Moskva

55 Hearts of Ice

It turned on whether Alex was right. If they intended to kill her, then surrendering would hasten that. She was only good as a bargaining chip while Tom was free. If they didn’t intend to kill her, then not surrendering might get her hurt.

In anger, or to put pressure on him.

So, did they intend to kill her or not? The question went round Tom’s head as he slid from empty room to empty room, listening at doors, following the echo of footsteps, trying to work out where they’d taken her.

Maybe, Tom decided, General Dennisov intended to return her.

It was Kyukov who’d told Alex she was going to be killed. Maybe General Dennisov hadn’t been part of that conversation. Maybe it was Kyukov who didn’t intend to return her.

Tom thought of the Soviet boys in Berlin, bound by the murder of one of their own, their lives haunted by the ghost of a German child whose death had been worse than Becca’s ever could have been. He wondered whether Beziki had been telling the truth about not being in the room when Golubtsov died.

I am a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation…

There were times Tom hated the heartless bastard.

Now was one of them.

As he headed for the slaughter floor to check they weren’t holding Alex there, he felt rather than saw a shadow at the edge of his vision. Swinging round, Tom stepped back, tight to the wall.

The corridor down which he glanced was empty.

Returning the way he’d come, he cut through the offal room, moving to where he’d just been from another direction, and heard breathing. As footsteps approached, he tightened his grip on the bolt gun, rammed it against the head of the person turning the corner and only just stopped himself pulling the trigger. The dark eyes of a terrified old woman looked up at him. Very slowly, Tom removed the gun.

‘Go home,’ he said. ‘You’re not safe here.’

She pointed at the ground.

Looking around him, Tom said, ‘You live here?’

She nodded.

‘You know all the rooms?’

She shrugged to say of course she did. She was the one who cleaned them and kept the machinery operating.

‘I’m looking for a girl.’

He would have said more but she was already moving. When she looked back, Tom realized he was meant to follow.

The old woman stopped outside the freezer room and stood as tall as she could to peer through the glass porthole in its heavy door. Stepping back, she gestured for Tom to do the same, flicking a switch beside the door so that he could see better.

Alex was in there.

She scrambled up as the lights came on, heading for the door, her arms hugging her body, eyes suddenly full of hope. She’d been stripped to his shirt and put in there half naked. She shook so badly it looked like she had a fever.

He stepped back so she could see who it was.

‘Tom…’ Alex pointed at the handle and Tom reached for it, feeling it refuse to turn. He caught the exact moment hope fled her eyes.

There was no key.

Then he saw a flap beside the door, flicked it up and found a number pad underneath. ‘What’s the code?’ he demanded.

The old woman shrugged.

‘Tell me the number.’

She shrugged again, stepping back when Tom raised his bolt gun.

‘How can you not know the number?’

She spread her hands. It was a very Russian gesture.

‘Where can I find the general?’

Fear filled her eyes and she was backing away before Tom could stop her.

He let her go, almost following her in case she went to tell the general where he was. Only then she’d have to explain about leading Tom to the freezer-room door. Why, he wondered, had she done that?

If she’d taken pity on Alex, why not the others?

Tom put his face to the porthole. Alex waited on the far side, still hugging herself against the cold.

‘I’ll get you out,’ he promised.

She mouthed something he couldn’t hear.

Tom hoped it was Good luck and not Please don’t go.

Striding away from where Alex was trapped, Tom turned out the lights as he went until he’d put half a dozen rooms into darkness and still found himself facing only emptiness. Should he kill one of them or surrender himself, as the general demanded? How could he do either if he couldn’t find them and they wouldn’t face him?

‘Fuck this,’ Tom said.

Beneath a boning table next to a bandsaw he found rags and a small drum of industrial alcohol. He already knew where to find bottles: outside in the loading bay. Tipping alcohol into five empty bottles in turn, Tom stuffed rags in their mouths and headed back inside.

The first Molotov cocktail was lit before he even made it through the storeroom door. He hurled it into the cupboard holding the stun guns, hearing glass break and seeing fire blossom. The second and third and the half-empty drum of alcohol followed. He shut the door behind him.

Tom made it to the next room before the blanks started exploding.

Behind him, box after box went up, the clatter of spent cases slamming into walls, the steel door of the storeroom and the cupboard itself, loud enough to drown out all the other noises in the factory. It sounded like a small war.

Sirens wailed as fire alarms triggered, the remaining lights went down and emergency bulkheads flickered on in every room. The moving rail that had run without ceasing since Tom had entered the factory abruptly stopped. In the sudden silence of the alarms being shut off, Tom heard the clang of a steel door being thrown open.

There’d been another room and he’d missed it.

A second clang told him the door was shut again.

Kyukov came into the gloom, pistol held up and ready, his gaze fixed on the doors to the slaughter floor and the offal room. Throwing over a steel packing table, Tom ducked down behind it just as the man saw him and fired.

The bullet put a dent in the steel the size of Tom’s fist. A second bullet followed. The third tore the metal.

‘Should have surrendered,’ Kyukov shouted.

In answer, Tom lobbed a Molotov high over the table’s edge and heard it smash on concrete. He threw the last one after it, hearing Kyukov swear and drop his pistol to beat at his burning clothes.

Tom closed the gap in seconds.

Putting the stun gun to Kyukov’s right shoulder, he pulled its trigger.

The steel bolt lanced from the muzzle, shattered the man’s shoulder blade and instantly retracted.

Kyukov screamed.

By the time he stopped screaming, Tom had his pistol. Clicking the safety catch, Tom pushed the gun into his belt without even thinking. Then he kicked Kyukov’s legs from under him and slotted another blank into the bolt gun. Putting the muzzle to Kyukov’s head, he demanded the code for the freezer door.

For a second, Tom thought Kyukov would obey.

‘You want the girl to live,’ Kyukov said. ‘You’ll put that down and get me upstairs. That’s where the general is. In case you’ve been looking.’

Tom punched him.

When Kyukov looked up, he was grinning. His bloody teeth were gritted, his shoulder shattered and there was murder in his eyes, but he was grinning.

‘That’s not going to work,’ he said.

‘What’s the keypad code?’

‘I don’t know. Ask the general. He’d know.’

‘Give me the number,’ Tom demanded.

‘Or what? You’ll shoot me through the head? That won’t give you the number. Come on. Help me to the general. You wouldn’t want Alex to die.’

‘This is your last chance,’ Tom said.

It was the man’s widening grin that made Tom drop to his knees, put the bolt gun to Kyukov’s other shoulder and fire.

Four and a half inches of steel bolt did its work.

‘The number?’ Tom demanded.

He had to wait for Kyukov to stop screaming.

‘I don’t know it,’ Kyukov said. ‘Honestly. I don’t.’

Putting the reloaded gun to Kyukov’s kneecap, Tom pressed down and curled his finger round the trigger.

‘One, nine, four, five,’ Kyukov said. ‘One, nine, four, five.’

Tom pulled the trigger anyway.

Kyukov’s scream lasted for ever. A for ever during which the noise of the exploding blanks in the storeroom died away, and once Kyukov’s screams had stopped too, the factory seemed almost quiet.

‘I told you,’ Kyukov gasped. ‘I told you.’

‘What’s the number?’ Tom demanded.

‘That’s the number,’ Kyukov said. ‘I promise.’

1945… The fall of Berlin, the end of the war. Where all this came back to. That’s the number. It probably was too.

Tom left Kyukov on the floor.

‘For really good results,’ Kyukov called after him, ‘you need to score human skin before roasting. And always eat hot…’ He caught Tom’s shocked look and grinned.

His grin suddenly faded as Tom came back.

The final bolt took Kyukov an inch above an imaginary line between his eyes, which was what the manuals recommended for larger animals. When Tom turned, he found the old woman staring at him. She shrugged.

He didn’t expect her to speak.

He’d already worked out that she was mute.

The lights were off in the freezer room. That should have told Tom something. But he turned them on from instinct, still expecting to see Alex. When he couldn’t, he flipped up the keypad’s flap and punched in its code.

The door opened instantly.

The huge space was empty; Alex was gone.

He didn’t need to search the room because there were no hiding places. It even felt empty. Unless that was him.