by Craig Thomas
Galakhov ran along the corridor, his footsteps thumping on the strip of carpet. Up one more short flight, stopping just before the turn into another corridor, well-lit, and a man on guard at the door of Khamovkhin's room. The man hi the dressing-gown, going now perhaps into the ball. If Anders or one of the others was still speaking, he might wait before he mentioned the man in outdoor clothing, armed, too, that he had passed on the stairs. But he might have thought about it He looked once. The guard was sitting on a chair, alert but comfortable. Then he took the last step, two strides to the middle of the corridor — fifteen yards. He fired twice, and the guard, only then looking at the intruder, hand hardly moved at all where the gun rested on his lap, was flung off the chair and slid across the corridor, a piece of carpet rucking up beneath him, a vase tumbling with a hideous noise from a delicate table whose legs were snapped by the impact of the body.
Fifteen yards — his hearing was coming back now as he ran to Khamovkhin's door. He fired another two shots at the lock, then kicked in the door. The bedroom was dark, but Khamovkhin had left one lamp on in the sitting-room. Galakhov saw his quarry, impotent and foolish in striped pyjamas in the bedroom doorway, and pointed the rifle at the middle of the figure. Khamovkhin was frozen with terror.
And Galakhov cursed. Shots, shots. The guard had been despatched noisily, now he was going to kill Khamovkhin with more noise. Because he had passed one sleepy-eyed, half-awake Englishman on the flight of stairs, and the adrenalin bad worked, time seeming to escape him, and he had bludgeoned his way to this moment. He listened.
Nothing, but his hearing was still ringing from the explosions of the rifle.
'Get dressed — get dressed, or I'll kill you now!'
Khamovkhin, as if slapped by the voice, went back into the bedroom. Galakhov crossed to the door as Khamovkhin switched on the light in order to dress. He pushed it wide, and leaned against the door-frame, his eyes flickering from the figure of the Soviet leader as he dressed to the outer doorway which yet remained free of shadows.
'Hurry up — hurry up!' Adrenalin running away again, and panic-thinking. He wasn't going to kill Khamovkhin now, he was going to use him as a hostage to get out. Something had decided that — the same stupid animal in himself that had used the gun because time seemed about to run out. 'Hurry.'
Khamovkhin looked up at that. Galakhov saw the flicker of ginning hope in his eyes. Then the man pulled on his jacket.
'That'll do!'
'My jacket — my topcoat. You don't want your hostage to freeze to death, do you?' He turned to the wardrobe, and reached in for his coat.
What was that — noise on the stairs? Someone must have heard! Then Khamovkhin, tidying the collar of his topcoat, donning his fur hat, as if on his way to some public appointment in Helsinki, was standing next to him — a look of amusement in his eyes. Galakhov jabbed the rifle into his ribs, making the old man's breath exhale in a gasp. But the look in the eyes did not change from their damned superiority, their amusement. Galakhov was baffled.
'Go to the door,' he ordered. Khamovkhin did so, then waited, pausing as if for some stage entrance. Enter the statesman — Galakhov placed the rifle against the old man's spine, then he called out.
'You're there, of course — Air Aubrey and Air Buckholz?'
Silence.
'Galakhov?' They knew his real name, then. 'Air First Secretary — are you unharmed?' Aubrey, the Englishman.
"Yes, Air Aubrey. I am afraid that — who did you say, Comrade Galakhov? — I am his hostage, shall we say?'
'Shit!' Buckholz or Anders.
'I'm taking him out now! If you listen very carefully, you'll hear me switch to automatic. Kill me, and he dies anyway.'
'I know how rifles work, Galakhov!' he heard Buckholz say.
Then don't take any chances.' He jabbed Khamovkhin in the back. 'He's coming out first — and the rifle is placed against his spine. Clear a path for us. Right — move!'
Eighteen: The 24th
Vorontsyev awoke with a start, his head jerking upwards so that he banged it against the wall. He had opened his eyes, but there was a deep blackness in the room, deeper than he remembered. Frantically nigging back the cuff of his coat, he stared at his watch, the luminous figures slowly swimming to an approximation of a circle of numbers. His mind tried to reject the information, but the body groaned with realisation. Three-twenty — no, three-twenty-five. He had slept, undisturbed, for nine hours.
His back ached, and his neck was stiff. He moved his left leg, and the pain shot through him, seeming to erase the restorative sleep in a moment. He rubbed the back of his neck, groaning softly to himself. It was too ridiculous to contemplate, the unforgivable slide into sleep when he needed to be strong, alert.
He climbed upright, hands pressed against the wall behind him, until his left leg stuck out awkwardly, and his frame was shaking with the effort. He banged his palms against the wall in impotent fury. Gorochenko — he had perhaps two hours, no more than that.
Forty-seven halls, countless store-rooms and cellars. He could be anywhere 1 He dared not consider that he might not be in the building at all.
He bent clumsily and picked up the gun, gripping it tight as if in an affirmation of purpose. He hurried now, banging against the edges of crates, then slurring his foot across the concrete. Despite the remaining warmth of the boiler-room, he was cold, and shivered. It was dark because the street lights in Red Square were out. He groped along the wall until he found the doorknob, cool under his hand. He turned it, holding his breath.
Still unlocked.
He went down the passage, rubbing the sleeve of his coat against the lagging of the pipes, tasting the dust he disturbed as he breathed in. Then the outer door, open, closed behind him. The flight of steps, lit by a frosty moonlight, chill and ghostly, the imitation marble glinting in flecks, as if frost-covered. He leaned against the wall, and pushed himself up each step, hurrying, oblivious to the pain — perhaps encouraging it as a punishment for his dereliction of purpose, the weakness of the physical organism — swinging the leg forward, leaning the body-weight on it, then upright, back to swing the leg again.
He was breathing raggedly, and there was a chill sweat across his back, and his brow was damp. The shoe seemed to squelch loudly again, noises like the slapping of a wet rag against a dirty windowpane. He waited until the panic of his blood died, then he looked up, and studied the high, pillared hall which contained great lumps of statuary, the rows of glass cases containing the earliest history of Russia — ivory, stone, pottery. High windows let in the deceptive frosty moonlight, seeming to render the hall into monochrome and chill him.
He shuffled as quietly as he could across the hall, towards two doors in the far wall, near the stairs ascending to the first floor of the museum. When he reached them, he ran his fingers over the little brass plates as if reading braille. 'Private'. The gun pressed against his chest, his body dose to the door from beneath which came a strip of yellow light, he turned the handle, and pushed.
He almost fell into the room, gripped tight to the door handle, and stood upright. A small room, fuggy with the warmth of an electric fire and a samovar. Slightly hazed with cigarette smoke he was sure it wasn't his eyes because the tobacco smell was pungent. Two faces looking up from steaming mugs. He must have caught them just after a security patrol. He dosed the door behind him, and leaned back against it. Neither of the two men had moved more than to half-turn to face him. After the slight, surprised scraping of chairs, there was silence, except for the faint noise of the samovar in the corner.
Two men, both in their late fifties or sixties. They seemed two aspects of one personality — medium height, he suspected, medium build, greying hair, thin. For all they interested him, they might have been twins. They were simply hands, reaction-times, and a lack of guns. He said, because somehow it seemed an inevitable remark, 'Where is he?'
Because that was what he had seen in the moment when they were real, and separate, before his
dogged mind and furious purpose dissolved their identities; he had seen them glance at one another, as if in knowledge.
There was a silence. He thought he had imagined it, was wrong. Then one of the men — he distinguished him, with difficulty, as the one with the broader face, and thicker grey hair — said quietly, 'He said — if you came, we were to take you to him.'
Vorontsyev sagged visibly against the door, the gun dropping to his side. Ridiculous. He had only to ask for an interview with his father. Crazy. They had been waiting for him. Without consciously considering the action, he reached into his coat and bolstered the gun.
One of the men nodded.
'Where is he?' Vorontsyev asked in a thick voice, still leaning against the door.
The smaller of the two men, his wispy hair stranded across his head, said, 'Above us. He's safe.' He looked at the trouser leg, and the smudge of dirty red around the heel of the shoe. 'You're wounded,' he observed dispassionately. He spoke like a policeman. Vorontsyev did not bother to consider how they had been suborned by Gorochenko. Now, all he wanted to do was to come face to face.
The man who had answered him first stood up. Surprisingly, he was taller than Vorontsyev.
'Come with me.' He turned to his companion. 'Check he has left no traces — just in case.' He turned to Vorontsyev. 'Where have you been in the museum?' It was off-hand, yet meticulous.
'The toilet.. ' The man still seated nodded.
'I told you,' he said. Then they had expected him. The remark about his wound was confirmation of a previous theory.
'And the boiler-room.'
'We deliberately did not search,' the big man said, standing now only a foot or so from Vorontsyev's face. His breath smelt of some spicy sausage. 'Why has it taken you so long?'
'I — fell asleep.' Vorontsyev felt ashamed as he made his confession. He watched the big man's face, but there was no sign of amusement.
'Shall we go?' he said. Vorontsyev nodded, and backed out of his way.
The big man opened the door, and walked ahead of Vorontsyev.
'The lift?' Vorontsyev asked, struggling to keep up, his leg hurting with each impact with the tiled floor. Their footsteps echoed now, it seemed.
'Shut off- the power.' Vorontsyev did not believe him, but felt unable to demand. He was to be made to use the painful flights of stairs. He found himself accepting it as some kind of retribution — for his reckless sleep in the boiler-room or the death of Alevtina, he was uncertain.
The attendant who was, effectively, Gorochenko's bodyguard, unarmed though he was, went steadily ahead of him; a taskmaster who proceeded at what seemed the exact pace to wear and pain him without ever being more than half a flight ahead of him.
First floor — the moonlight opening spaces of glass cases, long dusky corridors hardly coloured by the pale light. He knew from somewhere in his memory that the exhibits concerned the popular uprisings through history, and he grimaced with the irony as much as the nagging, reiterated pain in his calf- he noticed that the pain was becoming localised, though a more intense stabbing sort of hurt.
The footsteps strange and intrusive in the silence. Then the next flight of stairs, and Peter the Great's minutiae. Vorontsyev felt like an old man, and coughed as if with asthma. The attendant stopped, looked back and waited patiently until he was only a few steps behind. Then he moved on again.
French standard from 1812. And, almost at the head of the flight of stairs, a life-size dressmaker's dummy in the uniform of Kutuzov as general commanding the Russian forces in the war against Napoleon. It was so sudden, turning at the head of the stairs, lifting his head from his study of each careful step, and the irony was so obvious, his breath was expelled in a noisy rush, as if he had come unexpectedly face to face with Gorochenko.
It was not a lucky guess, it was inevitable that he should be here — in this building of all buildings in Moscow. He said, his words echoing hollowly, 'I wonder my father hasn't borrowed the uniform.'
The guide's footsteps went on without pause, then clicked more heavily as he began to mount other stairs. Vorontsyev groaned at the thought of the continued effort demanded of him, and gripped the stone of the balustrade more urgently.
Captured French colours from the awful, icy retreat from Moscow, scraps of partisan unit flags, swords, carbines. Moonlight glinted from metal, sombrely outlined the stripes and shapes in flags and colours. He felt heavy with effort and the weight of history, which had come alive for him as never before. His journey was allegorical, he could feel that palpably. Perhaps Gorochenko had intended it — a kind of first interrogation was the only parallel he could conceive. A softening-up. Gorochenko saying — he could almost hear the voice — this is what we are going to talk about. This is what is at stake.
He shook his head as if to rid it of the buzzing of a fly. He would not listen. Siren-song. The first bite of the drill on tooth's enamel. He had to steel himself.
At the top of the next flight — pause — stiff clutter of foot steps, his own — then another flight. He began not to attend, to attend rather only to the feet he placed carefully one after the other.
So he came to the last hall, the inevitable last one. 1917. Arms, banners, clothing, like 1812. And, in glass cases, the writings of Lenin and others — just as his corpse was under glass in the Mausoleum. The storming of the Winter Palace — great indistinguishable portraits and crowdscapes on the walls.
Gorochenko had brought him here often, as a boy. He remembered now. And the memory completed some circuit, fulfilled a pattern. Gorochenko was consistent, credible throughout his life — no strange dislocation here. This always had been the shrine.
He sobbed quietly, knowing that the guide would take it as an expression of effort or pain.
The guide unlocked a small door — they were at the end of the last hall, and switched on a light. Another flight of stairs, narrower. He motioned Vorontsyev inside, and now lent him his arm for support. Squeezed together, they mounted the stairs to a narrow wooden corridor, uncarpeted. Here, the guide knocked on another door, one of many set in the long, dim corridor that smelt of must and unseen, stored things. Vorontsyev heard the voice and, as if at the study door of a feared pedagogue, blenched.
'Come in.1
'He panicked,' Aubrey whispered as he crouched next to Buckholz at the head of the stairs, both of them peering round the corner at the open doorway of Khamovkhin's suite — and the heaped-up tangle of flesh and wood where the guard had collided with the table. The pieces of the broken vase looked like stiff petals surrounding the still form. 'I don't know why, but he went at it hammer-and-tongs, when no doubt he expected to kill quickly and quietly, and get out again. In this mood, self-preservation will be high, but he won't be entirely rational. He might kill just because someone's breath smells.'
'So — we line up in a fuckin' parade and wave him to the door?' Buckholz was in a mood to blame everyone, principally himself, and the mood was one he hated.
Khamovkhin appeared in the doorway, then stepped boldly into the corridor. Aubrey heard behind him the rustle of a rifle placed to a shoulder. Acute angle, he thought, almost raising his hand in warning — but Galakhov was already behind the Soviet leader, gun jammed into the spine. Aubrey stood up, and moved slowly out into the corridor. Galakhov saw a rather dishevelled old man in a shirt with its stiff collar detached. Aubrey looked like a plucked bird, except that the eyes were bright and alive, seeking an opportunity.
'Get back!' Galakhov ordered, making Khamovkhin twitch involuntarily as he jabbed him with the rifle.
Aubrey raised his hands innocently. 'Very well, Comrade Galakhov. I saw some evidence of your efficiency as an assassin just outside Oxford — ' Galakhov was puzzled, but he knew what Aubrey was doing with his relaxed, studied, almost hypnotic words. Delay.
'Never mind the talk. Get the stairs cleared. My guest and I are leaving.'
'I am sorry, Mr Aubrey,' Khamovkhin remarked. 'I hope we shall meet again — '
'Ge
t moving!'
Aubrey stood to one side, and Buckholz retreated from the head of the stairs. Galakhov realised that urgency alone would serve him now. He had to increase the tempo, disturb any arrangements and dispositions being made. They were slowing the whole thing down. Again, he futilely cursed the tempo imposed on him by the scene in the hall and the man on the stairs.
He looked down at knots of upturned faces, trellised by gun barrels, as armed men jostled each other on the narrow staircase. None of the guns was pointed at him. Increase the tempo, he told himself again. Whatever they're setting up, you can outrun it.
'Should I say that you won't get away with it?' Aubrey remarked at his side.
'I have a ticket to anywhere in the world,' Galakhov replied, and saw the discomfiture of the Englishman. 'You,' he added to Buckholz, 'can you drive?' Buckholz was silent. The rifle dug into Khamovkhin's spine. Aubrey suddenly felt the atmosphere rise in temperature, until the four of them were standing in the heavy heat of a greenhouse — just the four players, surrounded by silent extras, or an audience. 'Can — you — drive?' Galakhov said precisely, emphasising each word with the gun in Khamovkhin's back.
'Yes,' Buckholz replied sullenly.
'Good. You will drive us away from here.' Galakhov looked from the American's face to that of Aubrey. The Englishman had made his features bland, inexpressive. Galakhov wondered whether he had not made a mistake, leaving behind to organise some counter-measure the more brilliant and ruthless of the two intelligence men. He had no time for second thoughts — he opted for bulk, and physical menace, which meant that Buckholz would be neutralised by having to drive the car. 'Come!'
He pushed Khamovkhin down the first step, and the men fell back in front of them. Turn at the stairs, and the long corridor down which he had sprinted — that might have been the moment when the mental pulse had outrun him — and the security men, silly and innocuous, despite the guns, in their pyjamas and dressing-gowns, or coats thrown on over pyjamas. One in his vest and pants, even less dangerous. Buckholz was two paces behind him, and he did not know where Aubrey was. Not that it mattered. Every face he passed was distraught, angry, frustrated. He had them beaten, and he was going to make it.