Alex Dryden - Death in Siberia

They could have spotted her at any time as she passed. She must have been mad not to kill them. They could have radioed to others, for reinforcements, in order to make sure there really was no one coming across the border. She’d put her life at risk. She’d betrayed a ruthlessness that had always kept her alive.

After she’d left the pillbox behind her, her head had cleared at last. Things had become more straightforward, though no less dangerous. She tried to put her doubt out of her mind. She dumped the climbing equipment into the ravine and then she looked at the gun. Larry’s instructions came back to her. But she unscrewed the silencer and hid it and the gun deep inside her clothing with the three hundred rounds of ammunition. Any strip search would reveal it. It was a deeply risky thing to do.

On the day that followed the crossing, she’d walked for some thirty miles into Russia. The only people she’d seen were a few Buryat horsemen in the distance. The empty landscape. There were similar endless grasslands on this side of the border and the mountains to the grasslands of northern Mongolia which she’d crossed with Larry and the others the day before. The journey northwards across the emptiness was a relief, arduous certainly, but a respite from her tangled thoughts at that time of crisis.

She had rested up in a stone kurgan during the night after her crossing, then walked on in the hours before the second dawn to the hamlet of Erzin. She’d seen a few yurts and some more native Buryat horsemen, but there were no Russians in evidence. And no more border guards until she’d reached the first proper roads.

At Erzin she’d bought two large string sacks of apples from a Buryat family at the side of the road, which had been stored and preserved underground over the winter. And then she’d found some old clothes at a market stall, changing her appearance to that of a peasant farm worker, before boarding the bus to Kyzyl.

The old bus crawled slowly across the same wilderness landscape. Here, still close enough to the border to attract attention from Interior Ministry troops, the bus was stopped several times by border patrols and by the local police. Their methods were simple. Huge iron chains with spikes were dragged across the road to stop all traffic. Abrupt questions, long looks at her papers, snapped remarks, and the occasional gloating, lustful look at her body. But her papers had worked, the forgers at Cougar had done their job well. She had the two sacks of apples, in which the gun and ammunition were now concealed. She was going to the market in Abakan to sell the apples – that was her story. She must have repeated it eight times or more on the interrupted journey.

At Kyzyl, she’d taken another bus to Abakan. This was a bustling town and she could more easily lose herself now. At a marketplace in the centre near the bus station, she’d taken the gun and ammunition, then dumped the apples and hitched an overnight ride to Krasnoyarsk in a rasping truck that was taking cheap Chinese goods to the city.

When she’d arrived in the city she paid the driver of the truck on the outskirts and walked. Then she’d scouted the area where she’d needed to stay in order to be near the port and the hiring office. The plan was all worked out in a control room at Burt Miller’s Cougar ranch in New Mexico. She’d first marked out several old babas at the marketplace nearest to where she’d wanted to be. There’d be one who would rent her a room for a few nights. She’d finally taken a room from a 76-year-old woman named Zhenya with whom she’d fallen into conversation at the street market, a conversation that was instigated on Anna’s part for just that purpose. Zhenya’s apartment was in the slums of the slum city, in a filthy dilapidated block on Sverdlovsk Street, not far from the docks. It was ideal.

Now, Anna looked up at the greying skies of Krasnoyarsk. The sun had crept behind the clouds after its early dawn display, a broken promise. The city was mantled in dullness and unseasonal cold. She’d been at the apartment for two nights already, looking for work downriver towards the Arctic – and her destination. And this hiring today was her final chance of obtaining the job that would get her part of the way there, as far as Igarka. Her mission was at the starting blocks. But now she must make her way north, towards the ever colder destinations where she would find, or not, Professor Kryuchkov and the answer to Burt Miller’s question.

And so now she waited, for the second tired morning of the hiring process. And she tried to put her troubled thoughts from the incident at the border crossing behind her.

FROM THE CRIME scene Lieutenant Petrov first went back to his apartment. It was just after seven-thirty in the morning. Normally he would have gone straight to the militsiya station, but he didn’t wish to have the papers he had taken from the sole of Bachman’s shoe on his person when he arrived at work. He’d left a telephone message for his superior, Major Sadko, about the foreigner’s body and would leave it to him to gain whatever thin glory there was in informing the MVD. Sadko enjoyed keeping possession of such access to himself.

And now Petrov sat at his kitchen table for the second time that morning and unfolded the papers he’d taken from the corpse from their waterproof wrapping. He flattened each sheet one by one and placed two books at the top and bottom to keep them flat. There were just three sheets in all, each about three inches high, torn from a cheap, lined Russian notebook.

He’d made a cup of coffee and now placed the cup on the kitchen top far away from the table. Like an experienced climber who fears an uncharacteristic loss of balance when perched on a precarious ledge, he suddenly imagined that he could lose control of his normally smooth physical functions and that, at any moment, his hand might involuntarily knock the cup over and destroy whatever was written on the papers. Then he turned his attention to what was written on them.

What he’d expected to find in their carefully concealed manifestation he wasn’t sure. Writing, obviously, but in truth he’d hoped for more prose than he could see, something plainly put that any man could understand, even a lowly militsiya lieutenant like himself. So when he saw a sea of figures, calculations and equations that covered the three pages on both sides and were interspersed by only the occasional explanatory paragraph of prose, which the figures put him off from reading, he was disheartened. And everything on the papers was also written in terribly small handwriting. He felt that his meticulous preparations for the event of reading them – the carefully placed chair, the cup of coffee, the objects to flatten the documents and his intensively calmed mind – had been misplaced. There was nothing for him to prepare for if the papers were incomprehensible to him. Only the prose, in Russian, made any sense to him and even that was written in some kind of scientific language that all but eluded his understanding. He didn’t bother even to try and take it in.

He got up from the chair and went to the tiny sitting room next to the kitchen. These apartments were like chicken coops, he thought. Just enough room for a man and a woman to lay the eggs the State required of them. Well, he and his deceased wife hadn’t fulfilled any State quota. They’d been childless when she’d died.

He rooted in the drawers of a desk that contained mostly his former wife’s belongings – knick-knacks she’d found in the market, a small religious icon painted on cheap wood, postcards which were never sent to people who existed anyway only in her imagination, a ball of string, a pair of gloves – until he found a smudged magnifying glass she used to examine postage stamps from around the world and which she’d collected from a man with a stall on Leninskaya, in exchange for apples and honey from Petrov’s small allotment out of the city near old Afasiev’s place.