Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

A veteran of some war or other, Piatakov thought. Who wasn’t?

Brady leaned himself against a convenient wall. “We want to go to Kelif.”

“Well, that’s just where the ship is headed, so you can put the gun away.”

Brady smiled. “You might find this hard to believe, Captain, but there are people who don’t want us to get there.”

The captain smiled back. “And why would that be? You don’t look like fleeing nobility.”

Brady’s grin broadened. “See?” he said to Piatakov, who was standing with his back to the doorjamb. “I told you our disguises were perfect.”

“If only we could persuade Anastasia to take off the tiara,” Piatakov said, surprising himself. How long had it been since a joke had come out of his mouth?

Brady and the captain both laughed. “What’s your name, Captain?” the American asked.

“Nikolayev,” the captain said.

“Well, Captain Nikolayev, where do you normally stop between here and Kelif?”

“Burdalik, Kerki, and wherever we’re flagged down.”

“Do you need to stop? For food, fuel, anything?”

“We might need to take on more fuel.”

“Which I assume means you might not. So we’ll deal with that when we have to. In the meantime, we travel nonstop.”

“That’s what you think. This boat stops every time it finds a sandbank. I suppose you could try shooting them,” he suggested with a grin.

Brady ignored him; he never seemed to register other people’s sarcasm. “How many people are there on board?” he asked.

“Four crew, eleven passengers. Paying passengers, that is,” he added pointedly.

“How many soldiers?”

“I’ve no idea. Lev?”

“Four. Three men and one officer,” the helmsman said stiffly, not taking his eyes off the river.

Brady pulled himself upright. “Right. Captain, we’re going to bring all the passengers and crew—all but Lev here—to the lounge. And once we’ve relieved them of any weapons they’re carrying, Sergei here will search the cabins and storerooms. Durga will stay up here on the bridge and keep Lev company.”

“So who are you really?” the captain asked, in a tone that suggested he didn’t expect a serious answer.

Piatakov also waited for the joke, but for once Brady was otherwise concerned.

“Soldiers of the revolution,” he said absent-mindedly. “With nothing left to lose,” he added, looking the captain straight in the eye. “I used to pilot a boat like this. On the Missouri River in America. You understand? No one here is indispensable.”

Caitlin and Haruka sat onone side of the desk, Komarov and Jack on the other. They were in Chechevichkin’s office, which at this hour of the morning was blissfully cool and filled with dappled light. Caitlin had noticed that the coffin was gone from the adjoining room; the Armenian must have been buried the day before.

Komarov had asked the questions, Jack translating them into Uzbek. The girl had told the story of her husband’s murder—the “beast,” she called him—and was now describing her journey on horseback and expressing her surprise that the Russian had let her go on the outskirts of town.

Caitlin tried to picture this man as her husband. He seemed both closer and more distant, like a part of herself she was losing contact with.

But Sergei had cut himself loose from more than her. His bitterness had been understandable, but the man who’d joined Brady on this murderous odyssey had clearly taken leave of his senses. What did he think he was doing taking terrified children for moonlit rides?

She switched her attention to McColl, watching his lips as he interpreted, remembering their lovemaking only three nights before. He would soon be gone, she supposed, in prison or over the border. And how would she feel then?

Komarov was standing, thanking Haruka for her cooperation, asking Caitlin if arrangements had been made.

“She’s going back to her family,” Caitlin told him. “On one condition—that they don’t sell her into another marriage against her will. A condition the local Cheka will need to enforce,” she added pointedly. “It’s the best I could do at short notice.”

Still, the girl was smiling as Maslov escorted her out to the waiting father. McColl asked Komarov if he’d be needed in the next couple of hours.

“No, but don’t stray far.”

“I’m going to take a look at Tamerlane’s Mausoleum,” he said, glancing at Caitlin.

“I could do with some exercise,” she said, seeing a chance to find out why he was still around.

“Take a look behind us,” he said when she asked the question, and there, a hundred yards back, two armed Chekists were sauntering in their wake. When they all reached the mausoleum, the Chekists perched on a broken-down wall while she and McColl admired yet another blue dome.

“They’re sticking closer,” he told her on the walk back. “I don’t think Komarov wants to lose me.”

Neither do I, she thought. But one way or another, she would.

Komarov moved his chair intothe courtyard and rummaged in his pocket for the latest cable. Sasha had been his usual thorough self, and the facts his assistant had gleaned from the few available records had refreshed his own memory of that summer’s events. The name of the British agent that Aidan Brady had accused Caitlin Hanley of meeting was Jack McColl. And it had of course been Brady who’d shot the boy in Kalanchevskaya Square. Two reasons for the Englishman to hate the American, but if Davydov really was McColl, surely there had to be more to his presence in Russia than a three-year-old vendetta.

There was nothing to suggest that Piatakova had lied about her relationship with McColl, other than Komarov’s own impression at the time that she’d cared about him more than most people did about long-abandoned lovers. Maybe she had, but another three years had passed since then, and no one Sasha had spoken to doubted her loyalty to the revolution. Which was, he realized, a relief.

There was more. Within hours of this McColl’s escape from Moscow, two crates of crop-rotting poisons had been left on the Vecheka’s doorstep on Bolshaya Lubyanka, and two White agents had been found shot in an Arkhangelskoye dacha, one dead, one severely wounded. Reading the wounded man’s description of his assailant, Komarov could see nothing to rule out the Englishman now masquerading as an interpreter from Tashkent. McColl, it seemed almost certain, had foiled a plot by Russian allies of his own government to destroy the crops that fed Moscow. Which should, Komarov thought, have been the end of his official career as a spy. So whom, if anyone, was he working for now?

The question was still exercising his brain when Maslov ushered a young and uniformed Russian into the courtyard. “Tell Comrade Komarov what you just told me.”

The man was a railway guard. His train had been crossing the Amu Dar’ya bridge the previous night when he had spotted a small boat in midstream. There had been three men in it.

Komarov slapped an armrest with the palm of his right hand, causing the railwayman to step back a pace. “The boat from Charjui to Kerki—when does it leave?”

“It should have left this morning, comrade. At dawn, I think. It was waiting for the spare parts we brought in from Krasnovodsk, so—”

“Check it!” Komarov snapped at Maslov. The subordinate lifted the telephone and asked the operator to get him the Charjui Cheka. The three of them waited in silence, the guard shifting uneasily from foot to foot.

“You can go,” Komarov told him. “Thank you.”

The man needed no second bidding.

Maslov was through at last. “Well, find out!” he shouted down the line. “They’re—”