Paul Christopher - Red Templar

When you worked garbage you found all sorts of useful and potentially valuable things you could sell at the big tailgate markets in Mozhaysk and other places outside the city. In his forty-six years on the job he’d found everything from a perfectly good gold watch to a pink-enameled artificial leg. Even if what you found wasn’t worth anything, there wasn’t a day that went by working garbage that wasn’t interesting.

Still, driving the big motor grader had its good points. He was alone in the high, glassed-in cab, so there was no one to answer to when the sauerkraut, cheese and sausage produced their inevitably pungent brand of oily farts, and no one to complain when he filled the cab with smoke from the cheap bulk cigarettes he favored.

He finished the first sandwich and started on the second. At sixty-two, with all those years on the job, he was getting far too old for the work, but he couldn’t see himself sitting around watching television or growing tomatoes in their little allotment, and his small pension wasn’t going to let him do much more than that. It didn’t matter, really; one way or the other his wife’s sandwiches and the vodka and the cigarettes would get him eventually, either from a heart attack on the road or straining on the toilet fighting to pass the rock-hard bowel movements the sandwiches caused.

Felix Fyodor glanced out of the side door of the cab. The blade of the grader was marked with reflective tape at five-centimeter intervals, like a ruler. When the snow reached the first strip of tape he would begin his route. The route took him east along the perimeter road of the big forest plot with the double razor-wire fence, then south and west and north until he got back to where he was right now. When he finished the big square around the forest plot, he’d put the grader onto the closest on-ramp of the highway into the city, then grade the snow all the way to the Ring Road and back again. Then he’d take a piss break, have a snack and do it all over again. On a night with a predicted heavy snowfall like tonight he’d probably do the run seven or eight times before his shift was over.

Once, years ago, he’d asked about the property behind the wire and he’d been told to mind his own business, but eventually he’d heard enough whispered stories to figure out that the land had been Stalin’s Moscow dacha-the place where he’d spent most of the great patriotic war and the place he’d died in on March 5, 1953, supposedly full of Alzheimer’s or syphilis or something and poisoned by the KGB chief Beria to keep him from signing death warrants for just about everyone in the government, including Beria. Someone had wanted to make a museum out of the place, but how did you make a museum for a mass murderer? Khrushchev had stopped the idea and the place had been empty and abandoned ever since. Felix Fyodor took a bite out of the second sandwich, trying not to think of the heartburn already climbing up his chest. It would be a long night and he needed nourishment. He looked down at the markers on the plow and wished the snow would fall a little faster. He was parked within a few yards of the entrance to the whole estate, and it spooked him more than a little.

They traveled along the almost arrow-straight tunnel, the only illumination coming from the broad beam of the self-propelled car’s headlight. Holliday kept the throttle pushed about halfway forward, and according to the speedometer they were going ninety kilometers per, which translated into roughly fifty-five miles per hour. At the forty-five-minute mark that meant they’d gone about forty miles from the original station beneath the Kremlin. On the seat outside the operator’s compartment Eddie had fallen into a half-conscious doze, rocking gently with the motion of the train, his big head lolling, his eyes closed.

As they rolled onward Holliday tried to assess the chaos they had left behind them in the subway station. By now the Spetsnaz team would have reported to their bosses and the word would have gone up the chain of command-someone had hijacked Stalin’s secret subway from more than half a century ago and was hightailing it up the line to wherever it ended up. Personally Holliday didn’t care. At the first opportunity he wanted to get off the damn thing and figure out some way to get himself and Eddie safely behind the walls of the American embassy.

There was a heavy clanking from the tracks beneath the wheels and suddenly the throttle moved under Holliday’s hand, dropping halfway back to the neutral notch. The car slowed. A minute later there was a second sound from the tracks and the throttle smoothly moved back under his hand. The car slowed to a walk, and ahead Holliday could see that they were coming into a station. As they moved up to the platform Holliday released his hand from the throttle. The car rolled on for a few yards and then stopped. The doors hissed open. Wherever they were going, this was it. The platform was dark.

Holliday switched on his miner’s lamp, then stepped out of the driver’s compartment and helped Eddie to his feet. They stepped off the train. The platform was completely barren-no signs, no gates, no nothing, just an arch of dark-glazed brick and a single exit. There were half a dozen lights in the ceiling behind wire screens, all of them dark. The place felt like a tomb.

He and Eddie made their slow way to the exit, the light on Holliday’s helmet painting the way. Eddie’s breathing was ragged, but at least he was still conscious. The exit was in the exact center of the platform-an alcove and four steps leading to a small vestibule. The vestibule was square with a low ceiling, and was completely without decoration. There were two doors, one obviously for an elevator, the other more like a hatchway, with a large round locking wheel in the center. There were faded Cyrillic letters above the wheel.

“Can you read what it says?” Holliday asked.

“Bomboubezhishche,” read Eddie, not hesitating at all over the mouthful of a word. “Bomb shelter.”

Holliday pressed the single button beside the elevator doors and remarkably they creaked open. He helped Eddie inside the plain gray steel compartment. There were two buttons on the wall. He pressed the top one. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise.

* * *

The United States Embassy in Moscow consists of a ten-story office block, a connecting, windowless security block, a series of low barracks-style offices, all surrounding a central courtyard and further surrounded by a tall brick wall. There is only one means of access and egress to the complex-the front gate, which in turn has several well-hidden anti-suicide bombing measures as well as a SWAT team on twenty-four-hour duty. To get into the main building, any guest or official must first pass through a sally port, which allows movement of only a single individual at a time and in one direction.

The bachelor and guest quarters at the embassy were located at the far end of the complex and offered only the most basic amenities-bathroom, shower, bedroom with a single narrow bed, a desk and a telephone. The decor was resolutely beige. The telephone in the room being occupied by Brinsley Whitman Havers rang at three twenty-five in the morning. Whit had been having trouble sleeping, knowing that his man was in play, and he picked up on the second ring. It was the security office, a man named Tapsinger.

“Yes?” Whit said.

“You’d better get over here pronto, sir; there’s a lot of back chatter in the air about your boy.”

“Which one?”

“The target, as I understand it, Holliday.”

“What kind of back chatter?”

“FSB back chatter, sir, and it’s coming out of the Kremlin itself. Scary stuff, sir. Seems he’s hijacked Stalin’s old private subway train. There’re bodies everywhere. This stuff is going all the way back to Washington. Somebody’s in it up to his eyeballs. It’s starting to sound like a first-class international incident.”