Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

“On the contrary,” Komarov said, passing him the piece of paper.

“How does that help us?”

“Think,” Komarov suggested.

Maslov thought. “If we find the library, we might get a better description,” he said sceptically.

Komarov sighed. “If we find the library, we might find out what they’re planning.”

Maslov looked at him blankly.

“If you were planning to cause some trouble, in a place that you didn’t know well, you would probably do some research.”

Several miles to the north,McColl heaved himself up and over a brick wall. What had been a garden was now a jungle, and as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he could hear the animal population taking evasive action. Which was all to the good. Those quadrupeds that had survived the last few winters in Moscow would have sharp reflexes and even sharper teeth.

The back door of the house sprung open at a touch. He stepped inside, heard the scamper of more tiny feet, and carefully worked his way toward the front, where a faint yellow light shone through the glassless window above the boarded entrance.

The front room was similarly lit and empty but for a large framed painting of a white country house, which hung drunkenly askew on the wall to his left. Most of the floorboards had been cut from the floor, leaving what looked like a series of runs for the rats.

The back room was completely dark, so he decided to risk a match.

The flare revealed a hundred square feet of functioning civilization: a bed, a chair, a table bearing books, an oil lamp, and a crust of bread. There was a threadbare carpet on the floor and heavy curtains pulled across the window.

McColl lit the lamp and started to search.

It took about twenty minutes—a notebook and papers were stashed beneath a loose floorboard. He doused the lamp and left the same way he’d arrived, dropping into the darkened alley behind the row of houses and emerging back onto Bogoslovski Street. Thirty minutes later he was back in his room at the Hotel Lux, the door wedged shut, his find spread across the bed. Suvorov had possessed seven sets of false identity papers.

The notebook contained a series of messages, coded on the left-hand pages, decoded on the right. The last of these was longer than most. McColl read it through twice, then sat staring into space, stroking his lower lip with his little finger. It was more than a little unnerving to see the order for his own elimination written out in black and white, particularly when the writer was supposedly on the same side.

Not that he had a side anymore, but the bastards at Five didn’t know that.

McColl had been surprised and vaguely amused by Cumming’s original request to check on a Five operation in Russia. What sort of idiots spent their time and energy on supposed enemy soil plotting against their own compatriots? It had seemed absurd, still did. He’d agreed to come only because of Brady’s involvement.

And because it got him out of Wormwood Scrubs.

So. What was Five planning? It had to be something unusually important—or unusually sordid—for Kell’s people to declare open season on the Service. Or to even consider using someone like Brady.

But what?

He went back to the earlier messages in the notebook. Most of the recent ones concerned an operation styled “Good Indian.”

He remembered Ruzhkov reporting that Brady’s Indian comrades were not enamored of Gandhi. Could that be what they and Five had in common?

What was that phrase that the US general had coined? That the only good Indian was a dead one?

Komarov had imagined that therewere about ten libraries still functioning in the city; there turned out to be more than fifty. Since the spring they had been rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the civil war, their book stocks preserved with a fanaticism that Dzerzhinsky would struggle to match. Maslov, of course, found only irritation in the unexpected scope of the search, but Komarov, staring out of his office window at the fierce summer rain sweeping across the courtyard, felt rather pleased; on any list of civilization’s prerequisites, he thought, public libraries would come higher than most. It was a sign that the revolution could be normalized, that the best of the past would still have a place in the new society.

It took his men slightly over thirty-six hours to track down Brady’s library.

Both women on duty that afternoon remembered the American comrade, and yes, he had been consulting books on India and Central Asia: accounts of journeys, of the Russian conquest of Turkestan; historical and political studies of the British Empire in India; even some ancient histories of the general area. He’d always been most courteous.

“They’re headed for India then,” Maslov said as the car carried them back to the M-Cheka offices. It was still raining, but with none of the morning’s vigor.

“Apparently,” Komarov muttered.

“Then our job is over. It’s just a matter of alerting Tashkent and the Frontier Cheka.”

Komarov wondered if Maslov had any idea how long the relevant frontier was. “Perhaps,” he said mildly.

A message was waiting on his desk: the train carrying Marusya Dzharova had finally reached Samara. The two men went up to the wireless telephone room and waited patiently while the operator connected them with the Volga city. Once established, the line was remarkably clear: Vitaly Kozorov, the chairman of the Samara Cheka, sounded as if he might be in the building next door.

“She’s not a hundred percent sure, but she thinks they’re all headed for Tashkent,” he told them. He went over exactly what the woman had said.

“Thank you, comrade,” Komarov said. “Hold on to her until you hear from me, will you?”

“That seems to clinch it,” Maslov said with evident satisfaction.

Komarov wasn’t listening. He had just put two and two together—the interpreter turning up from Tashkent, conveniently speaking both Urdu and English, just as the foreign agent had disappeared. Tall and dark and wearing a shabby suit.

The man had shaved off his beard.

It might conceivably be a coincidence, but that didn’t seem likely and wouldn’t be hard to check. Once Maslov was gone, Komarov summoned Sasha. “Get onto Tashkent,” Komarov told him, “and find out if they’ve heard of Nikolai Davydov. He claims to be a party member. And Sasha,” he added as the young man headed for the door, “keep this between the two of us.”

Alone again, Komarov walked across to his window and stared out at the empty yard. The people involved in this affair seemed connected in so many ways. Brady and Piatakov’s wife had known each other before she met Piatakov, but had obviously fallen out years before—it was Brady who had come to the Cheka in 1918 to report her being in touch with a known English agent.

Could that have been Davydov? There was no reason to think so. Three years had passed, and according to Piatakova—whose loyalty to the revolution seemed beyond question—her former lover had already quit the British Secret Service when she saw him back then. The alternative version—that she had been a spy for all that time—seemed preposterous. But he supposed it was possible.

Whoever Davydov was, unless Komarov was much mistaken, the man was involved in this business in some way or another. As for the renegades, they were on their way to India, a bunch of crazed Quixotes intent on torching English windmills.

He would get permission from Dzerzhinsky to go after them and—assuming Davydov wasn’t who he said he was—take both him and Piatakova along for the ride, one as his interpreter, the other as the only person who could, in the absence of any photographs, identify Piatakov and Shahumian. And he would watch them both like a hawk for any telltale signs of a common purpose.