between unyielding.metal. The sudden tightening of the rope burned the flesh in Templar’s palms and almost ripped his arms from their sockets.

A few feet from death, suspended above Ilya’s broken body, Simon Templar appreciated the pain as a welcome alternative to extinction. He hung there gasping, dumbly bewildered that he should still be alive.

He dropped to safety. Slowly, in breathless wonder, he turned his gaze to the extraordinary sight before him — a vast storage space, the size of several city blocks, stacked to the rafters with aisle upon aisle of jumbo oil drums. Each drum contained hundreds of gallons of precious, hoarded heating oil.

“My, my, my,” said Templar appreciatively, “tricky old Tretiak hid it all in his basement.”

Templar pulled the computer disk from his pocket, regarded it in the flickering light of the fire that licked the shattered timbers above him. How much money did he hold in his hand? Ten billion dollars? Twenty? Realistically, he had contacts who would eagerly cough up tens of millions for the formula encoded upon the little magnetic wheel. Wealth beyond imagining. The prospect had, until this very moment, held him in an inescapable stranglehold. It had made him rich, for certain, but what else had it made him?

He tossed the disk up into the flames. The world’s only copy of Dr. Emma Russell’s cold fusion formula shriveled and melted into bubbling blue plastic.

Wealth beyond imagining...

If he felt a pang of remorse, it was buried under an avalanche of other, nobler feelings. In a life seemingly devised of one daring escape after another, Simon Templar felt, for the very first time, that he was truly free.

“Miracle number two,” whispered the Saint.

The floor above suddenly swarmed with Russian Marines foaming out the blaze, and it wasn’t long before Templar saw Frankie peering down through the crater in happy disbelief.

“Hey! Look at that! You’re alive! And there’s enough oil there to heat all of Moscow.”

“And no one to stop you,” called out Templar. “No one to stop you at all.”

Frankie was immediately joined by newscasters and reporters rattling off breathtaking descriptions of the mansion’s fiery destruction and its recently revealed hidden treasure.

CNN’s Lloyd Swain pointed his camera through the smoking hole in the foyer floor, as did his counterpart from UPN.

CNN’s signal digitally bounced via Eutelsat 2, flight 3, at 16 degrees east, transponder 41, to CNN in London, who then passed it on to CNN in Atlanta by way of Maxat’s Global Skylink. When the signal arrived in Atlanta, it was inserted live into CNN International as “breaking news,” and was then transmitted back across the Atlantic and retransmitted all over Europe.

The digital image of Simon Templar bounced over four satellites on its way to London’s television screens.

Inspector Teal sat drop-jawed in silence, absorbing every detail of the live coverage. He turned reluctantly from the TV set when his landlady informed him that he was wanted on the telephone.

The phlegmatic detective pulled his plump posterior from the comfort of his La-Z-Boy recliner, loosed a sigh, crossed the room, and placed the receiver to his ear.

It was Sir Hamilton Dorn. “Watching the news, Teal?”

Teal mumbled an affirmation. A direct call from Dorn was highly irregular.

“Does Scotland Yard have anything solid on this Templar character, anything you could use to actually press charges?”

“In reality?”

“What else is there?”

Teal cradled the telephone against his shoulder while he unwrapped a fresh stick of spearmint gum.

“if could lay my hands on him tomorrow, I’d have no more hope of proving he stole anything than I’d have of running the Pope in for bigamy. However, we could charge him with obstructing the police in the execution of their duty...” Teal left the sentence incomplete. He preferred Dorn supply the appropriate ending.

“What’s the use of busting the Saint for a milk-and-cookies rap like that?” asked Dorn rhetorically, and Inspector Teal wasn’t sure exactly which tack to take.

“At best he’s wanted for questioning in a dozen unsolved thefts and swindles,” responded the detective. “At worst, if he arrived back in London tomorrow, I could do nothing more than meet him at Heathrow and ask him if he had a good time in Russia.”

There was an ominous silence on the other end of the line, and Teal feared he was about to be remonstrated by a knighted superior.

“It’s not my fault, sir,” stated Teal gloomily. “We aren’t in the Saint’s class, and some day we shall have to admit it.”

Dorn cut him short. “This matter has definite international intelligence implications. Teal. I think my office should handle it directly. I’ll speak to the commissioner, and you can simply let it go.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s just as well,” added Dorn. “With these high-profile heroics, no jury would convict him of anything. Especially after...”

The two men said it in unison.

“God Save the Queen.”

Teal moved his gum to the other side of his mouth.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

“Good, Teal. I appreciate your cooperation. In fact, I’d like you to come by my office tomorrow and bring detective Rabbit-Hoe—”

“That’s Rabineau, sir...”

“... and we’ll have a nice chat.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sensing Teal’s weariness, Dorn made an unusually friendly offer.

“I’ll even buy you a beer when you’re off duty.”

Teal gave it serious consideration before reciting his standard reply to offers of alcohol.

“Fat men ought not to drink, but I appreciate the gesture.”

“As you wish,” said Sir Hamilton Dorn.

Teal returned the telephone to its cradle and plopped himself back down in front of the television. On the screen, live from Russia, Simon Templar looked every bit the hero.

5

“Am I boring you, Inspector?”

It was Dr. Emma Russell who asked him the question during her debriefing in Teal’s office a few days after her return from Moscow.

“Don’t take it personally,” explained Rabineau, leaning back in her chair. “He always looks like that.”

“Has this Simon Templar made any threat to contact you in the future?” asked Teal as he unwrapped another stick of gum and folded it into his mouth.

“No. Actually, he never had a chance to say much of anything to me after I started running for the embassy.”

Rabineau drummed her well-manicured fingers on the desk. She was a recent graduate of Lord Trenchard’s famous Police College, and usually gave the impression of being very well satisfied with her degree.

“Quite a charmer, though, isn’t he?” offered Rabineau. “The Saint, I mean.”

Emma was guarded in her reply, but attempted to sound spontaneous.

“I admit he holds a certain short-term appeal. But if you’re referring to romance, all I got from Mr. Templar in Moscow was a series of near-death experiences.”

“Count yourself lucky,” insisted Teal. “Simon Templar is our top suspect in the Uffizi bombing in Florence a few years back...”

“An innocent woman was killed, along with two children,” added Rabineau.

Emma took the bait, snapping out an impassioned objection.

“No! He’s no murderer, Inspector...”

The two detectives exchanged glances. It had been a test, and Emma failed. Belatedly she sensed it.

“Or... maybe he is... who knows?” She was unconvincing.

Teal sat close to her and did his best to appear compassionate.

“It’s not unusual for kidnap victims to become enamored with their captors. Dr. Russell.”

Emma’s cheeks flushed.

“Simon Templar may be the Saint — and, from the looks of that Russian business, even a hero — but he’s obviously also a thief, a fraud, a criminal. He stole your life’s work, don’t forget. He isn’t a romantic hero, he has no lofty motives. Tell me. Dr. Russell, has his stolen wealth benefited anyone except himself?”

There was only one honest answer.

“No.”

Teal took her hand as would a well-intentioned clergyman.

“The Simon Templar who endangered your life in Moscow is not exactly the Robin Hood of modem crime.”

Emma sighed, nodded, and checked her watch. She couldn’t wait to get out of there.

“Look, there’s an important conference coming up. I’ve got to prepare my talk.”

Teal walked her to the door while Rabineau pretended to do paperwork.

“We understand. The British Physicists Conference, isn’t it? Been a lot of publicity about that one, several famous scientists making presentations. You have a life. We appreciate your taking the time.”

Emma smiled her best professional smile and left without looking back. Teal shut the door and turned to Rabineau.

“The situation seems perfectly obvious. Inspector Rabineau,” said Teal drowsily. “She’s in love with him.”

The hand-drawn map in the nervous grip of Dr. Emma Russell led her VW Bug down a winding English country road.

She had been perfectly honest in most of her comments to Inspector Teal — Simon Templar had not threatened to make contact with her. The fact that he had made contact indirectly and discreetly that very morning by leaving a detailed map to his whereabouts on the front seat of her car was an item best left out of official conversations.

Emma, to be fair in representing her moral and ethical dilemma, argued with herself quite intently about whether or not it was wise to rendezvous with the Saint. Returning first to Oxford, she admonished herself aloud while primping in front of a mirror.

“You’re smitten like a schoolgirl, Emma,” she advised herself, “and you really should have nothing further to do with him.”

She laughed at her own daring absurdity, walked out to her little VW Bug, and pointed it toward Bath, Avon.

“Purified by our kisses,” recited Emma, “we are healed.”

She found a certain irony in the history of her destination, for Bath’s fame rested on cleansing and purification.

According to a legend of which Emma was particularly fond, it was in 500 B.C. that Prince Bladud discovered the amazing curative powers of the natural hot springs. Afflicted with leprosy, he saw his swine healed of skin ailments after wallowing in the mud. He followed their example and was cured. It occurred to Emma Russell that perhaps she was only doing some mud wallowing of her own, but she preferred envisioning a more romantic and transformative outcome.

After all, she reasoned, when the Romans arrived in the first century a.d. they transformed Bath into England’s first spa resort, complete with a temple, theater, and even a gymnasium.

“From mud to majesty,” murmured Emma, “good things can come from unpleasant beginnings.”

And she thought of Simon Templar.

There was no way around her emotions. She was fascinated, enthralled, attracted, and fearful. The fear fueled the fire of her attraction.

The Saint had deceived her, rescued her, stolen from her, and given her freedom. He was the most astonishing combination of heroism and terrorism imaginable — a mystery more complex, elusive, and compelling than cold fusion itself.

Despite numerous opportunities to reverse direction an return to the familiar security of her tiny apartment and slowly swimming fish, Emma kept a firm foot on the gas pedal and an ongoing inner dialogue. The outcome of her internal debate was no surprise.

Emma was in love.

She followed the map’s directions perfectly.

The commissioner of Scotland Yard tugged relentlessly at his thinning mustache.

“The boys from Fleet Street are having a field day with this one, Teal.” He waved the Evening Clarion as if he could make it disappear. He couldn’t.

The silver-headed superior let go of his tattered lip hairs and slammed his fist on the table.

“Front page material,” continued the commissioner in his most authoritative dramatic tone, “byline by feature reporter Barney Malone, accompanied by a delightful photo of Simon Templar, alias the Saint — Scotland Yard’s Most Wanted Man — performing heroics in Russia. ‘Saint Saves Russian Democracy!’ ‘International Criminal or New World Hero?’ ”

He attempted throwing the newspaper against the wall, but it only flapped to the floor.

“The press loves making us look foolish, and you’ve made them so happy I’m surprised this Barney Malone fellow hasn’t proposed marriage.”

His monologue came to an abrupt conclusion, either from frustration or a lack of fresh verbiage. Teal chewed slowly, his lids hovering close to closing.

The commissioner stared at his melancholy chief inspector and shook his head in dismay.

“Do you have anything to say, Inspector Teal?”

Teal had plenty he would like to say, but his experience and professionalism forbade it.

“Sir,” he began calmly, “this Saint fellow is obviously a most unpredictable character with a lot of excess energy and some rather personal ideas of justice above the law. He also seems to be exerting some degree of influence over the judgement and emotions of Dr. Russell, not to mention the president of Russia, who wants to pin a medal on him.”

“Yes, I read that in the paper.”

“They are enamored of one another...”

“Karpov?”

“Russell and Templar,” clarified Teal. “I have no doubt that she knows his whereabouts, and if he is back in the U.K. or not. I also believe that she was not forthright with us in her debriefing upon her return from Moscow.”

“No doubt.”

Teal chewed faster.

“Whatever is really going on with the Saint is definitely tied in to this entire Tretiak business and international espionage regarding cold fusion.”

Teal paused. By broaching international espionage, he was tossing the proverbial ball onto a court out of his jurisdiction.

The commissioner leaned back in his chair and projected a thoughtful air. The detective allowed his meditating superior an appropriate measure of silence.

When the commissioner next spoke, the presentation took Teal by complete surprise.

With his mustache in one hand, he arose from his chair, came out from behind the desk, walked over in front of Inspector Teal, and sat down on the desk’s edge. He leaned forward and spoke in hushed tones.

“I’m going to ask you a question, Teal. And I want you to answer it as if your entire career depended upon the honesty of your answer, because it does.”

The detective’s languid lids snapped open as if they were window shades.

“I beg your pardon...”

“Listen to me and answer me with absolute veracity,” insisted the commissioner.

Teal stopped chewing.

“I need to know, right now, between the two of us...” he leaned so close to Teal that he almost fell off the desk. “Has Sir Hamilton Dorn given you any special instructions regarding Simon Templar of which I may be unaware?”

In his three decades with Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Claude Eustace Teal had never before found himself in such a politically charged position. Had he been a man of lesser intellect, he would have blurted out the honest answer immediately. He was not a man of lesser intellect.

He eyed his superior drowsily and appeared to stifle a yawn.

“You are well aware, sir, that had Sir Hamilton Dorn instructed me to do anything, and had he invoked confidentiality necessitated by national security, I would have to comply with his request.”

The commissioner slapped his thighs.

“So, do you mean to tell me that Dorn wanted the Saint to vanish in Moscow, not to be seized and extradited?”

Teal felt the balance of power shift in his favor.

“I didn’t exactly say that, sir. But I think you and I can reach an understanding.” If he could have forced a convincing smile, he would have.

The commissioner smiled encouragingly.

“If you would be so kind as to take me into your confidence regarding the matter, I’ll do the same,” offered Inspector Teal.

Fair enough.

The commissioner stood and began pacing about the office.

“Politics, Teal. Damn politics. You know how I hate it when we get the rug pulled out from under us by Special Branch or MI5...”

Teal mumbled and nodded.

“I know British Intelligence is having fits about Tretiak, Templar, Russia, and this whole Russell affair. They have no reason to tell us anything more than they want to. And that means this so-called Saint could be a clandestine operative of Her Majesty’s government, the CIA, or even the French. The French!”

The commissioner had a personal problem with the French.

“If Simon Templar is a deep-cover agent, or if he’s been drafted or pressured into serving some major player in the intelligence community. Sir Hamilton Dorn would be perfectly happy to let Scotland Yard look foolish and incompetent if it served what he calls ‘the greater good.’ ”

“I’m sure it’s happened before, sir,” agreed Teal.

“Damn right! Not that I don’t support the best interests of the Crown, mind you, but if Dorn’s messing with a priority investigation of Scotland Yard and not informing me of it...”

Teal looked more tired than ever.

“And so,” added the dour detective, “there is the possibility that certain government agencies have a vested interest in keeping Simon Templar out of jail and up to his neck in international intrigue. He could be on his own, or under someone’s thumb.”

The commissioner stood at the window combing the remains of his mustache.

Teal stood and held his bowler over his protruding stomach.

“Well, Teal, tell me.”

“The honest answer is that Simon Templar, despite the massive media attention given his antics in Russia, managed to disappear from Moscow. He has not, to this point in time, been apprehended. That does not mean that if we bring him in, that Sir Hamilton Dorn wouldn’t arrange his release for purposes of, shall we say, ‘voluntary conscription.’ ”

Perfect.

Teal managed to confirm his failure while deflecting attention and suspicion back on Sir Hamilton Dorn.

“Of course,” added the detective, “were Dorn to arrange a release on the condition that Templar serve Her Majesty’s government, it would be in the national interest.”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

“And in such a situation, I’m sure that you would be the first informed, and perhaps the only one so informed. After all, I may be chief inspector, but you’re the commissioner of Scotland Yard.”

The tiny comb returned to the commissioner’s pocket. He turned and smiled warmly at Inspector Teal.

“Thank you. Thank you for your honesty and dedication, Inspector.”

Teal nodded.

“Do you have any idea where this Templar may have gone, or what he may do?”

The detective’s bowler hat began moving in circular motions, propelled by pudgy fingers.

“We haven’t seen the last of him. He’s out there, somewhere. Wherever he is, whatever the reality of the situation, there’s one thing we know for sure — Dr. Emma Russell is in love with him. That means the feeling may be mutual. If so, there is an off chance that Templar will show up at the physicists convention at Oxford tomorrow.”

The commissioner cocked his head.

“Were you and Rabineau planning to be there?”

Teal shifted his ample weight

“As I said, it’s an off chance. There is tremendous security for the event as it is, sir.”

“Be there, Teal. Even if it is a waste of time, we need to have a strong presence. Dorn’s men will be, probably disguised as gentlemen.”

It was clear that the masculine descriptive was not intended as a compliment.

Between Oxford and Bath, half hidden in the deep woods, was a secluded farmhouse which, despite the corporate shell who’s name adorned the deed, was among the property assets of Simon Templar.

This isolated abode was one of the Saint’s more rustic temporary residences. He owned or leased several habitats, in numerous residential areas under a variety of names.

There was an impressive apartment maintained at #7 Upper Berkely Mews in the name of Sebastian Tombs, another at Cornwall House in Piccadilly leased to Louis Hayward, and a rather respectable-looking house in Home Counties Weybridge sold to a wealthy gent calling himself Hugh Sinclair. All these men were the Saint, and all these properties were utilized for his diverse purposes.

Today the purpose was romance.

Dr. Emma Russell turned off her car’s ignition and waited for the VW’s engine to rattle its way to silence before setting the hand brake. She eagerly pulled the Bug’s reluctant and wobbly handle and gave the door an encouraging shove with her shoulder. She exited, took a deep breath, and walked toward the farmhouse door.

It was unlocked. She let herself in.

Feeling a bit like Goldilocks sneaking into the Three Bears’ cottage, Emma looked around the rustic rooms. There was no porridge on the stove, but there was a warm fire glowing from the bedroom hearth.

On the nightstand next to the bed were her seven cold fusion cards. Standing next to them was Simon Templar, alias the Saint.

“You can take your cards and go if you want.”

For a moment she couldn’t speak. She had last seen him at the American embassy, disguised as Straubing. Today he stood before her as no one but himself, his eyes gleaming with mocking humor and honest romance.

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Emma. The entire room seemed to glow from the fire in her heart.

He swept her into his arms, and they kissed as if it were a grand swashbuckling adventure. For them, it was.

“My hero!” exclaimed Emma, and they both laughed as they tumbled onto the bed.

They kissed several more times before Simon spoke to her in the lisping voice from the first day they met.

“I’ll expoth her for the fraud thee ith!”

Emma gasped and giggled. “That was you?”

“Yeth. I mean, yes. That’s who I thought Dr. Russell would like,” admitted Templar with self-deprecating humor. “I thought she was going to be some old biddy.”

“I will be an old biddy someday, and you’ll be right after all.” Emma patted his shoulder encouragingly.

“I didn’t know Dr. Russell was a gorgeous soon-to-be-trillionaire,” continued Templar. “You’re going to be the richest woman in the world.”

“I am?”

Templar pulled her close.

“Sure. Why do you think I’m hanging around?”

He kissed her and she kissed him back. They replicated this interpersonal chemistry experiment several times in rapid succession before Templar leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

“Emma, my life is very strange. I told you about when I was a kid, the orphanage...”

She kissed his cheek and put an arm around him.

“I got out of there when I was thirteen, ran away, and lived on the street. I made it all the way to America on stealth, wits, and stealing. I thought I was winning, but all I was doing was amassing numbers in a bank balance.”

Emma held him closer. “Did you hurt a lot of people, Simon?”

“I robbed a lot of people. Stole money, diamonds, art, time, emotion, trust. And I was good at it. I am good at it. But...” His voice trailed off.

“Why, Simon Templar,” chided Dr. Emma Russell, “I believe you’re having an attack of ethics.”

He smiled. He hadn’t felt this open, this free, since his childhood.

“There’s an expression I heard once that I paid no attention to,” acknowledged Templar. “It went like this: Your resentments will kill you. I was about the most resentful guy on the planet — almost fifty million dollars in the bank and I only felt alive when I was stealing something, trying to get back what was stolen from me — and that, of course, is... stupid... insane... nutsy-coo-coo.”

He suddenly rolled over on top of her and kissed her firmly and loudly on the nose.

“Hey, Mr. Wet Kisser!” She laughed, but couldn’t help arching beneath him as if they were lovers.

“My name is not Mr. Wet Kisser,” he insisted playfully. “The name is Templar, Simon Templar — the hero of a thousand adventures.”

“How’s this for an adventure, Mr. Templar?”

She kissed him with compelling passion.

At length, when they came up for air, he offered his commentary.

“A thousand adventures like that and I’ll be the world’s weakest swashbuckler.”

She propped herself up on her elbows. “Unbuckle your swash,” she intoned wickedly, “the adventure has yet to begin.”

“Why Dr. Ruthell,” lisped a compliant Templar seductively, “You thertainly are ecthiting.”

“Yeth,” she agreed.

“Sounds to me like there’s something wrong with your tongue.”

She convinced him otherwise, and they savored the evening together.

During a pause from their more animated moments of interaction. Templar rested his head against her chest. He heard the sound of her heart, listened to her breathing, and touched her gently.

“I wonder if George Sanders started like this,” murmured the Saint.

Emma chuckled. “Very suave, that Mr. Sanders,” agreed Emma. “He was married to both Zsa Zsa Gabor and her sister.”

“Not at the same time, of course.”

“Certainly not,” Emma said it with a dollop of high-society intonation.

“Sanders and I have a lot in common,” remarked Templar cryptically.

“Were you also married to Zsa Zsa? If so, I want all the details,” purred Emma in her best Gaborian accent. “After all, Zsa Zsa is considered the embodiment of all things good in bed.”

“I’d like to see her prove that in a court of law,” said Templar, and they both paused to visualize the presentation of evidence before he continued. “George Sanders and I both have fake names, we were both ripped off by Russian gangsters, and we both got out of Russia in the nick of time — my departure being more recent than his, of course.”

“You pulling my leg?”

“My pleasure, darling. But no, this is ironic fact. He was born in St. Petersburg. His father was the bastard son of Prince von Oldenburg and one of the czar’s sisters. The day George left Russia for school in England was the same day Lenin entered. They actually saw each other at the Finlandia train station when Stalin, Trotsky, and the rest of those Russian gangsters came to meet him.”

“Stalin came to meet George Sanders?” Emma was teasing.

Templar sighed in feigned exasperation.

“Lenin eventually confiscated all of George’s family’s money and killed most of his relatives. George never got over it, but he went on to become suave, debonair, famous, and then...”

Emma knew, and her heart skipped a beat.

“His resentments killed him,” Templar said. “He committed suicide.”

“And?” Emma prompted him to continue.

“And that’s where the resemblance ends,” said Templar as he pulled her over on top of him, “because I’m done with Russian gangsters, fresh out of resentments, finished with revenge, and madly in love with the brilliant Dr. Emma Russell.”

They kissed several more times with unabated gusto.

Later, prior to drifting off to sleep in each other’s arms, they spoke softly.

“How did you know all that stuff about George Sanders?”

“If I find something, or someone, of interest, I find out everything I can. I have an insatiable mind.”

“So that’s what you call it,” remarked Emma pleasantly.

He smiled in the darkness.

“I do love to read,” said Templar. “And I noticed the eclectic collection of books in your apartment. What was that one...? ‘The best beloved of all things in my sight is justice.’ ”

“Ah. The Hidden Words of Baha’u’llah. One of my favorites.”

“That was the only one I read — I was busy casing the joint, as I recall.”

“There is one quote in there that reminds me of you, Mr. Templar. I know this one by heart... almost, maybe.” Emma cleared her throat before recitation.

“ ‘Thou art even as a finely tempered sword concealed in the darkness of its sheath and its value hidden from the artificer’s knowledge.’ ” Her voice was soothing, melodic. “ ‘Wherefore come forth from the sheath of self and desire that thy worth may be made resplendent and manifest unto all the world.’ ”

“If I manifest myself too much, Teal will resplendently arrest me and drag me to a police station in Pimlico, or worse yet, Westminster — members of Parliament get taken there.”

He may have been joking, but there was something about his intonation that made Emma uneasy. She nestled closer.

“After your Russian heroics, do you really worry about getting arrested?”

Templar was silent for a moment before responding.

“There’s something you must understand,” he said seriously. “They’ll never stop hunting me. Never. On every continent there are cops who won’t quit till I’m caught. I can never stop running.”

Emma immediately understood what he was trying to say, and she would not have it.

“I can run, too!” She was ardent, almost pleading. “You saw me run in Moscow. I ran and I ran and my heart didn’t fail...”

Templar took the precious woman in his arms, and felt her tremble against him.

“Your work counts for too much, Emma. If I didn’t love you, I’d let you come with me.”

She fought back tears, clinging to him as if her life depended on it.

“Then what’re we doing here? Everything was so wonderful, finally. You and I, like this... I thought...” Her warm tears were wet on Templar’s shoulder.

“Why did you ask me to meet you here, for a one-night stand? To break my heart?” She knew the answer was neither.

He stroked her cheek tenderly, lovingly.

“So I could return what I took from you... and to hear you tell me that you loved me too, no matter what.”

Emma held him tightly.

“I do love you,” said Emma, and it was as much an entreaty at it was a confession. “I love you, I love you.”

“... Simon...”

“I love you, Simon.”

“Miracle number three,” sighed the Saint.

6

Templar awoke to find himself alone. Next to him, resting on Emma’s pillow, were two significant items — a small stickpin of a human ideogram sporting a rakish halo, and a handwritten note of explanation and farewell.

He held the pin as if it were more precious than rubies. He blinked away the emotion stinging the corners of his eyes and kept reading.

He hurriedly dressed, prepared himself for any eventuality, and blasted his Volvo toward Oxford.

The conference was as well attended as it was well publicized. Physicists and scholars representing science’s diverse disciplines arrived from throughout Europe, America, Australia, Asia, and the South Pacific. Dignitaries in attendance included prominent political figures more adept at public relations than physics, and the requisite representatives of the Royal Family. The latter necessitated the prominent presence of uniformed bobbies and plainclothes agents from Special Branch.

The carefully crafted program was, as is the case with most professional conferences, structured for maximum appeal to specific passions and universal interests.

Dr. Emma Russell held no illusions concerning the reason for her inclusion among the conference’s featured presenters — she was the scientific community’s mascot dreamer and semirespected iconoclast.

While her credentials were impeccable, her obsession with cold fusion was controversial. The placement of Dr. Russell in the morning session assured a stimulating jump-start to the proceedings, especially in light of the recent Russian adventure.

Emma knew she was scheduled primarily for entertainment value, controversy, and speculative newspaper copy. She not only knew it and fully accepted it, but on her drive from Templar’s retreat to Oxford, she delighted in it. If revenge was sweet, vindication was sweeter — especially when it ushered in a glorious new age of unlimited heat, light, and energy.

Traffic was predictably heavy in Oxford, the “city of dreaming spires,” where too many bells were always ringing in the rain. The bells of Oxford pealed out their resonant welcome through the predictably wet weather as Emma’s VW putt-putted into her pre-assigned parking place.

Emma locked the car, paused to inhale an invigorating breath of crisp Oxford air, then walked with light steps to her Chemistry Building office.

On the way, she smiled at distinguished visitors admiring the campus. She read name tags and participant badges of passers-by and fellow scientists who would, in less than an hour, be astonished recipients of her love-inspired breakthrough.

Teal and Rabineau, hardy representatives of the United Kingdom’s law enforcement elite, were on campus as well, hovering near a chaos of umbrellas raised against a British cloudburst.

“Do you think he might show?” asked Rabineau. She was intently studying photographs of an unmasked Simon Templar culled from CNN’s video coverage in Red Square.

Teal masticated slowly, raindrops dripping from his hat.

“How would we know if he did? With the Saint being a master of disguise,” said the detective, pointing discreetly toward an enormous, dignified Samoan, “he could be that gentleman right there.”

For a moment, Inspector Rabineau considered the possibility.

“If she loves him, he might love her, too. Then again, if she loves him, she sure as hell isn’t going to press charges.”

“She doesn’t have to,” Teal sighed. “If we nab him we’re to bring him in for questioning — debriefing is more like it — it’s Dorn and British Intelligence that want him. It’s a matter of priorities — they get first crack at him, even before Interpol. Even if they can’t pin anything on him, the threat of it can hang over him forever. They apparently view him as ‘potentially useful.’ ”

Rabineau’s eyes brightened. “Am I supposed to know that, Inspector?” she asked playfully.

The chief inspector pulled his collar up against the rain. “Forget I said anything,” he instructed, and they both knew he didn’t mean it.

A few minutes later they saw Dr. Emma Russell approaching the Shelton Theatre on foot from the Chemistry Building, bareheaded and blissfully unaware of the weather. The two detectives blended into the background and kept an eye out for signs of the Saint.

The umbrella-laden crowd was queued up outside the theater, moving slowly through the doorways into the auditorium. Emma, in an attempt to bypass a particularly slow-moving contingent from Baycombe, moved to the crowd’s edge.

She skirted the dawdlers on her right and was passing an alley between two quadrangles on her left when a balding man with thick glasses intruded on her personal space and broke her concentration.

“Excuse me, but is this where Dr. Russell is going to speak?”

“Yes, I... uh... I mean, she...” Momentarily flustered, Emma paused to compose herself. As she faced him, a brief bit of sunlight glinted off the stickpin in his lapel — a jaunty stick figure sporting an absurd elliptical halo.

“Oh my God...” Her eyes flicked nervous reference to the abundance of law enforcement personnel on site. They flowed along with the crowd, moving toward the edge, and ducked into the alley.

“Emma,” Templar spoke in his own voice, “I came to say that if you think I’m just going to sit there and watch you give away an unimaginable fortune...”

She held her breath.

“... you’re absolutely right.”

Emma smiled. There was nothing more to say. She glanced from his disguised face to her wristwatch, and then to the theater door. It was time. As she threw him a fraught farewell look, he whispered a parting promise.

“You found me, Emma... I’ll find you.”

She slipped back into the crowd, and joined her fellow attendees. Entering the Shelton Theatre she was soon surrounded by colleagues, press, and Oxford security.

Teal and Rabineau, still standing outside in the rain, were feeling both increasingly wet and foolish.

Teal motioned toward the theater.

“We might as well go on in.”

With the auditorium filled and the perfunctory introductions concluded, the conference chairman introduced the first speaker.

“... Dr. E. J. Russell, whose presentation is entitled ‘The Future of Cold Fusion: Promise and Possibilities.’ ”

Emma waved away the applause as she approached the stage and prepared to take the podium.

Inspector Teal secured a seat just off the aisle near the side exit, and scanned the crowd for anyone resembling Simon Templar. His intense concentration was broken by the nasal lisp of the balding nerd who plopped himself down in the seat beside him.

“You don’t thwallow thith cold futhion nonthenth, do you?”

The detective frowned at the intrusion, then resumed scrutinizing the attendees as Dr. Russell began her address.

“We know cold fusion had a difficult childhood. Those few of us in the field are orphans, bastards at best...”

She knew Templar was somewhere in the crowd, and her gaze soon found his bald head and thick glasses. The sight of him sitting next to Inspector Teal almost made her drop her notes.

She paused, composed herself as if searching for just the right phrase, and continued.

“But difficult childhoods, I believe,” said Emma, looking directly at the Saint, “create the most interesting adults.”

As not to be obvious, she turned her attention to another section of the theater.

“And today, I’m here to tell you that although practical application of cold fusion is still speculative, still years away...”

She turned back toward Templar, and the Saint was gone. Her voice involuntarily caught in her throat, and Teal noticed she was looking directly at him — almost.

The detective turned to the empty aisle seat beside him, then back to Emma on stage. A slight flush of pink appeared on his portly cheeks as he processed the unavoidable implication.

“Recent events in Russia,” continued Dr. Russell, “have dramatically demonstrated that, in a theoretical sense at least, cold fusion has finally come of age.”

Teal slowly unwrapped a fresh stick of spearmint gum, and muttered softly under his breath.

“Hell, let Dorn find the Saint himself.”

Outside the theater, Simon Templar strolled undeterred toward his awaiting Volvo C70. Passing through the parking lot, he discreetly discarded the baldcap wig and geeky glasses, both of which went sailing into the nearest trash can.

He turned the ignition key and piloted the C70 out into traffic.

The businessman whose Canadian passport identified him as James Westlake of Windsor, Ontario, drove his Volvo to Heathrow in full compliance with the rules of the road. He couldn’t risk a traffic ticket, and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel while listening to the BBC. The reporter detailed the current status of the restablized democratic regime in Russia, and confirmed that the notorious Simon Templar, alias the Saint, was, despite his recent heroics, still wanted for questioning in numerous international cases of high-tech theft.

Someday, Templar fancied, he would take Teal to tea and explain to him the entire sordid story. Someday. Not today, not with half of Scotland Yard and British Intelligence searching for him with arrest warrants, not with Interpol awaiting him in any country which had ever signed an extradition agreement with the United Kingdom.

“In other news,” continued the BBC reporter, “a nonprofit research foundation has been established to develop cold fusion technology. Funded by an anonymous donation of fifty million dollars, the foundation is chartered to develop ‘inexpensive, clean energy for the benefit of all mankind...’ ”