Sobbing: she seemed to do nothing else these days.
The overshoes dripped melting snow on the carpet as he crossed the room; he pushed them off onto the small rug under the piano stool and went to the liquor cabinet.
‘Here,’ he said as he brought her a brandy. ‘For once, drink it and don’t argue. Medicinal reasons.’
She forced a smile. ‘You’d know, wouldn’t you?’ She swallowed a mouthful and pulled a face as it went down.
‘What hurts most of all is not knowing,’ she whispered when she’d caught her breath. She began to rock slowly back and forth in her chair. The brandy washed up and down the sides of the glass with her movement. ‘Not knowing where she went. Or why, Georgi – why? Not knowing where she is now. Or even if she’s still alive. My dear God.’
Zavarov turned back to the cabinet and poured a brandy for himself. As he knocked it back he clamped his eyes tight shut and wished silently for strength. Strength to get through the next few weeks; strength to keep carrying Ligachev, who wasn’t nearly as self-assured as he wanted Serov to believe. And strength to cope with Olga and her ceaseless maundering.
‘Don’t go over it again, my love,’ he said, sounding more tender hearted than he felt. ‘Not tonight.’
For want of something to busy himself with, he collected the overshoes and slipped off his coat on the way out to the hall. There was a rustling sound as he reached the half-open door; it seemed to have come from the far end of the corridor. He folded the coat over one arm and went along to investigate.
He rounded the corner at the end and stopped dead. Ratushny’s flabby face was peering up at him, looming pale against the darkness. He couldn’t have looked more guilty or scared if he’d still been caught standing by the drawing-room door with his ear pressed against it.
‘You worthless little maggot,’ Zavarov hissed.
Ratushny’s mouth opened to say something, his chins quivering. But before the words could form, Zavarov dropped the overshoes and cracked the open palm of an enormous hand across his jaw. The major-domo folded silently to his knees, blood spilling over his white uniform as the coffee had done on that fateful morning when Ligachev called. He cupped his hands as if to catch the blood and pressed them to his face.
Zavarov bent over and seized him by the scruff of the neck.
‘Get to your rooms,’ he rasped in Ratushny’s ear, ‘before I tear you in half.’
Olga’s voice, still tearful but now anxious as well, called from the drawing room.
‘What’s that noise, Georgi? Is anything the matter?’
Ratushny scuttled off, dripping blood, and Zavarov flopped against the wall. He forced calmness into his voice.
‘It’s all right, my love,’ he called, ‘I’m just being clumsy. I dropped my overshoes, nearly tripped on them. But I’m all right.’
He clamped his eyes shut again and tried to drive away that beautiful young face in the photograph that floated up before them.
28
London
The bald man arrived at the Opera House at seven fifteen and went straight to his seat in the downstairs part of the auditorium. He dropped a coin into the mechanism on the back of the seat in front of him and unclipped the opera glasses. In the last moments before the lights dimmed he amused himself by scanning the auditorium. His survey included the Grand Tier.
He saw Knight and Franklyn arrive just before the overture began. They had prestigious seats at the end of the tier’s front row, where it curved around towards the stage; only the private boxes were closer to the performers. When the bald man saw Knight settled in the seat at the end of the row he put the glasses away and sat back to enjoy the evening’s performance.
He smiled as the count fell in love with Rosina and Figaro schemed with him to win her hand; he laughed at gloomy Don Basilio and Bartolo; his shiny head swayed in time with Rossini’s melodies; he called out ‘Bravo!’ with everyone else in appreciation of the ensemble at the end of Act One.
At the interval he let himself be swept along with the chattering crowds as they flooded out of the auditorium. But instead of going to the bars and buffets as they did, he picked his way through the flow of people towards the toilets. He was still smiling.
He stood in a cubicle with the door locked until he knew that the toilets were empty. His suit jacket was hanging behind the cubicle door. The lightweight nylon jacket that had been folded up in its inside pocket now hung over it, to give the wrinkles a chance to fall out. It was wine coloured, like the uniform of the Opera House staff. At a distance no one would note the absence of braid or the fact that it was the wrong material.
Four leather slings were strapped about his body, two under each armpit. The suit jacket had concealed them earlier; now he slipped on the nylon jacket and buttoned it up carefully.
He stood there patiently until he heard the distant strains of the aria, ‘Il vecchiotto cerca moglie’. It was his signal that Scene One of Act Two was drawing to a close; it was time for him to go to his position.
He moved from the cubicle to the outer door, opening it by fractions as he watched and listened. The foyer was deserted.
He stepped out and closed the toilet door gently. From the foyer he turned confidently down a corridor that ran along the building’s perimeter.
At length he came to some narrow stone steps that led upwards by the outer wall. Instead of the rich carpets and polished wood of the public areas, here there were only cold stone and brick, plastic and lead. Bare pipes criss-crossed the walls; low-wattage bulbs left shadows in corners and turnings.
The stairway wound up behind the Grand Tier and on up again behind the Balcony Tier. The music grew in volume as the stairway took him higher. At this level only the wall separated it from the performance, whereas on its lower level small offices, toilets, boiler rooms, plumbing and air-conditioning networks had intervened.
At the top of the staircase a scuffed wooden door faced the bald man. He was at his destination. He knew exactly where he stood; he had studied the plans. Beneath his feet curved the great dome of the auditorium. Forward of him it swept towards the stage, behind him to the Balcony Tier, and on either side to the wings of the Grand Tier.
A hundred feet below him, Rosina’s anguish mounted as Bartolo told of the count’s unfaithfulness and swore his own love for her. The music soared in an orchestral thunderstorm that symbolised the torture in her soul.
The bald man unbuttoned the nylon jacket and drew the components of the Mauser SP66 sniper’s rifle from the leather slings. The Mauser was one of the world’s most accurate weapons, and the model in the bald man’s hands had been customised to break down into the four pieces he now began to fit together: the barrel, the stock, the butt and a Smith and Wesson image-intensifying night sight. The butt was distinctively formed, shaped like a pistol grip with the shoulder rest extending behind it; the design, even to the adjustable cheek rest and the thumb hole behind the pistol grip, gave the user the best possible and steadiest hold on the weapon. The muzzle was already fitted with a silencer and a flash hider, the latter intended to prevent the firer being dazzled by the weapon’s flash at night.
When the Mauser was assembled and its bolt primed, the bald man pulled the scuffed door open, snatching his hand back at once to the rifle. The music drowned the click of the doorlock and his foot stopped the door before it smacked against the jamb.
The room was long and narrow. It curved with the dome that formed one of its sides; its far wall sloped away towards the apex. This wall was open to the auditorium below, like a long, thin window; huge lights were ranged along it, flashing lightning to the stage as the storm roared on.
There was only one man in the room. He was bearded, wearing jeans, and sat on a stool before a complex panel of switches and slide controls.
Something made him turn around as the bald man entered, perhaps the change in air temperature caused by the open door. His eyes widened in alarm.
Unhurriedly, even as he was moving
into the room, the bald man steadied the Mauser and touched the trigger, firing from waist level and releasing the first of the magazine’s three rounds. A torrent of blood spurted from the technician’s chest as he toppled backwards with the force of the 7.62mm bullet. A puff of plaster indicated that it had torn through him and embedded itself in the wall behind.
The bald man was beside the technician as he fell, able to catch an arm and lower him gently to the floor. Sidestepping the pool of blood, he checked that the man was dead, then straightened up and chose a good spot at the thin window.
*
From the privileged seats of the Grand Tier the spectacle of the storm was exhilarating. In the main room of Bartolo’s house Rosina flung herself to the floor, bosom heaving. The music climbed to a crescendo, swelling through the rapt auditorium. The floodlights dimmed to a flicker, trembling on the verge of darkness. Lightning flashed across the sky beyond Bartolo’s windows, throwing into relief Rosina’s sobbing form.
High on Bartolo’s walls were recessed alcoves in which sat scrolls, books and pottery jars.
The thunder rolled. In a fine piece of dramatic timing, one of the largest pottery jars toppled from its alcove to smash on the floor at the precise moment that the thunder crashed. The thunder rolled again, another jar tumbled, there was another mighty crash.
Joss Franklyn was enthralled; he had an even better view than in Act One, sitting now in the seat that Knight had occupied earlier. He’d forgotten to extinguish his pipe after the interval and had returned to the auditorium with it clamped as usual between his teeth. An usher had spotted him, he’d doubled back to find an ashtray, and when he finally got to the front row the curtain was rising. But Knight had moved up a seat so that he could slip in at the end of the row; and that was where he now sat.
The bullet thudded into his heart just as a third pottery jar shattered on the floor.
Beside him Knight felt him shudder, and thought he was jumping in surprise at the crashing jars, like himself. Only when Franklyn’s head and shoulders began to slump forward did he turn towards him.
‘Joss?’
He touched Franklyn’s arm. There was no response. Franklyn was falling sideways, away from him, and into the aisle space.
A heart attack was Knight’s first thought, and he knelt down to undo Franklyn’s collar and tie. But his hand met a damp wetness.
‘What the –’
There was a sickness in the pit of his stomach as he tore Franklyn’s jacket and shirt open. The music pounded on, drowning the sound of ripping cloth as the soaked shirt split. Knight bent his head close to Franklyn’s chest. Even in the semi-darkness he could see that it was one large, dark stain. This close, the smell of blood was overpowering. With that he began to grasp what had happened. He could make out no details to find where the wound was and had to run his hand across Franklyn’s chest, probing through the warm blood. At last his fingers slipped into a hole large enough to accommodate three of them; it was jagged and fragments of bone had been pumped out by the blood, catching in his fingers. He grabbed his scarf from the seat and pressed it forcefully in place in what he knew by now was a futile effort to staunch the flow.
An usherette arrived, carrying a shaded torch. He glanced up at her, sweat blinding his vision.
‘First-aid unit, do you have one?’
The girl nodded. ‘St John Ambulance.’ She was staring in horror.
‘Fetch them. Quick as you bloody can, girl!’
As the orchestral storm began to subside, the occupants of the nearby seats became aware of the activity at the end of the row. Heads began to weave and peer. Knight sensed the same kind of mixture of concern and morbid interest that followed road accidents.
‘What’s happened?’ a man behind him whispered.
‘Heart attack.’ Knight said. He dropped Franklyn’s wrist, which he’d been searching for a pulse, and bent closer to place his finger against the side of Franklyn’s neck. He saw then that his eyes were rolled back so that the whites showed, and realised that he was wasting his time. It made no difference: he kept searching for some sign of life anyway. As he did so, he scanned the opposite half of the Grand Tier, looking for the gunman.
No, he concluded, not from over there. Not possible among all those people. His gaze swept up the dome and he saw the long, narrow opening towards its top. For an instant he thought he saw a movement but it could have been his imagination.
He looked down from the opening to the stage. A strange, bluish light now flooded it, unchanging and obviously wrong. It made the faces and costumes of the artists appear ghostly as they carried on with the performance.
The ambulance team arrived and he moved back out of their way. He watched as they set to work; he’d found no pulse but was reluctant to leave Franklyn until he knew their verdict.
They took less than a minute to reach it. They were equipped with torches and he heard one of them swear softly as he moved the scarf and saw the damage underneath. He looked questioningly up at Knight.
‘Nothing to be gained by making it public knowledge,’ Knight whispered. ‘A heart attack’s all anyone needs to know.’
The man nodded his understanding. In his shock he was willing enough to submit to Knight’s authority. ‘Is who did this still here somewhere?’
‘It’s possible. Keep it to yourself.’
Knight wiped his blood-caked hands on the blanket folded across the stretcher and left the team to it. As he strode up the short aisle to the exit doors he met the manager coming the other way. The usherette had probably sent him. Knight grabbed his arm.
‘Those stage lights – the ones that are all wrong – are they controlled from up there?’ He pointed to the narrow opening at the top of the dome.
The manager nodded, anxious to get past him. ‘I’m sorry about the lighting, sir. We have a technical problem. I’m sorry if it’s spoilt –’
‘I want to get up there. To the lighting place. How do I do that?’
The manager began to protest, so Knight steered him back to the exit door and outside.
‘Now you listen. Here’s what you do. First, phone the police. Tell them there’s been a shooting.’
The man turned pale, his jaw dropped, but Knight carried on.
‘Tell no one else or you’ll have pandemonium. Ask the police to get some men here at once. The killer’s probably left already but just in case he hasn’t, some of them better come armed. Bow Street station is right opposite you, so they’ll be here in no time.’ He took out his Home Office pass and put it in the manager’s hand. ‘Read this out to them. It’ll mean something to them. Explain I told you to do all this. Let the performance continue in the meantime and never mind your lighting problems. We don’t want all these people in the way if the killer’s still in the building. When the police get here, they’ll take over. They’ll block the streets outside. If the performance ends before they arrive, make an announcement for the audience to stay in their seats. Got all that?’
The manager nodded uncertainly.
‘Now tell me how to get up to that bloody lighting place.’
Two minutes later, as Knight stood breathless in the long, curved room at the top of the dome, he saw the reason for the lights’ failure. A young stage manager, who’d also come up to investigate, had arrived before him and saw it too. He was standing with his back to the technician’s body.
‘See anyone else when you got here?’ Knight asked.
‘No. Only him.’ The man glanced down at the body. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’
Knight shook his head. ‘We wait for the police to arrive. That’s all.’
Somewhere below them the singing stopped and applause began to ring out. The performance was over.
*
The bald man skirted Covent Garden, where the shops were closed and the stalls had been cleared from the cobbled courtyards for the night, and turned down Southampton Street and into Maiden Lane. He had thrown his overcoat on over the nylon ja
cket and was carrying his suit coat folded over an arm. There were plenty of people around, both tourists and Londoners, and he walked at a businesslike pace but not hurriedly, so no one paid him any heed.
No one, that is, except the black-haired woman with the crew cut. She now wore white cotton trousers, a colourful blouse, brimmed hat and fashionably cut raincoat. She carried a sightseer’s map of London and the camera swung from her wrist by its strap. There were several thousand women like her in London that night.
Without raising the camera to her eyes, she had run off a sequence of shots as the bald man had left the Opera House, the chatter of the autowind drowned by the traffic; now she turned into Maiden Lane just in time to record him climbing into the white Sherpa.
Then she continued on down Southampton Street to where the dusty Volvo station wagon was waiting for her on a yellow line.
29
Moscow
Serov let himself into his apartment and poured a glass of bourbon to take away the chill that had followed him home from Izmaylovo. As he drank, he fetched the old leather grip bag, went into the bedroom and flung open the wardrobe doors.
Molodechno was the last occasion for which he’d had to pack. How different from that trip this one would be.
He checked each garment before he folded it away in the bag. If the labels and laundry tags were Soviet or East European, he returned it to the wardrobe and substituted a garment of American or West European manufacture.
His approach to the task was spasmodic. He retired often to an armchair or the couch in the bedroom, to sit there in thought. Or he paced back and forth through the other rooms. He kept the bourbon topped up and was seldom without a cigar. From time to time he looked up and his gaze seemed to devour his surroundings, as if he was committing them to memory.
When the clothes were sorted, he turned his attention to the safe behind the bookcase. The Aganbegyan report was where he had stored it on his return from Molodechno. He transferred it and the other contents to a lockable, steel-lined briefcase. Among them were the letters and other items which Galina had found.
Patriots Page 25