Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘Part of it. The final part.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The banknote wasn’t complete,’ she said, turning to look at the calculations writ large behind her. ‘It took coming here finally to see it, to finish it.’

  ‘So, this is the conclusion?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘It gives Azrael the eyes to see.’

  ‘The hundred-dollar bill and this,’ I pointed at the wall, ‘are, were, the only copies?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  I paced back to the stove and picked up her sleeping bag.

  ‘And Amos, could he have told anyone?’

  ‘No. He didn’t know how close I was to solving it.’

  ‘And Doc, what did Doc know?’

  ‘He knew I’d made a breakthrough, but … Max, what are you doing?’

  She watched me as I picked up a candle and held it under the sleeping bag. The nylon sacking caught almost immediately. I swung the growing ball of fire under the dresser. The old varnish cracked and blistered. Small blue flames licked up its sides and took hold of the legs. Within seconds the wood was alight, the room filling with smoke. I stepped back and covered my face as a rush of flame leapt up. Whatever had been stored inside the cabinet had accelerated the burn into a roaring blaze. Soon the floorboards would catch, then the wall and ceiling. The roof would go up and the house would come down – by which time we would be on our way.

  I took her by the wrist, but she twisted free.

  ‘No,’ she shouted above the hiss of the fire, stepping backwards towards the flames. ‘You’re not listening. You haven’t understood anything. It isn’t the note that needs to be destroyed.’

  I went after her, arms outstretched, lungs already straining from the smoke and heat.

  ‘Please, Rachel.’ She was choking now, struggling to draw breath as the oxygen burned out of the room. She hesitated and then let me embrace her. I held her close to my chest as the blaze began to spread across the floor. ‘It’s OK,’ I said.

  She flattened her hands against my back and I readied myself to take her weight. My shoulder, ribs throbbed. She buried her face into my chest. With one hand she gripped my waist; with the other the back of my neck.

  ‘Just relax.’

  A brilliant mind; an infuriating, captivating lover; a revolutionary – whatever she once had been was consumed then and there by madness. Perhaps completing the algorithm had sent her over the edge; perhaps it had taken the descent into insanity finally to see the answer she’d devoted a lifetime to looking for. She had spent years fighting her demons, without ever imagining that she would create one, become one. She had gazed into the abyss; and the abyss had gazed into her.

  I could feel the fire singeing my hair, clothes, burning the skin on the backs of my hands. But as I braced myself to lift her, she pulled away from me again, even closer to the fire. Her hand was still at my neck, so that our heads touched, but her body, legs were clear of mine.

  ‘Rachel …’ I moved forward again and felt her fist clenched between us. I looked down and saw the scout’s knife, drawn from behind my back: blade up, old steel reflecting red in the fire-glow.

  ‘I’m sorry, Max,’ she said, pressing her mouth to my ear.

  Then she drew her head back, eyes fixed on mine, and thrust. I brought my hand around, down, but I was too slow. The cutting edge ran across my fingers, slicing to the bone. The point went in hard. She gasped with the effort of it and then smiled, pushing herself on to me, forcing the steel in and up. I felt the blade lodge home, felt the blood pumping on to her stomach and mine. I closed my fist around the grip and we clung to each other. I saw my mother and Doc, laughing, happy; I saw Rachel on the bedroom floor, the life pouring out of her; I saw her in the forest, the wind in her hair, laughing, free. And then all I could see were her eyes, flashing green in the firelight. She raised her hands, red with gore, and laid them on my cheeks.

  ‘God forgive me,’ she whispered in Irish. ‘It is finished.’

  I let her go and she stepped back, pulling herself free of the knife. Then she looked up, and her legs gave way, and she fell into the flames – and it was.

  34

  Zero one hundred.

  The glow of the fire threw a halo around the village. I ran to Aleksandr Denisovich’s house and didn’t look back.

  I headed east and then north, and within a few minutes the red glow in the rear-view mirror vanished and there was no sign that anything had happened at all. The Lada ground on through the darkness to Vologda. Hunched over the wheel, the heating cranked to the maximum, I strained my eyes into the bright beams thrown by the four-by-four’s headlights. The sides of the road were piled with snow. Fresh ice formed on the asphalt as new flurries froze between the tyre treads. My hands were stained red with my blood and hers.

  I wanted to turn around. I wanted to rub my face with ashes and scream at the sky. I wanted to do, say something, anything, that would change what was. The road pulled me onwards. I repeated the words we’d said. I imagined a life in which I had not run; in which she was not dead. But what’s gone is gone. And you can never go back. Trying to has cost many a man his head, his soul. Mine nearly included. The consequences of survival would be something I lived with for ever.

  I flexed my fingers gripping the steering wheel through makeshift dressings I’d torn from my shirt. Only when I tasted the salt on my lips did I realize I was crying. I blinked hard and kept on keeping on. It was all I could think to do.

  But it was slow going.

  The further north I drove, the harder the snow fell. I estimated the drive at sixteen hours in decent conditions, adding four hours to account for the winter weather and another two on top to be safe. If I stayed in-country any longer than twenty-four hours, getting out would become almost impossible: no matter how ineffectual the Russian police were, a day was the most I’d have before they caught up with me. Steal more cars, and I risked tripping a wire where it counted. If the FSB got involved and joined the dots with the GRU, I’d be lucky to make it halfway to the Estonian border.

  Even if Aleksandr Denisovich had already reported his car stolen, I doubted the police would make visiting him a priority. And it was unlikely that he or anyone else would bother to call the emergency services about the fire: the dilapidated priest’s house had been consumed entirely and there was no one to call an ambulance for – even if one was available to send. No, the real variable was old Polina Yurievna. I couldn’t count on it, but I’d have bet my last hundred rubles that she’d send the authorities on a wild goose chase. I was near enough kin. And Russians take blood very seriously indeed.

  I kept my speed steady and my driving unremarkable. I didn’t want to give the police any excuse to pull me over. It wasn’t only a case of being identified: even a successfully negotiated routine stop would slow me down. Although there were hours of driving ahead, I knew that, in the end, every minute would count.

  Timing my escape was a fine balance, though: if I’d given Jack Nazzar much less than twenty-four hours, he wouldn’t have time to get an extraction team on location. Sometimes he’d use local Special Forces for exfiltration. But for this job I knew he’d insist on running the whole show with his own men from the Revolutionary Warfare Wing. Deploying the SAS in Estonia was a political minefield, but I doubted the pro-NATO government in Tallinn would object – always revelling in any opportunity to stick two fingers up at Moscow.

  But the entire plan – if sending one message and then driving halfway across Europe to find out if it had been acted on could be called a plan – might be tipped into failure by even the slightest margin of error. A flat tyre, worsening weather … It would take very little to defeat me.

  Zero five hundred.

  I arrived in Vologda two hours before first light and refuelled. Then I fished Talia’s cracked-screen cell phone out of my jacket pocket and weighed up whether or not to create a backup of the photograph I’d taken of Rachel’s fina
l calculations. I could send it to myself by Signal – but it was too much of a risk. I had to assume that the handset would be loaded with spyware, and, just as Baaz had cautioned in Paris, even if the messaging application was fireproof, it would be straightforward for Talia to capture the photo before the data was encrypted and sent. Besides, as soon as I switched the phone on, Talia would see exactly where I was again.

  In Israel she’d been good to her word. But as soon as she knew that Rachel was gone there was no reason for her to keep me alive. On the contrary. I was a witness, the only witness, to the Shabak’s absolute failure to protect someone who’d turned out to be one of Israel’s most valuable human assets. It was an unsettling thought – but whatever happened in the hours that followed would owe as much to the quality of Talia’s relationship with Ezra as it did to the quality of mine with Frank.

  As far as the Shabak was concerned, though, the clock was on my side: even if Talia wanted to, she simply didn’t have enough time to take direct action. And given everything, it seemed unlikely she’d enlist the help of the Russians. Although that was a gamble, too; if she was monitoring the phone, then she knew I was heading for Värska from Arkhangel. But if anyone was following me, they couldn’t be sure where I’d approach the border – and cordoning off half of Russia simply wasn’t practical.

  I wrapped the phone tightly in a plastic bag I’d found in the glovebox of the stolen Lada and buried it deep inside my jacket with my Russian passport and the photograph of my mother. I restarted the engine and pushed the gearstick into first. But as my foot hovered over the gas pedal, I heard my own voice come back to me.

  Forget London. We’ll go east, deep into the forest. Not even your angel will be able to find us.

  I didn’t have to make a run for the border. Turn east, and I could disappear – for ever, if I liked. I put my foot back on the brake and thought about that. I was beyond orders. No one could compel me to do anything. I’d been on the run for days. And now, finally, came the chance – perhaps the final chance – to escape.

  But Rachel’s angel was real all right, and I knew I’d never shake it off in the trees. No matter how deep I went, the damned thing would be on my tail until the day it finally caught up with me. I could outrun any man sent to hunt me. But not even riding the fastest horse east from Arkhangel could I escape my fate.

  It would be disastrous if the Russians intercepted the phone and the photograph of Rachel’s calculations. But destroying her Destroyer wouldn’t solve anything. Eventually another mind, perhaps even more brilliant – and more unhinged – than Rachel’s, would rediscover what had been lost. And then we would be at their mercy, enslaved to the interests of some unforeseen tyranny.

  No. Getting out of Russia wasn’t merely a case of ensuring my own survival, or even of sabotaging the Russians. I had to stick with the plan, and make certain that what Rachel had brought into being was either used for the greater good – or never used at all – and I could only guarantee that from London. Rachel had been blinded by the brilliance of her creation, warped into madness by the power of it. Perhaps I would be, too. Perhaps Arkhangel’s promise of absolute authority would always prove impossible to protect against.

  But there was someone I trusted to see clearly enough to navigate the landscape that Rachel’s angel would reform – and yet Baaz had only one part of the algorithm. Without the photograph of the writing on the wall neither of us could unlock the secrets that had driven Rachel to her death.

  It didn’t matter whose side Commander Frank Knight was on. Good or bad, he was just one man – and Grumpy Jock would make sure I got to Blighty in one piece. But only by returning would I ever know why I’d been sent out in the first place. The death knell might have sounded, but this watchman was still alive.

  I hit the gas, and turned west.

  A hundred and fifty klicks further on and an hour behind schedule and the sky began to lighten. Mezga, Trukhino, Khvoynaya … the towns and villages of north-west Russia hid behind the snowflakes blowing constantly around the car. Saturday traffic was light; the local cops more concerned with keeping their feet warm and cars moving than shaking down drivers. No roadblocks. No sirens. No one in pursuit. No one I could see, anyway.

  Sixteen hundred.

  I pulled into Veliky Novgorod with an hour of daylight left and refuelled for the third time. I bought food, too – a barely edible snack wrapped in plastic – and coffee. I kept my head down, covered with Aleksandr Denisovich’s driving cap, said the bare minimum to the teller and paid in cash. Then I parked up in a quiet side street and swallowed a mouthful of the insipid, brown liquid. At least it was hot.

  While I ate, I mapped out the rest of the journey in my mind. If conditions remained the same, the drive to the border would take another five hours. That would put me at the RV at nine o’clock – with two hours to spare before Jack Nazzar and the Wing were expecting me. Where, exactly, they were supposed to expect me, I hadn’t said. But I was hoping that one look at a map of the border would leave Jack in no doubt.

  Five years before, I’d trained on Russian Hind helicopter gunships in Poland with A-Squadron SAS. Jack had come along for the ride, never happier than when he was airborne. As part of one of the exercises he’d devised with MI6, we’d studied every possible exfiltration method and route out of Russia imaginable: commercial flights with operators using false IDs; border-hopping light aircraft flown by Romanian pilots; RIBs manned by the SBS collecting personnel on the Baltic coast and then taking them to a submarine rendezvous offshore; vehicle extraction by road in both summer and winter across the land borders with the Ukraine, Finland and Latvia – and various combinations of all of them. But it was escaping via Estonia that had stuck in my mind as the most feasible, achievable plan. I hoped Jack had been similarly impressed.

  South-east of the Estonian village of Värska, Highway 178 – a single-lane road fringed by forest and farmland – slipped out of the Baltic state and into Russia. It continued across sovereign Russian soil for just over a kilometre before crossing back into Estonia again. It was a geographical oddity, a cartographer’s hiccup called ‘the Saatse Boot’. And because the road led nowhere, except from one part of Estonia to another, the border crossings were open to local traffic and almost completely unguarded. To the south-east, the highway connected a small patchwork of villages virtually cut off from the rest of the country by poor roads and a vast expanse of forest. But to the north-west there would be easy and inconspicuous access for Jack and what I hoped would be his rescue mob.

  Halfway along the 178’s course inside Russia there was a junction with a forest path – which cut through the trees for two klicks from the Russian village of Gorodishche on the east. As far as low-profile easy-access exfil went, it was the only option. The track was too narrow for vehicles. But I was prepared to gamble that on foot, and with two hours to spare, I could make it down the track, along the road and over the north-west frontier of the ‘hiccup’ to freedom.

  It was time to go.

  I nosed back out on to the highway, pointing towards the backwater city of Pskov and the border a short drive beyond.

  Twenty-one hundred.

  I was close now. The frontier with Estonia was only eight klicks away as the crow flies. But the point at which I’d have to ditch the Lada was another twenty klicks by road. I turned off the highway and parked up in the village of Molochkovo-Dubenets – a bitterly cold clutch of houses that clung to the southern shore of Lake Peipus, two massive bodies of water, connected by a narrow sound, which were cut vertically in two by the border. Its frozen wastes stretched away to the north for a hundred and forty kilometres – not that I could see more than a few metres of the lake itself, even with the headlights aiming directly at it. The weather had closed in dramatically since the last of the daylight had bled out of the sky hours earlier. Thick squalls of snowflakes now filled the air, spun into great white gyres whirling away from the headlights.

  I’d planned to hug the lakeside n
orthwards along a winding rural road before cutting west to the jumping-off point, where I’d continue on foot. But the route ahead was already impassable. I was going to have to double back on myself and take a larger road that ran parallel to the lake, inland.

  I killed the lights and closed my eyes in the darkness. I went to sleep immediately, and then woke abruptly as my head fell forward. I was exhausted, injured and overwhelmed by the blood-tide Frank’s mission had unleashed. I pinched my eyes and rubbed my face. I was losing time. Two hours until RV – assuming there was anyone to RV with. The last stretch could take an hour to drive – after which I’d have to make two klicks on foot in the dark, thigh deep in snow. And that was assuming I could even remember the way. I was pushing it. If I hit one more dead end, it would all be over, anyway.

  I switched the lights on again and turned the Lada around, retracing the short drive towards the main road. It only took a couple of minutes to reach the junction where I’d turned off. I emerged cautiously on to a triangle of snow-buried asphalt. And then the air lit up.

  On the other side of the road the flashing warning lights of a Russian police four-by-four blitzed me with a red and blue strobe. An officer was already out of the vehicle, walking towards me, left hand outstretched, waving a light baton. The headlights of both our cars lit up his electric-yellow hi-vis vest in the torrent of snowflakes between us. If I dropped the clutch and punched the gas, I’d hit him hard enough to put him down. But there would almost certainly be another officer in the vehicle. If I was going to drop him, it had to be clean. I left the motor running and opened the window. The blast of air sharpened my senses. The officer touched the brim of his fur hat and smiled.