Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

The telephone was still ringing, loud and demanding and persistent, as he ran back up the stairs. Then, abruptly, it stopped. It took him three or four goes to find the right key to let Maroussia out. She was fine. She wasn’t hurt.

‘What—’ she began. Lom held up his hand to cut her off.

‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘Move. We need to clear out. Now.’

They had to step across the body on the stairs. Maroussia looked but said nothing.

They passed the open door to the office where the corporal’s body lay across the desk. The telephone started to ring. On impulse, Lom went in and picked it up.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Mamontov? Is that Mamontov?’

It was a woman’s voice.

Lom recognised it.

Chazia.

‘I must speak to Mamontov,’ she said. ‘Immediately. It is a matter of great urgency.’

‘Mamontov is the corporal here?’ said Lom.

‘Of course. Who is this? Who am I speaking to?’

‘Mamontov can’t come to the phone. He’s dead.’

‘Who is this?’

‘This is Lom.’

A moment’s silence in the receiver. Then Chazia spoke.

‘Safran was supposed to kill you.’

‘He fucked up. I’m coming for you.’

‘I’m not hard to find.’

‘So wait for me.’

Lom put the phone down.

Maroussia was waiting outside the office. She’d found two more bodies. She stared at Lom, her face drawn tight and blank.

‘Vissarion?’ she said quietly. ‘Did you…? Did you do this?’

‘Of course not.’

She exhaled deeply.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course you didn’t. But… what happened here?’

‘I don’t know. I was locked in a room. I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Then—’

‘Think later. Now, immediately now, we have to get far away, completely clear of here. We have to do that very quickly.’

Lavrentina Chazia hung up the telephone and reached for the intercom.

‘Iliodor?’

‘Yes, Commander.’

‘The Marinsky Square gendarme post. There is a problem there.’

‘Marinsky Square? That’s where the Shaumian girl is being held. A patrol is on its way to collect—’

‘There is a problem there.

Lom. Lom is the problem. Lom is there.’ ‘Lom? That’s impossible. Safran was—’

‘I have just spoken to him, Iliodor. To Lom himself. On the telephone, from Marinsky Square. He threatened me, Iliodor. He threatened me . The Marinsky Square station is down. I want them found, Iliodor, him and the girl. Found and brought to me. No more gendarmes. No more militia. No more mistakes. I want the SV involved.’

‘But this afternoon is the funeral—’

‘This is the priority, man! This matters more! Deal with it yourself, Iliodor, and do it now.’

Chazia switched off the intercom and sat back in her chair, scratching irritably at the itching dark patch on the side of her neck. She didn’t like being threatened. And she needed the Shaumian girl found .

Taking a deep breath, she pushed her anger and frustration aside. Focus. Focus. She had work to do. Her desk was heaped with files, reports, photographs, telegrams. The walls of her office were hung with maps. Nothing happened in the Vlast that Chazia didn’t know about. Nothing moved and nothing was agreed. All significant intelligence reports passed through her office before anyone else saw them and were only acted on if and when she let them out again. She knew more about criminals, dissidents and revolutionaries than the police. More about the ongoing war against the Archipelago than the military commanders. She knew it was a war the Vlast could not win.

Since the death of the Novozhd and subsequent collapse of the peace conference the junior officers had taken to hanging their generals and taking their men across to the enemy. In Herkess and Gorkysk the populace had risen against their land colonels. The aristocrats were coming out of their tenements and moving back to their estates. Eleven oblasts had been lost in the last week alone. The fleet at Remontin had mutinied. The divisions and war fleets of the Archipelago were within striking distance of Mirgorod itself. They could be at the gates of the city in a matter of days. The city’s defensive line looked impregnable on the map but it was brittle. When the enemy came with their armoured and motorised artillery like movable fortresses and the nine-hundred-rounds-a-minute drum magazines of their Whitfield-Roberts automatic rifles, the political commissars would not hold the army together. The hundred-foot war-mudjhiks which still remained viable might delay the advance for a few days but that was all. One sharp blow and the western Vlast would crumble. Dust.

Good. Let them come. Let them destroy the aging, desiccated Vlast. Let them sweep it aside. Its collapse was both inevitable and necessary, and the Archipelago would do it more quickly from outside. It would make her task all the easier.

A New Vlast.

History was on her side. The enemy could not hope to hold what it took. Weakened by the war and by its own internal contradictions and fault lines, its stupid plurality, that loosely bound argumentative club of island nations would soon retreat back beyond the Cetic Ocean. They would have no stomach for the terror to come. And while they were here, she would be building a new and better Vlast in the east, protected from the Archipelago occupation by five thousand miles of rolling continental plain. The New Vlast would be strong. Modern. Purposeful. Cleansed of all the impurities, weaknesses and compromises accumulated under generations of feeble Novozhds. And united under her.

And yet it was taking too long. She had no illusions. She knew that failure was possible. The others had been cleverer than she had expected. Dukhonin. Khazar. Fohn. Particularly Fohn. Within hours of the Novozhd’s death they had pulled together this Colloquium . They had gathered to themselves the reins of power in the Vlast. The generals and officials of the Inner Council had signed up to it before she even knew what was in the air. Fohn had done that. He had been ready. Polished, metropolitan, underestimated Fohn.

Fohn had made himself Chairman. Dukhonin was General Secretary. Khazar was… what? She could not remember. Khazar was negligible.

Chairman Fohn had wanted to keep her out of it altogether–her! Chazia! Excluded from power! But Dukhonin and Khazar had not dared shut her out. So it had become the Colloquium of Four, and they made her Secretary of Security. She had insisted on keeping the police under her direct control and retained the title of Commander. But she hated and despised the whole thing. It was a useless, bastardised, temporary compromise going nowhere. She would bring it all down. Set them one against another, take them down, one by one.

But it was taking too much time.

Chazia was not patient. She was hungry and sleepless. She itched and fretted and burned. She sat in her high office and read the reports and scratched at the dark itching patches on her arms and face. The worms and insects moving under her burning skin. She needed more strength . More power . An edge to cut them down. A massive fist to crush them.

She needed the Pollandore. The Pollandore was power, she was convinced of that. There was no doubt. But she couldn’t use it because she didn’t know how. For that she needed the Shaumian girl.

There was a quiet sound behind her. Chazia jerked her head round. The hidden door in the panelling of her office opened and Josef Kantor stepped in.

Chazia hated the way he would just come in like that, with his pockmarked face, dirty red silk shirt and preposterous fedora, presuming access and attention. She regretted ever giving him the key to the bridge gates.