Robert Harris - Archangel

He watched the blurred pink faces of the two men above the stone parapet as they headed north across the river into the grey afternoon and then were lost from view.

KELSO PAID HIS two-rouble fare at the Borovitskaya metro station, collected his plastic token, and descended gratefully into the Moscow earth. At the entrance to the northbound platform something made him glance back up the moving staircase to see if Mamantov was following, but there was no sign of him among the tiers of exhausted faces.

It was a stupid thought - he tried to smile at himself for his paranoia - and he turned away, towards the welcoming dimness and the warm gusts of oil and electricity. Almost at once, a yellow headlight danced around a bend in the track and the rush of the train sucked him forwards. Kelso let the crowd jostle him into a carriage. There was an odd comfort in this dowdy, silent multitude. He hung on to the metal handrail and pitched and swayed with the rest as they plunged back into the tunnel.

They hadn't gone far when the train suddenly slowed and stopped - a bomb scare, it turned out, at the next station: the militia had to check it out - and so they sat there in the semidarkness, nobody speaking, just the occasional cough, the tension rising by imperceptible degrees.

Kelso stared at his reflection in the dark glass. He was jumpy, he had to admit it. He couldn't help feeling he had just put himself into some kind of danger, that telling Mamantov about the notebook had been a reckless mistake. What had the Russian called it? Something to die for? It was a relief to his nerves when the lights eventually flickered back on and the train jolted forwards. The soothing rhythm of normality resumed. By the time Kelso emerged above ground it was after four. Low in the western sky, barely clearing the tops of the dark trees that fringed the Zoopark, was a lemony crack in the clouds. A winter sunset was little more than an hour away. He would have to hurry. He folded the map into a small square and twisted it so that the metro station was to his right. Across the road was the entrance to the zoo - red rocks, a waterfall, a fairy tower - and, a little further along, a beer garden, closed for the season, its plastic tables stacked, its striped umbrellas down and flapping. He could hear the roar of the traffic on the Garden Ring road, about two hundred yards straight ahead. Across that, sharp left, then right, and there it ought to be. He stuffed the map into his pocket, picked up his bag and climbed the cobbled slope that led to the big intersection.

Ten lanes of traffic formed an immense, slow-moving river of light and steel. He crossed it in a dog-leg and suddenly he was into diplomatic Moscow: wide streets, grand houses, old birch trees weeping dead leaves on to sleek black cars. There wasn't much life. He passed a silvery-headed man walking a poodle and a woman in green rubber boots that poked incongruously from beneath her Muslim robe. Behind the thick gauze of the curtained windows, he could see the occasional yellow constellation of a chandelier. He stopped at the corner of Vspolnyi Street and peered along it. A militia car drove towards him very slowly and passed away to his right. The road was deserted.

He located the house at once, but he wanted to get his bearings and to check if anyone was about, so he made himself walk past it, right to the end of the street before returning along the opposite side. 'There was a red sickle moon, and a single red star. And the place was guarded by devils with blackened faces... 'Suddenly he saw what the old man must have meant. A red sickle moon and a single red star -that would be a flag: a Muslim flag. And black faces~ The place must have been an embassy - it was too big for anything else - an embassy of a Muslim country, perhaps in North Africa. He was certain he was right. It was a big building, that was for sure, forbidding and ugly, built of sandy-coloured stone which made it look like a bunker. It ran for at least forty yards along the western side of the road. He counted thirteen sets of windows. Above the massive entrance was an iron balcony with double doors leading on to it. There was no nameplate and no flag. If it had been an embassy it was abandoned now; it was lifeless.

He crossed the street and went up close to it, patting the coarse stone with his palm. He stood on tiptoe and tried to see through the windows. But they were set too high and besides were blanked off by the ubiquitous grey netting. He gave up and followed the facade around the corner. The house went on down this street, too. Thirteen windows again, no door, thirty or forty yards of heavy masonry -immense, impregnable. Where this elevation of the house eventually ended there was a wall made of the same stone, about eight feet high, with a locked, iron-studded wooden door set into it. The wall ran on - down this street, along the side of the ring-road, and finally back up the narrow alley which formed the fourth side of the property. Walking round it, Kelso could see why Beria had chosen it, and why his rivals had decided the only place to capture him was inside the Kremlin. Holed up in this fortress he could have withstood a siege.

In the neighbouring houses, the lights were becoming sharper as the afternoon faded into dusk. But Beria's place remained a square of darkness. It seemed to be gathering the shadows into itself He heard a car door slam and he walked back up to the corner of Vspolnyi Street. While he had been at the back of the property, a small van had arrived at the front. He hesitated, then began to move towards it.

The van was a Russian model - white, unmarked, unoccupied. Its engine had just been switched off and it was making a slight ticking noise as it cooled. As he came level with it, he glanced towards the door of the house and saw that it was slightly open. Again he hesitated, looking up and down the quiet street. He went over and put his head into the gap and shouted a greeting.

His words echoed in the empty hall. The light inside was weak and bluish, but even without taking another step he could see that the floor was of black and white tiles. To his left was the start of a wide staircase. The house smelled strongly of sour dust and old carpets, and there was an immense stillness to it, as though it had been shut up for months. He pushed the door wide open and took a step inside.

He called out again.

He two options now. He could stay by the door, or he could go further inside. He went further inside and immediately, like a laboratory rat in a maze, he found his options multiplied. He could stay where he was, or he could take the door to his left, or the stairs, or the passage that led off into the darkness beyond the stairs, or one of the three doors to his right. For a moment, the weight of choice paralysed him. But the stairs were straight ahead and seemed the obvious course - and perhaps, subconsciously, he also wanted to get the advantage of height, to get above whoever might be on the ground floor, or at least to get on equal terms with them if they were already above.

The stairs were stone. He was wearing brown suede boots with leather soles he'd bought in Oxford years ago and no matter how quietly he tried to walk his steps seemed to ring like gunshots. But that was good. He wasn't a thief, and to emphasise the point he called out again. Pree-vyet! Kto tam? Hello? Is anybody there? The stairs curled round to his right and he had a good, high view now, looking down into the dark blue well of the hall, pierced by the softer shaft of blue that shone from the open door. He reached the top of the stairs and came out into a wide corridor that stretched to right and left, vanishing at either end into Rembrandt gloom. Ahead of him was a door. He tried to take his bearings. That must lead to the room above the front entrance, the one with the iron balcony. What was it? A ballroom? The master bedroom? The corridor floor was parquet and he remembered Rapava's description of Beria's damp footprints on the polished wood as he hurried off to take the call from Malenkov.