The academician’s grief mixed with shame when he grasped the real reason for the sudden deaths of the young men involved in that night’s attack. It was clear enough what had happened: a powerful father had taken revenge for the destruction of his daughter’s life and dignity. His own son had not died from medical negligence. He had been deliberately punished by the state—and, in a grim sense, had earned it.
Going to the prosecutor’s office would have been suicidal. No one would dare open a case against a man at the top. Telling foreign reporters would trigger a political scandal and permanently stain his family name. The scholar found himself trapped. He could not speak openly, but he could not simply swallow the truth either.
A warped mixture of paternal love and a desire to strike back for his dead son pushed him toward a reckless decision. He could not hit the leader directly—that was impossible. But he could strike at the system itself, and at the ideological machine the ruler had spent years helping to build.
The man had long-standing ties to circles of dissident intellectuals and had quietly passed information to foreigners about abuses of state power. Now, with what amounted to an information bomb in his hands, he carefully made several high-quality photographic copies of the diary pages. He hid the original notebook in a secure place, preserving the central piece of written evidence.
The copies were passed to a foreign correspondent for an international radio service in Stockholm, with strict instructions not to publish them right away. The material was to surface later, when it could do the greatest possible damage to the regime’s reputation. In that way, the grieving father prepared his own delayed revenge for the revenge that had already been carried out.
What he did not know was that his apartment, phone calls, and movements were already under constant surveillance. The security services quickly learned that documents had leaked, and the information landed on the leader’s desk. He was enraged—not so much by the exposure of the killings as by the possibility that the details of the attack on his daughter might become public.
To him, such a publication abroad would amount to a second humiliation of Irina, this time in front of the world. He summoned the general and ordered that the problem of the disloyal academician be handled quietly and cleanly. A man of international stature was not to die in some obvious accident. He was simply to disappear from serious public life.
The Artist received a new assignment, one far more complicated than eliminating four spoiled young men in the capital. The goal now was to permanently discredit a respected figure whose fate was watched by foreign journalists and academics. Taking advantage of the era’s fascination with UFOs, the services devised a cynical plan of psychological pressure built around a fake abduction.
One night, as the scholar was driving back from his cabin outside the city, a strange unmarked van forced his car to the shoulder. Men in silver coveralls stepped out in silence, and one of them aimed a blinding device through the window. After a flash of light, the frightened academician lost consciousness at the wheel…
