Robert Harris - Archangel

A few minutes later they passed a kind of truckers' lay-by. He braked hard, stopped, and reversed back into it. Beside him, O'Brian struggled blearily into consciousness.

'Why're we stopping?'

'The tank's empty. And I've got to rest.' Kelso turned off the ignition and massaged the back of his neck. 'Why don't we stop here for a bit?'

'No. We need to keep moving. Fix us some coffee, will you? I'll fill her up.'

They went through the same ritual as before, O'Brian stumbling out into the cold and hoisting a pair of jerrycans from the back of the Toyota, while Kelso wandered away for a cigarette. The wind had a sharper edge to it this far north.

He could hear it slicing through trees he couldn't see. Running water splashed somewhere, softly.

When he got back into the car, O'Brian was in the driver's seat with the interior light on, running an electric shaver over his big chin, studying the map. It was an unnatural time to be awake, thought Kelso. It meant nothing good. He associated it with emergency bereavement, conspiracy flight; the sad skulk away at the end of a one-night affair.

Neither man spoke. O'Brian put away his shaver and stuffed the map into the pocket beside him.

The reclined seat was warm and so was the sleeping bag and within five minutes, despite his anxieties, Kelso was asleep - a dreamless, falling sleep - and when he awoke a few hours later it was as if they had crossed a barrier and entered another world.

A LITTLE TIME before this, when Kelso was still at the wheel, Major Feliks Suvorin had bent to kiss his wife, Serafima.

She offered him merely her cheek at first but then seemed to think the better of it. A warm, soft arm snaked up from beneath the duvet, a hand cupped the back of his head and drew him down. He kissed her mouth. She was wearing Chanel. Her father had brought it back from the last G8 meeting.

She whispered, 'You won't be back tonight.'

'I will.'

'You wont.

'I'll try not to wake you.'

'Wake me.

'Sleep.'

He put his finger to her lips and turned off the bedside lamp. The light from the passage showed him the way out of the bedroom. He could hear the sound of the boys' breathing. An ormolu clock announced it was one-thirty-five. He had been home two hours. He sat down on a gilt chair beside the door and put his shoes on, then collected his coat from its carved wooden hanger. The decor was copied from some glossy western magazine and it all cost far more than he earned as a major in the SVR; in fact, on his salary, they could barely afford the magazine. His father-in-law had paid.

On his way out, Suvorin glimpsed himself in the hall mirror, framed against a Jackson Pollock print. The lines and shadows of his exhausted face seemed to merge with those of the picture. He was getting too old for this kind of game, he thought: the golden boy no longer.

THE news that the Delta flight had taken off without Fluke Kelso had reached Yasenevo shortly after two in the afternoon. Colonel Arsenyev had expressed in various colourful colloquialisms - and had no doubt minuted elsewhere, for the record, more discreetly - his amazement that Suvorin had not arranged for the historian to be escorted on to the aircraft. Suvorin had choked back his response, which would have been to inquire, acidly, how he was supposed to locate Mamantov, control the militia, find the notebook and nursemaid an independent-minded western academic through Sheremetevo-2, all with the assistance of four men.

Besides, by then this was of less pressing importance than the discovery that the Interfax news agency was putting out a story on Papu Rapava's death, quoting unnamed 'militia sources' to the effect that the old man had been murdered while trying to sell some secret papers of Josef Stalin to a western author. Three outraged communist deputies had already attempted to raise the matter in the Duma. The Office of the President of the Federation had been on the line to Arsenyev, demanding to know (a direct quote from Boris Nikolaevich, apparently) what the flick was going on? Ditto the FSB. Half a dozen reporters were camped outside Rapava's apartment block, more were besieging militia HQ, while the militia's official position was to hold up their hands and whistle.

For the first time, Suvorin had begun to see the merit of the old ways, when news was what Tass was pleased to announce and everything else was a state secret.

He had made one last attempt to play devil's advocate.

Weren't they in danger of getting this out of proportion? Weren't they playing Mamantov's game? What could Stalin's notebook possibly contain that would have any modern relevance~

Arsenyev had smiled: always a dangerous sign.

'When were you born, Feliks?' he had asked, pleasantly. 'Fifty-eight? Fifty-nine?'

'Sixty.'

'Sixty. You see, I was born in thirty-seven. My grandfather he was shot. Two uncles went to the camps ... never came back. My father died in some crazy business at the start of the war, trying to stop a German tank outside Poltava with a bit of rag and a bottle, and all because Comrade Stalin said that any soldier who surrendered would be considered a traitor. So I don't underestimate Comrade Stalin.'

'I'm sorry -But Arsenyev had waved him away. His voice was rising,

his face red. 'If that bastard kept a notebook in his safe, he kept it for a reason, I can tell you that. And if Beria stole it, he had a reason. And if Mamantov is willing to risk torturing an old man to death, then he has a damned good reason for wanting to get his hands on it, too. So find it, Feliks Stepanovich, please, if you would be so good. Find it.'

And Suvorin had done his best. Every forensic document examiner in Moscow had been contacted. Kelso's description had been circulated, discreetly, to all the capital's militia posts, as well as to the traffic cops, the GM. Technically, the SVR was now 'liaising' with the militia's murder inquiry, which meant at least he now had some resources to draw on: he had worked out a common line with the militia which they could spin to the media. He had spoken to a friend of his father-in-law's - the owner of the biggest chain of newspapers in the Federation - to plead for a little restraint. He had sent Netto to poke around Vspolnyi Street. He had arranged for a watch to be put Qn the apartment of Rapava's daughter, Zinaida, who had disappeared, and when she still hadn't turned up by nightfall he had sent Bunin to hang around the club she worked in, Robotnik.

Shortly after eleven o'clock, Suvorin had gone home.

And at one twenty-five he got the call that told him she had been found.

'WHERE was she?'

'Sitting in her car,' said Bunin. 'Outside her father's place. We followed her from the club. Waited to see if she was meeting anyone, but nobody else showed, so we picked her up. She's been in a fight, I reckon.'

'Why?'

'Well, you'll see when you go up. Take a look at her hand.' They were standing, talking quietly, in the downstairs lobby of her apartment block, in the Zayauze district, a drab hinterland of eastern Moscow. She had a place close to the park - privatised, to judge by the neatness of its common parts; respectable. Suvorin wondered what the neighbours would think if they knew the girl on the third floor was a tart.

'Anything else?'

'The apartment's clean, and so's her car,' said Bunin. 'There's a bag of clothes in the back - jeans, T-shirt, pair of boots, knickers. But she's got a lot of money stashed up there. She doesn't know I found it yet.'

'How much?'

'Twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars. Bound up tight in polythene and hidden in the lavatory cistern.'

'Where is it now?'

‘I've got it.’

'Let's have it.'

Bunin hesitated, then handed it over: a thick bundle, all hundreds. He looked at it hungrily. It would take him four or five years to make that much and Suvorin guessed he had probably been on the point of helping himself to a percentage. Maybe he already had. He stuffed it into his pocket. 'What's she like?'