When Alexander Zukov was born and it was discovered he was, indeed, a male child, no one was surprised. After all, his grandmother Sofia had predicted it, and his mother and father had named him months before his birth, so strong was their faith in Sofia's power of divination. He was called Sasha, after the fashion of boys named Alexander, and in honor of his grandfather.

Like all very young children, there came a time when Sasha began to relate to the world around him, an epiphany that is every child's transformation from the unknowing to the knowing.

That capacity for self-awareness, the time after which he would have some recall, came to Sasha when he was almost a year old. Perhaps because it was his first recollection, it was somehow more vivid, but all other memories followed.

It was late in the evening, after he had been put to bed, supposedly to sleep, when he stood up in his crib to get a better view of his mother, for he could hear her laughter somewhere near him. Sasha looked through the darkness of his bedroom, and the open doorway in front of him, to the well-lit hallway beyond. There in the corner of the hall, the child's father and grandfather took turns in a game, each attempting to stand on his head and drink water from a glass.

It was a friendly competition and, of course, each man tried to distract the other. Then, each laughed when the other failed. Although Sasha could not see them, his mother and grandmother were laughing too. As each man failed in turn the women commented derisively on his weakness, lack of balance, and poor coordination.

Both men were Russian army officers, career military men who took themselves seriously and who maintained that sense of dignity and reserve that military life in all armies requires of those given command responsibility.

On this night, in this apartment, however, dignity and reserve gave way to the competition between father and son, made louder and more difficult by too much vodka. After each man had tried several times, it became evident that there would be no winner. Finally, the women took the glass of water away from them, and declared the game over.

Secretly relieved, the men nevertheless protested good-naturedly, each accusing the other of bribing the women to save his pride. During a pause in this genial interplay, the baby's laughter pealed from the darkened bedroom.

Tanya Zukov, Sasha's mother, looked at her mother-in-law, Sofia, and said "I believe our baby has discovered his toes," then added, "he'll be asleep in a moment."

Still, she arose and walked through the bedroom door toward the child. Before her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she heard Sasha vocalizing excitedly. Then she saw him standing in his crib, one arm outstretched in the direction of the doorway.

As Tanya approached him, Sasha happily repeated one of the few words he knew: "Papa, Papa, Papa." He looked imploringly at his mother, then to the lighted hallway beyond, then back to her face again. Suddenly, Tanya knew! He understood! He was not laughing at his toes. He was laughing at his father and grandfather.

He, too, was aware that their behavior was out of character, and he wanted his mother to understand he knew that. She did. "Sofia," Tanya called, "come look, and bring the men. Sasha has something to tell us."

So it was that Sasha's first memory was a happy one. For the first time, he recognized activities in other humans, and, moreover, was understood by them. He remembered too, after his mother had turned on the bedroom light, that his father and grandfather were dressed the same way.

By the end of his second year he knew they dressed much alike because they were soldiers, and by the end of his third year, he knew that he too would be a soldier; in fact, it never occurred to Sasha he would be anything else.

Nigel Snow, an English exchange student, had actually been the one who spotted the floating corpse. Nigel had been out for his ritual early morning run along the stone embankment above the Moscow River when he noticed something in the water below.

He stopped, then inched as close to the revetment as the guardrail would permit and looked more closely. There was no doubt about it; that was a human body, floating face down.

In the center of the back, right between the shoulder blades, there appeared a faint brown stain.

The body was dressed in a uniform with a wide black leather belt and, though the lower legs were barely visible beneath the surface, what appeared to be black leather boots.

Nigel froze as he took in the view below. Here was not merely a dead person, he suddenly realized, but a crime scene.

"Jesus Christ," he said aloud, "I've got to tell someone." Fifteen seconds later, Nigel was in the middle of

Moskvoretski Bridge flagging down a bus. Since he was a student at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, and fluent in Russian language, he had no trouble communicating his discovery.

Within an hour a Moscow police boat had picked up the floating corpse. Nigel Snow was forgotten and it was reported that an American tourist had discovered the body.

Because the deceased was a military man, Moscow police called the Russian Military General Staff office. Five minutes and three calls later, the news arrived at the Glavnoye Razvedochnoye Upravleniye (GRU), that most secret of the fifteen general staff directorates, which handled military intelligence; an office not merely secret, but whose title was virtually unpronounceable by non-Russians; the intelligence community worldwide was grateful for the acronym GRU.

When it was discovered the dead man was no less than General Sergi Zukov, a GRU staff officer himself, the apparatus of Soviet military intelligence woke. Like a huge octopus sensing a threat, it began to gather itself.

In another hour, 370 agents worldwide had been alerted, likely scenarios discussed, and assets readied. The octopus was on the move.

General Sergi Zukov had been missing for a week and another intelligence officer, Major Anatoly Bessalov, had disappeared with Zukov. It was assumed he too was in the river. Police divers searched the river for days to no avail. Because of the circumstances, an autopsy was ordered immediately, and a panel appointed to hear results. During the autopsy it was discovered that Zukov had indeed been shot in the back, and, in an act of exceptional savagery, shot once in each ear.

Autopsy x-rays had shown that the bullets to Zukov's head had each entered the ear angling upwards. In such a manner, the bullet paths had crossed and both 9-millimeter slugs had lodged against the inside of the skull, causing massive brain trauma.

Dr. Olga Kalugin did the autopsy. In her fifties now, she had been pretty as a young girl, not beautiful, but pretty. Her nose was a little too flat, too Slavic, but her eyes were large and kind. Gradually, as her career in forensic medicine grew, as she accumulated case histories of stinking corpses hacked to pieces by madmen, the phantom of dreadful experience drew its cold hand across her face and left a stone mask of indifference there. Olga had investigated the deaths of those murdered by the State, and those executed by the State because they had murdered without permission from the State. Now chief medical examiner for Moscow, Olga was called on when the State wanted to be certain it was on solid ground, and Olga Kalugin was as certain as one can be.

In reporting to the joint civilian-military intelligence panel on her autopsy of the victim, Dr. Kalugin gave the usual details of sex, height, age, weight, and clinical morphology, then summed up: "We assumed the bullet to the spine came first. Those to the head were likewise fatal but unnecessary." She paused, then added: "The last shots were from a firearm held against the deceased man's head by a killer who wanted to be very close to his victim."

Dr. Kalugin hesitated. Never one to waste a syllable, she added a clipped final sentence, "The murder was premeditated, deliberate, sadistic, and even artful in performance. This murderer thoroughly enjoyed himself. He was also so close that blood and bone fragments must have exploded back on him. He may even have been wounded."

Sofia Zukov sat beside a window in the front room of her apartment in Leningrad and knitted. It was late December and the noonday sun was low in the gray Russian sky.

She had turned off the lamp at her elbow, frustrated that its feeble yellow glow competed with rather than helped what little natural light there was. How odd, she mused, that natural light and lamp light were mutually exclusive. They simply refused to work together. One or the other must always dominate.

Latitude, architecture, and time of year all conspired to make her handiwork more difficult. Leningrad's northern location and the earth's axis resulted in late sunrise and early sunset in December; midday, even in clear weather, was a time of twilight. The white nights of late spring, when the sun shone around the clock for weeks, were half a year away. White lace curtains muted the faint sunlight even further, casting a filigreed shadow across her lap.

The thick walls in Sofia's apartment provided eighteen inches of space between inner and outer windows as insulation against the glacial cold. Since the inside windows opened on hinges, the wide ledges provided handy refrigerator space in winter, when the air between the panes stayed chilled.

Sofia, of course, had a refrigerator, unlike her mother, who had never owned one. Well, her mother never owned one that could be depended on. Still, it was more the comfortable habit of childhood, rather than necessity, that required Sofia to keep some milk, cheeses, and hard Russian salami on this window ledge.

As she worked, she remembered happier times thirty years earlier, when her family had all been together in this very apartment, and she stopped for a moment to revisit those memories.

Her husband had died from smoking-related lung disease years before, and though she missed him terribly, her son and daughter-in-law had been great comfort to her.

She could even see her husband's features in their son's face. It was as though a little piece of her husband, Sasha, lived on in Sergi. Her memories were as precious as material possessions handed down through the generations. You couldn't hand down the memories though. They died when you did. Still, she had had nice things. She remembered her first pair of pantyhose. They had been given to her by an American tourist when Sofia worked as a maid in the Intourist Hotel one summer. And the cigarettes, her husband loved American cigarettes, particularly Marlboros, the fresh ones the tourists had, not the stale ones the Berioska shops sold.

Eventually, the cigarettes had killed him. At first, he began to cough up little flecks of blood, then larger drops, and finally his doctor had warned him the time would come when he would cough one time too many; his lungs would hemorrhage and it would be the end of him. And so it was.

Sasha had gone to the hospital with severe breathing problems one night, and when Sofia had visited him the next morning, he abruptly told her to get the hell out of the room. She had pretended to leave, but as the door closed, she slipped back inside and watched him, hidden by a cloth screen. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, a cigarette in his left hand, and suddenly coughed. He tried to get his right hand in front of his mouth, but the blood ran through his fingers; then he coughed violently to get the choking blood from his lungs, which insured massive hemorrhage.

By that time, Sofia was at his side, holding his head against her stomach. He had not wanted her to see him die, she realized. Still, dying or not, he knew she was there and feebly raised a bloody hand to pat her arm reassuringly. She whispered his name again and again, and that's how the nurses found them.

Now, young Sasha, her grandson, was fighting the war in Afghanistan, alive and well, she hoped, but far away.

Then, a year ago, her daughter-in-law had been killed by a drunk driver while visiting Sergi, who was stationed in Moscow. Tanya had been walking on the sidewalk in front of the Lenin Museum. What could be a safer place for her to walk? The museum stood at the toe of the hill on Red Square.

The drunk had been a taxi driver, returning downtown from Sheremetevo Airport at 100 miles per hour. Evidently, he had nodded off for a moment. There was no sign he ever woke up before he jumped the curb and crushed Tanya against the museum's brick wall. That he also killed himself in the accident was no comfort to her family.

The police had returned Tanya's personal effects in a bag. Inside the bag, in an envelope, Sofia found Tanya's diamond ring. It had been Sofia's, and before that, Sofia's mother's ring, each woman passing the ring down. Since there had been but one woman in each of the three generations, jealousy had never marked its passing, and each owner had given it to the younger woman as a wedding present.

When Sasha came home on leave, but too late for his mother's funeral, Sofia gave him the ring. At least he would have that. It was time to break the woman- to-woman tradition. Sasha could give it to whomever he pleased.

Then, just a month ago, came news of her son's death. They had found Sergi's body floating in the Moscow River.

The army colonel who delivered the news of Sergi's death was an old friend of the family. He would tell her only that Sergi had been shot, but that neither army intelligence nor Moscow police had any idea why. The colonel added that young Sasha would be informed within the hour.

"Have you seen Anatoly Bessalov?" the colonel asked Sofia. "As you know, Sergi and Anatoly worked together in the army, and Major Bessalov is now missing as well."

The need to deal with the shattering news of her son's death was far greater than any consideration of the absence of Anatoly Bessalov, so Sofia had only numbly uttered the word "nyet" in reply to his question.

Weeks later, she considered the question anew. How terrible for both sons, she suddenly realized, for Anatoly's son, Ivan, was stationed with Sergi's son, Sasha, in Afghanistan. Still, something bothered Sofia, nagged at her, but she couldn't put her finger on it. She looked through her window and mourned the passing of both men. Then her attention was pulled back to the work in her hands. The little white booties were finished and she held them up for inspection. Assured they were a perfectly matched pair, she returned them to her sewing basket.

It was time to relax for a few minutes. She closed her eyes, rested her head against the winged back of the chair, and began to drift into her accustomed nap. As her hands relaxed, the knitting needles slipped from her grasp and tinkled a soft staccato as they hit the wooden floor.

Startled by the sound, Sofia sat up and fussed at herself, exclaiming aloud, "Will I never stop dropping these damned needles?"

She bent down, picked them up, and arranged them securely in her lap. Then she closed her eyes again.

At 3:30 in the morning, the day after Sergi Zukov's body was found, one of two phones began to ring at the bedside of Captain Ivan Yurin of the fifth directorate of the GRU, which concerned itself with military intelligence for the Russian General Staff.

Since Ivan and his wife, Elena, had just been transferred to Kiev two months earlier, that phone had never rung at any hour. It was a secure phone, dedicated to GRU matters, which removed all doubt as to who was calling. Ivan's voice, then, was businesslike.

"Yes," he said, "Yurin here." The voice at the other end answered with equal brevity. "This is General Primikov's aide, hold for the general." At that point Ivan turned on his bedside light. A second later, the general spoke.

"Sorry to wake you, Captain, but I've got an interesting assignment for you."

"Yes, sir," Ivan responded, surprised not merely by the lateness of the call, but by the direct link to the head of the GRU.

The general went on. "In thirty minutes you will be picked up at your door. Pack for Leningrad, and, oh," he added, "tell Elena the two of you are moving there." At that point the line went dead and Ivan knew the communication was over. He had spoken only two words.

Ivan turned to his wife, who by now was up on one elbow looking at him, her eyebrows raised quizzically.