‘But I didn’t …’
‘Please, Mr McLean.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But go easy on Baaz. He’s an innocent. Just send him home.’
‘Of course.’
I scanned the rooftops as best I could, but it was pointless. If I ran, I was dead – if not right there, then eventually. It had ever been thus.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I appreciate it.’
I turned my back to her and walked towards the Chevy, bent slightly at the waist, straining my eyes to no avail to make out any detail in the darkness inside. I stepped up on to the running board and turned around.
‘Tell me, were you and Ezra in the field together?’
‘No. We weren’t.’ She moved back into the doorway. ‘Ezra Black was my husband.’ I swung myself into the SUV. ‘Please, Mr McLean. If you find Rachel, bring her home.’
‘Which home is that, Talia?’
I gave her a mock salute. She smiled and disappeared into the lobby, and I was alone in the back of the car with only the driver up front for company. I pulled the door to. He hit the gas and together we sped into the city.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
He looked over his shoulder, eyes wrapped with Ray-Bans despite the dimness of the sodium-lit streets outside.
‘Moscow.’
30
The cold bit like a knife.
Minus eight. Air dry as steel. Skies grey as lead. It had been snowing all night – fresh drifts of powder set solid as the temperature dived. It was a hard, unforgiving cold, offering no mercy to the city frozen in its grip. I thrust my hands into my pockets and kept my head down, and waited in line impatiently for the taxi that would take me into town.
I needed to get into cover. Fast. Every second I was in the open, in public, risked detection. The express train was too exposed. Moscow was littered with CCTV cameras which, MI6 had briefed us at Raven Hill before I went AWOL, were linked to an increasingly sophisticated facial recognition system. A taxi at least kept me off the streets. Talia had loaded a black daysack for me with winter clothes, a washbag, a few rubles, a wad of dollars – and a fake Russian passport.
‘Sorry,’ the Israeli driver had said with a grin as I’d surrendered the Greek papers I’d got from Lukov. ‘The boss doesn’t trust Bulgarians.’
For the first time in my life I’d entered Russia as a Russian citizen – on an Aeroflot flight from Ben Gurion direct to Sheremetyevo International. The Shabak had taken care of formalities in Israel. Speaking with what I hoped was a Russian accent unmuddied by growing up in the West, I’d been propelled through immigration in less than fifteen minutes. Maybe I’d got lucky. Maybe Avilov and the GRU were running their own show, outside the scope of internal security. Or maybe they were watching to see what I’d do next – namely, buy a sandwich and a sharpie and change some dollars to rubles.
In the arrivals hall the cashier had examined the hundred-dollar bills carefully and passed them under an ultraviolet scanner. It had crossed my mind for a moment that Talia might have equipped me with a stash of Moshe’s interpretations. I’d craned my neck to see what happened when the note passed under the light, but the only thing obvious was that the plastic strip beside Benjamin Franklin’s face glowed pink. The woman behind the window had seemed happy enough, and passed me a stack of crisp local notes.
Then I’d found a bathroom and locked myself in a stall. From the wad of leftover dollars I’d extracted a C-note and on the reverse written Архангел in thick, black Cyrillic letters. I’d folded it up and put it in my jeans ticket pocket and emerged into the first Russian winter I’d experienced for five years.
Just as a cab was within touching distance a babushka with sharp elbows and ageing furs barged me out of the way from behind and bundled herself into the back seat. The cabbie emerged, shrugging his shoulders as he opened the boot for her bags.
‘Dobro pozhalovat v Moskvu!’ he said. Welcome to Moscow. Damned straight. In the politeness stakes the Russians gave even the Israelis a run for their money.
Another car pulled up behind and I climbed in. I had no hold luggage, just Talia’s daysack, in which I had also discovered a guidebook – designed, I supposed, to make me look like a tourist out to have fun and not a spook on the run. I’d changed my wound dressing, had breakfast in departures and a shave thirty thousand feet over the Black Sea. I felt good.
‘K Bolshomy,’ I said. To the Bolshoi. From there I’d easily pick up another cab. And another. Eventually ending up in the Kuzminki area, a messy, down-at-heel neighbourhood in the south-east of Moscow, which was about as far away in feel as it was possible to get from the slick city centre. From there I’d plan my next move. The driver was sealed off from the rear passenger seats by a glass screen – an innovation since my last visit. An intercom allowed us to speak.
‘Just like New York,’ I said in Russian, tapping the partition. From behind the wheel his eyes caught mine in the rear-view mirror.
‘Da,’ he nodded, and carried on his conversation through a hands-free rig with someone I guessed was either his wife or his girlfriend.
I also had a phone. Talia had left me a burner with a clean Russian SIM and one number in the address book: hers. As soon as we’d got airborne, I’d switched it off and taken the battery out. Carrying it at all was like being tethered to a personal locator beacon. But so far Talia had been good to Ezra’s word: I was still alive.
But sending me to Moscow wasn’t just a cute way of getting me out of her hair. Her personal imperatives notwithstanding, either I’d manage to unravel what had happened to the Israelis’ disappeared scientist or Russian intelligence would take grateful delivery of their number one suspect. Whatever the case, Talia would emerge smelling of roses. Less so me. Once the GRU found out I’d sent its money man to meet his maker, then Talia’s motives would be the least of my concerns.
I thought about Moshe, and about Avi’s girl, Sveta. Despite the drugs and the fear, she’d have to be able to identify me and had probably listened to her sugar daddy spilling the beans. Even if I’d become an increasingly reluctant executioner, someone was taking care of business behind me. But who? The signature heart-shot that had done for Moshe was chilling. If the same assassin had dispatched Sveta, too, then I wasn’t a day ahead of anyone: he’d had the drop on me all along.
I recalled what old Colonel Ellard had said at Raven Hill once, after a job had unravelled on me: ‘There’s no use worrying about things over which you have no control.’ I stretched the flight out of my legs and tried to relax. Cars crept past the tinted passenger windows. Long gone were the old Volgas and Ladas – now it was all SUVs and foreign imports. A smart new Range Rover inched past: Moscow mafia chic. Few traces, if any, of my mother’s city remained. Although the roads were clear of snow, progress was slow. We ground on south-east down the M-11, crossing the Moscow Canal and then over the sprawling intersection with the Central Ring Road towards the Marfino district, before dropping due south, bound for the city centre.
And then what?
There was, as usual, no plan and very few possibilities. Cut off, and without comms to London, I had no way of contacting anyone in the GRU, except for the receptionist at its headquarters on Grizodubovoi Street. And walking into the Akvarium was as good an idea as jumping into the Moscow River. But the GRU’s operators would track me down, all right. The trick was making sure the crisis was forced at the place and time of my choosing. It was high risk: I just hoped that whatever Rachel’s project meant to them was heady enough to trip them up in its pursuit. And I prayed, too, that wherever Rachel had ended up, she thought it had been worth it all – because, as far as I could see, its most significant outcome for her had been to lay her father in his grave.
We passed Dmitrovskaya Metro station. The traffic slowed even further as we hit Sushchevskiy Val Street.
‘Detour,’ the taxi driver said in Russian through the intercom. ‘Too much traffic.’ His accent was hard to place. From Georgia, maybe. I
was about to ask him where, exactly, but he was trying to reconnect a dropped call, fiddling about with the hands-free set which was draped around an icon on the dashboard. We headed west. And then after a couple of klicks swung on to the junction with Leningradsky Avenue. But instead of heading south-east again, the driver stayed in the outside lane and took the slip road north-west.
‘Hey.’ I leaned forward and tapped the glass. ‘Wrong way. The Bolshoi theatre, remember?’
‘Shortcut,’ he grunted. ‘Faster.’
Larger fare, more like. I looked at the meter. It was still set to zero. I went to rap on the glass again, but stopped myself, and thanked him instead.
Something wasn’t right.
We passed the Dinamo Metro station and then came off the main highway, driving parallel to the bare trees rising up out of the frozen white ground of Petrovsky Park. Then we cut across the busy road we’d just left, over a wide bridge that formed a junction for cars turning left. We came to a stop in the middle of the filter lane. Another taxi pulled up to our left. The woman in the back was chatting away to the driver. She leaned forward to show him something on her phone. There was no security screen. No partition. I saw my driver’s eyes dart back to mine in the mirror. He cut the intercom and began speaking rapidly into his cell phone.
I looked right: another cab – again, with no screen. I tried to get my bearings. We were in the Aeroport district, close to the inner-city Khodinka airfield.
Shit.
In my mind I brought back into as sharp a focus as I could manage a set of intelligence maps we’d been shown of Moscow in 2009. We’d been given them for good reason: to help familiarize ourselves with the location and construction of a brick and glass monstrosity that was an almost straight rip-off of the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross on the Thames. Not two kilometres from where we sat waiting at a red light was the one building in Moscow I wanted most to avoid. Rising up on the south side of the airfield – and home to all manner of spies and sharks – was the now fully operational headquarters of the GRU. There was no doubt about it. We were heading straight for the Akvarium.
I was sitting on the right side of the vehicle. I curled my fingers around the door-release but to no avail. I looked at the safety screen more closely. Half-inch bullet-resistant plexiglass recessed into the chassis. I looked at the passenger windows, too: also reinforced. I was trapped. I guessed I’d enter the Akvarium the same way I was always taken into Vauxhall Cross: via an underground tunnel that emerged in a secure area. I would have no opportunity to run – because there would be nowhere to run to.
In a couple of minutes I would be swallowed, lost. The Akvarium was rumoured 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 daysack. 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 washbag, my left around the barrel of a plastic lighter. I thrust them both into my jacket pockets.
The traffic cutting across us from south-east-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 grey clouds were underneath us. The driver was turning, his phone suspended, dancing in front of him. My face against the plexiglass.
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 corkscrew spirals 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, turtle-like. There was no smoke. There had been no blast. I pushed myself clear of the wreckage and on to 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, bonnet 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 ploughed 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 on to the street. I retreated further. 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: Doctor Leonid Avilov, the GRU officer who’d hounded me from the ship, through the tunnels and all the way to Moscow.
He moved towards me, fast. I staggered backwards, 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 on to 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 backwards, 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 freefall freedom.
And then the relief of contact as I slammed down, starfish-like, on to 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 tyres of the truck behind.
My driver carried on, unchecked, and took a left on the Gard
en 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 that climbed up 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 snib sprang loose and the door inched open, throwing a wedge of light on to the snow. The woman looked as if she was 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 towards mine.
Arkhangel : A Novel (2020) Page 27