Snow Falcon kaaph-2

by Craig Thomas

  He leant against the wall of the museum for a moment, as if recovering his breath. He inspected his shoe and ankle. A tiny pool of darkness seemed to well round the sole of his shoe as he watched, and he looked stupidly back to the gutter and the pedestrian crossing, convinced he could see the betraying spots. He shook his head. No, nothing. Moving the injured leg with both hands, as if it were a wooden limb, he smeared the little pool, and stepped forward. No one seemed to notice him. Probably they would think him drunk, or ill, if they did.

  He moved swiftly — at least the pain seemed to come in quick gouts now, suggesting speed of movement — his limp comically exaggerated. The main facade of the museum overlooked Red Square, a long flight of grandiose steps up to the pillared entrance. A mock-Russian style, designed by an Englishman. He saw the steps before him with pain rather than relief. They were almost bare of people — one or two loungers, near the bottom, a few students passing in or out of the doors, some figures bent with study and the very weight of history. And the glass, revolving doors in the shadows under the pillars of the porch.

  Slowly, careful of the treacherous early frost, looking back every few seconds, he mounted the steps. He was leaving only the occasional blood-spot. He had left two or three footprints clear in his blood after he had paused in the street, but not now. His leg ached more familiarly, as if with cold — except when he placed his weight on it. He kept close to the balustrade, using the handrail to assist him, swinging the wounded leg before him. He concentrated on the immediate task, narrowing his awareness; that way, he did not think of Alevtina, dead like Ilya and Maxim, but killed by her own superior. Yet he did have a vague sense of living beyond the immediate future, living beyond a new expansion of consciousness in which he would perceive, in a pitiless clear light, the moral nature of what he had done, what he was doing. The puritan in him was poised to reassert itself.

  It would have to wait, he told himself, gritting his teeth — I have to get to the fucking toilet and bandage my bloody leg!

  The coarse, blunt language, the simple demands from the time and place, eased aside the looming shadows at the back of his mind. He straightened up, walking slowly so that his gait might have a little normality, he pushed through the revolving doors, seeing a man's wizened, clever face moving past him on the other side, nodding in greeting. Vorontsyev did not know him. It was a gesture without suspicion. He stepped away from the doors, heading swiftly through the turnstile, hardly pausing to pick up his twenty-five kopeck ticket. The door of the male lavatory was near the entrance to the museum, he remembered.

  At the door of the lavatory, he turned his head. The chequered pattern of the floor seemed unstained, but if he looked carefully he could see one or two faint smears, perhaps a spot or two. Even as he looked, he saw the shoe of an attendant smear one spot out of recognition, and nodded in satisfaction. He dosed the door of the washroom behind him, then locked himself in one of the three cubicles. He slumped wearily on the seat, his strength seemingly drained entirely.

  The thought kept hammering in his head like a migraine. He had killed Alevtina — killed her. He hardly envisaged the flung corpse, arms wide, or felt the initial pain in his leg. Merely the moral position, a whirl of abstracts in his mind. Killed Alevtina, a member of my team.

  He was dizzy, too, with the lost blood. Carefully, he bent over, his awareness spinning like a drunk's, and rolled up the sodden trouser leg. The bullet from the Makarov had passed through the flesh and muscle of the calf, a neat hole at one side, a darker, cratered wound on the other. His sock was soaked with blood, and he decided not to remove his shoe.

  Clumsily, he fished the leather-bound flask of vodka from his hip pocket, and wetted his handkerchief with the spirit. Then he washed around the area of the wound, which seemed to have eased its bleeding since he had begun to rest it. Then he welted the handkerchief until it was soaked, and dabbed it against the wound.

  He cried out once, then clenched his teeth in quivering weakness to still the further cries the pain prompted. Then he pulled his shirt from his waistband, and tore off a strip of it. This he knotted over the wound, waiting without breathing to see if the material became dyed. A spot bloomed, but did not spread far. He leaned back against the cistern, grateful, his trouser leg still rolled above his knee, his fur hat askew on his head.

  Almost at once, inattentive to the world beyond the cubicle as he was, the mental landscape asserted itself. The brief future — where was Gorochenko? Had he made a mistake in coming? If he was locked in, and the old man wasn't there, hadn't he wasted the last night before the coup? Where would he hide until the museum closed?

  And the past — the dead sprawled overcoat on the frosty path near the flats; the dead Alevtina with her face twisted into the dust coating the tiles of the Revolution Square Metro station. The man, whose face he barely knew, did not figure in the flash of images.

  And his own death; inescapable, boiling certitude of ideas, raging as soon as he touched on them, an opened box of his world's ills. For he was committed now, irrevocably. Not in the eyes of others, of the organisation or the state he would be judged to have betrayed, but in his own eyes. The death of Alevtina had revoked all extenuation in his own severe judgement.

  He had to be strong — he looked at the gloved hands before his face, and he could see them quivering — if he was to finish it now. Nothing definite formed in his mind concerning the final encounter, but he believed that there had to be one. He needed safe darkness for a while. He could not let the whirl of imagery, its mad dance, control him.

  He longed for unconsciousness as he might have longed for sleep before a difficult task.

  He stood on the leg, rolling down the damp trouser leg, testing his weight. Pain shot through his thigh and side. He sagged against the wall of the cubicle, then unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out. He limped to the single washbasin, and cleaned his hands.

  As he left the toilet, idling his way as unsuspiciously as he could towards the stairs to the level below ground, and the boiler-room where he would hide, he wondered how large the night-duty team would be. Two or three, perhaps. He did not know whether or not they were armed. He thought not. But they would have an alarm system rigged direct to the nearest police station, perhaps even to the Centre in nearby Dzerzhinsky Street.

  But he would need a plan of the building, or a guide.

  He eased himself down the steps, treading softly and nursing the aching leg. He hoped the boilerman had gone off duty. He did not want to kill him.

  He noticed a returning calm, as if his severely limited view of circumstances and needs forced other considerations aside. He was glad of that.

  Physical acts. Through a door marked 'Private', then along a dusty corridor roofed and walled, it seemed, with lagged pipes. A hollow but muffled click of footsteps, tangible irregularity of movement. He limped on, quicker. Take the gun from the pocket, hold it in both hands for a moment of steadying, left hand clutched round the stub of barrel, right hand on the moulded butt. Then left hand to turn the doorknob. Unlocked He pushed open the heavy door, and the boiler-room was in darkness. He flicked on the light, glanced swiftly round the low-roofed, dusty room with its landscape of huge pipes and the squat old boilers. He switched off the light.

  He stepped fully into the room and dosed the door behind him. He did not think the night staff would lock the boiler-room, rather use it for warming themselves, since it was likely that the regulations disallowed the whole building to be heated overnight.

  He tried to picture the room. A faint radiance from windows high up near the ceiling aided him. He limped cautiously across the open space he had registered, turned left, left again. His hand reaching forward all the time, then connecting with the rough surface of a wooden crate. A stack of them, against the wall beneath the small high windows. Careful not to bang against them with his left leg, he eased himself behind them, and lowered himself, like an invalid might do into a bath, to the dusty floor. The concrete was warm,
the wall against his back also warm.

  He settled himself, the Stechkin on the ground immediately by his hand. The luminous dial of his watch indicated five fifty-five. An hour, or a little more.

  But he would have to find a plan. The History Museum contained forty-seven halls and rooms and who knew how many store-rooms, cellars repositories. Gorochenko could be anywhere. The dry, dusty heat insisted that he would be found Vorontsyev found his head nodding forward, as he was relaxed by the safety of his hiding place, eased by its silent warmth. A gurgle of pipes, the muted roar of the boilers, but no noises.

  He knew he would find Gorochenko. He would find him. Find him.

  His tiredness was too imperative. There was no real need for him to be awake before say eight or nine at the earliest. The KGB would not make a thorough search, his ruddled senses reasoned. And he was tired — drained.

  He slept.

  Kenneth Aubrey had decided on a Folley of genial attentive-ness to detail as a method of auto-suggestion. He had tired of conversation with Khamovkhin, even of badinage or recollection with Buckholz. Bored with the world of diplomacy, he wished to re-create a sense of the secret world, his own covert life. Thus, armed with the files and reports of the duty-team drafted to Lahtilinna, previously in the care of Anders, he retired to his room, took off his jacket — the central-heating was more than adequate — poured himself a large whisky, and began to read.

  Slowly his mind seemed to unstick — perhaps a more appropriate image, he thought, might have been of an oil-calmed sea through which now thrust the spars and wreckage of his secret life. He did not feel quite so old, hardly felt useless at all — and enjoyed the jagged, broken bits of reality jostling on the calm waters of diplomacy. After all, he was not employed by his masters to baby-sit the Soviet leader while everyone waited on the KGB, nor form a human wall through which no bullet might reach Khamovkhin. Since the crisis seemed to have passed, he had felt diminished by his occupation, just as he had felt enlarged in importance perhaps five or six days before. But this, this — his hand waved over the apparently untidy heap of papers as if to indicate something to an audience — was what still, apparently, satisfied him most, and most consistently.

  There, he thought, turning back a page. What a scratchy account! A boat had been discovered four miles up the lake from the castle. Some attempt, it seemed, had been made to hide it. Aubrey picked up the form, as if checking for some watermark of authenticity. It was a Duty Report Form DRF/22B, which he had issued to Anders for the purpose of collating all duty-team reports. This one was more than a day old — part of an initial wide-sweep search for the missing Ozeroff. At the bottom of the report, the column for 'Diagnosis' and that for 'Prognosis' both remained blank. Aubrey clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The boat was still there — it had been disabled by the report-maker, and left. Obviously not important because it was still there.

  Aubrey continued reading. It was two hours before he came across another report on the boat, then another. All of them with the same indifference to speculation. It irritated him that the duty-teams should have been so unused to search operations that they had covered the same ground three times in a space of hours. By that time, anyway, several other items in the reports had irritated him, then began to disappoint him, then turn his mood slowly to dissatisfaction.

  Meal times were slack times, agreed. Sleep or rest periods were undisturbed. Patrols seemed efficiently organised — he picked up a series of duty-change items, and saw Anders's bold hand scoring through names — on three different sheets — because he had forgotten the names, or had been wrongly informed who was going on or coming off duty. And the individual reports — he reached further across the desk for a handful of them, the light from the standard lamp catching the shiny baldness of the top of his head — these were sloppy in the extreme. He began to read one aloud in a stage-Cockney accent, to ridicule it.

  'Ah took owver from this geezer a' ayt-uh-clock. Tall blowke, pahka on. Don' know 'is nayme.' He snorted, then added: 'What use is this sort of thing? None whatsoever!'

  Once he began to look — there was some sense of anti-Americanism in the exercise — he saw signs of it everywhere. Then he had the justice to admit that the substitute duty-team, drafted in from half a dozen countries and belonging to two or three different security services, had been his idea. He mentally apologised to Buckholz, leaned back in his chair because he had suddenly lost interest in mockery which had turned to self-mockery, rubbed his eyes so that he pushed his half-glasses up on to his forehead, and stared at the ceiling.

  His mouth opened like that of a fish, as if he could not catch his breath. Immediately, he sat upright, fiddling his hands across the sheafs of papers as if playing a piano or uncertain of what he wanted. Then he pressed both palms down Sat and hard on the paper, as if a wind might disturb them. It was in there — it was in there!

  He looked at his watch — almost three. Three? Three in the morning, and the date was the twenty-fourth.

  He picked up the telephone, dialling Anders's extension. The voice, when it came, was drowsy but unruffled.

  'Yeah?'

  'Aubrey here.'

  'Sir — anything wrong?'

  'I'm not sure. I've just been reading over your collated reports and roster stuff here — '

  'Yeah?' Now the voice was that of a civil servant and anticipating some ministerial displeasure.

  'No, not a rocket for you, dear boy — just a thing that struck me, looking at the thing overall, as it were.'

  'Something wrong?'

  'Possibly. Tell me one thing — how many of the names can you recollect, just off-hand?'

  Silence, then: 'Maybe seventeen, eighteen — why?'

  'I can't recall all SIS personnel here, either. To me, they were names Shelley supplied from London, or Philipson here, or other Station Heads. All we worried about was getting sufficient bodies here. Our little friend, "Captain Ozeroff-Houdini" — he relied on a similar situation, didn't he?'

  'He had papers, and records must have been altered — '

  'Yes, dear boy — but, they didn't know his face, did they? As long as they expected the face that turned up, no one there would recognise him as someone else, would they? Now, if you take that a stage further — ?'

  Anders digested the idea in a moment.

  'I'd better wake Mr Buckholz!'

  'I think you'd better wake everybody — and we'll do a spot-check of everyone who is inside Lahtlinna at the moment — then those outside can come in and be recognised!'

  Galakhov looked at his watch — three-o-two. He was standing in the darkened kitchen of the castle, the moonlight slicing through tall narrow windows. He had stayed long enough to make himself a cup of coffee, even turning on the lights while he did so. But, assailed by a sense of approaching crisis, he had switched them off as soon as the mug was in his hands, the coffee on his lips. He had been on patrol round the castle grounds, only occasionally meeting other duty personnel, exchanging a word or two with them, they leaving amused by something he said, he secretly revelling in the ease with which he was able to remain at Lahtilinna while the hunt for him went on.

  He finished the last of the coffee, put the mug in one of the huge enamel sinks. He paused for a moment, a shaft of moonlight weirdly illuminating his narrow young face, as he visualised the sketch-plan of the route to Khamovkhin's room. Softly, softly, he told himself, a smile on his lips. In and out, and then back on patrol, to slip off when he was alone in the grounds. So simple.

  He let himself out of the kitchens, and took the stairs to the main hall. From the furthest point of the corridor, he could see that there were lights on in the hall — off-duty men at the billiard table? Hardly likely they were watching Finnish TV — especially at that time? Cautiously, he approached the archway into the hall.

  There were perhaps a dozen men already there, and he could see others coming along the galleries above, or down the staircase. Most of them were in dressing-gowns,
some with coats over the pyjamas all of them were wearing. He saw Aubrey, in shirt-sleeves, and Buckholz in dressing-gown and pyjamas, fur boots on his feet. Anders was dressed, and looking extremely wide-awake and efficient. He listened to his opening remarks and then, as if by reflex, he visualised again the sketch-plan of Lahtilinna. Anders's words about a complete head-count, and the men staying where they were until everyone was accounted for, went a long way away because he had understood their intention at once. What he wanted was an alternative route to Khamovkhin's bedroom.

  Anders's voice faded behind him as he returned down the corridor, fur-lined boots silent on the stone floor. At the end of the corridor was a flight of stairs — servants' route to the master bedrooms on the floor above. He listened — a distant, muffled burst of laughter cut short in the hall, but nothing closer than that. Galakhov felt the urgency press him, and he ascended the stairs as quickly as he dared.

  He paused on the landing, feeling time running ahead of him. He had to move swiftly now — the job was nothing in itself, occupying no more than a minute. He looked up the next flight of stairs from the landing. Shadow, but lights from a corridor beyond and to the left.

  He was almost at the top of the stairs when the sleepy man with disarranged hair and silent slippers bumped into him — and recoiled at the still-cold touch of his parka and the barrel of the rifle. A Finnish copy of the Kalashnikov, issued by Anders.

  'Sorry,' he murmured.

  'What the hell's going on?' the other man muttered, rubbing his arm where he had bumped the gun, yawning. Galakhov could have driven the rifle butt into his face — but he would only waste precious moments.

  'Some sort of identity check, I think'

  'What? Jesus — what a waste of good sleeping time!'

  He tossed his head, rubbed his hair more into place, and began to descend the stairs. Then he paused, and looked up quizzically, taking in Galakhov's outdoor clothing and the gun. And perhaps the face he had not seen before. Galakhov cursed that he had not killed the man — now, he could not reach him, and dare not fire a shot. Then the man seemed satisfied, nodded, and went on down the stairs.