Stalin's hammer:Rome aot-4

by John Birmingham

  “One of our best men, Talbot,” corrected Walker. “He was a shared asset.”

  “I do note your unfortunate use of the past tense,” said Harry.

  Talbot Carstairs swept up the small pile of tungsten shavings, carefully placing them back in the envelope.

  “A shared asset, yes, yes,” he conceded. “One of your people, actually, Colonel.”

  “Sorry? You mean from the Twenty-second SAS, or another uptimer?”

  Carstairs nodded at the last option. “Ivanov, the Russian. You know of him, I assume? One of your special commando Johnnies.”

  “We’ve met,” said Harry. “A long time ago now. Just after the war.”

  He searched his memories of the encounter. Ivanov, as he recalled, was looking for SAS men, either uptime or contemporary, to freelance inside the USSR. Harry had sent him off with nothing but his best wishes.

  “Well, he was supposed to meet Sobeskaia this evening, over in the Soviet sector,” Carstairs went on. “At a hotel called the Albergo Grimaldi, where Sobeskaia was staying. But it’s all gone rather pear-shaped, I’m afraid. We don’t know anything about what’s happened to Ivanov other than that there’s been some gunplay out there.”

  “And bombs going off,” added Walker as he took up the explanation. “We put him together with one of our local contacts. A guy who could get him over the Wall and back.”

  “Mafia,” said Harry. It wasn’t a question.

  “They love their freedom and their country as much as the next guy,” said Walker. “Anyway, Ivanov was just supposed to meet with Sobeskaia. Shake him down for some information, see what was up with this shit …” He waved a hand toward the small envelope in front of Carstairs.

  “But the meet-up went wrong,” surmised Harry.

  “Never even happened. This Sobeskaia asshole sent his girlfriend to the first contact. This is the broad who got the shavings to us-who we’re pretty sure is dead now, or as good as. He’s fucking her, so he trusts her. They’re looking to get out from behind the Wall. Figured they could buy a ticket with a few twirls of shredded tungsten.

  “Anyway, we’ve got no real-time link to Ivanov. His presence there is deniable. But we’ve got other sources over in the Soviet sector telling us there’s been a heap of gunfire, some grenades going off, all of it in the vicinity of the Grimaldi. Sovs are saying it’s just fireworks. But the word on Sobeskaia’s girlfriend is good, we reckon. He sent her to the meet as a decoy. Probably knew it was a fucking washout.”

  “Charming. And Sobeskaia?”

  At this, Carstairs appeared to be trying to suck the fillings out of his back teeth, while Walker merely grimaced. The SIS man spoke first.

  “He’s turned up here in South Rome, at the same cocktail party you’re due to attend this evening. He arrived about forty minutes ago, although it seems he’s been over in our sector for a day already. We now suspect that the rotter never intended to meet with Ivanov. He sent his mistress into a trap while he hid out here, then ran for it, turning up at our shindig tonight. Uninvited. Unexpected, of course. But he is a senior member of the Soviet trade delegation, so he gained access. He has been hanging off the arm of the ambassador ever since, demanding to meet with you. Naturally, the caterers are going spare because now the party’s absolutely swarming with security men. Ours, theirs, and God only knows who else.”

  Harry rubbed his eyes, which were throbbing with the start of a tension headache.

  “I don’t suppose he said why?”

  “To defect. To you. Personally.”

  Harry nodded slowly as he made an effort to control the adrenaline surge. He felt dizzy with hunger, and perhaps even a little giddy from the drink earlier. Not the best of shape to find oneself in at the current impasse.

  “And I imagine there’s some reason why you haven’t just walked him out the door and into a car?”

  Walker smiled. “Yeah. It’s like Talbot says. About ten minutes after Sobeskaia showed up at Babington’s, an NKVD snatch team arrived. All of them with bona fide invites. Junior trade envoys, second assistant cultural attaches-that sort of crap. And all of them now circling our guy like fucking bull sharks. I think that’s why he wants you in there, Harry. You’re a two-for-one deal: an SAS officer and, now and forever, an heir to the throne. He figures they won’t dare throw down on him while you’re standing there. And if they do, what the hell-you’re just the sort of guy who’ll jump in and take a bullet for him.”

  “The hell I will,” Harry retorted. “And I’m no more an heir to the throne now than you. And I haven’t even had dinner yet.”

  Carstairs shook his head. “I’m sure, Colonel Windsor,” he said, “that just like the gossip rags who follow your every move, Mr. Sobeskaia is either unaware or unimpressed by the Succession Act of 1949 and subsequent amendments. As far as he is concerned, you are an heir to the British throne, here and in the future. He wants to defect to you, and only to you. As for dinner, we all missed out, but you can eat when you get there. I hear the shrimp cocktail is excellent.”

  Talbot Carstairs smiled weakly. His second attempt at wit for the evening.

  Never a good sign.

  7

  North Rome (Soviet sector)

  After an hour of crawling, running, waiting, and crawling some more, Pavel Ivanov found himself back in the narrow, subterranean storeroom. He recognized none of the tunnels or crawl spaces through which Franco had just led them, but when they pushed through the heavy gray blankets, there was no mistaking the shelves piled high with terra-cotta jars and bottled preserves.

  He’d kept his own counsel following the short battle with the NKVD, preferring to have his issues with the priest out when they were not fleeing pursuit. But even now the opportunity wouldn’t arise. Once out of the underground labyrinth, the Furedi siblings exchanged a few whispered words before Marius made the sign of the cross over his brother and disappeared back through the blankets and into the tunnels. Franco grabbed Ivanov by the elbow and drew him upstairs.

  “You must move now, Russian.”

  Biting back a curse, he followed, stowing his MP5K. They hurried up the stairs, returning to the maze of cramped corridors that seemed to run through a dozen or more apartment buildings. Nobody paid them any notice. Not the old men he saw smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and playing cards on a front stoop. Not the mamas and nonnas who met at the junction of two well-trafficked hallways to exchange limp bundles of green vegetables. Not the children who raced up and down, lost in some game involving laughter and mock gunplay and squealed Russian curses.

  In some ways, he thought, the war, the Transition, the Communist occupation, the wrenching destruction of the twentieth century’s settled history-none of it had much affected the day-to-day life of Franco Furedi’s people. The mafia soldier had probably passed through here dozens of times in the past twenty years covered in filth and blood. And never once did anyone see anything. He wondered how long their hard-bitten omerta would last under interrogation by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs-the NKVD. Men and women who would remain obdurately close-mouthed while they themselves were being tortured often became babbling torrents of information by the time you had snipped the second or third finger from their child’s hand. In Ivanov’s personal experience, and to his unutterable shame, he knew that in especially masculine societies like this one, you could move the whole process along with greater speed by taking the tiny manhood from a captive’s favored son. (Or even just the tip, if you were a soft-hearted type, like him.) It always made for terrible reprisals later on, though.

  When he was thoroughly lost, in both reality and memory, Franco surprised him by turning off the ground-level passageway and heading up a staircase. They passed by open doors through which the Russian caught glimpses of family life in this ancient slum. Small rooms crowded with many children and old people, but very few men of working age. He smelled tomatoes cooking and garlic being fried, scents strong enough to overwhelm the mold and rot and the rank,
barnyard odor of unwashed, tightly compressed humanity. There was little sign of the future forcing its way into this place. Even the cheap, crudely made consumer goods that had lately been pouring out of the Soviet slave factories into the West were nowhere in evidence.

  After some more twists and turns, Franco put a finger to his lips, signaling for Ivanov to be quiet, as he pushed through a closed door on the top floor of a tenement that looked like it had been occupied by Rome’s poorest workers since Leonardo was a boy. There were fewer people up here, Ivanov realized. In fact, they hadn’t seen anyone on the stairs or moving about the hallway for the last few minutes. He followed Furedi into the tiny apartment, which was empty save for a couple of thin, stained mattresses and the detritus of what looked like US Meals Ready to Eat. The former Spetsnaz officer recognized the signs of a lay-up point. He also recognized the voice tube system as soon as Franco used it to talk to yet another hidden accomplice.

  Curiosity, bordering on compulsion, tried to draw Ivanov over to the one grimy window to see if he might establish their location, but training and experience kept him rooted to his spot in the dark, just inside the door. He was still beholden to his guide to lead him to safety.

  “Si, lo sara,” the Italian said quietly before closing the cap on the speaking tube. He then gestured for Ivanov to follow him cautiously to the window, where they took up positions on either side.

  “Look, but be careful,” said Franco, jutting his chin out in the direction of the street. The old lace curtain was faded and rotting, allowing Ivanov to put one eye up to a moth-eaten hole, rather than having to twitch the fabric aside.

  He was surprised to find they had a view overlooking the hotel where he was supposed to have met his contact. Sobeskaia, the businessman. The narrow street outside was blocked by an ambulance, an eight-wheeled BTR-60 armored car, and three long black sedans-prewar Mercedeses, by the look of them, a favorite of the NKVD for the fear they inspired. The Gestapo had often arrived in the middle of the night in exactly these models.

  As he watched, medics carried a body out of the hotel on a stretcher. The corpse was covered in a bloodstained sheet. “Our man?” he asked simply.

  “No,” said Franco. “Probably his mistress. Killed by your Skarov, according to our people in the Albergo. We do not know what happened to this Sobeskaia. But we are looking for him. We will find him.”

  Ivanov felt himself adrift on a dark sea. Who the fuck were these people of Furedi’s in the hotel? He wondered whether his OSS controllers on the other side of the Wall knew what had happened yet. The Russian had no way of contacting them while he was in the field. This was a deniable operation, after all. His long history of freelance action against Moscow would lend credibility to the inevitable protests that he was a rogue actor, should he be caught. God knows, there were enough of them among the ten thousand uptimers marooned here a decade ago. But Ivanov also knew that Rome seethed with spies, and it was unlikely that he would have been let loose without hidden overwatch of some sort. Overwatch probably had no idea where Sobeskaia was either, but they would already know the mission was a washout.

  Not for the first time, Ivanov had to swallow his frustration at the primitive methods of his contemporary allies. For all the great leaps in technology since the Transition, in many ways he was no better equipped than an agent smuggled into Berlin or Prague in his original time.

  Franco waved one hand down at the street, where Ivanov could see a few sturdy old couples taking their evening stroll in defiance of the occupiers’ best efforts to intimidate them. Children ran about as well. Perhaps the very ones they had passed earlier. They certainly seemed to be playing the same game.

  “We will find Sobeskaia,” Franco repeated. “Everyone looks for him now.”

  Resentment and rage warred within Ivanov, and he struggled to maintain his detachment. The mission was a scrub. It had been blown somehow, and now Skarov, his oldest surviving nemesis, was scouring the city for him. Or at least the portion of it known as North Rome. It was time to accept defeat and tactically withdraw.

  He was about to step back from the window when he saw Beria’s chief spy catcher emerge from the hotel. The sight of the tall, shaven-headed NKVD killer brought forth a galvanic, almost visceral response. He was a powerfully built man, like Ivanov, but high cheekbones and sunken eyes gave him a cadaverous look and accounted for his nickname within their closed and dangerous world: the Skull.

  At the sight of his death’s-head visage, rage flared like hot flames, washing away Ivanov’s impatience and unhappiness with the way this operation had gone. Rage, intemperate and hard-favored, threatened to blind him as he stood there at the window in the gloom of the evening.

  Skarov, dressed in black from his expensive, hand-stitched steel-capped shoes, to the knee-length leather coat that swirled about him like a cape. Skarov his nemesis-just a trigger pull away. He was a family man when not on duty, a dedicated father who played with his two boys and only daughter, who never strayed from his wife of eighteen years. However, as a Guardian of the Correct Future, Colonel-General Alexi Skarov’s duties often took him away from home and hearth, leaving his family to fend for themselves. Ivanov still had the souvenir from his visit to their dacha, nearly two years after Vendulka had met her end at Skarov’s hands.

  As his eyes remained fixed on the Skull, he fondled the souvenir, which he kept in a small pouch hung around his neck. Ivanov felt the giddy urge to laugh again. He coughed and clamped it down.

  “Come, we must go,” said Franco. He tugged firmly at Ivanov’s elbow.

  But the Russian would not move. He stood as though rooted to the floor, axes in his eyes, staring at the Skull. He could feel his very organs seething and slithering over each other inside him.

  The coat. That long black atrocity. He had worn it as a provocation. He had worn it because he knew they would be meeting somewhere today.

  Dying would not be hard, Ivanov thought. I could die content tonight, if only I could take Skarov with me.

  Ivanov had to clench his fists to stop himself from reaching into his weapons satchel and retrieving the submachine gun. Besides, he was too far away. As cathartic as it would’ve been to empty a whole magazine down into the street, the chances of killing or even hitting Skarov from this distance were not good. Not without killing a number of innocents. The bastard probably wore a ballistic vest in any case.

  “Now …”

  The Roman dug a thumb into his elbow joint, pulling Ivanov out of his dark reverie with a spike of electric pain that ran up his arm and into his shoulder.

  “We must go now. More of them are coming.”

  As he spoke, two heavy trucks, Ural-375 troop movers, lumbered around the corner and slowly edged their way forward through the narrow confines of the ancient cobblestoned back street, to join the fleet of official vehicles outside the Albergo Grimaldi. The massive six-wheeled trucks muscled their way past the pedestrians, wheels up on the paving stones of the footpath, forcing the old men and women taking passeggiatto to back themselves up against a wall or climb the front steps of the nearest apartment building to avoid being crushed. Even the swarms of children, who had braved slaps and occasional kicks from the uniformed NKVD guards at the hotel, kept their distance from the trucks. Every day someone in this city died under their wheels.

  Franco dragged him away from the window before the reinforcements jumped out of the rear. Someone knocked at the door, softly, but following the mafia man’s lead, Ivanov did not reach for his weapon. The door opened a crack and an old woman put her head around. When she saw them, she offered up a heavy cloth bag before retreating back out into the hallway.

  “We change now,” Franco ordered, stripping off his once-gray municipal worker’s uniform.

  Ivanov followed his example, not bothering to undo any buttons, just ripping the soiled overalls open and stepping out of them. Franco tossed him a cold, wet hand towel, which he used to wipe off the worst of the filth. They had no time to clean t
hemselves properly, but that probably wouldn’t matter. With the power supply so unpredictable, and basic necessities like soap often hard to come by, the streets of Occupied Rome were not the freshest-smelling thoroughfares down which he had ever wandered.

  They climbed into their new clothes as quickly as they could-although they weren’t exactly “new,” thought Ivanov, as he pulled on a pair of pants roughly patched together from stiff, paint-dappled canvas. One leg was shorter than the other. A threadbare shirt lacked buttons and sported apparently indelible sweat stains under the arms. The sleeves were so tight he feared to rip them if he flexed his hands. A once-black jacket, gone dark gray with age, started to tear at the seams as he tried to get it over his massive shoulders.

  “This will not do,” he said, deciding the moment had come to take control of the operation. Furedi and his comrades had agreed to get him in and out, but they had also agreed to put him together with Sobeskaia. That wasn’t going to happen now, and he had to question whether their exit plan was also shot.

  Franco, who looked much more at home in his worn-out vagrant’s apparel, took umbrage. “It is all these people have, Russian. The Communists strangle them. Food, clothing, medicine for the old people and the children, they have none of it …”

  “And I am grateful for the help. But this will not work. I will stand out in these clothes. Draw attention. We need another option.”

  “I told you, my people do not-”

  Ivanov cut him off. “Your people have done enough,” he said, adding, “I would not ask more of them”-lest the Roman take offense at his ingratitude. “But dressed like this, we’re not going back down underground, are we?”

  “Not far. Just a few streets away. Then we walk through the night markets. Communist markets-but they allow the farmers to sell produce there once a week. Very crowded, it will be good cover. And farm people,” he said, backhanding the Russian in the chest, “they do not dress for church at the market.”