Firefox

by Craig Thomas

  He calmed himself. It wasn’t the same, this situation, it was less dangerous.

  He walked on, having regained an hallucinatory equilibrium. He was the best there was … he was flying.

  He climbed up the steps of the embankment to the Krasnoknlinski Bridge, crossed the canal without seeming to hurry, and descended the flight of steps down to the narrow embankment of the Moskva, on the south side of the river. The black water stretched away to the line of yellow lights along the Kotelnitcheskaia Quay on the other bank. There were no footsteps behind him for seconds after he ended his descent, yet his refined, nervous hearing picked up the muffled sound of the engine from the bridge above. The car had rejoined the tail. Now, the KGB would be predicting his movements and purposes. He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty.

  They, too, would probably see some significance in the exactitude of the time. He heard footsteps come cautiously down the stone steps, as he stared out into the river. Two pairs. Then only one. One of the KGB men had paused halfway down the steps.

  He stared into the darkness under the bridge. No figures detached themselves from the shadows. He turned his back, and began to walk along the embankment.

  It was only a few hundred yards to the first flight of steps down from the Gorovskaia Quay and, as he approached, three shadows appeared on the steps and moved towards him. For a moment, he wondered whether they were not KGB men - then one of the men spoke softly in English.

  ‘Mr. Orton?’ the voice said.

  ‘Yes.’ There had been no trace of a foreign accent.

  The three men joined him swiftly, and a torch flared in his face. The English voice said: ‘Yes, it’s him.’

  The tallest of the three men, young, square-featured, blond, took up the dialogue.

  ‘How many followed you?’ His accent was Russian, though he spoke in English.

  Gant replied in Russian, testing his pronunciation: ‘Three on foot, I think - and a car. It’s up on the bridge.’

  ‘Good,’ the Russian replied. Gant was watching the first man, the Englishman he assumed was from the Embassy security staff. He was the same build as Gant, and his hair was brushed back from his forehead. He smiled at Gant, as if in encouragement, or conspiracy.

  Gant returned the smile.

  ‘What are they doing, Pavel?’ the Englishman asked, keeping his eyes on Gant.

  ‘The one on the steps has returned to the car - the short fat one is wondering what to do, since there are four of us here now.’ The Russian laughed softly. ‘I think he is frightened!’

  ‘Then help is on the way - we’d better get Mr. Orton away from here right away, while they’re still in two minds.’

  Gant was on edge, ready for sudden movement, for flight… They had been standing in a tight group and the material of the Englishman’s coat, so like Gant’s own, was pressed against him. The big Russian, Pavel, drew a heavy wooden truncheon from beneath his own dark coat. They were a circle of dark coats, Gant thought irrelevantly, and the Englishman was wearing his hair in the same out-of-date style as he was … Fenton, the Englishman who had played the part of Orton many times in the last two years cried out in surprise - then the surprise became pain. Pavel brought the heavy club down across the Englishman’s forehead - once, twice. Then the Englishman was on the ground, moaning, and the club descended another three sickening times. Even as his stomach revolted, as his mind screamed that he was in a pit of snakes, like the Veterans’ Hospital, Gant realised that the big Russian was rendering the Englishman’s face unrecognisable.

  The police whistle scratched across his awareness, then seemed to accelerate and to slide up the scale, as if it were on record and the turntable had speeded up to make the sound unrecognisable. The KGB man was calling for reinforcements.

  ‘Your papers - quickly!’ Pavel snapped, bending over the battered features of the Englishman. The sight of the face seemed to hypnotise Gant. ‘Your papers!’

  He reached into his breast pocket and handed over his passport, his movement visas, his identification from the Soviet Embassy, in a trance-like state. They were stuffed into Fenton’s pockets, and the Englishman’s own papers removed. The third man snatched the trilby from Gant’s head, and then helped the big Russian to lift the body and roll it the few yards to the edge of the embankment. They released it and it slid into the black ruffled waters of the Moskva. The dark topcoat billowed, and the man’s arms became the arms of a crucifix - he floated slowly away, drawn by the current.

  ‘Quickly! Follow us - to the Pavolets Station, the Metro,’ Pavel growled in his ear, shaking him out of immobility. Other whistles were answering the summons from the KGB man fifty yards away.

  Gant’s feet began to move, a hundred miles away beneath him. He stumbled up the steps onto the Gorovskaia Quay, following Pavel and the other Russian.

  Whistles shrilled behind him, and feet galloped echoingly along the embankment. Pavel and the other man were running ahead of him, drawing away. He saw the flash of white as Pavel turned his face to him.

  ‘Quickly!’ he yelled.

  Gant began to run, faster, faster, leaving the whistles behind, leaving the floating body…

  The short, fat man, and the taller figure who had detached himself from the car in front of the Moskva Hotel, were up to their waists in the chill waters of the Moskva, dragging the body to the embankment.

  The fat man was grunting and cursing with the effort.

  When they had tugged the corpse up onto the flagstones, the fat man bent over it, wracked by coughing, fishing in the breast pocket as he did so. He pulled out a British passport, soggily closed around other papers.

  The taller man flashed a torch onto the picture of the man with the greasy hair, then at the ruined face at the edge of the circle of torchlight.

  ‘Mm,’ the fat man said after a while. ‘I warned them at the Centre about this.’ There was a note of self-satisfaction in his voice. ‘He didn’t have any drugs on him at Cheremetievo. It was obvious that he was unable to meet demands. They have killed him, Stechko. His smuggling friends have killed Mr. Alexander Thomas Orton.’

  Two.

  THE JOURNEY.

  Gant had a hurried impression of a huge facade, ornamental, almost oriental, that was the main-line railway station, and then their pace slowed, they were descending the elevator to the level of the Pavolets Metro station. Gant tried to disguise his breathing from the few incurious Russians and his eyes wandered over the brightly lit, sombre marble walls of the descent. Nothing he had seen in New York, or London, or Paris, was like this. The Pavolets Station was like the grandiose architecture of a museum in which the actual vehicles that rushed with a sigh of air from the dark tunnel holes seemed almost out of place.

  The platform was uncrowded, but they remained apart so as to be inconspicuous as they waited for the train. Pavel stood next to Gant for no more than a moment and deftly slipped a bundle of documents, inside a blue British passport, into Gant’s hands.

  He murmured, ‘Study these before you leave the train. Your name is Michael Grant, almost your own name. You are a tourist staying at the Warsaw Hotel. They are not looking for an Englishman, remember. Just stay calm.’

  Pavel wandered further along the platform. Gant glanced at the passport photograph, registered the image of himself there, and took off the trilby and the spectacles and shoved them into the pockets of the overcoat. Then he removed the overcoat, and held it casually over his arm. His dark, formal suit still seemed to betray him; its cut was so obviously foreign. One or two Russians appeared to stare at him.

  The tram swooped into the bright strip of station and he moved forward, tugging his overcoat back onto his shoulders. He knew he had made a mistake, that the overcoat was more anonymous. He turned in his seat as the train pulled out, and saw Pavel unconcernedly reading a newspaper, his long legs stretched out into the aisle. The other man was not in the same compartment.

  Gant began to scrutinise the faces in the compartment. There were only faces of t
ravellers - tired, bored, introverted, eyes avoiding contact with fellow passengers. The faces of the world’s subways, he thought. He had seen them a million times before. Yet the feeling of nakedness would not go away. The train sighed into another brightly lit strip of platform, and he saw the name slide past his gaze - Taganskaia. They were heading northeast, away from the centre of Moscow.

  The doors of the compartment whispered open, and Gant watched those who left, and stared at those who came. No one even so much as glanced in his direction.

  He felt sweat beading on his forehead, and glanced once more in the direction of Pavel. The big Russian glared silently at him, his whole manner of body and the force of his expression displaying a command to behave normally.

  Gant nodded, and attempted to relax. He was moving, but it appeared too much like drifting to comfort him. He did not know where he was going, and he had no idea how far he could trust his companions except that he had Aubrey’s assurance. But Gant could not relax. A man had been murdered in the centre of Moscow, and they were making their getaway on public transport. The whole thing had a faint atmosphere of the ridiculous about it - and, Gant acknowledged, anonymity. Aubrey again.

  Aubrey had told him nothing about the manner of his disappearance from Moscow, nor of the manner of his transportation to Bilyarsk. He was luggage, freight, until they reached the factory and the hangar. And that was how, he admitted, he had tried to regard the whole operation - yet, the shock to his system, to his reserves of calm and indifference, administered by the death on the embankment, made it increasingly difficult to remain freight, or luggage. He was scared.

  When the train stopped briefly in the Kourskaia Station, he managed not to look out of the window, except in the most bored manner, and he managed not to inspect the passengers boarding the train. When he looked back at Pavel, however, as the doors sighed shut and the train surged forward, the big Russian was looking back down the platform. Gant followed the direction of his gaze. At the gateway to the moving-staircase passengers, who had just descended from the train, were being questioned by two men in overcoats and hats.

  Gant, fear dry in his throat, waited for Pavel to turn his gaze back into the carriage. When he did so, and saw Gant staring at him, he merely nodded, once. Gant understood him. KGB. They were covering their bets.

  Even if they had not yet begun the massive operation of boarding every metro train, they were already sealing up the bolt-holes. They knew how good an escape route the metro was - they had a map of the system and a timetable, just as Aubrey had done when he planned the escape route. And the murder had been done conveniently near the Pavolets Station.

  Swiftly, almost as a distraction, he studied the papers Pavel had given him. When he had finished, he put them away, and his eyes were drawn hypnotically to the window again.

  The dark tunnel rushed past the window, and Gant felt the knot of tension harden in his stomach, and tasted the bile at the back of his throat. He stared helplessly, at the door connecting his carriage with the one ahead, waiting for it to open, to admit an overcoated figure whose manner would betray his authority, whose eyes would scorch across his features.

  The train slowed, the darkness beyond the grimy windows becoming the harsh lighting of the Komsomolskaia Station. Involuntarily, he looked at Pavel.

  The big man had got casually to his feet, and was hanging idly onto a handrail near the sliding doors.

  Gant got up unsteadily - he knew that his face must be pale and sweating - and stood squarely at the second set of doors in the carriage.

  As the train stopped and the doors slid open, he realised that he knew nothing of what the papers in his pocket contained. In sudden panic, he had forgotten. He stepped shakily down onto the platform, was pushed from behind by another passenger and the movement was a grateful trigger. Grant … like his own name. He remembered. His eyes sought the exit flight. Yes, there were two KGB men there.

  Pavel pushed close to him, as if as a reassuring presence. A small crowd of people seemed to have left the train at that station, and he and the big man were at its heart It moved slowly, as if with communal wariness, towards the exit. The station’s opulence glanced across his awareness. Even here there were no hoardings, no advertisements of women in underclothes or huge bottles of Scotch or cinema posters - only frescoes of the great and praiseworthy victories of the Russian people since 1917, in the bold, awkward, cartoon style of Soviet realism.

  He sensed Pavel fade back into the crowd again, but did not turn his head. The crocodile drifted towards the waiting men at the foot of the exit stairs. They were inspecting papers, and he reached into his pocket for Michael Grant’s documents. He pulled them from his pocket and re-inspected them as swiftly as he could.

  Michael Grant - passport, entry visa, hotel reservation, Intourist information brochure.

  The KGB man’s face loomed in front of him, a white, high-boned, thin face, with a large, aquiline nose, and sharp, powerful eyes. He was inspecting Gant’s papers thoroughly, and glancing from photograph to face, and back again. Then he looked at the documents issued to Michael Grant since his arrival in Moscow, three days before. Gant wondered whether such a man had booked into the Warsaw Hotel on that day - and he knew it wouldn’t have been overlooked.

  Michael Grant would be a bona-fide tourist, whose papers had been borrowed and duplicated.

  ‘You do not appear to be in the best of health, Mr. Grant?’ the KGB man said in English. He was smiling, and seemed without suspicion.

  ‘No.’ Gant faltered. ‘I - a little tummy trouble. The food, you know…’ He smiled weakly.

  ‘In your photograph you are wearing glasses, Mr. Grant?’

  Gant patted his pockets, and continued to smile, a smile that was wan, and remarkably stupid. ‘In my pocket…’

  ‘The food at the Warsaw - it is not good?’

  ‘Yes, fine - just a little too rich for me.’

  ‘Ah. Thank you. Mr. Grant.’

  The man had taken the number of the passport, and the numbers of the documents that he had handed back. Gant had walked a dozen steps before he realised that he had bluffed his way through, that his feet had automatically stepped onto the ascending flight of stairs, and he was being moved up and out of sight of the two KGB officers. His stomach felt watery, and he belched. He wanted to be sick with relief. He forced himself not to turn round to look for Pavel and the other man, to stifle the growing panic of the thought that they might have been picked up, and he was now alone…

  He stepped off the staircase, and moved over to study a large map of the Moscow metro system. He did not dare to turn his attention from the map, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of the topcoat, his shoulders slightly bowed, as he fought against the tide of nausea. He told himself, over and over, that this tension was the same as flying, the sudden, violent twists of time which moved from calm and boredom, to terror, were things that he had experienced many times before.

  But it did not seem to work, the sedative of familiarity.

  Perhaps, in the huge. ornate foyer of the metro station, with its gigantic statuary, marbles and bronzes, and the mosaic floor and frescoed walls - perhaps he was unable to transpose himself to the cockpit, and calm his growing panic. All he knew that moment was that he was alone, stranded - they would have picked up Pavel, and the other man. What could he do?

  A hand fell on his shoulder, and he jumped away as if stung by some electric charge within him. He turned round, and Pavel saw the damp, frightened face, and doubt nickered in his eyes.

  ‘Thank God,’ Gant breathed.

  ‘You look terrible,’ Pavel said, without humour. ‘Mr. Grant - I watched your performance … it was not very convincing.’

  ‘Jesus! I was shit-scared, man!’ Gant burst out.

  Pavel looked at him, towering over him. Gant seemed smaller, slighter, less impressive than even his disguise would normally have made him. Pavel, remembering what Edgecliffe, the SIS Head of Station in Moscow, had said of the A
merican, agreed. This man was a risk, Edgecliffe had said - if he causes serious trouble on the journey, get rid of him - don’t risk the whole network, just for him. And Gant looked as if he might be big trouble.

  ‘Go and make yourself sick,’ Pavel said, with distaste in his voice. ‘Go, and hide yourself in the toilets. There will be more KGB men on the way. We shall leave the station after they feel they are sufficiently reinforced when they are confident that, if we reach the main entrance, then we must have been searched at least three or four times. Go!’ He spat out the last word and Gant, after staring at him for a long moment, turned his back and walked away. Pavel watched him go, shook his head, and then set himself to watch, from the cover of his newspaper, the arrivals at the Komsomolskaia Metro Station.

  David Edgecliffe, ostensibly Trade AttachŽ to the British Embassy, was in the bar of the Moskva Hotel.

  From his position near the door, he could look out into the foyer of the hotel. He saw the KGB men arrive, together with at least two people from the Political Security Service. If his diagnosis was correct, then Fenton, poor lad, had not died in vain. He shook his head, sadly, over his Scotch, and swallowed the last of it. The appearance of those particular KGB officers would mean that the bluff of Orton’s murder at the hands of his supposed Moscow pushers because of the failure of supplies to reach them, would have been swallowed. Orton was dead - long live Gant.

  He smiled sadly to himself and a waiter, at his signal, came over with another Scotch on a tray together with a small jug of water. He paid for his drink, and appeared to return to his book. Covertly, he watched the KGB men as they carried away Gant’s luggage.

  They would have searched the room, he knew, and would have removed everything. Orton, the mysterious Englishman who looked so harmless, but who had infected the youth of Moscow with the terrible affliction of heroin, would be thoroughly investigated.

  Edgecliffe was smiling. In his signal to Aubrey, that night at least, he could report a state of satisfactory progress.

  Besides the false papers he had shown to the KGB searching the metro, to protect himself from identification as a suspected drug-trafficker, Pavel had in his pocket, among other things, something that would have caused Gant to become far more ill than he had thus far seemed to be: it was a red card, such as was only carried by members of the KGB. It was a card which he sincerely hoped not to have to use since it was a fake, but which he knew he might have to employ if there was no other way out of the station.