Jack Grimwood - Moskva

Tom spread his hands to admit defeat, perhaps incomprehension. His own sister was six years older, already a mother several times over and quite possibly a grandmother. ‘Haven’t seen my sister in years.’

‘I would miss Yelena.’

When the snare drum and guitar started up, Dennisov grew still. ‘This is good,’ he said finally. ‘This is very good. You find any more like this, you bring them to me, right?’

‘If I do,’ Tom agreed.

‘These badges have to do with that girl?’

‘No. I found them on the street.’

‘Show me the last again.’

Dennisov took the Lenin badge, turning it over in his hand.

‘The others are tat. This is gold and reserved for senior Party members. These days they’re platinum, so this is at least twenty years old.’

‘You’re saying her boyfriend was older?’

‘More likely his father is important.’

It looked like any other Lenin badge to Tom, although perhaps the great man’s head was a little finer, the enamel a little brighter. This wasn’t good. He’d been hoping they were all tat, the kind of thing a foreign student out at the university might give a younger girl to impress her.

‘You’re sure?’

‘My father has one. It goes nicely with his silk suits.’

Stubble, gym shorts, rusting prosthetic leg… Dennisov really didn’t look like someone whose father was nomenclatura , important.

‘He lives in Leningrad with my sister.’

Tom glanced towards the bar.

‘Not Yelena. My other sister. Yelena’s our housemaid’s daughter.’

‘Your father has housemaids?’

‘He calls them something else.’

The call came first thing next morning. A brisk five or six rings, put down at the other end and then, almost immediately, the phone rang again, and kept ringing until Tom rolled out of bed, grabbed his dressing gown and slumped on to a tapestry-covered stool beside the telephone table. ‘Fox,’ he said.

‘This is Masterton.’

‘Sir?’

‘Thought you must have left.’

‘I was still asleep, sir. Hard night.’

‘You’re not out here to enjoy yourself.’

‘Believe me, sir, I’m not. I went drinking with the son of a KGB general. Ex-Spetsnaz. Ex-pilot. Wounded in Afghanistan and invalided out. He’s of the opinion that killing civilians is self-defeating. Also, that Afghans are fanatics. Like all religious fanatics, the more you attack them the worse they get. The Red Army have been begging the Kremlin for years to bring the troops home.’

‘Any of that true?’

‘Every word of it.’

Sir Edward was silent for a moment.

‘You realize he’s probably reporting everything you say? So take care not to compromise us. As long as you don’t do that, and get more out of him than he gets out of you, I suppose it’s fine. This is for your report, I imagine?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Want a word. I’ll send a car.’

‘Probably quicker if I take the metro, sir.’

‘Quick as you can then.’ Sir Edward began to put the phone down, then his voice was there again, suddenly loud in Tom’s ear. ‘I gather my wife visited you yesterday. Is that correct?’

‘She wanted to know what I found on Alex’s computer.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘Nothing, sir. I’m not sure Alex even turned it on.’

‘That’s what Anna said.’ The telephone clicked, and a second later there was another click and then static and a sudden sense of distance. In part, that had to result from the magnitude of the gulf between Tom and the man he reported to. Tom was closer to Dennisov, a crippled Soviet pilot, than he was to the ambassador, in every way except being on the same side.

The last thing Tom did before leaving his flat was pin two of the three enamel badges he’d found in Alex’s room to the collar of his Belstaff. The Fortieth Anniversary of Victory badge on the right, the little circle with Lenin’s head to the left. He left the Komsomol badge on the side.

Tom really did intend to take the metro. But the Muscovites flowing down the steps into the underworld had clothes the colour of smog, and their cheap aftershave, bad haircuts, dour expressions and stink of cigarettes and wet wool reminded him of Belfast. So he let himself be caught up in the tide flowing past the entrance, with two men in heavy coats behind him and a woman with a wobbly pushchair up ahead. When she suddenly stopped, Tom stepped into the road to avoid her, raising his hand in apology to a black Volga.

The crop-haired driver wound down his window.

‘Foreigner,’ Tom said. ‘Sorry.’

It took the men in coats moving in for him to realize this wasn’t about him stepping into the road. An arm went round his shoulder a split second before a blade touched his side. ‘No one would see a thing,’ one of the men said.

The other nodded towards the Volga.

‘Your choice.’

Three of them. Two outside, one in the car. Four, if you included the woman with the pushchair, who once again blocked his way.

‘I have diplomatic immunity.’

‘Not with us.’

A hand touched Tom’s head to force him into the back and he tensed, feeling the blade jab slightly. You could survive a stab to the side… All those shit-filled tubes, though. You could die from it too.

‘I demand to talk to my embassy.’

‘Later,’ the man said. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Perhaps?’

‘Perhaps not.’

It was the driver who made up Tom’s mind.

Instead of worrying about how this would unfold, he reached into his glove compartment for a packet of cigarillos, took a lighter from his leather jacket and lit up, sweetish smoke drifting through his open window.

It was magnificently ‘fuck you’, the action of someone who already knows how a scene will unfold. Tom too knew his part. The rules said stay alive as long as possible.

Until dying became preferable.

One of the two men slid in beside him.

As the Volga pulled away, the other turned back towards the metro, shrugging to Tom’s shadow. Only the woman with the buggy stared after them. Up ahead was what passed for a Moscow traffic jam: a handful of cars edging past a broken lorry. A militsiya car, siren off, lights flicking lazily, was parked behind. Tom’s driver didn’t even glance across as he pushed his way through. He was younger than Tom had thought, less confident than his display with the cigarillo had suggested. Discreetly checking the door, Tom found it locked.

‘I have a gun,’ the driver said.

‘I’m sure you do.’

The problem with the young was that they had things to prove.

Tom certainly did back then. Thirty-eight wasn’t old but it mostly wasn’t reckless either. These two had been entrusted with delivering him. They wanted to live up to that trust. The IRA worked on the same model. Young men sent out by men far older. All forces worked like that, Tom’s included. Of course, his didn’t have black Volgas, black glass office blocks or famous jails.

‘Where are you taking me?’

The man beside him looked over, his expression flat. ‘You talk too much.’

Heading south, they passed Red Square, crossed the Moskva and a canal beyond, then joined a long loop of the Boulevard Ring that carried them back over the river and round the east side of Moscow. Finally, they turned back towards the centre and stopped a quarter of an hour later outside a row of houses fronted by spindly trees. They sat for a moment, the engine ticking to itself.

Tom began sliding for the door the moment he heard it unlock, only for a thickset pedestrian on the far side of the road to unbutton his coat, show Tom his holster and walk across and open the door for him.