The Domino Game (6 page)

Vari nestled back into his seat and gave him a single tight nod. “It’s done.” He leaned towards Nikolai, his voice low but exact. “You meet him at the Rossiya Hotel, two hours from now. His room will be booked in the name of Mikhail Tarkovsky. You’re to call reception from your cell when you get there, ask for his room and he’ll give you the number.”

Nikolai was overcome by a surge of disequilibrium, as if his world had just been knocked from its axis. Was he really doing this? He searched for something to say.

“Why the Rossiya?”

The shadow of a smile crossed Vari’s face. “I wondered that myself. A message, maybe? When he and I first met fifteen years back the Rossiya was
our
turf: we used to call her the KGB dining room. Now she’s just like most of the ladies – she belongs to whoever has the money.” The smile faded and he gave a shrug. “I expect they have someone on the payroll who can arrange things the way they like them, and the place is so big it’s easy to disappear. All you have to do is make it to the elevators and after that no one will ever find you. Don’t worry, Niko. He knows what he’s doing: he’s been around the game a long time.”

Vari leaned in close across the table, his dark eyes measuring Nikolai’s resolve. “You’re sure you want to do this, little brother? It’s a big step. The biggest. And you always have the other options.”

Nikolai rubbed his brow. “No I don’t,” he murmured. “Not really. Gilmanov and his wife lost their lives over this. I got him into it. If I sell out now then what he did has no meaning.” His expression had become bleak. “And that’s only part of it. If I don’t act on this, Ivankov will own my soul!”

Vari nodded and glanced aside. “And the second alternative?” he looked back at the younger man. “Taking it up the ladder? You’re sure that’s out as well?”

Nikolai forced a grim smile. “I think you made your point on that one earlier.” He shook his head; sighed. “No. It goes too high. We only have two tapes and they’ve already given us one of the Government’s most senior ministers and the guy one step from the top of the Bureau itself. How many more are there?” He answered his own question. “God knows. And God knows where it might all lead. What I can’t understand is why Ivankov took the risk of making the recordings and transcripts in the first place.”

“Easy,” Vari snorted. “They’re his insurance. Think about it, Niko, these people he’s in bed with have massive power. If anything ever goes wrong for Ivankov they can always fix it, if they have to – if the stakes are high enough to make them want to. And if someone like Ivankov has that sort of stuff on you, that
makes
the stakes high enough. Those records give him immunity, little brother. At least here in Russia they do, anyway.”

Nikolai dragged a long breath. Exhaled, defeated. “You’re right, I suppose. So that brings us back to the third option, doesn’t it?”

He shook his head in silent dismay at what he was about to do. However he rationalized it – however justifiable, in the circumstances, his action might be – the fact remained: he, Nikolai Aven – patriot and crusader – was, technically speaking, about to commit treason.

He looked at Vari across the table. “So… that’s the one we go with.”

Vari studied him for a long moment, as if he were trying to identify any flaw in the depth of Nikolai’s commitment. Eventually he gave a tight nod, lifted the blue plastic bag to the table, reached inside, extracted a sheaf of papers and slid them across the laminate surface.

Nikolai regarded the transcripts with shocked confusion then swung his head upwards.

“You said we should hide them. When I left you in the apartment upstairs that’s what you were doing.”

Vari’s thick eyebrows arched in speculation. “Was I? Or is that just what you assumed? You must learn to be cautious about making assumptions, Niko. In this business they send you flowers for a bad assumption.” He paused to let the words sink in then spoke again, his tone conciliatory this time. “Just a small lesson, little brother, but don’t worry about it. You see, I made an assumption as well.”

The confusion swirled in Nikolai’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Take them.” Vari prodded the papers towards him. “Fold them and put them in your jacket pocket.” Without thinking Nikolai did as he was instructed. Vari continued. “Knowing you as I do, Niko, I assumed that you would take the third option and that’s why I brought the transcripts. This has to be done quickly and you need to produce enough evidence to get their attention right away. The papers will do that, but without the tapes they’re useless. My guess is that the Americans will agree to whatever you want, so long as you can deliver the tapes, and that’s the way you have to play it Niko. You give them a limited time to study the transcripts and make up their minds. A day, no more. Then, if they want to deal, you swap the tapes for their protection.” He shook his head firmly. “No negotiations, Niko, you understand me? Either they’re in or they’re out.”

Nikolai’s eyes drifted aside as he weighed the logic. He looked up sharply.

“And the tapes. Where are they?”

Vari chuckled and closed a hand over Nikolai’s. “Now you’re becoming too suspicious. Behind the stove, little brother. I promise. If the Americans want to deal, then they need to come to you, to your building. They pick you up… you, Natalia, Larisa. You give them the tapes, all at the same time, then you’re home free and they have the dirt on Stephasin and Patrushev to use as and when they please.”

A hint of doubt crept across Nikolai’s face. It suddenly occurred to him that in the speed and confusion of what was happening he had forgotten to question the obvious. “And what if they don’t want to deal?”

Vari’s thick cheek twitched in a wink. “They will, little brother, don’t you worry. The Americans love buying things, especially things like this.”

The realization dawned on Nikolai slowly, like the numbing warmth of a potent vodka coursing through his veins. He stared at his partner with a look of incredulity. “How long?”

Vari tilted his head to the side, pretending perplexed.

Opposite him Nikolai edged forward, his voice a tight, intense whisper. “Quit the innocent crap! You’ve done this before. You
work
for them, don’t you?”

Vari pursed his lips, considering the question. In the end, he shrugged. “Only sometimes.”

“Jesus Christ!” Nikolai hissed.” I don’t believe this!”

Vari regarded him with bemusement. “What’s not to believe? This is Russia.”

The reality set in and Nikolai slumped in his seat. He turned to the window, staring out bleakly at the tiny, ancient church opposite. Once it would have been the heart of the community: now it stood isolated and near derelict, clinging precariously to what little remained of a tiny island of land at the hub of a traffic-crazed intersection. Compromise versus survival. He drew a long breath and let it go, shook his head slowly in resignation and turned back to his partner. “This American. Tell me again, what is his name?”

Vari glanced around at the milling customers. Edged closer and spoke softly, pronouncing each syllable with distinct precision. “Jack Hartman.”

Jack Hartman. Nikolai repeated the name silently to himself, committing it to memory.

“And you’re certain…?” He paused. Rewound. “You’re
absolutely certain
you can trust him?”

6

Outside they separated,
Nikolai crossing the street to Olympic Plaza while Vari headed back in the other direction, towards the side street near Niko’s apartment where he had left the Volga, his empty hands now swinging freely at his side. As they had risen from their seats in the restaurant, Vari, without missing a beat, had turned in an arc and shoveled the blue plastic bag and its contents into the waist-high rubbish bin next to their booth. Seeing Nikolai’s questioning look he had responded with his usual considered logic.

“Now you see it, now you don’t. I came with it, I leave without it, so now they conclude that while we were here we gave everything to someone else. But who? Now they are confused and so they have no idea what to do or who to follow. For a while we have the upper hand.”

Nikolai checked his watch as he walked past the shopping center to the crosswalk. An hour and a half before his meeting at the Rossiya. Ninety minutes to worry about Natalia and Larisa. He drove the thought from his mind and concentrated instead on Vari’s instructions:
Take the Metro across town and back. Switch trains half a dozen times and watch for anyone you see more than once. If you notice someone sticking with you then that’s the person you’re looking for. Don’t worry about trying to lose them. Just remember what they look like and when you get to the hotel do exactly as I told
you.

He crossed with the lights and turned south along the broad pavement, quickening his pace; resisting the urge to glance behind, fixing his eyes instead on the big red “M” that loomed ahead, high above the blunt Soviet facade of the Prospekt Mira Metro. A cluster of food stalls backed onto the curb at the edge of the forecourt. Nikolai plunged into the spice-laden haze that rose from their grills, threaded his way through the loose crowds milling around them and cut across to the bank of heavy timber and glass doors that marked the station entry. He pushed through to the airlock, hauled back the inner door and let it drift closed behind him, cutting dead the mind-blurring drone of traffic noise from the street. For a moment, by comparison, the station hall seemed as silent as a cathedral, then Nikolai’s deadened hearing reprogrammed itself and a new suite of sounds tuned in: the constant soft clack of heels on stone; the low murmur of a thousand muted voices; the quiet mechanical clatter of escalators that never stopped.

He headed for the ticket counters on the left, falling into the longer of the two ragged lines, using the waiting time to scan the crowds.

Saturday midday – not a shadow of rush hour, and Mira wasn’t even that busy a station – but still there were people everywhere.

His eyes swept across the hall and back, uncertain of who or what he might be searching for, registering figures and faces and clothes, willing his brain to print each image to his memory. Was it a man he was looking for? A woman? More than one? And if the other stations were as busy as this – and they would be – what the hell chance did he have of getting a fix on any one individual? Then he saw her, on the escalator, coming up from the concourse below, her head slowly rising above the handrail, and his heart stalled.

The pink dress, with its puff sleeves and white lace collar. The shining, dark hair drawn back from her perfect pale face and knotted high in a sleek pony tail, Boris the Bear dangling from one tiny hand, while the woman beside her clasped tightly to the other. Larisa and Raisa returning late from their shopping expedition, the neighbor shepherding the little girl ahead of her. Just meters away from him but a world apart.

Every instinct of Nikolai’s being impelled him to rush to his daughter. To grab her, scoop her up in his arms and carry her away with him, but to where? To safety? And where was that?

Instead he forced himself to remain where he stood and let them pass oblivious to his presence, watching silently as his daughter skipped ahead, a tiny but intense burst of energy and light and color bobbing through the somber hall, dragging Boris and Raisa along behind in her eagerness to get back home.

In the end it was the voice of the sullen clerk, amplified through the thick, grimy glass of the ticket booth, that drew him away.

Nikolai slid a crumpled note towards the woman, waited while the Metro tokens and change rained into the brass tray then scooped them up and stepped aside, turning back to the exit. They were at the door now, Raisa reaching across Larisa’s head, clutching at the shiny steel rail, hauling it back, Larisa skipping ahead of her, through the airlock, pushing her way out into the sunlight. And then the heavy panels swung shut behind them and they were gone.

Nikolai stood frozen, feeling the sharp edges of the tokens and coins biting into the soft flesh of his palm as his fingers closed round them. Then, very slowly, he forced himself to turn away.

He crossed to the turnstiles, slipped a token into the slot and stepped through the gate. Made his way to the escalator and rode it down to the Circle Line, stepping through the huge steel arch at the bottom onto the surreal, chandelier-lined concourse. Pure light bloomed upwards to the vaulted ceiling, glistened on the gold leaf of the rococo moldings and gleamed against the cream marble walls. The Moscow paradox, Nikolai reflected: the further underground you went here, the more civilized everything appeared.

He cut through an archway onto the westbound platform, drifting into the ranks of waiting commuters, willing himself to surrender the image of his daughter and to concentrate instead on Vari’s instructions. His eyes settled on the digital time board above the tunnel entry, watching fifty seconds trip past before he felt the familiar, cool rush of air against his cheek. He turned back as the train emerged from the darkness, its six blue carriages glissing to a stop along the length of the platform.

Compartment doors hissed open; passengers spilled out; those around him pressed forward. Nikolai held back. Glanced at his watch and looked around as if searching for a lost friend, his eyes skimming the crowds, trying to assess whether anyone else on the platform had become hesitant as well. At what he judged to be the last second he stepped across the threshold into the nearest carriage, grabbed an upright pole and pivoted back to face the doors as they snapped closed in front of him. He settled into his space, regarding the other passengers. Some chatted together quietly. Others studied newspapers or paperbacks in preoccupied silence. Most sat staring vacantly beyond the windows. Even if there was no one here who seemed remotely interested in his existence, that still left the five other compartments ahead and behind.

The overhead lights flickered and the car lurched. Nikolai tightened his grip on the pole, bracing himself as the engine grabbed the slack, then they were moving. Surging forward and picking up speed as the carriages skimmed the platform, the thick electric hum of the engine consumed by the rush of displaced air as the train plunged into the cool darkness of the tunnel.

Nikolai rocked with the motion, holding his vantage point at the door through the first stop. At the next, Belorusskaya, he got off. Tagged the swarm through the archway into the main concourse then stepped aside and paused for a moment, as if gathering his bearings, letting the tide of bodies surge around him. His eyes swept the crowd, searching without success for any familiar image. But then with trains coming and going each way every ninety seconds – with the concourse a perpetual maze of human confusion – why would that be a surprise?

Belorusskaya was an interchange station. He wanted the Green Line now: up a level. He headed for the escalators, passing through the halls of pink and black Armenian marble, beneath overhead mosaics depicting scenes of rural splendor. Superbly executed, Nikolai gave them that, but still just Soviet propaganda. Like those stirring posters by Mayakovsky – the cluster of healthy, bright-eyed young folk brandishing a streaming flag and pointing dramatically upwards to something apparently magnificent, but beyond mortal view: presumably a vision of the glorious future that communism promised. As it happened, even Mayakovsky had become so depressed about reality he’d killed himself before he reached forty.

Nikolai fell into line and stepped onto the wooden treads, starting the rise upwards. Had travelled maybe ten meters when a thunderous female voice burst from the public address system overhead. He swung back to the attendant’s booth below where an elderly, overweight, blue-uniformed woman bellowed into an ancient telephone handset, berating a group of teenagers she’d seen clambering up the central escalator, jostling other passengers aside. To his astonishment the kids froze: shrank back and instantly transformed into model citizens. How did this work, he wondered? These were post-Soviet teenagers – Armani T-shirts, Nikes, Walkmen they’d probably stolen, or at least stolen the money to buy. Yet the throwback voice of a Soviet authority they’d never actually experienced still had the power to stop them dead in their tracks. He glanced back at the booth in time to see a faint smile of triumph slide across the uniformed woman’s face. Watched as she replaced the telephone handset and sat and folded her arms, a remnant of a dissolute regime left stranded here beneath the streets by a rapidly receding tide. Yet in many ways remnants like this were all that now remained to separate order from chaos. It was a depressing thought and his own reality was depressing enough.

There were three escalators: two up and one down. Nikolai swung back to face the upward journey, his eyes trailing right to the central escalator that followed the same course as his own. His gaze ran across the faces of its travelers: masks of indifference, except for one. One that was alert and animated and had been watching him before quickly turning away. He caught his breath and let the sweep of his gaze move on, pretending to have noticed nothing, but running the match in his brain. Hair, height, clothing all nondescript, but eyes that were unmistakable: eyes the color of pale gray-green glass. He swung around to the front without missing a beat, staring blandly ahead, careful to conceal the unexpected surge of confidence he now felt within. Nursing the fragile hope that he might still have some control over his own destiny.

He took the Green Line all the way south to Tsaritsyno in the suburbs where the station traffic was thinner, then switched platforms and rode back to Paveletskaya and picked up the Circle Line again. Took the Circle west to Park Kultury then changed to Red, back to Okhotnyy Ryad. Five legs to the journey, six stations in a little over an hour, and he had made her at four of them. She was still with him, trailing thirty meters behind when, at twelve minutes before two, Nikolai emerged from the subway into the shallow sunlight on Revolution Square.

The Rossiya was on the embankment, a few hundred meters south. It took him ten minutes, walking briskly, cutting through the backstreet behind GUM then swinging back towards Red Square. He entered the huge hotel through the western foyer, following Vari’s instructions; made his way across to the tour desk to the left, pretending to browse the brochures while he waited to see whether the woman followed.

She did, half a minute later. Entered and paused at the edge of the huge compass that marked the center of the lobby carpet, glancing around with apparent disinterest then, finding him, peeled aside, pretending to be drawn to a showcase display promoting a nearby casino.

Nikolai plucked a leaflet from a rack, began scanning it and half turned as if searching for better light. From where he stood fifteen meters away he could see the colored litter of gaming chips scattered across the base of the showcase, above them a roulette wheel propped upright against a panel of indigo baize. She knew what she was doing, he had no doubt about that. The dark fabric backdrop shadowed the inside of the glass creating a mirror that allowed her to read his every movement without turning.

Well, she could watch, but she wasn’t going to follow.

Nikolai slipped the brochure back into its rack, turned on his heels and strode off towards one of the two open staircases that flanked the foyer and led to the mezzanine. The woman at the showcase let him have a head start and then fell in behind. At the top he turned along the open gallery, past the balcony bar, following the icons that pointed the way to the men’s washroom. She reached the top of the stairs and started to follow, then realizing his destination, peeled aside again, pulling a compact from her purse and pretending to study her make-up. He got his last glimpse of her as he turned the corner into the restroom alcove. By then his left hand was already closing around the cell phone in his pocket.

To his relief there was no restroom attendant. He carried the phone to the last cubicle in the row, let himself in, closed the slide bolt and prayed to God the phone was going to work in this Soviet bunker.

It did. Vari answered on the second ring.

“So, little brother, did you have a successful trip?”

Nikolai ignored the question. He heard footsteps on tile outside and held his breath. Released it when he heard a heavy stream splashing against the porcelain urinal. He turned to face the back wall of the stall and cupped a hand to his free ear, keeping his voice low. “A woman. Early thirties. Around one hundred and sixty centimeters tall. Shoulder-length dark hair. Tan complexion. Light green eyes… electric green. Black pants, a white blouse, black sleeveless jacket. Attractive but playing it down.” He pressed the phone closer; heard Vari’s pen scribbling frantically on paper in the background.

“Just the one?”

Nikolai shook his head as if his partner could see. “Not certain, but as close as I can be.”

Vari took a breath. “Okay. Good. Now, when we hang up, stay where you are and call reception. This is the number.” Nikolai closed his eyes and listened, committing the digital sequence to memory. “You want Mr Tarkovsky’s room, remember. Mikhail Tarkovsky. He’ll be in the west wing. He’ll give you the room number. Leave the toilets and go straight to the elevators but take your time and don’t look behind.”

“What about her… the woman?” Nikolai whispered urgently.

“Don’t worry about your woman, my friend. She’ll have other things on her mind. Are you with me, little brother?”