Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘Maybe if we knew where they were taken?’ said Lom. ‘Vishnik had notes, but without them… It would take us days to find all these places. Weeks.’

Maroussia slipped her hand inside the couch, feeling around towards the top of the backrest.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘There’s something else in here. Hang on… yes!’

She pulled it out and held it up. A large map, printed on thin paper and folded to make a compact packet, the creases strengthened with strips of glued linen.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Lom.

Lom cleared a space on the floor and they laid it out flat. The map was a standard large-scale street plan of Mirgorod, but Vishnik had made marks all over it. Hundreds of small circles in black pencil. The pattern was instantly discernible: a few outliers in the outer quarters, growing denser towards the centre of the city. The marks clustered most thickly at a point on the River Mir where it made an elbow-bend southwards and the Yekaterina Canal joined it.

‘It’s the Lodka,’ said Maroussia. ‘The Pollandore is in the Lodka.’

The Lodka. The stone heart and cerebral cortex of the Vlast. The immense island building, the thousand-windowed palace of bureaucracy, the labyrinth of linoleum-floored corridors, entranceless courtyards, stairwells without stairs. The offices of uncountable clerks and archivists and diplomats and secret police. The basement cells, the killing rooms, the mortuary. Vishnik had traced the Pollandore to there.

Lom refolded the map, scooped up the photographs, stuffed the whole lot back into the envelope and gave it to Maroussia.

‘Take it,’ he said. ‘We need to get moving. We’ve been here too long.’

She pushed the envelope into her carpet bag and they hurried out of the apartment, Maroussia first, then Lom hustling the dvornik ahead of him. At the bottom of the stairs they turned left into the narrow entrance hall and walked straight into two militia men coming the other way, 9mm Blok 15 parabellums in their hands.

The men confronting Lom and Maroussia were officers, a captain and a lieutenant. Crisply turned out uniforms, neat haircuts under their caps, pale steady eyes. Their cap badges said SV. Spetsyalnaya Voyska . Political Police operating within the armed forces. The militia picked the best from the army and the gendarmes, and then the SV picked the best of the militia. The SV were supremely competent, tough and absolutely ideologically loyal.

‘We’ll do this step by step,’ the captain said. He pointed at Lom. ‘You. Four steps back and face the wall. Put your hands against it, high, and shuffle your feet back.’

Lom did as he said.

‘You–’ the captain pointed to the dvornik ‘–come past me on the left, go into the office and stay there. Keep back from the door. Don’t come out.’

The dvornik looked back at Lom. A leer of triumph. Arsehole.

Maroussia was still standing in the centre of the corridor.

‘Now you,’ the captain said to her. ‘On the floor.’

Maroussia didn’t move. Lom couldn’t see her face.

‘Maroussia,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘You need to do what he says.’

She put her bag on the floor and lay face down, hands on her head. The captain stepped forward and took the envelope out of her hand. The lieutenant came up behind Lom and patted him down, keeping the muzzle of the Blok 15 pressed hard against the base of his spine. He patted down Lom’s pockets. Took out the empty gun and the razor.

‘OK,’ the captain said. ‘Now let’s get out into the street.’

A covered truck waited outside, an unmarked GPV in generic military olive, the tailgate open. The driver saw them coming and started the engine. Lom and Maroussia got in the back and sat side by side on the bench. The lieutenant sat opposite. Covered them with his gun. The captain came last, carrying Maroussia’s bag. He closed the tailgate and sat at the far end of the truck, away from them. Nobody spoke. It was all measured, practised, competent. The lieutenant slapped the back of the cab and the truck moved away.

‘Where are we going?’ said Lom. He had to speak loudly above the noise of the engine. The SV men ignored him. Maroussia sat ramrod straight. Expressionless.

‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘If that’s how you want it.’

He leaned back and stretched his legs in front of him. Closed his eyes and let his mind open, focusing on nothing.

Listen. Feel. Breathe. There is plenty of time.

He felt the faint, steady pulsing in the skin-covered gap in his skull. Focused all his attention on it.

Lom used to imagine his unconscious mind as a dark, irrational place, an airless primeval cave where monsters moved. But the opposite was true. The unconscious mind was immense. Bright, airy, perfumed, luminous, borderless, beautiful. The outside world poured into it constantly, without ever filling it up. Everything was felt, everything was noticed.

And all you had to do was pay attention.

Now, at this very moment, there was the street noise outside, the faint calling of seagulls, the rumble of the truck’s wheels on the road, the working of the engine, the whisper of cloth against cloth, four people breathing. The smell of leather and sweat, hot steel and engine oil. The lieutenant’s shaving soap. Maroussia’s hair. Her skin. And there was the rub of his cuff against his own wrist, the sock rucked under his foot, the pressure of the hard bench seat against his back and thighs. In the subliminal mind’s timeless empire nothing was diminished. Nothing wore thin by tedium and habit. Nothing was ignored, nothing judged trivial. Nothing was forgotten. The luminous inner world contained everything he was and everything undiscovered that he might still become. His forest birthright. His strength and his power.

Lom opened his eyes and looked across at Maroussia. She was still sitting straight-backed and staring ahead. How long did they have? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Then they would reach the Lodka, or the Armoury, or wherever they were going. Then all chance would be gone.

Listen. Feel. Breathe. There is plenty of time.

The GPV came to a halt. An intersection, or a traffic hold-up. Lom reached out into the air around him. Carefully he began to assemble it, to gather it together. He’d never tried to work with such precision before. Always, previously, he’d done what he’d learned to do in haste. In desperation. Recklessly. This time the task needed subtlety: blow out the back of the truck, take down the SV men. But not hurt Maroussia. And try not to draw the attention of everyone in the street. He wasn’t sure if he could do it but it was time to try. He was as ready as he would ever be.

But Lom never made the move. Something else happened. The sudden crash of breaking glass from the cab of the truck. A shout. A scream.

Open to the world as he was, Lom felt the driver die.

Lavrentina Chazia had another place in the Lodka, a place few knew of, deeper than the deepest of the interrogation cells, reached by steep iron stairs and locked corridors to which she had the only key. It was not a room but a high, narrow tunnel, running under the immense building and out beyond it. Sometimes, when she was working alone, Chazia heard faint sounds and echoes from the dark tunnel mouths. The skitter of footfalls. Mutterings and distant shrieks. Heavy objects being dragged across stone and mud. She took no notice. Mice and rats in the city’s loft.

The section of tunnel where she worked was filled with cool grey morning light, spilling downwards from smeared light wells in the roof. Parallel steel rails set into the flagstone floor disappeared in both directions into shadow. The air smelled of damp stone and river water and machine oil and the faint iron-and-ozone scent of angel flesh. The tunnel hummed and prickled with the muted almost-life of the angel stuff. It was a low vibration at the threshold of perception. Chazia had collected blocks of it, in slabs and rolls and drums: offcuts from the Armoury workshops where they maintained the mudjhiks. For years she had been working here, at her bench, at night, under the bleak illumination of fluorescent tubing. She worked with lathes and belt saws and finer, subtler tools. It had taken her years to acquire the skills and equipment. Years of trial and error. Years of developing techniques. Years moving towards ever greater power.