Лесли Чартерис - The Saint

For an instant Templar and Emma were too stupefied to move. Then, as if launched by a rocket, the Saint threw himself against the false wall. The plaster smashed to a thousand dusty pieces; the highboy slammed against the floor. The woman screamed and flailed her arms like a human pinwheel.

They were out.

Templar and Emma raced down the narrow corridor toward the short flight to the roof.

“The stairs! The stairs!” screeched the old woman.

Ilya and his men crashed out of the kitchen, and Vlad momentarily became entangled in the makeshift clothesline.

“C’mon, dammit!” barked Ilya. He stumbled through the apartment to the only stairs he knew — the winding concrete stairwell reaching from lobby to rooftop.

Templar and Emma quickly ascended the narrow wooden stairs. At the top of the short flight was a trapdoor. Emma pushed it, but its ice-encrusted frame wouldn’t budge.

“No!” she cried out in anguish. She was becoming desperate.

Templar added his muscle to her efforts, and the ice around the wooden trap broke free with a loud snap. He pushed Emma out ahead of him onto the broad, flat rooftop and scrambled after her.

They desperately scanned the wind-whipped roof, seeking an avenue of escape.

“Can we jump to the next building?” Emma asked, astonished that she would even think of doing it.

There was a building within jumping distance, but the roof was a sheet of ice beneath their feet.

Templar’s mind raced; his eyes seeking another solution. “There!”

“Where?”

Templar grabbed her under the elbow and yanked her toward a sheet-metal utility shed in the middle of the roof. A swift kick to the door shattered away all ice around the frame and gave them entry.

“We can’t hide in there,” objected Emma incredulously.

“Who’s hiding?” Templar pulled her inside. “We’re leaving!”

He pushed past random tools and tar paper to the cluster of utility pipes arising from a wide shaft.

“Oh, God,” exclaimed Emma, “you’re not think-mg of...”

He was.

When Ilya and his cadre of thugs charged up the concrete stairwell and banged out through the metal fire door onto the roof, he should have expected what he saw. Nothing. Again. Almost nothing — a utility shed with ice broken around the doorframe.

“There!” yelled Ilya, slapping Igor on the arm and pointing. “The shed!”

Igor impulsively pumped several shells into either side before kicking open the door. Vlad, his shoes devoid of his compatriots’ off-road tread, slid stupidly around in a circle before falling on his rear.

Templar and Emma had not cowered in the shed awaiting inevitable perforation. They had wrapped their coats around the utility pipes and slid down the hundred-foot shaft.

Had it been a carnival ride, Emma might have enjoyed it. Probably not; she was not the carnival type. Fearing for her life every inch of the speedy, perilous descent, she was too terrified to scream.

Igor, better intentioned than bred, sprayed a deafening hail of hot lead down the shaft just as Emma and Simon touched bottom and exploded out into the basement.

Fuming with anger and frustration, Ilya whacked the automatic off target. Then he whacked Igor.

“We want her alive! Him you can kill; her you can wound. But don’t kill her! Idyot!”

Ten floors below, Emma, overwhelmed, leaned against the dark basement’s empty oil tank. She gulped air and popped a heart pill. “I can’t believe I did that,” she gasped.

Templar, finding the adrenaline rush curative, had already found the light switch. A yellow bulb on a long cord dangled above them, providing minimal illumination.

“No time to relax now,” he said seriously. “The American Embassy is east of here. They can’t touch us there.”

“East? How can you tell which way is east?”

He held up his penknife. “There’s a compass built in.”

“Do you have a blowtorch in that thing, too?”

“I’ve told you too many secrets already,” said the Saint, and he began searching the basement for direct access to Moscow’s extensive underground.

The American Embassy’s location was no secret, and Ilya could see the Stars and Stripes proudly waving from his position on the rooftop.

“Damn! They’ll be heading for the embassy! Let’s go!”

Heading for the embassy, indeed, but not by the most direct route. Instead of emerging at street level and attempting to outrun and outwit Tretiak’s team. Templar sought out the dank basement’s sewer outlet and service tunnel — primary indicators of access to the underground world of black market deal making, clandestine retail outlets, and dissident hideouts.

Having discovered the opening, he yanked out the metal grate and pulled Emma after him into the maze of subterranean Moscow.

Cringing from the dirt, darkness, and disorientation, Emma demanded to know where they were.

“We are under the street, under the buildings,” explained Templar. “This isn’t unusual, it’s simply that most people never think about the city under the city.”

“I don’t,” confirmed Emma without the slightest trace of humor.

Templar glanced again at his compass, then led his wary companion around another dark corner.

“Most major cities, especially old ones — even American ones like New York and Seattle — have an entire subterranean culture,” he continued. “It used to be that the lower-class workers couldn’t be seen above ground except on the job.”

Emma was not interested in social history. “Are we there yet? I see lights.”

She also heard voices. One of them was decidedly female.

Templar stopped when he saw an attractive woman in her mid-twenties coming toward them, gesturing wildly.

“Hurry, in here! You’re the Americans?!”

Emma looked at Templar; Templar looked at Emma. They both looked at the slender, curly-haired woman who seemed overly enthusiastic to see them.

“Expecting us?” asked Templar.

The girl laughed and motioned for them to follow her.

Emma wished she were home with her fish.

Dark, cramped, and as dismal as an air-raid shelter was the subterranean depot into which they were summoned. But propped against the dirt walls, lit by oil lamps, were gilt-edged embroidery. The room was filled with silver chalices and various authentic or replicated Russian Orthodox sacramental objects.

In the corner a nerdy young man was polishing a pendant.

“That’s Toli, my curator, and I’m Alexa Frankievitch, but since you’re Americans, you can call me Frankie.”

“How did you know...?”

“Oh, I’ve been expecting a happy American couple looking for valuable religious relics. In fact, I was expecting you an hour ago. I thought you got lost.”

Frankie turned to her vast display of items for sale.

“I can sell you all manner of religious relics and semiauthentic antiques,” she insisted.

Templar leaned over and whispered in Emma’s ear.

“She thinks we’re somebody else.”

“No kidding,” hissed Emma. “Let’s get going.”

When Frankie turned back around, Simon attempted to confront the situation directly.

“Frankie, listen, all we want is—”

“I know, I know,” interrupted the energetic young woman, “the icon of the Virgin of the Don. I need thirty-thousand dollars American up-front.”

“No, no...” Emma tried to intercede and explain.

“Okay, twenty thousand, not a penny less,” Frankie relented, unaware that no one was bargaining with her. “C’mon. It’s the very icon Prince Donskoy carried into battle against the Tatars, who retreated, was a miracle—”

“I don’t believe in miracles,” Templar cut in brusquely. He picked up a jewel encrusted chalice and spun it in the air. “Whadya do, Frankie, stamp these replicas out by the dozens?”