Robert Harris - Archangel

SHE listened to the ten o'clock news, then switched on the ignition and drove slowly out of Bolshaya Lubyanka, heading north-west across Moscow to the Stadium of the Young Pioneers, where she parked in her usual spot, just off the darkened track.

The night was cold. The wind whipped the thin dress tight around her legs. She held on to her bag as she stumbled towards the lights. She would be safer inside.

Outside Robotnik there was a good crowd for a Thursday night, a nice line of rich western sheep all waiting to be fleeced. Normally her eyes would have flashed as sharp across them as a pair of shears, but not tonight, and she had to force herself forwards.

She went round to the back entrance, as normal, and the barman, Aleksey, let her in. She checked her jacket into the cloakroom and hesitated over her bag but then gave that to the old woman attendant as well: the floor of the Robotnik was not the wisest place in Moscow to be caught carrying a gun.

She could always pretend to be someone else when she came to the club, and apart from the money that was the other good thing about it. ('What~' your name?' they would say, trying to make some human contact. 'What name do you like? 'she would always reply.) She could leave her history at the door of the Robotnik, and hide behind this other Zinaida: sexy, self-possessed, hard. But not tonight. Tonight, as she stood in the ladies' toilet, freshening her make-up, the trick didn't seem to be working, and the face that stared back at her was indisputably her own: raw-eyed, frightened Zinaida Rapava.

SHE sat in one of the shadowy booths for an hour or more, watching. What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like. It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.

Just after half-past eleven, when the place was at its busiest, she made her move.

She circled the dance floor, smoking, holding a bottle of mineral water. Holy Mother, she thought, there were girls in here tonight who barely looked fifteen. She was practically old enough to have given them birth.

She was coming to the end of this life.

A man with dark curly hair poking through the straining buttons of his shirt came over to her but he reminded her of O'Brian and she side-stepped him through a cloud of aftershave, in favour of a big south-east Asian in an Armani suit.

He drained his drink - vodka, neat, no ice, she noticed: noticed it too late - and he got her on the dance floor. He quickly grabbed her backside, a cheek in either hand, and began digging his fingers into her, almost lifting her out of her new shoes. She told him to cut it out but he didn't seem to understand. She tried to press her arms against him, push him back, but he only increased his grip and something gave in her then, or rather joined - a kind of merging of the two Zinaidas -Are you a good Bolshevik, Anna Safanova? Will you prove it? Will you dance for Comrade Stalin?'

- and suddenly she raked the fingers of her right hand down his smooth cheek, so deep she was sure she could feel the glossy flesh clogging beneath her nails.

He released her then all right - roared and doubled over, shaking his head, spraying beads of blood around him in a series of perfect arcs, like a wet dog shaking off water. Someone screamed and people rippled away to give him space.

This was what they had come to see!

Zinaida ran - across the bar, up the spiral staircase, past the metal detectors and out into the cold. Her legs splayed like a cow's and gave way on the ice. She was sure he was coming after her. She dragged herself back up on to her feet and somehow made it to her car.

THE Victory of the Revolution apartment complex. Block Nine. In darkness. The cops had gone. The little crowd had gone. And soon the place itself would be gone - it had been jerry built even by Soviet standards; it was going to be pulled down in a month or two.

She parked across the street, in the spot where she had brought the westerner the night before, and stared at it across the roughened, freezing snow.

Block Nine.

Home.

She was so tired.

She grasped the top of the steering wheel with both hands and laid her forehead on her bare arms. She was done with crying by then. She had a very strong sense of her father's presence, and that stupid song he used to sing.

Kolyma. Kolyma,

What a wonderful place!

Twelve months of winter

Summer all the rest.

And wasn't there another verse? Something about twenty-four hours of work each day and sleeping all the rest? And so on and on? She knocked her head against her arms in time to the imagined beat, then rested her cheek against the wheel, and that was the moment that she remembered that she had left her bag with her gun in it back at the club. She remembered it because a car, a big car, had drawn alongside her, very close, preventing her from pulling out, and a man's face was staring at her - a white blur distorted through two panes of dirty wet glass.

SILENCE WOKE HIM.

"What time is it?'

'Midnight.' O'Brian yawned noisily. 'Your shift.'

They were parked beside the deserted highway with the engine off. Kelso could see nothing, apart from a few faint stars up ahead. After the noise of the journey the stillness was almost physical, a pressure in the ears.

He pulled himself upright. 'Where are we?'

About a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty miles north of Vologda.' O'Brian snapped on the interior light, making Kelso flinch. 'Should be about here, I figure.'

He leaned over with the map, his big fingernail pressed to a spot that looked entirely blank, a white space split by the red line of the highway, with a few symbols for marshland dotted on either side of it. Further north the map turned green for the forest.

'I need a piss,' said O'Brian. 'You coming?'

It was much colder than in Moscow, the sky even bigger. A great fleet of vast clouds, pale-edged by the moonlight, moved slowly southwards, occasionally unveiling patches of stars. O'Brian had a torch. They scrambled down a short bank and stood urinating, companionably, side by side, for half a minute, steam rising from the ground before them, then O'Brian zipped up his flies and shone his torch around. The powerful beam stretched for a couple of hundred yards into the darkness, then dissipated; it lit nothing. A freezing mist hung low to the ground.

'Can you hear anything?' said O'Brian. His breath flickered in the cold.

'No.'

'Neither can I.'

He switched off the torch and they stood there for a while. 'Oh, daddy,' whispered O'Brian, in a little boy's voice, 'I'm so scared'

He turned the light back on and they climbed the bank to the Toyota. Kelso poured them both more coffee while O'Brian lifted up the rear door and dragged out a couple of the jerrycans. He found a funnel and began filling the tank.

Kelso, nursing his coffee, moved away from the gasoline fumes and lit a cigarette. In the darkness, in the cold, under the immense Eurasian sky, he felt disconnected from reality, frightened yet strangely exhilarated, his senses sharpened. He heard a rumble far away and a yellow dot appeared far back on the straight highway. He watched it grow slowly, saw the gleam divide and become two big headlights, and for a moment he thought they were coming directly at him, and then a big truck, a sixteen-wheeler, rushed past, the driver merrily sounding his horn. The noise of the engine was still faintly audible in the distance long after the red tail lights had vanished in the dark.

'Hey, Fluke! Give us a hand here, will you?'