In a couple of minutes I would be swallowed, lost. The Akvarium was rumored to be so labyrinthine, and internal access so heavily restricted, that whole sections of it remained mysterious even to the people who lived and worked there. It was an entirely self-contained and self-sustaining state within a state: water, electricity, food, living quarters, weapons, manpower—and even, General King had said, one of Russia’s three cheget nuclear briefcases, a key command and control component of the Kremlin’s Strategic Nuclear Forces. Once I was inside the Akvarium, it would be the GRU calling the shots, and no one else.
I ran my hands through the day sack. I needed a miracle. I felt for anything I could use as a weapon or to force a lock. My right hand closed around a small can of aerosol deodorant in the wash bag, my left around the barrel of a plastic lighter. I thrust them both into my jacket pockets.
The traffic cutting across us from southeast-bound Leningradsky Avenue stopped. The lights turned green. But before we could move, the front passenger door opened and a heavily built man with a buzz cut climbed in and sat next to the driver. He turned and smiled through the reinforced glass. I looked around. The Range Rover had pulled in behind us. They must have been waiting to see where I was heading. Now they’d decided to spring the trap.
We inched forward. I looked at the driver and then past him, out the left-hand window, scanning the road for signs of more operators. The car lurched. And then my ears filled with the slip-shunt bang-crack of metal colliding, crunching, smashing.
The taxi next to us began to move, veering across the intersection. It was rolling, lifting. My head tilted. The winter sky slipped away. I could see the cab’s ceiling. Then the right-hand window. A child waiting to cross the road was standing on his head, screaming, but his feet were on the ground. Then the gray clouds were underneath us. The driver was turning, his phone suspended, dancing in front of him. My face against the Plexiglas.
We were rolling.
Silence.
And then a deafening wrench-roar of hard energy compressed into a decelerated pop of pulverized glass imploding around me. Blood in my mouth. My eyes. The world snapped out of slow motion and spun in crazy corkscrews until my head found asphalt and the white winter sun turned black.
Shouting.
Pain.
And then white light and focus.
I was lying on my back in the middle of the intersection. I turned my head and spat the remains of a tooth on the frozen ground. I sat up. The world rocked, faded. I braced, elbows on the ground, and the darkness ebbed away. I was half in the taxi, half on the road. The car was upturned, turtlelike. There was no smoke. There had been no blast. I pushed myself clear of the wreckage and onto all fours. The driver was dead, neck snapped, nose flattened in a red smear across his face. The goon next to him hung from his seat belt, unresponsive.
The woman who’d been in the taxi next to mine weaved across the road, holding her hands to her head. A brand-new Mercedes, hood wrecked, steam pouring from the engine, had come to a halt in front of her. Its driver clambered clear of the airbags and jumped out of the passenger side away from me—five-eleven, athletic, head down and sprinting for safety. The Merc had run the red light and plowed straight into my cab. I hadn’t been blown up: I’d been T-boned.
I tried to stand. My right leg was injured. The bullet wounds in my thigh and shoulder had torn. As I found my feet, the Range Rover swerved around me. The doors opened. Two men stepped out, dressed in black fatigues and respirators, AKS carbines in their shoulders. I moved back, gripped with pain, nausea. Another Range Rover screeched to a halt, spilling more men onto the street. I retreated farther. The front passenger of the second Range Rover stepped into view. Leather shoes, black wool coat, light build—and a gash splayed across his right temple: Dr. Leonid Avilov, the GRU officer who’d hounded me from the ship, through the tunnels and all the way to Moscow.
He moved toward me, fast. I staggered backward, covered on both sides by shooters.
“I didn’t expect to find you in Paris,” he said, closing on me.
I tried to take another step back, but I was stopped by the low stone parapet guarding against the steep drop onto the highway below. He drew a syringe from his coat. I put my hands into my pockets and glanced over the side, counting under my breath, calculating speed, distance. He was close enough now that I could smell his aftershave.
“You see, I always thought we would meet here in Moscow.” He removed the cap from the needle.
Now.
With one movement I brought both my hands up to his face, right thumb on the aerosol, left thumb sparking the flint of the lighter. A short burst of yellow-blue flame expanded into his eyes. He dropped the syringe, screaming. I bent over backward, grabbing his wrist as I went, and let my feet go from under me. My spine arced over the wall, skimmed by a volley of shots. Avilov’s hip caught on the parapet. I held fast. The wound in my shoulder ripped further; the black coat billowed out above me. I let go.
One sickening second of free-fall freedom.
And then the relief of contact as I slammed down, starfishlike, onto the stretched-out tarpaulin of a passing truck. A moment too late, Leonid Avilov fell clear of the bridge. I heard the dull thud of him hitting the asphalt and then the wet crunch of his skull flattening beneath the tires of the truck behind.
My driver carried on, unchecked, and took a left on the Garden Ring. We were heading east. On the Eurostar platform in Kent I’d imagined a life in the mountains—a life of solitude and peace. I’d imagined I could escape. But I’d been alone and on the run since I was sixteen. I could disappear into the Eurasian Steppe or the Great Northern Forest as easily and perfectly as a pebble would vanish into the Pacific. But I would never outrun myself. I knew then, as the wind lashed my face, that Rachel had been lost to me the moment I’d turned my back on who I really was. As I hung on to the truck, I let go of the idea of her—and understood, finally, that it was not Rachel that I’d been trying to save all along, but myself.
And I knew then that there was only one place left for me to go.
Home.
31
What do you want?”
The old lady spoke in a barely audible whisper behind the thick panels of a heavy wooden door. It was difficult to make out what she was saying. I looked around. It was snowing hard now. Large silent flakes filled the air, burying deeper the steps to the entrance of my mother’s old house. I put my ear to the lock and raised my voice.
“My name is Maksimilian,” I said. There was no reply. “Maksimilian Ivanovich,” I tried again, remembering to use my patronymic. “Anastasia’s son.”
Anastasia’s son. They were words I had not spoken since she died. I straightened up and rolled my shoulders and prayed for the old lady inside to let me in. Blood dripped from my fingers, spotting the white blanket that carpeted the porch. My clothes were filthy, covered in salt and dirt. I looked over my shoulder again. There was nothing behind me but darkness.
“Who?”
“Anastasia,” I said, shouting at the still-shut door. “Olga Milova’s daughter.”
There was a long pause, and then the scraping of wood on wood. The bolt sprang loose and the door inched open, throwing a wedge of light onto the snow. The woman looked as if she were in her eighties, at least—a jumble of bones and leathery skin and fine white hair that fell down to her shoulders. Her eyes were brilliant, though. Blue and piercing, searching mine like Doc’s had less than a fortnight before. An eddy of snow blew into the old cabin. She drew a black shawl around her shoulders and thrust her face toward mine.
“Olga Milova doesn’t live here,” she said. “She’s dead.”
“I know,” I said. “I . . .”
“This is my house. Polina Yurievna’s house. Not hers.” She paused, and then added, “Or yours.”
“I know. That’s not . . . Polina Yurievna, may I come inside?” She lo
oked at me, at my fouled jacket, squinted at the red snow by my feet. The temperature was dropping further. My mouth still tasted of iron—tongue, teeth still bleeding from the impact in the taxi. “Please.”
“Why?” she asked. “Are you in trouble, Maksimilian Ivanovich?”
“No,” I lied.
A wry, unexpected smile spread across her face.
“Rubbish,” she cackled. “I’ve never known anyone from your family that wasn’t.”
She pulled the door open farther and stepped aside, and for the first time ever I walked into my mother’s house, cupping my left hand with my right so as not to spoil the floor with blood. Once I was inside, the old woman gazed at me intently, looking, perhaps, for proof—some trace of my mother in my face, eyes.
“These are strange times,” she said. “One day to the next you don’t know whom you’ll meet. And always,” she said, leading me deeper into her home, “without warning. Everyone always wants something.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“How did you get here?” she interrupted—though whether from impatience or deafness, I couldn’t tell. “The roads are blocked. It’s been snowing all week.”
“Yes,” I said. “They are blocked. But only once you leave the highway. A farmer out clearing snow gave me a lift on his tractor from Koptevo.”
I spared her the details of the rest of the journey from Moscow—the majority of which I’d made hidden in the salt bin of a truck heading northeast to Ivanovo, the oblast capital. I’d climbed out when the driver stopped to refuel, shivering in a culvert until the coast was clear. From there I’d hitchhiked—a series of short lifts repaid with a few hundred-ruble notes—then taken the tractor. I’d walked the last mile—with difficulty. The car crash and fall from the bridge hadn’t only knocked out one of my teeth; they had also badly bruised my ribs and sprained my left knee as well as reopening my bullet wounds. I’d made good time, all things considered.
We stood in silence for a moment, her eyes continuing to explore my face until she made up her mind.
“I have an old sheet,” she said, and paused to clear her throat, “for bandages. Hot water, too.” She waved her hand toward the stove. “And pokhlyobka for your belly.”
I looked around. On a shelf in the far corner, an ancient, gilded icon of St. Michael presided over her proud, searing poverty. We were standing by the dining table, a solid wooden platform more like a butcher’s block. Years of elbow grease and pork fat had rubbed into it a deep, burnished patina. By the door where I’d come in, a wood-fired range warmed a large pan of soup. On the far side of the table sat a metal-framed bed covered with an acrylic blanket. A bucket with soaking soiled clothes lurked in the corner. There was no TV, no radio—no luxuries at all, nothing that wasn’t entirely necessary to sustain another day of life, St. Michael included.
There was a flight of stairs—open wood planks with no banister—leading to an upper level, which, Polina said, her legs could no longer manage.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” I said. “I didn’t realize how late it was.”
“There’s no harm done,” she replied, waving her hand at me. “I don’t sleep much, anyway.” She patted her thigh. “Restless legs.” Then she laid her hand on the table, skin tight across her knuckles. “Are you really Anastasia’s son?” I nodded. “Well, this is where it happened, you know.”
I took off my jacket and began to ease myself out of my sweater. Talia had dressed me in black—guessing, perhaps, I’d need to be camouflaged against gore, as I had been in Tel Aviv. She hadn’t figured I’d spend five hours up to my neck in rock salt. The wound in my left shoulder felt as fresh as the day I’d been shot in the cottage. The furrow in my right thigh had split open again, too.
“Where what happened, Polina Yurievna?”
“Your grandmother, Maksimilian Ivanovich. Where she crossed into the next life. And where your mother came into this one.” She stroked the table.
“And how,” I asked, “would you know that?”
“Because I was here when it happened, Maksimilian Ivanovich. Right here.” She turned to look at me, pale blue eyes lingering on mine in the lamplight. “I delivered your mother, on this very table.”
* * *
—
I SCRAPED THE last of the soup from the bowl.
Polina had helped to dress my wounds before we ate. While she’d wrapped my shoulder, I’d told her that my mother was dead, too—a fact that she had received with the sign of the cross.
“Her first breath was your grandmother’s last,” she’d said.
We’d broken bread after that. When Polina finished eating, she got up from the table and fetched two small glasses, which she filled to the brim with colorless liquid from an unlabeled glass bottle balanced on the stairs.
“Let’s drink to Anastasia, may God rest her soul.”
We drank in silence, without touching glasses. Then she stood up again and shuffled off toward the bed. From under it she produced a scuffed tin box tied shut with a length of twine. She unpicked the knot and, back turned to me, rifled through what sounded like a stack of papers. Finally she returned the box to its place and turned around, a piece of card in one hand and a knife in the other.
“These are for you,” she said.
The piece of card revealed itself to be a black-and-white photograph. The image was of a young girl, laughing, blond hair wound up in the glowing crown of a tight basket braid.
“It’s Anastasia. Your mother.”
I looked on the reverse. There was nothing except the date: 1959. She would have been seven or eight years old. Decades of certainty crumbled on the lips of that bleached-white almost-smile. I’d thought, when I ran away aged sixteen, that her past had evaporated—and mine with it. I’d imagined that Doc beamed the last rays of light shed by a star that had died long ago. It wasn’t so. My mother had made me an orphan. But I had chosen exile.
I sat with my hands on the table, feet on the floor, trapped in the space between the competing stories of who I was.
“And the knife?”
“It was your grandfather’s,” Polina said, sitting down again. “He said it killed many fascists in the Great Patriotic War.” She winked at me. “But Olga said he just whittled wood with it.”
I drew it from its home-stitched leather sheath. It was an old Red Army scout’s knife—with a pitted six-inch blade and battered, black wooden handle. It had an inverted S-guard, designed for holding it with the cutting edge upward, and a needle-sharp clip point. It was rudimentary, but oiled and well balanced.
“Thank you,” I said, slipping it into the makeshift scabbard and then tucking it away in the back of my jeans. It sat comfortably in the spot where I usually carried my pistol.
I turned back to the image of the enigmatic little girl playing behind the rusted pelmet of the Iron Curtain. It was the only photograph of her I had.
“She kept that smile her whole life, you know. I never could tell what she was thinking.”
“They said she was a spy. Is that true?”
I zipped the photograph into my inside jacket pocket. “Who,” I asked, “said that?”
“Everyone. After she went to England.”
“Ireland,” I corrected her.
“Yes, there. Everyone said she must have been a British spy. How else could she have”—she looked around the room, at the worn wood paneling and sparse old-fashioned furniture, searching for the right word—“escaped?”
“My mother wasn’t a British spy,” I reassured her. “Of that, I am one hundred percent certain.”
“The woman who came here at Christmas said the same thing.” She poured two more glasses of vodka.
“This Christmas?” I asked. “In December?”
She looked at me as if I were a simpleton.
“Anastasia brough
t you up speaking Russian, but she didn’t bring you up in the Church, did she?” I shook my head. “January the seventh. Our Christmas.”
“But that was less than two weeks ago.”
“No, it was the sixth. I remember, because Aleksandr Denisovich brought me some fresh logs in his new car . . . or . . . No, that was the day before. It’s very nice, his car. His brother bought it—”
“Polina Yurievna,” I interrupted her, “what woman?”
“Rakhil,” she said. “It’s a lovely name, isn’t it? And so unusual.”
My pulse quickened. I swallowed hard.
“What did she look like, this Rakhil?” Inside my chest my heart banged against bruised, burning ribs.
“Black hair and green eyes.” She looked at me and smiled. “And so beautiful. Are you sure you’re not in trouble, Maksimilian Ivanovich?” She chuckled to herself and added, “Or that she’s not?”
Rakhil. It was as if she’d shot me between the eyes. Rachel. In Arkhangel. It wasn’t . . . conceivable.
“And she’s here, still here, in this village?”
“Yes,” she said. “In your village.” She smiled and held her arthritic fingers up for inspection. “I’m old, but I could still deliver one more of Arkhangel’s sons.”
I reached over and took her hands in mine, rubbing my thumb gently across her knuckles.
“Trust me, Polina Yurievna,” I said, struggling to keep my voice steady. “You already have.”
* * *
—
I STEERED CLEAR of the path.
It was barely a hundred and fifty meters to the church of St. Michael the Archangel, but the snow was thigh deep between the trees. Fresh flurries piled it even thicker. It must have been minus fifteen. There was no moon visible, no streetlamps. Away from the glow of Polina’s windows the night absorbed me, sucking me into the void of the winter landscape.
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