Red Templar

14

The telephone trilled. Genrikhovich stared at it as though the plastic device were a scorpion. It rang a second time. He picked it up and listened. The blood drained from his face and Holliday thought he was going to faint. Genrikhovich hung up the telephone and dropped into his old wooden chair.

“We have been betrayed,” said the curator, his face the color of ash.

“Who?” Holliday said quickly, getting up from the drafting chair.

“One of the secretarial people staffing the basement level. She is an informer for the FSB. The file boy must have told her I was here.”

“Who warned you?”

“A friend. It is not important.”

“How long do we have?”

“According to my friend, not long. They are sending a squad of OMON.”

“Shit,” breathed Holliday. OMON Black Beret squads could be armed with anything-AK-47s, PK machine guns, Bizon folding-stock submachine guns, AN97 assault rifles with under-barrel grenade launchers. Their motto was, “We know no mercy and do not ask for any.” Their unit insignia was the roaring head of a white Siberian tiger. Not exactly comforting news. “How many exits?”

“Dozens, scores,” answered Genrikhovich. “I have never counted.”

“How will they come?”

“Probably the same way we did. Either that or through the courtyard entrance to the basement level.”

“What’s the quickest way out?”

“Those two exits. The others lead onto the square or onto the Neva Embankment.”

“Do they have a boat unit?”

“In St. Petersburg, yes. They will be waiting.”

“That’s out then,” said Holliday. Something was niggling at him in the outer suburbs of his brain, but he couldn’t quite see it through the clutter of a billion other pieces of useless historical information. Who really cared if the thing they used to pull back the spring on a French crossbow was called a goat’s-foot lever? And why was he thinking about key lime pie? Or Orson Welles, the theme music for The Third Man echoing furiously in his head like a burrowing earwig?

“We are running out of time, compadre,” urged Eddie calmly.

Key lime, Harry Lime, the character played by Orson Welles in The Third Man. The cats. The Hermitage cats. Where did the rats come from?

“Are there any old tunnels down here, maybe left over from World War Two?” he asked suddenly.

“My father never told me of any. . ” Genrikhovich paused for a moment, then nodded. “St. Petersburg has always had terrible problems with sewage. Hundreds of years ago houses would connect their wastewater pipes to the small storm sewers. Everything became terribly polluted. Nothing was done until 1924 or 1925. They began building outfall tunnels on the embankments. The war stopped the system, and when the war was over they began an entirely new system.”

“Is there one of those embankment outfall tunnels near here?”

“One was dug directly beneath Palace Square to connect the Neva with the outflow from the Moika Canal. It was built between the Hermitage Theatre and the Old Hermitage.”

“Can we get to it from here?”

“I expect so.” Genrikhovich nodded.

“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” said Holliday, grabbing Genrikhovich by the arm and pushing him toward the door.

“The file!” Genrikhovich wailed.

“Bring it, amigo,” Holliday said to Eddie as he thrust Genrikhovich forward.

“Si, companero,” answered the Cuban, stuffing the transparencies into the pink accordion folder, along with any other documents on Genrikhovich’s desk. He followed Holliday’s back as he went through the door.

“Left?” Holliday asked, still gripping Genrikhovich’s arm.

The older man nodded mutely, his breath coming in short, unpleasant-sounding pants.

Turning left, they headed down a narrow, linoleum-floored corridor. It was green to the wainscoting and yellowing dirty white above, like everything else Holliday had seen of the Hermitage. On the floors above him were the treasures of centuries, and all he could see was green-and-white walls and tangles of pipes and conduits overhead. They reached a stone wall about a hundred yards along, probably some sort of supporting buttress. A gouged hole had been hacked through the stonework and a tall metal door fitted, the masonry roughly patched around it. Holliday hauled it open and they stepped through into another blank, empty length of corridor. As they set foot in the passage, red lights in the ceiling every twenty-five feet or so began to blink furiously, and Holliday could hear the distant sound of a wailing siren.

“They are locking the place down! We are trapped!” Genrikhovich moaned.

“They haven’t caught us yet,” said Holliday. He grimaced, imagining what would happen if and when they did. In the old days it would have been a quick trip to the cellar of the Lubyanka at 19 Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow and a single tap to the back of the head with a nine-millimeter Makarov. Now he wasn’t sure what the procedure would be. Certainly nothing pleasant.

They reached a massive industrial boiler room, machinery already clanging and booming as the ancient furnaces began the long, ponderous chore of heating a building the length of a football field with a thousand drafts and leaks from a time when peasants, coal and entire forests of firewood were cheap and accessible.

A dozen men in blue coveralls and wearing goggles and hard hats swarmed over a maze of interconnected up-and-down catwalks, tending the machinery like something out of Metropolis or 1984, worker ants tending a series of fat, ancient and rusty brown queens. Steam rose everywhere, and the hot, wet air echoed with the sounds of men calling to one another above the clatter of the pipes. Nobody noticed Holliday, Eddie and Genrikhovich, or if they were noticed they were ignored.

“There,” said Genrikhovich, pointing. Holliday looked. At first glance it appeared to be the remains of what once might have been a coal bin, but then he saw. Behind a bulbous electrical generator there was a man-high vent covered by a heavy mesh grille. Holliday herded Genrikhovich toward the opening with Eddie following, the Cuban’s sharp eyes watching the workers carefully.

Holliday reached the grille, Genrikhovich crowding in behind him. “We must hurry, please,” he said, his voice whining, one hand clutching Holliday’s wrist. Holliday shook it off. He could feel warm air pushing on the back of his neck and knew, intentionally or not, that the big vent was exhausting the hot air out of the boiler room. Somewhere there’d be a big white plume of condensation riding the cool air outside.

The vent was about eight feet in diameter, hinged on one side and locked on the other with a padlock through a tongue and hasp. The metal was iron and it was flaked heavily with layers of rust and grime. If Genrikhovich was right, this had been intended as one of those 1925 outfalls and never used. The padlock was a long laminated brass shackle style with the name VARLUX along the bottom, and clearly a copy of an American Master brand lock. The padlock looked fairly new. He checked the bottom of the lock. There was a faint MADE IN CHINA stamp. Everything was made in China these days. It wasn’t a good sign.

Holliday looked around. A long, adjustable spring-handled monkey wrench lay on top of the generator casing. He picked up the wrench, put the short, flat-sided grip into the shackle of the lock and pulled hard. There was a dry snapping sound as the tongue of the hasp snapped off the vent grille. Eddie darted forward and caught the lock before it hit the floor.

“Gracias,” said Holliday.

“No es nada, mi amigo,” replied the Cuban softly. “Your Spanish is becoming muy fluido.” He handed the lock to Holliday, who slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

He dug the short arm of the wrench through the grille and pulled. There was a ratcheting squeal and it opened six inches. He looked over his shoulder but no one seemed to have noticed. He pulled again. There was a second high-pitched grinding sound from the hinges and the screen opened two feet. “Go!” Holliday whispered to Genrikhovich, pushing him through the opening. He turned to Eddie, but the Cuban was already moving behind the big generator. “What the hell are you doing?” Holliday hissed at his friend.

“Momentito,” whispered Eddie, disappearing behind the big piece of electrical equipment. Still, no one paid any attention to them. Holliday waited, his nerves winding up like a clockwork engine. He could feel the fear tickling the hairs at the back of his neck, and out of the corner of his eye he could see one of the blinking red lights, which no one else seemed to have noticed. His mouth was dry as sand. In a few seconds one of the workers would turn and see the light, even if the sound of the siren was buried under the hum and drone of all the machinery in the boiler room.

Finally the Cuban returned. He was holding a giant six-volt dry-cell searchlight.

“I saw this. I thought perhaps it would be good to see where we are going, no?”

“Yes.” Holliday grunted. The Cuban was right. “Go and find Genrikhovich,” he ordered, “He won’t have gone far. I’ll stay here and close things up.”

Eddie nodded. Still holding the monkey wrench, he slipped through the opening and disappeared into the darkness. Holliday followed, then turned and eased the grille until it was open only three or four inches. He fished the lock out of his pocket, hung the shackle over the remains of the hasp and eased the door shut. If anyone gave it a casual look the vent would have appeared to be locked. He turned and stumbled into the darkness.