A Wild Justice

NINE Bad Old Ways

He returned to the Georgetown street in the evening gloom, the rain hardly diminished against the windscreen by the action of the wipers. He pulJed the car into the kerb and switched off the engine. The tape’s relentless Dylan ceased at the same moment and his thoughts returned like angry hornets to fill the silence.

The image of Kauffman, hunched in his confessional chair, clutching an untasted drink, was very vivid; and profoundly enervating. He sat in imitation in the hire car, watching his aimless hands fiddle at the circumference of the steering wheel.

The rain blinded the windscreen like a waterfall. Not at all like tears.

Nothing else matters now, not you or me… He’d said something like thai to Kauffman, simply in order to threaten him — but the words had gained weight, come like a rock to crush him. Nothing mattered — not now.

Except Turgenev, except the certainty that the pattern had repeated itself in Afghanistan and later in Siberia. Billy, just like Vaughn, had grabbed the easy dollar, the easy lie. Found heroin, sketched a supply route, put everything in place, made money.

Been killed. Deservedly.

Not Beth, though John Lock removed his hands from the steering wheel so that they might gently hold his head while it raged with the unborn life of what he had learned from Kauffman. It hurt like a migraine.

It assaulted his present and his past, turning them inside out. He had been placed in a moral vacuum by Kauffman’s story and the pressure suit of his past had not protected him.

Lock groaned, pressing his head against the windscreen, which was mercifully cold. Billy, Vaughn, the Company … all reduced to a multiple murder because of money in a Virginia mansion outside of which the Flag flew and inside of which the elite of Washington had assembled the previous evening, to toast his sister’s birthday. While Billy had been fingered in the library by Pete Turgenev because …? Why? Siphoning off more than his share? A double-cross, a wrong deal, a too-late fit of conscience?

And an innocent bystander had been killed along with the perpetrator. His sister.

He got out of the car, forgetting to lock the door he slammed in rage. He stamped up the steps of the apartment house and let himself in. His rage carried itself into the hall ahead of the smell of the ra’in and the fallen, sodden leaves and his wet clothing.

He mounted the staircase blindly, head hanging, swinging from side to side. Someone was going to pay, someone was going to answer — it was all he could think with any clarity amid the whirling, upthrown images of things spoiled or past redemption. He threw back his own door and clomped down the hallway towards the living room.

The girl was lying on the big sofa, her body twisted around so that one arm lay underneath it and the other was drooped to the carpet, as if she had been fending someone off. Her face confirmed that. Her very young, stranger’s face. The blue eyes, heavily made up, were wide and terrified, staring directly at him as he entered the room. One of his ties — he immediately recognized the vivid pattern as that of a present he had received from Beth last Christmas — was tight around her slim throat.

He had strangled her, the body declared. In his apartment, with one of his ties. Her skirt was around her waist and she was wearing no underclothing. He had strangled her in a violent, sadistic rape after the drinks left half-emptied on the coffee table.

In their struggle, which must have been very brief, she had overturned the standard lamp and rucked up the Chinese rug.

But he had been too strong for her, and had raped and killed her. All of it was evident — so evident — to his heightened senses, that he at once listened to the street outside, waiting for the noise of police sirens. The slowing swish of a car —

— he touched the net curtains, but the car turned into a drive way across the street. He recognized it as that of a neighbour.

Not yet, not quite yet—

He turned back to the girl’s body. A teenage hooker, maybe even a schoolgirl, someone of no account to them, who could merely fulfil the part of a raped and murdered body. Like Beth, a bystander … They knew he was getting close and had to be stopped.

Something inside him was thinking beyond the panic the body inspired. It moved him to the bedroom and the safe under the floorboards, where he removed the fake passports that had been religiously renewed ever since his days with the Company. His hands started to fill a sports bag, when he found the pistol … only to replace it in the bedroom drawer because it would be found on him at any airport in the United States. Instead, he was prompted to gather his toilet bag, other things … crumbs of a life, like the photograph of Beth in a silver frame.

By the time he returned to the apartment’s living room, he could hear the loudening noise of a siren. There was no time left.

Lock looked at the girl and the rage boiled inside him. But he also knew that the apartment had been taken from him, that he would never return here. Turgenev had taken Beth first, and now the rest of his ordinary life. Leaving him only with a past self he thought he would never again need; the man who knew how to kill people, how to deceive, how to escape, how to survive.

Turgenev … Vaughn Grainger had to tell him it was Turgenev, that he was behind everything, including the murder of this girl. When he heard it from Vaughn, he could He dragged himself away from the room and the girl’s body, ran through the hallway, slamming the door of the apartment behind him. The siren’s noise was audible on the landing.

Dmitri Gorov was shaken from an exhausted sleep by the telephone’s peremptory insistence. He shrugged awake, sensing himself still clothed. His mouth was dry and tasted awful. He glowered at the dial of the clock as it came into focus. He must have fallen asleep about an hour ago, after Alexei had left. He groaned and picked up the receiver. Goludin’s excited, somehow boyish voice.

‘- found it, sir! We’ve found — Marfa and me, we’ve got a bag of the stuff, heroin!’

‘Calm down!’ he growled. ‘Where, how? Take it slowly.’

Dmitri felt his own excitement. The cramped, dull room seemed warmer.

‘One of the storerooms in the hospital.’ His voice suddenly became a hoarse, theatrical whisper. ‘Calling from there now.

It’s in my pocket, the evidence!’ Then, after a pause: ‘What do we do now?’

‘Don’t leave Marfa,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll come over.’ He rubbed his cheeks, then his weary, gritty eyes. ‘I’ll come over now. Stay with her till I get there — no one suspects?’

‘No. We thought — ‘ The voice was now an exhilarated chortle.

‘- someone was going to stumble right into us, but no one did.

Footsteps outside the door, they just went on down the ‘

‘Never mind. Just try to act normally. Routinely. And — well done.’

He put down the receiver, after balancing it in his hand for a moment, wondering whether to call Vorontsyev.

‘Leave him to rest,’ he muttered as he got off the bed as heavily as an invalid. Then, like a fierce bout of indigestion, the enormity of what Goludin had told him struck his stomach, doubling him over. ‘Jesus — I’ But the exclamation was exultant.

His hands clenched into fists as the tension eased and he straightened up. He wanted to punch them like an athlete signalling success. ‘Got you! Got you!’ he exhaled, grinning, rubbing his hands together as he hurried to the bathroom.

He flung cold water against the sleepy numbness of his face, towelled himself vigorously, then studied his features for a moment in the mirror, aware of the house’s perpetual silence.

A weary, ageing, defeated man stared back at him, belying the excitement that still wrenched at his stomach.

He dismissed the image and hurried from the bathroom, rubbing down his ragged dark hair, tugging on his overcoat. He almost failed to hear the telephone, even exclaimed against its noise as he turned back down the hall.

‘Yes?’ he snapped impatiently.

‘Dmitri? It’s Lubin. There’s a report just in-‘ His voice was awed, as at news of a bereavement or the loss of a lifetime’s savings. ‘It’s the chief, an explosion at his flat. The place is wrecked!’

‘Is he alive?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve been trying to find out. The report’s only just come in, from a patrol car. Half the house has caved in, a young woman and a “child are dead for sure, but I ‘

‘Meet me there!’ Dmitri snapped. ‘Now!’

He put down the receiver and turned, disorientated. He felt dizzy and sick. He put his hands gently to his face, as if to assure himself of his identity. His forehead was icily damp with perspiration, and he was once more aware of the house as silent and empty. Alexei, Alexei … They’d got to him because they were too close. Much too close to be left alive.

He stood in the doorway of his house, staring at the snow.

They had killed Alexei.

Goludin reached the door of the ward, to find Dr David Schneider coming away from Marfa’s bed. He had almost challenged the doctor before the realisation that Marfa was unharmed and was vigorously shaking her head beyond Schneider’s shoulder to stop him. His cheeks flushed, and his eyes became shifty, unwilling to meet Schneider’s careful inspection of him.

‘I — thought you were guarding your colleague?’ Schneider remarked. There was a nervousness about the American, but Goludin was aware only of his own embarrassed guilt. ‘I found her bed empty and the sister unaware of your location,’

Schneider added stiffly, as if imitating a formality of manner he did not feel. ‘I’ve-‘ He attempted a reassuring smile. ‘I’ve warned the young woman to stay in bed, for her own sake.

OK?’

‘Oh — what? Yes, yes —’ Marfa was still shaking her head as if in warning, What excuse had she given, what if he was asked where they’d been? ‘Sorry about that.’ Schneider’s Russian was schoolroom correct, carefully enunciated. Yet Goludin was aware that his own replies made him seem the user of an unfamiliar language.

Schneider, he was certain, suspected something. Then the doctor nodded dismissively, and moved past him. Goludin hurried to the bed, blurting:

‘What did you say?’

‘That I went to the toilet while you must have wandered off for something to eat!’ she replied excitedly. ‘Well?’

‘Dmitri’s on his way here now — we just have to sit tight!’ He was grinning in imitation of her now, the tension radiating from both of them in the aftermath of their discovery. ‘Bloody hell!

We’ve done it, Marfa — we’ve actually done it!’

Schneider paused in the corridor to glance back through the windows set in the ward’s fire doors. He saw the young detective bending over the woman in the bed. It was as if they were children hugging a secret to themselves and congratulating themselves on their knowledge. The realisation was an icy trickle in the small of his back. He hurried to the lifts.

He’d kept an eye on them, suspecting they had been deliberately secreted into the hospital, arrivals in some Trojan horse.

Yet they’d done nothing, seemed to know nothing, have little or no suspicion; a rather intense young woman and a clodhopping detective. They had gradually ceased to represent any danger.

Now-?

He thrust through the lift doors even as they began to open and clattered along the corridor in the basement towards the storeroom. He passed a nurse whose arms were laden with fresh linen and who nodded respectfully. He felt his returned smile was sickly.

He inspected the lock. There appeared to be no damage, no signs that it had been forced. He unlocked it and let himself inside, relocking the door before switching on the lights. At once, it seemed, he saw the small, spilt patch of white powder on the floor, though in fact it must have been some seconds later. He moved slowly towards it, his heart thudding in his chest, his side feeling winded. He bent awkwardly down like an old man, wetting his finger, touching the powder, tasting —

— spitting it out. It was the horse. His body was bathed in sweat. He glanced wildly up at the shelving, then rose to his feet, clambering and scrabbling to the top of the shelves as if to escape rising water. Found the opened box, touched it again and again in disbelief and the wish that he was wrong; the fervent wish that …

He slid rather than climbed to the floor. Rested his head against the cold metal of the shelving. Banged his fist limply against a shelf, as images of the woman in the bed and the stupid young male detective appeared in his head, like mocking masks. How could they have found it, those amateurs, those morons …? The older cop suspected him, he knew … One of the packets was missing, they had evidence now. Hard evidence.

They’d come looking for him with a warrant.

He sniffed. He had to tell Panshin. Now that Rawls was dead, only Panshin could get him out from under, help him climb out of the deep mire he was in

‘Calm down, Panshin!’ Bakunin barked, his hand clenching in a strangling motion on the desk. ‘It’s been taken care of! The head has been chopped off the chicken, you’re just watching the body die.’ He listened. ‘They can be dealt with easily. Just tell the American doctor to calm down. What’s the matter with these people, haven’t they anything resembling guts?’ They were all grasping and pathetic, like Rawls, who had been too greedy and whose removal had brought the others back into line. An example had been made and had had its effect. Now, because some of the shipment awaiting transport on from Novyy Urengoy had been stumbled on by a moronic detective second grade and a woman, the panic had broken out again like a revisiting epidemic. Schneider and Panshin — what poor straw-men they both were. Greed was their only confidence; otherwise, they were negative, empty, grubby creatures. Invertebrates.

‘Tell Schneider to watch them, see who visits them. And reassure him, Panshin. Tell him everything has been dealt with, that everything is now OK. Do you understand? The head has been cut off the chicken. Tell him that!’

Bakunin thrust down the receiver, the fingers of his other hand drumming on the desk. The morning was sullen, skulking like a reluctant worker beyond his office windows. Hiding behind cloud.

What was the matter with these people? he asked himself again. Did they …? He inspected the idea that had sprung into consciousness. Handled it like a priceless vase. Did they want another example? Is that what they needed?

It might, anyway, be sensible to remove Schneider, even if it was no longer necessary.

The shadows of the mountains shrank like curled, dried leaves in the Arizona sunrise as the flight from Baltimore dropped out of a cloudless desert sky towards Phoenix. Lock watched the landscape brighten into aridity, become hard, unforgiving; a reflection, he realised, of the man who observed it from the Boeing’s high, small window.

Ahead and to port, reservoirs gleamed as small as puddles after a shower, and Phoenix glinted through the haze of distance. He felt his tension return and stirred in his seat to ease its slow, certain grip on his stomach.

He had abandoned the hire car, taken the airline shuttle bus from downtown up Interstate 95 to Baltimore-Washington airport in Maryland. The red-eye to Phoenix and Tucson had not been under surveillance, his false identity had not been challenged at the gate — despite the first reports on CNN of the Georgetown murder and the proclamation of his identity and background and an old. State Department photograph of him that had appeared on the portable TV being watched by the black woman working at the newsstand. He had made the aircraft carrying only the shreds of calm and resolve with him, his past as intangible and lost as old, flaking skin shed by his body.

As the Boeing had lifted into the Maryland night sky and pushed through rain into starlight, all the people he had been had seemed like figures, far out to sea, drowning. The orphaned child with the elder sister who organised his life and eased his grief; the college student and basketball player, the cum laude graduate; the CIA field agent who had enjoyed his bitter little war; the State Department expert on the new, chaotic Russian Federation; the occasional, uncommitted lover, the dutiful, accomplished partygoer and dinner guest, the music buff. They were all out there, in the deep, drowning. As others watched the inflight movie or tried to sleep, he watched his past slip beneath the waves, unable to save any of those people he had been—

except one. Except for the trained, artificial person he had been for a few short years when he had worked for the CIA.

That younger man was the only person he had ever been who could — now — hope to survive; the one who had packed the sports bag, collected the money and the false papers and had been able to ignore the dead girl lying in his apartment.

As America, deep in night, slid beneath the aircraft, he came to a gradual, reluctant accommodation with John Lock, field agent — a man who had killed people, arranged death, employed cunning and ruthlessness; who had survived Afghanistan. That man was all he was allowed and all he wanted to be; because he was the only one who could get close enough to Turgenev to kill him.

He had drowsed for a time after accepting that fact. The lights of Oklahoma City, after all the other cities, and then a brief, almost dreamless sleep. He had woken only when they served breakfast, feeling stale but alert, tense more than tired. Hardly fearful, hardly at all.

Phoenix’s desert and glass towers and the giant cactuses. The low, purple hills, the tiny shadows, windscreens on the highway glinting like semaphore, then the aircraft was making its final approach to Sky Harbor airport. The mountains suddenly surrounded the city and were taller than the flightpath. He had to hear from Vaughn Grainger’s lips that Turgenev had ordered Billy’s death, that Tran was not the main man, that it was Turgenev behind the heroin smuggling. Vaughn had to tell him that Turgenev now wanted the whole pie for himself.

The wheels touched the runway, skipped then settled and the turbines whined in deceleration. Turgenev had gotten greedy and decided to take the whole shooting match away from Vaughn and Billy. When he heard it from Vaughn’s lips, then however long it took and by whatever means, he would avenge Beth’s I murder. Avenge even the teenage hooker dead in his apartment.

The aircraft slowed, then turned off the runway towards the blinding mirror of the terminal building. Sunlight flooded the cabin. People stirred as if from hibernation. He shook himself and stared abstractedly through the window until the plane’s flank met the tunnel in a kiss and the passenger door was opened. He waited. The other passengers could disembark first, in case they were waiting for him, the Phoenix cops or the Bureau.

Eventually, he walked off the aircraft, smiling conventionally at the conventional smile of the stewardess, the sports bag in his left hand, his right hand aware that he was unarmed. Would they guess he had come to Phoenix? How could they?

The first cop seemed unaware of him, talking to a man in a loud check jacket and a straw hat. A family passed him, the man and woman bulbous in shell suits, children and suitcases towed behind them. He had no luggage to collect and headed for the cab rank, walking towards the blinding desert sunlight as if towards a searchlight. Another indifferent cop. He felt the sweat as a thin, damp line along his collar and forehead. Then he was out into the hard sunlight, his eyes squeezed narrow against its glare. The heat of the morning was already intense. He felt exposed in his grey suit and tie amid the splashes of bright shirts and colourful shorts and print frocks. He bent hurriedly into the driver’s window of the first cab and murmured:

‘Mountain Park Hospital, fast as you can make it.’ The driver’s shrug invited him into the rear of the cab. He looked around him. No one seemed interested in him, no one at all.

He sat back in the plastic bench seat, the sports bag beside him, hot from his moments in the sun. He rubbed his unshaven face, feeling as trapped in his clothing as he did in the interior of the battered Chrysler. The cab driver’s Latino eyes studied him indifferently in the mirror. Lock turned his head and looked back along McDowell, then studied the cars that turned after the cab onto 7th Avenue. It didn’t seem as if anyone was tailing them, but he was suddenly too weary to be certain.

The hospital gleamed like polished desert rock in the morning sun. He paid the driver, then glanced at the few cars that had turned into the driveway behind the cab. None of them seemed suspicious, no one stayed behind a tinted windscreen. He entered the air-conditioned foyer gratefully, his steps increasingly leaden as he headed for the Grainger Wing. As if he had come, unarmed, to challenge a lord in his castle, not to interrogate one old man concerning his twenty-year criminality. Lock took the lift to the top floor.

A panoramic window looking over the park towards the New River mountains. Cactus and the flash of a hummingbird against the glass, come to sip at the provided liquor containers. He realised that the duty nurse recognized him.

‘Mr Grainger is very much better, Mr Lock,’ she announced.

‘We thought you’d returned to Washington?’

‘Uh, yes. But I—’ He shrugged. ‘There isn’t anyone else, no other family. I felt ‘

‘We understand, Mr Lock. I’m sure Mr Grainger will appreciate your visit.’ She got up. ‘I’ll just see if he’s awake, and prepare him.’

She entered Vaughn’s room, leaving Lock alone in the corridor.

A moment later she returned, beckoning him through the door.

‘I’ll leave you two alone together, Mr Lock. Try not to tire him.’ Lock nodded and the door closed behind him.

He was immediately aware of his familiarity to the nurse, aware of his name and the photograph on CNN. The woman would be on the day shift, she would have had time to watch the news. He shivered. Vaughn Grainger, he realised as he became accustomed to the shadowy, blinded room, was watching him with fierce eyes. He moved slowly to the bed.

‘Uh — hi, Vaughn. How are you?’ he murmured awkwardly.

Involuntarily, he glanced at the heart monitor, which bleeped softly, regularly, and at the tubes that connected the old man to the monitors and the medication. ‘Vaughn—?’ The old man was staring at him, but the fierceness in his eyes was lifeless, as if he had died or been paralysed in a moment of rage.

Grainger raised his hand and indicated a chair beside the bed.

Lock offered to take his hand, but it was withdrawn to the languor of the smooth white sheets. He sat down. The room seemed hot despite the purr of the air-conditioning. A bird sang outside the window.

“I — had to come back,’ Lock announced, rubbing at his damp, prickling forehead.

‘Why?’

Lock tried to reassure himself that he possessed sufficient time.

He had glanced almost subliminally at the newspaper headlines as he passed the airport newsstand. He hadn’t made the front page. The Washington PD would not necessarily assume he’d come back here. Rather the opposite. There was time ‘Vaughn’

He cleared his throat, leaning towards the old man’s sculpted, arrogant features propped against the plump white pillows; an invalid pope or king. ‘Vaughn, I know some things,’ he began. ‘I’ve been told some things. Reasons why Billy and Beth were killed …’ His words failed against the old man’s pleading and contempt. Lock was staring at two faces, Vaughn in the past and present, both there in the room.

‘What things?’ It was the Vaughn he had always known who triumphed, as if there was no right on earth that allowed anyone to question his actions. ‘What’s gotten into you, John?’

It was a trick. The heart monitor bumped its green, charted line more quickly and more irregularly across the screen and he could hear Vaughn’s stertorous breathing. It was nothing but an old man acting a part too young for him; unsustainable illusion.

‘Vaughn,’ he pressed more confidently, ‘you know what things. Things about Tran, about you and ‘Nam … Billy, too.

Those things ‘

The liver-spotted right hand gripped his wrist like the talon of a hunting bird. Vaughn’s eyes blazed.

‘What in hell made you ask? Why in hell did you want to know?’

He shook the old man’s grip away.

‘They killed my sister!’ It was an enraged whisper. Vaughn seemed more distant, shrunken, his face that of a stranger. ‘You think I could forget that? You think it’s something to forget?’

Grainger’s head moved from side to side amid the pillows in what might have been distress rather than denial. His hand now patted the bed impotently. The heart monitor was like a radio picking up a distant and elusive signal. Then Grainger gestured at his mouth, then at the oxygen mask hanging over the head of the bed. Lock passed it to him. The room seemed filled with greedy sucking noises … which gradually calmed. Eventually, he removed the mask. The monitor had settled like his chest into regularity. Another trick? At any moment, just by calling or pressing his bell, Grainger could end the conversation. He would have to leave.

The old man’s eyes glittered wetly.

‘You shouldn’t have looked, John-Boy. You shouldn’t have turned over the stones. There’s only ugliness there.’ His breathing was loud and tired.

‘I had to — don’t you understand?’ Lock pleaded in his turn.

Grainger nodded reluctantly.

‘Yes — but it’s done you no good, John … You can’t do anything. Nothing. This is a grown-ups’ game, not an adventure.

You won’t get called into the house for peanut butter and a bath just as the game gets interestjng, John.’ His hand was patting Lock’s now. ‘They won’t let you.’

‘Vaughn, my bridges have all been burned behind me. They saw to it. A dead girl in my apartment, the cops tipped off. I know how they play!’

The revelation surprised Grainger. His skin became more pallid.

The monitor bumped like the index of a failing economy.

‘You can’t do anything.’

There’s nothing else I want to do,’ Lock replied.

Grainger studied his features as he might have done that of some surgeon or priest newly arrived at his bedside, offering life and hope. To Lock, the regularity of the heart monitor was now clocklike, marking time he could not afford.

‘They’ll kill you, John. I can’t let that happen … not after everything.’ He was suddenly weeping uncontrollably, silently, the tears running down the pale, leathery old skin of his cheeks, darkening the collar of his pyjama jacket. ‘John-Boy, I just can’t tell you — I You can’t do anything except get yourself killed, and I can’t let you do that.’

Silence, then, into which the hum of machines entered quietly. Then the noises of the distant hospital routine. Vaughn’s breathing, his own, the soft blipping of the heart monitor.

Eventually, he said gently: ‘You have to tell me, Vaughn. You just have to.’

Another silence, before: ‘How much do you know?’

‘I know about you and Tran — I know how you turned the company around in the ‘70s. With heroin.’ He glanced at the monitor, but there was no quickening of its trace. ‘I don’t know if Billy was involved way back — ‘ Grainger shook his head.

‘He wasn’t,’ he growled defiantly. Lock nodded, attempting a smile.

‘I know how you brought the drugs in. I know why you did it. A guy called Kauffman in the CIA-‘ It was evident that Grainger recognized the name, ‘-he told me all he knew, which was most of it.’

Each phrase, each nugget of accusation, prompted a small jerk of Grainger’s head. There was pain in his eyes, together with defiance. Rather than guilt, there was the sense of a gambler who had lost; no self-revulsion, just a flinty admission that the game was over and he had been beaten. Guilt was for the little guys, the no-accounts. The realisation hardened Lock and enabled him to say curtly:

‘But it went on, changed into a new inning, right? The game wasn’t over when you turned the company around, when you were riding high. Why, Vaughn? Was it too hard or too easy to stop?’

Grainger’s gnarled hands closed into fists on the sheet. The accusations demeaned him. Lock was contemptuous of him, morally superior. Grainger’s features sharpened, became cold as in death.

‘You’ll never know,’ he replied. ‘Will you, John-Boy? You’ll never know.’ The dismissive chuckle rattled in his throat. The heart monitor was steady as if by an effort of will.

‘One thing I do know, Vaughn — and it’s a fact — Pete Turgenev’s the main man. Not you.’

It was true, then. The blanched skin, the pinpricks of pink on the cheekbones, the glare in his eyes — and the hands, working with the cotton of the sheet as if it was something that writhed in his grip and fought him.

Lock said: ‘It’s a long time since you headed the whole thing up — isn’t it, Vaughn? Neither you nor Billy has been in control. Pete’s the studio boss — uh?’

Grainger did not reply. His glittering, pale eyes moved furiously, seeking escape, justification, perhaps even continued silence. Lock was aware of the warm room, the heat of tension that seemed to enclose them, the bed, the dazzling frame given to the blinds by the desert morning outside the steady, almost monotonous blips of the heart monitor, charting Grainger’s life like a seabed.

‘What happened, Vaughn?’ Lock asked eventually, in a soothing voice, trying a change of mood. At once, the old man’s eyes softened, became calmer and less focused. ‘When did it all start going wrong?’

Another silence, the heart monitor like a ticking watch marking Lock’s sense of time wasted, making his body jump with nerves.

‘A long time ago,’ the old man offered to the ceiling, as if Lock was a priest from a faith still disavowed. ‘Somehow Turgenev knew about Vietnam … the guy was KGB, wasn’t he? He’d know those things, or make it his business to find out. He came with an offer — to Billy. Billy almost threw him out. I-‘ The voice faltered. ‘I had to — to put Billy straight on a few things …’

The hands worked at the cotton sheet again, this time in furious smoothing motions. Lock sensed Billy’s outrage, and was thankful for it. ‘Billy liked being a mw/ft-miHionaire,’ Vaughn Grainger offered to the room by way of justification.

‘Heroin smuggled via Siberia, right?’

‘Right. We went ahead. We wanted to get into Siberia, open it up. It gave us the funds when the banks weren’t lending to expand. Heroin was a loan, no more than a wise investment.

‘Tran and other people had the network, from back then. We just activated it.’ Then, contemptuously: ‘The CIA used heroin as another currency — we did the same, John-Boy!’ There was no special pleading in the rage, merely an informative tone. This is the way the world dances, boy, and you’d better get used to it. Perhaps he’d told Billy in the same manner?

‘I understand,’ he soothed.

There was a bright gleam of disdain in Grainger’s stare.

‘Not you, John-Boy — not you. You think the world works another way. It doesn’t.’

‘What happened that made Billy’s death necessary?’

Grainger swallowed; an ugly, guttural noise. Then he said:

‘Turgenev wanted to take over — just like that. He had a plan all ready to present to us here in Phoenix. Last week, was it …?’ The old man seemed terrified at the vagueness of memory rather than at the recalled events.

‘Yes, last week,’ Lock confirmed, feeling nauseous.

‘Billy was stalling him, trying to bring in big new investors, interest the banks in rescheduling the company debt … Turgenev knew he had the arm on us, he knew we couldn’t stand up to his dummy corporation trying to buy us out — or we’d all go down the tubes and into jail for a thousand years apiece!’

The hands were strangling something on the bed again, the head was raised slightly from the pillows, the neck muscles ropelike, the eyes staring.

Lock snapped: ‘So you knew he must have killed Beth and Billy, right from the beginning!’

‘I swear to God, no!’ His head turned to stare at Lock, appalled that he could have been so misjudged, so blackened. ‘I knew hardly anything, almost nothing at all … Billy explained here, last week, the week before. I was involved only with the Foundation-‘ It sounded so much like plea-bargaining that Lock was revolted by it. ‘It was only then I found out that Turgenev and some other people, the Russian mafia over here, in our country, wanted to move in and move us out. I swear to you, John, I didn’t know …’ What had begun as a protestation became, even as he spoke, a recognition of weakness and self contempt. He lay back on the pillow, releasing Lock’s hand, and stared defiantly at the ceiling, where the blind’s shadow was thrown like the white bars of a cage imprisoning darkness. Then he announced: ‘The asshole government, the banks, the big corporations — no one realises the Russian mafia’s here, organised, in big numbers. They’ll wake up to it too late to do anything about it.’

‘You knew he’d killed them, though?’ Lock prompted, their breathing audible in the room, almost masking the heart monitor as it returned to calm. It hurried once more as the question was asked.

Grainger shook his head. ‘I didn’t know. Maybe I–I didn’t believe it. Maybe I underestimated … I didn’t know, not right off.’

‘But eventually …?’

‘No one wanted Beth killed, John.’

Turgenev did.’

‘His goons killed her.’

‘His orders. You know that, Vaughn.’

After a long time: ‘I know it.’

Lock sat back in his chair, drained. The old man seemed calm, empty, waiting to die rather than recover. There was nothing more he could learn — and there was nothing more he could do, or wished to do, for Vaughn Grainger. The room was intolerably warm, as if the air-conditioning had failed. It was finished now — or begun. Perhaps that was the reality. Had he wanted Grainger to deny everything, turn him around so that he could go back to Washington and to being who he had been until last week? He shook his head. No, he hadn’t wanted that.

But hadn’t expected this emptiness either, this vacuum inside himself.

Grainger startled him. Still staring at the narrow ribs of sunlight thrown on the ceiling, he said:

‘You take care, John. You take good care.’

There was a sense of concern and even pride in the voice.

Perhaps, most weirdly, a sense of recognition, as if they were united now, the same kind of people.

He stood up. Accepting everything else, he could not permit the chasm between himself and Grainger to be bridged. He turned away, hearing the old man murmur:

‘Take care, John. Good luck’

Then he was through the door and the nurse looked up in a moment of concern, then a longer instant of bright optimism.

‘You didn’t tire him too much?’ she chided.

‘What-? Oh, no. Thank you, sister. I have something to do now, you’ll excuse me?’

‘He shouldn’t be using you to run business errands for him, Mr Lock. The doctors prescribed complete rest ‘

He turned on her angrily. ‘I think he’s easy in his mind, nurse.

I really do!’

He turned away from her and down the corridor, her little puffs of offended professionalism sounding like the noises of a small engine. He waited for the lift without glancing back at her, then descended to the foyer of the Grainger Wing. Its emblem, name, motto, all offended; paint on a skull, white on a whore.

Conscience money. He strode towards the entrance, the sports bag swinging at his side like a weapon. The doors sighed back, allowing him into the heat and light.

He stood, half-blinded, on the marble steps, his ringers dabbling in his breast pocket for his sunglasses. He saw no police vehicles, no one watching him, as his eyes adjusted to the glare.

As he slipped on the glasses, there was a faint noise near his head like an angered insect. Nothing else for an instant, but even before he could raise his hand to waft it aside, the glass of the doors behind him shattered.

He heard a scream, drawn out and low, as adrenalin surged through his body and he fell, then rolled across the steps. Gunshot, silenced weapon. More shattering glass, then he saw marble chip and fly up from the impact of a third shot, beside his head. He heard it whine away in ricochet.

Heard, too, the noise of police sirens

Pyotr Leonidovich Turgenev scanned the sheet he had removed from his secure fax, nodding in self-compliment. The takeover of Grainger Technologies by his dummy corporation in America was meeting with little in the way of resistance. GraingerTurgenev would become, apparently but not in reality, an entirely separate and autonomous company, the dummy corporation buying out the Grainger shareholding. He placed the fax sheet on his broad walnut desk and walked to the wall length windows of his study. Elsewhere in the office suite, even late in the evening, his secretaries and assistants continued to monitor his business interests, share purchases, currency dealing.

The security lights mounted along the eaves of the hunting lodge cast purple-tinged shadows on the snow that stretched away from the window towards the belt of trees which encircled the estate. There was a faint, livid glow away to the south where Novyy Urengoy lay like a pool of brackish water, festering and vile. He detested the place and its concerns — even those which involved him. Novyy Urengoy was people like Panshin, the American Schneider — like Rawls before him a craven, greedy, spineless thing — and even Bakunin, the peasant GRU colonel.

He disliked their necessity in the scheme of things, their satellite status around his star.

The hunting lodge had once belonged to a half-mad prince from the last century. He had built it in the middle of Siberia’s desolation, far from plentiful game and wildfowl, had dug lakes, planted trees, had imported deer, bear, fox and duck to kill at his leisure.

There was, he admitted, something admirable about the scale of the thing and the wealth necessary to create a hunting estate in a barren wilderness at the edge of the arctic tundra. He enjoyed the house — more than the New York apartment, less than the villa in Antibes, and perhaps to the same degree as the ranch in Montana. Moscow and Petersburg he loathed equally.

He rubbed his long forefinger up and down the aquiline curve of his nose, staring out at the snow. A secretary entered after knocking, explained the urgency of some papers. He gestured they be placed on his desk and dismissed the woman with another wave of his hand. He was content — no, it was necessary — to brood for a few minutes longer. Lock, the subject of his mood, was little more than an itch. He was all but less than nothing. And yet … he was still out there, even after the frame-up involving the dead hooker in his apartment. The police had been only moments too slow, but Lock had blundered through the closing trap, and was now in Phoenix. What did he expect to team? Turgenev knew what he could be told by Grainger, but he wondered how much Lock desired those truths.

Did he really want to bring his world crashing down?

Turgenev smiled in puzzlement. He disliked not really knowing Lock. In Afghanistan, he seemed always in Billy’s shadow, a Ml somehow formless, immature figure; dull, conventional, almost prim, a maiden aunt in a war zone. He smiled again. That had been true … the man had had the necessary courage, he had absorbed his training well, he’d survived a few tight situations.

But he hadn’t been real, somehow, not quite there.

Did his ignorance threaten to cause him to underestimate Lock? He didn’t think so — he simply liked certainty.

But then, he was certain of his people and Tran’s people. They would eliminate Lock …

He snapped his fingers to summon his attention to the desk and its papers. Lock was a dead man. The local problem of Vorontsyev had been settled —

He paused for a moment. He had underestimated Vorontsyev.

The policeman he had thought ineffectual, almost a dilettante or intellectual, morose and solitary, hanging on for his pension, had surprised him by persisting; by getting as close as he had done before he had been stopped.

Therefore, had he underestimated Lock?

He resolved the question by sitting in the leather swivel chair behind the desk, his back to the window, and taking up the sheaf of papers the secretary had brought in.

No, he had not underestimated the man. Lock was about to go under for the third time — not waving but drowning.

His hand grabbed instinctively for the sports bag he had dropped, scrabbling like a crab across the marble steps, as the police sirens loudened and he tensed against the next bullet. Then Lock rolled across the mosaic inlay towards the shattered open doors of the hospital. Something puckered the marble near him and buzzed angrily away. Then he was on patterned carpet, his body colliding with a woman stretched prone and terrified in the foyer. He got to his knees and scuttled away from the door. The carpet was littered with frightened bodies as if there had been an air raid.

There was blood on one bright print frock, then he was on his feet and blundering past a nurse in uniform and a doctor kneeling over someone else in shock. His heart thudded against his ribs, the tempo of his panic. He fled past the lifts, hardly aware of his direction, allowing the survival mechanisms to dictate to him. He plunged down steps into an empty, soughing corridor that smelt aseptic and safe.

Whether they were Tran’s people or belonged to Turgenev no longer mattered. All that was important was that he was still acting like a slow-moving target, open to surprise, easy to kill -

stairs ascending again. He glanced back along the corridor.

Two distant white-coated figures, neither of them in pursuit of him. He clambered up the stairs, his breathing loud and ragged, his legs heavy. He emerged into a smaller, more cramped foyer.

Accident and Emergency. A man was bleeding onto thermoplastic tiles from a head wound, there was another man with a bandaged arm. A harried, untidy nurse belied the orderly calm of the Grainger Wing before the first shot. He blundered through the stiffly opening doors into the hard, varnished sunlight and onto the dusty concrete of a car park. He could immediately hear the police sirens, and glanced wildly around him. The staff car park, ranks of cars and 4WDs glinting with chrome and glass.

A woman standing beside one small Nissan sedan was struggling into a white coat. He ran towards her. At once, her face was startled and determined.

‘Keys!’ he snapped. ‘I don’t have time to explain, give me the car keys!’

She was frightened, but not sufficiently. He saw her raise the keys to throw them out into the car park. He snatched at her wrist, smelling her perfume and fear at once, his face close to hers. Her eyes were wide, panicked at the prospect of violence.

He wanted to shake his head, but thrust her away, keeping hold of the keys.

‘I just want your car!’ he shouted at her like a plea, and unlocked the door. Her fear changed into outraged anger. She was looking around for help; then she began moving towards him as he threw the sports bag into the back of the car. A baby seat, empty, for which he was thankful.

‘Hey — I’ she began, but he glowered at her.

‘Lady — doctor-l Just keep away from the car!’ He climbed in and fumbled the key into the ignition. It fired first time. The woman was banging the driver’s window. He waved her away, snarling: ‘Get away from the car!’

He let off the brake and the car surged forward, brushing her aside. The tyres squealed on the hot concrete as he headed the car wildly towards the barrier of the car park, which swung up at his approach. The woman, waving her arms in furious anger, diminished in the mirror. The Nissan bumped out onto a narrow road. He turned …

… north. Towards the mountains and the desert beyond them. Out of Phoenix.

Away from the airport — there were other airports. He accelerated away from the traffic lights, turning onto Black Canyon Highway — Interstate 17. Flagstaff was a hundred and forty miles north. It had an airport, flights out of Arizona. Far enough to begin with. He studied the mirror. He was sweating profusely but his temperature and heartbeat were returning to normal.

There was a sense of exhilaration nudging aside the shock of the unexpected attack.

The cactuses lined the road now like crosses. There didn’t seem to be a car in the mirrors, intent on pursuit or on matching his speed. With luck, he had perhaps thirty minutes before the police put up a helicopter to monitor the I-17 and the other roads out of the city. The doctor would describe her car, describe him. He would, in a half-hour at most, be identified as John Lock, fugitive. Less if they asked the nurse outside Grainger’s room.

The suburbs straggled away on either side of the highway. As if dousing green and gold fires, crop-spraying hoses fountained great peacocks’ tails of water that rainbowed in the sun. An aircraft dropped towards Sky Harbor airport. The mountains opened. Cholla, prickly pear and saguaro cactus populated a dusty expanse as the road began to climb towards the New River mountains and into the Sonoran desert. Sun City, nibbling at farmland, lay behind him in the mirrors, as ordered as a trailer park, the planted fields seemly and neat. Phoenix was little more than a mirage in the morning heat.

He began scanning the high desert air, paling to colourlessness, for the first signs of a police helicopter. He realised he had to get rid of the car but shivered at the thought, the desert suddenly more real, pressing around the air-conditioned box of the Nissan. He had to have another car, and quickly.

TEN Form of Escape

‘Good, good,’ Turgenev murmured, adding: ‘That’s fine, Ivan and thank Takis for me.’ He settled back in the leather swivel chair, watching the smoke rise from the Cuban cigar resting in the onyx ashtray. ‘I’ll leave the detail with you — sure, I’ll be there for the signing of the new contracts. How hot is Athens at this time of the year? Good …’ He chuckled companionably with the caller, the CEO of GraingerTurgenev in Greece. ‘OK, talk to you soon.’

He put down the telephone, picked up the cigar and puffed contentedly at it. He was aware of himself in the gilt mirror on one wall, exuding what the English would call complacency. He smiled at his image, and was tempted to wink at himself. The Athens operation was an unqualified success. The Greek government scheme, seventy per cent financed by the European Commission in Brussels, to bring Russian natural gas to Athens via a pipeline from Bulgaria, had become hopelessly behind schedule.

To avoid the penalty clause in the original contract, Russian contractors had been offered a bigger share of the project. It was worth, conservatively, as much as six per cent of the total cost, perhaps fifty million dollars, to GraingerTurgenev. His company.

Besides which, he reminded himself, Greece was his own judas gate into the billions of dollars that could be siphoned off from the EC over the next few years. Greece alone would receive twenty billion ecus over five years … the opportunities for profits were enormous.

He put down the cigar and rubbed his eyes. He slipped on half-glasses to study the sheaf of reports that had been left on his desk. In a week’s time, he expected a delegation of senior politicians from the republics of Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan — at the hunting lodge. A crucial meeting. The gasfields and oilfields that clustered around the Caspian Sea had been called the new Gulf. Western Siberia’s output was gradually falling … He had to take advantage of the opening up of the Asian fields. To wrest the potential huge profits from the pipeline work, the terminal construction on the Black Sea, in conjunction with Chevron and other US and European companies, was a prize almost beggaring belief.

And within his grasp. He closed his hand on the desk, as if merely flexing it, opened and closed it again and again as he read the reports. Grainger Technologies, which would be his within days, a couple of weeks at most, was crucial to his strategy.

Billy should have stood aside — Turgenev sucked his teeth as he recalled Billy on that last evening, at his Maryland home, sweating, guilty, defiant and washed up … Billy should have sold out to him, or at least agreed that the Central Asian project was the future — their mutual future — for the next twentyfive years. But Billy hadn’t seen it, wouldn’t agree … poor Billy.

He finished reading. The planning had been exact, even to the removal of Billy Grainger and the acquisition of the company.

Finance, cooperation, funding, strategy — and murder. Meticulously considered and arranged. Billy’s death was business by other means, he smiled to himself, consciously misquoting Clausewitz.

Against all of which Lock was merely a hornet buzzing outside the window of his study … a harmless nuisance, like a beggar in the street.

His hand passed over the sheaf of papers, brushing away a small grey beetle of cigar ash. The sister’s death, of course, had been unavoidable. If Billy’s murder had not been disguised as violent robbery, he would not have been as easy to kill for some time after that night. Beth had, unfortunately, therefore been endangered along with Billy. And Billy’s bout of Protestant morality regarding the heroin had sealed his fate as much as the necessity to direct Grainger Technologies towards the rewards of the new oil power region of Central Asia. He had to have control of Grainger by the time the delegation arrived. He had to be able to offer them a package, a unitary capability that would outweigh other consortia.

Eventually, there would be no need for the fuel of heroin to power his empire — but that time was not yet. Just as one day, the smuggling of nuclear scientists and technicians to Iran and Iraq would prove unnecessary. At present, however, it gave him presence and leverage in the Middle East, dealing with those governments the West kept at arm’s length.

He looked at his watch. Nearly midnight. The woman had arrived earlier in the evening and now awaited him like the denizen of a harem. He grinned. Time for bed … He bent and picked up the faxed sheet from the floor where it had curled itself into a tube. It referred to Lock’s escape from the Mountain Park Hospital. Lock had spoken with Grainger. He knew it all now. That had been what had enraged him, bul now he contemplated it calmly. Lock was the subject of a manhunt across the continental United States. He was a plague carrier, a leper and outcast with nowhere to go. If and when he was arrested — if Turgenev’s own people were beaten in the race by the police who would believe him? He was a sex murderer; a teenage heroin addict, playing at prostitution to feed her habit, had died.

Lock had killed her. There were even witnesses. Lock would never get out from under …

… even though his death would be simpler and more satisfying.

He placed the fax on his desk and barely paused to consider it further. Tran’s people, working in harness with his own men, would prevent Lock ever leaving Arizona. They had a car registration, a description, a possible sighting on the Interstate 17, heading north into the desert.

Turgenev was whistling softly to himself as he switched out the lights in his study. For a moment he watched the pale glow of security lights and snow reflected into the darkened room.

Then he finally closed and locked the door behind him and began climbing the wide staircase with its elaborately carved banister towards his bedroom.

It was a place called Bumble Bee, west of the 1-17, which he had left at Rock Springs. The Sonoran dust blew through it on the slight breeze, and the wooden stores, hotel and handful of houses seemed almost desiccated by the sun. Even the image of Colonel Sanders seemed more aged and leather-skinned above the diner. There was a garage and petrol station next to the Kentucky Fried Chicken parlour and a large sign above a low building that claimed it was the General Store and that it possessed Jeeps for Hire. It was what he had been seeking and he felt the relief rumble though him like the subterranean approach of a subway train.

The traffic was little more than a duo of pick-up trucks and a dusty Oldsmobile. Figures in stetsons and denims added to the sense of timelessness as if the place had been bypassed by the years as surely as it had been by the interstate highway. There were hills like broken teeth in red-sand gums to the west and south; omnipresent saguaro cactus, and yucca and pine and oak woodland darkened the slopes of the mountains to the north.

His body was quivering with released tension as he climbed stiffly out of the car into the baking, suffocating heat and the gritty dust. The breeze was like the breath of a furnace. Even so, he shivered. The sight of a TV aerial was sufficient. This was a town, however fossilised; there would be newspapers, TV, radio, any of which could be broadcasting and detailing a description of him and the Nissan, He had drawn the car into a narrow space in the shadow of a dilapidated trailer parked behind the garage. It might go unregarded for two or three hours. A repair truck masked it from the main street of the town. He pulled out the sports bag and locked the Nissan. Then he dropped the keys and dustily kicked them beneath the car.

Lock crossed to the store, his assumed nonchalance threadbare even to himself. He nodded to an old man perched on a hard chair on a wooden verandah. The sidewalk creaked beneath his shoes — city shoes, city suit. He cleared his throat and entered the cooler, musty air of the store. It was a little before noon and he was tired: dragged down,too, by the revelations in that hot, quiet room in the hospital and by the sense of what dimly lay ahead of him.

‘Good morning.’

The storekeeper, in a tartan shirt and denims — his stomach spilt the pattern of the shirt over his belt-studied him, then asked: ‘How come you parked all the way over there?’

‘I — er, I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way, block anyone,’ he replied lamely. ‘I want to hire a jeep, do some desert sightseeing …’

‘We got jeeps. You from Phoenix?’

‘Visiting. My — er, my wife’s been taken into hospital. Appendicitis.

She’s OK, but I didn’t want to hang around, kicking my heels for the next ‘

‘I’m not your father, boy — you don’t need to explain. You want a jeep, I can hire you a jeep. You got desert clothes, boots?’

There was an increased eagerness — and innocence — in the inspection now being carried out. There was no suspicion of him except as a stranger. A lofty, dismissive contempt. ‘Everything you’re gonna need is right over there,’ the storekeeper said, the foretaste of profit gleaming in his eye. His hand caressed his greying beard as if he were miiking something. Lock was thankful for the safety implicit in the man’s attention to business, to fleecing the city-feller who walked in out of the sun looking for a vicarious, safe experience in the Sonoran desert.

‘You got to take out insurance — I got the forms right here,’ he continued, following Lock to the counter set in front of a window looking out over the forecourt and the petrol pumps.

There were hunting rifles and handguns, desert boots, denims, thick shirts, knives. Lock controlled his breathing. The place had the excitement of an Aladdin’s cave. ‘You want a hunting licence, feller?’

‘I might as well.’

‘You shoot good enough not to harm yourself nor anybody else out there?’ Lock nodded. The storekeeper produced the hire forms, the insurance docket, the hunting licence. Lock produced his passport. At once, the storekeeper looked up, surprised. ‘You planning on leaving the country with my stuff?’ he asked.

‘I thought it might help,’ Lock offered, a new bout of tension seizing his head like a migraine.

‘You city boys,’ the storekeeper sniffed. ‘OK — you go pick out some clothes and a rifle, I’ll use this here passport for the details.

Like you say, it saves time.’ He donned wire spectacles and studied the passport which, to Lock at least, looked suspiciously unused. James Laurence was the name on it, a resident of Baltimore.

He was in advertising. ‘You here on vacation?’ he heard from the storekeeper.

‘My wife’s folks live in Phoenix — retired out here.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Lock selected two shirts and a pair of denims from the shelves, tried on a pair of boots. Then he inspected a glass case of handguns. There was a Smith & Wesson 459, a gun he had handled in the field. The rifles were racked on the wall beside the window.

‘You got an address in Baltimore — make that Phoenix?’

Lock supplied a fictitious number on Camelback Road. The storekeeper scribbled. Lock would have liked the M-16, but as a civilian he knew he ought to choose something that approximated to a hunting weapon. He reached out, tentatively touching each of the rifles in turn. It was as if he were making some bargain, signing something irrevocable, were he to buy one of them.

There was a Ruger single-shot carbine, looking as if it belonged in Bumbte Bee and not the world beyond it. It was accurate, though. At too close a range. He chose another Ruger, the Mini-14, on which a telescopic sight could be mounted and its magazine could hold up to thirty rounds. A ten-round magazine would make it lighter. He ignored the shotguns.

‘You done shopping, feller?’

‘Yes.’

Lock indicated the Ruger, and a scope from the glass case.

Then the Smith & Wesson pistol. Then a knife. He dumped the shirts and denims and the boots beside the weapons.

‘You’re sure aiming to do some serious hunting,’ the man observed mockingly, a greedy glint in his eye. He had difficulty preventing his hands from rubbing themselves together in congratulation.

A truck pulled up outside and Lock flinched. An arm, throwing. Newspapers landed on the stoop near the old man in the hard chair. ‘You want a paper?’

‘No.’

The storekeeper shrugged. ‘I’ll bring ‘em in later. Food, feller —‘cross the street. Not old Colonel Sanders but the cafe next to it. Sell you anything you want — say, you’ll need camping equipment, right?’ His grin broadened into what might have been carnivorous appetite.

It was another fifteen minutes before Lock was shown out to the jeep he had contracted to hire. His face was on the front page of the Phoenix newspaper lying on the sidewalk near the dozing old man’s boots. He shivered again. His suit was in the sports bag. The storekeeper had allowed him to change his clothing behind a rudimentary curtain at one dim end of the store.

His photograph, supplied by the Washington PD, was there for the man to recognize, in all probability, only moments after he cut the rough string holding the bundle of newspapers together.

Then he would phone the cops in Phoenix … He felt his whole body become sacklike, all his determination slumped in him like a great weight dragging him down. He barely heard the storekeeper’s words of advice and warning as he took a map from the man’s hand with a vague, numb grip. The storekeeper studied him, then shrugged. The jeep was insured, you’ve paid for the equipment, I don’t have any problem if you get lost and die out there, his look said.

Lock started the jeep and pulled away from the store along the town’s one street. He sensed the storekeeper watching his departure. He would buy food later. All that was important now was to get out of Bumble Bee before an alarm was raised. He was hungry and his throat was dry. He headed north, accelerating involuntarily towards the 1-17.

The weight in his stomach increased and his shoulders slumped. His knuckles were white, gripping the wheel.

Serious hunting. It had been said mockingly. It might easily come to that.

Serious hunting …?

The pistol and the rifle were a joke, part of an elaborate charade. Lock pulled the jeep off the highway just north of Cordes Junction, onto a dirt road that wound drily towards tree sloped mountains. He parked beneath a paloverde, startling a mourning dove from its branches. He watched the bird circle, then flutter back to rest; returning as surely as his thoughts to the same perch. It was no good, there was no point in running.

He couldn’t fly away from it … He switched off the engine and at once the desert silence encroached, pressing against his ears like a depth of water.

The song of a cactus wren pierced the quiet, slitting it like a blade, relieving the pressure of the desert; though not the weight of his thoughts. Nowhere to run … the one inescapable fact being the girl’s body on the sofa of his apartment. There was evidence, eye-witness accounts, a continental manhunt … He raised his head, eyes closed tightly, to the sky. Opened them and saw chollas, barrel cactus, buckthorn — felt dust on the faint breeze. It settled on his hands. He let his head drop forward onto the steering wheel.

He was hungry. He had bought food at one of the service stations at Cordes Junction — where they would remember him, have his description for anyone who asked — but a pervading sense of nausea prevented him from reaching for the food. It was akin to despair, the sense of failure that enveloped him.

Pete Turgenev was seven thousand miles away and more, safe in Siberia, while he was on the run from his people, Tran, and the police. Those brute facts had pursued him along the highway like a desert wind, however fast he drove, however hard he gripped the wheel and tried to retain a hold on his imagination.

But they had overtaken him the moment he stopped to buy food, spare cans of petrol, water. Pete Turgenev was safe while he was surely, inexorably, being run to earth. Impotence, fruitless, pointless rage, were all he had left. His picture was in maybe fifty newspapers in a dozen states already. There was no way out of it.

The wren poured out its strange, rasping song, largely unnoticed, punctuating the passage of a blank, dead time. The faces of Beth, Kauffman, Billy, Vaughn, the dead girl, all circled in his mind, Turgenev’s most of all. They were moving as slowly as distant comets, too distant to have any significance …

The wren’s song, the faces, the hard rustle of the cactus and the Lock looked up. The dust that surrounded the jeep was made as murky as a sandstorm by the hovering helicopter, its down draught ploughing at the red desert. It was becoming more difficult for the marksman to aim accurately. He had to keep moving, had to help create the dust-screen. The jeep stumbled and tore its way through the thickly scattered sagebrush and cactus, crushing low hedgehog cactuses, swinging to avoid the chollas and the scattered, isolated paloverdes. The mountains appeared more distant. The windscreen shattered near his hand, showering it with needles of glass. Flecks of blood mingled with the thick red dust on the backs of his hands. The dust storm behind seemed to be closing.

He swung the wheel again, then again, as he drove into a blind alley of tree chollas that had gathered like senile spectators to stare at an arroyo where there must once have been water.

The jeep tumbled into the dry watercourse, wheels spinning, driveshaft screaming before the tyres bit again. Narrow gully, the tree chollas leering over him, the dusty cloud over his head spinning wildly as if caught by a small tornado … Only then, as the helicopter tilted crazily across his vision, did he realise that the jeep was mounting the other bank of the arroyo before he could turn the wheel. The vehicle was failing to make it, was falling back slowly, turning onto its side as slowly as a large animal that had been anaesthetised.

The scream of the driveshaft again, then the tear of the offside wheels, the mad spinning of the other two. He switched off the ignition as the jeep subsided with great, slow dignity, coming to rest at the bottom of the arroyo. So slowly that he was aware of no impact, no jolt. The sky seemed to spin across his vision for a second or so — that was the only disorientation. The tree chollas appeared cool, their needled flesh like thick bunches of strange fruit. He scrabbled from the driver’s seat, grabbing at the Ruger Mini-14 which had been flung loose from the rear of the vehicle. The Smith & Wesson pistol was thrust into his belt. He seemed to swim through dust into the shadow of one of the chollas. Bullets plucked up dust around the jeep. Within the noise of the rotors he heard the gunshots and the approaching vehicle. Through the distressed shadows of the cholla’s branches. he could see the occupants of the Jetranger. There were three of them.

He recognized Tran. Peering between the pilot and the marksman.

Then their faces vanished behind the updrawn red dust.

Lock crouched against the low wall of the arroyo, hunching into himself, feeling the vehicle’s approach through the earth like an echo of a distant tremor. He could hear its engine. Jeep, some other 4WD. Two men, three — ? He clutched the rifle against his cheek as if the metal would cool its burning. It would be finished here.

The vehicle stopped. He listened to its engine idling, to a masked and incomprehensible exchange by radio or R/T. Now he was still, the desert’s afternoon temperature seemed choking, unbearable, as close around him as a straitjacket. He was pinioned there by the heat of the place until they came for him.

He heard the door of the vehicle slam shut. The helicopter, as if to gain a better vantage or to distance itself imperiously from the necessary, unpleasant violence, slipped higher in the sky, maneuvering gently on the other side of the stricken jeep so that it could locate him; then just watch.

Inevitable -

he turned onto his stomach quickly, wrenching his muscles, and fired the Ruger as a figure leapt into the arroyo, dropping the six or seven feet to — become a deadweight, even as it fell, so that it sprawled, grey-suited, on the red dust. An M-16 held in one unmoving hand. A voice called out as Lock rose into a crouch and began running, away from the man’s body. He sensed rather than heard the Jetranger shuffle closer, as if angry at having lost sight of him. There was shouting behind him, but caution, too. They’d climb nervously down into the arroyo, now.

The Jetranger loomed above him. Shots plucked at the ground around him. The helicopter leaned like a drunk, like someone peering down into a well, so that the marksman, suspended in webbing, could lean further out, take more certain aim. Lock watched the slow, careful increase of the helicopter’s angle. He could see the marksman’s mouth, stretched into a rictuslike grin.

He was Caucasian, like the pilot. Tran’s face was that of a child between two adults maneuvering to kill him. He raised the rifle without thinking and fired once, twice — four, six, seven …

The marksman hung in the webbing like a doll, the perspex of the helicopter’s windows was starred like a spider’s web. He could see neither face; only that of the marksman, who still seemed to be grinning at him, his hands moving with the tilt of the machine …

… which was slowly sagging, as if the helicopter had lost its tight grip on the air. The Bell turned, nose drooping, leaning tiredly on the desert “air, tilting towards the dust it was throwing up around Lock.

Lock was blindly thrusting a new magazine into the Ruger as he continued to stare with utter, rapt fascination at the slow death of the machine. It fell lowards him, but it no longer possessed the slightest suggestion of danger. It was harmless, a dead man hung from its open doorway, arms jigging senselessly in imitation of a scarecrow. The Jetranger toppled towards the arroyo, its rotor blades whirling like a dazzling, sun-catching dish as it drove towards him — broken spell. He moved leaden legs very slowly, clumping as through deep water, away from the last plunge of the helicopter.

Then he flung himself flat, the Ruger stretched out at the end of his arm.

The helicopter ploughed into the bank of the arroyo, churning dust, rock, gouts of dry, dead soil over him. The noise ground in his teeth and bones, the earth shook under his body in a frenzy … The screaming of metal, the breaking of the machine.

The slow fall of the level of noise into eventual silence; perhaps minutes later, he could not tell. He kept his hands pressed over his ears for a long time after the noises seemed to have stopped.

Then he fumbled for the Ruger and turned onto his back before sitting upright amid the rubble of soil and dust and broken tree chollas.

The sword of a broken rotor blade thrust up from the dry bed of the arroyo. Another was plunged into the bank. The helicopter was smeared with dust, cactus, darker soil. The windows were entirely obscured. There was no one else there, it seemed, except for himself, no other spectator. Cautiously, he rose to his feet and walked unsteadily towards the machine.

The marksman had been caught in the rotor blades. The smearing on the fuselage and shattered windows was not entirely cactus juice and damper soil. The corpse was headless, almost shredded; what remained of it was still suspended in the soiled webbing from which it had been hanging in order to kill Lock.

Lock vomited. Retched until his throat ached. Then shivered with a sudden chill, as if the still-high sun had set. The pilot’s door was hanging open. The pilot was strapped stiffly into his seat, staring sightlessly at the spider’s web Lock’s shots had created over his window. Lock leaned over the body — a hole in the chest, another in the left temple — and saw Tran’s small form, broken-necked, lying against the bulkhead. One arm lay underneath him, the other was stretched out as if to ward something off. There was no doubt the Vietnamese was dead.

Startled, Lock straightened at the noise of a door slamming in the desert silence. Then an engine fired, wheels spun, and the 4WD careered away. Its dust rose like the smoke of a fire beyond the rim of the arroyo.

One of them had already died. They hadn’t been paid enough to hang around after Tran’s death, or without back-up from the Jetranger. The surviving foot-soldiers had fled.

Lock walked away from the wreckage, towards the shade of the remaining tree chollas. He sat down in the inviting shadows, cradling the rifle on his knees, his head hanging forward with new, drained weariness. He closed his eyes, trying not to imagine the first flies humming around the bodies in the helicopter.

It was a long time later, by the sun’s declination, that he was awoken by the noise of a light aircraft passing low to the west of the arroyo. He stood up, adrift on sudden nerves, and located the plane, descending towards some hidden desert airstrip three or four miles away from his position. It was obviously not engaged in any search for him. It dropped to cactus height as he scrambled clear of the arroyo. The airstrip was due west. His head ached and he felt dizzy. The dirt road he had been on must lead to it.

He looked at the overturned jeep and shook his head. To right it alone was probably beyond him. He would have to walk. He heard a mourning dove, then a cactus wren. The flies around the wreckage were a constant, distant murmur, like that of a small, muffled motor.

He thought of calling Faulkner in Washington. But he had seen a newspaper at the service station. The girl had been a hooker and an addict and he had picked her up. His hire car had been seen cruising the district. Turgenev had him in a box, and the lid had been nailed down tight.

Despite what he had done here …

… he had done nothing but alleviate the immediate pursuit.

Given himself a breathing space, maybe a few hours, some of which time he had already wasted by falling into exhausted sleep.

There was nothing else he could do. Turgenev had burned all the bridges behind him. There was nothing left for him here —

Water, he must take water. Eat something. He should make the airstrip before nightfall.

Igor Trechikov, chief of pcilice for Novyy Urengoy, stared down at Vorontsyev, who was propped against plump pillows in the hospital bed. A sense of sadness assailed him. His chief of detectives’ arm was in heavy plaster, his forehead was bandaged and, beneath the sheet, his broken ribs were strapped. There was bruising on his jaw, scorch marks on his cheeks.

Trechikov shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Vorontsyev’s people — Dmitri Gorov, the female detective Marfa, just herself released from the hospital, and Goludin — were arranged around the bed like a ceremonial bodyguard.

Vorontsyev’s eyes glared blearily at him, and he fumbled to find the sense of outrage that he had fell on receiving his instructions from Bakunin. That anger would now serve to maintain his dignity and authority during his reprimand of Vorontsyev.

Looking at the younger man now, he seemed accused of dereliction.

‘I

— I’ve been kept informed of your condition, Alexei,’ was all he could immediately find to say. The girl scowled contemptuously.

Vorontsyev blinked once, a remote, detached gesture. There was not, it was claimed by the medical staff, any brain damage. Concussion, yes, but that was supposed to have passed. ‘Terrorists, of course-‘ He quailed. Until Bakunin’s phone call, he had been able to believe that embracing fiction, even act upon it. House-to-house searches, arrests, interrogations all designed to unearth the terrorist cell.

Bakunin, without the slightest explanation, had ordered him to suspend Vorontsyev and his team. Thereby dynamiting the fiction, as surely as those far too powerful even to suspect had dynamited Vorontsyev’s flat.

Vorontsyev’s lips opened like an oyster shell.

‘Vera Silkova’s dead — together with her baby,’ he announced in a faint, dull voice.

Trechikov was bemused, then he recalled the two fatalities of the explosion. A young woman, someone’s mistress, and a baby.

The flat behind Vorontsyev’s. The explosive had been hidden in the TV set and radio-detonated. Vorontsyev had delayed on the landing outside his door, talking to a neighbour. The — terrorists had claimed they were gas fitters. Perhaps they’d got the timing wrong, or been hurried into the detonation. Whatever, they were ten seconds too early — though not for the young woman, who had been sitting at a table on the other side of the wall between her flat and Vorontsyev’s television. She and the baby had been killed instantly.

‘Terrible business — ‘ Trechikov began, shuffling his feet afresh as the echo of Bakunin’s hard, demanding tones returned to him. ‘I-‘ He faltered once more.

Vorontsyev’s unplastered hand moved on the bedclothes.

‘I know it upsets you. Chief. She wasn’t important.’

The tone was sympathetic, the intent icy. Dmitri Gorov appeared embarrassed, while the young detective and the woman wandered away from the bed to the other end of the spacious private room. At least he had been able to insist on that quality of treatment for his chief of detectives when neither rank nor money could demand it.

Trechikov nodded Gorov away from the bed and sat on the chair Goludin had vacated. Dmitri, after studying Vorontsyev for a moment, nodded the other two outside and closed the door behind them. Trechikov relaxed until his gaze returned to the pitiless stare with which Vorontsyev regarded him. The room was too warm for Trechikov in his fur boots and greatcoat, but he felt that to shed the coat would be to divest himself of some last lingering authority. Vorontsyev continued to look at him as if he were a beggar who smelt of vodka and dirt.

‘By next week they’ll have you as good as new — ‘ he began, but Vorontsyev interrupted him, the free hand gripping Trechikov’s wrist.

‘Listen, Igor VassiFyevich,’ he hissed, painfully hoisting himself higher against the pillows. ‘Listen to me. I can smell their scent on you like your wife would smell another woman’s perfume!

I know you’ve come to tell me to lay off — suspend me?’ He studied Trechikov’s face, the glare in his eyes a source of heat that drove the man back. ‘Right. That’s the crux of it. Someone’s given you your orders.’

‘No, Alexei — I T came to see how you were, it’s my first free hour since the … Look, you’ll have to take some leave, the investigations are in the hands of the GRU — 1 just want to make sure you get well/ Stay well, stay alive, the panic in the voice announced unambiguously. Vorontsyev retained his fierce grip.

‘Vera Silkova’s dead, Igor. Don’t you understand? They almost killed Marfa up on that rig, now they’ve managed it in the case of an innocent bystander.’ He was whispering, yet Trechikov was held as by some ancient mariner. ‘They don’t care. There were people in the other flats when they tried to blow me to smithereens. They killed Vera Silkova and her baby just to get at me, to make sure of me!’ He swallowed. The bruised lips were opening and closing like the pastiche of a healthy mouth. ‘I don’t care about Rawls, about the Iranian, anyone else who died because of them. But don’t tell me it’s all right, Igor, don’t tell me that!’

He released Trechikov’s wrist. The older man rubbed it immediately, as if it had been burned. Vorohtsyev lay back once more, seeming to subside into the pillows.

‘I — all right, Alexei, all “right … I won’t say thai, not in the way you meant. I tried to keep you away from it, Alexei. You should have listened to me — obeyed my order.’

‘Maybe,’ Vorontsyev admitted grudgingly after a silence.

‘What do you know, Igor?’

‘Nothing!’ Trechikov at once protested. It was true — thank God, it was true.

‘Who called you, who told you to come?’

Trechikov shook his head vehemently.

‘I’m here to place you on leave, Major,’ he said, fumbling for formality as for a defensive weapon.

Vorontsyev’s lips grinned. The eyes remained hard as flint.

Trechikov had never suspected this stubbornness before.

‘Bakunin?’ Trechikov was astounded, so that his expression confessed even as he attempted to control it. ‘I thought so. It had to be him. And who is he answerable to?’

‘How the hell would I know that?’ Trechikov burst out.

‘You might have a guess.’

‘I don’t know!’

‘Calm down, Igor — careful of your angina.’

‘I do have angina—’ Trechikov protested at the mockery.

‘And a pension and a dacha and a greedy wife, Igor. I know.’

‘It’s easy for you, Alexei’

‘Yours is the easy way, Igor,’ Vorontsyev sighed, his eyes filled with pain. He seemed wearied by the argument, or by whatever process of reason had preceded his observations. Trechikov felt nettled at being upbraided, but no sense of superior authority seemed to hand. ‘I tried it. I know.’

‘Look, Alexei, just keep your head down, man!’ Trechikov protested.

‘I might have done — beforeV Vorontsyev snapped. ‘I’d have got tired, we’d have got nowhere, everything would have settled down. But they couldn’t wait, could they, Igor? They couldn’t wait for that to happen! Doesn’t it irk you — just a little — that they don’t give a fuck for any normal kind of behaviour? They don’t even behave like your average crook! Their first response is explosives.’

‘Look, Alexei, I understand your outrage, I really do. But it will only get you ‘

‘- killed? I know that, too.’

‘Well, then?’

‘I don’t have any choice. Not now. I’ve found things out.’

Trechikov flinched away, as if Vorontsyev had announced he had a communicable disease. He was, Trechikov admitted to himself, afraid. Alexei even knew that he wouldn’t report this conversation; knew his weaknesses, his self-pity, his fear, and the shreds of decent normality he attempted to keep wrapped about him in the coldest wind.

‘I — there’s nothing …?’ Vorontsyev shook his head. Trechikov leaned forward/his forehead damp. ‘You’re on leave. Read that as suspension. Your team will be reassigned.’

‘When?’

‘At once. For their safety, Alexei. Think of them, won’t you — whatever you decide.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Be careful — very careful, Alexei.’

‘Yes,’ Vorontsyev replied tiredly. There was a tinge of regret in his voice, as if he felt himself coerced on his intended path.

Trechikov was very afraid. In a few moments, he might be able to consider Vorontsyev pig-headed, criminally stupid. But not quite at that moment. He stood up, nodded brusquely, and walked to the door. When he looked back, Vorontsyev had deliberately shut his eyes. Trechikov left, and felt himself walking through a small cloud of censure from Vorontsyev’s team, who had now been joined by another detective he recognized as Lubin. They parted for him, but he sensed their hostility, as if he had entered a puritanical courtroom, his criminality already plain in his demeanour. They were fools, blindly stupid, all of them.

Vorontsyev opened his eyes as he heard the door open. Dmitri, Marfa, Goludin and Lubin crowded into the room, half-afraid of their visit yet deeply curious. Dmitri perched himself on the chair vacated by Trechikov and Marfa sat on the other side of the bed. The two young men remained near the door, as if guarding it against violent intruders. In a sense, that was exactly what they intended.

‘What did the old man want — another warning-off?’

‘Just that, Dmitri. He meant for my good. Like he means to reassign all of you for your own good.’

‘No!’

‘Maybe it’s best, Dmitri — no, listen to me. The old man’s terrified. Bakunin’s been at him. And there has to be someone else behind Bakunin. Drugs, nuclear physicists, technicians — it’s too clever by half for that ape Bakunin. Do you understand me?

All of you?’ He stared at each of them. One by one, they nodded like sullen children. ‘OK. I want you to realise how dangerous it is. There is no safety net, none at all. We’ve been abandoned — that was the message and it wasn’t in code. / am on my own.

Is that clear?’

He looked at each of them carefully … Goludin seemed doubtful, anxious; Marfa had a clarity of enthusiasm that might be innocence or trust; Lubin attempted to appear grave.

Dmitri — was Dmitri; there was nothing else to do but go on with it. He had no right to take anyone except Dmitri with him.

‘Look,’ he said tiredly, ‘I’m putting a sticking plaster on a cancer — that’s all I can do. It won’t count for anything, it won’t really help. I’ve been put in this position. My head’s above the parapet — yours aren’t.’ Dmitri’s look excepted him. He rubbed his loose jowl and the stubble of his beard rasped in the quiet of the room. ‘I’m trying to give someone who’s dying pink medicine that will do them no good at all. I refuse to let you become as futile. You understand — really understand?’

He realised pain and pleading had both appeared in his expression. He was asking them for their help, even their protection; behaving like a demagogue, filling their heads with an ideology that was alien to them.

‘Don’t answer — just go,’ he said.

Marfa burst out: ‘Whatever you say about sticking plasters sir— we know more than that!’ She glowered at the two younger men as if dragooning them into her cause. ‘That heroin — the boxes it came in, they had Grainger Foundation, Phoenix, Arizona stamped on them. The hospital’s involved, of course — but we can all guess who must be behind it…’ Her confidence faded. Perhaps it was anxiety that quietened her and made her next words uncertain. ‘Can’t we?’

Goludin seemed on the point of panic, but Lubin smiled gravely at him, then he appeared to draw calm from their numbers.

‘Can we?’ Vorontsyev asked with forced lightness.

Turgenev,’ Dmitri offered after a hot silence. ‘It has to be him. GraingerTurgenev is the ideal conduit, we’ve known that since Schneider and Rawls came into the picture. Flights in and out all the time, money no object, power to ‘

‘Control Bakunin and the chief,’ Vorontsyev finished. ‘I should have left it on Bakunin’s doorstep, shouldn’t I?’

‘As you said, he doesn’t have the brains. Or the power, really.

Only Turgenev has that.’

‘Now you see why I asked you to leave — all of you?’ He looked at Dmitri, who shook his head in a minimal gesture.

Then Dmitri said:

‘Here’s the rundown. I have a score to settle and, anyway, we’re friends. Lubin and Goludin think they’re on an awfully big adventure, the sort that makes cop movies — the idiots — and Maria would follow you, like a dog, wherever you went.’ The woman blushed furiously, her eyes hot, and filled with admission.

‘OK? Anyone been misrepresented? No? Good. The next question is — what do we do now?’

‘It isn’t that easy,’ Vorontsyev protested.

‘It is, if you’ll just keep quiet, Alexei.’

Vorontsyev was embarrassed at their gauche, crystal enthusiasm, their blindness to reality. And relieved and grateful not to be alone. He said quietly:

‘You want to do this?’ In turn, after looking almost furtively at each other, they each nodded. ‘Very well,’ he sighed. ‘And thanks.’

Then their enthusiasm burst out in a cacophony of suggestions.

‘We know there are a couple of scientists around ‘

‘Check the use of his private jet —’

‘Pull Schneider in, he must know who’s’

‘Panshin’s another key to it’

Vorontsyev held up his hand and they eventually fell silent.

‘This town is Turgenev’s web. Step on it anywhere, and he’ll know about it. //he’s behind it …”

There was no doubt. Not any longer. No one else possessed the immunity from ordinary existence that would allow them to have the chief of detectives blown up in his own home and be entirely careless of any response. He had masked the suspicion from himself during the days he had lain in that bed, terrified, only gradually certain of his own survival.

There was so much money to be made, there was influence to be gained in the Middle East and the Moslem Triangle. Above all, there was great cunning and intelligence on display, and enormous power. Only Turgenev had power enough to control the police, Bakunin and the GRU, the American hospital, and executives of GraingerTurgenev. Only Turgenev could have had him ordered to death with such impunity …

… the thought that had brought him sweating awake during the long last few nights. The gradual colouring of a silhouette, the growing accuracy of a photofit. Eventually, he had seen Turgenev’s features clearly. He had been in no doubt for twenty four hours now. All roads led to the hunting lodge on the tundra.

‘All right,’ he said, clearing his throat, ‘let’s get to work. Get some more chairs, coffee and food. Just remember — ‘ He looked at his plastered arm and strapped ribs as he had done so frequently and impotently. ‘- one mistake is one too many. Just one.’

John Lock sat in the Kim first class lounge at Toronto International, waiting for his flight to Amsterdam. He had bought the ticket with the credit card showing the last of his identities.

With the last of his strength, too, it now seemed. His nerves were itchily weary, easily alarmed; his hand, picking up the bourbon, shook each time he stretched it towards the low table.

He had little sense of whether it was night or day outside the windowless lounge, no sense whatsoever of his waiting fellow passengers; of the girl who served the drinks. He remained stale and unwashed and exhausted within the aftershave and the smooth cheeks and the new shirt and jacket. The denims had cleaned up sufficiently. The new sports bag at his feet was all but empty. Two paperbacks, another shirt, some underwear all bought at Toronto International.

He looked at his watch once more, blinking the dial into focus.

Another hour before his flight.

He’d found the airstrip — yesterday, today? — almost four miles from the arroyo. The single-engined Cessna he had seen landing was used for crop-spraying, mail deliveries, grocery flights, the occasional passenger. For the right steep price, the pilot had flown him to Reno, Nevada. He had intended to find another plane to take him south, anonymously, to Mexico. And had known at once they would anticipate his choice. Yankees on the run always fled to Mexico, as if it was the only border they had ever heard of.

So, he had headed north. First from Reno to Sacramento in a twelve-seater jet, then from Sacramento to Vancouver, and finally Vancouver to Toronto on Air Canada. No big airports, no security checks until he reached Canada. He’d slept overnight in an airport hotel in Vancouver, then flown to Toronto … so it was yesterday or the day before that he’d killed Tran, he realised with a jolt. The realisation was no more than a muffled, distant explosion.

It was unreal now. As was the girl’s dead body in his apartment.

Only the beginning of it — Beth — and the end he envisaged

— Turgenev — were real to him. Beth and Turgenev. What Turgenev had begun, he would end.

There was nothing else he could possibly do, even imagine.

Nothing whatsoever.

ELEVEN Incidence of Arson

John Lock stood in the fur-lined boots he had purchased at

Moscow’s Cheremetievo airport, hunched in his new overcoat against the evening wind and blowing snow, and stared at the ruin of the house. The traffic of Novyy Urengoy passed behind him, hissing and grinding through gritted slush, headlights flaring, brakelights eager. His cheeks were numb with the icy cold.

His whole head ached with it, despite the fur hat he wore.

It had taken him almost two days from Toronto to reach this place, and someone had blown it away. Curtains flapped like soaked rags at glassless windows, there was charred paintwork and stucco, a ha If-col lapsed roof, no lights. The janitor of a newish block of flats along the street had told him that terrorists had tried to kill a cop. He knew the only cop who lived in the Tsarist, ramshackle house; Vorontsyev, the honest cop he had told Beth about, the evening before she was murdered. He could remember the interior of the house, the rooms of Vorontsyev’s apartment on the first floor. He’d accepted the Russian’s invitation to dinner, then to listen to jazz records in his apartment. Had warmed to the man almost at once, after the incident in the hotel bar had been cleared up. Now, he simply stared at the blind empty windowframes like open mouths, lightless like all the other windows. The place had been taped off by the police, but he had already seen dim figures, shabby as rats, moving amid the rubble. One of them had carried off a scorched-looking microwave cooker, two others had loaded a damaged washing machine onto a wheelbarrow and disappeared into Ehe sleet.

Turgenev … Lock shivered. His whole being was cold. Turgenev could strike at Vorontsyev without a qualm or hesitation.

Even the janitor somehow hadn’t believed the terrorist story, shrugging morosely and cynically after its relation. And a young woman and a baby had died, and another woman had been injured by falling masonry. Lock shook his head. He knew the town well enough to know there were no terrorists … only gangsters, the biznizmen; the Russian mafia. And he knew that Vorontsyev had been concerned about heroin — he had said as much, that evening he had invited him back to the prim, airless, lonely apartment. Heroin angered him; there was something about it killing his fnspector’s daughter, wasn’t there? However hopeless, even ludicrous it seemed, he wanted to enlist Vorontsyev’s help. He had to have the policeman’s aid. He was the only man in Novyy Urengoy he could trust.

To get Turgenev — to have the remotest chance of killing him — required help. The help of a man he hardly knew.

Ridiculous.

But no other way lay open to him. No other way at all.

Drugs, Vorontsyev, an attempted murder … Turgenev. He sensed himself forestalled, anticipated — though he knew it was all but impossible. Turgenev might already know he was in Novyy Urengoy, but it must be coincidental that Vorontsyev had become a target. Nevertheless, he shivered once more; he was not the other player in a chess game, he was a mere piece on the board.

He moved closer to the ruined house, scuffing a scorched floorboard with his boot, shuffling his feet amid ashes and shattered brick and stucco. The snow was already lying; it was white on his shoulders.

The cop had been taken to the American hospital, so the janitor next door informed him, turning away from a tenant grousing about the absence of a glazier to replace shattered windows and the snow coming in and her baby sick … Could he risk the hospital, the Grainger Foundation Hospital? It had to be tied in to the drugs somehow, it would be too easy for it not to be. Vorontsyev was still alive, surely he’d be under surveillance? Under guard?

What else could he do? Walk away? Go back out to the airport?

He’d be snowed in anyway, he told himself with a self deprecating grin. Might as well spend the time where it’s warm and quiet He had no plan, beyond talking to Vorontsyev, beyond the attempt to enlist the policeman’s aid. Vorontsyev, as they listened to his jazz records and drank his vodka weeks before, had been someone afraid of awakening his own moral ardour.

However, his inspector’s tragedy was eating at him, making him pursue the drug smugglers. He had intended feeding Vorontsyev everything he knew, ihen turning on him like a trapdoor spider and demanding his help. Giving him Turgenev, of all people, on a plate — and enlisting his help in killing the man.

Badly injured, yes … the janitor had informed him. He had spat as much out of habit as dislike.

What possible help could Vorontsyev be to him now? He was on his own …

Christ, but it was cold, so damn cold.

‘Very well. No, just have him watched for the moment … you have someone on him? Good. Keep me informed.’

Turgenev put down the telephone, the forefinger of his left hand brushing back and forth across his lips, as if he had only recently shaved off a moustache. He studied the telephone as if he expected it to continue to inform him of Lock’s whereabouts and intent. Intent? Obvious, of course. He had wondered about the man during the last three days, since his people had let him get away in the Arizona desert. He’d thought that the sister’s death had been avenged when Lock had killed Tran, but he’d been traced to Reno, then Sacramento, finally Vancouver. There, in the melee of the international airport, descriptions of him were futile; and he’d changed to another identity, new papers.

They had no name for him.

Now, he was in Novyy Urengoy. Bakunin’s people, alerted by himself almost on a whim and certainly not from anxiety, had identified the American disembarking from the Moscow flight two hours ago. Last plane in. A blizzard continuing perhaps three or four days was sweeping down on the region from the arctic; the first real storm of winter. No one would be able to get in or out, certainly not Lock. The blizzard would imprison him in Novyy Urengoy. Turgenev was satisfied.

He glanced down the columns of figures he had received detailing his currency speculations against the French franc and the measure of his profit. Given such gains in so brief a period, the profits from heroin — now that he was poised to acquire Grainger Technologies — seemed meagre, begrudged. He smiled, then continued plucking his lower lip between finger and thumb, removing his half-glasses.

Grainger Technologies and the other companies he had acquired in the US — and those he was moving against now would render him immense power and wealth. The two thousand and more emigres from Russia who comprised the biznizmen engaged in organised crime in the United States were small beer, fleas. People like himself — perhaps at first only himself — were making far greater inroads … He was content.

His thoughts returned to John Lock with a mild, nostalgic regret. Novyy Urengoy was the best possible place to have Lock situated. His town. He must consider how best to rid himself of the American, then set Bakunin on him like a savage dog. Lock was alone — of that he was utterly certain. There would be no loose ends. He had fled America as the subject of a murder charge. His death in Russia would not be reported. He would simply have vanished, which was perhaps suitable for someone so unformed as Lock, someone who left so little impression on people and things. Sad? Well, perhaps, for nevertheless the American was likeable … But he was unimportant.

In the end, it was a simple matter, only the death of a single individual.

‘Yes?’

It was the American doctor, Schneider — the one with the Jewish name. Bakunin tasted contempt as ready as raw onion in his mouth.

‘My routine report,’ he heard Schneider offer in a humiliated, angrily self-pitying tone. ‘Vorontsyev has been visited by the overweight officer and by the girl. They didn’t stay long.’

‘Which one of them is guarding him now?’ The chief of police had refused to enforce any order keeping Vorontsyev’s people away from the Foundation Hospital; Bakunin could not openly demand it. Unless someone like Schneider could administer a lethal dose of something, by needle or via his food, Vorontsyev was safe in his bed.

‘His name’s Goludin, I think. He seems very innocent — and innocuous.’ Then, Schneider added quickly: ‘Why can’t one of your men make these reports. Colonel?’

‘One of them is,’ Bakunin snapped back. ‘Goodbye, Doctor.’

He put down the receiver and rubbed his ear where perspiration made it itch, then he picked up his cigarette and drew deeply on it, blowing the blue smoke at the ceiling of his office.

Schneider was shit-scared, that much was obvious, but entirely malleable because of his involvement with the heroin. He could be extradited to a country that would crucify him — his own or he could die as a foreigner just like his friend Rawls in a distant country. Either way, his cooperation was ensured, almost genetically guaranteed. Bakunin grinned to himself, coughing on the amusement and cigarette smoke.

Vorontsyev …? Turgenev seemed unduly hesitant, if not reluctant, in Vorontsyev’s case. Was he waiting for him to leave hospital? All he wanted for the moment was surveillance on the man’s team — the woman, fat Dmitri, Goludin and the young forensic officer Lubin. All of whom had been ordered back to normal duties by the police chief… and all of whom appeared to be engaged on other cases — a rape, small-scale extortion, an overdose, a knife wounding. The usual scum on the surface of crimes committed by the rabble. If they had been given any orders by Vorontsyev, then they didn’t appear to be carrying them out.

Bakunin rubbed his chin with the fingers holding the cigarette.

The smoke curled into his eyes, making him blink.

It didn’t seem suspicious; it was difficult to believe that after what had happened to their chief of detectives, they were left with sufficient nerve to continue their investigations. They’d run their cart into a brick wall, the donkey was injured, they were dazed. End of journey … though Bakunin would prefer that they were eliminated altogether; one by one or at the same time, it didn’t matter. Who, after all, would have the temerity to ask questions about their deaths? He had to press that matter with Turgenev. The problem had not been solved, simply postponed.

Vorontsyev …? For the moment, Turgenev appeared to be preoccupied by the American, Lock. Bakunin looked down at the file that had been faxed to him by somebody Turgencv employed in America. Lock was a State Department official …

Bakunin did not recall having encountered him in Novyy Urengoy, despite the American’s frequent visits to the region. A bland, good-looking, too-young face looked up at him from the fax. A bland record, too. He didn’t appear dangerous, though Turgenev stressed that point particularly. He had made this Lock a priority, one that overrode even Vorontsyev.

Very well — so be it, Prince Turgenev, he remarked mockingly to himself. Yours is the say-so, the authority. If you want Lock killed, so be it.

His accent and manner appeared as effective as his passport. He was an American in an American-funded, American-run hospital, and if he wanted to’ talk to an injured Russian, so what?

The nurse on duty simply pointed along the corridor to the door of Vorontsyev’s room and dismissed him from her mind.

He hesitated for a moment with his hand on the doorknob.

A wave of weary defeat came over him and he wanted to surrender to it. It was as if he were a parent summoned to this place because of an accident to his child. He anticipated the scarring, the brokenness, the incapacity that lay beyond the door. His desire for revenge which had brought him here in the drugged, heightened state it induced — a state in which anything and everything was possible — now deserted him momentarily, leaving him drained, incapable, anxious. What help could this Russian policeman give him, having barely managed to survive a bomb attack? What help would he want or dare to give to someone he hardly knew?

He pushed open the door. The man’s one arm was in heavy plaster but the other scrabbled beneath the sheet. His forehead was bandaged; eyes glittered abnormally bright, watching him.

Lock raised one hand defensively and closed the door behind him.

‘I — er, they said I could see you, you were OK for visitors,’

Lock stumbled out. The man in the bed, so disappointingly immobile, was surprised at his accent, the words in English.

Relaxed by his evident innocuousness.

‘Who are you?’ Vorontsyev seemed to hesitate on the edge of recognition. ‘You’re American?’

Lock nodded. ‘We’ve met.’

Suddenly, Voromsyev’s eyes were brightly suspicious.

‘I remember — Lock.’ The hand rustled beneath the sheet.

Then: ‘You’re State Department — American government …’

The hidden hand had a firm grip now on what had to be a gun.

Had he imagined the tiny click of a safety catch being moved?

‘Sure,’ he said tiredly. The man entirely disappointed him; cancelled everything in an instant. Uninvited, he slumped onto a chair beside the bed, his head held in his hands. He was so tired, his body at last admitted, having nothing of the drug of revenge to stimulate it.

‘Why are you here?’

‘My family are — were — connected with this place, the people who run it. My sister married into this … She’s dead.’ Lock obviously disconcerted the Russian.

Vorontsyev saw bent shoulders, a stubbled face, stained pouchy eyes; a man defeated, inadequate. It was as if he was interrogating some petty criminal, someone small, motiveless, opportunistic. Lock, the man he had invited to his flat — the flat Turgcnev had had blown up, killing Vera Silkova and her baby — given drink and confidences to, warmed towards; forgotten within days. The man had seemed as anonymous and trusty as a counsellor, a doctor. ‘But why are you here, John Lock?’

Lock hesitated for some time. The warmth of the room was somnolent despite Vorontsyev’s tension. Then he said: ‘J knew I could trust you. I even told my sister about you.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘My sister … She was murdered.’

‘In America?’

‘Yes.’

‘But not by an American?’

‘Not by an American. Not on American orders.’

Vorontsyev shifted in the bed, as if Lock’s bleak, aged gaze disconcerted him. He rested the gun in his lap.

‘Have we — ?’ he began, clearing his throat. ‘Have we anything in common?’

‘I don’t know.’

It was a simple matter of trust; an extremely complex matter.

He couldn’t read the American’s mind or his recent experiences in his face. To pretend to do so would be to delude himself. This man knew Turgenev, had been close to him, he recalled. Lock had told him thai, as they had eaten a Chinese meal from one of the new take-away shops in the town and drunk foreign beer.

He’d liked the American, then. Only weeks earlier … ‘Someone has to begin,’ he said. ‘You?’ He waited, then added: ‘If there’s something you want from me?’

‘Are you in any condition to supply it?’ Lock replied. The American seemed baffled and defeated by his being injured and in hospital.

‘You wanted my help, then?’ Vorontsyev said softly.

‘Maybe.’

‘Because of a single evening’s conversation? You trusted me to help you?’

Eventually, Lock replied: ‘You were my only hope — I knew no one else.’

Lock glanced around the hospital room, towards the double glazed window. Snow flew in the glare of sodium lighting thrown up from one of the car parks and a gas rig flared like a fading distress signal out on the tundra. Then he looked intently at Vorontsyev, realising that the decision to tell the Russian why he was there was … well, it was no big deal, was it? He’d walked into this place of his own free will.

He struggled to remember Vorontsyev’s remarks on the heroin problem in Novyy Urengoy, his concern, his anger; there was his inspector, too, the one whose daughter had overdosed.

‘It’s about the drugs,’ he said. Vorontsyev flinched in surprise.

‘I know a lot about it — now. I didn’t, when we talked. I wasn’t even very interested. It was your problem, not mine … But it is mine, now-‘ His voice was choked off by memory gripping his throat tightly. He cleared it and continued. Vorontsyev was watching him as if he were telling the most compulsive tale ever created. ‘It’s GraingerTurgenev. The whole place is a conduit ‘

‘Don’t say anything more, just for the moment,’ Vorontsyev said. Lock looked at him suspiciously. ‘This place is a staging post. A warehouse’

‘Jesus, they contaminated everything, didn’t they?’

‘Who is they?’

‘Pete Turgenev — my dead brother-in-law, his father.’ He sat back on the chair and rubbed his face as if roughly washing away a great deal of grime.

‘How big is the — business?’

‘Millions of dollars. The whole of GraingerTurgenev’s been built on the profits.’ Vorontsyev’s eyes gleamed, then grew alarmed as they heard a knock on the door, which opened at once.

‘Dmitri.’

‘Who’s your visitor, Alexei?’ Dmitri Gorov was holding oui a package of sandwiches towards Vorontsyev. Two bottles of beer were tucked into the crook of his arm.

‘An American — a friend. Someone who has good reason to be here. The same drugs that killed your daughter, Dmitri, were most probably responsible for his sister’s death. Not through a needle, maybe, but just as directly.’

Dmitri’s features, clouded with pain, became at once conspiratorial.

‘This the American you took home, the diplomat, by any chance?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does he want?’

‘I think he wants to kill Turgenev.’

The only sound was the inspector’s surprised breathing. The silence that followed was heavy, stormy. Lock’s Russian had come back fluently, naturally. He’d stumbled over simple phrases at the airport in Moscow. Now that he’d burned his bridges behind him, he had become, in a strange and somehow comforting way, almost as Russian as the two policemen. As if he had changed his identity. Eventually, Vorontsyev said:

‘And he wants us to help him do it, old friend. Turgenev, as we were forced to realise for ourselves, is the kingpin.’ Dmitri was nodding and frowning. The sandwich remained unregardedly held out towards Vorontsyev. ‘It’s much bigger than we ever imagined ‘

‘You’re taking a lot on trust, Alexei, from the mouth of a Yankee who just walked through the door and introduced himself.’

‘Look-‘ Lock began, but was interrupted by Vorontsyev.

‘We haven’t time to go through all that, Dmitri. The hour’s too late.’

The door opened and each of them turned to it. To his great surprise, Lock recognized the doctor.

‘Dave — Dave Schneider,’ he said, getting up from the chair.

The expressions of mistrust on the faces of the two Russians startled him.

‘John — what are you …?’

Lock knew that it was all somehow wrong, that Schneider was wary of him just as the two Russians seemed afraid of Schneider; alarmed at his having seen Lock in their company.

Lock and Schneider shook hands. Vorontsyev kept his free hand firmly around the butt of the gun. The safety was still pushed to Off. It would make a noise, of course, but if necessary he would shoot Schneider … if Lock would stop placing himself in the line of fire. Something bleeped and Schneider removed his pager from his pocket.

‘Back in just a minute, John — you can tell me how the hell I find you here, and in the chief of detectives’ room!’

The door closed behind him.

‘Quick, Dmitri — get Lock out of here. Back to your place!’

‘What-?’ Lock was bemused.

‘He’s part of it. Lock. Get moving! Who’s in the car with you, Dmitri?’

‘Goludin — why?’

‘Take him with you — lie low at home until I can think our way out of this mess! Get moving!’ Lock turned to him as he said: ‘Get either Marfa or Lubin over here to watch my door!’

‘What is going on here-?’ Lock began.

‘I’m saving your life. Lock! Just be satisfied.’ Dmitri was already at the door, checking the corridor. ‘Now Schneider knows you’re in town, the GRU and Turgenev himself will know inside another ten minutes! I would imagine their only idea wiJl be to kill you.’

‘Clear,’ Dmitri said, drawing back from the door, glaring at Lock. ‘And they’ll bloody well know you’ve talked to us! What the hell did you come here for, Yank?’

Lock hesitated between their evident enmity and their panic.

He stared at the injured Vorontsyev, the man’s body tense and enraged as if it struggled in chains rather than plaster and sheets.

Then he nodded. ‘OK — what about you?’ Vorontsyev seemed relieved that his question was appropriate.

‘Just go with Dmitri. I’m safe for the moment, but you’re not.

Go on, get moving!’

Dmitri dragged him by the arm and he gave in to the hard urgency of his grip, following him through the door. His disappointment was already insinuating itself. One injured man in bed, another fat man suspicious of him — and he’d heard only three other names …

He hurried after Dmitri, whose coat was flying around him, aware he was unarmed.

‘No, Schneider called me only a moment ago — it must be less than ten minutes since he saw the American in Vorontsyev’s room.’

‘That may already be too long,’ Turgenev’s voice replied, and Bakunin scowled at the receiver he momentarily held away from his cheek. ‘What measures have you instigated?’ The cold formality was deliberately aloof.

‘You’d better decide their outcome, don’t you think?’ Bakunin sneered, swilling the remainder of his coffee in the mug he held in his free hand.

‘Very well. Bring matters to a conclusion immediately.’

Was there someone in the room with him?

‘You’re certain?’

‘Yes.’

‘You want the American eliminated?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Anyone in the vicinity — ‘ There was someone with him.

‘Vorontsyev?’

‘Later. Thank you for letting me know. Just make sure it’s successful.’

Turgenev switched off the phone and placed it on his desk, which he then walked behind as if it would provide him with a barrier. The blizzard, still gathering strength, flung the snow across the large window of the study, through the glare of the security lights. He sat down and smiled apologetically at his visitor, who had remained all but oblivious of the call.

‘I’m sorry for the interruption, Hamid. You were saying …?’

The Iranian, dark-featured, as compact as a coiled snake, adjusted his tinted designer spectacles. He was unshaven rather than bearded and his shirt collar was buttoned beneath the jacket of the grey silk suit.

‘My friend, I was simply relaying the impatience of Tehran in the matter of the consignment that is overdue.’ He smiled, placing his fingers together in a steeple; a mullah of the Office for the Protection of the Iranian Revolution rather than an agent or case officer. Hamid wa’s as ruthless, cunning and effective as the best of the KGB had ever been — like himself, he observed.

But there was something chillingly sincere in his abuse of power, his acts of espionage, suppression, torture. Hamid, like so many Iranian intelligence officers, believed the ideology. Faith, of course, in his case. It was all for Allah and Islam, the killing, the imprisonments, the exterminations.

It made Hamid and his kind, including the dead Vahaji, more difficult to deal with. His thoughts returned to the image of the coiled snake. To disappoint these people was as risky as thrusting one’s hand into a sack containing a cobra.

‘I understand the impatience. Hamid my friend, I do not seek to make excuses. The heart attack of one of those people delayed matters — but it was the lack of security, the indiscreet nature of your own officer’s behaviour that has meant greater care, slower progress.’ He shrugged and spread his hands in the air in front of him. ‘I have successfully added to the little stock of people you expect to take delivery of. There are now six key people in Novyy Urengoy ‘

‘Here?’ Hamid asked greedily.

Turgenev shook his head. He detested dealing with Hamid and Iran precisely because of their sincerity, their hungry urgency.

‘No, not here. But safe.’

‘Then I would like to take delivery of them at once, if they are top people?’

‘I give you my word they are. Your weapons programme will be accelerated by perhaps as much as a year.’ He grinned disarmingly.

Charm rarely worked with the Iranians — only results satisfied, gained influence. And even though Turgenev felt himself poised to move beyond the influence in the Islamic world that Iran could supply, and was all but ready to play a much larger game, he could not afford to dissatisfy. Which irked like a wasp sting. Hamid’s eyes glittered. He touched his chin with a rasping sound. The wind outside was a low, distant moan, as of an animal dying in great, lonely pain. ‘I do deliver what I promise, Hamid — I always have.’

‘Agreed. Then, at once.’

‘You’ve seen the weather, Hamid — where can you take them in a storm like this promises to be?’

The Iranian’s eyes gleamed with anger.

‘I do not know — and do not ask — what difficulties there have been, or how much jeopardy has arisen as a result of Vahaji’s death and the police investigation — ‘ Turgenev kept his features expressionless. Hamid possessed more background than he had supposed. ‘- but I must ensure that these people are not discovered.

They are safe only in Tehran. Your not entertaining them here tells me as much.’

Turgenev began an expansive, soothing gesture, but merely placed his hands on the desk, fingers spread.

‘If planes can’t fly, you can’t move them, Hamid my friend.’

‘A plane must fly — as soon as possible.’ He scowled over Turgenev’s shoulder at the blizzard.

That I can’t guarantee.’

‘There are guarantees on both sides, my friend. This is one of yours. There has already been too much delay.’

Despite everything, Turgenev admitted with a sense of weakness he loathed, he still required the goodwill of Iran and Pakistan. Especially, he needed to counter growing Chinese influence in Islamabad that was already leaking through to Tehran. He must remain pivotal in the assistance given to nuclear weapons programmes in both countries for the foreseeable future. And he needed the drugs that came as payment to ease the spread of his influence in America. The heroin was the bluntest of instruments, and perhaps the most effective. Much remained dependent on Tehran and people like Hamid in the Office for the Protection of the Islamic Revolution.

‘I’ll arrange for detailed weather forecasts, maps, satellite information. Hamid, I will do what I can ‘

‘Then I am certain that it will be sufficient.’ Hamid smiled.

Turgenev was unable to entirely resist the image of a snake’s mouth opening as it struck. He stilled his body which wanted to squirm in his subordination to the Iranian. He had to please them, as a servant would have pleased a master, or a whore a client. They were a strand of the web, but angering Tehran would set the whole of the web quivering with suspicion of his lack of cooperation, with rumour and doubt. Then, as if to brand him with the mark of a’ bondman, Hamid said softly: ‘The woman is here, the one I requested?’

‘Of course, Hamid. She is waiting in your room, I imagine.’

The Iranian stood up. He was little more than five feet in height, slightly built. His hand was cool and dry — like scales on a … Turgenev shut away the recurrent image and shook Hamid’s hand firmly.

‘I will say goodnight, my friend. You will arrange for the meteorological details?’

‘Of course. A pleasant night to you.’

When the Iranian had left, Turgenev went to the sideboard and poured himself a large — vodka, he decided, and threw the liquor to the back of his throat where it burned satisfyingly. A Russian drink, he told himself, to rid his mouth of the taste of the Iranian and his own humiliation. He poured another vodka and turned to the window.

Damn the blizzard — damn Hamid equally.

And Lock …

… Bakunin had better make no mistake there.

The car remained parked where it had lurched against the snow laden fence surrounding the dacha, its outline little more than a huddled white shape. The room was still cold, despite the log fire Dmitri had lit and the oil stove on a sheet of newspaper in the middle of the old rug. Their wet footprints had dried to vague reminders on the polished wooden floor.

Lock was chilled to the bone by a coldness that seemed part of the house and its recent history rather than an accident of the blizzard. They ate in virtual silence on a bare table at one end of the long room; baked beans, sausages, potato. Lock was hungry almost to viciousness. The younger man, Goludin, who had driven the car from the hospital along treacherous roads out of Novyy Urengoy, seemed morose and depressed, wary of Lock as if warned he carried infection. He was a lugubrious blank sheet of paper that had absorbed the ink of Dmitri’s mood.

Which burst out again as he said heavily, fork emphasising his meaning:

‘You’ve brought us the news we didn’t want to hear, American!

How powerful our leading citizen is! Did we really need to know that? I ask you, does it help us? Turgenev was out of our league before you came … now? God alone knows!’ Lock spread his hands defensively.

‘I needed your help. You think I’d have asked for it if I wasn’t desperate?’ he replied. ‘A handful of half-assed detectives in a hick town. This place needs Wyatl Earp and his brothers, not you guys.’

The only American we’ve got is you, Lock — and you don’t seem up to all that much, even if you do speak good Russian!’

Dmitri spat back, potato flicking onto his chin as he spoke.

‘That makes two of us, man, two of us.’

The ensuing silence was lengthy, tightening around them like a drying shroud.

‘So I’m not Schwarzenegger,’ Lock murmured eventually.

‘And you’re not Alexander Nevski. Given those shortcomings, what do we do about our mutual problem?’

‘Aiexei — Major Vorontsyev — issues the orders. I told you, we’re hamstrung. Now you’re here and you’ve been seen to be here, it’s just a matter of time before —’

‘Then we’d better take the fight to them, hadn’t we?’

Goludin said woefully: ‘How can we get to Turgenev? It’s impossible.’

Dmitri nodded vigorously, wiping his chin. ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ he pronounced. ‘You heard him.’

‘So, we wait until the hospital patient makes up his mind what to do?’ Lock snorted. ‘You have to have leads, man! People you can lean on, a way of opening this thing up!’ He hesitated.

Uncommunicative as Dmitri Gorov had been, the smuggling of the scientists the Russians had stumbled on was more unnerving than the heroin. Turgenev paid for the heroin with the brains of men and women who had worked on the Soviet nuclear programme. He controlled Novyy Urengoy, and his means of doing so was the GRU. Turgenev was a tsar in this place, an autocrat … and he would be protecting himself against the discovery of a crime that even Moscow couldn’t ignore. ‘OK, you tell me what we can do,’ he concluded, sighing.

Dmitri seemed satisfied, but without response. Goludin pushed his plate away and got up from the table. His boots squeaked on the polished floor as he walked towards one of the windows. His shadow moved across the wall, thrown by the firelight and the lamps. Dmitri ruminatively picked his teeth with a match. Lock stared at his own hands, clasped as if in prayer on the table.

‘There’s got to be some way,’ he announced as if cheated.

‘Some road we can open up to get to him. You must have evidence ‘

‘Have you?’

‘It’ll all be buried deep by now,’ Lock admitted.

‘Your case is just like ours. Lock. Powerless. You can’t even go home, if all you say about yourself is true.’

‘It’s true.’

‘And you still think there’s something we can do?’

Goludirr’s shadow moved on the wall, slowly and comfortably like that of a parent, enlarged and authoritative. Lock heard the young man say:

‘Shall I feed the rabbit, Dmitri?’ It dissolved all sense of comfort the shadow had offered.

‘What? Yes, if you like. There’s some stuff in the ‘

There was a noise that Lock was slow to identify. Goludin’s bulky shadow on the wall behind Dmitri seemed to enlarge further, but that was no more than a trick of the light, or -

Lock turned in his chair as Dmitri began to get to his feet.

Goludin was skating across the floor towards them, his arms raised, his face distorted by agony. Then the rug tripped him and he blundered heavily to the floor. The bullet had spent itself against the wall above the fireplace. The shattered window was crazed as if with frost. Goludin lay still on the floor at Dmitri’s feet. An instant later the windows shattered inwards at the insistence of a hail of bullets. Icy air flooded in as Lock crouched to the floor.

Dmitri, his face pressed close to Lock, his hand on Goludin’s collar as if he intended dragging him upright and back to life, shouted:

‘Put the lamps out! I’ll douse the fire!’

Lock nodded, crawling away from Goludin’s body across the polished floor, his hands sensing splinters. He pulled one lamp, then a second to the floor, fumbling with their unfamiliar switches. He heard the log fire roar aqueously, then sizzle into a dim glow. The room was in darkness. Snowlight seeped in, the noise of the wind and the rustle of the distressed curtains masking everything. Then Dmitri was beside him, lumping across the floor on all fours like an arthritic old hound. His breathing was ragged.

‘No bloody time leftV he cried in a shouted whisper. ‘Have you got a gun?’ Lock shook his head. ‘You useless bastard!’

Dmitri’s rage had all the anger of a man helpless against a storm or an earthquake. Which had obviously been visited on him by Lock. Then he crawled away and Lock heard scrabbling noises before he lumbered back on his haunches and pressed something metallic and cold into Lock’s hand.

‘Makarov 9mm,’ he instructed, ‘eight rounds. Here — spare clip. Can you use it?’

‘I can use it.’

‘They’re heavily armed — that was an assault rifle hole in Goludin, poor bastard.’

‘Is the place surrounded?’

‘I’m just about to check. You watch the front of the house.

We’re cut off from the car.’ He crawled away, eventually into another room. His eyes had been big with fear and anger, but there was the beginning of the trust of mutual risk. Then he heard Dmitri’s mobile phone punctuating the wind, like a failing distress signal.

‘Alexei — I Get out of there now! I don’t care how, just get out!

What? Is Marfa there? Good — now get out. Where? Yes I’ Lock raised his head slowly until his eyes were level with the windowsill. He could hear Dmitri as he collided softly with some item of furniture. He could see nothing through the curtain of blown snow, hear nothing other than the wind. He shivered in the icy temperature, aware of the body on the floor just a few feet behind him. He squinted. The hazy light from the town outlined the igloo that their car had become, and there were other, more distant shapes similar in size. But there was no sign of movement, people. Military intelligence troops. Lock shivered once more, then was startled by the noises of Dmitri’s return.

‘I can’t see a damn thing out there!’ Dmitri whispered. ‘You?’

Lock shook his head. ‘There won’t be just one or two of them, Lock, they’ll have come by the busload!’ Talk was keeping his desperation at some slight distance, that much was evident. ‘A barracks outing, and that bastard Bakunin in charge! Because of you I’

‘Calm down, man!’ Lock shouted back in a hoarse whisper.

‘For Christ’s sake, let’s think of some way to get out of here, not how to do their job for them!’

Heavy, dragged breaths for a time, then, with barely suppressed anger still evident in the voice: ‘OK — OK. Any ideas?’

Then a sudden movement removed any lingering caution as he fired and the moving white bundle seemed to hunch into itself before falling into the snow beyond the garden fence. Rifle fire flickered like a row of candles in the blizzard. Lock and Dmitri lay together on the floor, their bodies shuddering with the impact of the bullets into the wooden walls, the floor.

Gradually, the noise was replaced by the sound of the wind.

And Lock heard, with a rage that was like fierce excitement:

‘You stupid bastard!’

‘Sure. I counted six separate locations — what about you?’

‘Five.’

‘It’s six … and maybe the same out back. At least as many strung out around the house. That’s a dozen and more. This guy Bakunin — he doesn’t take prisoners, right?’ Dmitri shook his head. ‘Then they’ll be changing positions now, having given themselves away — take someone out, if you can. From the other window ‘

Lock raised his head beside the window. A flicker of fire and the impact of a bullet against the far wall, the sound of a ricochet.

He fired at the spot where the muzzle flash had originated but the two bullets disappeared silently into the snow. Ducked back as more gun flashes leapt out. The bullets hummed like insects in the room. Dmitri fired once and cursed a miss. Their reply was fourfold and the big man crouched beneath the window like some catatonic mental patient.

‘You all right?’

‘Yes — you?’

‘OK.’ Two lost animals calling to one another. ‘You think they’ll close in?’

“I don’t know!’

‘How do we get out?’

‘God knows.’

Lock, lying on his stomach, could smell old polish on the floor, old cooking in the furniture, mustiness.

‘I should watch the back of the house,’ Dmitri offered reluctantly.

‘Sure.

Do that.’

‘I can’t call anyone … It’d be risking their lives, too.’

‘Sure. Watch the back’

Something, entering through the shattered window, burst near the fireplace. The room exploded in a blinding, white phosphorus light. Lock slapped at shards of flame on his clothes. The skin on his hands burned. Dmitri was exposed as by a flashbulb.

The explosion filled Lock’s eyesight, making him unable to see the fire it had started.

‘Incendiary grenade-!’ he heard Dmitri shout. Goludin’s clothes were smouldering, so was the rug, Lock realised as his eyesight returned. There were other fires, dotted over the room, flaring up quickly. The curtains near him were ablaze.

‘No choice!’ he shouted. ‘Back door!’ Then: ‘What’s out back?’

‘Garden — a shed, vegetable plot — ‘ He sounded like someone from a realtor’s office. ‘Fence, low enough to climb over — OK?’

‘It’s all there is — get going!’

The room was being greedily consumed by the fire. Two shots, as if poked in their direction to stir them into movement. They’d be waiting out there ‘I’ll go through the door, you try a window.’ Lock swallowed saliva, and at once his mouth was dust-dry. They crawled side by side to the kitchen door, Lock following Dmitri through it.

‘You’ll see the shed, off to your right.’

‘OK. Watch yourself’

The fire crackled behind them, stirred to a rage by the wind.

‘Christ, the bloody rabbit!’ Dmitri cried. Lock was stunned — the girl’s, he realised. The four-legged icon wrapped in fur, every feeding-time a devotion for the lost daughter. He couldn’t say damn the rabbit… Dmitri awkwardly pulled on the overcoat he had dragged from the table. Lock felt his own thrown against him and he struggled into it. Then Dmitri lifted the rabbit’s cage down from a work surface and cradled it to his chest.

The fire was garishly orange, blocking the open door to the living room. Smoke roiled and billowed, making Lock choke.

He stared at the kitchen door. ‘The church in the old town, can you find it?’

‘Yes’

‘Rendezvous there if we lose contact — OK? Alexei will make for it, too!’ The rabbit’s eyes were preternaturally large, hypnotised in terror by the light of the fire as it crouched in its cage.

He hesitated only for a moment, then slipped to the door and reached up to silently unlock it. Gripped the handle, then flung it wide, his whole body protesting at the imminence of pain. He flung himself to the right side of the door, rolling along the narrow, snow-covered verandah, bullets slapping into the wooden wait just above him, throwing up puffs of snow near his face. A bloody rabbit, was all he could cogently think, a bloody rabbit, for Christ’s sake!

Rolled off the verandah into deep snow which masked him, whitening his overcoat into camouflage. He swallowed icy snow and looked up, attempting to locate the shed. Flame burst through the roof of the wooden dacha and from the windows at the rear of the house, outlining him. He climbed to his feet and ran in a crouch, stumbling through the snow as through deep, tidal water. Shots. Felt nothing. Numb with cold and shock, he wouldn’t even sense the bullet that crippled or killed him —

— breath bullied from his body by collision with the wall of the shed. Snow fell from the roof, covering his head and shoulders.

Impact like that of a bullet, halting him. His cheek against the rough wood. Still alive, unhurt. Just winded.

Firing, away on the other side of the house. Dmitri and his daughter’s bloody rabbit — pointless. Pointless without the rabbit?

He dragged air into reluctant lungs. Ice in his throat, his cheeks numb as the blizzard dried the melted snow on his face, caked it with more snow. Two shots impacted into the opposite wall of the shed, smashed glass. He saw a child’s swing skeletal against the pale sheen of the snow, oranged by the fire. The whole of the dacha was now ablaze.

The church in the old town. He remembered it from his previous visit — a lifetime ago. Onion-domed, neglected, black with grime. Shots again from the far side of the garden, perhaps pistol shots, perhaps Dmitri…

He knelt in the snow, recollecting the surroundings of the dacha, aware of his shadow thrown by flames on the wall of the shed. The haze of the town’s lights was dim, almost invisible. That way-?

That way. He crawled into a bush which shed its weight of snow on him. Crawled into and through its snagging, scratching thorns and found the fence. Rickety, low, decayed — turned at the noise and fired, giving away his position, killing the greatcoated man who was blundering at him, rifle aimed.

The soldier seemed to dive over him, still attacking as he died. then the body was still in the deep snow, arms splayed as if he had drowned and the body was floating.

Lock flung himself against the fence and it gave outwards, then collapsed. He fell sideways and ludicrously into a snowdrift, hearing a voice cry out:

‘Over here! Across the lane — in the trees, here!’ He did not even pause to consider some kind of trap, it had to be Dmitri calling to him. He blundered through the snow, which suddenly dipped and spilt him into what must be the lane. He struggled free of the drift and climbed the bank of the buried lane. A few lumbering steps more and the depth of snow diminished, surrendering to the dark barrier of the firs.

He could see nothing.

‘Dmitri?’ he called.

‘Over here!’ It was him.

He gripped the man’s sleeve as he might have done a lifebelt, breathing stertorously, hearing the gasps of Dmitri’s exhausted breaths. Head hanging, he found himself staring into the wide, black, terrified eyes of the rabbit, its cage half-filled with snow.

The eyes reflected two tiny, burning dachas.

There was silence inside the trees, hardly any wind, little blown snow.

‘How did you — ?’ he began.

‘It’s my place. They don’t know it, didn’t know the lane was there, probably — no time now. Come on, this way. Quickly!’

Vorontsyev switched off the mobile phone, then stared at it as if he had received news of a bereavement, puzzled and shocked rather than endangered. Marfa seemed more alarmed than himself at the raised, urgent tone of Dmitri’s voice.

‘What is it — what’s wrong?’ she asked, moving closer to the bed, glancing back more than once towards the door. ‘Dmitri sounded as if he was in trouble.’

‘He was,’ he said, pushing back the bedclothes. His legs looked pale and weak as he stared at them. The hospital robe that tied at the back was rucked to his thighs. ‘We have to get out of here — check the corridor.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes, nowV he snapped at her uncomprehending expression.

She looked bovine, simple. ‘For God’s sake, check the corridor, then get me my clothes!’

She scowled at him, then crossed to the door. Looking out, she saw nothing, not even the duty nurse or another patient.

Was that suspicious? She turned back into the room, to find Vorontsyev struggling to twist the shiftJike robe around so that he could untie the knots. His plastered arm flailed as if he were beset by bees or dogs. He appeared so comical she burst into laughter. His reddening face glowered at her.

‘Get me my bloody clothes!’

‘What’s wrong?’ she yelled back at him.

‘They want to finish it tonight, by the look of it!’ he ranted, sweat breaking out on his forehead, the fingers of his left hand merely tightening the knots in the ties of the robe. ‘For God’s sake I’

‘Don’t waste time dressing,’ she said levelly, calming a surge of fear that was as sudden as nausea. ‘Just get your boots and a coat on ‘

‘I’m bloody dressing nowV he bellowed.

It seemed like a domestic quarrel that had ascended to some insane boiling point, like some of her parents’ rows.

‘Then let me,’ she said, pushing him towards the bed. Then she dragged his clothes from the wardrobe. ‘Sit down — sir.’

His gun was in his hand, as if to ward her off, but aimed at the door. She bent down and put on his socks. Then she reached for the knots of the robe and he sat staring stupidly at her. It was risible rather than erotic and she bent her head to avoid his noticing her smirking expression. She was aware of the door behind her and of the skin itching on her back in anticipation of someone entering. She undid the knots with quick, nervous fingers, then said:

‘Take it off — sir.’ Her voice was as clogged as if she were undressing him in sexual foreplay, but the fear was becoming uppermost now. Dmitri’s voice had been panicky, over the edge.

‘Is — is Dmitri in immediate danger?’

‘Quiet — I’m listening for noises in the corridor!’ he snapped in a hoarse whisper. ‘Yes,’ he added. ‘I’m certain.’

He shuffled his loins into the jockey shorts she held out like a mother dressing an infant. He seemed unaware of her, but before she could experience pique, what he had said jolted her and she felt very cold.

‘Trousers,’ she said hurriedly.

He stood up and climbed into them as she held them. Then the shirt, then she zipped the trousers, buckled the belt. Off to school… He thrust his feet into his boots and she laced them, her fingers cold and anxious.

‘Come on!’ he snapped.

‘I’m hurrying as fast as I’

‘Sorry.’

She helped him into his overcoat, and held out his fur hat after she had buttoned the coat loosely across his padded, immobile arm. He shook his head.

‘Painkillers — that drawer/ he said, pointing with the pistol.

Then he moved to the door and opened it softly.

Vorontsyev looked out. Empty. Good. He waved the pistol in his left hand, to bring Marfa to the door behind him. ‘We’ll use the big lift, the one they use for moving people about on stretchers … come on.’

He went through the door and Marfa followed him, watching beyond his shoulder, expecting at any instant the arrival of armed men, and aware of his broken arm and the stifled grunts of pain as she had dressed him. His condition made her fearful for her own safety rather than his, even though the sensation shamed her. He was loo vulnerable, too weak and injured to be of help.

She tried to outface the thought of death, squash the memories of her experiences on the rig — the attack, the semiconsciousness, the smells of rubbish, the maw of the garbage truck towards which she had slid helplessly … He turned, and his expression made her realise she had stopped and was leaning limply against the corridor wall. He hurried back to her, shuffling like a hunchbacked grotesque, something from a movie.

‘Come on!’ he said urgently. ‘It’s all right, we’ll make it!’

Vorontsyev realised that the calm with which she had dressed him had been all she possessed to help her confront the situation.

Her ordeal at the rig had been too recent. He threw his left arm around her shoulders, to drag her into an embrace of encouragement and to move her towards the lifts. They really had to hurry

TWELVE Modest Offices

The two men hurried behind him along the corridor, as if they were in pursuit or taking him on a journey he had no wish to make. His panic mounted as he reached the door of Vorontsyev’s room. His hand refused to reach for the handle. Then one of Bakunin’s men, the one in the leather topcoat, elbowed him aside and jerked open the door, throwing it wide onto -

bedclothes pulled back, signs of urgency. A glass of water had spilt onto the carpet. David Schneider felt a great relief overwhelm him, then a sense of danger as the two GRU men glared at each other, the bed, then him.

‘Where are they? You were responsible for keeping them under surveillance!’ one of them bellowed at him. His companion in the leather coat moved towards Schneider, the Makarov pistol gripped like a small club in his fist.

‘Who warned them, Yank? Who?’

‘Not me! They were your orders, you two were told to take care of him — he was here only minutes ago!’ he blurted it all out, the words like flailing hands attempting to counter an assault.

‘The lift!’ one of them snapped. ‘They can’t have got far, the cop’s injured — come on!’ They passed Schneider, the one in the leather coat growling;

‘We won’t find them in this storm, if they’re already outside.’

‘Get some back-up!’ the other shouted back at him as they stood before the lift doors. ‘It’s being used, look!’

‘Stairs — I’- Schneider heard, and then they were running along the corridor to the staircase.

He slumped against the wall, wiping the back of his hand across his wet, loose lips. God —

‘Where’s your car?’ Vorontsyev’s breath whistled between pursed lips that registered the pain in his arm and ribs.

‘The car park — not far from the main doors.’

‘OK.’

‘Where then?’

‘Teplov’s knocking shop. I told Dmitri the church, but he’ll know what I meant. Teplov will be discreet.’ He tried to grin, but his lips were as wet as his forehead. Groaning in a short-breathed manner, he cried: ‘These bloody ribs!’

She moved involuntarily towards him but he merely glared her away. The lift door opened. Icy cold drowned the compartment, snatching away their breath. Vorontsyev shivered uncontrollably.

‘Come on,’ she urged, and he leaned the least of his weight against her, no more than a gesture.

The underground delivery and emergency area stretched away around them like a cavern of concrete. The blizzard hurled itself down the ramp and through the echoing stanchions. He stumbled ahead of Marfa, doubled up as if against the full force of the wind rather than to nurse his arm and ribs, and she followed like a servant. The security man in his booth, its windows fugged and cosy, seemed oblivious of them as they climbed the icy ramp -

to be struck by the wind and its burden of hurled snow, made breathless and blind by it. Vorontsyev staggered against her, knocking the breath from Marfa’s lungs. She felt drowned in rushing air. Then her breath caught. Sodium lamps flared like distant gas rigs in the bellow of the storm, showing the snow as impenetrable, solid.

‘All — right?’ she screamed against his cheek.

‘Yes!’ he bellowed back, a thin, small noise.

‘This way. Over hereV

He merely nodded, his head slow like that of an ailing donkey, as she guided him towards the car park. Their boots clumped through six or seven inches of snow and, as the wind numbed her to the bone, she was further chilled by the thought of an iced car, the failure of the engine, the condition of the road. She was afraid of awakening the pain in his ribs as she touched at his elbow, moving them like two ridiculous, lost blind people across the indeterminate white expanse of the car park. She looked up once, twice, a dozen times to orientate herself by the dim, masked lights of the main hospital block. There was no noise but the wind, no images that were not fluid and white, except the occasional whitened lumps of cars, shapeless as cows asleep in a field. She began to yearn for the warmth that even the distanced, almost obscured hospital lights dimly promised.

Then she lurched in a cuffingly stronger surge of wind into her own car, her numb gloved hand smearing the snow on the windscreen. She rubbed at it furiously as if to uncover a familiar, buried face. Vorontsyev was crouching beside the lock, flicking at a cigarette lighter, which refused to ignite in the storm.

‘Try it,’ he said.

The key turned like a lever lifting a great weight, then she pulled the door open, climbed in and unlocked the passenger

“door. Vorontsyev collapsed gingerly into the seat and shut the door. The blizzard seemed hardly diminished by the metal of the car; it drummed and plucked on it, making it a sounding box. The windscreen fugged. Marfa turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed and refused. Twice, three, four coughed and accepted at the fifth attempt. The engine sounded very small, like that of a distant lawnmower. She heard Vorontsyev’s laboured breathing before she gently pressed the accelerator.

She had left the handbrake off when parking. The back of the car squealed and shimmied itself like the rear of a cat about to strike, before it moved out of its parking place, clambering over thick snow covering rutted ice. The car struggled, danced drunkenly, slipped and mocked its way towards the exit. In the headlights came the occasional whitened shape of another car and the flying snow.

The streetlights …? Two of them — another two as she turned onto the road towards the invisible town. Another two coming slowly out of the storm as she passed the second two then a fourth pair, a fifth, measuring out their tortoise journey across the treacherous, cleared but filling road. The snowploughs could do no more than bail desperately, like men in a sinking dinghy. And all the time, Vorontsyev’s breathing …

… maddening her. A snowplough surged forward like a liner, flung snow enough to bury them, moved away behind them.

The car skidded across the road, then furiously back as if eager to make amends. Her wrists ached … arms … eyes … Eventually, her ears dulled to his breathing and winces of pain.

A hundred pairs of streetlamps, two hundred — phantasms of shops and cafes like blank screens to either side, and finally, after perhaps an hour or more, the semi-darkness of the old town, then the dome and cross of the church against the town’s bleary light. She drew the car close against dilapidated fencing, behind another vehicle — a customer, in this weather? The libido — pigs\ Exhausted mockery and contempt whirled slow as planets in her mind.

She looked across at Vorontsyev, who was struggling from a doze.

‘Are we — here?’

She nodded.

‘Yes,’ she sighed, releasing the steering wheel with difficulty, as if she had captured it long ago as a prize. ‘Yes. The knocking shop — do you think you’re ready for it, sir?’ Then she began giggling with relief, aware that he was looking uncomprehendingly at her, helpless to prevent the giggle from becoming a roar of laughter.

‘OK now?’ he asked in the eventual quiet.

Catching her breath, she said: ‘Yes. Can you climb out unaided or shall I?’

‘Help me, please,’ he said with ungentle abruptness.

She got out of the car, rounded it through the snowdrift, and struggled his weight upright. He leaned gratefully on the roof while she locked the car, then dumbly followed her beside the churchyard, across the lane and along the side paih to the brothel. The old house seemed shrunken by the blizzard, its walls stippled and sheened with ice. The light above the front door fell weakly onto the snow-covered, trodden steps. Vorontsyev slumped against the stone of the porch as she rang the bell.

Dmitri tugged back the door as if startled from sleep, his features widening into shocked relief, then narrowing at once to solicitation as he admitted Vorontsyev’s condition.

‘You look like my mother!’ Vorontsyev growled.

Dmitri closed the door behind them. Vorontsyev raised his head and found himself confronted by Sonya’s bulk. She was dressed in an expanse of red sweater and trousers that seemed like those of a badly stuffed teddy bear. Her face was a hard, heavily made-up mask. Teplov, in dark slacks and jacket that hung from his small frame, stared out from behind her as if slung from her matronly back, his eyes tired and pessimistic.

Vorontsyev laughed barkingly, the noise almost at once becoming a cough of pain.

‘What do you want. Major — a reduction for a party booking?

We don’t have any girls to accommodate her, by the way ‘

Sonya and Marfa glowered at each other.

‘Why, Major — why?’ Teplov moaned, complaining to an invisible and higher authority. Sonya appeared violently pleased at Vorontsyev’s injured helplessness.

‘Because there’s nowhere else-‘ he began, but Dmitri interrupted.

‘I told them it was surveillance, Alexei.’

Vorontsyev shook his head. ‘Misha won’t have swallowed that

— will you, Misha?’ Teplov appeared to wish he had been able to digest the fiction; devoutly so. ‘It’s Turgenev, Misha. He and Bakunin are after us.’ Fear, cunning, hopelessness pursued each other across Teplov’s thin features, animating the corpselike skin. He shrugged. ‘See, Dmitri? Misha knows it’s too dangerous to tell anyone. They’d bump him off, too.’

‘You are a shitV Sonya bellowed, striking Vorontsyev across the face, causing him to stagger against Dmitri, cry out with renewed pain. Sonya announced at once: ‘Get him upstairs, into a bed. Come on, you stupid policewoman, help me!’

She walked Vorontsyev to the staircase, and began half-lifting him up each step. Three of Teplov’s girls watched Sonya and Marfa, prepared either to giggle or commiserate.

‘Where’s Lock?’ Vorontsyev called back to Dmitri, climbing the stairs behind them together with Teplov.

‘Along the corridor — nice room. Lubin’s with him.’

Sonya knocked loudly on the door, demanding it be opened.

Lubin’s bright look faded as he saw Vorontsyev, who snapped:

‘I’m not dying — just need a rest. Painkillers …’ he added in a mumbling voice to Marfa.

Lock’s face was appalled. Vorontsyev was thrust onto a bed by Sonya’s large, strong hands. The pillows were scented, clean, utterly soft, enveloping, and the big bed was welcoming, so welcoming and embracing …

… blinked awake.

‘What-?’ He attempted to move, then squealed with pain.

‘Oh, Christ!’

‘Before you ask, Alexei, you’ve been asleep for less than five minutes,’ he heard Dmitri announce. ‘Sonya’s brought coffee.

There’ll be sandwiches …’

They helped him into a sitting position.

The room was cheaply opulent, an image from a collection of titillating studies of brothels of the last century. Sonya’s idea of style, taste, sophistication. But it was warm, clean, subtly lit and the scents were pleasant. Mirrors heavily gilded, the bed a four-poster, the carpet imitating Persian or Afghan rugs. Red flock wallpaper, of course. Dmitri’s daughter’s rabbit was chewing on green leaves, hunched in its cage on a nineteenth-century German sideboard with a bulbous, serpentine front. He felt safe, strangely.

He looked at each of them in turn.

‘Where’s Goludin?’

‘Dead, Alexei — that’s why I warned you to get out of the hospital.’

‘Oh my God — tell me the rest of it/ he said, feeling utterly weary; no longer safe.

‘Yes, be ready to move them when I give the order,’ Turgenev repeated, wrinkling his features into an expression of distaste that mocked him from the bedroom mirror. Panshin in his damned jazz club was the personification of corruption in miniature; he was sleazy, squalid. ‘Yes, check for surveillance, if you have any sense. And try not to sound too relieved — you should have no trouble from the police.’ He paused, then pressed the console beside the bed, accepting the incoming call he had kepi waiting. ‘Yes?’

He stared at the ceiling as he resumed his position against the pillows, avoiding the mirror.

‘Bakunin ‘

‘Yes? Is it over?’

‘Gorov and the American — got away.’ The voice was an abashed, anxious murmur.

‘You incompetent bloody fool, Bakunin,’ Turgenev’s voice strained for control. His hand, truer to his mood, clenched and unclenched on the counterpane. ‘What happened?’ He listened.

‘Then find them. What of Vorontsyev — you what?’ Perspiration sprang from his hairline. The pillows enveloped rather than embraced. The armpits of his silk pyjamas seemed clammy.

Events in Novyy Urengoy could not possess such self-volition, could not possibly orbit beyond his control. He was quivering with rage. It was as if everything was denying his authority.

‘Yes?’ he snapped, every emotion concealed by the fiction of busy irritation. Finally: ‘Then they are hiding somewhere — they are together. Find them and finish them. Make sure you’re successful this time.’

He put down the receiver and rubbed his temples as soothingly as a masseuse might have done. His head ached, as if he had entered a cold place from a warm room. The blizzard murmured beyond the double-glazing and the heavy drapes. He was deeply enraged. Challenged by a handful of petty, ignorant men who had decided upon self-destruction, on useless heroics. Nevertheless, successfully defied, every moment they remained alive. He inspected his fingers as if they had dabbled in dirt. Inferior, weak, unreliable individuals — Panshin, Bakunin, Vorontsyev and his crew … all no more than dogshit on one of his shoes, but now walked into the house, onto priceless rugs, offensive and unignorable.

Angrily, he got up from the bed and crossed to the bathroom in search of aspirin.

‘I know there are five of us. Lock, I know that-‘ Vorontsyev’s exasperation made his voice high, strained. ‘I know Turgenev as well as you do, only not under such elegant and sophisticated circumstances! I understand better than you do how easily he could rid himself of us.’ His anger faded and he lay back against the pillows. But Lock would not let him rest.

Then what exactly can we do to even things up a little? You know the town, the quality of the opposition. What do we do?

We can’t stay here forever.’

‘I know that, too,’ Vorontsyev sighed, waving his good hand feebly. The painkillers made him feel tired, made clear thinking difficult. ‘It’s still a question of survival, not revenge, Lock however much you want it to be the other way around.’ He paused. Lock’s intent gaze disconcerted him; he could see the American had little interest in survival, none in escape.

Lock had come for Turgenev and his new and untrusted companions were mechanisms whose only purpose was to place him in a position from which he could destroy his enemy.

‘It can’t be done,’ he said, ‘what you want. We can’t help you with it, no one can. There’s no way you can get close to Turgenev.’

Lock glowered at him, and said: ‘Then I’ll find the way for myself. Thanks for your help.’ He looked meaningfully at Dmitri, then stood up.

‘Sit down, Lock … there is one way. It won’t come out neatly, you killing Turgenev at high noon on the main street—’ He grinned and the mocking laughter in his chest was punished by the searing pain of his ribs. He coughed. ‘Forget the drugs for the moment.’ Dmitri appeared betrayed, let down. ‘It’s the scientists we should concentrate on.’

‘Why?’ Lock asked bluntly.

Vorontsyev gestured at the scattered papers on the bed and the other furniture, at Lubin and Marfa crouched on the floor, sorting the files Lubin had snatched from headquarters on Dmitri’s orders.

‘There’s everything in those files we have on the heroin. Even on Turgenev — our suspicions, all suspicions, are in the heads in this room. But there’s no proof and there never will be. He kills people, remember, to keep his secrets.’ He shivered. ‘You were once CIA, you claim … OK. There are CIA people in Georgia, protecting Shevardnadze, in Moscow around Yeltsin, the FBI is all over Moscow and Petersburg advising the local militia, gathering material on the mafia to help clean them up in America, let alone in Russia ‘

‘I know all that!’ Lock protested.

‘Then use what you know!’ Vorontsyev snarled. ‘Instead of imagining you’re in a cowboy movie, thinkV He coughed again.

Marfa’s empathetic wince made him angrier. ‘If we can nail down some proof, some actual evidence, regarding the trade in nuclear physicists and technicians with Iran or any other Moslem country, the CIA and the FBI will crawl all over Novyy Urengoy! Can’t you bloody well see that. Lock? That it’s not a one-man crusade against the forces of darkness? We need to find one of those very valuable human commodities, just one, and get him away from here.’

‘To Moscow?’ Dmitri asked in surprise.

‘Anywhere, now we’ve got Lock to help us. He speaks American, he’s State Department’

‘ ‘I’m wanted for murder,’ Lock said quietly.

‘A little local difficulty. Give them this and you’ll give them Turgenev. You’ll get a citation! shake hands with your President.

Be on the front cover of Time, I shouldn’t wonder!’

He waved his good arm and lay back once more, exhausted.

Lock continued to study his face, even when the Russian closed his eyes. Unexpectedly, he felt less alienated and alone in the room, less aware of four pairs of strangers’ eyes watching him. He rubbed his hands through his hair, aware, in an unwelcoming way, of the worm of survival wriggling in the pit of his stomach. And of Turgenev, remote and enfortressed and secure, and the smallness of their numbers, their utter powerlessness.

The shuffling of papers from the two younger ones kneeling on the carpet, the quiet scrape of pencils and of Dmitri scratching himself. Vorontsyev’s breathing and the ticking of an ornate, last-century clock on the marble mantelpiece …

‘OK — all right,’ he announced eventually. ‘I agree with your analysis. Washington — and maybe Moscow — would move heaven and earth to stop top Russian scientists being smuggled out. Drugs-‘ He swallowed angrily. ‘Drugs are passe, yesterday’s problem. Too ordinary to get excited about.’

‘You really agree the Yankees will want to know?’ Dmitri interjected, rubbing his loose jowls, looking tired, almost drunk.

He got up and poured himself some more coffee from the percolator Sonya had replenished. ‘Well, Mr Lock?’

Lock looked at his watch. It was after one. The blizzard roared around the old house, rattling the ill-fitting windowframes. He had a sense of urgency, but lack of sleep and agreement with Vorontsyev distanced it, made it comfortable like the rabbit in its cage. He shook himself.

‘Yes, I do — how much time do we have?’ he asked, turning back to Vorontsyev.

‘As long as we stay hidden,’ Dmitri muttered.

They had heard the creak and growl of half-track vehicles passing the house; the GRU had to be turning the whole town on its head in an effort to find them.

‘That long?’ Lock replied cynically. ‘OK, Major — what now?’

Vorontsyev opened his grey eyes, then leaned forward, hand pressed against his ribs, and said to Lubin:

‘Anything — anything at all?’

‘We’ve been over and over the stuff here, racked our brains, sir. Just can’t narrow it down’

‘They have to be somewhere!’

‘Obviously, Lock. Turgenev owns the whole town, or most of it. What he doesn’t own he has in his other pocket. They could be anywhere — not the hotels, though. That’s how we stumbled on them in the first place. Not out at his place either, that would be stupid of him. Somewhere close, somewhere safe.’

‘Panshin’s club — Panshin’s apartment?’ Dmitri asked.

‘Who’s Panshin?’

‘The jazz club.’ Lock nodded. ‘He’s into the heroin business, we’re certain of that now. That’s a recent venture. He could be dragooned into this, too …? I’m not sure.’

‘They’re as locked in as we are, anyway,’ Dmitri observed.

‘They won’t be going anywhere in this — and it’s set to last another two days at least. If we can stay alive, we might have forty-eight hours!’ He smiled pessimistically.

Vorontsyev shook his head carefully. Lubin was afraid and Marfa was rubbing her upper arms vigorously as if cold.

‘You see, Lock? We’re really as desperate as you,’ Vorontsyev murmured. ‘OK, Panshin for one — where else?’

Turgenev has offices all over town,’ Marfa offered, Lubin nodding in agreement as he sifted a sheaf of papers. ‘Companies he owns or part-owns. Warehouses — even out at the airport he’s got cargo hangars. Shops, industrial units.’

Vorontsyev laughed, puzzling Lock.

‘You see, Lock, it’s the geological record of a capitalist,’ he explained. ‘Even Tsar Peter had to start somewhere, in quite a small way. Importing luxury items, especially food and booze.

Then fashion for a time, wasn’t it, Dmitri?’ Gorov nodded, himself smiling in recollection. ‘Import-export. Just like today, only smaller. Different cargoes, different profits. Gradually, he acquired gas leases, and the money to exploit them. Then more quickly, he grew and grew.’ He stared at the ceiling. ‘So, we have dozens of small to medium companies, all with offices, still connected to Turgenev, little bits of his empire all over town. Give Mr Lock the list Let him choose which one we hit first!’

‘That’ll just draw attention to us!’ Lubin protested.

‘Sorry, youngster.’

Lock took the handwritten sheet, glancing down the considerable list of companies. Turgenev’s recent past, his last six or seven years. Toes in the water, no more than that. Food importing, frocks, drink, just as Vorontsyev described. He looked up.

‘He was creating a dozen covers, wasn’t he?’

‘I imagine so. Every means he could to gain constant access to the airport, to flights in and out.’

‘And these companies are still in business — legitimately?’

Vorontsyev looked at Marfa, who nodded.

‘Apparently.’

‘Then he won’t use any of them, will he? Not for this, not at this moment in time.’ He handed the sheet abruptly to Marfa, who scowled at his condescension. ‘Find one that isn’t trading any longer, one with large enough premises. That’s where they’ll be.’

‘Sir?’ Marfa asked.

Vorontsyev nodded.

‘Humour Mr Lock, Marfa,’ he said, carefully excluding all excitement from his voice.

The dress shop was on 9th Street, three blocks from the elegance and triple mark-up of K Street. Its grille-protected windows were dark and empty, like a number of the shops on either side of it.

Small, dingy emporia that seemed to have been early casualties of the rising tide of affluence in Novyy Urengoy, patronised now by the dependents of rig workers, the unemployed and old, the disabled and the remaining locals. The car, slewed onto the opposite pavement, was alone in the snow-filled street. The few sodium lamps merely tinted the bfizzard.

Vorontsyev imagined rather than saw the flicker of torchlight behind the dark blank of the shop window, the cloudy pupil of glass left free of ice and driven snow. The car’s heater protested loudly at its forced labour, and Lubin was reflectively silent in the driver’s seat. Lock had tried to insist he stay at Teplov’s, but he had outmanoeuvred the American, leaving Marfa on the pretence that Sonya wasn’t to be trusted not to call someone to inform on their whereabouts. Dmitri and Lock had entered the empty shop. There was an apartment, cramped and uninhabited, it appeared, above the shop and owned by the earliest manifestation of a Turgenev properly company. Turgenev had bobbed on down the street on the surge of money brought into the town, to own the leases and a claim on the profits of a dozen of the smartest, most expensive boutiques and stores, bars and nightclubs. Yet he had kept this place untenanted, unearning, when he might as easily have sold it to one of the Iranians or Turks or Pakistanis who supplied their own communities — at least rented it to one. Vorontsyev felt a tickle of excitement in his chest, like the beginnings of a cough. Lock was smart; more into the covert than he was, the secretly criminal, the world of mirrors and disguises. Places where things didn 7 happen. He and his people had watched only the inhabited places, the movements and motives of crowds.

He saw a torch flash light against the upstairs window, then sensed that a curtain was drawn across the glass. He lit a cigarette and listened to the storm and Lubin’s efforts to control his breathing. The boy was all right — just.

Ten minutes later, he saw Dmitri and Lock emerge from the narrow alleyway leading to the rear of the shop and lump their way across the treacherous street. The snowploughs hadn’t cleared it for hours and traffic had consequently avoided it.

The blizzard whirled snow in on him as Dmitri opened the door and clambered into the front passenger seat. Then Lock repeated the shower as he slid in beside Voromsyev. The American was grinning.

‘It’s a place waiting for someone to arrive!’ Lock exhaled, self-satisfaction wreathing his chilled features. ‘Tell him, Dmitri, tell the man!’

‘Nothing there — the place is empty,’ Dmitri began, turning round in his seat. Vorontsyev felt his own impatient excitement mount. ‘Hasn’t been used for much at all, by the look of it, for some time. Dust everywhere in the upstairs flat. But, food, a couple of fan heaters, drink. The electricity supply’s on, so is the gas. Camp beds stacked at the back of the shop, too.’

Vorontsyev gripped Lock’s arm.

‘You could smell cigarette smoke, Major — I swear it. Maybe four, even five people, judging by the supplies and the camp beds. We just have to stake this out!’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Alexei, it doesn’t matter — they must be coming here!’ Dmitri insisted. ‘As Lock says, all we have to do is to wait for them to arrive.’

‘Who? Bakunin and a division of armour? We can’t sit around on the street in daylight, Dmitri!’

‘Maybe they’ll come tonight?’ Lock suggested seductively.

‘Any minute now — uh? Think about it.’

Both Dmitri and the American were reckless at the ease with which they had uncovered the safe house — for it had to be that

— and he felt almost shamed at his own cautious reluctance; as if he refused to join in some childish game that might prove dangerous. Nevertheless, he continued shaking his head.

‘An hour — no more. One hour. Lubin, move the car down the street.’

The engine clattered noisily as Lubin pressed the accelerator.

The snow chains on the tyres ground and creaked and the ZiL rolled away from the deeply rutted kerb, skidding into the middle of the road. Lubin righted it and drove cautiously down the centre of the street to the junction with gaudier L Street.

The occasional lurching truck, one or two cars, shop windows holding a subdued glare, a couple of all-night cafes optimistically still ablaze.

‘Park here,’ Vorontsyev instructed.

Lubin dragged on the handbrake and, at Vorontsyev’s nod, switched off the engine. The blizzard was suddenly louder inside the car, shaking it like a riotous crowd. L Street was obscured, then revealed, obscured again; darker 9th Street seemed like a narrow tunnel.

‘Right, gentlemen, I said an hour, and an hour is what I meant.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We leave at three, at the latest’

The mobile phone in his pocket trilled. All four of them were startled, as if by a sudden searchlight thrown on them. Lock tugged it from Vorontsyev’s coat pocket and switched it on.

It was evident to Lock that it was Maria’s voice, despite the hoarse, urgent whisper she employed like a bad actress.

‘They’re here, Alexei — sir. GRU. They want to search the place from top to bottom — ‘ There was another, harsher female voice beyond Marfa, urging the girl to get out. ‘They’re here I’

‘For God’s sake, Sonya — shut up!’ Marfa snarled, pressing her face close to the mask of make-up worn by the older, heavier woman.

They were standing against the bedroom door, Sonya’s large, plump white hand still gripping the porcelain doorknob. Sonya’s eyes were wild with concern, almost oblivious to Marfa except as a presence. There was spittle on the carmined lips.

‘Get out, leave us alone!’ Sonya repeated. ‘They mustn’t find you here!’

‘Which way?’ Marfa demanded, the mobile phone pressed against the side of her face like a dark poultice. She heard Vorontsyev gabbling reassurance. ‘No, don’t come here!’ she snapped at him. ‘The place must be surrounded. I’ll get out where are you? Yes, 9th and L–I’ll find you. Yes!’ She closed the connection and thrust Dmitri’s phone into her pocket, tugging her scarf tightly around her face.

Then she was adrift, bereft of volition. She felt panic begin to spread like a blush across her features. Sonya was contemptuous for an instant, then simply afraid again. Only the rabbit, browsing leaves in its cage, seemed oblivious of threat. Marfa forced herself to the window and lifted the edge of the drawn curtain, which smelt of old velVet and old dust. Headlights glared through the blizzard outside and she heard the sound of raised voices and the clump of boots on rutted snow. Dark figures hurried.

Behind her, Sonya was clearing coffee cups with clumsy hands.

Marfa knelt and began shuffling the scattered papers into an untidy bundle, then stared wildly about her for a place of concealment — for the papers, herself? God Sonya was staring at her, but her attention was directed beyond the door, her head cocked to one side like that of a large, predatory animal. Marfa opened the heavy old wardrobe to push the bundle of papers into it’. Garish slips and housecoats, boots, underclothes. A spangled, ribboned basque lay like an abandoned piece of armour on the floor of the wardrobe. Then Sonya was behind her, her hands gripping her shoulders, her lips against Marfa’s cheek.

‘Quick — get your clothes off! Come on — put the papers in the bedV

She was tugging at the scarf, the long dark coat, even the glasses Marfa had not removed. Marfa tried to push her hands away, then experienced a moment of terrified betrayal as the woman held her wrists with one big hand and slapped her face.

The spectacles flew off.

‘Get away — V

‘Get your clothes off, put on a housecoat — hereV Sonya replied. ‘I hope to God Teplov doesn’t give the whole bloody game away! Come on!’

Marfa took off the coat, then her sweaters, lastly her denims.

Sonya bundled them into the wardrobe. Closing the door, she snapped:

‘Don’t get into the bed, it’s too obvious! Christ, why can’t you women wear some make-up — who’d fancy you in a month of Sundays?’

She pushed Marfa down on the bed. Marfa was chilly in the flimsy housecoat which reeked of cheap scent and barely covered her white knees. Sonya seemed no less distraught than when she had entered the room to warn her.

‘Can you smoke a cigarette without coughing?’ she asked.

Marfa nodded doubtfully. ‘Here!’ She thrust a cigarette at her.

‘And stop shivering!’

In a mockery of stately ease, Sonya sat in one of the velvet upholstered chairs, lighting another cigarette.

There were noises along the corridor, then the door was flung back and two GRU soldiers, greatcoated, wet-shouldered and grinning, appeared at the threshold.

‘Didn’t your mother teach you to knock?’ Sonya snapped.

‘What is this, another raid?’

‘Shut up, Grandma!’ the more pimply of the two young men mocked. The other snickered, nudging his companion and announcing:

‘Don’t fancy yours, Sasha!’

‘Mother Fat and her daughter, Miss Thin — bloody hell, you don’t go to any trouble for the customers, do you?’

A voice, sharp with authority, called from a distance, and the two soldiers snapped to half-attention before Sonya’s mocking laughter made them shambling figures of uncertain contempt once more. Quickly, they opened the wardrobe, drawers in an old chest, glanced beneath the bed.

‘Expecting to find your older brother here, boys?’ Sonya observed, exhaling smoke theatrically at the ceiling and crossing her legs.

The two young men scowled. One of them, onion on his breath, stared affrontingly at Marfa, his body hovering very close to her. She forced herself not to flinch, to present no more than patient indifference.

Tired of his lack of authority, the youth with acne snapped to his companion: ‘Let’s go before you catch something!’

‘Not even the flu, boys,’ Sonya shot after them as they slammed the door.

Sonya’s features crumbled into a clownish expression of exaggerated defeat and anxiety. Then she said hoarsely:

‘Now, get your clothes on and get ready to leave as soon as they do.’ She was listening to the clump of retreating boots.

Marfa tried to control the shiver that possessed her, rubbing her arms furiously and hunching into herself. She could taste the onion that had been on the soldier’s leering breath! ‘Come on, they won’t be back — just a couple of tarts, they’ll report. Not that anyone but a kid’would say that about you!’ she snorted, relieving her nerves. ‘Snap out of it! Sod off and don’t come back!’

Vorontsyev stared at the phone in his hand, listening to the noise of the disconnected call. Then he and the others were Startled as the blizzard buffeted a shapeless staggering lump against the side of the ZiL. Then the drunk or addict or whatever he was slouched on, bent against the flying snow and the force of the wind, towards the lights of an empty, hopeful cafe. A snowplough ground across the next intersection, its warning light dim through the storm.

‘What’s happening?’ Dmitri blurted, turning back to Vorontsyev.

‘The GRU are there.’

‘Teplov?’

‘No, he wouldn’t. Just bad luck’

‘What about Marfa?’ Lubin all but wailed.

‘She told us not to go back there!’ Vorontsyev warned as Lubin turned the key and the engine coughed.

Lock remained silent as he watched the snowplough disappear and the huddled lump of the man retreat up L Street. The girl was none of his affair, however her vulnerability nagged at him.

If they caught her, she’d talk, as would any of them in time, but there was little or nothing to tell. Only the location of the ZiL.

Lubin and Vorontsyev were staring at each other in challenge.

Then the young man in the driving seat turned away, swallowing loudly. Dmitri’s large hands rested on the back of his seat.

Then he flapped his fingers in acquiescence and shrugged his shoulders. Lubin’s breathing was the sole noise of dissent.

‘We hang on?’ Lock asked.

Vorontsyev nodded. ‘We hang on-‘ he began gloomily.

‘Hello, what’s that?’ Dmitri was looking past Vorontsyev. Then he opened the door and began clambering out of the car. ‘There’s a car on 9th — parked. I’ll just go and have a look.’ He shut the door quickly on any reply.

The wind cut through his bulky clothing and the snow blinded him for a moment, until he read the direction of the wind and turned his gaze aside. He staggered like the drunk against the wall of wind and snow, as if feeling his way blindly along its solidity. Heard his teeth chattering and pulled his scarf across his mouth. His boots floundered through the drifted snow against shop fronts, grilles, steel doors. Signs in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, pigeon-English, Russian, Ukrainian. Smells, even in that temperature and force of wind, mostly the scent of the poor and the crowd, what they ate and drank.

He realised his mistake even as he imitated the figure who had faltered against the car. Lurching against the black, snow roofed car, he identified it as German. BMW. The thin, pale face of the driver stared into his and he recognized Dom Kasyan, Val Panshin’s hit man; small and neat as ever in a dark overcoat and black driving gloves. The face twitched with recognition and the decision to act. The door of the car began to open. Dmitri pulled himself away as if from a magnetic field, stumbling back across the pavement and against a darkened shop window protected by an ice-cold metal grille. Kasyan’s face was alert, threatening, even as his lips moved close to the mouthpiece of the earphone. A white wrist rested on the steering wheel. Something gleamed as it was held in the black driving glove.

Dmitri struggled with his clothes, opening his overcoat and reaching for the pistol in the shoulder holster. Kasyan put down the phone. It was only seconds since — the BMW’s engine fired, the door slammed, and the car screeched and ripped its way on snow tyres across the ruts and into the middle of 9th Street. Dmitri’s gun wavered in front of him, as if heid by someone else. His heart was pounding.

‘Oh — bugger it, buggerV he bellowed at the flying snow, way ing his arms as if he had been stranded in the storm by the accelerating BMW.

He turned and blundered back towards the ZiL, the wind behind him pushing him like a rock down a mountainside. Lubin and Lock were already standing beside the car, guns drawn. He looked back, stumbling, and saw the BMW turn out of sight.

‘What is it?’ Lock shouted.

Ignoring him, Dmitri reached the car and leaned into it, his breath coming in great sobs.

‘Kasyan — that little shit Kasyan!’ he shouted. ‘I recognized him and he recognized me\ Oh, shit, Alexei, it’s all cocked up —!’

‘What’s the matter?’ Lock demanded.

Vorontsyev snapped: ‘Panshin’s right hand. Panshin’s got the scientists all right, Kasyan must have been scouting the place they won’t bloody well come now!’

‘Lubin, let’s move it, uh?’ Lock ordered. ‘They know where we are now. Come on, fella, move it!’ He bundled Lubin back into the driver’s seat and climbed in beside Vorontsyev. ‘How far is this guy Panshin from here?’

‘What?’

Speed, man, speed. Did the guy use a phone?’ Dmitri, slamming his door, grunted in the affirmative. ‘OK, so Panshin knows. But he has to talk to Turgenev now. There have to be new arrangements, another safe house. Panshin must have them at his place — jazz club, you said?’ Vorontsyev nodded. ‘Then let’s hit it before they can get those people out of there. Hit it now— or forget it!’

‘Four of us—?’ Dmitri began.

‘What about Marfa?’ Lubin asked urgently. ‘She’ll expect us to be here.’

Marfa had obviously escaped; had necessarily escaped, for Lubin’s equanimity, his ability to function. Perhaps each of them assumed the same, Lock realised, even himself. The reminder of their numbers jolted him. He shook his head.

‘Hit it now, or forget it,’ he repeated. His hands were clenched into fists in his gloves, resting on the thighs of his denims. Come on, Vorontsyev, he thought, willing the policeman to agree. He looked at the Russians in turn. ‘We need one guy, just one. It was your idea — one guy to show to Moscow, to the CIA or the FBI. Only one.’

‘Lubin — take us to Panshin’s …’ He smiled, though he was leaning back in the rear seat to ease his ribs and arm. ‘I feel like some late jazz.’

‘What about Marfa?’

‘I can’t call her — it might kill her!’ Vorontsyev snapped.

The scullery door of the old house was slammed shut behind her. She stood shivering in the wind, her scarf flying away from her face so that she had to release her shaking body and grab at it. The cold she blamed as much on the ridiculous, humiliating housecoat — her throat and cheeks still reeked of the cheap scent — as on her fear or the storm. The door being banged shut was Sonya’s final ejaculation of angry relief.

She looked at her watch. Almost two-thirty in the morning.

The blizzard and the darkness oppressed her. Her own escape sharpened her sense of Goludin’s death. He’d been casually, finally erased, like some mistake. She saw his earnest, affably willing features and experienced a lurching sense of loss that momentarily dizzied her.

She shook her head to clear it and sniffed loudly; then reached into her pocket and removed Dmitri’s phone, at once dialling Vorontsyev with clumsy, gloved fingers. Then she waited, hearing nothing but the wind. The looming church was the only other building she could distinguish. Come on, come on, she muttered in her thoughts, stamping her feet.

‘Alexei — I’m all right!’ she blurted, at once embarrassed at her released nerves.

‘What happened?’ she heard in a voice from which all emotion was excluded, to her disappointment.

She told him in a babble of disconnected sentences, concluding:

‘They didn’t fancy me!’ And giggled with tension.

‘Where are you now?’

‘Outside the brothel. You?’

‘We’re—’ It was as if he had paused to consult the others, then he added: ‘We’re on our way to Val Panshin’s club. We think the people we want are hidden on the premises.’

‘I’ll join you,’ she said quickly. ‘Be there in fifteen minutes at most.’ She switched off the phone at once and thrust it decisively back into the pocket of her coat. In the other pocket, she gripped the pistol. The file of papers was held under her arm.

She stepped out into the full force of the wind and the hurled snow, which stung hard against her face. Her boots plunged into heaped snow as she’walked lumberingly towards the church’s dark, empty, decayed bulk and the lane where the car had been parked — aware that someone might have been left to keep the car under surveillance. It had a police numberplate, even if it was caked and hidden with frozen, dirty snow. She gripped the gun more lightly as she reached the broken fence that bordered the lane alongside the church. The deep impressions of the ZiL’s tyres were all but hidden. Maybe they hadn’t noticed the smaller car, her car …?

There was no one near’ it. She warmed the lock with the petrol-fuelled handwarmer she kept for the purpose, pressing it against the icy metal, then inserted the key. Tugged the door open with a crack of ice and climbed into the driving seat. The storm’s noise hardly diminished inside the car. She could hear her own breathing though, and saw it cloud the inside of the windscreen. She thrust the ignition key towards the dashboard — hands, a stiff arm, around her throat. Heard someone else breathing, close against her face, closer than the soldier with acne, smelt the scent of his clothes and old sweat … Her head was being dragged back by the arm locked around her throat, dragged upwards to be snapped away from her body, the breath squeezed out of her. His fierce breathing beside her, his bulk leaning over the seat from the rear of the car where he had concealed himself … others?

Couldn’t breathe now, not at all, not even through her nose which was running, not through her mouth, clogged with saliva and terror … Sensed his success, the imminence of it, through his frame and stiff arm. The windscreen was blind but the snow was darkening, darkening — body a long way below her now, not part of her, head spinning but in darkness, just little flashing lights like red and green stars flickering in the blackness … Body further away, much too far to help, that slow-moving arm more distant than his arm around her throat, much too distant…

The shot deafened her, so that she hardly heard his roar of pain. Hardly felt his arm release its grip, or saw it wait in slow motion away from her, sliding like a defeated snake back over her seat into the rear of the car. She turned to watch the white hand as if it belonged to a waving friend. And her hand — really her finger — squeezed the trigger once more. The pistol exploded, illuminating his face and blinding her … There had been a great deal of blood from the first head wound.

She turned away from the dead man, her whole body shaking in the seat, her thoughts repeating that she had not noticed the wetness of recently melted snow on the door, should have noticed it was wet, should have …

She started the engine out of panic, and the car squealed and wriggled down the lane, thrown from rut to rut, drift to drift.

She winced in anticipation of firing from behind her. The last air bubbled out of the dead man’s lungs. She felt sick, so desperately sick — she had to stop …

… She threw the door open and vomited into the snow.

When she closed the door again, the shivering would not stop.

She was icily cold. She wiped her chin with the back of her glove. Gripped the wheel hard enough to still her arms, then slowly, deliberately accelerated. The car appeared much bigger, overwhelming her as it seemed to turn out of the lane towards the new town of its own volition. She clung to it as if vainly to restrain it from bolting.

They’d left only one man. Probably didn’t know it was hers, hadn’t given it much of a priority. The watcher had decided to be clever, hide in the car, or just be more comfortable than pressed against the wall of the church. She didn’t want to think about him. She could smell the blood but could not bring herself to stop the car again in order to bundle the body into the snow.

Not yet, anyway, not just yet They sat in the car, the engine and the heater off, where Lubin had parked it on K Street, one block from the entrance to Panshin’s club. The Cafe Americain was closed and lightless.

Panshin’s car was parked at the rear, as was the BMW driven by Kasyan. There were two other cars, small and Russian — but no transport in which half a dozen people could be easily smuggled lo another location. Lubin was watching the rear of the club, eager to erase any sense of insubordination his concern for Marfa might have’evoked.

‘You think they’re still inside?’ Vorontsyev asked.

‘Maybe — maybe not. Panshin’s in there, for sure. Let’s ask him, uh? How many other guys would be around at this hour?’

‘Three, perhaps four. The place has been closed for about an hour. In this weather, and with what he’s been hiding in the attic, he might not even have opened.’ He shrugged. ‘There could be more than four. Extra guards. Lock, we won’t know

‘what we’re walking into —’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Lock’s expression was bleak and introspective; dangerous to himself a’nd those in his immediate vicinity, Vorontsyev concluded. ‘It’s the only shot we have. We have to take it, both of you know that.’

Dmitri sighed, but he was nodding, however reluctantly and with however much reservation.

‘We’ll need Marfa — she can watch our backs.’

‘We need to go in now/ Lock said levelly. There was, once more, the sense of an actor rehearsing a role that did not quite suit, one that required another voice, a stranger’s mentality.

Vorontsyev remembered Lock’s CIA background. This was a field agent resurrected; bad old habits, recovered instincts. ‘Kasyan’s been back maybe twenty minutes now. They’ll have called for back-up. We don’t have much time.’

‘If she walks in blind, she could get herself killed!’

‘Then call her!’

Vorontsyev handed the phone to Dmitri, who dialled his own number.

‘Yes?’ Marfa sounded distant, removed.

‘AH right?’

‘Dmitri-!’ she burst out.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing!’ she snapped back. ‘Nothing.’

‘We’re going in to Panshin’s now. When you get here, wait outside, watch our backs. We don’t know who’s in there or how many. We may be coming out in a hurry — be ready for us.’

Dmitri snapped off the phone.

‘OK?’ he asked.

Vorontsyev nodded. The click as Lock slid a round into the breech of the Makarov was startling, bell-like in clarity. Dmitri exhaled noisily.

‘OK.’

Lock opened the door and got out, shutting it softly behind him. Vorontsyev looked darkly at Dmitri and murmured:

‘Don’t let anything he does get you killed, old friend. Remember that. We watch out for each other, not for him. Understand?’

Dmitri’s expression was a conflict of acceptance and disappointment, good sense struggling with some bright new loyalty that embraced the American. Then he said:

‘Understood — sir.’

Vorontsyev snapped: ‘Lock is dangerous to everyone around him, whichever flag they’re carrying. Just remember that! All he wants — still wants — is Turgenev dead. He’s humouring us.

Don’t let him humour you into your pine box!’

THIRTEEN Members and Outsiders

‘Very well, Hamid — very well!’ His exasperation was like a broken bone thrust through the surface of their conversation; the polite mincing game he was forced to play kept tearing like ricepaper. ‘I will personally supervise your departure on my aircraft.’

There it was again, that note of pressure in his voice, that admission of the Iranian’s superiority.

It is temporary, he reminded himself, merely a negotiating ploy.

He was weary of the storm and his own narrowed focus, forced upon him by Hamid — above all he was weary of the small, neat, efficient Iranian. This’is temporary. He repeated the mantra, comforting himself.

‘Good, good — my friend, I realise I am trespassing on your patience and time.’ He shrugged. ‘I Śmyself have people I must please, even if that is not your situation. Thank you for helping me.’

Turgenev grinned and rubbed his hand through his thick fair hair. The apology was sufficiently generous for him to accept it; it smoothed him like a woman’s hand.

‘Accepted.’ He raised his hands. ‘We continue to need each other, Hamid — it’s best that we work closely together.’ Even as other, more important matters piled up, he added to himself.

Deals, negotiations, reports, analyses were stacked in his mind as blatantly as would have been billions of dollars heaped in neat piles on the desk in front of him. Those matters were worth such sums, but he had to superintend the boarding of half a dozen nuclear scientists and technicians onto his private jet for the flight to Tehran, like some damned steward in an airline uniform. He continued levelly, his voice pleasant: ‘The weather window is forecast to appear around eight, soon after full daylight. It could last two hours, or twenty minutes-‘ The Iranian’s features darkened with annoyance. ‘- they can’t be more accurate, I’m afraid.’

‘I understand,’ Hamid said slowly.

‘Good.’

‘They are prepared?’ He made them sound like meals that would be served on the aircraft.

Turgenev nodded. ‘They are. Safely hidden but fully briefed.

They know what is happening to them, and they have been handsomely down-paid.’ One or two of the early people had panicked at the last moment. A few had tried to back out, even to Jeave Iran or wherever, disgruntled and homesick. Pour encourager les autres, they had not been allowed to return. ‘It’s not like the early days any longer, Hamid. Moscow treats them like dirt now. They want to work for you!’ He laughed.

‘What time shall we be leaving?’

‘Six, Hamid, not before.’ It was as if he heard the blizzard more clearly for an instant, bellowing about the hunting lodge.

A window rattled somewhere. The snow had drifted to first floor level outside the heavy curtains of the vast, panelled sitting room. The storm seemed intent on burying his home. He smiled, toasted the strict Moslem with his whisky, then swallowed the last of the drink. He felt almost at ease, despite the Iranian’s presence — until he remembered Bakunin and the business of Lock and Vorontsyev.

He wished to hear of a successful conclusion to that fiasco before he left for the airport.

‘Is there something wrong?’ Hamid enquired with fastidious politeness.

‘No — nothing,’ he replied evenly, without emotion, ‘Nothing.’

Vorontsyev listened, head cocked to one side. Dmitri’s noises at the front door were barely audible, even in the sheltered car park behind the Cafe Americain. Lock stood beside him, softly stamping his feet against the cold or his own tense impatience.

Lubin, features pinched with cold beneath the fur hat, waited with what might have been reluctance for his next order.

Dmitri’s yelling and buffeting of the front door was suddenly carried to them clearly by a freak of the wind and Vorontsyev nodded to both his companions. At once. Lock moved clumsily forward, as if released from some huge restraint. His borrowed pistol was gripped in one gloved hand, stiffly at his side. Vorontsyev’s own gun was in his left hand. He’d had Dmitri strap him more tightly together — paradoxically the recollection of Dmitri’s description caused him to smile — so that it was difficult to swallow the icy air as he breathed. He was on the edge of grogginess because of the painkillers.

He stumbled once and Lubin caught his arm to steady him.

Then they were in the shelter of the porch, trampling on drifted snow. Lock banged on the rear door of the club, which masqueraded as its members’ entrance. Other punters used the door on K Street.

‘Open up — GRU!’ Lock bellowed in Russian, startling his companions.

‘Come on, you lazy shits, the Colonel’s here and wants to talk to Panshin! Open up, you bastards! He wants to know how you managed lo cock it all up!’

Lubin was smirking in open admiration of the American, even as the door opened and a face Vorontsyev recognized as belonging to one of the bouncers inspected them, then began protesting.

‘Keep the fucking noise down! You want to?’

Lock struck him across the bridge of the nose with the barrel of the Makarov and thrust the door against him as he screamed in pain. The bouncer was shovelled back into the corridor like a sack of something. Lock bent over him and withdrew the pistol from the waistband of his trousers, then at once stood up. His movements were jerky, adrenalin-filled, under only the most effortful restraint. His eyes were as wide as a cat’s on seeing a small rodent break from cover.

‘Where?’ he snapped.

‘That way!’ Vorontsyev replied, pointing down the corridor.

They would have to cross the floor of the club, through the tables, to reach the offices. The corridor remained empty. A smell from the lavatories and stale cigarette smoke. Inside, away from the storm, they could hear raised voices as Dmitri argued with whoever had opened the front door to an apparent drunk.

Aggressive and indifferent, he was demanding a drink. ‘Hurry!

I don’t want Dmitri out there for too long.’

They whirled their way between the tables, neatly stacked with their upturned chairs, across the width of the club towards a velvet curtain that masked the corridor to Panshin’s offices and the stairs to the accommodation above the club. The first shot surprised them, biting at one of the chairs Lubin was negotiating, leaving a white, bonelike scar even in the dimness of the room’s poor light.

Lock, crouching behind a table, fired twice towards the curtains.

Vorontsyev, squinting after the muzzle flashes, saw no one. There had been no cry.

He stood beside Lock, who quietly growled: ‘It was wearing a uniform. How many of them, Vorontsyev?’ His demand for information was intent.

‘I don’t know. How many would Bakunin spare to?’

‘Alexei?’ The cry of a father as Dmitri came hurtling into the club from the corridor leading to the front entrance. His gun was waving wildly, his head moving like that of a threatened prey-animal. Two shots from within the velvet curtain and Dmitri ducked back as Lock returned fire.

‘Dmitri?’ he yelled.

‘AH right!’

‘Lubin?’

‘Yes!’

‘Watch the stage!’ Lock called out, then scuttled away between the tables, on all fours like a quick dog. Vorontsyev flinched as shots were directed towards the sound of his voice.

His ribs were like hot needles thrust into his side and chest, and his arm, immobilised though it was, shrieked in concert with his torso. ‘There — I’ he heard Lock call, and was blinded by the muzzle flashes.

Someone tumbled back, making a poor stage exit, a dim shadow disappearing. The club reeked of explosives. He watched as Lock clambered swiftly up onto the low, narrow stage where the musicians performed, saw him scuttle towards the side of the stage, then disappear.

There were no orders, he realised, no noises of command and disposition — and he began to fear they were too late. Kasyan had called Panshin or someone else from the car, the moment he had recognized Dmitri. There had been time, too much time, for them to move the scientists. Dmitri appeared beside him, breathing like a beached whale.

‘You were right,’ he gasped, ‘he’ll have us all dead before morning at this rate! Are they here, Alexei?’

Vorontsyev shook his head. ‘I doubt it.’

‘Shit! Where are they?’

Two shots directed at them whined overhead. Dmitri returned fire, as did Lubin. Then Vorontsyev heard Lubin scrabbling to a new position. Two more shots from behind the curtains, then they parted violently as a figure was thrown through them, dragging them aside. A uniformed greatcoat, the dim patch of a white face, then Lock’s figure appeared, his arm raised and waving them forward.

They hurried towards him. His face was twisted with angry disappointment.

‘There aren’t enough of these GRU guys!’ It was as if he wanted more killing. ‘They’ve gone!’ He studied their faces and realised they had reached the same conclusion. Lubin joined them, his face shiny with perspiration and excitement. ‘Where would Panshin be?’

‘Upstairs, or in one of the ‘

Vorontsyev fired twice, almost resting the gun on Lock’s shoulder.

Kasyan’s slight figure ducked back into the doorway from which it had emerged. Lock whirled round on the empty corridor.

A smell of dust and explosives mixed with their tension.

‘Panshin!’ Lock bellowed. ‘I’m here for you, man! I want yew!’

He looked at them. ‘Dmitri, watch the corridor while we check upstairs. You, Major, stay with him. Come on, kid.’ Lubin hurried behind Lock up the flight of narrow stairs to the apartments and changing rooms above the club. Lock thrust out his hand at the head of the stairs, pushing it into Lubin’s chest to halt him. Then he glanced slowly, carefully around the corner, along the landing. Blank doors of veneered board, the smell of cigar smoke and expensive, over-employed aftershave.

He grinned, turning to Lubin.

‘Don’t get in my way. Keep behind me. OK?’

Lubin nodded.

How many of them were there? He knew, with a sick, enveloping disappointment, that Turgenev had moved the scientists.

That would have taken the majority of the GRU men away, too.

But Panshin and Turgenev would have guessed that he and Vorontsyev would come here, so how many had they left as a protection force? The ground floor was silent. Whatever Kasyan was planning, it wasn’t immediate. But there weren’t enough people with him to take any risks … how many does that leave up here, with the man with the aftershave and the cigar?

‘What does Panshin look like?’

‘What?’ Lubin was surprised. ‘Short, round, grey hair. Lots of rings, bracelets’

‘OK, let’s find him.’

The place was turning like a coin between Turgenev’s fingers; a safe house was becoming a trap. If they hadn’t left more than a handful of soldiers, then Turgenev wanted him and his team inside before anything happened. He kicked at one flimsy door and it flew open. He flinched back, but had not been in any firing line. The room was dark, smelt of food and cigarettes. He reached beside the door and switched on the light. A table, four half-empty plates, cutlery, glasses, an ashtray. His disappointment was as heavy as a stone in his stomach.

Then he quickly kicked at another door.

‘Panshin, get out here!’ he roared.

‘Watch — I’ was all Lubin had time to cry out.

Lock dropped to one knee, gun stiff-armed before him, the trigger squeezed three times as the magazine of the Kalashnikov was sprayed along the walls and ceiling of the corridor and the soldier staggered backwards under the impact of his shots. Then the finger slackened on the trigger as the man fell. The corridor was filled with smoke and plaster dust. Lock looked round towards Lubin.

The young man was sitting against the wall, inspecting his fingers as he took them from his temple, a kind of bleak wonder in his eyes. His hand was shaking violently. Then he saw Lock and grinned shakily, even held up his hand. Flesh wound.

Lock nodded. Heavy, hurrying footsteps on the stairs. Lubin whirled round, gun ready, as Dmitri lumbered into sight, blurting:

‘All right — Christ!’ Plaster dust settled in a fine down on his wet shoulders. Vorontsyev paused at the head of the stairs, doubled up as he fought for breath. ‘Where’s Panshin?’

Lock indicated the door from which the soldier had emerged, waggling his gun at it. Then he lunged forward towards the open door and the* upturned boots of the dead soldier. He crouched beside the doorway. In the pool of light offered by a standard lamp and a desk light, Panshin sat like an effigy, a caricature of a gangland boss. His plump, beringed hands were clearly in view on the leather top of the desk. His eyes watched Lock watching him without expression. There was no fear. Lock realised, getting to his feet.

He kicked the door wide, but Kasyan was not directly behind it, instead to one side. Lock fired the Makarov as he held it close against his side. His stomach felt the heat of the barrel, the two shots. Kasyan collapsed against the far wall of the study and slid gently into a sitting position, his features retaining their surprise, even their cleverness for a moment. There was a second door to the room. Kasyan must have used a flight of stairs that linked the study to the ground floor. Panshin’s hands had barely moved on the desk before Lock turned to him.

Slowly, Panshin’s round face, which seemed designed to express no range of emotions beyond confidence and a cunning superiority, slid into the discovery of fear. His eyes flickered beyond Lock as the others filled the doorway, then came back to the American; the stranger, the threat. Lock crossed the room to the desk, rounded it and stood beside Panshin.

He leaned his face towards the Russian.

‘I hear you’re the main man, Panshin,’ he announced. ‘You’re into heroin and people-smuggling, the real big time.’ The Makarov was out of sight at Lock’s side. ‘Cut me a deal,’ he added mockingly.

A clock that ticked in unison with his breathing had begun in Lock’s head. Panshin was unnerved, but not in disarray, even though his eyes strayed to the slight, dead form of Kasyan sitting like a dosser against the wall. Reserves of confidence, yes; untouchability, too. The familiar presence of Vorontsyev and the others diminished the threat of Lock, for they had always been containable, dismissible. And the GRU were looking after him now and there weren’t enough dead bodies visible to Panshin to make him really afraid.

‘You’re American,’ Panshin managed in innocence, as he glanced at the small carriage clock on his desk.

Lock swept the clock to the floor. Panshin flinched.

‘Let’s take him, Lock,’ Vorontsyev suggested, not moving from the doorway.

‘Too much excess baggage)’ Lock snapped back. ‘Well, fal man? What’s the deal? Where have they taken your guests?’

‘I don’t think I know what you’re-‘ Panshin began. Then Lock struck him across the temple with the barrel of the gun.

He heard Lubin’s indrawn, shocked breath.

He dragged Panshin upright in his chair, perching himself on the edge of the desk, the gun pressed against the man’s cheek.

Blood seeped from the expensive grey coiffure, down one rounded jowl to the white collar of the silk shirt.

‘OK, here’s my deal, Panshin. I don’t give shit about you.

You’re just something I have to go through to get to Turgenev.

I want to know where he’s stashed the guys he dumped on you.

Five, six nuclear physicists, technicians, whatever. Where were they taken — and when does he plan to send them on their way?’

‘I — don’t know …’

‘You can do better than that. A whole lot better.’

‘I don’t know—!’

Their shadows against the wall loomed together over the desk.

Lock’s body blocked Panshin’s view of the others. He heard the whispered instructions as Vorontsyev sent Lubin and Dmitri downstairs. Lock knew he was becoming the room’s only reality for Panshin, he saw it in the man’s eyes. They flicked again to Kasyan, whom Lock allowed him to see, then to Lock’s shoulder, which blocked the reassurance that the sight of an injured and exhausted Vorontsyev would have given.

Panshin shrugged. It was a costly effort.

‘I don’t know what happens next. The GRU came here and took away some people I was asked to — to look after for a day or so. I asked no questions.’

‘Someone as cautious as you, Panshin? You’d have needed to know the whole game-plan. That skin of yours is too well filled not to have been looked after over the years.’ He smiled. ‘Once more, here’s the deal. Where and when? Your gain is you get to survive.’

Panshin began shaking his head, but a second blow with the barrel of the gun snapped his head back, making it appear loose and doll-like. The man cried out with pain. He fumbled a silk handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it with the greatest solicitation against his cheek. The wet, pained eyes regarded Lock with impotent hatred. Lock forced casual, indifferent satisfaction into his expression. It wasn’t difficult, he realised.

He said quietly: ‘Pete Turgenev had my sister killed, Panshin.

After that, why should I care what happens to you, what happens here?’ He raised the gun and Panshin flinched away, hands waving feebly as he began to drown in the danger to himself.

‘No!’ Vorontsyev lurched forward out of an apathy of fascination and revulsion towards the desk and the cameo of Lock’s control of Panshin. He experienced a pang of empathetic fear for the club owner, even as he reminded himself of the gangster’s background.

Panshin’s features greeted him with relief as he lunged against the desk.

‘Leave it!’ Lock snarled.

‘Sod you, Yank!’ Vorontsyev growled back. Then he banged the fist of his free hand on the desk and said urgently: ‘Val, it’s all going down the tubes and I don’t know if I can keep this American from killing you! Just tell us what we want to know.’

‘What in hell are you doing playing around with this, Vorontsyev?’

Panshin demanded. ‘This isn’t how it’s done!’

The remark was ludicrous. Vorontsyev felt diminished, as if he had been making a fraudulent insurance claim.

‘Well, damn you, Val — it’s how he does it!’

Panshin’s features creased into sulky folds; uncertainty now dominated his horizon.

‘See, Val,’ Lock said, ‘the rules have been changed. Guys like him-‘ He tossed his head in Vorontsyev’s direction. ‘- didn’t have the motive to go up against Turgenev. It was all getting by and making a rouble and losers are assholes and keep your nose clean. The cops and the bad guys played to the same script. Don’t tell me about it, Val — my country invented those rules!’ He leaned forward. ‘It isn’t about superpowers and systems, Val — it’s about whether or not I kill you. And the rules don’t apply. Do we deal?’

He was on the point of raising the gun, but there was no remaining need. Panshin believed him.

‘I don’t know where … I swear it — but he’s going to get them out today, this morning. Airport. There’s a break in the weather coming … his plane …’

There was nothing more. Panshin slowly subsided onto his desk, his folded arms cradling his head. The coiffured grey hair was glossy in the light of the desk lamp; he seemed to continue to exude power and money, even in decline.

Lock was staring at him.

‘There’s nothing more!’ Vorontsyev stormed. ‘That’s all he knows, all we need to know.’ It was as if Panshin was an actor resting after a performance of sincerity. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Him?’

Vorontsyev snatched Panshin’s head off the desk by jerking at the thick hair. He turned the man’s terrified, bemused features towards Lock. ‘Tell him you won’t ring Turgenev, Val — tell him you’ll be signing the order for your own execution if you so much as lift the phone.’ He shook Panshin like a rat. ‘Tell him, Val, and he’ll let you live!’

‘It’s true,’ Panshin muttered, too submerged in the moment and the most distant consequences to give his assertion any authority. ‘It’s true.’

When Vorontsyev let go of his hair, Panshin let his head decline onto his arms once more. Vorontsyev nodded to Lock, who got up from the desk obediently and followed him to the door.

The phone in Vorontsyev’s pocket trilled.

‘Yes?’

‘A friend at headquarters gave me your number.’ It was Bakunin. ‘I know where you are. I’m calling from just down the street. In my night-glasses, I can make out the head of your girl detective, sitting in her car. So can one of my marksmen through his nightscope. Will you come out or shall I give the order to fire?’

Turgenev whirled round in triumph, erasing the expression from his features. The Iranian had not knocked, simply emerged into the study as if by right. The phone in his hand seemed to Turgenev to betray something.

‘Yes,’ he said carefully, ‘I quite agree. Put that into operation right away, would you.’ He cut off the connection to Bakunin and put down the receiver. ‘Hamid — I’m sorry, but I do have other concerns.’

‘Of course, my friend. I simply came to collect the files on our passengers to Tehran. I hope that is in order?’

Turgenev plucked up from the desk a thick wodge of files, bound with red ribbon.

‘Appropriate, I think — the colour of celebration?’

‘Perhaps. Thank you.’

And now, get out, Turgenev thought. Get out and allow me to attend to more important matters.

He admitted tiredness, the erosion that bouts of unaccustomed excitement, much like sudden debaucheries, had brought on.

The punctuations of Bakunin’s reports, on which he had insisted, had dragged at his reserves. That Vorontsyev and more especially Lock were trapped in Panshin’s club was a line drawn beneath the whole business — but instead of being able to turn freely to the matter of Grainger Technologies or his other American interests, he must attend to this medium-ranking officer in Iranian Intelligence. It demeaned him; the man’s presence was no longer tolerable.

‘If you’ll excuse me, Hamid, there are things I must attend to.’ He ushered the small Iranian to the door.

‘Of course. My apologies.’ Then he was gone, at least for the moment.

Turgenev carried a sheaf of faxed reports to the desk, a whisky in his other hand. Putting both down, he fumbled in his pocket for his half-glasses and sat down. There were at least a dozen urgent phone calls, faxes He plucked off his glasses and stared at the blank of the window behind the desk, turning his chair with a slight squeak.

His gaze travelled past the paintings and porcelain that invaded even the one room that was intended as a workplace, a puritanical domain. The storm continued to fling the snow across the window, almost horizontally in the glare of the security lights.

Around eight, they continued to predict.

Very well, he would believe them. It would be little more than a diversion, now that Bakunin was on the point of eliminating all immediate risk. Lock, the anxious, eager-to-please boy, the young man never-quite-there, the stereotype, would soon be bagged rubbish to be carted away. He smiled, almost sadly, with recollection. It had been Billy Grainger who had described Lock as the best and worst kind of American — the Peace Corps boy with a handgun. They had agreed, over the vodka and caviar in the rude hut in the Afghan mountains, while Lock patrolled outside on guard, that the world had killed a lot of Americans just like him in a lot of foreign wars.

Which is just what this encounter was. Billy had even added that America had killed a lot of Americans like Lock.

Turgenev shook his head, again with some proximity to sadness.

Then he replaced his glasses and checked the most urgent faxes and retyped phone messages. Yes, he decided, he would sell his small holding in that Far East satellite TV corporation to Murdoch … no, he would not sell that much sterling at the moment… yes, he would take that offered stake in the Kuwaiti exploration company seeking to nuzzle into the trough of the Asian republics’ oilfields … no, not that, yes, that was OK …

‘Then torch the place yourself — before they do it for you!’ Lock shouted, rounding on Vorontsyev.

They were collected like the dispirited remnants of an audience for a concert that would never begin, amid the stacked tables of the club’s auditorium. Dmitri was to one side, on Vorontsyev’s instructions, and Lock’s raised voice angered him because it might alarm Marfa, make her next movement precipitate and suspicious.

‘- still, that’s it,’ he encouraged, as if he could actually see her sitting in her car outside on K Street. ‘No, there’s no order to fire … all you have to do is to slide down slowly, slowly in the seal, or bend down as if looking for something, and gel out of the car…’ Why she hadn’t seen them arrive, Dmitri had no idea. He was sweating profusely, on her behalf rather than his own. ‘OK — no, begin when I tell you … What?’ He held Vorontsyev’s phone close to his lips. He hoped that Marfa was holding her phone below the sightline offered by the windscreen as she had been instructed to do. She seemed consumed by guilt that she had noticed nothing through the rushing blizzard.

‘OK. All you have to do is to get away from the car. No, I don’t know in which direction they have you in sight, I’d guess from the front, in this weather, to see you at all. Just remember they can’t see anything properly, nightscopes or not, through the snow. OK — yes, in your own time, but slowly …’

Lubin was still dabbing at his temple. The blood had already dried to a crust. Perhaps it was a nervous reaction because Marfa was in danger. Dmitri nodded to Vorontsyev.

‘Is that what they’ll do, Lock — really? Why not storm the place, call on us to surrender?’

‘Listen, Vorontsyev, what would you do? Not as a cop, not even as GRU — but as a gangster? Have fun setting the place on fire and shooting the rats as they come out … wouldn’t you?’

Vorontsyev nodded with great reluctance. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Good!’

‘And afterwards?’

‘We don’t have any choice, you know that. The airport.’

‘And how do we get there?’ Vorontsyev stormed. ‘We can do roadblocks in this country like no one else on earth! You don’t think someone like Bakunin has forgotten all those old habits, do you? I’m pretty easily identified, in case you hadn’t noticed!’

‘OK, OK — I can get through on my fake passport. Gas company executive. You — you go in the trunk of a car or the back of a truck, well hidden. Look, just get there, OK?’ he ended in exasperation, waving his arms as if against a sudden swarm of midges.

‘Separate exits?’ Lock nodded. ‘K Street is-?’ Vorontsyev glanced at Dmitri, who held up the mobile phone, shrugging pessimistically. God, she had to be all right ‘They’re all around us, if they have any organisation,’ Lock pronounced. ‘But we’re dots in a blinding snowstorm. They’re the best odds we can get, Alexei.’

The trilling of a phone.

‘Yes?’ Dmitri’s voice.

‘Is she — ?‘Vorontsyev began, but Dmitri waved him to silence.

He listened intently, then began nodding like a Russian doll; the layers and enclosures of the doll were exposed one by one, so that the final impression was of a furious, small figure rocking violently to and fro. Marfa was all right.

‘OK — OK. She says sorry. She can’t see anyone, apart from one truck on the street. They must be in the buildings.’

Lock crossed to Dmitri and snatched the phone, in the same moment gesturing to Lubin to begin dousing the furniture with the petrol he had found stored in the basement, next to the racks of house wine.

‘Listen to me, Marfa,’ he said overbearingly. ‘It’s up to you to help us out of here — don’t argue, just listen! OK, that’s better … Now, describe the cover out there, the streetlighting, everything!’

‘Wait!’ Vorontsyev ordered, turning to where Panshin was sitting hunched on one of the club chairs, his temple still bleeding and covered by his stained silk handkerchief. ‘There’s Panshin’s BMW outside. Got the keys, Val?’ Lock’s flippant exhilaration was infectious.

‘Not all of us,’ Lock warned. ‘We need to split up. We’re too easily spotted together. Marfa — hold on.’ He studied Panshin thoughtfully. Then he said: ‘Lubin, go look out the rear. Carefully.

If they’re not around, then OK, you and Dmitri can get the Major out in the BMW. Move it.’

Lubin put down the petrol can and scuttled away and along the corridor to the rear door. Lock seemed puzzled for a moment, then he began studying Vorontsyev and Dmitri, examining them it. as carefully as a doctor reluctantly confirming a pessimistic diagnosis.

‘We’re it. Lock, the whole army,’ Vorontsyev murmured.

‘I know it. Marfa ‘

‘Yes?’

‘Any movement?’

‘N-no,’ the girl replied with urgent uncertainty. A girl scout, he thought disparagingly.

‘OK, hold on there — I’ll get back to you.’ The girl seemed unresponsive to the joke; perhaps she didn’t understand it.

‘Yes,’ she replied gloomily.

Lubin reappeared, his face excited as a child’s.

‘I can’t see anyone out there — no fresh footprints, tyre tracks ‘

‘They have to be out there somewhere’

‘Lock, we’re wasting time!’ Dmitri barked, joining them.

‘Either we move now or we don’t move!’

‘OK. The Major can’t move quickly, anyway. Take him in the BMW.’

‘Call Marfa in.’

‘I’ll take care of Marfa!’ Lock replied.

‘You mean, she’s part of the distraction. I won’t have her put in more danger—’

‘Vorontsyev, she’s all the way into this thing! She’s no passenger.

I’ll take care oi her!’

Vorontsyev nodded reluctantly. Lubin appeared about to protest, then Lock snapped at him:

‘Torch the place!’

‘What about him?’ Dmitri asked, nodding at Panshin. Then he understood. ‘You can’t,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘He’ll just blunder out of one door or the other and they’ll ‘

‘- be distracted,’ Lock completed. ‘Let’s hope so.’ He turned to Lubin. ‘Go ahead, do it!’

Flame spurted at once from the place where Lubin had thrown the bundle of paper napkins he had lit. Panshin’s face was filled with firelit horror.

‘Get moving!’ Lock growled to Vorontsyev. ‘Forget him!’

He urged them towards the rear door. Dmitri had snatched Panshin’s keys from his hand. The fat club owner seemed uncertain, but Lock knew he would follow him to the front door.

The flames roared up towards the club’s low ceiling. The smoke was already thick, choking. Panshin’s features crawled with terror, and with concern at the fate of his club.

Vorontsyev nodded at Lock and disappeared along the corridor towards the rear door, Dmitri beside him like an overcoated nurse. There was no time to consider their chances — nor his own. He began moving swiftly towards the club’s street entrance, ha If-attentive for the noise of shooting, or a car engine from the rear. He heard Panshin labouring alter him, heavy footed, dazed.

Lock crouched against the tinted glass, dark enough at night to conceal him even from nightscopes. He visualised the street as best he could. The storm flung its weight of snow across the blurred light of the streetlamps and neon that dimly summoned to shops and clubs and bars he could no longer see across the street.

Time to go. Panshin? He watched the man as he might have done an insect … Something stopped him from thrusting Panshin through the door. The corridor was lit by the fire, and the smoke wrapped itself more thickly about them. Nevertheless, the moment of utter detachment in which he could have used Panshin as a shield had passed and he couldn’t recover it.

‘You’re on your own, pal!’ he snapped and pushed the door wide. ‘Live long, uh?’

Then Lock was through the door, slipping on the drift of snow heaped in the porch and on the steps — skidded, was deafened by the wind, then lurched against the smoked-glass windows of the club, his hand smearing the snow. The glass shattered near his hand, fell inwards from the impact of the first shot. They could see nothing more than moving blurs, shadows — but hadn’t missed by more than inches. He scuttled to the corner of the alleyway, and heard the roar of a car engine, saw the muzzle flashes of two guns, high up as if suspended in the storm. Window vantages overlooking the club car park. The BMW’s brakelights wobbled on and off as if in uncertainty, but they were retreating into the storm’s murk, heading away from K Street. A last violent glare of the brakes, then it was gone.

Now you, he urged himself. More glass shattered somewhere close. He skidded his way across the alleyway, dropped behind the cover of Marfa’s parked car, already assuming the lumped lack of identity of other stationary vehicles burdened with snow.

He glanced around him. A shot shattered the car’s windscreen.

Glass and snow flew. The girl waved to him from a nearby shop doorway, her gloved hand raised beside a heavy grille. He waved back, gun raised, gesturing her to begin retreating down the block. She shook her head, gesturing towards the other side of the street. She’d seen where the shots originated.

He gestured to her, crouched only a matter of yards away, turning his wrist as if turning a key. She pointed at the car. He signalled understanding with a raised thumb, then he heard shouting.

The flames from the club belched through the shattered windows and the open door, to be lashed and sculpted by the storm. Panshin was standing in the light of the nearest street lamp, waving frantically, nis figure bulky, recognisable.

Lock opened the passenger door of the car and slid into the seat. He moved awkwardly over the brake and gear lever, roughly brushing the seat as he shuffled himself into a half-lying position behind the wheel. Panshin was still on the pavement, arms waving, dinner jacket whitened with snow. He raised himself in the driving seat, feeling for the ignition. You’ll have to be better than most Russian cars, he thought. A lot better.

He turned the key, hearing two shots in the moment before the engine caught. He watched Panshin’s body slowly, heavily, collapse into the snow and become half-buried, knowing that he had witnessed an execution. They’d known who it was, and he’d died because they were house-cleaning. He thrust the gear lever into reverse and let out the clutch. The car squealed and swung, lurching backwards like a drunk.

Two shots careened off the snow-covered bonnet. The storm half-blinded him through the shattered windscreen. He sensed the prick of glass in his buttocks and thighs from the partly littered driving seat. Shots against the door, impacting, distorting metal and padding. The car swerved, slid sideways, skidded. He was sweating feverishly, his hands slippery inside his gloves. The window behind him shattered.

The car would afford protection for only seconds now. It bucked as he accelerated in reverse, the rear wheels spinning wildly against a huge ridge of rutted ice. He waved frantically at Marfa, a white blob of a face — waving her to keep pace with the car but not to get in. Yelling:

‘Keep behind the car, behind the car!’

He thrust the gear lever into second and accelerated forward, braked and then threw the car again into reverse. Once more, it bucked against the obstacle but wouldn’t surmount it. A rear window shattered behind his head and he heard the ominous, dead pluck of bullets into the upholstery.

A rotund little bear jiggled on a short length of elastic in the rear window, its arms wide in hopeless surrender. He thrust the car forward again, the tyres squealing, then accelerated once more in reverse. Maria’s face, as she crouched behind the car’s moving shield, was white and astonished, as if she feared he was trying to expose her to the unseen marksmen. The car bucked like a horse kicking out with its back legs and then mounted the ridge in the road and skidded away like an escaping animal because his foot was still jammed down on the accelerator.

It careered across K Street towards the buildings that housed the snipers.

Marfa was left stranded and exposed. Bullets struck the car.

Panshin’s body, suddenly a hundred yards away, was slowly being covered with snow.

He stopped the car in a skid, then accelerated back across K Street towards Marfa. As the car mounted the pavement only feet from her, he saw her gesturing towards a dark, narrow alleyway beside a bar where neon struggled. Cowboys’ Bar. Seeing her gestures, he realised they had a better chance on foot.

The car shunted against the grille across the windows and came to a halt. He switched off the engine, opened the passenger door and scrambled out onto all fours, rising like a sprinter to dash into the shelter of the alley. He slid into a tangled heap with Marfa as he collided with the girl.

Bakunin stood over the body of Valery Panshin, which the snow was inexorably and tidily masking, and considered the Tightness of the whim that had ordered the club owner’s demise. The snow melted on Bakunin’s cheek and settled on the epaulettes of his uniform greatcoat and on the crown and brim of his cap.

It had been correct, sensible, inspirational even. Turgenev had kept him in ignorance regarding the American, Lock, and the extent of his knowledge and influence. His danger was unimportant, despite his temporary escape from the marksmen.

Already, his troops were flooding that alleyway and the whole area around the burning club in pursuit of Vorontsyev and Lock and their feeble entourage. Bakunin could now feel the heat from the fire welcomely on his face. No, his position of massive ignorance, deliberately imposed by Turgenev, was intolerable.

It could have exposed him. Panshin — the worthless, cretinous, greedy Panshin — might have already told, confessed. However, in the event that he had not, he had been put beyond any ability to do so. Opportunity, means, motive — Panshin was bereft of all three with two neat holes in his forehead.

Whatever Panshin knew was imprisoned in that broken vessel that had leaked a small amount of blood and brain tissue into the snow. He stirred the body with his foot. Then he looked up.

‘Find them quickly,’ he snapped, ‘and finish them. Reinforce the roadblocks — and warn whoever’s in command at the airport.

Do it without publicity, on a secure channel. You understand?’

The lieutenant, his features frozen by cold and obedience, nodded. ‘Good. He may have let something slip, but I imagine they’re interested in nothing greater than their own skins. However, it doesn’t do to be sloppy, Lieutenant.’

Turning away from the junior officer and the body, he strode through the snow towards his staff car.

‘Alexei, for God’s sake, get into the boot of the car!’

Dmitri Gorov’s patience was as exhausted as his heavy frame.

Vorontsyev stood in the driving snow, staring into the well of the old car’s boot, unmoving and silent. Lubin was absent, hiding the BMW amid the detritus of a building site which wouldn’t see the resumption of activity until the blizzard ended. He and Vorontsyev were in a narrow slit of a street, poorly lit, between blocks of workers’ flats. Three streets from the flat in which the drug courier, Hussain, had been murdered by an explosive hidden in a paraffin heater.

‘Not yet,’ Vorontsyev replied. ‘Dmitri — V he burst out, turning to Gorov. ‘There has to be something else we can do. The airport will be guarded.’

‘And Turgenev himself will be there,’ Dmitri offered seductively, immediately whirling round at the sound of someone approaching. Lubin appeared, hands raised in mock surrender, then passed out of the light of the lamp into shadow.

That’s a guess, Dmitri, nothing more. Is the car well hidden, youngster?’

Lubin grinned and nodded, his teeth chattering with cold, his boots crusted with dirty snow.

‘It’s a good guess, Alexei. It’s his plane they’ll be using, and only his muscle will get it airborne in this blizzard, weather window or no weather window. He’Jl need the runway cleared, the plane de-iced, the pilots briefed … I think he’ll be there, if only to make sure we aren’t!’

‘OK, OK — it doesn’t matter anyway, does it? We don’t have any alternative. I’ll get in — in a moment.’ He smiled. His ribs ached slightly less now that his breathing was level, unexcited.

The escape had been quite straightforward, given the circum

308 stances. The big BMW had got them out of the trap of the alley in a rush and they’d skirted the one car that had attempted to block the exit before it could get into position. The pursuit had been organised, but slow to react. Arrogance, overconfidence.

They’d slipped into the canyons of the town’s poorest quarter and into the storm before they could be effectively tailed.

Now, they had to bluff their way through the roadblocks and drive into what amounted to a trap already set. Dmitri’s theory concerning TurgeneV was probably rubbish, but it comforted, even inspired him, so let that be. For himself…? One passenger intercepted while boarding would be enough, one nuclear physicist to wave like a flag. The security people would swamp this place, the UN would have apoplexy, Yeltsin would destroy Turgenev to maintain his own credibility and clean hands towards the West … they needed just one, or the evidence of one.

‘Dmitri, if all else … doesn’t work out, buy a camera and some film in the airport shop, will you?’ He looked intently at Gorov, who understood and nodded.

‘We’ll get something out of this, Alexei — something.’

‘Of course. Right, then — let’s get moving. Lubin, you say you can hotwire this heap — you can drive it, too. And, Lubin, you did well, back there.’

‘Sir!’

God, the enthusiasm of youth. All he had ever wished was to be saved from the fervour, as if he had menopausally passed the age where he could be impregnated with a cause, a sense of right. Now, it was just as Lensky the pathologist had predicted for him — he had become a middle-aged idealist… But he was mortal, vulnerable, and knew as much only too well. His arm, dulled by painkillers, confirmed that much! He was sensible about life, knew that it ended quickly enough without taking risks. Now, he was doing just that. He shrugged.

‘What’s wrong, Alexei?’

‘Someone just walked over my grave,’ he replied sombrely.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ he added brusquely. ‘You two help me in

— I can’t do it for myself.’

It was a black Cadillac, hardly even a half-stretch limo. So unexpectedly American that it amused him, despite his hunger and exhaustion. It was sitting on the snowy drive of a large dacha which appeared totally out of place. It was surrounded by high-rise blocks of flats encroaching on the poorly lit outskirts of the old town. A narrow street of six-storey blocks was the umbilical that connected this wooden house with its older, shabbier country cousins, which trailed out towards the tundra like uncertain spectators of vastness.

‘Whose car is it?’ he asked.

They crouched in the shelter of a builder’s skip, one of as many as a dozen scattered like dice in the space between the blocks of flats which rose like dark draped curtains behind the storm. The few lights showing at five-thirty in the morning were like rents in their material rather than signs of habitation.

Marfa whispered hoarsely: ‘He used to consider himself a gangster, a biznizman — in the early days. Two telephones in the house and a pink bathroom suite and he was the tsarevich.’ She snorted. ‘He was bought or frightened out of business, but they let him keep the car and gave him the money to build this place.

He was a pimp, about Teplov’s level, but in those days the girls were still on the streets. He used to have a coupJe of ramshackle caravans parked around here which served as the accommodation.’

She sniffed. ‘He wasn’t a talented crook.’

‘Not like Pete Turgenev, the prince of tides, uh?’ She looked blankly at him. ‘Not as smart as Turgenev,’ he explained.

‘No, not that smart.’

‘OK, I can get that car to start — it looks just about good enough for a gas company executive. We’ll take it. No deposit, nothing to pay for six months, right?’ Again, she seemed nonplussed.

‘Forget it. Let’s get the car. Does he have a dog, this guy?’

‘I don’t think so. Just an old woman to look after him. His wife died of AIDS — she was his first girl. Nothing but the usual transmissible diseases for years, then—’

‘Don’t tell me, the Americans arrived and brought their diseases with them!’ Lock snapped. ‘Let’s get the car.’

As they came out from behind the skip, the wind ripped at them, growling with renewed threat. There seemed not the slightest chance that there would be a break in the weather.

Which suited, anyway. He wanted the airport closed in all day.

He leaned against the force of the wind, stepping high through the snow like a child exaggerating the difficult new art of walking.

Maria huddled beside him, using him as shelter without any suggestion of contact or companionship.

The drive sloped slightly. The Cadillac, mapped like a cow by its colour and the blowing snow, stood in front of closed garage doors. Lock sidled furtively beside the driver’s door and removed a short length of lead pipe from his overcoat pocket. The things you can pick up off the sidewalk … He fitted it over the old fashioned door handle and jerked it violently downwards. The lock broke and he tugged the door open.

The car alarm bellowed at him

‘Carefully now,’ Dmitri warned. The GRU vehicle’s headlights blared through the snow, picking them out moving along the airport road at a snail’s pace. ‘Just pull over and wait.’

The road had been cleared the previous evening and would be cleared again, he presumed, at first light. At six in the morning, it was clogged with the night’s fall and drifts, a tumbled landscape in miniature. Beside him, he could hear Lubin breathing hoarsely, quickly.

‘Calm down, lad, calm down.’ Then, almost mischievously, and to release his own tension, he added: ‘And get ready to run if they don’t like the look of us.’ He was chillingly aware of Vorontsyev in the boot.

The UAZ jeep drew alongside them, its canvas hood white under the weight of snow, its wipers flicking like drowning arms.

A face inspected them with minimal curiosity from behind a streaked driver’s window. It was, for a moment, apparent that the jeep would pass on down the road towards Novyy Urengoy.

Then it stopped and Dmitri heard its brake being dragged on.

His heart thudded in his chest.

‘We’re maintenance men at the airport — really security, right?’ he reminded Lubin.

‘Yes, yes!’ the young man replied with quick nerves.

Dmitri wound down the window of the old car. A decayed Mercedes now only fit for the scrapheap; which meant the Turks and Pakistanis in Novyy Urengoy. He hoped it hadn’t yet been reported stolen. On the other hand, Police HQ wouldn’t give a toss if the caller had an Asian accent.

‘Yes?’ he asked the frost-featured soldier who leaned down to the half-open window. There was no deference in his voice.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Security. We’re checking for — criminals,’ he concluded, as if remembering an item of rote learning that meant nothing.

‘Criminals, eh? Our business, too, as a matter of fact. Out at the airport.’ He flipped open his wallet, displaying a piece of plastic to which was attached his photograph. Something he’d had for years, a temporary posting out to the airport in the early days of heroin smuggling, when the most daring they had been was to disguise themselves as maintenance people. ‘OK?’ he asked. ‘We’ll be late clocking on if we hang about here.’

The soldier indicated that he wished to see the ID once more.

A corporal’s stripes on his greatcoat. His word would be enough for any officer in the jeep or nearby. Come on, come on —

Dmitri gestured as if to close the wallet again, and the corporal nodded. The snow was melting between his collar and his cap as he bent to the window and he resented his discomfort.

‘OK,’ he grumbled. ‘I wonder you buggers didn’t stay in bed on a day like this!’

‘Double shift — lots of overtime,’ Dmitri replied, sensing Lubin’s tension mount after a momentary sense of relief.

‘Thanks, mate. Good luck.’

Lubin drew slowly, very slowly, away from the UAZ. It diminished in the mirror, swallowed by the storm as the corporal was still engaged in climbing back into the rear of the vehicle.

His breathing clouded the windscreen, despite the puffing of the heater, and Dmitri leaned across to wipe it clear. Snow rushed into the headlights as if the blizzard had gathered new strength.

‘We’re through, boy — we’re through!’ He raised his voice and turned in his seat. ‘We’re OK, Alexei — on our way!’

The last block of flats had disappeared into the snowstorm like a drifting liner, the few scattered dachas looked like boxes abandoned in the snow. And immediately there was the roadblock; two long-necked lights on parked dollies, the red and white pole, even the glow from some kind of trailer vehicle that served for accommodation. It was disconcerting, appearing as if it had been in place for some considerable time and had well-rehearsed routines. Marfa was catlike in her display of nerves in the driving seat.

He put his hand on her shoulder and her whole frame flinched at the contact. ‘Take it easy,’ he murmured, excluding all emotion from his voice.

They’d had the old Cadillac off the snowbound drive and down onto the street before a light had come on in the old biznizman’s dacha. No other lights, no flicking of curtains; people chose not to know. He’d gotten the bonnet open and found the alarm circuit. Ripped it out, silencing the noise. The door of the wooden bungalow was cautiously, fearfully opening as Marfa accelerated away. Yet somehow the noise, the hurry, had unsettled her more than the action on K Street, when she might have been killed so easily. Perhaps she’d just run out of resistance?

Lock didn’t know—

didn’t have time to care right now, he reminded himself.

A door in the side of the trailer vehicle, army drab showing where the snow had melted on its flanks, opened and light spilt out, gleaming through the snow. The girl shivered and Lock made as if to grip her shoulder once more, then resisted the impulse. His own nerves might be betrayed through his fingers.

Two guards, both armed with folded-butt assault rifles. Reluctant in the snow, but obedient. A corporal and a private by the flashes on their greatcoats.

Lock had damaged the door where he had broken in, denting it purposely to give the appearance of an impact by another car.

Marfa, masquerading as his Russian driver, wound down the window as the corporal leaned close to it.

‘Papers? What are you doing out here, this time of the morning?’

The private yawned, but his eyes never moved from the girl the car, the shadowy passenger behind her. ‘Well?’

Marfa said: ‘I’m just the driver — taking someone out to the airport. Gas company business.’ She managed the sentences as if they were in a foreign language, awkwardly but with a stiff, correct fluency. They might just believe her.

‘Who’s your passenger?’

He’d told her the name on the last of the passports. Paul Evans. She was hesitating, as if searching her memory for something long forgotten. Quickly, he wound down the window. He hadn’t wanted to antagonise them, but ‘What’s the hold-up, fella?’ he asked, his accent broadly Texan, his tone impatient. ‘Let’s get going, uh?’ he added to Marfa, making shooing gestures the two soldiers would clearly see. ‘Jesus, these guys in uniform.’ It was added quietly but the contempt would carry, even if they didn’t speak English.

The corporal snapped in Russian at Marfa.

‘How can you stand driving this prat around?’

‘What’s he saying, honey?’ Lock enquired.

The corporal smirked, catching the tone that indicated a lack of Russian. Then he spat into the snow beside the car and said:

‘OK, Yankee!’ His accent was thick but the English was decipherable.

‘You gel out now — quick!’

‘I’m not stepping out in a snowstorm for some jumped-up asshole in a uniform!’ Lock replied in assumed outrage. ‘You want to see my papers, fine! Anything else, forget it!’

The corporal’s rifle nudged above the door sill. It was held casually at his hip. The barrel gleamed wet in the diffused glow of the overhead lights. He had successfully distracted them away from Marfa. The corporal’s face was eagerly angry. He wanted to take this Yankee inside the hut, humiliate him.

There hadn’t been anything else he could do. Which was no comfort: ‘Out!’ the corporal ordered, and the rifle waggled, a baton waved merely to attract attention. ‘Mr American — out.’ He stepped back, expecting instant obedience.

Lock snorted loudly and clambered out into the storm. There was an officer in the doorway of the trailer now, watching the small drama.

‘What is it, fella — your haemorrhoids giving you problems?

You got a nasty temper on you — ‘ Lock’s breath was driven from his body as the rifle’s muzzle was jabbed into his stomach. He raised his hands. ‘What’s gotten into you people?’ he demanded.

‘Listen, fella, I’m an executive with’

‘Inside!’

He was shunted towards the steps of the trailer. He glimpsed Marfa’s worried features and his left hand gestured her to silence. Then his foot slipped on the steps and the corpora] helped unbalance him by a prod in the back with the rifle. The officer had already retreated to his foldaway desk halfway down the cramped, harshly lit interior. Fuggy, heady with warmth.

He’d seen two other armed GRU soldiers outside and there was a sergeant at a smaller desk. He and the officer watched him with the anticipation lechers might have extended to a young woman. Lock clamped his nerves, held them still.

‘You’re the head honcho, right?’ he drawled angrily. ‘You got the say-so — so what is this? Some kind of stick-up? A frame? I got business to attend to out at ‘

‘Sit down!’ The officer indicated a hard chair placed before the desk. With obvious but abashed reluctance. Lock sat. ‘Good.’

‘Look, Captain, what gives? There ain’t usually roadblocks on the edge of town ‘

‘No.’

‘Then, what’s the problem?’

‘We are looking for an American.’ The captain’s manner was theatrically pleasant, his English expressed in a slight American twang.

‘I don’t get you.’

‘Perhaps I get you?’ The officer smiled, offered a cigarette which Lock declined, then lit one for himself. Marlboro.

The? Look, Captain, here’s my US passport. That ought to be good enough.’ He handed the passport over. ‘See. Paul Evans ‘

‘And who is he?’

The.’

‘And who are you?’

‘What?’ He forced the anger as if from a small waterhole of confidence, one rapidly evaporating. ‘Oh, yeah. I’m the guy in charge of shipments, materiel…? Equipment coming in. For SibQuest, the oil-gas company.’ He managed to grin. ‘We’re small but we’re sure growing!’ SibQuest had Americans and Canadians as well as Europeans working for them, even though they were a Qatari company with Australian partners. As yet, they weren’t important in the Siberian gasfields.

The captain was looking up the name on a typed list in a folder of stiff polythene sheets. His finger ran along his lower lip with the regularity of a typewriter carriage. What if he had the names of the executives-? How could he? The captain looked up.

‘You expect shipments to arrive in this weather?’

Lock shrugged.

‘No. But some came in before the weather changed. I’ve only just gotten around to them.’ He grinned.

‘It seems a very early time of the day to be troubling yourself and your driver,’ the captain mused, his eyes straying to the window. In a clear patch in the porthole-like window. Lock saw Marfa’s shadow within the car and two of the GRU soldiers leaning down to the driver’s window. He hoped fervently their interest was sexual. And that Marfa’s nerve would hold up.

‘Sure.’ He gestured expansively with his hands, appeared shamefaced. ‘OK, so someone higher up, a V-P, kicked ass. I have to get out there on the double. My job might be on the line.’

The military contempt for the chicanery of civilian life was evident, like a bruise on the captain’s features. This disorderly application of pressure, authority, made him contemptuous of the man Lock was assumed to be.

‘Can I get going?’ Lock asked tentatively.

The captain toyed with the passport, opening and closing it, his dark features narrowed in concentration. How much did he know? He didn’t have descriptions, maybe, but he knew an American was involved. The cramped interior of the trailer seemed hotter, almost stifling, the storm very distant despite the occasional quivering of the vehicle in the wind’s buffets.

Lock felt the seconds elongate, as if time dripped like a faulty tap.

Then the captain threw the passport onto the desk.

‘Very well, Mr Evans. You may continue with the work of saving your career. Sergeant, show the gentleman out.’

Thanks.’

Lock stood up and made for the door. The sergeant intercepted him, tugging on a parka and pulling the hood over his head as he did so. Then he came down the steps behind Lock, following him to the car. The two soldiers rose to slouched attention beside it.

‘She’s your driver, yes?’ the sergeant asked.

‘Sure.’

They stood beside the car. Maria’s features were small with cold and tension.

‘You’re in a hurry?’

‘Yes’

The sergeant was inspecting the car. He bent by the rear wheel and took the tyre valve between his fingers. Then he looked up, his broad, thick-nosed face jntent, greedy.

‘OK, so how much?’ Lock asked, then remembered to protest;

‘The captain know you play this game every time there’s a roadblock?’

‘You will tell him?’

‘This place is corrupt as hell!’ Lock protested.

‘And everyone in it,’ the sergeant added philosophically.

Lock got out his wallet and took two ten-dollar bills from it.

The sergeant shook his head. He took out another ten. The sergeant, snow epauletting his shoulders, rose to his feet and took the bills, slipping them at once into his pocket.

‘A good remainder to your journey,” he said, smiling. Then he held the door of the car open like a hotel porter.

Lock collapsed into the rear seat and the door was shut behind him. The windows instantly clouded. His heart thudded in his chest as he said: ‘Pull away slowly — slowly.’ The sergeant’s arm was raised and the barrier imitated his gesture, sliding upwards towards the two giraffe-necked lights. The rear wheels skidded.

‘Slowly, dammit!’ he growled, his own tension uppermost.

The car wobbled beneath the upraised barrier. Gradually, as Lock turned in his seat, the glare of the lights diminished back down the road, the snow pouring more and more thickly behind the Cadillac.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry.’

The girl said nothing. Lock felt no relief, no anticipation, only an exhausted weariness — and a sense of foreboding.

FOURTEEN Blue Remembered Hills

Even in. Afghanistan, at the height of a winter snowstorm, the mountains had periodically and reassuringly loomed out of the blizzard and driving sleet; implacable and familiar. Here, he realised, there was nothing. There just wasn’t a landscape, hardly even a shadowy clump of stunted firs. The tundra stretched flat and empty all the way to the Gulf of Oh and the Kara Sea; and began at the perimeter fence of Novyy Urengoy’s airport.

Lock shuddered in the rear of the old Cadillac. The heater was little more than a futile protest against the weather that enveloped them. Marfa sat blowing on her woollen-gloved hands in the driving seat. Dmitri’s mobile phone — or was it the Major’s? — was pressed against Lock’s cold cheek, so that the stubble rasped. Beyond the fence against which Marfa had parked the car, aircraft looked as small and lost as gulls sitting out a storm on unmoving pack ice.

‘You think that’s feasible?’ Lock asked, breathless at the proposition.

Perhaps his encounter with the GRU in their trailer had unnerved him more than he suspected or admitted. He could not be certain — maybe it was the narrowing perspective Vorontsyev’s plan offered, the run up the blind alley. There’s no way out, once we do that.’

‘It’s the only way,’ Vorontsyev explained patiently. ‘We then won’t have to confront Bakunin’s troops. We got here an hour ago. Lubin’s been scouting. He counted three APCs, a half-dozen UAZs, even a piece of medium artillery, parked behind a commissary truck. That means as many as fifty GRU troops in the immediate area. I suggest we avoid the airport buildings, Lock.’

There was a pained, cynical irony in his tone.

‘OK, OK!’ Lock blurted in irritation. ‘I’m just saying there’s no way out of your locale, none at all.’

‘It hinges on Turgenev. If he’s there, then we can use him to get us out. At least, keep us alive. If we can’t take off … It is a damn aircraft. Lock, in case you’d forgotten!’

‘So, Bakunin lets us fly out, no problem?’

‘Bakunin takes his money, power and orders from Turgenev.

Once we have Turgenev, we have checkmate, //you let Turgenev remain alive, Lock. Dmitri, Lubin, Marfa — ‘ The girl’s head twitched at the sound of her name, as the car rocked in a buffet of the wind.’- and myself, would be trusting you with our lives, once we got aboard the aircraft. Can we do that, Lock?’

It was absurdly simple, even if he didn’t like it. He had to agree to let Turgenev live, or effectively kill them all. There was no other way of gaining Vorontsyev’s vaunted proof. He clenched his free hand into a fist beside his thigh, grinding the knuckles into the denim-clad muscle. It was that, above all, thai he did not want — Turgenev as a hostage, Turgenev continuing to breathe … and being taken to Moscow or somewhere else where he would have influence, connections, powers of bribery and escape. He would, he knew, be letting Turgenev make a home run. Beth’s murder would never be avenged.

‘Lock? Well, what’s your answer, Lock?’

‘He’ll get off, scot free!’ he protested in a wailing voice that startled the girl upright in her seat.

‘Maybe. Maybe not. He’ll be stopped. Lock. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘I want him dead,’ he admitted.

‘And us, in that case,’ Vorontsyev replied gloomily, almost as if he accepted the implacability of Lock’s hatred.

Vorontsyev was parked inside the airport perimeter, near the cargo hangars. Even with night-glasses, Lock would not have been able to see that far through the flying, pre-dawn murk. He could see only dim, retreating lights that seemed to be swallowed by the storm and the darkness, and a short length of the fence in either direction. And a solitary clump of twisted, snow-laden firs.

‘OK,’ he offered eventually in a choked, reluctant voice. Then more strongly, ‘OK. I agree. It’s the only way.’

‘Good,’ The relief was apparent, even in the pinched, maidenish voice given him by the mobile phone connection. Lock even heard the sigh of his next breath. ‘That’s good. You’d better come in.’

It was as if they had barred his membership to something, leaving him uninitiated and an outsider.

‘You think the gate will swallow my story one more time?’ he asked. ‘Do I risk it?’

‘They’re relaxed, confident,’ Vorontsyev reported. ‘But, if you don’t want to try, rip out a length of the perimeter fence and walk here-‘ He paused, listening to someone, either Dmitri or Lubin. Lock could vaguely hear another voice, then, more closely, Vorontsyev’s agreement. ‘Maybe you should walk. Just in case. Marfa knows the airport layout. We’re next to a line of fuel bowsers.’

‘Turgenev has to be with them, Vorontsyev.’

‘Of course. We’re behind the Russair cargo hangar. Don’t keep us waiting.’

Lock switched off the humming phone and tapped the girl on the shoulder. ‘You OK?’ he asked solicitously, even though his mouth was sour with what he could only regard as defeat.

‘Yes!’ she snapped.

‘Don’t bite my head off, lady. I just wanted to know whether you could handle this or not.’

‘I can handle it.’ She turned in her seat. The windscreen beyond her was blank with snow. ‘I’m all right. Really, I’m all right.’

‘Sure,’ he replied without irony. ‘OK, let’s go.’

‘What about the car?’

‘It’s just a shape against the fence — leave it where it is.’

He opened the door and clambered out into the blizzard, staring around him in the darkness. No murky dawn was yet rivalling the dim glow of the perimeter lights. He turned up his collar and thrust his gloved hands into the pockets of his topcoat.

Hunched into himself, he began to trudge along the fence, looking for a gap, a torn piece of mesh, the girl plodding behind him.

There’d be plenty of breaks in the wire, the small-scale smugglers would have made them over the months and years of cigarette and hashish illegalities.

The weight of a sense of betrayal strengthened, bowing his shoulders. Beth’s murder was to go unrequited, Turgenev was going to get away with it. The taste of that was colder than the snow on his tongue. God damn it to hell, he cursed. God damn it all to hell …

His interior landscape, stretching into the future, was as empty and featureless as the tundra that reached away around him on every side.

Hamid was standing beside the grey Mercedes like a chauffeur, but that was not the image that came back to him as he was shrugged into his topcoat by one of the servants. Instead, he heard his mother’s voice, her annoyance with him merely her fear of displeasing his father. Pyotr, the car is waiting for you Pyotr!

The last more as a plea than an injunction.

As a boy, he had stepped out of the main door of the block of flats in Moscow on many snowy pre-dawn mornings like this, and a man clapping his hands together for warmth would have been standing beside a battered minibus, his face pinched and angry at the delay. It had not been a car, whatever his mother’s affectations beyond the pretensions of middle-ranking Party membership. His schoolfellows’ faces would be peering through the fugged and iced row of windows, some of them smirking. You’ll be late for school ~ again … So would run the litany of her peculiar orthodoxy of obedience — to his father, the Party, the Kremlin; to everybody she knew to be superior in status to herself and her husband. And his mother had known, with the nicety and obsession of a stamp collector, every minute gradation of office, income, accommodation among the various circles of the Inferno that had been the Secretariat of the Soviet Communist Party, its civil service.

He donned his fur hat. Glanced at the murky sky, still more lit by rig flames and the glow of the town than by the dawn.

But the snow was easing, he was certain, and the wind, though it remained forceful in its gusts, was more fitful, coquettish almost after the directness of the blizzard. The weather window would open and Hamid and the scientists would be gone …

He became aware of the reason for the memory. It did not lie in his irritation with Hamid, or the Iranian’s pose beside the limousine. It was that the scientists, all six of them, were seated in a minibus parked behind the Mercedes. It had arrived at the lodge only minutes earlier. The windows were tinted and he could not see their faces. But that vehicle had evoked his childhood in Moscow. He smiled, but with lingering bitterness. The memory of his stifling, orthodox, unquestioning home had never been rendered neutral by the solution of time. It remained acidic, stinging. He remembered Leonid Turgenev’s gratitude for his Party card and his menial promotions and millimetric measurements of financial improvement, his ruthless driving of his only son to succeed in just the same manner as himself … his disappointments at the young Pyotr’s love of sport, his laziness at school, his poor reports, his indiscipline. The beatings, the harangues, the lectures, the instilling of creeping, blackmailing guilt … then his irrational pride when his son became a trainee officer in the KGB 1st Directorate School.

He had hated his father. Towards his mother, the cipher, the imprint of her husband, he had felt the smallest tenderness and the greatest irritation. They were both dead now. He grinned as he approached the car, so that the Iranian was puzzled by the expression of humour. Wouldn’t that be a simple, even simplistic explanation for his joy in capitalism? The antithesis, the complete refutation, of his father’s crabbed, servile ideological loyalty, his puritanism, his utter lack of hedonism.

He slapped Hamid on the shoulder, surprising the man.

‘In two hours, my friend, you’ll be above the clouds and on your way to Tehran. Don’t look so damn gloomy!’ he laughed.

There was no longer any sense of humiliation, or subservience to the Iranian; no reminder of meniality and the past.

Memories of his father always turned on their axis like this.

They still possessed an initial sting, like a needle being inserted into a forearm vein … but the effect was like a narcotic drug.

Pleasure, a dreamy confidence, a joy at his power, authority, wealth. How his father would have hated him now, and what a crying shame the old bastard hadn’t lived to see — well, the Mercedes would have been enough, pulling up outside that grimy concrete block of flats!

‘Come on, Hamid — let’s get you on your way!’ he called in the greatest good humour as he climbed into the limousine.

Lock chewed on the lumps of baguette, filled with a hard, rindy cheese and moistureless tomato, swallowing them gratefully, each mouthful awakening rather than abating his hunger.

Vorontsyev was watching him with a sardonic amusement that did not occupy his flinty grey eyes. Behind the forced humour, the Russian’s face was drawn and grey with the enervation of the pain in his arm and ribs. The dawn seeped slowly, an ineffectual thin dye, into the cloud-heavy sky. The snow no longer blinded, but blew like flimsy material through which the contours of the airport were visible. Snow-laden aircraft, the tower, the terminal building, the snowploughs, a tank, a piece of self propelled artillery, petrol trucks.

There was no sense of increased or urgent activity. They were not expected. However, Lock accepted that Vorontsyev’s estimate of around fifty troops was probably correct. They were alone in the car, which smelt of dirt and cracked plastic seating and stale food and bodies.

‘Can’t be done, it’s too risky,’ Lock said eventually, when he had eaten the last of the baguette. The front of his overcoat was covered with big crumbs. ‘We’d be walking into a blind alley, with no way out. Can’t you see that?’

‘Lock, I’m tired. I don’t need this …’ Vorontsyev shifted his body in the rear seat, wincing with pain, breathing in snorted, nasal breaths. ‘We’re already in the blind alley, and our backs are against the wall. The plane is the gate we didn’t expect to be there. We have to get away from here, right away. Can’t you see that?’

Lubin was in the terminal building, dressed in a cleaner’s overalls he had commandeered. Dmitri was somewhere on the terminal roof, watching the road by which the scientists would be brought to the airport, if they came. Marfa was scouting the hangar which housed Turgenev’s Learjet, and the dispositions of the GRU. Listening to their occasional reports over R/Ts they had stolen from a secure locker in the police room in the terminal increased Lock’s sense of the utter futility of their presence.

Vorontsyev’s crazy scheme of hijacking Turgenev’s plane and flying out of Novyy Urengoy seemed hardly more impractical than any alternative.

What alternative?

‘Well?’ Vorontsyev prompted. ‘What’s your answer?’

‘That’s crazy I’

‘What else is there?’

They glowered at one another like sparring animals, cats with raised backbones, stiff fur. Then Lock relaxed, sipping at the coffee in the plastic beaker. The warm, sweet liquid trickled down a narrow unfrozen track in his gullet.

‘I don’t see it that way,’ he said quietly. ‘Turgenev may not come — we don’t know he’s going to be here!’

‘Lock — listen to me.’ Vorontsyev’s left hand gripped the sleeve of Lock’s coat like that of a remonstrative parent. ‘Do you want to walk out of here, or not? Does it matter to you, staying alive?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m not here by myself, that’s why!’ He snorted.

‘Look, I probably care almost as little as you do about what happens next, but I have a responsibility to the other three. I had enough trouble persuading Lubin he wasn’t abandoning his wife and kid! None of my people deserves obliteration. Understand?’

His eyes were hot and bleak, his lips quivering with rage.

‘I won’t let you do that. You owe Dmitri your life, damn you!’

Lock tugged at the damp scarf around his throat.

‘This idea of mine,’ Vorontsyev continued, ‘may be lunacy, but it’s safer than any other way.’

‘It depends on Turgenev being here! Otherwise, they’ll just shell the plane with that tank or the self-propelled gun! Christ, haven’t you thought of that?’

‘I’ve thought that if Turgenev does come, you’ll kill him out of hand, and then they’ll simply cut us down. I’ve thought of that, Lock. Have you?’

‘What if he doesn’t come?’

‘Then if we can get aboard the aircraft, quickly enough, without giving ourselves away, we might just make it anyway.’

Vorontsyev looked down, as if shamefaced at a lie he had told.

‘If Turgenev doesn’t come himself, I won’t come with you.’

‘I know that.’ He was silent for some moments, and then he said: ‘I might not make it myself.’ He was staring down at his broken arm, tightly buttoned inside his topcoat and at the slack, uncomfortable posture of his body in the seat.

‘This is your only way back, Lock — take it,’ Vorontsyev announced after another long, tense silence. ‘You agree on that, at least?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right. What time is it?’

‘A little after seven. Dawn.’

Vorontsyev clumsily picked up the R/T that lay between them on the cracked plastic seat. He pressed it against his cold, unshaven cheek.

‘Dmitri — anything?’

The howl of the wind behind Dmitri’s small voice. ‘Nothing, Alexei.’

Vorontsyev craned to peer through the rear window, out towards the runway. The old car, with its weight and disguise of snow, had become unsuspicious, parked with other cars belonging to airport staff. The snowploughs remained stationary at the end of the runway. Their last run had been an hour earlier, headlights staring through the snow and darkness, the snow flung aside in great fountains.

Panshin was dead. Lock had told him that. Turgenev didn’t know they had been told of the airport and the flight to Tehran.

‘OK. Keep watching, old friend. Lubin?’

The young man’s voice was a hoarse, secretive whisper. ‘Nothing, Major. No increase in activity, no increase in tempo. Idle bunch of bastards,’ he added, as if to dispel his own nerves rather than to reassure.

‘OK — Marfa?’

Again the howl of wind, audible to both himself and to Lock, who instinctively rubbed his gloved hands together against the thought of the cold.

‘They’re still carrying out the routine patrols. The aircraft’s been inspected, but it hasn’t been fuelled-‘ Vorontsyev felt a sick hollow in his stomach. ‘I haven’t seen any sign of the pilots.’

She, too, was whispering.

‘Where are you?’

‘In the hangar. Behind some crates of spares.’

‘Has food been taken aboard?’

‘I think so.’

‘Stewards, cabin staff — any sign?’

‘Just one. No, thefe were two, a man and a woman. They’re on board now, I can’t see them — waitV Her excitement jolted both of them. Then she was whispering less audibly. Lock leaned towards Voiontsyev to try to hear. ‘A car’s just pulled into the hangar, two people getting out — uniforms, caps.’ A tense pause, then: ‘They’re going aboard. Small suitcases, charts — the pilot and copilot?’

‘Must be. Don’t move, but keep calling in. Dmitri, stay where you are until you can see something you can confirm. Lubin, get back here now!’ Vorontsyev glared triumphantly at Lock.

‘They must be coming, mart! They have to be.’ He chuckled, but the sound turned to a painful cough. He waggled his hand, and continued breathlessly; ‘Turgenev’s providing us with the rope we can hang him with!’

Lock looked round wildly at the noise of big engines starting.

One of the snowploughs was on the move. ‘Can we take the scientists inside the hangar?’

‘Where will they fuel up?’

‘In the hangar or — ‘ He watched the second snowplough begin to rumble towards the runway. The first snow was gouting from the leading machine in a great wave. ‘Maybe the runway. It’s safer, out in the open. Where, how, Vorontsyev?’

‘Alexei — two vehicles. A Mercedes and a small bus, by the look of it. Blacked-out windows. Turgenev’s car?’

‘Keep watching, Dmitri!’ Vorontsyev sounded breathless.

‘Major, an APC has just pulled up at the hangar, soldiers getting out of it!’ they heard Maria report. ‘Eight, ten\ Spreading out’

‘Shit!’ Lock raged. ‘Where now, Vorontsyev? Uh — how?’

‘Yes, Bakunin. We’re heading directly for the hangar. Where are you?’

Over the car telephone, Bakunin sounded as if he were donning a familiar, stiff, subordinate uniform.

‘Half a mile from the airport.’

‘Our friends — where are they?’

‘Lost them, temporarily. I have given orders, made dispositions.

They’re hiding out somewhere. It won’t be long before ‘

‘Panshin?’

‘Dead.’

‘What did they learn from him?’

‘Nothing that will be of any use. He wouldn’t have talked. He was aware we were outside, had the place surrounded. He would have been too frightened.’

‘Very well.’ Turgenev rubbed his nose. The thought of Lock’s continuing freedom irked but did not unsettle. ‘Check the whole security operation and then let me know when you’ve done so.

We won’t start engines until I have your all clear.’ He smiled at Hamid beside him. ‘Don’t waste time.’ He put down the telephone.

‘The hangar’s been put out of bounds, Vorontsyev! Don’t you understand? Your bright idea isn’t going to pan out!’

They were standing beside the car, in the bitter wind.

Occasional flakes of snow plucked against their cold cheeks, but the blizzard had all but quietened. Low cloud still pressed threateningly. The snowploughs were hundreds of yards down the cleared runway. Lubin hovered on the other side of the car like a child ignored while his parents quarrelled. Lock saw Dmitri scuttling towards them with a crab’s wary haste.

‘Let me think, Lock,’ Vorontsyev ground out between clenched teeth. ‘Let me think.’

‘Well, Alexei — I’ Dmitri blurted as he reached them, red-faced.

Vorontsyev turned on him. ‘Shut up, Dmitri,’ he warned. He had erred, he realised. Perhaps fatally. He rubbed his unshaven cheeks with his still-damp glove. Stamped his feet against the cold, as he wandered away from the car.

‘Marfa?’ he whispered into the R/T.

‘Yes? The GRU troops are all outside the hangar, but you won’t be able to get in now.’ He scowled at the information.

‘There’s a fuel truck, and one of those tugs they use to tow aircraft. Oh, and a fire truck.’

‘The pilots?’

‘I can see them in the cockpit — the flight deck,’ she corrected herself.

‘Anything else?’

‘No.’

‘Keep me informed — tell me when Turgenev and his passengers arrive.’

He turned back to look at his three companions, huddled in argument. Lock waving his arms in derisive dismissal. The anger wearied him, and was futile. Like everything else. Turgenev was here, bold as brass in his Mercedes, tsar of all he surveyed, just about to hand his lame nuclear physicists onto the boarding steps, ushering them away to Iran or Pakistan or even Iraq, wherever he had contracted to send them. His plane would probably bring in another consignment of heroin when it returned! And he — he was standing amid a line of snow-laden cars stamping his feet like a discarded mistress!

Marfa’s voice interrupted his flagellatory recriminations.

The Mercedes is here — with a small bus behind it. Is it them?’

‘Yes!’ he exploded. Then: ‘Where exactly are they?’

‘Outside. Waiting. The aircraft’s being towed out of the hangar now. There are men around the fuel truck. The fire-fighters are standing to attention — I’ It was all so damned easy for Turgenev.

He was, truly, truly untouchable. Only hundreds of yards away but immune. ‘The plane’s cleared the hangar — coming to a stop.

The fuel truck’s alongside it now.’ How long did it take to fuel a Learjet? God, there was an aircraft out there with a range of maybe three thousand miles and more, two pilots on board, a gift from the gods —! He ranted inwardly. ‘The fuelling’s started, by the look-of it,’ he heard.

‘Be careful,’ he warned.

‘Turgenev, . it’s himV she whispered. ‘He’s watching the fuelling. There’s a smaller, dark-featured man with him, and some people are getting out of the bus.’

‘How many?’

‘Four, five — six. That’s all… Just a minute, I’ll try to change my position, get a better look.’

He waited in furious but impotent impatience. As if events raged beyond a thick wall or tinted, unbreakable glass. He was divorced from them; they continued without him.

‘That’s better/ She was breathing harshly. ‘I’m near the hangar doors, there’s no one left inside. There’s — I can see six of the GRU from where I am. The others must be out of my line of sight. The six passengers from the bus are going on board …

When are we going to move, Alexei?’ She asked her question in a peremptory, agitated manner. ‘Turgenev — he’s …’ She paused, then: ‘He and the dark-skinned chap are going aboard, too!’

Turgenev could not, simply could not, be taking them to Tehran personally. The other man would be doing that. But he was on board, they were all together, just as he had hoped and planned.

And there were ten armed guards, and fifty more within shouting distance …

Lock was at his side. He twitched with impatience. ‘What’s happening?’ Then he heard:

‘Yes, they’re all on board now ‘

‘What?’ His eyes burned. ‘They’re leaving while we stand around here?’ He drew the Makarov pistol from inside his topcoat and thrust a round into the chamber. ‘You can kiss my ass, Vorontsycv! If you won’t do something, I will!’

‘Are you coming?’ they heard Marfa ask.

‘I am, lady — / am!’ Then he added: ‘Your boss doesn’t have the chutzpah for it, apparently, honey!’ He scowled in contempt.

‘Wait!’ Vorontsyev cried.

‘What for, man? Hell to freeze over?’

‘The aircraft’s engines have been switched on, they’re running them up,’ Marfa reported. ‘The GRU are scattering like mice!’

Then she sensed the situation; or the quarrel between Vorontsyev and Lock impinged at last. ‘What are we going to do, Alexei?’

‘We’re coming!’ he snapped. ‘All of us. Two minutes-!’ He grabbed Lock’s arm. They reached Dmitri and Lubin. ‘The hangar. Come on, let’s get moving!’ He retained his hold on Lock’s sleeve, as if to prevent the man from bolting, or firing the pistol he held in his hand. ‘We must try to stop the plane.’

ŚHow?’

‘The tower?’

Lock shook his head. They hurried across snow that was barely disturbed by footprints, through a scattering of warehouses blazoned with Cyrillic script and English. A tank creaked across their path, a hundred yards away, imperious and oblivious.

‘There’s no way to stop the plane except by ramming it,’ he admitted breathlessly.

They passed the first of the long row of hangars. The clouds seemed a lighter grey, though no less thick. There was little more than the scent of snow in the air.

‘The plane’s beginning to taxi!’ Marfa’s voice was high with excitement, then suddenly filled with disappointment. ‘Alexei, Dmitri — come onV

Lock ducked back at the corner of a hangar, waving the others to a halt. Someone grabbed his arm to prevent themselves overbalancing.

Then he peered round the edge of the building. The soldiers had passed out of sight. The APC stood as if abandoned fifty yards from them. He saw Turgenev’s Mercedes and the empty bus next to it … And the Learjet sliding gracefully as a swan across the perspective between the two hangars.

Where was Turgenev? The plane was beyond reach, but —

‘Where’s Turgenev?’ he snapped into Vorontsyev’s R/T.

‘Still aboard’

‘Oh — Christ!’ he wailed, staring at the lowering sky.

The Learjet began taxiing away from the hangar, slowly increasing its speed. Yellow-painted self-propelled passenger steps followed servantlike in its wake, out towards the taxiway.

The fuel bowser moved off, puffing grey fumes. The APC, the bus, the Mercedes … The driver was standing beside it, smoking -

scattered pieces. He couldn’t make the jigsaw come together.

Mercedes, relaxed driver, plane, Turgenev, plane, Mercedes, driver still smoking, in no hurry to leave, waiting, waiting for ‘The car! His car — for God’s sake, we can use his car! Look, it’s waiting to pick him up. He’s not going anywhere! He’s getting out before it takes off, has to be—!’

Then he was running along the side of the hangar, its corrugated wall a hypnotic blur, disorientating him. The driver had his back to him, he heard the sound of laughter, presumably from a soldier he could not see. He heard his breathing, his heart thudded in his chest and the blood pounded in his ears. He had no idea whether or not they were behind him. He could see the aircraft, dazzling against the grey sky like a great dove, its flank emblazoned with the logo of— GraingerTurgenev. His throat was dry, he could not swallow, could hardly breathe. It was as if it was put there to mock him. GraingerTurgenev.

Rage, desperation, compulsion — all expressed in the swing of his arm at the surprised, half-turned face of the driver, all weighted in the strength of the blow he delivered to the man’s face with the barrel of the Makarov.

He was still looking at the body when hands grabbed him and thrust him into the car’s leather-scented interior. Someone, grunting with pain, got heavily in beside him, there was a third, wearing the chauffeur’s uniform cap, in the driving seat. Dmitri, the first he recognized, was in the front passenger seat. Marfa flung open the door and clambered in, squashing Vorontsyev, who yelled with pain. His face was ashen with effort. The car was heavy with tension, exhilaration.

‘Slowly!’ Vorontsyev cried, still in pain, clutching his ribs.

Lubin steered the Mercedes forward. Lock glanced through the rear window. The driver’s unconscious form was clearly visible, lying in the snow between the two hangars. They passed the GRU soldiers, clustered around a truck painted olive-drab.

They were drinking coffee or vodka, oblivious to the passage of the car. Lubin turned onto the taxiway behind the self-propelled passenger steps that had followed the Learjet. Turgenev was going to get off the airplane before it took off, and his Mercedes would be waiting for him.

The aircraft reached the end of the taxiway and turned onto the runway. The main passenger door, behind the flight deck, opened as a dark gap. Lock could only snatch at his next breath.

‘Slowly,’ Vorontsyev insisted, his breathing less ragged.

The passenger steps were twenty yards ahead of the Mercedes.

The Learjet was poised at the end of the runway. Lock heard his own sharp intake of breath as a tall, fur-hatted figure in a well-cut, dark overcoat appeared in the gap of the open passenger door. Turgenev. The name filled his mouth with saliva, like the anticipation of food. The terminal building was a wall of dull glass against which the tank and the self-propelled gun were posed. The passenger steps drew up beside the plane and their hydraulics jiggled the top step into alignment with the open door. Everything seemed slowed down and made distant; the effect of the car’s tinted windows or perhaps his own anticipation.

Vorontsyev was watching him anxiously. The Mercedes drew to a halt near the bottom of the steps.

‘Just me,’ Lock said. ‘When he’s halfway down the steps. Not till then, not ‘

‘Don’t kill him, Lock.’

Lock made no reply, his hand poised on the door handle. They watched him like an audience, each one of them still, tense.

Turgenev waved a hand’back into the passenger cabin of the plane, then stepped onto the short flight of steps.

‘Look!’ Marfa breathed, pointing back towards the hangars.

‘They’ve found the driver!’

The GRU uniforms were clustered in a tight knot between the two hangars, small as a gathering of ants around a dead fly. A UAZ jeep was pulling up beside them. Lock turned back to the steps and saw, to his horror, that Turgenev had paused near the top, one gloved hand on the metal handrail. He was unalarmed, merely curious, squinting towards the hangars. The familiar car, parked beside the steps, reassured.

The Iranian would be armed, Turgenev probably not…

… now.

He thrust open the door, climbed out, skidded on wet slush, then pushed himself towards the bottom of the steps. As he looked up, he knew at once that Turgenev had recognized him. The Russian turned quickly to regain the aircraft. Lock’s boots pounded on the metal steps as the man retreated. His breath was laboured, his feet slippery beneath him. Turgenev was quicker than he, having passed through shock into action in an instant.

Other boots on the passenger steps. Turgenev, turning in the doorway, his hand reaching into the breast of his coat. The distance too great, the time too short, his sensation of being slow, old, hardly moving —

— released as he blundered into Turgenev, catching the scent of his cashmere overcoat, and his aftershave. Then he collided with a locker’s metal, dizzying himself, his head shrieking with pain. His hands fumbled for Turgenev, who slipped them with a matador’s grace and was gone, through a drawn curtain into the forward passenger cabin. Lock held his head, something wet on his gloved fingers. Lubin and then Dmitri loomed in the doorway, Marfa’s head bobbing behind them.

Lock pointed forward, then staggered through the curtain.

Turgenev was at the other end of the small cabin, at the door to the flight deck. And turned to watch him. Hunted, alarmed

— and strangely aloof. The Iranian was on his feet, on the starboard side, rising from his seat, staring wildly at them. Armed.

Gun in his hands, held out stiff-armed, no shock-delay, pure professionalism.

Lock fired twice and the Iranian’s blood splashed the cabin ceiling and the wall behind his head. Lock’s left arm almost torn from its socket by the impact of the single shot the Iranian had had time to fire. He staggered, sat heavily on the arm of a chair.

A terrified, middle-aged face stared up at him from behind thick glassed spectacles.

‘Stop him!’ Lock groaned.

The flight deck door had closed behind Turgenev. Foreboding.

There was no way the man would allow himself to be taken hostage, allow the airplane to ‘Christ, stop him—!’ he bellowed.

Dmitri had reached the door, his hand was on the handle, his face careless of his own safety, when Lock heard the first shot.

Dmitri threw back the door. The second shot echoed in the cabin. Someone whimpered in terror. Through the open door, Lock could see Turgenev standing between the two pilots’ seats, each of which held a slumped, still form. He’d shot the pilot and copilot. They couldn’t, now, fly anywhere.

Then Turgenev turned away to shut down the engines. Dmitri seemed startled into rage at the movement and struck at Turgenev’s arm with his gun. Turgenev’s pistol clattered to the floor of the flight deck, his features expressing a snarling anger for an instant. Then he shrugged, rubbed his arm, and raised his hands in a mockery of surrender. Dmitri wore ashen shock on his round features. Turgenev entered the passenger cabin and Dmitri closed the door on the bodies.

Someone screamed, as high-pitched and alien as a siren.

Vorontsyev turned, “to see Marfa slap the stewardess across the face, then hold her tightly against her. The woman’s shoulders heaved, her face buried in dark hair and the stuff of Marfa’s coat.

Lock looked down at his wounded arm. There was blood on the sleeve of his coat. There was hardly any pain, surprisingly.

His arm was still in traumatic shock. He let his hand rest on his lap, oblivious of the stunned imprinted fear on the face of the bespectacled man in the seat beside him. He coughed at the tickle of burned powder from the gunshots. A gout of blood splashed down onto his hand. Blood ran from his lips, down his chin. He gingerly opened his topcoat. The breast of his check shirt was darkened with blood. He felt a numb terror — the salty blood on his tongue, filling his mouth again.

The Iranian’s one shot had passed through his arm — and his lungs.

Vorontsyev was looking at him in horror, even as Turgenev announced:

‘It seems, gentlemen, our flight has been delayed indefinitely.’

Vorontsyev raised his pistol in his left hand, but did not strike Turgenev. Instead, his imagination sensed the isolated aircraft, the runway, the fleeing passenger steps, the tower, the terminal, all spreading out around them. The game was lost. The aircraft had been sabotaged.

‘It hasn’t worked — Major.’ Turgenev was smiling. ‘You’re stuck. Dead stop.’ His eyes, as he spoke, were studying Lock with an intense, hot anger; and growing satisfaction. He seemed unconcerned by their numbers, his own situation.

‘Your friend Bakunin can get us another pilot,’ Vorontsyev replied. ‘In exchange for you.’ He sensed his words like soft hands pushing at a great door he could not hope to open.

Turgenev shook his head.

‘I don’t think so. Besides, this time the hijackers have to negotiate with the hostage, isn’t that so?’ Casually, he removed his gloves and, wrapping his coat around him as neatly as a woman might have done, he sat in the one empty seat in the forward cabin.

‘Lubin, Dmitri — check the other cabin — close the passenger door,’ Vorontsyev said mechanically, gesturing with the useless pistol.

Dmitri glanced almost angrily at him, then abandoned the silent, pale-featured Lock and passed through the curtain behind Lubin. They heard the noise of the door being closed and locked.

Marfa pocketed her gun and moved towards Lock, who hunched away from her on the arm of the seat. It was obvious to Vorontsyev that she was making a great effort to keep her features inexpressive as she saw Lock’s wound. The American growled once like a dog suspicious of further harm, then allowed her lo unbutton his shirt, inspect the wound. Vorontsyev, in the strained, heightened silence of the cabin, distinctly heard the small, ugly noises of the bloodsoaked shirt against Lock’s skin.

He turned to Turgenev, who seemed distracted by memory or reflection. Marfa moved quickly to the lockeTS, opening and slamming them shut, until she found the first-aid box. She glowered at one of the scientists until he abandoned his seal as nervously as a sheep, then helped Lock into it. The man’s face was grey with pain. Vorontsyev turned away, unwilling to witness the extent of the wound, to acknowledge that Lock was, effectively, Turgenev’s prisoner — the man needed an emergency operation, transfusions … might even be dying. He ground his teeth in impotent rage.

Then, surprisingly, Turgenev moved to stand beside Marfa, as if to supervise her attentions to Lock.

As Dmitri re-entered the forward cabin, Vorontsyev said: ‘Get these two back with the others — they can sit on each other’s laps if they have to. Lubin can keep an eye on them.’

‘I’ll start finding out who and what they are.’ It was as if Dmitri, like himself, had stumbled upon a piece of defensive play-acting, the role of a clerk or customs official which would keep reality at bay, at least for some moments.

Vorontsyev picked up a briefcase which had slipped to the floor from the Iranian’s seat. The dead man sat hunched like an abandoned doll against the bulkhead. Vorontsyev tossed the briefcase to Dmitri. ‘It’ll be in here. Terms and conditions of employment, previous experience, the lot-‘ He tried to smile, knowing it was at best a sickly, defeated expression. Dmitri merely nodded, tapped the two passengers on the shoulder and herded them through the curtain to the four-seat rear passenger cabin.

Marfa had completed her bandaging of Lock’s arm and chest.

Turgenev, hypocritically, shook his head. ‘Hospital, very soon or not at all. Maybe not at all, anyway.’ Maria’s quivering lower lip confirmed the callous, detached diagnosis. Perhaps Lock was dying anyway, but delay would kill him for certain …

… as surrender would Hill them, his people who had followed him into this prison. He could not bargain anything for Lock’s life, for the only counter he had was Turgenev himself. The scientists, whoever they were and however eminent and valuable, were mere goods. Turgenev and Bakunin would be indifferent to their survival. There was only Turgenev, the hostage and the negotiator.

He turned at a voice from beyond the flight deck door, startled.

Saw Lock’s ashen face, and snapped at the still distraught stewardess, who seemed obsessively afraid at the imminent opening of the door:

‘Give him some brandy — hurry up, girl!’

The young woman scuttled to obey her orders. He opened the door of the flight deck to the smell of blood, even in the cold air, and Bakunin’s voice, tinnily irrelevant, from the radio.

Turgenev had followed him, and the man flinched at a defensive jab of the pistol in his direction. Turgenev again mockingly held up his hands, then fiddled with the radio, handing a headset to Vorontsyev, who motioned him into stillness against the door.

Half-turned in the small, awkward space, leaning over the pilot’s head with its drying leak of blood, he growled:

‘Yes, Bakunin, what do you want?’ It was as if he had been interrupted from important work.

‘Vorontsyev, what the hell do you think you can achieve by this?’ Bakunin barked. ‘You’re not going anywhereV

Vorontsyev saw the flash of Turgenev’s confident grin, and the black, flylike dot of a helicopter through the windows. It was closing slowly, traversing a surveillance rather than attack course.

‘Listen to me, Bakunin. Prince Turgenev — ‘ Turgenev snorted with suppressed amusement. ‘— the local tsar, is here with us.

He thinks he can bargain his way out of here, but he can’t do it unless we go, too. OK?’

After a pause, Bakunin said: ‘Then why haven’t you taken off? You don’t really need my permission, do you?’

The helicopter minced back and forth across the windows.

The clouds seemed lower, a darker grey. The airfield stretched away around the isolated Learjet, a slow, hesitant fog seeming to cling just above the blank snow. The runway gleamed blackly ahead of the aircraft like a taunt.

Turgenev leaned beside Vorontsyev.

‘Bakunin,’ he said, ‘it’s me. I’m all right. But there is an evident shortage of pilots aboard the plane at the moment,’ Bakunin chuckled. ‘You understand? Our friend here doesn’t seem to know what to do-‘ Vorontsyev listened, without making any effort to interrupt Turgenev. ‘- but that makes him doubly dangerous. We’ll be in touch.’ He switched off the radio.

Immediately, Vorontsyev flicked the radio back on. ‘Bakunin, unless you want to see the money tree cut off at the roots, arrange a pilot for us!’

Turgenev shrugged, then announced imperiously: ‘Now you’ve told him what he should have been allowed to realise in that slow, saurian brain for himself. We are all helpless out here ‘

Vorontsyev pushed Turgenev through the door into the passenger cabin, the pistol prodding the back of the man’s cashmere overcoat. ‘Why should that be?’

‘What choice does he have? If this aircraft takes off, if any of you managed to get away, he is ruined. Do you think he has houses round the world and their accompanying bank accounts?’ Turgenev laughed. ‘He probably keeps it under the mattress, everything I’ve ever paid him!’ He paused, then added: ‘Something of a problem, mm?’ Turgenev seated himself once more, his smile fixed. Vorontsyev inspected Lock’s sick, hanging face, then Marfa’s distress.

A snowflake, large as a jellyfish it seemed, appeared on one of the porthole windows of the cabin. Then a second and a third.

Vorontsyev closed his’eyes in anguish. When he opened them, the stewardess had retreated from the forward cabin. Dmitri was standing between the two cabins, revealed like an actor by the drawn-back curtain. Maria was attempting to read a file. He glanced at the digital clock on the bulkhead. It had been less than ten minutes since they had boarded the plane.

Ridiculous …

He bent over Lock’s seat and the American’s eyes fluttered open. Vorontsyev was appalled at the violence of his decline.

He touched the American’s hand.

‘Christ, this hurts, and it’s strange …’ Lock muttered, blood at once dribbling from his lips so that he snatched his hand away from Vorontsyev and wiped the side of his mouth with a bloodsoaked handkerchief. There was almost nothing left of Lock, apart from the hot, burning eyes, reddened and blinking in and out of focus. Lock wanted nothing, nothing but to kill Turgenev. There was no gun near his hand, Vorontsyev realised with relief, then immediately wondered whether Lock still had the gun somewhere. He hoped not. He patted the hand that had returned to his and stood up. His arm and ribs seemed a long way from him, their jolts and naggings of pain undemanding.

‘They’re top people,’ Marfa whispered, leaning towards him and offering the file. ‘Two from Semipalatinsk, one from that newish place south of Moscow — two top-grade technicians.’ She swallowed. ‘They’re bomb builders, Alexei.’ She was strangely animated. ‘They could have made a real difference.’ She was flicking the files like cards in an illusion. He saw two heads crowned by military caps. He turned to Turgenev.

‘Nothing but the best,’ Turgenev said. He withdrew a cigar case and lighter from his pocket. ‘The sign’s not on, is it?’ he mocked, and puffed at the Cuban cigar contentedly, a paradigm of the capitalist.

The windows behind his blond head were streaked with melted snow running like tadpoles. The telephone embedded in the arm of Turgenev’s seat blurted in alarm. Turgenev gestured at it, and Vorontsyev nodded.

‘Yes? Ah, Bakunin —’ He smiled at Vorontsyev, as if in apology for the unwelcome interruption of their conversation. ‘No, I don’t think that’s necessary. I think the situation’s realities are sinking in—’ He broke off, attracted by the violent, blood foamed coughing from the seat across the narrow aisle. He turned to face Lock, who was holding the Makarov pistol quiveringly towards Turgenev. ‘Just a moment’

Ugly swallowing noises, the soughing of Lock’s breaths, and their uncertainty.

‘Pete — ‘ He paused, but managed to still the threatened coughing fit. ‘Tell the guy I’m dying, uh? Tell him I’m the wild card, unre — liable…’ He paused again, for a longer time. His eyes glared briefly in Vorontsyev’s direction. Tell him there isn’t a lot of time. If I — think I’m going to — black out … you’re coming with me. OK?’

He fell back against the seat, exhausted. Turgenev moved to a more upright position, as if to spring, his eyes enlarged with adrenalin like those of a cat. He glared at Vorontsyev -

who grinned. Turgenev appeared momentarily unnerved.

It was out of the question that Lock should be allowed to kill Turgenev, their only letter of credit, their passport … Yet, Lock’s last desperation frightened the man.

Vorontsyev had to use it.

‘I’ll get back to you, Bakunin … What? No, nothing’s wrong!’

Lock was wearing a beard of blood, but his mouth was smiling with a luxurious, impervious satisfaction. The Makarov was rested heavily, almost numbly, along the arm of his seat, pointed unwaveringly at Turgenev.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’ Turgenev snapped.

‘Do we get a pilot?’

‘I only have to wait — what? Fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour, and the only man in the room who poses the slightest threat will be dead!’ He was leaning towards Vorontsyev, whispering savagely. ‘What is there to concern me?’

The, Pete,’ Lock announced faintly, with a detached, fey amusement. The. Get the guys a pilot. They won’t stop me killing you — but you know that, uh?’

Vorontsyev maintained his stony expression for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Up to you.’

Snow flew past the windows behind Turgenev. The fuselage quivered infinitesimally in the increased wind. The slight tremor seemed to transfer itself to Turgenev’s frame.

‘His lungs are filling up with blood, like a swimming pool,’

Turgenev hissed. ‘I don’t have to wait long.’

‘But he worries you — he’s nothing to lose.’

‘You won’t let him kill me, Vorontsyev. You don’t want to die.’ Turgenev’s voice was a hoarse whisper. He was leaning forward intently, but seemed distracted by Lock, who wiped the latest blood from his chin, uhen waved Marfa’s solicitations aside.

And Lock was studying the conversation as closely as if lip reading. Vorontsyev was increasingly aware of his detached, Olympian manner. ‘We both know that,’ Turgenev continued, his priorities buzzing insectlike in the tense, cramped space of the cabin. Vorontsyev was worried by Lock’s control of the situation. ‘So, we wait. Bakunin won’t give you a pilot … you can only deal through me.’ Turgenev leaned back, but his confident assurance was something being rehearsed in a large mirror.

Turgenev wondered if he could buy them off … then the thought made him smile. He need only string them along until Lock coughed his way into oblivion. Even Bakunin, out there behind the swiftly returned blizzard, was too greedy ever to contemplate a solution that involved harming Turgenev.

There was only Lock …

… and the evident fact that Vorontsyev and his people seemed subservient to Lock’s priority. They were becoming no more than observers of the scene.

Yes … It was that that was unsettling, the creeping foreboding that they might act too late. They may hesitate just long enough for Lock to kill him before their sense of their own survival awoke …

Bakunin glanced around him at the detritus of the control tower, its litter of operators and managers, his second in command, the GRU troops. The tinted windows of the tower were blind with driving snow. The idiot who stood beside him, taller, slimmer, younger, had suggested storming the aircraft. Special troops, he had replied, then added an assertion that We can handle the situation. The captain had accepted his decision, probably without a moment’s reflection on his own small accumulation of bribes, kickbacks, payments for looking the other way, even the occasional squalid, unimportant murder.

But Bakunin had reflected. Special troops would be under outside command. Other people would have to have the situation explained — the American, the town police, Turgenev, all of it would have to be justified. It was too dangerous to himself to involve a specialist anti-hijacking unit.

And his own troops couldn’t cope with it, couldn’t pull it off…

… even though — and the thought returned like a wasp he could not rid himself of on a hot afternoon — no one could be allowed to come off that plane alive, with the sole exception of Turgenev.

Finality. Vorontsyev, the stupid, lazy, time-serving policeman who’d got something akin to religion over Turgenev … and especially the American, whoever and whatever he was or had been. Acting or hoping to act as a nemesis. The incident had to be wiped from the tarmac and from reality, just as Panshin had been despatched, falling into the snow, a bullet through his forehead. For safety’s sake.

‘What do you estimate visibility to be?’ he asked his second in command.

‘Around twenty to twentyfive metres, sir.’ Georgian accent.

He distrusted Georgians, but the man was efficient after the manner of his own dim certitudes.

‘Very well. Have the aircraft surrounded by armed troops in a forty-metre perimeter. Anyone trying to come or go — have them stopped.’ He glared at the younger man. ‘You understand me, Josef? These people must be neutralised. A closed incident is what we must achieve — together with the safety of Turgenev, of course.’

‘Will you try to negotiate them out?’

The storm made the windows fiercely blank, writhing outside the octagonal enclosure of the tower like fanned smoke from a conflagration. He shook his head.

‘Turgenev is making his own arrangements, Josef. I do not intend to jeopardise — ‘ He shrugged.’- the man makes the rules here. If he feels in any real danger, he will begin negotiations.’

‘The pilots?’ the captain asked, looking much like a bemused boy as he spoke. ‘He — just, well, he killed them? Himself?’

‘That’s it, Josef. Admirably decisive, mm?’ He laughed. ‘They haven’t any idea of the kind of man they’re playing with. None whatsoever!’

‘Should we — you, call him again?’

Bakunin thought for a moment, then said: ‘In ten minutes.

If he wants something, or is in the unlikely position of having to ask for help, he’ll call us. The others don’t want to talk to us — he’s in charge. He never let them gain control of the situation.’

He disliked the admiration in his voice. ‘The weather has this place in a vice for the next twelve hours, minimum. Now, get that plane encircled, just in case they try to run for it.’

The captain saluted and turned away. Bakunin moved towards the blind windows and their rushing snow. The whole tower quivered in the wind’s force.

Brilliantly ruthless, killing the pilots.

What would he do? Buy them off? Just sit and wait? Expect to be rescued?

Offer them an alternative victim, a smaller scandal?

His suspicion was spreading and inflating like a wasp sting

It began with the blinking, the effort to keep the small cabin in focus. His eye movements.were becoming more exaggerated, more frequent. Before that, there had been a kind of exhilaration in the pain, a fierce clarity of sensation and thought. Or perhaps that had come from his understanding that he was dying, and deteriorating very quickly. Now, the cabin swam in and out of clarity, as if it were sometimes there around him and at other times outside the streaming, blind windows.

The girl, Marfa, was an unwelcome nurse. Rather than seeming solicitous, she loomed now as a reminder. Memento mori. Vorontsyev’s pain was another signal of his decline which he resented, having been so detached only minutes earlier. He had been above and outside it all, controlling them.

He coughed, a gout of blood fell onto his lap and he disregarded it, fighting for breath. Gradually hearing the appalling, liquid noises in his chest. The girl had propped him up with pillows from one of the lockers. He was bleeding into one of them, his head resting on another. She had wrapped a blanket around him because he was feeling colder. It would be difficult to talk, but he must — to Vorontsyev first, and then and only then to Turgenev.

Lock pointed with the pistol, unnerving Turgenev, alarming the Russian policeman. He essayed a smile, shook his head. He gestured Turgenev out of the cabin with fierce little shakes of the gun. Vorontsyev nodded and Dmitri took Turgenev into the rear cabin. The scientists in there were irrelevant, he had seen that very clearly; the files would be sufficient for their purposes.

But not important, not like the obligation to ensure the survival of these people who had placed him in a position to kill Turgenev … and who, if he didn’t get rid of them now, would prevent him from achieving that last goal.

Vorontsyev sat in the nearest seat, leaning forward. Marfa gave Lock a drink of tepid water, which he managed to swallow, fighting off the dangerous tickling it caused in his throat.

He had to be made to understand … but Lock was afraid of squandering his remaining strength and consciousness. He blinked. It required shorthand, they had to attend very closely, understand him at once ‘Go,’ he announced, then pointed at the files on one of the seats. ‘All — you need, there.’ There was a bout of coughing after that huge effort, yet he hated more the girl’s sympathetic, anguished breathing beside his face and wished he had the redundant energy to push her away.

Vorontsyev shook his head. Lock nodded vehemently.

‘All — you. Use — use the car …’ His breathing unnerved him, the long wet inhalations and exhalations like a tide, drowning him as he sat helpless.

Again, Vorontsyev shook his head. Then he said:

‘If we leave, it’s with you. Hospital’

Lock shook his head.

‘No — good.’

‘Then we’d need to “take Turgenev, bargain our way out.’

‘No.’ Once more, the room was starkly clear to him. Dmitri stood behind his seat, the girl crouched beside him, Vorontsyev looked as lugubrious as any deathbed mourner. The pain seemed like light rather than heat. He saw their situation with the identical, fierce clarity that had been his wound’s first gift. ‘Mexican — standoff,’ he announced. ‘Only chance — go now.’

Vorontsyev’s scheme had trapped them all. Turgenev was fated to survive. They’d get no pilot, there’d be no storming of the plane. Eventually, they would try, as Vorontsyev evidently planned, to exchange Turgenev for their freedom. Turgenev would have them eliminated as soon as he had been released.

They all knew that. He had the power, the influence, the weight of numbers. They’d never be allowed to survive.

‘You — want to break him. The files,’ he said. ‘Storm will hide you — don’t wait.’

Vorontsyev’s eyes admitted the bleak truth. The storm was the only thing on their side. Once it blew itself out, they’d be as exposed as tumours on an X-ray plate, to be surgically extinguished.

They couldn’t take him — and he wouldn’t surrender Turgenev to them.

Vorontsyev knew that Lock was offering them their lives — or some slight chance of their lives — in exchange for the murder of Turgenev. He maintained an expressionless look. Lock would ensure they had their best chance of escape by forcing himself lo remain conscious. He would wait until the very last flicker of consciousness, the final moment of his own life, before he shot Turgenev. Then, on the edge of the dark, he would execute his enemy.

He glanced towards the files. If they got out, managed to make it to Moscow or some other city, maybe someone would listen; maybe the authorities would act. Regard Turgenev’s empire like rot in an old building — treat it; kill it … It seemed a romantic notion.

Lock smiled at him. It was obvious the American knew he had made his decision.

‘See?’ he said- ‘You have to — uh?’

Then he began an appalling fit of coughing, his whole frame heaving, blood staining his lips and chin and the front of his shirt. Eventually, he subsided further into the seat as Marfa, no longer resented, cleaned his face and inspected his wound with nimble, afraid fingers. Vorontsyev realised that Lock would be dead in minutes. He got up and went to the window.

Beside the plane, the Mercedes was a white lump, something covered with a heavy sheet. He strained to see beyond the violence of the storm, but the scene was featureless, empty. They might already have the plane surrounded — they certainly would do before the blizzard subsided. He could feel the tension, the claustrophobia of the cabin.

Then he turned to Lock.

‘Yes,’ he said, picking up the files. ‘Everything we need is in here.’ He looked at Marfa and Dmitri.

‘What about the others? The cabin crew, the six — ?’ Dmitri began.

‘They’ll be more interested in escape than anything else. Just like us,’ he added with a bitter smile. ‘Tell Lubin to bring Turgenev back in here, then talk to the steward. Tell him they’re all being released. As soon as we’ve left, they can leave.’ Dmitri nodded and retreated to the aft cabin.

Turgenev was alertly suspicious as he re-entered, aware that some decision had been reached; concerned, but still confident, pleased at the evident decline of Lock.

‘Hi, Pete,’ Lock greeted him, his supineness suggesting relaxation rather than exhaustion.

His tone startled Turgenev.

‘Well?’ he sneered. ‘What idiotic solution have you agreed on?’

The — deal,’ Lock announced, ‘you for them … They — go, we … stay-‘ He swallowed noisily.

Turgenev turned on Vorontsyev. ‘You’ll never get off the airfield!’ he snapped. ‘Not even under cover of this weather.’

‘We’ll see. Lubin — you drive. Dmitri, open the door-‘ He shuffled his own forgotten broken arm to greater comfort.

They’d have to drop onto the snow-covered tarmac but that wouldn’t kill any of them. He glanced at Lock. ‘Do you want him tied in his seat?’ he asked. Lock slowly shook his head.

‘Very well. Marfa?’ She nodded.

The noise of the passenger door being opened and the bellowing entry of the storm drowned all sound, all thought.

The curtain flared in the wind. Vorontsyev pushed Turgenev into his seat, paused for an instant beside Lock, who merely smiled, a boyish, unworried expression. He heard Lubin jump, then saw Marfa disappear through the door. Dmitri glanced back at Lock and Turgenev, then disappeared. Vorontsyev paused at the raging gap in the fuselage, blinded and disorientated, then jumped, collapsing at once into the new snow, his ankles shot though with pain.

He was helped to his knees and looked back. The stewardess and her companion were standing in the doorway. He waved his pistol and their figures vanished. He heard the engine of the Mercedes fire. Dmitri was sweeping the snow from the windscreen with swinging movements of his arm. Marfa was beside him and he shook off her proffered hand. They reached the car as Lubin began revving the engine. Snow was flung out by the rear wheels and the car skidded slightly sideways.

‘Get in!’ he bellowed to Dmitri who was still clearing snow from the windows. ‘Lubin — straight down the runway, don’t stop until you reach the fence, then go through it! Understand?’ Then he heard distant, toylike detonations. The car seemed plucked at, assailed by small pebbles. Dmitri’s features flattened into caricature against the passenger window, then slid out of sight.

‘Dmitri-!’ he yelled, opening the door, looking down to inspect the dead features that stared up at him. Two shots passed above his head, shattering the window on the other side of the car.

‘Go, go!’ Marfa was screaming at Lubin.

‘No!’ Vorontsyev cried out, but the car lurched forward, leaving Dmitri as a shapeless lump in the snow, diminishing.

More shots Lock heard the shooting, at first with great clarity, then more distantly as the steward slammed the passenger door shut.

He heard the Mercedes accelerate, then that noise, too, was lost in the babble of panic from the aft cabin. He switched his attention — slowly, with a great effort of concentration — to Turgenev.

And shook his head.

‘Don’t call — them, uh? Stupid ‘

Turgenev sat back in his seat. Lock had no more than minutes now; his blinking the cabin into focus was a nervous tic, regular and compulsive. His face was ashen, there was blood on his chin which he had not bothered to wipe away. His breathing was irregular, less of a struggle but like a fading signal from a distant transmitter. Turgenev knew he had only to wait for five, ten minutes — gestured with his eyes to warn the steward, who had appeared behind Lock. The man nodded his understanding and retreated behind the curtain.

‘Don’t count on it,’ Lock said quietly.

Lock listened to the subsiding babble from the other cabin.

Soon, they’d open the door and bellow their identities into the storm, hoping not to get killed. Or they’d tell Bakunin or whoever was out there they had only one dying man to content themselves with … Soon.

‘You’ll never know if they made it,’ Turgenev offered.

‘Neither will you — Pete.’ He suppressed a threatened fit of coughing. He heard his lighter, slower breathing. It wouldn’t be long now, not long at all. ‘Beth. Why?’

‘What? Oh — that was handled badly, John. It shouldn’t have happened.’

‘It did, though …’

‘Yes, it did. Look, John, I can still save your life!’ It was talk, just talk. ‘I can get you to hospital, I can keep you alive, John!’

‘You — emptied my … life, Pete. It isn’t anything ~ any more.’

He heard the steward move behind his seat and managed a louder voice: ‘Crazy to try!’ He smiled as he heard the man retreat to the aft cabin. There was the silence of a tense audience in the rest of the Learjet.

‘John, this is crazy. You’re crazy. This revenge thing. It isn’t how things work…’ His voice insinuated. There was a not unkindly authority in its tone. ‘Lock, you — people like you you’re just romantics … This doesn’t solve anything, even begin to. The world is shit. Lock. Everywhere, in every way. You used to think Afghanistan was a good war, that you had God on your side, that you were helping …’

Lock watched Turgenev lean closer to him, as if confiding some important truth.

‘It was bad through and through, John, that war. It was the world in microcosm … Let me help you ‘

Lock blinked with a furious, futile rapidity. He felt himself retreat from the cabin. The ringing of the telephone set in the arm of Turgenev’s seat was very distant and quiet.

Turgenev’s hand moved to the phone. Lock struggled to attend to the movement, lurching more upright — to be doubled up in a blind, uncontrollable fit of coughing. Blood on his hands, on the gleaming barrel of the pistol … Then hands on him, a hand grabbing for his pistol -

which fired. Lock saw nothing, heard the noise of the gun, twice, felt a weight fall crushingly onto his back … lost consciousness.

The steward snatched up the receiver, gabbled into it. Turgenev’s body had toppled sideways into the narrow aisle. Lock’s had slid down in his seat so that his blind eyes stared up at the steward. His young, expressionless face saw blood dribbled down the dead man’s chin.

‘Yes, yes.-! Both dead! Both — we are all safe, yes, Colonel, we are all safe!’

Relief coursed through the steward. He put down the receiver, then stepped over Turgenev’s sprawled body towards the door.

He opened it, shivering in the icy cold.

A moment after the impact of the projectile, the aircraft was engulfed in flame.