Moskva (14 page)

The elderly Zil parked beyond the gates of the embassy had the profile of a slightly bloated shark and the chrome smile of a limousine escaped from the sixties. Tom thought the woman climbing from the front was a chauffeur until he registered the braid on her shoulders and her peaked hat. Her uniform looked new. Although Tom doubted if anything straight off the peg would come with creases quite that sharp. Her shoes were sensible, though, stretched across the instep and slightly down at the heel. They were polished to a high shine.

She stared at him doubtfully.

‘You’re late.’

‘I was shaving.’

‘Not well, from the look of it.’

Putting his hand to his ear, Tom felt a sticky patch where he’d nicked himself with the dry blade. He should have been another ten minutes late to see the ambassador and done it properly. Did he look as English to the Russian as she looked Russian to him? Not slight like a gymnast, or thickset like a shot-putter, but compact and stern, her fair hair folded into a complicated braid.

‘At the gate. What did that woman say?’

‘Mary? She said not to trust you.’

‘Good advice. We won’t be trusting you.’

Tom grinned despite himself and the woman looked
offended. ‘Tom Fox,’ he said, offering his hand. Her shake was every bit as firm as he had expected.

‘Svetlana Milova, Major.’

‘How do you do.’

‘We should go.’

‘How far is it to your office?’

‘We’re not going to my office.’

‘You’re
militsiya
?’

‘I’m Vnutrenniye Voiska.’

‘But you are the officer who telephoned Lady Masterton to say her daughter had been spotted shoplifting in GUM?’

‘Telephoned who?’

She lied badly and drove well.

‘Why,’ said Tom, ‘would a
militsiya
major tell a missing girl’s mother that her daughter had been seen in GUM if it was untrue? Hypothetically speaking.’

‘To see if the mother knew where the girl really was.’

Major Milova ran a red light and hit her horn when a truck threatened to pull out from a side street ahead. Glancing across, she checked to see whether Tom had another question, and when he didn’t, she added, ‘For example, if she dropped everything in hope of finding her daughter, you’d know she didn’t.’

At Sad Sam, the major came up with him, looking around his flat with open interest, and hovered in the bedroom doorway while Tom dragged on heavyweight jeans and a warm leather jacket. When she stepped in after him it was to straighten the trousers he’d just hung on his wardrobe door.

‘Now we should go.’

‘Is it far?’

‘Further than foreigners are usually allowed.’

Since that was sixty kilometres from Moscow it didn’t tell him much. Climbing into the car, Tom winced as Major
Milova pulled out in front of a truck, which obediently braked to let her in.

‘They say you’re army,’ she said after a while.

Tom nodded, realized she was too busy negotiating the city’s outskirts to register his answer and left the reply unspoken. She knew anyway. They drove on in silence, until the roads got rougher and the fields bigger, the sky darkened and the Zil turned on to a dual carriageway with signs for Leningrad.

‘You’ve been shot?’

‘Twice,’ Tom said.

The major snorted. ‘Five times.’

She looked as if she meant it too. Her eyes were on the darkness beyond the window, and her cap was low, making an angle with her cheekbones. Tom found it impossible to guess her age. Younger than him. Her blonde braids were so neat they looked artificial.

‘Afghanistan?’ he asked.

‘No. The only women there are nurses, cooks, support staff. They do their duty on their backs comforting our glorious troops. No woman but a fool would go to Afghanistan. These are campaigns you won’t know about.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we don’t talk about them.’

It took Tom a moment to realize she’d switched to English, and very good English at that. ‘Where did you learn?’

‘London. Where did you learn Russian?’

‘School, then a refresher course before I came out.’

‘Your schools teach Russian?’

‘Mine did.’

‘One of those expensive ones for aristocrats?’

‘State-run, boarding school. For children from problem families.’

The car’s headlights revealed a town ahead. Falling snow
reduced its main street to shapes glimpsed through fog every few seconds, when the wipers scraped the windscreen clear. The heater gave off little heat and a stale, bar-fire smell. After a while, the major reached without looking to turn it off. The Zil grew chillier.

‘You’re shivering,’ she said after a while.

‘I’ll survive.’

At a roadside stop – little more than an awning over a cart, with a brazier up front to warm patrons – she halted long enough to let Tom stamp his feet, eat a baked potato, drink harsh coffee from a tin mug and vanish behind a canvas screen to piss. It was too dark for Tom to see how yellow he made the snow. Very, from the size of his headache. It was always the dehydration that got him.

‘I’d like to ask you something,’ said Major Milova, once the huge black Zil was back on the road. ‘Why didn’t you tell us sooner about the girl?’

‘You’re telling me you didn’t know?’

‘That’s not the point.’ The major hesitated. ‘Although I personally didn’t know until yesterday.’

‘Should you have done?’

‘Only if the cult element is true. You realize she could just be hiding out in the countryside with her boyfriend? Young girls do that. Especially spoilt Western ones. We have people watching the building. They’ll be able to tell us more.’

‘Who told you yesterday?’

‘The minister briefed me himself.’

‘Vedenin?’

‘He had it from the local
militsiya
. They found the location when looking for something else.’

Tom spent the next ten minutes trying to work out what Alex or anyone else would get out of joining a cult, while the road became a ragged twist of rapidly unfolding hedges on
either side. A sense of belonging, maybe? It was easy to see what cult leaders got out of it: money, sex and power. The things everyone wanted. They just got more of them. Tom’s thoughts stalled there. Largely because Major Milova glared at a lorry blocking their way and overtook it on the first clear stretch, her wheels bouncing on pitted tarmac at the road’s edge. Adjusting for black ice on a bend without seeming to notice, she settled back, the headlights of her Zil revealing the now empty road.

‘You stink of alcohol,’ she said after a while.

‘Last night’s. You don’t drink?’

‘My grandfather drank. You need to stop for vodka?’

Tom shook his head.

‘That’s something.’

Her words left Tom wondering when one beer had become three, and three five. At what point had drinking in bad bars stopped being part of his cover and became his preferred way of life? When the cracks with Caro appeared? The first time he realized she’d taken a lover? It would be easy to blame her for what he’d become. It was always easier to blame someone else. Dennisov was his perfect drinking partner. Next to Dennisov, he was practically teetotal. And Becca … He’d been absent for half her life and back just in time for her death. He’d been drunk for a week after that.

‘Did your grandfather ever give up?’

‘After my grandmother was arrested.’

‘What happened?’

‘He lived. She died.’

The set of Major Milova’s mouth and the intensity with which she stared at the darkened road made it clear that further questions were unwelcome.
So much hurt compressed into so few words,
Tom thought.

He knew he was guilty of that.

Half an hour later, when the snow finally stopped falling and the night sky cleared, and the moon suddenly became visible, and lights of a lorry they’d overtaken were so far behind they appeared only occasionally, looking like the single headlamp of a distant motorbike, she asked how he had met Gabashville.

‘He asked me to dinner.’

‘You met him before that,’ she said firmly.

‘If you know, then why ask?’

‘To see how much we can trust you.’

‘I thought you said you didn’t?’

She sucked her teeth in irritation and drove on.

She drove fast, using all of the road, taking the middle line through corners and overtaking anything in their way. Tom had been told a Zil produced insane amounts of torque but this was tuned to a higher spec than he’d thought possible.

‘BMW,’ she said, when he told her that.

‘You swapped the blocks?’

‘Of course not. 7695cc, 315 hp, 120 mph. The Zil has an excellent engine. However, 0 to 100 km in 13 seconds. A West German diplomat was caught …’ She shrugged. ‘Being indiscreet in his choice of friends. He went home hurriedly and left his car. It was a nice car. We borrowed a few parts.’

She took the next corner so fast Tom braced himself as the snow tyres skittered, although she pulled out of the skid before it really began. ‘Combat driving?’ he asked.

‘You did the same course?’

‘Something similar.’

‘You use live ammunition in training?’

‘Thunderflashes and blanks.’

‘I don’t know why we haven’t overrun you yet.’

Villages, a town and then a lone garage loomed out of the
darkness and Major Milova pulled on to its forecourt without indicating, edging her way to the head of a five-vehicle queue and parking diagonally across the front of a Moskva that had been about to reach the pump. The young man inside didn’t even seem surprised.

‘You want cigarettes?’

Tom dug in his pocket for roubles.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘The Soviet Union will pay.’

Clambering out, she tramped to a hut lit by a dangling bulb. Through the wide window, Tom watched her point at a phone, say something and pick up its receiver without waiting for an reply. She listened, talked a little, then listened some more. When she came back she looked thoughtful.

‘You know Dennisov?’ she said.

‘I thought your interest was Gabashville?’

‘I’m told you drink in his bar. You’re friends.’

‘We share a taste in music. He’s a good man.’

‘Did this good man tell you he killed his commander?’ The stiffness of her shoulders told him she expected a reply.

‘What should I call you?’ Tom asked.

She glanced over at his question. Waited.

‘Just, if we’re going to be working together …’

‘Since I have more combat experience, you could try “sir”.’

Tom couldn’t tell if she was joking. ‘If Dennisov killed his CO, why isn’t he under arrest? Come to that, why is he still alive?’

‘You know who his father is?’

‘That’s the only reason?’

‘It helped. His father is a Soviet Hero. Dennisov hates the man. For some people … serious people … that’s more valuable than any patronage his father could give.’ Major Milova hesitated. ‘Also, his CO was not a good man. He was not even a good CO. Dennisov’s report said the man died on
impact. Dennisov and his sergeant survived, the sergeant dying of his wounds soon afterwards.’

‘Then how do you know he killed his CO?’

‘Before he died, the sergeant told a nurse.’

‘What does she say now?’

Major Milova’s mouth soured. ‘She insists she didn’t hear anything like that. As for the colleague she confided in … there was an unfortunate incident involving some of Dennisov’s troop who thought she talked too much. They decided to fill her mouth for her. She’s retired. Gone back to the Crimea, I believe.’

‘I’ve worked with COs who should have been killed.’

‘Mine have always been outstanding …’

He couldn’t tell if that was a joke either.

The major went back to positioning her car for corners and sliding through bends at speeds that had Tom discreetly gripping the door and wondering about the state of her tyres. It wasn’t malicious. He wasn’t even sure it was conscious. She was simply enjoying herself.

‘Svetlana,’ she said finally. ‘You call me Svetlana.’

‘Tom.’

She took her hand from the wheel and they shook awkwardly.

The major’s fingers were so close to frozen Tom turned on the Zil’s heater without asking. The thing still stank like an electric fire but the interior was almost warm by the time she flicked the car on to a side road and hugged a tight turn that took them on to a narrow track up a hill. The track had been gritted, which was just as well given the black rock rising on one side and the ditch on the other. She brought the Zil to an abrupt halt at a barrier, winding down the window at a gesture from a guard who stepped from the trees.

‘Major Milova,’ she said.

A torch played across her face while a second guard stood directly in front of the Zil with his SLR at the ready.

‘And him?’

‘Major Fox. He’s with me. We’re expected.’

They knew that already, because the bar came up and the first guard rolled away a cement-filled barrel to let the Zil through. The snow banks beyond were pristine and the birches ghostlike. Neat wooden houses stood amongst the trees, each one a hundred paces from the next. The further they drove, the bigger the dachas and the wider the gaps between them. By the time the road turned to climb again, the dachas had high fences and heavy gates protecting wide snow-covered lawns. The last of them had its gates open.

‘Vedenin’s?’

‘Of course. He’s expecting us.’

The door opened just as they reached it, and it took Tom a second to recognize the grinning young man standing there. ‘Come in,’ Vladimir Vedenin said, opening his arms as if he intended to embrace them both. ‘The old man’s waiting.’

Stepping hurriedly aside, Svetlana indicated that Tom should go first.

Vladimir Vedenin led them through a cluttered hall, past a wall hanging that seemed to show a squat Viking couple standing side by side, and into a kitchen, where Minister Vedenin stood in the middle of an admiring crowd.

Tom recognized three men from the minister’s group at the embassy party. A woman whose face he recognized from
Pravda
, astronaut-turned-politician, if he remembered rightly. What he couldn’t see was the young man who’d been running Vedenin’s security on New Year’s Eve. ‘Dmitry left us,’ Vladimir said.