The Black Sun Conspiracy

Chapter Thirty-Four

Sam barely took in a word of what Alexandr was saying. He could guess at the gist of it — he ought to join the Order, he would not live if he did not, his talents would be invaluable to them. All he could focus on was his astonishment at seeing the crazy Russian who had got them out of the Antarctic submarine dock alive.

It felt like a million years ago when they took the perilous trip to Antarctica to look for the Wolfenstein Ice Station and its Nazi secrets, his first meeting with Alexandr. They had exchanged a few emails after they subsequently parted ways in Ushuaia, but Alexandr was seldom to be found anywhere sufficiently populated to have internet access. More often than not he was beyond the reach of normal forms of communication, somewhere in the depths of his native Siberia.

“Listen, old friend,” Alexandr beckoned Sam to lean in close. Sam doubted it would do any good, but obeyed anyway. “I can see that your mind is made up. You are already determined to tell them to go fuck themselves. I know this feeling well, right? I feel it too. Even now, now that they trust me and protect me, I am not always happy. But I am alive, yes? And there is no happiness to be had by a dead man. Dead men drink no Samogon — that is what my father used to say. You are a proud man, I am a proud man. But we will find the places to keep our pride. There is always a way to be part of something great.”

“You think this is something great that they’re doing here?” Sam asked, incredulous.

Alexandr replied with a one-shouldered shrug. “In my home town there are people who now have enough to eat, children who survive the winter, all because the Order wishes to establish itself there. I see men given jobs and their wives growing fat on the money. Can I tell you that this is not great?”

Sam thought back to the research that Nina had done in the past two years, the disturbing ideology that underpinned the beliefs of the Black Sun. He tried to imagine Alexandr as a believer in the purity of a master race, but he could not do it. The man had always seemed too… not sane, Sam had to concede, but at least not crazy in that particular way. He tried to remember whether the Slavs had spread as far as Siberia and whether that part of the Black Sun’s ideology would be troubling for him. “But where do you fit into it all?” Sam asked. “Why did they bring you in?”

“Antarctica,” Alexandr said, leaning back in his chair and carelessly crossing his booted feet upon the table. “After you left Ushuaia I was engaged to return to Wolfenstein, guiding a party of men whose task was to destroy the place once and for all. I aided them in their mission, which meant that I saw and heard things that I was not supposed to see or hear. These things should have led to my death, but it was not my time…”

Even though they had not seen each other for some time, Sam recalled the sound of Alexandr settling in to tell a long story. He decided it was time to hit the bar. The whisky was still calling to him, and Renata had drunk it without incident. He grabbed a couple of glasses and the bottle and settled down in one of the elegant leather seats.

The tale that Alexandr told was every bit as far-fetched and compelling as Sam had come to expect. The leader of the task force sent to destroy the ice station had been a man called Dragos Zajac, an arms dealer whom Alexandr had once assisted as he smuggled a cargo of weaponry through Russia with the secret police hot on his trail. Zajac had thanked him, agreed that he owed Alexandr a favor in addition to his payment, then called upon his services again on the return journey. The way Alexandr told it, it was his intervention that allowed Zajac to hide out in the Ural Mountains for several months and avoid otherwise certain death. They had sworn a blood pact to be brothers forevermore.

So when Zajac had realized that he the man he was hired to exploit and kill was none other than his blood brother Alexandr Arichenkov, he refused to fulfil his commission. The two of them had pillaged the ice station for its few remaining resources, then stolen out in the dead of night on a reckless, near-suicidal trek to Novolazarevskaya. There they had stowed away on a plane bound for Cape Town. From there they had begged, borrowed and stolen one form of transport after another until they made it to Moscow, and there they had parted ways. Their brotherhood, Alexandr felt, was firmly cemented as a result of their adventures.

“When my blood brother, my dear Dragos, told me of the Order to which he belonged and informed me that they would seek my life unless I allowed him to argue for me and bring me into their ranks, I took him at his word. I trusted him, and I still do. Just a few short weeks later I was summoned to Saint Petersburg and invited to become a part of the Order, a Member of the Fifth Level who would help Dragos to build a network throughout Russia. I agreed, not only out of love for my brother but because in the weeks since I had returned there had been no fewer than three attempts on my life! But those, Sam, are a story for another time. They helped to convince me, and that is all you need to know. And now I hope to convince you. Sam, keep your life. You can do good things with it, as long as you still have it.”

A harsh, buzzing sound filled the room, making Alexandr wince a little. “That is to tell me that I must go and leave you to consider your answer.” He stood up and shook Sam’s hand, then pulled him into a bear hug. “I hope that I will see you again before long, but if I do not it will be because you have refused their offer. If that happens, know that I will drink to your memory.”

“I bet you will,” Sam grinned. “And if I say yes, you’ll drink to the fact that I’m still alive.”

He watched the Russian leave, then poured himself another dram and sat staring blankly at the mahogany wainscoting. In his mind’s eye he saw himself back home, back in his flat not far from the bookshop on the corner, his favorite pub down the road and his cat fast asleep on him. The image felt so real, so intense that Sam could practically feel his legs going dead under Bruichladdich’s weight. He imagined working at the Edinburgh Post again, back in his old job as a result of the Black Sun pulling the strings.

‘I doubt that would happen,’ he thought. ‘They might say that I could work anywhere I liked, but they’re not going to want me plugging their agenda on some tiny local paper.’ He adjusted his mental picture, trying to place himself in a major city. ‘Not London. I’m not living there again. But I suppose… Berlin, maybe? Or Paris? New York? I can’t exactly see myself as a Manhattanite.’

Next he tried to picture the kind of articles he would have to write to please his beneficiaries. Back in his earliest days he had had a few articles spiked because they did not match the editorial stances of the papers he was writing for at the time. Staff writing for news outlets whose views were entirely shaped by the political leanings of their proprietors had proved a frustrating experience, and Sam quickly went from delight at securing his first paid job to sullen anger at having to toe the party line. It had been those feelings that had pushed him into freelancing, where he had remained quite happily until his Pulitzer had made him a hot property.

Even then, Sam’s first instinct had been to refuse the offers of permanent positions that came flooding in. He was enjoying his freedom and did not want to give it up. It was Paddy who had sat him down and talked sense into him, as he had done so many times over the years of their long friendship. The offers wouldn’t last forever, he had pointed out. Once Sam’s brief moment of recognition was over it would all dry up, and if he ever wanted a bit of security he would be fighting for it alongside everyone else. Better to seize the moment while he still had his pick of the papers and could name his price. Seeing the wisdom of Paddy’s advice, Sam had chosen the publication that seemed least likely to cramp his style. He had chosen The Clarion.

‘Fair enough,’ thought Sam, ‘that might not have worked out so well in the long run, but it definitely seemed like the best idea at the time. And what would have been better? To have stuck with freelancing, or chosen a different paper, and never met Trish at all? Would she still be alive if I’d made different choices, or would she always have found her way to the warehouse that day? Is it better to have loved her for a brief time than it would have been never to know her at all? What would she want me to do now? What would Paddy suggest?’

Lost in his thoughts, Sam barely even noticed the guards coming to collect him until a hand closed around his arm and pulled him to his feet. ‘Well…’ he thought as they marched him out of the room, ‘looks like it’s decision time.’