Jasper Kent - Twelve

'I'll go alone,' I replied firmly. 'He's only expecting to see me. If we all go, he may run. He'll come with me. If he doesn't then we'll know for sure he's a traitor.'

Dmitry sneered.

'Believe me, Dmitry Fetyukovich,' I told him in cold earnest, 'if Maksim is a traitor then he has betrayed me as much as any of us. I'm not going to let a man like that get away with it.'

'I could order you to tell us where he is,' said Vadim, but I could tell from his voice that he wasn't going to risk seeing his squad further eviscerated by having his orders disobeyed. He looked at me, then to Dmitry, then back to me. 'Very well, Aleksei. You go. Bring him back here and we'll decide together what to do with him – if he's guilty.' But his last words were an afterthought – he had already decided.

I saddled up and began my journey south out of the city. Desna wasn't far, but I wasn't eager to get there, and so I proceeded at a gentle canter. Whether or not I trusted Dmitry's word on what Maks had done, I didn't entirely trust him to follow Vadim's orders and leave me to do my job alone. Along the journey, I kept one eye over my shoulder and turned off the main road to double back a few times, but there was no sign that I was being followed. It had already been dark for some time when I arrived at the woodsman's hut, just north of the village.

I had not seen the place before – I think it had been Maks' own suggestion originally to add it to the list – and I was surprised by its size. It was big enough for one or two men to sleep in relative comfort if required.

I knocked on the door and spoke softly. 'Maks! Maks, it's Aleksei.'

The door opened and I saw Maks' face, pale, unwashed and frightened. 'Are you alone?' he asked. I nodded. He took a paranoid glance around before opening the door fully and letting me inside.

'How long have you been here?' I asked.

'Two days,' he replied. The inside of the hut was barren, but for a simple clay stove against one wall and a single small chair. 'Sit!' he said to me, indicating the chair. I picked up the chair and moved it to the centre of the room.

'No, you sit,' I said. I tried to sound generous but, in reality, I was preparing for an interrogation, and I would be in a better position if I were to stand and walk while he was forced to remain seated and look up at me. He did as I had said.

'I've spoken to Dmitry,' I said.

Maks looked to the floor. 'Good,' he muttered.

'Is it true?' I asked.

'Is what true?'

I lost my composure and spoke to him more personally than I had intended to, breaking out of the role of interrogator. 'This isn't a debate, Maks. This isn't even a trial. This is about our friendship. Just give a straight answer.'

'I can't.' His reply was completely genuine. 'You know me, Aleksei, I just don't think that way. I don't speak that way.' I knew what he meant. Some men put up an intellectual front to give a veneer of profundity to their gut feelings. Maks did not deal in gut feelings. He had them and – I had realized when he had explained away his visit to the brothel – he understood them, but he didn't care for them or rely upon them. His sincerest expressions were always constructed through a process of reason. 'But if you talk specifically of friendship, that's one thing I haven't betrayed. I wouldn't betray anything that counted.'

'But you've betrayed your country.'

It wasn't put as a question, but he answered it anyway. 'Yes.'

'And you sent Simon, Faddei and Iakov Alfeyinich to be slaughtered by the French.'

'Oh yes, and Andrei too if I could have – although we could argue about the "slaughtered".'

'What do you mean? Are you saying they're not dead?'

'No, no. They're dead. I was just questioning the rather evocative choice of word.' Anyone who didn't know Maks might have thought that he was trying to be confrontational, or perhaps that he was trying to be affable – to make a friend of his interrogator – but I knew that he was simply being his usual, honest, precise self. His mind dealt with what he must have realized was the imminent prospect of his death as a traitor with the same detachment that he viewed a discussion on literature or a new political theory.

'So you're not making any attempt to deny that you've been spying for Bonaparte?' I asked him directly.

'No. Why should I?'

I bridled at this sudden show of apparent honesty. 'Would you have denied it a month ago?'

'Of course.'

'So what is it that makes you so keen to be honest with me now?'

'The fact that you know everything. I'm not going to make the effort of lying to a man who knows the truth,' he replied with absolute simplicity. If only one of us then had comprehended that I didn't know everything, that there were explanations that desperately needed to be made, then things might have turned out very different. But Maks, for all his articulacy, had never been one to readily understand that the thoughts that were so clearly laid out in his brain had not yet managed to find their way into those of other people. The fact that my horror at his being a traitor to his country was so great, even though that crime to him meant so little, perhaps confused him into thinking I knew about the greater horror he had discovered.

'So how long have you been working for Bonaparte?' I asked him.

'You know I've always been sympathetic to the Revolution.'

I nodded. We all had been, until the Revolution had turned into an empire and the empire had invaded our country.

'It was when I was captured at Austerlitz,' Maks continued. 'They have experts who can spot potential recruits: the young, the politically avant-garde. The only way that they changed my mind was to point out that Napoleon would either be the master of Europe or would be defeated. There can be no happy compromise that leaves a free Russia – the British wouldn't allow that, for a start, and who can blame them? They have their own interests to consider.

'But I had to choose. Did I want a world in which the ideas of the Revolution flourished or one in which they perished? You know what I would have chosen, Aleksei, without even having to ask.'

He was right. I couldn't accuse him of inconsistency. Everything he ever did was a predictable conclusion of his beliefs and his circumstances. It had been my mistake not to take what I knew of him to its logical end.

'And so, after a few years' indoctrination, they released you like any other prisoner?'

'"Indoctrination" is another of those evocative words, like "slaughtered",' he replied, 'but that's the general idea of it.'

'And what "services" have you done for Bonaparte since?'

'Very little, to be honest.' He smiled ironically. 'Vadim had seen in me exactly the same potential for "irregular" operations as the French did, so almost everything military I've done has been with you, him and Dmitry, and even then there's not been much. I've reported back what I've known about general troop movements and so forth, but it's always seemed too immediate, too personal, to tell them about anything we've done. It turns out to be a lot easier to betray a country than a person.'

'Until last week when you knowingly sent three brave men to their deaths.'

'Again, we could quibble over words there, but that was different. That was for the good of humanity.'

'Humanity?' I scoffed. 'It's always for humanity, isn't it? But tell me, Maksim, what makes French humanity more important than Russian humanity? Or British more important than Austrian? We can't fight for the whole of humanity, because humanity has no enemies but other humans.' He was about to object, but I was in no mood to yield. When I'd arrived at Desna, I had been urgently hoping that Dmitry had somehow been wrong – that Andrei had lied – and as Maksim had confirmed everything I'd been told I had tried to sympathize, tried to understand why he had done what he had done. But now, as he tried to justify the deaths of three of our comrades on the basis of the good of humanity, that was when I saw him for the traitor that he was and felt as Dmitry must have done when he first found out.