Free The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis Page A

long, long ago.
    He cracked his knuckles again. His rage and self-hatred needed an outlet. An excuse to boil over. An attempted mugging. No copper would fault a man for defending himself.…
    But he made it home without incident, after filing the idea away for further thought. The yowling from upstairs, like an endless screech of fingernails on slate, greeted him before he opened the front door.
    Liv didn’t say anything about his bloodied face when he entered. The look on her face shamed him more than any words could. Even his cock-ups were beneath her contempt now. She took it for granted he was a washed-up failure of a man.
    So did he.
    When did it happen? Could he remember the moment when the last glimmer of love went out of Liv’s eyes? When the world snuffed that final fading ember of affection like a candle, to replace its feeble glow with cold shadows and foul vapors?
    No. There was no such single moment. History provided no comfort in what-if, no solace in if-only. The twists and turns were too complex to chart. The corruption of his family life, the perversion of his dream, grew from the long slow grind of years. Gretel killed their daughter, but the failed attempt to begin anew had killed their marriage.
    Marsh trudged to the garden shed, the drink in his veins too dilute to provide comforting numbness against the yowling from his broken son.
    11 May 1963
Soviet Embassy, London, England
    What the world had lost in fine vintages when the Soviet Empire collectivized the French wineries, it had more than regained in the form of Caspian Sea caviars. Will, whose lips hadn’t touched a drop of wine in decades, found this a perfectly acceptable trade. And the Gruyère de Comté was excellent. He mentioned this to Gwendolyn.
    â€œYou see, dear? The wineries were a dreadful mistake, but they acknowledge it. They haven’t done the same with the dairies.”
    She nibbled on a toast point topped with salty black roe. While dabbing at her lips, and with her mouth hidden behind a serviette, she said, “William, you daft, daft darling. Cheese doesn’t grow in the ground. I’ll wager it merits little interest from Lysenko and those academic stillbirths he calls colleagues.”
    Her choice of words caught Will, as it so often did, unawares. He tossed back the last of his tonic water to suppress the laughter that escaped him. Too late; his outburst turned heads and collected attention.
    Ambassador Fedotov weaved through the room to join them. Behind him, past a swirl of diaphanous curtains, Aubrey and one of his politburo counterparts chatted on the balcony overlooking the horseshoe drive. Next to the cold fireplace, the Foreign Secretary and his wife ( what is that woman’s name again? Gwendolyn will know ) listened to the Party General Secretary of the Republic of Belgium as he outlined his plan to introduce mandatory Russian language instruction in schools across the Republic. Under an immense cut-crystal chandelier (Will called it decadent; Gwendolyn called it shamefully czarist), two members of the House of Lords debated the merits of cricket with a member of the ambassador’s staff. HRH the Prince of Wales discussed an oil painting (mostly blacks and reds, depicting a group of noble farmers in a noble moment of noble uprising) with the embassy’s gray-lipped cultural attaché, Cherkashin.
    The string quartet returned from their break. They struck up another piece by one of the modern Soviet composers, all of whom were indistinguishable to Will. He thought it more suited to marching than dancing.
    The ambassador took Gwendolyn’s hand. “Your Grace. Thank you again for honoring our function.” He wasn’t a tall fellow, standing a full head shorter than Will and shorter even than Gwendolyn. His voice carried the peculiar warble of Russian softened by years spent in the West, like a block of granite weathered smooth by years of English rain.
    â€œA pleasure,