Mikkala slumped down again on the bed.
‘In the Administration Block,’ she said. ‘But…’ She stared up at him. Her face was drawn and chalky. Dark tears behind her eyes. ‘Oh god. I’ve made another mistake. I thought you were my friend.’
‘I am your friend. Of course I am.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You’re a good person, Mikkala. I don’t mean you any harm. I’m glad we met.’
‘Please go now.’
‘Get some sleep,’ said Lom. ‘Everything’ll be fine.’
5
It was almost 2.30 a.m. when Lom found the Administration Block. Parallel Sector security patrols had slowed him up.
The building was dark and locked. He took a small torch and the roll of lock-picking tools from his bag, let himself in and locked the door behind him. Made his way up the stairs and started from the top. Fifteen minutes later he was in Khyrbysk’s office. He extinguished the torch, drew the curtains and switched the desk lamp on.
He should have at least three hours before someone found the driver in the cab of his truck. Unless Mikkala raised the alarm, but he didn’t think she would.
He felt bad about Mikkala.
There was a row of steel cabinets along the wall of Khyrbysk’s office. Locked, but the locks were flimsy. No obstacle at all. He went through them methodically one by one, taking the most promising files across to the desk to read.
Piece by piece the story came together. Some of it he knew, but the rest… There were plans within plans. The ambition. Some of it was flat-out insane. He thought about trying to take photographs of the documents, but the light was poor and he had the wrong kind of lenses. He’d seen too many blurred and badly exposed copies of documents. He started pulling out pages and stuffing them into his bag. Whole files if need be. It wasn’t ideal–Khyrbysk would know he’d been burgled–but it couldn’t be helped.
By 4.30 a.m. he had the whole picture. It was lethal. All that Kistler needed to work with, and more. Except that nothing tied it for certain to Rizhin, and he was running out of time.
There was a green steel safe behind the door. He hadn’t touched it yet because of the combination lock. He didn’t know how to open those. But everyone wrote their combination somewhere.
Lom went through the drawers of Khyrbysk’s desk. Nothing. Checked the blotter but it was no help. Looked inside the covers of the books on his shelves. There was nothing that looked remotely like a combination to a safe.
Think. Think.
He went out into the corridor. There was a card on the door of the next office, tucked into a holder by the handle: ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR.
Secretaries always knew the combinations to their boss’s safe. Lom went into the room. There was an appointments diary next to the telephone. He flicked through the pages rapidly. On the inside back cover was a sequence of numbers. Four groups of four. In pencil.
Why would pencil be more secure than pen?
So you could erase it later.
He took the diary back into Khyrbysk’s office and tried the numbers, but they didn’t work. The safe didn’t open.
Shit.
Then he tried them backwards.
The tumblers fell into place and he heard the lock click open.
On the bottom shelf of the safe was a small stack of brown folders. Not official files. Titles printed carefully in manuscript. Black ink.
Private Correspondence.
Conference–Byelaya Posnya.
There was no time to look inside: grey light was beginning to show behind the curtains in the window. Lom pushed the folders into his overloaded bag and switched off the desk lamp.
When he came out of the Administration Block there was a dull band of light across the eastern sky. Dawn came late and dark to Vitigorsk under the livid permanent cloud. In the plush quiet of Khyrbysk’s office Lom had forgotten how the air stank. His bag was bulging. The sleeve and lapels of his coat were stained with his own dried blood. He looked a mess.
There was another truck loading bay a few blocks away. He’d noticed it in the night. He hustled, half-walking, half-running. The alert could come any moment now. He had to get clear of the checkpoints and on the road.
The gate of Bay Nineteen was open. An early driver unlocking his containerless cab. Lom circled round behind it.
The driver was lean, compact, energetic; long nose, flashing white teeth, thick black moustache; glossy black curls under a shiny leather cap. The kind of fellow that carried a knife. Bright black eyes narrowed viciously when he saw Lom’s gun.
‘Keep your hands out of your pockets,’ said Lom. ‘I’ll be in the back of the cab. All I want is a ride out, no trouble for you at all. But I’ll be watching you. I’ll have the gun at your head. You say anything at the checkpoint, you make any move, any sign at all, and there’ll be shooting. Lots of it. And you’ll be caught in the crossfire, I’ll make sure of that. You’ll be first. I’ll splatter your brains on the windscreen.’
The driver spat and stared at him. Said nothing. Didn’t move.
‘And I’ve got five hundred roubles in my pocket,’ said Lom. ‘It’s yours when we’re fifty miles from here.’
‘Show me.’
Lom reached into his inside pocket with his left hand. Showed him the thick sheaf of Kistler’s money.
‘Pay now,’ the driver said.
‘Fuck you,’ said Lom. ‘We’re not negotiating. It’ll be like I say. Nothing different. Move. Quickly.’
The driver spat again and nodded. Stood back to let Lom climb aboard.
‘You first,’ said Lom
The driver swung up and slid across behind the wheel. Lom followed and squeezed into the sleeping compartment. Crouched down behind the driver’s seat.
The engine roared into life.
6
Investigator Gennadi Bezuhov of the Parallel Sector, Vitigorsk Division, arrested Engineer-Technician 1st Class Mikkala Avril at three the next afternoon, less than ten hours after the discovery of the intrusion into Director Khyrbysk’s office. Bezuhov presented her with his evidence: the statement of assaulted truck driver Zem Hakkashvili; the accusation of assaulted chemist Sergei Varin; the reports of communications operatives Zoya Markova and Yenna Khalvosiana, who overheard a male voice in Avril’s room in the small hours of the night; the damp towel under her desk, stained with blood and engine oil. Suspect descriptions provided by witnesses Hakkashvili and Vrenn were undoubtedly of the same person.
The interrogation was brief. Suspect Avril, in a condition of marked emotional distress, immediately made a full confession and provided a detailed account of her encounter with the terrorist spy, whom she knew as ‘Vissarion’. She admitted discussing with him restricted information concerning the work of Project Continual Sunrise. She had provided guidance and assistance in breaking into the Director’s office and stealing Most Secret papers.
Engineer-Technician Avril’s attitude under interrogation demonstrated poor social adjustment, psychological disturbance and instability, personality disorder, pathologically exaggerated feelings of personal importance, severe criticism of senior personnel and opposition to the purposes of her work and deep-seated internal deviation from the norms, aims and principles of the Vlast. Investigator Bezuhov permitted himself to observe that the subject had been promoted to her current rank without passing though normal processes of assessment, and had been allowed to work unsupervised on tasks for which she lacked the necessary intellectual capacities and technical credentials.
Bezuhov’s superiors–Major Fritjhov Gholl, commander, Parallel Sector, Vitigorsk, and Director Yakov Khyrbysk himself–saw the broader perspective. They were acutely aware that Mikkala Avril was a Hero of the New Vlast, recruited and promoted on the instruction of Osip Rizhin himself, and she was in possession of information which must not be permitted to escape the confines of the project. Also they were not blind to the fact that the supervision of Mikkala Avril at Vitigorsk was not above criticism.
In the light of these additional considerations it was clear to Bezuhov’s superiors that the Avril case required sensitive and flexible treatment. Embarrassment must be avoided. Their own careers were at stake, and surely Rizhin himself would prefer to know nothing of this. A judicial trial followed by a period in a labour camp was out of the question.
‘Special handling, Gholl,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘In the circumstances? Don’t you think?’
Gholl accepted the Director’s judgement was sound, as ever.
Special handling. Seven grams of lead in the back of the head and the body dumped in the Cleansing Lake to dissolve.
‘But retain a sample of body tissue, Gholl,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Mikkala Avril had promising qualities. Death is temporary and she will be recalled, not once but millions of times, to walk for ever in perfected forms under countless distant suns.’
It was a comforting thought. The Director was not a harsh man. He looked to the radiance of humankind to come, and in dark days he lived by that.
‘You understand, Director, I will have to report back to Colonel Rond?’ said Gholl. ‘I must do that.’
‘Naturally.’
‘You need not be concerned; the colonel is always discreet.’
7
The 28th Division (Engineers), guided by Lieutenant Arkady Rett, arrives at the edge of the living angel’s cold-burning anti-life skirt where the trees are dying. They build walkways across the cold smouldering embers, the flimsy crusts of ground. The red hill advances and they retreat before it. Observations suggest it is picking up speed.
The commanding officer wrestles with many practical problems. Prolonged contact with the hill’s margin is troublesome. The metal of his machines grows weak and brittle, and his people fall sick. Their limbs and faces and bodies acquire strange patches of smooth darkness. Their extremities grow numb, whiten and begin to crumble. An hour a day is the safe limit, all they can stand. But the commanding officer makes progress. Now he has lines of supply, he puts the sappers on rotation. The excavation gear arrives. They reach the lower slopes and begin to dig.
Corporal Fallun, who refused an order and abandoned his comrades, was never seen again. Rett didn’t find him on his way back, and Fallun is assumed to be lost in the woods. The commanding officer classifies him a deserter and thinks of him no more. Fallun’s comrade, Private Soldier Senkov, who returned with Rett but never regained his senses and babbles relentlessly, never sleeping, is sent back out of the forest on a returning barge. He did his duty and the commanding officer recommends a sanatorium cure.
A piece of Archangel rides Senkov’s mind down the river and out of the trees. Quiet and surreptitious, all hugger-mugger, he slips the green wall and squeezes a tenuous blurt of himself through the gap into Rizhin world.
It is the merest thread of Archangel. A wisp of sentience. But he is through. He inhales deeply and shouts defiance at the sky.
This–this!–this is what he needs!
The impossible slow forest behind the green wall was killing him. There was no time there. There was no history.
But he finds Rizhin world different now. Hard. Quick. Lonely. There is no place for living angels here: the whole world stinks of barrenness and death.
Desperately he scrabbles for purchase and purpose.
Archangel! Archangel! I am beautiful and I am here!
And a tiny distant voice answers from the west. A shred of shining darkness from the space between the stars.
Chapter Nine
My age, my predatory beast–
who will look you in the eye
and with their own blood mend
the centuries’ smashed-up vertebrae?
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)
1
Vasilisk the bodyguard, six foot three and deeply tanned and sleek with sun oil, naked but for sky-blue trunks, runs five springing steps on his toes, takes to the air and executes a long perfect dive. Enters the pool with barely a splash, swims twelve easy lengths, hauls out in a single smooth movement and lies stretched out on a towel–blue towel laid on perfect white poolside tiles–in the warmth of the morning sun.
He lies on his back with eyes half closed, arms spread wide to embrace the sun, the beautiful killer at rest, empty of thought, breathing the scent of almonds. His slicked yellow hair glistens, his firm honey-brown stomach is beaded with water jewels. Through damp eyelashes he watches blue shimmer.
The pool is filled with water and sunlight. The surface glitters.
A warm breeze stirs the fine pale hairs on his chest.
A dragonfly, lapis lazuli, fat as his little finger, flashes out of the rose bushes, disturbed by a quiet footfall in the garden. The chink of glass against glass.
A housemaid with a tray of iced tea.
Vasilisk the bodyguard, blond and beautiful, half asleep, listens without intent to the bees among the mulberries, the shriek and laughter from the tennis court, the pock pock pock of the ball, the sway of trees on the hillside that sounds like the sea.
The sky overhead is a bowl of blue. Brushstroke cloud-wisps. Vasilisk closes his eyes and watches the drift of warm orange light across translucent skin.
Far away down the mountain a car drops a gear, engine racing to attack a steep climb. The sound is tiny with distance.
2
Lukasz Kistler’s sleek ZorKi Zavod limousine took the corniche along the Karima coast, purring effortlessly, a steady sixty-five, glinting under the southern sun. Two and a half tons of engine power, bulging wheel arches, running boards, mirrors and fins.
The road was a dynamited ledge, hairpins and sudden precarious fallings-away. The mountains of the Silion Massif plunged to the edge of the sea: bare cliffs and steep slopes of black cypress; sun-sharpened jagged ridges and crisp high peaks, snow-capped even in summer. And always to the right and hundreds of feet below, the white strip of sand and the sea itself, discovered by glittering light, a tranquil and brilliant horizonless blue.
This was the favoured country: sun-warmed Karima rich in climate and soil, with its own little private ocean. Karima of the islands and the hidden valleys. Karima of the flowering trees, hibiscus, tea plantations, vineyards and orange groves. Karima of the white-columned sanatoriums in the wooded hills and on the curving quiet of the bays. Rest-cure Karima. Union-funded convalescent homes for the paragons of sacrificial labour in olive and lemon and watermelon country: the bed-ridden propped under rugs in their windows to watch the sea, the ambulatory at backgammon and skat under striped awnings. Secluded private hotels with balcony restaurants (LIST ROUBLES ONLY ACCEPTED). Resort Karima. Twenty-mile coastal ribbons of pastel-blue concrete dormitories for the ten-day family vacations of seven-day-week leading workers. War never touched Karima. The Archipelago never got there, neither bombers nor troops nor cruisers nor submarines. Civil war was fought elsewhere. Karima was never hurt at all.
The municipal authorities of Karima made the most of the annual Dacha Summer of the Central Committee. The road to Rizhin’s Krasnaya Polyana, Dacha Number Nine at Zusovo, was remade fresh each year: the velvet shimmer of asphalt, the gleam of undented steel crash barriers.
The limousine tyres hissed quietly. The driver dropped a gear and slowed into a hairpin switchback, and the turn brought Kistler suddenly face to face with the biggest portrait of Papa Rizhin he’d ever seen: two hundred feet high, surely, and the benevolent smiling countenance outlined with scarlet neon tubes, burning bright against the cliff face even in the noonday light.
ALL KARIMA LOYALLY WELCOMES OUR GENERALISSIMUS!
Lukasz Kistler had his own dacha, a white-gabled lodge in the Koromantine style tucked in among black cypresses a mile or so from Krasnaya Polyana. They all did–Gribov, Yashina and the rest–all except Rond, who travelled with his staff and had rooms in Rizhin’s place. No vacation for the assiduous Colonel Hunder Rond.
Studded timber gates opened at Kistler’s approach. The car entered a rough-walled unlit tunnel cut through solid mountain and t
en minutes later emerged into sunlight and the courtyard of Krasnaya Polyana, a sprawling low green mansion on the brink of a sheer cliff.
The sun-roofed verandas of Dacha Number Nine looked out across the sea. Some previous occupant had planted the gardens with mulberry, cherry, almonds and acacia. Tame flightless cranes and ornamental ducks for the boating lake. Rizhin had added tennis courts, skittles, a shooting range. Papa Rizhin holidayed seriously.
Kistler found Rizhin himself in expansive mood, rigged out in gleaming white belted tunic and knee-length soft boots, Karima-fashion, paunch neat and round, hair brushed back thick and lustrous in the sunshine. He seemed taller. Mountain air suited him. The bullet scar on his cheek, still puckered and raw, gave his long pockmarked face a permanent lopsided grin. A show of white ivory teeth.
‘Lukasz! You came!’ Rizhin clapped him on the shoulder. ‘So we haven’t arrested you yet? Still not shot? Good. Come and see Gribov playing tennis in his jacket and boots, it’s the most comical thing–everyone is laughing. But he wins, Lukasz! He plays like a firebrand. What a man this Gribov is.’
They linked arms like brothers and walked around the edge of the lake.
‘Zorgenfrey came up yesterday from Anaklion,’ said Rizhin, ‘and completely fixed my teeth. No pain at all. Why can’t we have such dentists in Mirgorod? The Karima sanatoriums get the best of everything. Yet he tells me he can’t get his daughter into Rudnev-Possochin. He wants her to study medicine but the university puts up no end of obstructions. We must do something there. Talk to them for me, Lukasz. Iron the wrinkles out.’
‘Leave it with me, Osip,’ said Kistler. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
There were twenty-four at dinner: the Central Committee, Rizhin’s bodyguards Bauker and Vasilisk, uncomfortable and self-conscious (‘Come,’ said Rizhin. ‘We’re all family here.’) and silent, watchful Hunder Rond. They ate roasted lamb in a thick citrus sauce. Sliced tomatoes, cherries and pears. Red wine and grappa. Rizhin kept the glasses filled, and after dinner there was singing and dancing.
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