309828-0830-3333

“All right, let’s wrap this up quickly,” Trevor said, closing the file and indicating they should
return to their seats, “for our time is limited if we wish to interview the dancers at seven. Davy, I
trust you’ve made inroads with the student group?”
“Not invited to a meeting yet, Sir. But at least one of them seems to have warmed to me.”
“Excellent. And you believe you will be able to carry the role of a disgruntled schoolboy,
ready to toss aside the constraints of an unjust political system and snatch away the privileges of your
societal betters?”
“Of course, Sir.”
“That was a suspiciously swift answer,” Tom said with a laugh. “Perhaps Davy is not as
gruntled with his lot in life as you assume, Trevor.”
Davy’s ears turned red with what the others assumed to be embarrassment. “He brags a lot, just
as Mrs. Kirby predicted they all would. A fellow named Vlad Ulyanov, brother to Sasha Ulyanov,
one of the students hanged two years ago in that unsuccessful attempt on the tsar. Thus central to the
Volya leadership, but he’s one of the younger members. Claims the others don’t take him seriously.”
“His brother died while Gregor Krupin lived,” Trevor said. “His resentment of Krupin’s
authority must be profound.”
Davy nodded.
“For a group of self-proclaimed revolutionaries these lads do not appear very cautious,”
Rayley said. “Perhaps this is why their plans have been so easily broken up in the past, even by the
notoriously inept local police. But it also occurs to me that, just as Filip undoubtedly invited me to
the men’s enclave in order to plant suspicions about Konstantin, that this Vlad may be pretending to
accept Davy in order to feed him misinformation.”
“Possible,” said Trevor. “We seem to have two theories in front of us about how to best deal
with the Russians. One is to take them at face value and thus conclude they are playing clumsy
psychological games with us, so clumsy that one could safely call them stupid. The other is to
consider them diabolical masterminds who play at being stupid so that we will discount them too
easily as worthy adversaries.”
“There’s a third possibility,” Emma said. “We may be confounded because they are in reality
neither more nor less intelligent than we are, they simply think differently.”