Robert Harris: Archangel

Arsenyev had called the Kremlin.

He was therefore hearing Mamantov's ponderous tones twice - once via the television in his own office and then again, a fraction later, coming down the telephone, filtered through the sound of an ailing man's laboured breathing. In the background at the other end of the line someone was shouting, there were general sounds of panic and commotion. He heard the clink of a glass and a liquid being poured.

Oh, please, he thought. Not vodka, surely. Please. Not even him. Not this early in the morning -On the screen, Mamantov had turned and was boarding the train. He waved at the cameras. The band was playing. People were applauding.

Holy mother -Arsenyev could feel the lurching of his heart, the clenching

of his bronchial tubes. Getting air into his lungs was like sucking mud through a straw.

He took a couple of squirts on his inhaler.

'No,' grunted the familiar voice in Arsenyev's ear, and the line went dead.

'No,' wheezed Arsenyev, quickly, pointing at Vissari Netto.

'No,' said Netto, who was sitting on the sofa, also holding a telephone, patched through on a secure military circuit to the MVD commander in Vologda. 'I repeat: no move to be made. Stand your men down. Let the train go.

'The right decision,' said Arsenyev, replacing the receiver. 'There could have been shooting. It wouldn't have looked good.' Looking good was all that mattered now.

For a while Arsenyev said nothing as he contemplated, with increasing unease, this final fork in his life's road. One route, it seemed to him, took him to retirement, pension and a dacha; the other to almost certain dismissal, an official inquiry into illegal assassination attempts and, quite possibly, jail.

'Abandon the whole operation,' he said.

Netto's pen began to move across his pad. Deep in their fleshy sockets, like a pair of berries in dough, Arsenyev's little eyes blinked in alarm.

'No, no, no, man! Don't write any of this down! Just do it. Pull the surveillance off Mamantov's apartment. Remove the protection from the girl. Abort the whole thing.'

'And Archangel, colonel? We've still got a plane waiting up there for Major Suvorin.'

Arsenyev tugged at his thick neck for a few seconds. In his perennially fertile mind, the form of an unattributable briefing for the foreign media was already beginning to take shape: 'reports of shooting in the forest. . . regrettable incident.., rogue officer took matters into his own han~... disobeyed strict orders ... tragic outcome ... profound apologies...'

Poor Feliks, he thought.

'Order it back to Moscow.'

IT was as if the train had been held in check too long, so that when the brakes were finally released it lunged forwards and then stopped abruptly, and O'Brian, like the clapper of a beli, was slammed into the front and back of the compartment. The satchel flew out of his hands.

Very slowly, creaking and protesting~ and with the same infinitesimal speed as when they left Archangel, the locomotive began to haul them out of Vologda.

Kelso was still on the floor.

No notebook - no proof- no story-'

He dived for the satchel and scooped it in one hand, got the fingertips of his other up on to the door handle, and was attempting to rise when he felt O'Brian grab his legs and try to drag him back. The handle tipped, the door slid open and he flopped out on to the carpeted corridor, kicking backwards frantically with his heels at O'Brian's head. He felt a satisfying contact of hard rubber on flesh and bone. There was a howl of pain. The boot came off and he left it behind like a lizard losing the tip of its tail. He limped away down the corridor on his stockinged foot.

The narrow passage was clogged with anxious 'soft' class passengers - 'Did you hear?' 'Is it true?'- and it was impossible to make quick progress. O'Brian was coming after him. He could hear his shouts. At the end of the carriage the window of the door was open and he briefly considered hurling the satchel out on to the tracks. But the train hadn't cleared Vologda, was travelling much too slowly - the notebook was bound to land intact, he thought: was certain to be found -'Fluke!'

He ran into the next carriage and realised too late that he was heading back towards 'hard' again, which was a mistake because 'hard' was where Mamantov and his thugs had boarded - and here, indeed was one of Mamantov's men, hastening down the corridor towards him, pushing people out of his way.

Kelso grabbed the door handle nearest him. It was locked. But the second handle turned and he almost fell into the empty compartment, locking the door after him. Inside it was shaded, the curtains closed, the berths unmade, a stale smell of cold, male sweat - whoever had occupied it must have got off at Vologda. He tried to open the window but it was stuck. The Aurora man was battering at the door, shouting at him to open up. The handle rattled furiously. Kelso unfastened the satchel and tipped out the contents and had his lighter in his hand as the lock gave way.

THE blinds of Zinaida Rapava's apartment were drawn. The lights were off. The television screen flickered in the corner of her tiny flat like a cold blue hearth.

There had been a plainclothes guard outside on the landing all night - Bunin to start with, and then a different man - and a militia car parked ostentatiously opposite the entrance to the apartment block. It was Bunin who had told her to keep the blinds closed and not to go out. She didn't like Bunin and she could tell he didn't like her. When she asked him how long she would have to stay like this, he had shrugged. Was she a prisoner, then? He had shrugged again.

She had lain in a foetal curl on her bed for the best part of twenty hours, listening to her neighbours coming home from work, then some of them going out for the evening. Later, she heard them preparing for bed. And she had discovered, lying in the darkness, that as long as something occupied her eye, she could prevent herself seeing her father:

she could block out the images of the broken figure on the trolley. So she had watched television all night. And at one point, hopping between a game show and a black-and-white American movie, she had lighted on the pictures from the forest. Freedom alone is not enough, by far ... It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone...'

She had watched, hypnotised, as the night went on, how the story had spread like a stain across the networks, until she could recite it by heart. There was her father's lock-up, and the notebook, and Kelso turning the pages ('it's genuine - I'd stake my life on it'). There was the old woman pointing at a map. There was the strange man walking across the forest clearing and staring into the camera as he spoke. He ranted part of a hate-filled speech and that had nagged at her memory for a while in the early hours, until she remembered that her father had sometimes played a record of it when she was a child.

('You should listen to this, girl -you might learn something.)

He was frightening, this man, comic and sinister -Aike Zhirinovsky, or Hitler - and when it was reported that he had been seen on the Moscow train, heading south, she felt almost as if he were coming for her. She could imagine him stamping down the halls of the big hotels, his boots hammering on the marble, his coat flying behind him, smashing the windows of the expensive boutiques, hurling the foreigners out on to the pavements, looking for her. She could see him in Robotnik, overturning the bar, calling the girls whores and shouting at them to cover themselves. He would paint out the western signs, shatter the neon, empty the streets, shut down the airport -She knew they should have burned that notebook.

It was later, when she was in the bathroom, naked from the waist up, splashing cold water into her red eyes, that she heard from the television the name of Mamantov. And her first thought was, naively, that he had been arrested. After all, that was what Suvorin had promised her, wasn't it?