Alex Dryden: Death in Siberia

Burt now stuck his gloved hands in his pocket. Larry hadn’t asked him the question he expected him to ask. Not yet. But Larry’s mind was for the moment twisted into a fist of conflicting lines of thought that were tighter than a golf ball.

‘Bachman,’ Larry said. He felt a fury grip him. ‘The Bachman you courted so assiduously before this operation began.’ He looked like he might lunge at Burt. ‘Was Bachman working for us? For Cougar?’

Burt turned towards him and looked him directly in the eyes. ‘Larry, you should know better than anyone that Cougar doesn’t employ amateurs.’ Then Burt gave a hollow laugh of incredulity. ‘You think I’d employ Bachman? Really, Larry. But someone did, or may have done.’

Larry stood silently and the silence stretched into more than a minute as he tried to believe Burt.

‘So Anna is our only chance,’ he said finally.

‘Just as she always was,’ Burt added.

‘If she’s still alive,’ Larry wondered.

‘If she’s still alive or not, we’ve had another piece of news,’ Burt said. ‘Last night, out of Moscow. A formal press announcement, as it happens. To all the wire services. Professor Vasily Kryuchkov is dead. A heart attack, the Kremlin is saying. The Kremlin is hailing him as a Hero of Russia, a nuclear scientist greater than Sakharov, greater than anyone, they’re saying. He’s to be given a state funeral. And this time – now he’s dead – all his international colleagues will be invited to meet him at last. At his funeral.’

‘They’ve murdered him,’ Larry whispered.

‘I would say so, yes,’ Burt replied. ‘The lid is being slowly screwed shut.’

He turned to Larry.

‘When’s the next rendezvous?’ he said.

‘In five days,’ Larry replied faintly. ‘I’ll be on the ship. It should be arriving not far from us here in the next twenty-four hours. That’s when I’ll board.’

‘Good. For God’s sake, get her out, Larry.’

And then at last Larry’s mind began to form itself itself into some kind of order. The second question Burt had been waiting for rose slowly through its dark depths and finally broke the surface.

‘Who is the consortium?’ Larry asked him. ‘Who the hell is Friar Tuck Investments?’

Burt looked up at the taller man again.

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it, Larry. It’s the people who stand to lose most from Kryuchkov’s discovery – to lose everything, in fact. Our own people, our own oil companies in the West. Our all-powerful energy companies. The richest corporations in the world.’ Burt paused. ‘They’ll be wiped out completely.’

He brooded towards the sea.

‘Who knows?’ he continued slowly. ‘Maybe our own government is involved in the cover-up? To support our all-important energy companies. In return for their support, of course, for our government. Maybe,’ he said, and there was now a look of slight alarm on his face, ‘maybe I don’t know everything there is to know about our own men of power.’

There was a silence between the two men. Only the lapping of the water, as it rolled on to the shingle, disturbed the total peace of the pristine island.

‘Can you imagine the kind of sum they offered poor Clay to avoid that fate,’ Burt said.

ANNA STILL SAT on the earth floor. The fire had gone down and Petrov got to his feet and put more wood in the burner. It flared warmth into the choom and they both felt it in their bones. It reinvigorated her. She was beginning to feel strong again.

‘What date is it?’ she asked.

Petrov realised he had no idea. His links with his previously normal life seemed to have been severed almost completely. He looked in blank surprise for a moment, then got to his feet again and rummaged in his pack by the grass bed on the far side of the tent from Anna. He finally found his watch.

‘The twelfth of June,’ he read.

Four days, she thought, four days until the next possible pick-up. And she knew that each delay was bringing greater danger to the men who came into the small gulf off the Kara Sea in the 24-hour daylight. But it was the nearest pick-up point to Finland and the most remote from people, the best. Three hundred miles to the north of where she sat, a hundred miles east of Dikson, Siberia’s northernmost town. Around a thousand miles from the North Pole.

But even then, even if she made it, she would be returning with only failure.

Petrov waited. She hadn’t answered his question from earlier. And so he tried again, uncharacteristically forceful now in his demand for an answer from her. ‘Why?’ he asked again. ‘Why is the Kremlin destroying all the evidence of this discovery? Even down to the presumed murder of Kryuchkov?’

Anna stretched out and then curled her unwounded leg into her thigh. She felt the good muscles respond as if they were eager to get going, to be on the move again. To go north.

‘The Russian economy,’ she began, ‘is hopelessly dependent on oil and gas. The Government is interested in no other investment in the country. And now there’s the oil and gas they wish to exploit under the Pole – with this new mobile nuclear reactor they’ve built up at Dikson to power the drilling. Oil and gas make up at least thirty per cent of Russia’s GDP. They are two thirds of all Russian exports. They account for around half of the Federal State budget. A one dollar decrease in the price of oil on the world markets means a one per cent reduction in Russia’s GDP. And, of course, a similar increase results in the opposite.’ She stretched out her leg again, so that both were straight out and flat to the floor of the choom . ‘Without oil and gas, Russia would be a truly Third World country. It would disintegrate as a world power. It couldn’t afford its Space projects or its nuclear technology. It couldn’t survive in its present form. Its people would become poorer than they are even now. It couldn’t afford its vast security and intelligence services that keep the lid on popular discontent. Russia would have to change at last. Start to become a modern economy. But that’s not what Russia’s leaders really want, no matter what they say. Most important to the Kremlin and its spy cronies, without oil and gas the thieves who strip the State energy companies for their own personal advantage will no longer be able to do so.’ She clasped her hands in front of her and leaned her neck back, stretching her torn body as best she could. ‘In the West,’ she continued, ‘in certain Western intelligence agencies, in any case, they believe Vladimir Putin is now unofficially the richest man in the world. The graft and percentages that come to him and others from the State’s companies are vast.’ She paused and looked Petrov in the eye for the first time during this exchange. ‘That’s why they don’t want Kryuchkov’s discovery to reach the world. The spy elite in the Kremlin will become irrelevant. No more the siloviki – the men with power – but the men without power. And so they’re prepared to inflict ever further damage on Russia and the rest of the world with their pollution and their drilling and extraction and their highly dangerous and volatile nuclear reactor up at Dikson, ready to be dragged to the Pole. And the world, including your people, the Evenki, will pay the ultimate price for their greed.’

‘And Kryuchkov’s discovery?’ Petrov asked.

‘… would have made the world a far, far better place for everyone except the few who go on growing richer,’ she answered him.

Petrov sat deep in thought. But he knew what he was going to do now. It had been building in him for two days.

He’d always known he was going to do it, he supposed, somewhere in the recesses of his heart. He knew the woman he’d been searching for and who now sat in front of him was somehow pre-ordained. They had been brought together for the purpose. And so finally he spoke.