Prologue
Days before Operation Dagger Point becomes operational,
January 9, 1943, somewhere in Eastern Europe...

A kind of hushed chill pervaded the air around the portly
Russian, hunched amid the baronial trappings of tapestries,
metal armor, statuary, and ancient weapons displayed in
every corner, suspended from the stone walls, and primed
for effect on thickly carved Stygian furniture, set prominently
in the entrance to the fairytale castle, as if the mysterious
man who summoned him to the place meant to use the
magical images of Valkyries, the mystical Christlike Parsifal,
and the dizzying heights of the stone ribbed ceiling to
convince the NKGB officer of the aristocrat's preeminence,
and of his magnificently inhuman but divine character.

​

Yet, the man floating across the black and white marble
floor toward him was not some massive towering dark angel
risen from the dead to do battle. There was no lightning
issuing from his eyes, nor thunderbolts in his steps. The man
was average, ordinary, a plain unassuming man, although
elegantly dressed and aristocratic in his stride. It must have
been the stories surrounding the secretive man, all the
sententious whispers that caused the Russian to conjure up
in his mind a huge conductor, a puppet master that cast
enormous shadows wherever he went.