by Mark Dawson
#
HE OPENED HIS door quietly and slipped inside. It was just past six. He had taken off his coat and shirt and was about to run the bath when there was a knocking at the door. It was Anna. She must have been awake, listening for his return. She stood at the threshold, her arms crossed beneath her breasts. Her eyes fell to the scars on Milton’s naked chest, switching back promptly as she noticed he was smiling with amusement at her.
“Where were you last night, Mr. Milton?”
“I went out.”
“Where did you go?”
“Sightseeing.”
“All night?”
“Lots of sights to see,” he said.
She frowned at him disapprovingly. “It does you no favours to play games with us. And it does your friend no favours.”
“I’m not playing games. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m ready to see the colonel.”
“Yes,” she said. “We are leaving immediately.”
“Where is he?”
“Not in Moscow.”
“Where?”
She did not answer. “We have a long trip ahead of us. Four hundred kilometres, Mr. Milton.”
“In this snow?”
“It should take us eight hours.”
Chapter Sixteen
MILTON SWAPPED his bath for a shower, dressed warmly, and met Anna in the lobby. There was a car waiting outside for them. It was a top-of-the-line Range Rover Sport, a big and powerful four wheel drive with snow chains fastened around all four tyres. It was black and the windows were tinted. Anna led the way to it and opened the rear door.
Milton got inside and saw that they had been provided with a driver, too. The man was dressed in an anonymous suit and his blond hair had been shaved to a short, prickly fuzz. He was an intelligence operative, he guessed, one seconded from the Spetsnaz if his guess was right. He was big, several inches taller than Milton and fifty pounds heavier. He would be armed, and tough, and a passable match for him if things took a turn for the worse. Milton looked into his face in the rearview mirror as he slid into the seat, the man’s eyes cold and impassive as he glared back at him.
“Who’s the gorilla?” he asked Anna, his eyes still fixed on the man’s.
“His name is Vladimir,” she said as she slid alongside. “He’ll be driving us.”
“Just driving?”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Milton. You’re under the protection of the Russian government now.”
“That fills me with confidence.”
“Please, relax. We have a long drive.”
“So you said. Are you going to tell me where?”
“There is a place called Pylos. North east from here. The colonel is staying at his dacha. We will visit him there.”
“Why all the way there? You don’t have a safe house in Moscow?”
“Of course we do,” she said irritably. “But, no matter how careful we are, there will always be prying eyes in the city. The colonel is a private man. Pylos is remote. A place where Muscovites go for their summer holidays. It will be deserted in this weather. There is one way in and one way out and we will be watching both. Easier for us to ensure that your meeting is not noted. That is in both our best interests, is it not?”
Milton said nothing.
The driver put the Range Rover into gear and slid into the traffic. They headed to the north.
There were new high-rise apartment buildings on the edge of Moscow, coloured beige and cream and not as ugly as the old Soviet ones, with patches of snow-covered lawn between them. They drove on, passing out of the suburbs and into the countryside beyond, the road occasionally taking them through cute Russian idylls of sloping wooden houses and little orchards alongside and behind them. The houses all had ornamental window frames, rickety fences and rusty roofs, and sometimes the snow receded just a little to reveal a hint of the landscape that hibernated beneath it: a grove of silver birch trees, stretches of water choked by mirror smooth ice, tethered goats, wild deer and elk foraging for greenery amid the freezing grip of winter. The towns and villages were beautiful and ugly in equal measure, with fly-tipped trash left to rot on the outskirts: bits of old machinery covered over by the snow, discarded white goods, empty vodka bottles scattered across deep drifts. Milton remembered Russia well enough, and knew that the snow was covering a multitude of sins. It masked all the scars and blemishes and lies that collected beneath. It was an apt metaphor for a great country that had fallen into disrepute.
They followed the E115 north, passing through Khotovo, Pereslavl-Zalessky and Rostov. Milton watched the scenery passing by the window and thought about Pope and what the Russians wanted from him. Whoever he was, Shcherbatov was obviously a man not to be taken lightly. Mamotchka was a tough old coot; she had seen plenty of the KGB’s hardcases and blowhards, watched them rail against the unstoppable tide of capitalism, and she had outlasted them all. Her years had given her a breezy confidence and yet Milton had not missed the frown she wore throughout their discussion last night. Colonel Shcherbatov was different.
Anna was next to him. “Are you going to tell me anything about your boss?”
“It would be better if you met him with an open mind.”
“Why? Does he have a reputation?”
“Judge him for yourself.”
The driver glanced up at him in the mirror.
“What do you think, Vladimir?”
“Colonel Shcherbatov is patriot and hero,” he said in heavily accented Russian.
“I think I’ll be the judge of that.”
“You remember.”
“Vladimir,” Anna chided. “Please. Concentrate on the road.”
They stopped for diesel after six hours. The station was on the outskirts of Yaroslavl, three hundred kilometres from Moscow, and Milton got out to stretch his legs. The cold grew more severe the further north they travelled and here, on the station forecourt, it took just a few minutes to spear into the marrow of his bones. Anna came out and stood beside him, their clouded breath merging together and their shadows thrown long by the afternoon sun. They were enclosed by forest, the branches of the trees sagging with the great weight of the snow. Milton looked at the woman through the corner of his eye. She said nothing, as she had said nothing all the way throughout the drive, but now it seemed almost a companionable silence, as if a friendship might be possible between them if the circumstances were different. He had been in the same business as her, after all. Same coin, different sides.
He absently followed her towards the garage. A wrecked, bearded man was slumped against the wall. He looked up as they approached and asked in Russian if they would buy him a bottle of vodka. Anna dismissed him curtly and went inside. Beside the fuel, the proprietor had a ramshackle business selling beer and vodka, stationery, pornography, cigarettes, bootleg DVDs and perfume. The man glared at Milton from over the counter, a baseball bat ostentatiously propped against the wall, and when he came over to the till to accept Anna’s payment, he revealed an empty trouser leg that hung loose between his good leg and his crutch. He wasn’t old enough for Afghanistan, Milton guessed. Chechnya.
“You smoke?” she said as they walked across the forecourt together to the car.
“Now and again,” he said.
“Here.” She tossed him a packet of Winstons.
“Haven’t seen these for a while,” he admitted as he tore the wrapper from the pack.
“Taste like shit and they still sell more here than anything else.”
Milton put one of the cigarettes to his lips and lit it. The tobacco was harsh and bitter and strong and he had to stifle the urge to cough.
“See what I mean?” she said, a half-smile brightening her face.
“It’s a challenging taste,” he said, briefly raising an eyebrow. He mastered it and filled his lungs.
“We’re halfway there,” she said.
“What time will we get in?”
“Provided it doesn’t snow, around ten.”
“And if it snows?”
“Then we’ll sleep in the car.”
Chapter Seventeen
PYLOS WAS an enchantingly pretty place. There were onion domed churches and brightly painted wooden houses with ornate carved window frames and zinc and tin roofs, spilling down a hillside to a waterfront of fine former merchants houses and colourful houseboats. The main street was tiny and entirely free of designer shops and even the advertising for Western brands, ubiquitous in every other town through which they had passed. Milton had visited upstate New York on several occasions and the town reminded him of Bridgehampton: deliberately folksy, carefully low-key, yet the signs that it was saturated with money were obvious if you knew where to look.
The dacha was on the other side of the town, just outside the boundary. Large residences started to appear, walled and gated, all with plenty of land and access to the Volga. Milton stared through the window across the vast expanse of water. It was five hundred metres wide and seventy-five metres deep, the moon throwing a rippling stripe of light across the blue-black water. Milton saw the two police speedboats bobbing at anchor and, as he looked further towards the other bank, he saw the discreet signs of military activity. He knew there was no point in asking, but it was easy to guess what that meant: a place like this, with all these big summer retreats, there had to be a good chance that members of the political elite could be found here. Oligarchs, crime lords, high-ranking military officials, all of them swimming in the money that the new Russia showered on the chosen few.
Vladimir slowed and turned off the road, proceeding along a short drive to a pair of gates. There were two armed guards just inside and Milton noticed the CCTV cameras that were trained down on them; after a moment, the gates parted and they continued onwards. Milton concentrated on taking in everything he could. The dacha was large, much bigger than the cabin that he had naïvely expected. They approached it along a short drive that passed through a festive Russian landscape, stands of silver birches alternating with thrusting fir and redolent pines, the greensward between them obliterated by the deep falls of snow. There was an area for parking cars and the driver reversed next to another big executive Range Rover and an army jeep. The snow had been shovelled to the edge of the parking area, revealing the frozen gravel beneath, and as Milton stepped down from the car he stood on a twig and snapped it, the sound ringing back through the darkness like the report from a rifle. That, and the crunch of their boots on the gravel, were the only sounds; everything else was muffled, as quiet as the grave. Milton scoped out his surroundings as he allowed himself to be led to the entrance. To the south was a frozen stream, crossed, if necessary, by two planks which met at a man-made island in the middle. On the other side of the stream, and similarly set out along the banks of the Volga, were other dachas, each of them seemingly larger than the last. Milton saw smoke emerging from the chimney of the nearest one but the rest seemed deserted. The illuminated green roof and golden cupolas of a Church poked through a stand of fir. Icicles hung from the eaves of roofs, icy daggers that shimmied and glimmered. The road that they had entered on was quiet. There were no other people abroad. Anna had been right: this was perfect isolation. It was the ideal place to hold a meeting that no-one else could know about.
Vladimir led the way to the front door. It opened on his approach and he conferred in Russian with the guard who stood behind it. The man was armed: Milton recognised his holstered weapon as an MP-443 Grach, the double-action, short-recoil 9mm that was standard issue Russian service pistol. The conversation was brief, and evidently satisfied, the guard nodded and stepped aside. Vladimir waited at the door; Milton followed Anna past them both and inside.
He took it all in, unconsciously performing a tactical assessment. There was a large hallway, with doors opening out into the rest of the dacha in all three internal walls. A flight of stairs led up to a first floor and, he guessed, to a second and third above that.
Anna noticed him paying attention; she smiled and nodded at him. “It is quite something, yes?”
She thought that he was impressed. Fair enough; he would rather she thought that than the truth, which was that he was working out the best way to breach the thick oak door. “Who owns it?” he asked.
“The federal intelligence service.”
“I saw a lot of big places as we came in.”
“Plyos is special, Mr. Milton. Very exclusive.”
“And why’s that?”
“Have you heard of Isaac Levitan?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
She pointed to the wide canvas that was hung above the fireplace in the sitting room. It was a beautiful landscape, the distinctive bulbs of a Russian church reflecting against the water of a wide river. “He was the most famous Russian landscape painter of the nineteenth century. He worked here. He painted it many times. That is one of his works.”
“I’m not great with art.”
She ignored that. “Repin, Savrasov and Makovsky, too. All of them worked here. It is very beautiful in the daylight.”
“Shame we’re not here to visit, then.”
“Yes. There will be no time for sightseeing, not like in Moscow.”
He ignored the jibe and allowed her to lead the way upstairs. They reached a landing with several doors leading from it; again, he committed the layout to memory. She took him halfway down and pushed one of the doors ajar.
“This is your room,” she said.
Milton opened the door fully and looked inside. It was a large room, dominated by a four poster bed. It was simply but evocatively furnished, with heavy Volga linens and had a brick stove beneath a marble fireplace. A fire had been made, and, as the flames curled around the logs that had been stacked there, they cast their orange and yellow light into the dark corners. It was warm and friendly.
“Please, stay here tonight. There’s nothing to see in the village after dark and there are armed guards posted outside. They have been told to prevent you from leaving. I’m sure you could avoid them but it wouldn’t do you any favours. The temperature up here is colder than in Moscow. If you don’t have the right clothes, and you don’t, you wouldn’t last twenty minutes. Much better to stay here, where it’s warm. Okay?”
“Don’t worry,” Milton said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She nodded her approval. “The cook will prepare anything you like for your dinner. It will be brought to your room.” She indicated the telephone next to the bed with a nod of her head. “You just need to dial 1 to speak to the kitchen.”
He stepped further into the room, sat on the edge of the bed and started to work his boots off.
Anna stayed at the door. “The colonel is arriving tomorrow morning. He wants to see you immediately. We will have breakfast together and then I will introduce you.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
Her face softened with the beginnings of a careful smile. “My room is next door. If you need anything, you only need knock.” She said it as she stared into his face; it was meant to be meaningful, and Milton did not mistake the message.
He was tempted, but he did not take the bait. “Thank you,” he said. “In the morning, then.”
If she was offended, she didn’t show it. “Sleep well, Mr. Milton,” she said, closing the door. “You have a big day tomorrow.”
#
MILTON WAS AWOKEN by the sound of an engine. He reached out for his watch: the luminous dial showed a little after three. He slipped out of bed and, crossing the room quietly, reached the window and parted the thick blackout curtains. Snow was falling heavily outside, fat flakes that had already piled two inches deep against the sill and limited the view to a handful of metres. Milton saw headlights approaching from the road, an amber glow that moved slowly through the blizzard. A large, humvee style vehicle painted in military camouflage drew into the parking space and reversed to a halt so that its rear doors faced the dacha. Milton recognised the vehicle as a GAZ 2975 Tiger: large, heavily-treaded tyres, an armoured cabin and narrow window
s at the front, rear and along each flank. Troop transport, for the most part, and rugged enough to make short work of this weather. The engine cut out and the driver and passenger-side doors opened. Two soldiers disembarked, crunched across the compacted snow to the rear and opened the doors. The driver hauled himself up into the back and emerged with a third man. He looked half-unconscious, falling to one knee as his feet hit the ground. The two men put his arms across their shoulders and dragged him into the dacha. Milton’s view was from above and obscured by the wide flanks of the Tiger and the falling snow, but he saw enough of the man’s face to recognise Captain Michael Pope.
Chapter Eighteen
MAMOTCHKA KNEW PLENTY about colonel Pavel Valerievich Shcherbatov. He had first been called Pasha when he was a little boy; it was the diminutive of his forename and it had stuck with him ever since. For a man in his position of authority it might have been assumed by his juniors that the formal approach would be appropriate but Shcherbatov’s reputation went before him and he had found that he could afford give the impression of avuncularity; no-one who knew anything about him could have been confused about the consequences of taking advantage of his good nature. He was an amiable man, prone to laughter, and his easy smile had carved deep lines from the corners of his mouth and around his eyes. But he was a cunning man, an operator of the highest order, and those eyes shone with a wary intelligence that was impossible to miss. He was also ruthless and without scruple. It was difficult to advance in the Russian intelligence service without those qualities.