Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

“The Keystone Chekas,” Brady said mockingly. “Drop the guns, comrades. That’s good. Now, how many more are there with the car?”

The three men pursed their lips with unanimous obstinacy.

Brady stepped forward and put a bullet through the center of one man’s foot. After looking more surprised than hurt, the victim slumped to the floor with a whimper.

Brady pointed the gun at another man’s knee. “How many?”

“One.”

“I’ll get him,” Piatakov said, grabbing the cap from the fallen Chekist’s head and placing it on his own. He ran down the stairs and walked calmly across to the car, aware of people down the street ducking back into their houses. They were presumably thanking God that the Cheka hadn’t come for them.

“Trouble?” a bored voice asked from the car.

“Only for you,” Piatakov said, pointing Rogdayev’s pistol at the man’s head. “We’re going upstairs.”

In Rogdayev’s room Brady was holding a gun on the prisoners with one hand and trying to unravel the carpet with the other. “It’s all there is,” he said. “You watch them.”

It took the American ten minutes to prize out enough twine to tie all four men up. “Tomorrow they’ll be thanking us for not shooting them,” he said cheerfully, before ripping the telephone off the wall. “Let’s go.”

Piatakov took one last look at the dead Rogdayev and followed Brady down the stairs. “I’ll drive,” Piatakov insisted. The only previous occasion on which he’d seen the American behind a wheel, Piatakov had been astonished by the man’s timidity, which was so at odds with his usual behavior. “Which way?”

“Our lodgings,” Brady said.

“Is there anything there we need?”

“Probably not, but there’s something I want to leave behind. A little misdirection.”

It was only a five-minute drive through virtually empty streets. While Brady went up to their room, Piatakov checked the petrol tank before climbing back in behind the wheel. He remembered how shocked he’d been to discover that Caitlin could drive, and how angry that surprise had made her. The phrase “swallowing gender-based assumptions” stuck in his mind.

Brady came out looking pleased with himself, carrying both their bags. After dropping them in the back, he took his seat in the front and pulled out their dog-eared map.

“So we’re heading south,” Piatakov said, just to be sure.

“Yeah. Look for a sign to Khodjend.”

“How far is that?”

“About a hundred miles.”

Piatakov started the car. The streets were even emptier now, just one lone walker in the city center, swaying to a rhythm that only he could hear. There were no signs to speak off, but the moon was up, and the dark line of mountains occasionally visible off to the left meant he was heading in the right direction.

They had no trouble at the guard post on the city’s southern boundary; the guards saluted them through, knowing a Cheka vehicle when they saw one. After that there was only the moonlit highway, rough but surprisingly wide, the odd copse of trees a dark blotch on the star-filled sky.

Brady lit one of his foul-smelling cigarettes. “I feel like Butch Cassidy,” he said.

“Who?” Piatakov asked, glad that the windows were open.

“He was the leader of an outlaw gang. Back in the States. A successful one, for a while. And when it looked like he was going to get caught, he and his partner went off to South America. Started all over again.”

“Just like us,” Piatakov thought aloud. “What happened to them?”

The American laughed. “Don’t ask.”

Through that day and the next, the train made steady progress across a land growing slowly whiter, barer, less hospitable. On the third morning, they all woke to find the grass was gone; to the south the Aral Sea was reflecting the sun like a vast silver plate left out in the sand.

McColl had considered leaving the train at Orenburg, slipping into the town in the early hours and losing himself in the general confusion. He hadn’t thought Komarov would delay the train to search for a lost interpreter and was as confident as he could be of eventually finding his way out of Russia. He knew where Brady and Co. were going, and was almost certain of what they intended to do when they got there—all that remained was getting the word back to Cumming.

So why had he stayed on the train? He had convinced himself that the nearer they got to Persia, the better his chances of reaching friendly soil. And he had started to wonder whether Cumming had the wherewithal to find and stop a group of renegades that was probably under the protection of both Five and Delhi’s DCI. Or indeed, whether he’d want to as much as McColl did. Gandhi and his fellow stretcher-bearer hadn’t carried Cumming down from Spion Kop, and it hadn’t been Cumming’s foster child that Brady had murdered in Kalanchevskaya Square.

And then of course there was her. The woman he thought he’d seen the last of.

She might still love her husband, as she certainly did her work. But there was no point in kidding himself—he loved her as much as ever.

In the days that followedtheir departure from Orenburg, Caitlin couldn’t shake the feeling that someone out there was testing her resolve. Sergei’s departure, the carrion pile at Ruzayevka Junction, the roar of hunger at Sorochinsk… each accompanied by a cold voice intoning: “See, this is another price to pay. Are you willing to pay this one? If so, we’ll move right on to the next.”

The latest blow had been the news she’d received in Orenburg. Anna Nemtseva, the Zhenotdel worker from Orel for whom she and Kollontai had been seeking justice, had risked going back for a family emergency and been found two days later floating in the Oka River. The local Cheka had explained her death as accident or suicide and put down the gaping head wound to her striking a bridge as she jumped or fell.

Caitlin remembered Anna’s arrival at the Zhenotdel’s door that spring. Even after what the young woman had already been through, she’d been so full of hope for the future.

Had it been misplaced? Had Caitlin’s own? As she’d also discovered that day, the Orenburg Zhenotdel’s three delegates were at the end of their collective tether. Having been vilified, mocked, and obstructed at every turn by their male so-called comrades, the women concerned seemed perilously close to quitting in disgust. In the hour they’d spent together, Caitlin had done her best to provide fresh heart, but couldn’t pretend she’d convinced either them or herself.

Sometimes she couldn’t help feeling that it was all going wrong. Not the way Sergei thought it was—she didn’t believe that the party was deliberately betraying its own ideals. It had more to do with the size of the original task, now swollen further by the depredations of the last few years. People had had enough of chaos, and their instinct was to hunker down, to defend what they had against the threat of the new.

“If we just keep opening doors,” Kollontai had once told her, “sooner or later women—and men—will choose to walk through them.”

Perhaps. But these days there seemed to be more doors closing than swinging open, and that augured badly for the Zhenotdel. If the revolution regressed, if democracy withered and the bureaucrats ruled, all those institutions—the party, the soviets, the unions—which conceived and realized progressive ideas would eventually turn into hollow shells, mere parodies of what they had promised. And the Zhenotdel’s future would be no different. In Russia at least, the women’s struggle was only one part of the revolution, and like all the other parts, it had no chance of succeeding alone.