Jack Higgins - A Darker Place

A thoroughgoing bastard, Ivan Kurbsky, but then, he must have been to make colonel in the KGB. Also, a man with real influence to be able to get his daughter buried in Minsky Park Military Cemetery. Almost idly, he consulted the list of those buried at Minsky and there were over six thousand. He leaned forward, frowning, and tried again, but he had been right the first time. There was no Tania Kurbsky buried at Minsky Park.

This was nonsense. Roper had seen a family photo of Colonel Kurbsky by grave 6007, the headstone engraved with Tania Kurbsky’s name and dates. Very quickly, Roper explored the list of graves on his computer and there was number 6007 meticulously recorded by some clerk as… empty.

It took a lot to get Giles Roper excited these days, but he was now, a surge of energy spreading through him. January 1989, Tania Kurbsky, apparently dead but not in her grave. So where are you? He poured himself another whiskey and started to find out.

KURBSKY LET IT go until well into the afternoon before phoning Bounine. “How are things at your end?” he demanded.

“Crazier than ever. We have an asset in Paris who works for the office that books Embassy travel arrangements there. Before he left, Johnson made arrangements for a hotel called the Albany Regency in London. Our people have checked it out and he’s definitely booked. It’s a top-floor suite.”

“So how are they going to proceed?”

“Apparently, they’ve got hold of a truck from the firm that does laundry pickups and deliveries to hotels in the area. The idea is they grab him in his room and wheel him out under a pile of sheets or towels. They drive him to Berkley Down, where the Falcon awaits, and the rest you know.”

“This is going too far,” Kurbsky said. “When is it supposed to happen?”

“I don’t know. Apparently, Oleg and Petrovich are going to park outside and wait for the right moment.”

“Why they think the result will be different from the last time Luzhkov tried to have Johnson assassinated, I don’t know. Ferguson’s people keep a close eye on Johnson at all times. Thank God you aren’t involved, Yuri.” He hung up.

Thinking about it, it was reasonable to suppose that the most likely time to find Johnson at the hotel would be late afternoon or early evening. The stupidity of the whole idea was obvious, but on the other hand it was also so absurdly simple that it might just succeed, and he couldn’t have that.

He walked around the garden, checking his handiwork. He’d done well and it had needed it. Katya appeared and called to him, and he joined her.

“Your aunt is so pleased. She loves her garden. Come and have a drink. You’ve earned it.”

So he went, and she poured three vodkas and they toasted him. “You look better, Alexander,” Svetlana said. “Happier in yourself, I think. Full of energy and life under all that camouflage.”

He couldn’t very well tell her why. “To work with one’s hands, plants, trees, the whole gardening thing-it’s good for the soul, I think.”

“Will you eat with us tonight?” Katya asked.

“My thanks, but there are things I need to do at the safe house. But I won’t be too late.”

He went out to the terrace and away. Svetlana said, “You like him, my dear, don’t you?”

“And I fear for him,” Katya said.

KURBSKY CONSULTED his maps and discovered where the Albany Regency was. In the garage he had found an old pair of black overalls, and he changed clothes now, putting them on. There was a tweed cap, which he appropriated, and a khaki scarf, which he looped around his neck.

He had the gutting knife safe in his boot and now took the Walther from the secret compartment in his bag and slipped it into a patch pocket up the right leg of the overalls with an extra clip. In the left patch pocket, he stuffed one of the black ski masks. Some cash, gloves, and he was ready.

Down in the garage, he checked out the Ford van. Among the tools in the back was a “Man at Work” sign and three yellow cones, which could he helpful. There was nothing else to do except get on with it, and he drove out a couple of moments later.

Katya, who had been watching from the trees, went back into the conservatory. “He’s gone,” she said. “But to where?”

“All will be well,” Svetlana said. “If this is necessary, he will be good in spite of himself, I am certain of it.”

ROPER GOT HIS first breakthrough on his search for Tania by trawling the hospitals in central Moscow during the period covering the worst violence. There she was, a bullet in the left lung, another in the side, narrowly missing a kidney.

It was surprising they’d bothered to treat her, considering the attitude of the authorities in those troubled times, but somewhere there had been doctors and nurses who took their work seriously in spite of party officials, and Tania Kurbsky had lived. The next mention of her name was on a warrant for crimes against the State.

Roper got the feeling that it was then that things had changed. He suspected that her father probably hadn’t been aware of what had happened to her at first. She had probably appeared to have disappeared in all the turmoil, but then she’d been arraigned for treason against the State, the penalty for which was death.

Yet Tania Kurbsky was not executed. More work produced a special court hearing, the testimony of Colonel Ivan Kurbsky, and a new sentence: exile to Station Gorky in perpetuity. The numbered grave at Minsky Park was left in place, in consideration of Colonel Kurbsky’s services to the State.

Roper switched the computer off, feeling so desperately sorry at what he had found. This was not what Alexander Kurbsky believed to be true for so many years. How could he possibly be told? And even more, told that his sister might still be a prisoner in one of the worst places in the world.

He switched back on, and tapped in “Station Gorky.”

It was one of the most unpleasant things Roper had ever done. There was something reminiscent of the Nazis about the details of those incarcerated at Station Gorky, of Heinrich Himmler’s insistence on records of deaths, executions, gassing, so meticulously kept that eventually those who had committed the deeds were condemned in open court by their own records.

It was the same now with Station Gorky. The archives, long buried, were now available on the computer, lists written by hand or on cheap, old-fashioned typewriters, thousands of names.

For a long time, he seemed to be getting nowhere and it was hard going, but in the end, sitting back, easing his pain with more whiskey, the breakthrough came from a single phrase entered in the court documents referring to her sentence: in perpetuity. It was so simple in the end, like a code word, and when he tapped in “Station Gorky” and followed it with the dread phrase, one list after another was revealed. There were hundreds of them, with dates of incarceration and, in most cases, dates of death over the years.

He tapped in one or two as a start and found sparse entries, usually no more than two or three lines and a photo of the convict, shaven-headed for both men and women, eyes lifeless, all hope gone.

And Tania Kurbsky, admitted January 25, 1989, looked exactly the same, just like all the others, a creature beyond despair. To die of typhoid on March 7, 2000, must have been a blessing.

Roper sat back, totally depressed. For years, Alexander Kurbsky had accepted that his sister was dead, buried in Minsky Park Military Cemetery. To be told now that she had lived for eleven appalling years in the worst gulag in Siberia would be a terrible thing to have to come to terms with, but then, did Kurbsky need to know? What purpose could there be in telling him? None that he could see, but that would mean keeping the whole rotten business from everyone, and that included Ferguson.