Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

To the south the linebetween mountains and stars slowly rose. The traveling party stopped to eat by another ancient well tower, and McColl listened to the soldiers debating whether Kerki was more of a dump than Karshi. As they trekked onward, he imagined he could feel Maslov’s blank scrutiny, Komarov’s impatience, and Caitlin’s dismay, each a moving ball of emotion, rolling on across the empty wastes.

The first hint of light was showing on the eastern horizon when Komarov maneuvered his horse alongside McColl’s. “The Turcoman says we’re only an hour away from Kerki,” the Russian said conversationally. “You didn’t seem very surprised,” he said, shifting subjects without shifting tone.

“I was surprised you waited so long. When did you find out?” McColl asked.

“Before we left Moscow.”

McColl shook his head, then laughed. “Sherlock Holmes,” he murmured to himself.

“When did you realize I knew?” Komarov asked.

“The morning we left Tashkent. Your disciple couldn’t look me in the eye anymore.”

“He’d never make an actor,” Komarov admitted. “I think that’s why you’re good at what you do,” he went on in the same conversational voice. “Because your disguise feels more real than who you actually are.”

McColl said nothing to that, just hoped it wasn’t true.

“But you’re finished with all that now,” Komarov said, sounding almost sad that their contest was over.

“It’s your world.”

“Yes it is, but that’s not what I meant.” Komarov was staring at him in the growing light. “I suspect that you’ve run out of people you can put your faith in. Either as friends or enemies.”

McColl thought about that for several moments. “You may be right. But not completely, not when it comes to enemies.” He paused as he guided his pony around the skeletal remains of a sheep. “I watched Aidan Brady knife an American riot cop in 1914. That summer he damn near killed me in Ireland and then murdered two cops in England. In 1918 he had another go at shooting me and shot an eleven-year-old boy instead. And my erstwhile colleagues in London, when they finally caught him, decided he’d be more use alive than dead. Instead of the hanging he so richly deserved, they gave him this job. When my old boss found out and asked me to come here, I only said yes because it was Brady.”

Komarov was silent for a minute or more. “If you didn’t have Brady, I suspect you would find someone else—people need to put faces to what they abhor. Years ago, before the war, when I was still a city policeman, a political prisoner asked me how many enemies I had in Brazil. None, I told him, as far as I knew. He explained to me that the Russian government, which paid my wages, had colluded with other capitalist powers to force down the world coffee price. As a result the plantation workers were earning even less of a pittance than usual, and their children were dying in droves from starvation. Now, why, this man asked me, would those children’s mothers consider me anything other than an enemy?”

McColl smiled. “What did you say?”

“I said this was all very abstract, and what could I, personally, do about the world coffee price? He said: ‘Join the revolution.’”

McColl looked across at the Russian. There was no kindness in his face, but neither was there any trace of evil. There were deep lines around the eyes, etched by fatigue and something more corrosive, and the eyes themselves seemed to be pushing outward, as if they were trying to escape from the memories that lay behind them. “I think I’ve lost my chance to do that,” McColl said wryly. “Maybe you’ll put in a good word for me.”

“Maybe I will. There is something you could tell me—just to satisfy my curiosity, you understand. Just between us.”

“Yes?”

“Did you kill two members of the Trust in Arkhangelskoye in the summer of 1918?”

McColl could remember the room, the older man calmly explaining why Moscow was a harder city to starve out than Petrograd was. “I did. They were planning to poison all the fields around Moscow, and they had the stuff to do it.”

“From your people?”

“The French actually, not that it matters.”

“And it was you that left the supplies of poison in the car on Bolshaya Lubyanka.”

“It seemed the safest place,” McColl said.

“May I ask why? Why you killed your allies and thwarted their plot, I mean.”

McColl took his time to answer. “I had Caitlin to think about. And the boy I’d just brought to Moscow, the one that Brady shot. We all want to win, to see our ideas triumph, but there are some things you can’t do… or at least I can’t.”

As the sun rose overthe mountains, the yellow-brown desert abruptly gave way to yellow-green cultivation. They rode downhill through the welcome shade of a peach orchard, emerging onto a dusty track that ran between fields of golden grain. A mile ahead the river lay on the green swathe like a red-brown snake. On its far bank, the buff-colored houses of Kerki were spread across a line of low hills, and beyond these the desert reasserted its sway.

Another beautiful day, McColl thought. Perhaps his last, but probably not. There were many obvious questions to which Komarov would still want answers.

“So much for impassable deserts,” the Russian muttered beside him.

The Amu Dar’ya, here about three hundred yards wide, posed more of a problem. The ferry-raft was berthed on the other bank, and it took three rounds from Maslov’s revolver to roust out the operator. Once alerted he stared across at their party, vigorously scratched his head, and disappeared back into his house. Minutes dragged by, and Maslov’s finger was tightening on the trigger once more when the ferryman emerged with what looked like three sons, arranged in descending order of height.

They pushed out from the far bank, pulling the guide ropes free of the water’s surface as they did so.

The raft proved larger than it had at first appeared, easily accommodating both humans and ponies. The ferryman was clearly curious, but Komarov met his questions with discouraging grunts. The current was smooth and powerful.

Across the river they could see a wooden landing stage and, behind it, set back from the embarkation area, the ubiquitous chaikhana . On the latter’s right, there was a long wooden building, which one of the soldiers said was the town barracks. Between the two buildings, a road led steeply up to a half-ruined fortress. Red flags fluttered on the two towers that flanked its entrance gate; staring up at the battlements, McColl caught the flash of sun on glass.

Komarov was more interested in the barracks, which looked ominously quiet. “Ask him how many soldiers are stationed here,” he instructed McColl.

“About fifty,” was the initial reply, “when they’re here,” the unfortunate caveat.

“Ask him where they are.”

They were out chasing the Basmachi.

It was the first time McColl had heard Komarov swear.

The ferry was halfway across the river. As two men issued from the fortress gates and started down the hill, half a dozen soldiers appeared from behind the barracks and hurried toward the landing stage, most still arranging their dress. By the time the ferryman had pulled his craft alongside the landing stage, the soldiers had turned themselves into a ramshackle guard of honor, lining each side of the ramp and channeling the new arrivals into the welcoming arms of the officials from the fortress. One of these, to McColl’s amazement, was bedecked in a full-length leather coat, the sort that even stylish Chekists usually kept for winter. The other was a woman, and a handsome one at that. She was probably in her forties, and her eyes sparkled with an intelligence that seemed lacking in her male superior.