Snow Falcon kaaph-2

by Craig Thomas

  A moment of shame — an image of Kutuzov, looking in disapproval, as he had done when ordering the death of Vrubel. But they had Kutuzov, and it was all over, and he had been stupid and found himself trapped, and there was no other way he could act — he couldn't squeeze the trigger and kill Khamovkhin, because he could feel the bullets of their reply he could feel his skin crawling and wincing with the impact of their bullets. The imperative of survival had established itself like a disease.

  Stairs again, then the corridor to the hall — everything done in silence, until Buckholz said, 'I have to have a coat, man.'

  They stopped, like toy men whose mechanism has run down. Galakhov half-turned, and snapped, 'Someone give him a coat.' Then he pushed Khamovkhin on, through the kitchen, out into the cold night. As if the other men were party-givers seeing off last guests, they came no further than the door. Their footsteps were loud after all the silence, and their breathing suddenly visible hi the moonlight — breathing had been almost the only sound they had heard all the way from Khamovkhin's bedroom. Galakhov let Buckholz walk ahead, so that his gun covered both of them, until they came to the garages.

  'Something powerful,' Galakhov said as Buckholz dragged open the doors. He peered into the darkness. Buckholz switched on the lights, and Galakhov flinched as if a searchlight had suddenly been turned on him.

  What was he doing here? Where were they going? He suddenly wanted to call back at Aubrey that they must supply an aircraft, in Helsinki — where was he to go? Anywhere — literally anywhere, with such a passport He quailed inwardly. Nowhere, nowhere. The moment he let Khamovkhin from his grasp, he was dead. He would have to spend the rest of his life with a rifle against the Soviet leader's spine if he wanted to stay alive. Anywhere — New York, London, Moscow, Cairo, Tunis, Rome, Rio — somewhere, a man with a gun would remove him, as soon as there was sufficient daylight between himself and the Soviet leader — Siamese twins.

  'Get in — get in.'

  Buckholz seemed surprised at the tone of his voice, then smiled grimly in satisfaction. 'Beginning to understand, uh, kid?'

  'Get in, get in!' The gun waved in Buckholz's direction.

  'OK. You're the boss.' The irony was a slap across the face.

  Galakhov pushed Khamovkhin before him into the rear seat, made him slide across, got in himself. Buckholz turned round.

  'Where to, bud?' He was almost laughing!

  'North — follow the lake, north!' Galakhov tried to snarl, but the words came out as the utterance of someone without direction. Buckholz turned away, and switched on the ignition.

  The guide opened the door, then stood aside. Gorochenko was seated at a rough table, his overcoat and fur hat on, his hands gloved. He was smiling in welcome. Vorontsyev lurched into the room, dizzy with weariness, and the old man rose anxiously from the chair, a spasm of pain on his strong face. The guide caught him, lowered Vorontsyev into another hard chair. Then he saw Gorochenko shake his head, and the door closed, leaving them alone in the room with its blacked-out window and small, shadowy lamp.

  The silence seemed interminable. Vorontsyev stared at the edge of the rough table, feeling the aching in his left leg dying to discomfort. He did not move the leg. His sock was stiff with dried blood. All the time, he sensed Gorochenko studying him.

  Then the old man said, 'You're hurt, boy. Do you want it looked at?' Vorontsyev waved his hand on the table in a small, impatient gesture. Then he looked up, his eyes burning.

  'You betrayed me!' It was intended to recriminate, to express hatred. Instead, uncontrollably, it was a wail of anguish, even though he did little more than whisper.

  'I never did that,' Gorochenko replied.

  'Natalia — Ossipov in Khabarovsk — the dead man wired with a bomb — Vassiliev on the plane — each time you were trying to kill me!' Vorontsyev, in the presence of the old man for minutes now, was unable to react in any other way. He realised that he did not know, any longer, why he was there, what imperatives had driven him to this meeting. Perhaps only some sense of dramatic climax. He had no policeman's motives left to voice.

  'I — ordered none of those, Alexei.' There was little softness in the voice, no apology. Yet there was a desire to be judged innocent. Tour wife is a whore, I agree I used her.' The judgement was almost prim rather than patriarchal. Vorontsyev ground his teeth together. 'She was intended to watch you, and report to me. I — blackmailed her…' The sense of authority that was natural to him was clear in the neutrality with which he confided his actions. 'I would ruin her career, even have her arrested if she did not go with you, and report to me, via Ossipov. It was Ossipov who used her.'

  'No, it was you. And you who killed Ilya and Maxim. They are dead.' The scorn fell dully in the room, as if something in its cramped, ill-lit confinement deadened sound. Vorontsyev had the unnerving sense that, whatever had driven him here, whatever humanity he had brought, it had been stilled in him. They were two almost disembodied voices discussing distant matters.

  'Yes, they are dead. But — you sent them to Finland Station. What they witnessed left my — colleagues, no alternative.' A sudden spurt of emotion, violent as the cutting of an artery. 'They were KGB! What do you think they would have done to me if their report had been made?'

  The contempt now evident in the voice was like a hand which had been shading the light, suddenly taken away. It stung Vorontsyev, but before he could respond, the room's deadness seemed to settle on him once more. He said, almost sullenly, 'They were just pawns in your game. Of no value. Like Vrubel.'

  'No. But Vrubel wanted to get rid of you. He could not believe he was safe from a jealous husband in SID…' A flicker of hard amusement on the lips, then: 'He killed the substitute — an actor, by the way — and tried to kill you.'

  Implacability. Vorontsyev had seen it before, but confined by the minor problems of a parent's unheeded authority. Now his father disposed of lives much as he might have upbraided him for poor marks at school.

  'Ingratiating act — father,' Vorontsyev observed, and was pleased as the old man's face winced as from the taste of lemons, hollow-cheeked suddenly. 'I'm only grateful.'

  'Only natural in a son,' Gorochenko remarked coldly. Then something in his eyes seemed to decline, a light or a fire. He said, seeming ill at ease with a softer voice, 'I always knew that you would find me. If anyone were to do it, it would be you.'

  'You had me transferred to SID — what did you expect?'

  'Don't be ungracious, boy. I agree, however. I created my own Nemesis when I did that.' The powerful shoulders sloped forward, the head stretching to him in emphasis. 'I did it to protect you.'

  'Protect me? How?' The room seemed to have lightened as a force on his frame and voice. Or perhaps it was only that Mihail Pyotravich was less oppressive as a presence.

  'The safest place in this police-ridden state of ours is — in the police. Especially in the SID. How else could I be certain that you would never have to suffer?'

  'Why? What would I have suffered?'

  A pain seemed to glance across Gorochenko's face, and he said, 'It does not matter. I wanted to protect you, and that is the way I chose to do it.'

  'Why did you do all the other things?' Vorontsyev asked, responding to some contact re-established between them. 'Why? You, of all people!'

  It was as if Gorochenko could no longer control himself. Even muscular control of his features seemed to lapse, and his mouth worked silently. One side of his face, as if he had suffered a stroke, was still, but there was a tic near the right eye. His strong, veined hands curled and uncurled on the table. When he spoke it was in a sudden shout like an exhalation of all the rage of his life.

  'Me! Why me? Boy, you are a cretin, an imbecile! Who else would it be but me?' He got up, as if obeying a summons, and paced back and forth on his side of the table. 'How many times did I bring you here — how many times? Didn't you listen to anything I said?'

  He was a pedagogue, and Vorontsyev had shrunk in his own perspective
. He had seen imitations, pale substitutes, for this anger before in Gorochenko. He had never been patient with weakness, with intellectual failure, '1917! It was all for nothing! Stalin was something from the Middle Ages, with a savage dog he let off a chain. Beria. Even now I can smell that man and what he did; like a stench in my nose! Do you know that, eh? A stench! Everything came to nothing. One prison, from one end of the Soviet Union to the other. A bloody, dark, infested prison!'

  He paused. Vorontsyev saw him venting the rage he had never expressed, not as wildly. All the years of silence, of compromise, of acceptance, had burst like a boil.

  'And I'm a policeman!' Vorontsyev said. 'You made me belong to something you hated so much. Why?'

  Gorochenko was calmer, passing from fire to ice in a moment, it seemed.

  'I have explained that to you already. Didn't you understand? I never sought political sophistication in you, Alexei. But I never expected stupidity.' The tone was hard-edged, gleaming like a blade. The very exercise of contempt seemed to calm Gorochenko. An anodyne drawn from his own superiority. Vorontsyev saw the cold, aloof ego of the man, and he understood that he had always feared Gorochenko in some way. Perhaps this was why. Some secret sense of the qualities in him that had made him into Kutuzov. 'Never mind. It doesn't matter — not that part. But, you wanted to start a war I' 'I agree,' Gorochenko said frostily.

  'Right was on your side, of course?'

  'Naturally.' Vorontsyev searched the face as if seeking some other, deeper confirmation. As if his gaze was a blow, he saw the face crumple into softer outlines. The deep lines at the side of the mouth, habitually cast in an ironic frame, became shallower.

  'Just listen to me, Alexei.' His hands were flat on the table, as if in declaration. 'I — became Kutuzov. All the years I worked for it, using my standing with the Army, with old friends who had risen high — I knew what the price would be.' Again the rasp of certainty. 'And I was prepared to pay the price of a change of leadership. I knew that the Army wanted, needed, a limited war in Europe. Scandinavia was their prize for assisting me.'

  'And it would end there?'

  Gorochenko shook his head.

  'Of course not! Nor should it. Stalin is the one who decided the revolution should end at the borders of Russia!' Again the contempt for political ignorance or incertitude.

  'How can I be here, debating with you?'

  'Because you have to know why I am the man you have searched for, why I have done the things I have done.'

  'Is that all?'

  'Of course. You will not stop me.'

  'I — have to…' Vorontsyev, as if threatened, let his hand move from the table.

  Gorochenko smiled. 'No you won't, Alexei.' His eyes hardened their gaze. 'Look at yourself. You have spent the last ten years working your way up in an organisation you have not questioned, whose nature you have largely ignored. That, and being an emotional spendthrift at the expense of a tart. You have no capacity to stop me — because you have no perception of any concerns larger than me. You came to save me. Admit it. Perhaps from my own foolishness, perhaps from your organisation. The one thing about which you are certain is that I must go on living…'

  It was the experience of being told of your contemptibility by a beloved, the revelation of despite where he thought there was love. Like Natalia's flaunted lovers. Perhaps deeper.

  He flinched away from it. Get back to the debate. He said, 'You are beaten, Mihail Pyotravich. Praporovich and Dolohov have been eliminated. How can you do anything?'

  Gorochenko looked at the telephone, the only object, other than his big hands, on the table. He said, 'There is all the power I need. One telephone call — and the change of leadership occurs today, the conquest of Scandinavia is only a matter of time.'

  'You mean to go on, then?' Vorontsyev was appalled, despite the fact that he knew Gorochenko was unyielding, determined.

  'Of course. As I said — it is a simple matter of a telephone call.'

  'I won't let you make it!'

  'How will you stop me, Alexei? You have no moral or political reason for doing so. Have you? What is it? Loyalty to the state? To the KGB?'

  'Perhaps.'

  'Foolish. You have no loyalties. Your work has been an anodyne, an escape from your personal life. You are just a bureaucrat disguised as a policeman. A clerk.'

  'Are you so certain?' He was pleading. Gorochenko despised him, and he could not bear it.

  'Yes, Alexei. I love you, you are my son. But you are not a man of vision or faith. Which is why you cannot stop me. You have nothing to outweigh the love you have for me, the debt you owe me. I don't say this in contempt, but in understanding.' He reached his hand forward across the table, but Vorontsyev snatched his own hand away from the gesture like a sulking child, shaking his head as he did so. He was near to tears, and hated the truths he had been told, the hollowness his own father had exposed; hated the way in which his ego had been assaulted, and the superiority his father had displayed. He could not admit all those things, could not.

  'Why are you doing it — why?'

  It was a distraction, and he saw that Gorochenko knew it.

  'I believe. Do you understand that? I believe in the old dream of revolution. That is why.'

  'You want power — that's all. Just greedy for power they never gave you!'

  'Stupid,' Gorochenko murmured, but two spots of colour appeared on his cheeks. 'You do not understand. To have been alive in the twenties, and to see the whole country turned into a shit-pile by Stalin and Beria and the NKVD! Terror as the normal experience for millions 1 Can't you see any of it} 43'

  Alexei?' He half-rose, then sat down heavily, as if winded. But his voice was dear as he went on. 'I swore, every time I saw an empty chair at a Politburo meeting — every time I heard of another purge, every time a new, subservient face appeared on a committee or in the Secretariat — I swore I would survive, and I swore I would do what I could, when I could. I have waited a very long time. But now it will be done, for all those who died.' He clenched his fist. 'The people were at his throat when the Fascists invaded Russia! He was almost finished!' His voice cracked, then, more calmly: 'It has taken me another thirty years. A long time.'

  'Stalin died thirty years ago.'

  'What he did to weaken the Soviet Union did not die, Alexei. Now we have detente, another way of dying slowly.'

  Vorontsyev was appalled. He seemed unable to absorb the successive shocks of his father's obsessive determination. None of the previous revelations immunised him against those which followed. It was a drill breaking through to the living nerve each time.

  'You're mad.' Gorochenko smiled. Vorontsyev felt rage boil in him at the continuing superiority that smile symbolised. He drew his gun, and it lay heavy and black on the edge of the table. Gorochenko looked at it unflinchingly. 'I'm going to stop you. I'm arresting you.' Then he added, lashing out like a child: 'And you're not my father!'

  Gorochenko rubbed at his cheek, as if the blow had been a physical one. He looked at his watch.

  'I have only a little time left to wait. And you are not going to arrest me.' He seemed so certain, of everything.

  'I am! I am! You're a traitor! My father — my real father — would have hated you for this!'

  Gorochenko groaned, and passed a hand across his face. But it was as if he was afraid of something in himself, rather than of the rejection Vorontsyev proffered.

  'No, he would not, Alexei.'

  'He would, he would!' Vorontsyev was no longer conscious of his grotesque approximation to the voice and manner of a child. He crowed: 'My father was a hero! He would have despised you for what you're doing. You're a traitor!' The cliches comforted and strengthened him. They gave him a sense of existence to some purpose. An armour against Gorochenko's words.

  'Alexei!' It was a command. Vorontsyev watched him, shamefaced. Gorochenko seemed engaged in some silent debate, then to relent to some inner decision. 'Very well,' he said. 'Very well. I swore — perhaps an
oath as the one I took every day of the Stalin years — never to tell you this. But I will.'

  'What? More bogeymen?' Vorontsyev sneered.

  'If you like.' The old man's face was ancient now, filled with bitter wisdom. He reached into a breast pocket. Vorontsyev watched the hand carefully. It came out holding a letter — an old, stained letter with fluff in the creases where it had been folded for years.

  'Read this,' Gorochenko said carefully. 'It's from your father.'

  'Where is he now?9 Aubrey flipped the transmitter's switch, and heard the crackle of the radio in the spotter helicopter.

  'A couple of miles outside Heinola, still moving fast.'

  'You're experiencing no difficulty in keeping track of him 'None at all, sir.' Philipson was up in the Finnish Police helicopter which had picked up the fleeing Volvo less than ten miles north-east of Lahti only minutes before. The helicopter had been based in Lahti — a piece of good fortune for which Aubrey was grateful. He glanced at his own map.

  'Where can he go when he gets there?'

  'North again.'

  'Very well. Alert ground units — talk direct to the Police Chief via their channel. No interference.' Aubrey switched the set to receive, and turned round in the operator's swivel chair to face Anders. He appeared like an abandoned, betrayed child, or a worried parent. Aubrey could not decide which, but his concern for Buckholz was evident.

  Anders was staring at the set. 'You want to try Moscow again, sir?'

  'Not after the last little snub, thank you, Anders. If Chairman Andropov is unavailable, he will remain so. Hell tell us soon enough if he's succeeded in finding Gorochenko.'

  'He hasn't succeeded, has he?'