Death in Siberia f-4

by Alex Dryden

  Clay was to return to the hotel, connect with Sky and then both of them would contact Cougar and Burt Miller.

  By a circuitous route Clay made his way to the historical district of the city, shaving and changing clothes at a steam bath on the way, where all three of them kept rented lockers. He then hurried to the Business-Hotel Kupechesky, once more the student traveller, but at an almost suspicious speed, to any observer, for a student. The arrival of the MVD had been a very bad shock. Something had gone terribly wrong.

  After Clay and Sky had conferred in a public area at the back of the hotel, they knew that Miller had to be informed at once. It was Sky – a 25-year-old MIT graduate and rising star in Burt Miller’s Cougar Intelligence Applications Corporation – who went to the hotel’s business centre. He brought up his Facebook page in the name of Smokey Bear and began to type.

  Hoping to get on the ferry north. But Charlie’s gone down with something. Don’t know what. It’s an intestinal thing, he thinks. Throwing up all night. Major symptoms.

  Back at Cougar’s headquarters in New Mexico the Facebook page was visible on a dozen screens. It was almost instantly decoded. A Red Alert went out. MVD interest in Anna Resnikov. Her place of residence actually surrounded. Her not there – at least there was that – but otherwise everything looked black.

  There was absolutely no hesitation in the response. Abort the mission. That was the sole possibility. Burt Miller, whether from the uninhabited island in Finland, which he’d colonised for the purpose of the mission, or from somewhere else on the planet, issued the order personally. A message flashed up on Sky’s Facebook page at the business centre in the Kupechesky.

  So sorry to hear about that. It’s imperative he gets some decent medical attention at once. Just bad luck that it curtails what sounded like a fun trip. Hey! Larry’s got a place at the NBA. Wow!

  For Sky and Clay, Cougar’s response was clear.

  Eileen, on watch between the docks and Sverdlovsk Street, had finally seen Anna as she’d rounded the corner to the street. It was completely against all ground rules for her to be seen by Anna, let alone to make direct contact, and so she was relieved as she watched Anna first see the MVD herself and then take evasive action, walking on past the block without drawing attention.

  Back at the Kupechesky, the mission was crumbling fast. It was, in effect, over. Months of preparation for nothing. But those were their orders and Clay and Sky greeted them with a mixture of relief as well as a sense of being cheated. It was a huge operation in terms of importance and in the work they and those behind them had put in. Burt Miller had impressed its importance on everyone, in one briefing after another, though without the detail Anna knew.

  But they went on to a war footing at once. The three of them, and Anna, had a system of signals and dead-drops in the city. Anna was to check the signal twice a day, three times, if possible. The way it worked was that the initial signal told her which of the dead-drops to check. That way, the watchers could keep an eye on any drop that became unsafe. The signal itself was always at the bus station in the centre of town, a place that saw several hundred people come and go in the day, and which made it difficult for anyone trying to observe an individual. Clay walked from the hotel – a taxi might be remembered.

  It took him twenty-two minutes, maybe a minute or two more, he thought nervously, as he checked his watch for the third time.

  But finally he arrived on the broad concrete landscape of the bus station where ancient buses choked their butane and petrol fumes into the air and moved in and out in the constant ballet of journeys begun and ended.

  Over to the side, there were stalls selling fruit and cigarettes. And everywhere milling groups of travellers, loaded with bags and boxes of electrical goods to take home from the city, while others arrived with sacks of produce to sell at the markets. It was just the sort of mayhem that did nicely.

  Clay walked into the covered area under a concrete portico to where the ticket counters were. There were queues of people here, shouting and talking, sacks and bags of every kind littered the floor, and there was noise, mainly noise, and that gave the illusion of muffling an illegal action.

  To the left of the far-left ticket counter was a regular bus station shop – a hole in the wall. It sold sweets, cigarettes and lighters, and newspapers. Under the narrow counter of the shop was a timetable, glued eternally to the concrete wall and the most obscure of several in the building.

  Clay took a notebook and a purple-tipped felt pen from his pocket and crouched down on his heels to look at the bizarrely placed schedule which necessitated crouching or kneeling to read its information. It was faded and peeling in places but essentially immovable and well used despite its awkward position. He ran a finger down the timetable, obscuring it all the time with his body, and wrote three times of departures to different places near the city in the book in his hand.

  And as he did so, he made a small mark on the timetable itself, against the name Bugachevo, a large village about twenty miles outside Krasnoyarsk. The motion of his hand marking the timetable was seamlessly disguised with his writing in the notebook and both were hidden by his crouched body.

  Then he stood, looked down at what he had written in the notebook, frowned, and walked to a board which clacked destinations on a mechanical rotary system up above the heads of the travellers. He watched the board for a few moments, pocketed the notebook, and walked out of the building into the grey drizzle that now seemed as if it would last for the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AFTER SHE’D SEEN the MVD troops, Anna walked on, head down, along the length of Sverdlovsk Street. She turned left on a rubble-strewn corner at the end of Sverdlovsk, until she was out of sight. Then she stopped and leaned against a wall as if she were looking at some beautiful view and had come a long way to find it. Her breathing and heart rate slowed to normal, her primed reflexes eased. Muscles which moments before were tensed and hard now softened. She began to notice what else existed in the world apart from the MVD’s double-eagle insignia which had temporarily shut everything else out.

  She watched two small boys climbing up a pile of broken concrete in the street, then jumping off, highly delighted by the game. A bone-thin black cat scowled from a doorway a few feet away from her. The resilience of the children’s laughter caught and then quietened her mind.

  She’d been maybe twenty-five yards from the MVD raid on the block, twenty-five yards from the baba who’d rented her the room three nights before. But she hadn’t been challenged. Maybe Zhenya had seen her and stayed silent… and maybe she wouldn’t stay silent for long. The Ministry of Interior investigators were there to flay the minds of the block’s occupants. There was never anything trivial about their presence.

  Anna stood up away from the wall and began to consider her options. But then one of the boys came up to her before her thoughts could come together.

  ‘Give us money, give us money!’ He had a big grin on his dirty face while the other boy, more shy, hung back.

  ‘Here,’ she said. She took two chocolate bars from her jacket pocket and the boy seized them, eyes bright.

  ‘Give us money!’ he repeated without going away.

  ‘No money,’ she said.

  Then she turned and continued to walk away from the depressed quarter of the city, in the direction of the railroad yards. The boy followed on her heels at first, then his pace became slower as he fell away behind her until he stopped altogether and soon she’d lost him.

  Anna stopped only once, a few streets away from the block, in order to buy an apple at a stall in Orjonikidze Street from an ancient baba with veined and bulbous legs that sprung like disfigured fungi from beneath her black dress. The baba had twinkling eyes, grey hair under a scarf and she smiled toothlessly in gratitude at the few kopecks. Anna stood by the stall and chatted to her, ate the apple, looked back carefully in the direction from where she’d come, and then went on towards the rail yards.

  Her wa
lk took her away from the river at first, then across a buttressed bridge over it near the centre of the city, and on past the huge city monument to Lenin. From time to time, she stopped to look in a window or find something in her jacket, but it was done only in order to check behind her. She saw nothing that made her suspicious.

  Finally she reached the Krasnoyarsk Pass, the mainline station for the Trans-Siberian railroad. But she didn’t stop there. She continued along a small street next to the tracks and, following them, she watched the long, heaving freight trains that brought the bauxite from Bratsk into Krasnoyarsk’s aluminium factories. Now in June, the unloading was easy. But in winter when the bauxite came in, it was frozen to the metal sides of the freight cars and had to be jack-hammered out. From the minus 45-degree centigrade exterior of the yards it was transferred into the 120-degree interior of the smelting factories. Everybody knew that workers didn’t last long under those conditions. Marriages were short here, and children grew up fast if they grew at all in the stunting atmosphere.

  When she’d reached as far as the street allowed her to go, before it was blocked off by a tattered, drooping barbed-wire fence eight feet high, she doubled back, first turning to the right, and stopping again to see if she was alone. No walkers behind her, a line of cars passing her in a normal fashion. A beaten-up Lada drove by more slowly. It was not an official car but you never knew.

  Then she continued on her seemingly aimless way, into a set of side streets where she could observe more easily if one car stayed with her or came out ahead of her when previously it had been behind her. When she was finally satisfied she hadn’t been watched or followed, she headed under the M53 trunk road and walked directly along a litter-strewn gutter at its edge, the cars and trucks throwing up noise and smoke, until finally she reached the bus station. The drizzle seemed now like a leaking tap in the sky.

  At the hole-in-the-wall shop inside the bus station she bought a packet of Astra cigarettes from Arek, the Armenian man behind the counter, as she had done every time she’d come to check the signal in the past three days.

  ‘Spring,’ he said to her, and grinned from under a large, drooping black moustache. ‘And it drizzles for us,’ he laughed. ‘Are you still looking for work?’

  ‘Still looking,’ she replied.

  ‘Something will happen,’ he said. And it was a common enough phrase that covered all points between the out-and-out mystical and the blindingly obvious.

  ‘I’m expecting my mother to come in today,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Tell her to come and buy something from Arek.’ He grinned. ‘What time’s she coming?’

  ‘This afternoon. Around four.’

  She crouched down in front of the counter and looked at the timetable. She immediately saw the purple mark against Bugachevo. Then she stood again, smoking and looking at the magazines behind Arek’s head. ‘At four twenty,’ she said.

  ‘A woman like you,’ he said. ‘You should find it easy to get work.’ His watery, doleful eyes and drooping moustache gave him the look of a floppy-eared hound. ‘Here. Have this on me,’ he said. He handed her an Alenka chocolate bar, the best in the shop, just as he did every time she’d visited in the past three days. ‘You smoke too much,’ he observed, ‘even if it’s crashing my business to tell you so.’ She’d bought eight packets of cigarettes in three days.

  ‘Thank you, Arek,’ she said. ‘See you later maybe.’

  He thought she lived rough, somewhere around the bus station, while she looked for work.

  ‘Make sure you bring your mother here,’ he said cheerfully. Her visits had become the high point in his day and she could bring her mother along too if that was necessary and what she wanted. ‘And you take care, Valentina. Come to me if you’re in trouble. Come to Arek,’ he said with a puffed dignity, as if he were the world’s premier fixer.

  Anna walked out of the bus station, grinding the cigarette under her heel when she was out of sight of the shop.

  Bugachevo. The name of the village indicated the nearest dead-drop to the bus station. And that meant it was serious, as she’d known it would be. No doubt they’d seen the MVD surrounding her block just as she had. They were certainly good enough, her watchers. It had impressed her that she hadn’t caught a glimpse of any of them over the three days she’d been there.

  Across the plaza from the bus station were a few kafes and stalls out on the street, waiting for the sun to re-emerge.

  The kafe nearest the centre was named the Chaika. She sat outside on the pavement under a parasol in the drizzle and ordered a glass of water and a coffee and when it came it was bitter and sweet at the same time. She left some coins on the table and sat and watched with barely seeing eyes the passers-by, flimsy umbrellas up, rubber overshoes on their feet. And as she did so she turned over in her mind what the shrinking options were for her now. The MVD at the block changed everything. But, even before she’d picked up their message, and despite what Miller ordered, she knew she would reach her own conclusion.

  She looked at her situation dispassionately. In reality, it seemed extremely unlikely that the MVD knew of her presence in Russia, let alone here in Krasnoyarsk. She had entered the country illegally and that was where she would have been stopped if there was a leak. There was nothing she could see that could have compromised her – not yet, anyway – and of that she was sure, almost sure, as sure as one could be, anyway.

  The baba who’d rented the room to her, or one of the other residents who had seen her in the block, they were the weak links. But no matter how curious they were about her, perhaps, there was nothing that could have made them call in the MVD of all people. The militsiya maybe, but not the MVD. So there must be something else, she concluded, something that had nothing to do with her. Maybe there was some other fugitive who was also in the building and whom they did know about, and it was all bad luck. Someone else they wanted. A coincidence, certainly, but coincidences were not as unusual as people thought.

  She finished her coffee, left some more kopecks on the table for a tip, and went inside the kafe.

  At the rear of the kafe there was a women’s room she’d visited on one occasion. It was empty now, the door ajar. She entered and locked the door with a thin, wobbly bolt that had lost two of its screws. She stood in the small space and listened. The women’s room was at the end of a dark corridor, painted a dull red. There was a fire door to the outside at the end of the corridor but it was always locked with a chain and padlock. It was just there for taking out the trash. They didn’t want people drinking and then disappearing without payment. So no one would be coming down the corridor unless they were visiting the toilets. She heard nothing.

  She climbed on to the toilet seat and lifted the lid away from a high cistern up on the wall behind it. She couldn’t see inside the cistern, it was too high for her eye line, but she fished around with her hand until she found the plastic ballcock. She lifted it. With both hands now, and still unable to see, she unscrewed the two halves of the plastic ballcock. It was well sealed, and waterproof when it was screwed up tight. Then she felt around inside one of its hemispheres until her hand touched a packet, also waterproof for extra safety. She lifted this out, and dropped it into a dirty, chipped basin beside the toilet.

  She stepped down, listened again.

  The ballcock was new, it all fitted together perfectly. It had been placed there by Eileen five days before.

  She stripped the plastic away from the packet lying in the basin. Inside was a folded piece of paper. It contained instructions for the assembling of the ballcock. All in Russian. But inside the text, as they’d arranged back at Miller’s in America, was the hidden coding. She held it up to the light.

  Of course, it was as she’d expected. She was being recalled at once, immediately. Get out now. There would be a rendezvous on the Mongolian border, tonight, tomorrow night, the next – as soon as she could make it. They’d be on the other side, all as planned. Another custom-fitted Chinese mi
litary truck; colleagues, good food and drink. And a safe passage home. The thought made her pause. Home. But it was Russia that had always been her real home and America had never come to replace it in her mind. Russia, whose rulers would execute her if they caught her. But it was still more home than anywhere else.

  She screwed up the paper and flushed it down the toilet. From her pocket she drew a two-inch sheet of paper from a notebook. She wrote in Russian, in longhand. What she wrote were ‘notes’ from the plumber on how to assemble the ballcock. And inside her text, there lay the concealed message.

  It was terse, as all such communications were. But it was terse for another reason too.

  They need not wait tonight, tomorrow night or any other night on the other side of the border. She wasn’t going to abort the mission. She told them that she was going ahead and somehow the coded words distanced her from their actual meaning. But it was a firm ‘No’ to their order, to the great Burt Miller’s order.

  She put the notepaper inside the waterproof package, sealed it with tape, then stepped up on to the toilet seat again and placed it inside one of the hemispheres of the ballcock, screwing the two shut tight together. She let the ballcock drop back, the water hissed momentarily. Then she replaced the lid of the cistern and stepped down again.

  She flushed the toilet, then left the women’s room after washing her hands in the filthy basin and walked back up the dark passage, lit dimly by a low-wattage bulb, out into the interior of the kafe and, beyond, to the street.