by Craig Thomas
Which meant she was very, very lucky to be alive.
He shivered in the blown snow, hurrying alongside the stretcher on its trolley, across the garishly lit apron in front of the terminal building where the helicopter from the rig had landed.
Her vision was clouded. Shadows flitted at its peripheries like ghosts, keeping pace with her, with the sense of movement that was so like her inexorable slide towards the maw of the garbage truck. Her hands had been tied behind her, she now understood.
She still did not remember the hands that had grabbed her, or even the voice that had been screaming from the mouth-hole in a balaclava for the truck to stop tilting the garbage bin. She had been seen, just in time. She remembered the man’s eyes.
The same shocked eyes that had looked down at her, as she rustled and rattled like something for the oven in the crackling foil in which they had wrapped her.
Then it had been nothing but hands, rubbing, banging, pulling her like malevolent children playing with a cheap doll. After that, she had begun to burn, and scream …
Then figures around her, dark or light, but flickering like candle flames. Soothing noises, as if they were addressing a child or a simpleton. More burning and screaming … Then the wind and the cold and the rotor noise — now Vorontsyev, hurrying beside what must be a stretcher.
She was … alive. Wind, snow, cold, then warmth striking her numbed cheeks like slaps. And a ceiling above her, Vorontsyev clearer, and something stinging on her cheeks. Tears?
Vorontsyev watched her crying helplessly. His guilt returned in a churning of his stomach. He bent over her, scuttling like a crab to keep up with the stretcher, as he patted her hand which lay beneath the blanket. Her face was less grey now, but somehow urgent, like the face of someone unable to speak who was desperate to communicate a great secret. She opened her mouth and at once her teeth began chattering. The tears continued to flow, beginning to embarrass him.
Then they were on the other side of the cramped terminal and the blue, revolving light on the ambulance was gleaming through the driven snow. He continued to pat her hand as she was shelved into the rear of the vehicle. Mid-morning gloom shrouded the town, all but obscuring it. He clambered into the ambulance and sat beside her, with the two paramedics and the doctor who had accompanied her — at his guilty, enraged demand — from Rig 47.
That same doctor had told him over the telephone that the heat from the decomposing rubbish had kept her alive. It had been that close. He looked back at Goludin’s sombre, frightened face as the ambulance doors were shut. It hadn’t been Goludin’s fault, but his self-reproach had had to berate someone, put someone else in his own place.
Something was tugging at his arm. He looked down. Marfa’s face was alive with an idiot’s intent vacancy. Her voice, when she spoke, was no more than a crow’s rough croaking.
‘Moscow Centre,’ he made out. He nodded comfortingly. The pale hand gripped his sleeve. The doctor made to interpose and Vorontsyev’s glance warned him. Whatever it was, it was urgent to Marfa.
‘Send — picture … Iranian’.’ she shouted like someone deaf.
‘MBRF — Dmitri Oberov — Oberov. Say you want ID that face, now!’
He nodded, understanding. Got up and banged open the doors of the ambulance, glaring at the paramedics and the doctor.
Oberov was an ex-lover. Vorontsyev knew the name, casually dropped by Marfa in a confidential moment, as something that was past and meaningless. A colonel in the SVR, the new Russian Intelligence. He’d survived the coups, had even prospered from them.
Goludin looked as hopeful as a dog expecting forgiveness.
‘Get back to the office!’ Vorontsyev snapped. ‘Send a faxed picture of our dead Iranian to Moscow Centre, attention of Colonel Dmitri Oberov. Most urgent. ID immediately required.
Got that?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Get on with it, then. I want an answer today!’ Goludin hurried towards Vorontsyev’s car, after catching the keys as lightly as in a game. One could almost see his tail wagging.
Vorontsyev climbed back into the ambulance, at once assuring Marfa that he had carried out her instructions.
‘Let’s go!’ he snapped at the paramedics.
He was still angry as he joined the Dolly Madison Boulevard, after leaving Langley. Just as he was certain that he was being tailed. Tailed away from CIA headquarters? He was sure the Georgetown street had been empty of surveillance when he started the car, certain that he was not being tailed on the George Washington Parkway on the outward journey.
Almost certain … But the grey Lexus was there now, as he headed back towards Washington. Two cars and a big Mack truck behind him, but there, and maintaining exactly his own speed — accelerated, then dropped back, just to check. Beyond the spray thrown up by his tyres, the Lexus fulfilled the small test he had given it.
Then the Mack truck pulled out and began overtaking him.
The spray from its wheels blinded the windscreen. He flicked the wipers to rapid, and his anger was focused on the truck and the rain for a moment before it returned to Bob Kauffman. The guy had refused to help him … the files were either shredded or reclassified, he couldn’t authorise access, sorry, fella, but this isn’t any business of yours, is it?
Et cetera, et cetera … Lost your memory, John? Kauffman had grinned at his own joke. Why Pete Turgenev? You already know the guy … finally, Kauffman had said heavily, ‘If you won’t tell me why, I can’t help you.’
Lock pulled out to overtake the truck. The windscreen cleared, becoming no more than a house window down which the rain slid. Then the truck, as if jousting with him in the driving rain, pulled out again and the windscreen was blind. In the rear view mirror, the Lexus maintained its distance, two cars behind him.
He felt the nerves jump in his wrists as he gripped the steering wheel. He was still a dozen miles from Washington — should he lead them back to the apartment? Who in hell were they?
He recalled Kauffman’s face as Lock left the Langley complex.
Intense in expression, heavy and almost foreboding. He shook his head and slowed the car to let the truck pull away, to escape its blinding spray. The traffic was light. The fall-coloured trees beside the highway were drab and drenched, stretching away into the Virginia countryside. The truck seemed to tug the spray after its bulk and the windscreen lightened, as if a door had been opened from a darkened room. The Lexus was content to remain two cars behind.
It couldn’t be a tail Kauffman had put on him. Not because of Turgenev … or Tran —? Kauffman’s eyes had flinched at the name, then he had denied knowing the man. When he had gone to check the files, he had found Tran’s shredded, Turgenev’s reclassified, and suddenly there was no access. But Kauffman had known Tran; the name had brought an instant recognition and the sharpness of suspicion to his eyes.
Why?
The truck was too slow pulling ahead of him and he considered overtaking on the inside lane. The rain had begun before daylight. He had hardly slept after the flight from Phoenix. There had been no one tailing him there, or from the airport, he was certain. He moved into the inside lane.
In the Washington Post there was a rumour that Vaughn Grainger might be selling the family holding in the Grainger group, in the aftermath of the recent tragedy, as the columnist put it.
How much did Turgenev want that? How much did Turgenev already own, through dummy corporations, investors and banks which helped him circumvent the rules on foreign ownership?
The wheel slipped angrily in his grip as he gestured his rage to the tyres. The car seemed to float for an instant, then recover itself. What — exactly — were the links between Grainger Technologies and GraingerTurgenev?
He drew level with the Mack’s huge rear tyres, the side window now blinded like the windscreen, the noise and weight and momentum of the truck sensible inside the car. The Lexus, wipers working vigorously, slipped into the inside lane a hundred yards behind him. The bulk of the truck was
alongside now and Lock pressed his foot on the accelerator.
Who could Vaughn be selling to, if the rumour was true? He had to talk to Vaughn. He could see the rain-filled air brighten beyond the truck. Then the Mack seemed to lurch sideways towards him, a dark, vast bulk, looming inside the rain. He stepped on the brake pedal, but the truck continued to veer across the inside lane. Too late, he realised the Lexus had been a blind, distracting him — the truck was all purpose now. The brighter air disappeared as the truck’s flank caused the door and wing panels of his car to scream in protest. Spray flooded the windscreen, extinguishing everything. The door buckled against his thigh and the window shattered. The Mack’s noise was a rumble like that of a collapsing office block. His car left the road, dropped over the verge, careered downwards, the wipers waving frantically like drowning arms. The steering wheel bucked, trying to escape him. The truck. The damn’ fucking truck was trying to kill htm.
He glimpsed the Lexus in the rear view mirror, as it slowed, then his car lurched out of control, its head swinging like that of a wounded bull seeking its tormentors. It overturned, the roof buckling inwards on impact as he hung helplessly upside down in the restraint of the seatbelt. The car slewed like a skater in slow motion. He saw dark, inverted pines, red-leaved birches, still at first then rushing towards him. The car’s metal protested in a drawn-out cry as it collided with a slim birch, snapping it like matchwood. The car lurched a final time, onto its side, wheels spinning in the rain-filled air. His head revolved like the front wheel he could see.
Eventually, through the broken windscreen, he heard the rain. Heard his breathing. Saw his breath, clouding around him in puffs of distress and relief. His arm ached and his thigh seemed on fire. He moved his head gently, as if taking a priceless ornament from a high shelf with numb hands. Looked towards the road. An inverted image of the grey Lexus and two figures standing beside it, seventy or eighty yards away.
His hand fumbled with the seatbelt release and he tumbled sideways, hurting his hip on the steering wheel. He thrust at the door above him, to find it jammed. He gripped the doorframe through the shattered side window and heaved himself into the drenching rain. His head swam and he felt nauseous. He fell onto churned mud and torn grass. The noise of the traffic on the highway was very distant.
Lock staggered upright, leaning against the car. The wheels were slowing into stillness. No cars except the Lexus had stopped. The truck had disappeared. The two occupants of the grey car were coming down the slope as if following the crazed track his car had made. Groggily, in rising panic, he pushed himself away from the wreckage and staggered towards the trees. From behind him, he heard a shouted command to stay where he was, to come back.
He stumbled further into the crowding trees, slipping on pine debris and mud, his legs weak and treacherous, the panic in his chest making it difficult to breathe. They intended to kill him.
He blundered on through the trees.
Vorontsyev shrugged at Dmitri, his features darkly angry. The mobile phone, clamped against his cheek, seemed like a weapon wielded by his caller — GRU Colonel Bakunin.
‘No,’ he announced once more. ‘We’re taking no interest whatsoever in the Rawls murder. Colonel. I can’t imagine where you might have picked up that idea’
‘Are you waltzing me around, Vorontsyev? You think I’m stupid?’ Bakunin bellowed into the phone with unmasked, brutish authority.
‘Nothing of the kind,’ Vorontsyev murmured.
Dmitri was gesturing innocence with spread hands and arms, hunched in his overcoat. Beyond the window, cloud hurtled raggedly across the face of the moon. It had stopped snowing.
Dmitri was shaking his head, as if accused of a schoolboy theft.
‘You have no interest in the Rawls business. It’s a GRU matter.
I made that clear. Do you want me to make it clearer still?’
Vorontsyev scowJed at Dmitri. Goludin, who seemed to anticipate that the anger was directed at himself, seemed to cower in his chair like a small marmoset that had already suffered cruelty at his hands.
‘No. It’s already very clear. Colonel.’
‘Then keep your nose out. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
The phone clicked in his ear like a pistol shot. He closed the mouthpiece and thrust the instrument into his pocket. His littered desk, inconclusive and shapeless in image of his investigation, enraged him. He banged his fist onto the scattered files and papers.
‘How the heJl did Bakunin find out we were stiJl interested in Rawls?’ he barked. ‘How do I find myself being ballocked by that ox? I told you to be careful, Dmitri.’
‘I was careful — sir.’ Dmitri added the respect for Goludin’s sake. ‘I combed a couple of the files, that’s all. Rawls’ previous visits, stuff we had here, nothing else …’ He grimaced. ‘How on earth did the GRU find out?’
‘You mean, apart from whoever they have inside CID who would have told them?’ Vorontsyev threw his large hands up as if juggling with something explosive. ‘I tell you something, both of you — this isn’t funny. It’s sinister. The GRU’s the bureaucracy of Russia, same as always. More powerful now, perhaps. But that bruiser on the other end of the line has just told us that we’re not wrong — apart from telling us he’s somehow involved. He’s not being a bureaucrat any more, but an interested party. Do I make myself clear?’ he added, staring at Goludin, before growling; ‘You’re in it up to your neck, sonny.
I hope you realise that?’ Dmitri appeared pained on behalf of the young detective.
Goludin was silent for some moments, before he nodded and said:
‘Yes, sir — and thanks.’
It was a small comfort. Not a restorative by any means, but the scanty kind of reassurance that was available to Vorontsyev.
Another of the few reasonably honest young officers on whom he could depend. Up to a point.
‘OK — then off you go. You haven’t got time to go home and shave and shower, get yourself down to the hospital and relieve the man on guard outside Marfa’s room. I’m making you responsible for her safety. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Goludin replied, apparently grateful that what might have been regarded as his dereliction up at the rig was not to be mentioned again. He exited noisily, inflated with the renewed trust Vorontsyev had in him.
Dmitri grinned at Vorontsyev’s smile and said, once the door was closed: ‘Like Lubin, he’s a good lad.’
‘You sound like his mother.’
‘Don’t you need some children you can trust, Alexei? I do my best.’
‘I — know. Sorry. But how did that shit know?’
‘Any one of a dozen ways. We’d better be more careful than ever — if we’re …?’ The question faded into silence.
‘We are,’ Vorontsyev replied. Dmitri seemed both unnerved and excited. ‘Oh, no, we’re not putting Mr Rawls on the back burner. He’s connected with the drugs, through Schneider and through our dead Iranian, Mr Al-Jani. He’s ours.’
‘What about Marfa’s theory?’
‘That her old boyfriend in Moscow Centre will be able to identify the Iranian — give him a name and a rank? Maybe.
She was convinced. She insisted we did it, until the doctors smothered her in the best of expensive, charitable care. She thinks he’s definitely professional.’
Vorontsyev lit another cigarette and blew smoke at the dark square of his office window, where the moon was emerging like a dazed prisoner from behind rags of cloud.
‘So are the mafiosi, the biznizmen, Alexei. And if you think Bakunin’s somehow close to this, then it has to be for money, not politics — and that probably means the drug connection.
Have you thought about that?’ Vorontsyev rubbed his face. His eyes looked bleakly at Dmitri.
‘We’ve retreated about as far as we can go. Onto the last beach. Feel the cold water round your balls, Dmitri? What do we do? Ignore everything? We’re the cops, for God’s sake.’
‘We are.�
� Dmitri was nodding, his smile embracingly understanding, compassionate, like that on the face of an ikon. ‘So, what’s next?’
‘If the Iranian was a professional, why was he here — other than the drugs? Maybe he collected Tehran’s ten per cent, or worked for a minister or mullah who grows the poppy? Let’s see if Marfa’s friend in high places has an answer. Unless he’s too busy keeping his own arse doused while setting fire to other people’s trousers — which is about all those Moscow Centre bastards are good for these days.’
‘I heard that’s all they’d ever done. What about Kiev? That dead guy you were interested in?’
‘The man with his picture in the Dutch passport?’ Dmitri nodded. ‘He doesn’t exist. Kiev are still checking. But there’s nobody of his name and description working for any such company in the Ukraine.’ Vorontsyev shrugged.
‘Then why was he here? Is that drugs, too?’ Dmitri’s private war seemed to be expanding too rapidly for even his comfort. He was puzzled, unsure. ‘Some other mafia business?’ He seemed almost hopeful of an affirmative.
‘Protection, prozzies, smuggling, currency fiddles, arms deals, murder — take your pick.. They’re trawling missing persons for me now. We must wait and see, old friend — wait and see.’
‘And Schneider — the American doctor?’
‘He’s hanging there like meat, Dmitri — all the muscle and gristle softened, the flavour just right … We only need one thing, one link with Panshin other than association/
‘So, Val Panshin’s decided to go into the drugs business?’
‘Beats the profits from a Siberian jazz club and a sideline in pimping and contraband. He must have been tempted.’
‘Their team seems to be putting extra players on the field all the time, Alexei…’ He was troubled, then he blurted into the silence he had created: ‘Can we cope with this, Alexei? I mean, have we got the resources?’
‘— and the resolve? We’d better have. Hadn’t we?’ Eventually, in a room (hat seemed to have become hotter and where the light seemed dimmer, Dmitri nodded.