Alex Dryden - Death in Siberia

And Petrov knew the dark meaning of his words.

Petrov asked him if they were connected to the woman.

‘Everything is connected,’ Fradkov replied angrily. ‘Find the woman. Remember what I told you. The rewards will be astronomical for you. Failure, however, may have other implications,’ he added threateningly.

They will blame everyone but themselves, Petrov thought.

In and out of consciousness, Anna thought of one thing only; the death mask of Professor Vasily Kryuchkov. And with it, the failure of her mission, the waste of life, the loss of what she knew was a great – if not the greatest – opportunity for mankind. Sometimes in these moments she struggled for life, at others she felt the peace of near death and almost welcomed its embrace. But the attentions of Petrov and his mother, as well as her own deep desire for life, somehow always prevailed. She knew she would recover, though she understood in her rational mind that there was little point in doing so. Her mission had replaced her life.

On the evening of the second day, she was well enough to speak and Petrov’s mother left him with her. He drew up the small wooden stool he’d sat on as his grandfather died and sat next to the grass palliasse where she now sat, painfully, but upright, leaning against the backing of wooden sled runners. Petrov’s mother had made her a cup of tea – more of the herbs she seemed to know so well – and he offered her a drink of vodka from the bottle. She drank a little, then two mouthfuls, and she was alert again.

Petrov sat and watched her for a long time without speaking. And she, too, studied his face intently for the first time.

What she saw was his brown skin at first and, even without the surroundings of a reindeer hide tent where she lay, he was clearly from one of the tribes of the north. She noted a dilated face with a frontal retraction at all three levels – intellectual, emotional and instinctive. The man’s forehead was well differentiated, his eyes set back, protected. It told her he had a clever, deductive mind. On his forehead she saw a round-ish mark of curved lines, rather than the normal straightness. She believed then that she was looking, not just at a man who was clever at the twists and turns of life, but at someone who had some great spiritual quality. His high, full cheekbones, straight and protected nostrils, were a sign that he lived his life through passion, yet a passion that was guided and controlled by honesty and discretion. His jawline, she noted, was immensely strong. Whoever sat before her possessed a vital force and the capacity to carry on to a designated goal with great determination. As her eyes travelled across his gentle but strong face, her training told her that here was a man it was possible to trust.

Finally, he spoke first.

‘Did you kill Professor Bachman?’ he asked her gently.

It was such a strange and unexpected question, she was lost for words.

‘In Krasnoyarsk,’ he prompted her eventually, and again with a great, gentle inquisitiveness.

‘I know of no one called Bachman,’ she said finally. ‘And I killed no one, not in Krasnoyarsk in any case.’

The straightforwardness of her admission caused his mind to be at rest. After all, he’d seen the road littered with bodies and the OMON officer in the jeep in the forest and heard from Fradkov about the killings of the conscripts at the dacha and at the checkpoint on the road to Norilsk. Who knew, there might be others.

‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

‘Did you find me on the road and bring me here?’ she said, without answering his question.

Petrov nodded.

‘How far was it?’

‘Twenty miles or so through the canyons. I had to take a roundabout route. There’s a great deal of military activity in the area. They’re looking for you,’ Petrov added. ‘As I’m sure you’re aware.’

Anna was amazed that a man could carry an inert body so far through such difficult country. That he’d bothered to do so at all and not turn her in to the authorities lifted her confidence in him further. She felt her trust in him becoming embedded. She decided she would slowly open the doors of her knowledge and trust.

For his part, Petrov had no intention of hurrying her, and so he withdrew from the direct question he’d asked. He would lead up to it.

‘I saw the wreck of the Rossiya ,’ he said. ‘Was that you? How did you do it?’

She told him about the freeing of the anchor chain, and the grounding of the ship. ‘I was lucky,’ she added. ‘It grounded on a ridge next to a trench in the riverbed. That’s why it turned completely on its side.’

Petrov considered this for a moment.

‘And all the time you were heading north?’ he asked her. ‘You never had any intention of remaining in Igarka?’

Yes, she thought, to trust him was the only way. ‘I was trying to reach the Putorana nuclear research station,’ she replied. ‘That’s what I’m doing here.’

He sat and watched her in silence. If she was going to tell him, then she would.

His silence was one of intense calm, she thought. And she knew that, if she wanted their contact to mean anything at all, any communication would have to come from her.

‘There is… there was a man there, in Putorana. A great scientist in the nuclear field. We believe he’d made a discovery of truly life-changing proportions. His name was Vasily Kryuchkov. Another professor. I found him in the back of the truck on the road. But what I found was his dead body.’ She looked intensely at him. ‘I believe the State has killed him, in order for the world to remain ignorant of what he found.’

Petrov decided not to ask her what ‘We’ meant. ‘We believe…’ Who believed, he wondered, who did the woman work for? But he was not going to pursue it. It didn’t seem to matter much anyway. And so he sat in silence once more. Let her come to him, if she would.

‘Who is Professor Bachman?’ Anna asked suddenly.

Petrov let out a small sigh. His mind reeled back to the morning at the apartment block on Sverdlovsk Street, the discovery of Bachman’s dead body, and his own extreme diligence – peculiar, he now thought – by which he’d discovered the papers in Bachman’s shoe, papers that he still carried in a shirt pocket beneath the deerskin coat.

‘My name is Alexei Petrov,’ he began at last. ‘Lieutenant Alexei Petrov of the militsiya . But my mother’s family is here, all around us. It was up here where I was born, and up here where my spirit lies. My Evenki name is Munnukan . It means “hare”. But for many years I followed my Russian father’s demands to be Russian and to join the militsiya like him. It was me who first examined the body of Professor Bachman on the morning of the third of June. It was found in a trash alley at the side of an apartment block on Sverdlovsk Street.’

He saw her eyes widen, her body stiffen, but he didn’t pause. ‘It was lying face up next to the same apartment block where you had rented a room in the name of Valentina Asayev from a woman called Zhenya. That last information I alone found out. The MVD investigators there were not told your name, nor of your presence there. They must have found out in other ways about you.’

Anna thought of the photograph the foreman Ivan had taken of her on his mobile phone.

‘I was photographed on the Rossiya ,’ she said. ‘It must have been passed on.’

‘Then your face is obviously well known in Moscow,’ he stated, without demanding affirmation from her. But, from her eyes, he knew he was right.

‘I searched the body of Bachman,’ Petrov continued. ‘Even though when, almost immediately, I’d found that he was a foreigner, I knew the case should be handed at once to the MVD. I found he had a return ticket from Norilsk that day. I also saw that his clothes had been slit. Someone had been searching for something he was carrying, no doubt illegally or, at any rate, something that the authorities would not wish him or any other foreigner to possess.’ He paused. He didn’t know – not yet – whether he should reveal what he’d found in the sole of Bachman’s shoe. ‘I checked up on this Bachman,’ he continued. ‘He is, or was, a very eminent nuclear scientist from Germany who has written many papers, is very respected throughout the world, and had been researching a highly secret nuclear project for many years – as far back as the sixties, I believe. It seemed clear to me then, as it does now, that he was murdered for whatever it was he was carrying. And that must have been something that he’d brought from Norilsk that afternoon.’ He paused again. He didn’t want to tire her. ‘Norilsk is a hundred miles to the west of us from here, from this meadow, and only a little more than that from the Putorana nuclear research facility.’