“I’m not,” she said, laying her head back onto his shoulder.
An hour later, he left her asleep and padded silently back to his own room, hoping to maximize any thin chance of concealing their liaison. Still feeling wide awake, he went out onto the creaking balcony and watched a pair of scrawny dogs prowling the empty street.
Had he left it too late to escape? He probably had. If he took off now in one of the cars parked below, he’d either die in the desert or find the Cheka waiting in the first town he reached. And if the party ever reached Kerki, he doubted that Komarov would leave him untended again. The die seemed cast.
Perhaps it always had been. He’d left it too late to leave because this was where he wanted to be.
Two hundred miles to the west, the anchored Red Turkestan rolled gently in the smooth current of the Amu Dar’ya. Red lights shone at either end of the superstructure, though what purpose they served was beyond Piatakov; no boat would be moving on such a treacherous river at night.
They had run aground about half a dozen times that day, and both passengers and crew had been forced to take to the shallow water and bodily heave the boat off the sandbanks. The civilian passengers had taken less kindly to this unwelcome exercise than they had to the news that their boat had been hijacked. That minor detail had been accepted with a stoicism that bordered on masochism. The boat was still headed in the right direction, so why worry about who was in control? Better to shrug and enjoy what shade you could find. It was Russia writ small.
Brady was lying close by on the deck, covered with a greatcoat he had found in one of the cabins. Piatakov had watched the American’s face age as he drifted into sleep and had thought that with most people it was the other way around: he remembered Caitlin’s hair spread around her pale child’s face. Most people, he guessed, reverted to childhood in sleep, dragged back by dreams to a simpler world.
Did Brady revert to childhood when he was awake? Now, that was a disturbing thought—people who found life simple were always dangerous.
The American seemed to be growing more savage with each passing day. Had the civil war made him that way or merely set free what had been in there already?
Several years earlier, as they’d waited to set out on a night infiltration, Brady had told Piatakov that he’d been born in the year Krakatoa exploded and that, according to his mother, he’d rarely seen sunlight in the first three years of his life. This, he had said, at least half seriously, was probably why he loved darkness so much.
Piatakov thought about his own mother, and the picture that came to mind was her sitting in the overgrown arbor at the bottom of their jungle-like garden. She had loved its wildness, hated formal gardens—the newly fashionable topiary had been one of her few pet aversions. Nature was everything.
What would she think of what he was doing? She’d never condemned, always encouraged. “You’re such a good boy.”
What was good? Fighting for what you believed in? Well, people got hurt when you did that, and could hurting people be good?
He let out a sigh. Lately so many memories seemed to be claiming his attention. Why was that?
It didn’t matter. There was nothing threatening about them. On the contrary, the way they tied his life together was strangely comforting.
They left soon after dawn, jolting their way through sparsely inhabited hills, skirting the occasional village that clung to their slopes. As the bright white sky slowly turned to blue, the land began to flatten out, and the cars could sometimes run side by side, sparing each the other’s dust.
The forty-five miles to Guzar took most of the morning. It proved a very small town, perched on the rim of the desert where dried-up rivers converged in a cluster of black elms and mulberry trees. Their arrival was unheralded and provoked a range of astonished glances and gaping stares from the watching inhabitants, few if any of whom could ever have seen an automobile. The local party official was eventually hunted down in the town mosque, where he claimed he’d been doing educational work.
He arranged refreshments with alacrity and eagerly asked for news of the wider world from each man in turn. He didn’t speak to Caitlin, but couldn’t stop staring at this strangest of creatures, the so-called “comrade woman.” Every other woman in town was draped head to toe in the usual shroud.
The road onward to Karshi followed the rapidly evaporating river out across the desert, passing through a few small villages, all with fortified towers in various stages of decay. The track had been worn smooth by several thousand years of caravan traffic, and they covered this thirty-mile stretch without mishap in a little under three hours, entering what looked like a war-damaged town late that afternoon.
The local Soviet boss was waiting outside his red-flagged residence, ready to explain. The Basmachi had attacked the town twice before the recent deployment of a garrison, blowing up several buildings and riding off with all the food and drink they could carry. As a consequence, the hospitality he could offer his eminent guests from Moscow was somewhat limited.
Komarov waved all this away impatiently and asked if everything had been arranged for their desert crossing. It had. The garrison commander would supply the details, but of course they would travel by night. Komarov asked to see the man in question immediately and advised the others to get some rest while they could.
Piatakov mopped his brow with the front of his blouse for about the hundredth time that day. The sun seemed hotter than ever, beating down out of an ivory-colored sky, drawing agonized flashes of light from the rippling water.
They were approaching Burdalik, according to the captain, and the passengers had all been locked in their cabins. The desert had drawn back from the river over the last few miles, giving ground to reedy flats alive with wild birds and increasing stretches of cultivated land dotted with grey-brown houses and copses of mulberry trees. Every so often a small group of women appeared in the riverside fields, and when one spied the boat, they would all look up, then stretch their backs in unison, as if doing physical drills.
The Red Turkestan was inching around a shallow bend in the river when a posse of children appeared on the nearer bank, waving and shouting and running to keep pace with the boat. Two houses came into view, larger and closer to the river than others, and between them a road sloped down to a landing stage that extended some fifty feet out into the rust-colored water. Several small boats were tethered to one side, a large, flat ferry-raft to the other. A score and more people were gathered at its end. Some seemed to be arguing with a group of soldiers.
Three of the latter clambered into one of the small boats and pushed off into the current.
Brady appeared with the firing mechanism for the machine gun, and slotted it into place with a metallic clang. Piatakov watched the soldiers rowing out toward the center of the river. The gap between the two craft steadily shrank.
They must be mad, Piatakov thought.
Brady fired a burst, shattering the still air. The soldiers stopped rowing; the crowd on the landing stage rushed pell-mell for the safety of the bank. The children stood watching, every one on tiptoe; Piatakov could physically sense their excitement.
One of the soldiers raised a rifle, and Brady fired another burst, this time much closer. An argument broke out in the small boat, and the rifle was knocked aside. At that moment a bullet whined off the metal rail only inches from Piatakov’s hand.
He spun around. The young officer was taking aim with both hands, his eyes squinting against the sun, sweat pouring down his face. Piatakov dived to one side and was still reaching for his own gun when another two shots rang out in quick succession. Neither came anywhere near him.
He looked up to see the officer slide down the upper deck rail, his gun dropping onto the planking below and bouncing over the side. Chatterji walked off the bridge to examine the body and signaled that the man was dead by drawing a hand across his own throat.
The small boat was retreating toward the landing stage. Piatakov glanced across at Brady and found him staring straight ahead.
“Mountains!” the American called out, and sure enough, looming through the heat haze, a faint but enormous wall rose up to meet the southern sky.
The party left Karshi soon after dusk. The garrison commander, with only ten fit men at his disposal, had refused to spare more than four without explicit orders from his military superiors in Tashkent. There had been no volunteers, and the chosen quartet, all local men, didn’t bother to hide their lack of enthusiasm. The guide, a local Turcoman of unfathomable age, was of a more sanguine temperament. He listened to Komarov’s instructions, translated in halting Turkmen by McColl, and nodded. “Two nights,” he said in Russian, holding up the appropriate number of fingers for emphasis.
They left town with the disused railway, but the tracks soon diverged and were lost in the rapidly darkening night. Their ponies were all stallions, and none, McColl noticed with interest, had been castrated. They were suitably frisky.
Their road, increasingly ill defined, wound its way through the rolling terrain. Seeing them by day, McColl had taken the humpbacked shapes for dunes, but there was nothing temporary about them. It looked like some passing Medusa had turned this sandy desert to stone, leaving the impression of an ocean petrified in midstorm.
There was life, though, and in abundance. Large, ratlike creatures with long hind legs and tails darted across the moonlit slopes; tortoises in astonishing profusion crawled out of the party’s path as rapidly as nature allowed. More worryingly, an immense number of fearsome-looking scorpions seemed to be lining their route like a gruesome guard of honor. McColl imagined them falling in line behind the procession, a swelling army of trembling pincers waiting to devour their prey at a site of their own choosing.
Every couple of hours a well tower would loom up against the night sky, and there, for reasons that seemed both clear and truly bizarre, they would pause to quench their thirst with water they’d carried from Karshi. The Turcoman told McColl that one well was 750 feet deep; two camels were needed to raise the bucket over the wooden pulley. McColl imagined the women weaving the seemingly endless rope, as the men delved deeper and deeper.
The tower that greeted them as the sky began to lighten was ringed by long-abandoned huts, and the guide announced that they would spend the day in the latter’s shady interiors. But only, he added, once the scorpions had all been flushed out. After the soldiers had been to work and pronounced the chosen huts clear, the Turcoman still insisted on a daylong patrol of the perimeter. Otherwise, he said with a knowing grin, someone was sure to be stung in his sleep.
Komarov claimed the first watch, and the others laid themselves out on the rock-hard ground. McColl was the first relief and, after sweating his way through an hour of invigilation and beating the odd transgressor to pulp with the butt of his borrowed rifle, passed on the weapon to Maslov and went back to sleep.
Piatakov heard it before he saw it. He was sitting aft, half-hypnotized by the undulating reeds, when the airplane’s drone seeped out of the noise of the riverboat’s progress. Jerking his head around, he saw it, a biplane flying low over the water, coming downstream toward them, out of the yellow sky. He had no sooner identified it than the plane was above and past him, the clatter of its engine drowning the splash of the paddle, its shadow flashing across foredeck and bridge. Leaping to his feet, Piatakov saw it reappear, a flash of red above the ship’s superstructure, gaining height as it turned a wide half circle above the desert.
Brady was hustling down the steps. “Which way did it go?”
Piatakov pointed out the dark spot, fading southward.
“Looking for us, then.”
“Probably.”
The American wrung his hands with what looked suspiciously like glee. “Kerki,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for us.”
Kerki
It was still light when McColl felt a rough hand on the shoulder and opened his eyes to see Maslov pointing a Webley straight at his head. “Come outside,” the young Ukrainian ordered.
McColl rose to his feet and made his way out into the early evening sunlight, where Komarov and Caitlin were waiting, the former’s face expressionless, the latter’s a study in torment.
“Would I be right in thinking your real name is Jack McColl?” Komarov asked.
There seemed no point in denying it. “You would.”
“And do you admit to being an English agent?”
Scottish, McColl thought perversely. And serving a man rather than a country. But why waste his breath quibbling? “I do,” he said.
“An imperialist spy,” Maslov said smugly, as if delighted that life had so generously lived up to his expectations.
“I have some questions,” Komarov said, squatting down on his haunches and idly picking up a saxaul twig.
McColl leaned back against the wall of the hut, wondering if anyone was still on scorpion watch.
“Are you willing to answer them?” Komarov asked.
“That depends on what they are.” He couldn’t tell from Caitlin’s face whether or not Komarov had already accused her of knowing who he was.
“Of course.” Komarov drew a circle in the sand with the twig. “What is your part in this business?”
“I don’t have one. Not directly. My old boss in London sent me here to find out what ‘this business’ is.”
Komarov drew another circle inside the first. “What is this man the boss of?”
McColl looked up at the rapidly darkening sky. He was more than ready to betray his King and Country, the one a pampered figurehead, the other a convenient fiction that had recently all but murdered a million of its citizens. “He’s the head of the British Secret Service. Which I used to work for.”
“I know of it. So why did this man send you into Russia? Why not one of his current agents?”
“Because he knew he could trust me. There is a second British intelligence agency, which is known as MI5—Five for short. Five deals with Britain and the British Empire, the Service with the rest of the world, which of course includes Russia. My boss discovered that some people in Five were mounting an operation that involved both Russia and India. He had no idea what the operation was; he didn’t know whether these people had the support of their own bosses or whether they were receiving help from Service people here in Russia. He sent me to find out.”
“Ah,” Komarov said. “And what is your boss’s name?”
“I won’t tell you that.”
“Who helped you get into Russia?”
“I won’t tell you that either.”
The Russian smiled. “Good. I was beginning to think you were too obliging to be true.”
McColl stole a glance at Caitlin, but the sun was sinking behind her, and he could hardly see her face. “Yuri Vladimirovich, I will not endanger those who helped me, but I’ll tell you anything else you want to know.”
“Miliutin was shot,” Komarov informed him.
McColl sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that. He was planning to retire,” he added inconsequentially.
“Someone telephoned his whereabouts to the Petrograd Cheka. One of your people, I think. Your Five, if what you say is true. And one thing you don’t know: a man with a knife broke into your room in Tashkent. A Russian named Polyansky who’d been hired by an Indian in Samarkand. Luckily for you, you weren’t in your room at the time.”
“I see,” McColl said, noting Maslov’s accusatory look at Caitlin and the stony stare she offered in return. It looked like he might have brought her down, too—if so, he doubted she’d ever forgive him, not that he’d live long enough to find out.
Komarov had other questions. “Who killed Muhammad Rafiq in Moscow?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Brady, probably.” He would talk to Komarov in private, McColl thought.
Try to convince the Cheka boss that Caitlin’s only crime had been her failure to give him away. And that she’d only agreed to keep quiet once he’d convinced her that he meant no harm to their revolution.
“And the Russian at the hotel? Was it you who killed him and stuffed him under the bed?”
“Yes, it was. His name was Suvorov, and he did his best to kill me. I thought at the time I’d surprised him in Rafiq’s room, but he might have been waiting for me.”
“Because you threatened the operation?”
“I can’t think of any other reason. Suvorov certainly worked for Five, and it seems to be their operation.”
“I understand the Indian involvement, but why Brady and the other Russians? How did they get involved?”
“Five caught Brady in Ireland and gave him a choice between hanging and working for them. I can see why he chose not to hang, but I don’t understand his reasons for doing their bidding now that he’s beyond their reach.”
“So what exactly is this operation?” Komarov asked.
“They’re going to assassinate Mohandas Gandhi. The Indian nationalist leader,” McColl added, mostly for Maslov’s benefit. The sun was almost down, the desert a rapidly deepening shade of gold.
“Why?” Komarov wanted to know. “If the British want him dead, why not just arrest him and have him hanged for treason?”
McColl smiled. “That would turn him into a martyr. You don’t understand the beauty of this scheme. Brady’s team will be helped into India, given as many shots at Gandhi as they need, and then arrested. The hard-liners in London will have the proof they want that Russia has broken its promise to leave the empire alone. Those Indians who want to replicate your revolution will find themselves pariahs once Bolsheviks are accused of murdering the people’s hero. And Gandhi will be gone. Three birds with one stone.”
Komarov said nothing for several moments, and McColl could almost hear the Russian’s mind clicking its way through the facts. “I can see what the English in London and Delhi have to gain,” he said eventually, “and that Aidan Brady might hope to earn his freedom with such a deal, but why would men like Piatakov and Shahumian want any part of it? If Gandhi is truly a threat to your empire, why would they want to kill him?”
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 29
