Stalin's hammer:Rome aot-4

by John Birmingham

  It was rare for Harry to find himself contemplating uptime these days. Temporal theory had been taken out of the hands of science-fiction writers and placed in the care of well-funded faculties at universities like Berkeley and Oxford. The currently accepted consensus was that the future he had come from still existed. But so did the alternate future that Dr. Manning Pope had created aboard the Nagoya by exiling them all here. And an infinite number of other futures as well.

  That was why Harry, along with most sensible people, had stopped bothering to worry about such things. There was no point, unless you were Albert Einstein or Stephen J. Hawking-who was still only eleven years old and studying with the great physicist in California, while receiving gene therapy for the motor-neuron disease that had not even manifested itself yet within his tiny frame.

  Yes, best not to bother oneself with the infinite fucking Rubik’s Cube of chance and probability that the Transition has brought into the world. Or this one, anyway.

  He took a long swallow from the prosecco, which he enjoyed as much as he ever had any drink back up in the twenty-first. Possibly more so. Life here was easier for Harry Windsor than it had been at home. Even something as simple as a date with Duffy-and they were definitely dating-involved much less farting around and unpleasantness with the press than he had ever managed with Pippa back up when.

  “Still waiting,” said Julia.

  “Sorry … Misspent youth. It catches up with a fellow, you know. I killed a lot of brain cells in my twenties.”

  “We all did. But come on, really. You invited me to Rome. Is this going to be it for us-a quick dinner and a shag-or is there any chance you’ll get away from whatever villainy you’re up to this week? I don’t believe for a moment you’re only here for that ridiculous film or the trade talks.”

  The waiter returned with a plate on which sat a single large mushroom, steaming, lightly sheened with oil, garnished with shreds of deep green flat-leaf parsley, and smelling strongly of truffles. He sliced it in half before leaving them to their appetizer. The restaurant was full now, the buzzing crowd split evenly between locals and foreigners, mostly Americans and Brits, just like them.

  “The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is hardly villainy,” Harry said. “It’d have to be a shitload more interesting to qualify as that … And I am actually doing my bit for the film,” he added, almost apologetically. “It’s a big deal for Pinewood, and expected to earn quite a few quid for them, and the tax man after he takes his considerable cut. But you guess right-I have a full dance card at GATT. Mostly as a glorified greeter for the embassy. Half a dozen wretched fucking cocktail parties and dinners where I get to tell a few war stories, listen to lots more, and do whatever Her Majesty my young grandmother’s government asks of me to justify my rather generous income from the civil list.” He paused for a second. “I’m afraid I have one on later tonight, in fact.”

  Duffy ignored the admission that they wouldn’t be seeing each other later. “Regimental pay not good enough for you?” she asked as she carved off a small wedge of soft, perfectly braised mushroom. “Lost it all on fast women and slow horses?”

  “Something like that,” said Harry. “But I’m staying on for a couple of days after the gabfest wraps up. I thought we might take a drive down to the Amalfi coast, have a few days down there? Presumptuous of me, I know, but I presume you can get away?”

  Julia waved off any problems with an airy flick of one hand. The candlelight in the restaurant sparkled and flared in a couple of bejeweled rings, but it was the scars on the back of her hand that stood out. And the calluses on her knuckles and palm. They looked a lot like Harry’s scars.

  She no longer worked as an embedded combat reporter. They didn’t have them here, and even if they did, Julia Duffy would not have needed to work. She had invested wisely after the Transition and was now a very wealthy woman. The few freelance commissions she took on these days, she did for her own amusement and interest. She had found at war’s end, that she was a woman who bored easily. Her scars, like Harry’s own, she had collected on battlefields long past, and off in the long-lost future.

  “Pfft,” she scoffed. “Presume away. I only came out here to catch up with you. It’s been a while, Harry.”

  Julia spoke these last words with just a hint of reproach. But he knew her well enough to understand that much of that reproach was meant for her alone.

  “I’d love to get away for a couple of days with you,” she continued. “I sometimes find … I don’t know … Do you ever find yourself getting tired of them?”

  She let her eyes wander around the room. He assumed she meant the temps. And yes, he did get tired of them. Of their whole world, in fact.

  “Those girls I was working with this afternoon-and they really were girls in so many ways, not women. I’m mentoring them. That’s what happens when you get a bit long in the tooth to do anything really awesome for yourself anymore. You teach others to be awesome. Anyway, they’re great girls, and tough as nuts, even though they got a bit giggly around you. The smaller one with the dark hair, Jessica, reminds me a lot of Roseanna. They both mean well, and they’re like total zealots and converts to the cause, so they’re never going to grief you with any of that tiresome bullshit the temps still go on with.”

  She sighed.

  “But sometimes I just want to run away back to the twenty-first century. To the real modern world. And just hang out with people who don’t make every fucking minute of the day such a fucking effort.”

  Harry dabbed at his lips with a napkin. He had finished his half of the mushroom and pushed his plate away from him a little.

  “It sounds like you really need to get to the beach,” he said.

  “I do. So yes, let’s do that. I was going to file a few travel pieces while I was here-write the whole trip off for tax purposes, on general principles. But you know what? I think I might just take a couple of days to be a tourist again. I can wait for you.”

  Another waiter arrived to clear their plates, while a third approached with a wine list under his arm. Harry quickly negotiated a bottle of pinot grigio that everyone agreed would suit both of their mains before shooing away all of the attendants. Life as a standby royal, and later as an army officer, had at least polished up his attendant-shooing chops.

  “That sounds like an excellent idea, Jules. Fucking smashing idea actually,” he declared. “I wish I could do the same and just swan off this week. But I’m stuck here doing my party-princess routine while GATT’s still on. They’ve left me a couple of hours free at lunch two days from now. Would you like to catch up then?”

  Before she could answer, a frown furrowed her eyebrows. Harry looked back over his shoulder to whatever had caught her eye and found the senior of his two bodyguards approaching with a note in his hand. Messengers had also appeared for the MI6 and OSS station chiefs.

  4

  North Rome (Soviet sector)

  They made the relative safety of the sewer tunnels a bare minute ahead of their pursuers. Ivanov quickly judged there to be at least a platoon of NKVD paramilitaries coming after them. The storm troopers forced entry into the sewer system by the crude but effective method of blowing up a drainage grate.

  “Move!” he’d yelled at Franco when he heard the satchel charges thud and clang on the iron bars.

  His guide needed no prompting. He was already heading around the nearest bend, splashing up great fantails of foul-smelling black water and scattering rats before him. Ivanov followed, his ears ringing as gunfire crashed out, cutting off the sound of a woman’s screams.

  What just happened?

  He had been tasked to contact a Russian man, Sobeskaia-a factory owner of some sort, someone important enough to be in town for the GATT conference-and to establish his bona fides as an ongoing source. Was the whole meeting a trap? They were supposed to make first contact with this man Sobeskaia’s mistress at the back of the hotel where the couple were staying. Had it been a trap?

  Pos
sibly not, since the NKVD had sprung it well before he arrived. Perhaps something had gone wrong at their end too. As Ivanov fled headlong into the darkness of the buried levels of eternal Rome, he did not much care. What mattered now was getting the hell out.

  He powered up his NVGs, using infrared this time, and at once he could see that Furedi had done so too. Nor had the Italian needed to be told not to use the LLAMPS setting. If they stayed at this level, with some light filtering down from above, the heat signatures of the men chasing them would stand out starkly.

  He heard shouts and the thudding of boots dropping into the drain behind them as Franco steered them around another bend, gesturing furiously for Ivanov to follow. He gave the impression of a man who knew where he was headed. That was good, because Ivanov had no fucking idea. The angry discordance of voices soon resolved itself into the harsh, stentorian barking of one man. A voice Ivanov recognized immediately.

  Skarov.

  The shock of realization was almost great enough to stop him in his tracks, but the crack of a single pistol shot, followed by Skarov’s curse, and two more shots immediately afterward pushed him on. Ivanov bet that somebody had disobeyed an order to hold fire, and the NKVD spy catcher had summarily executed him.

  He bit down on a curse as his head bumped and grazed the rough brick ceiling of the drainage pipe. Stars bloomed behind his eyes and a stinging pain told him he’d opened up his scalp. It would need disinfecting. The passage narrowed around them. Franco was already bent over double in front of him. To keep up, the much larger Russian man was forced to crouch low and duckwalk as quickly as he could. He concentrated on making as little noise as possible, on not stomping on the wet bricks as he hurried along but rather pushing himself forward like an ice-skater accelerating across a frozen lake. A couple of body lengths ahead, Franco passed through the underground world like a deeper shadow on the darkness, leaving no trace at all. His field craft was exceptional, thought Ivanov. For a petty criminal, he would have made a good special forces scout.

  This way, the Roman gestured, before diving into a pipe that opened into their larger conduit at hip level. Ivanov followed the slightly blurred, cherry-colored figure without hesitation. The shouting behind them had died down but not because Skarov and his men had given up. They were listening and waiting.

  The pipe was slimy and smelled awful in a way that was slightly different from the usual miasma of the sewers. Even with the night-vision goggles, visibility contracted to almost nothing. Ivanov could feel the passage narrowing around his shoulders, but he forced himself forward anyway, trusting in Furedi to get them away. He could feel soft, obscene shapes and lumps of organic matter under his hands, but there was no way of telling what they were.

  A barked command to give themselves up reached out from somewhere behind, but it was not followed by shots or the sudden flooding brilliance of spotlights.

  He forced himself forward by inches.

  The crawl through this section was long enough that Ivanov had time to ponder the presence of his old nemesis behind him. Better that than to dwell on the increasingly cramped and claustrophobic surroundings.

  Alexi Skarov it was who had driven him from the Rodina, where whole armies of soldiers and spies had proven themselves unable to lay hands on Pavel Ivanov during the late 1940s. As he ghosted through the heart of Stalin’s vast charnel house, Ivanov had lit the fires of half a dozen Chechnyas and Georgias. He had inflamed the murderous passions of jihadists, separatists, and insurgents, along with mere criminals and gang lords. With these efforts he piled up a mountain of corpses and bled out whole divisions of the Red Army, spreading death and chaos from the occupied wastelands of Japan, through Siberia, down into Afghanistan and even once within the walls of the Kremlin itself.

  He had so infuriated Lavrenty Beria that the poison dwarf had offered not just a huge monetary reward for his capture but the precious freedom of real choice to any man who delivered Ivanov before him. Millions of roubles hung like the sword of Damocles above his head, but also the prospect of freedom to anyone who betrayed him. Deliver Pavel Ivanov into the hands of the NKVD, promised Beria, and not a finger would be raised against you should you wish to take your reward and leave for the so-called “free world.”

  It was quite a compliment, in a way. He had really pissed them off.

  But material reward was not Skarov’s motivation. The demon in the tunnels behind Ivanov now was much more dangerous than any bounty hunter or freedom seeker. Alexandr Dmitry Skarov was Stalin’s executioner-in-chief. He hunted Ivanov not for money or freedom but because for him it was the right thing to do. Skarov was a true believer in the revolution. And he would spill oceans of blood to prove that belief and to secure the people from the mistakes of any false history revealed by the Transition. Or the Emergence, as it was generally known on this side of the Atlantic. To Stalin, to Skarov, to millions of other believers, the arrival of the uptimers, the way they had torn the settled order of events into bloody shreds, was proof positive that the forces of history revealed by the dialectic were undeniable. The revolution could not fail, and so it had not. Time had wrenched itself apart to set things right.

  They were fucking crazy, Ivanov knew. But crazy dangerous.

  A giggle slipped from his lips, which he stifled into a snort. It was possible, Ivanov admitted in the quiet moments of rare solitude, that he might well be a little bit insane himself. Just possibly.

  He shook it off.

  Skarov had hunted him without relent, killing Vendulka and the rest of his original team one by one over the years until Ivanov was all that was left. He recruited others-there were always others and Ivanov knew what to promise them, even if the words rang increasingly hollow. They died as well, and Skarov had driven him from Russia, then from all her conquests. Nowadays, Ivanov was only able to snipe at the Communists from the edges of their continental gulag, darting in and out of cities like Rome, which lay on the border with the free world. And now here Skarov was, on the very borders of the evil empire, reaching out into the free world to try to lay hands on him again.

  Strange that he had lasted this long. He’d expected to die in Siberia with his Cossack allies years ago. If he were a religious man, he might’ve believed there was some sort of plan. But there wasn’t, he had decided long ago. There was only chaos, and the mission.

  The tightly constricted crawl space conjured up images of Skarov embracing him and squeezing and squeezing until the last breath was gone from his body. Just as Ivanov feared he would not be able to squeeze through, he felt Franco’s hands grip his shoulders with the strength of iron claws, pulling him forward until he popped out of the confined space like a cork. Tumbling down a curved slope of old worn cobblestones, he fetched up in a puddle of decomposing meat and vegetable matter.

  “We are below the markets here,” Franco said in a low voice. For an instant, Ivanov latched onto the hope that they had somehow passed beneath the Wall and into the NATO-controlled part of the city. Or at least underneath it. But Furedi quickly killed that hope.

  “Not the People’s Market. My people’s market.” The mafia scout was grinning, as though he had just told one of the funnier jokes Ivanov should expect to hear in his life.

  Ah, thought the Russian, a black market. An actual undeclared marketplace, where food and medicine and other goods smuggled in from the free south by the Trimbole family could be sold for massive profits, or sometimes simply distributed to secure the loyalty of those whose hunger had been eased. There was a reason the OSS preferred to work through operators like Franco and his kind on this side of the Wall. This was their world and their people. They were always going to be the A-Team here.

  Looking around them, Ivanov found himself in a stone chamber no bigger than a child’s bedroom. Steel grates barred three gaping holes underfoot. They looked like ancient wells, with iron bars rather than surrounding walls to prevent anyone’s falling in. His eyes watered with the stench of rotting food. It was difficult, with the c
ombat goggles set to infrared, to pick out individual items from the septic sludge under the tread of his boots. But here and there he could see a lettuce leaf hanging limp over an iron bar, crushed eggshells, or the splintered bones of what looked like a leg of lamb. Looking upward, Ivanov discerned the outline of what appeared to be two large steel plates just above them, close enough to reach out and touch.

  “A storeroom up there,” explained Franco. “We smuggle supplies in there and other places. We give the people a good price. Good for us and good for them. Good enough that they look after us. Especially now. Come.”

  Ivanov followed him to a set of steel rungs buried in the rock face. They climbed quickly. Franco used his shoulders at the top of the improvised stepladder to force open a heavy wooden shutter. Ivanov had not seen it in the gloom. They crawled up and out into a room that was obviously at street level. Windows, opaque with dust, admitted the last dying filaments of daylight. The Russian could smell faint traces of coffee, cured meat, and cheese, but the room was as bare as the abandoned church in which they had holed up earlier. Franco secured the wooden cellar door with a thick iron latch. It had obviously been left open for him, and Ivanov began to wonder at just how much pre-op planning La Cosa Nostra had done for what was supposed to be a simple contract job. An escort mission.