Blackstone and the Endgame

by Sally Spencer

  Vladimir sighed. ‘I will do all I can to prevent a revolution, but it will come anyway,’ he said. ‘At first, it will be a liberal kind of revolution, and the government will be made up of lawyers and journalists and other well-meaning – but ineffective – people. That will not last long. Within months, the Bolsheviks will have taken over, and then the situation will turn very nasty. They will hunt down anyone who has worked for the old regime, and they will eliminate them.’

  ‘Then you’d better make sure you get out before that happens,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘I will stay,’ Vladimir told him. ‘I will die for my tsar, even though, by that time, there will probably be no tsar to die for. But Tanya must be saved.’

  ‘And you think I can save her?’

  ‘I will save her! Me!’ Vladimir said fiercely. ‘But you,’ he continued, softening a little, ‘will have the job of looking after her once she is safely in England.’

  ‘You could have written to me and asked me to look after her. I would have agreed.’

  ‘I know you would. You’re a good man.’

  ‘So if that was all you wanted from me, there was no need to bring me to Russia at all.’

  ‘Ah, but there was,’ Vladimir said. ‘When I put the idea to her, she resisted – and she can be a very stubborn girl. So I brought you here so that she could get to know you – so that she could get to like you. And she does.’

  ‘That’s what all this was about?’ Blackstone asked, astounded. ‘You framed me, you framed Archie – and you killed the two thugs – just so that Tanya could get to like me?’

  ‘She is very important to me.’

  ‘I know she is. She’s your daughter.’

  Vladimir sighed again. ‘I wish she was,’ he said, ‘but though I love her as much as any father can, she is not my child.’ He pressed a button on his desk. ‘We must wait a moment,’ he told Blackstone.

  The study door opened, and Tanya walked in – but this Tanya had her hair swept back, and this Tanya had no scar.

  ‘The scar is a fake – a necessary disguise,’ Vladimir explained, reading his amazement. ‘Its sole purpose was to fool you.’

  ‘Me? Why me?’

  ‘Look at her, man!’ Vladimir urged him.

  Tanya was still standing hesitantly in the doorway.

  Blackstone looked at her face and saw that it was almost achingly beautiful.

  And then he recognized the source of that beauty.

  The woman he’d seen on Nevsky Prospekt hadn’t been Agnes at all. She moved too quickly – with too much of the grace of youth – to have been the middle-aged woman that Agnes would have become if she’d lived. It had been Tanya – eager for her first look at him.

  And Vladimir was right about the scar – once he had seen it, it had banished from his mind the possibility of any suspicions being formed about who she really was.

  ‘She’s Agnes’s daughter,’ he said simply.

  ‘You still don’t understand, do you?’ Vladimir asked. ‘I lied about her age – I lie about many things. I told you she was older than she looks, but she isn’t. She was born in 1900, which means that she is only sixteen.’

  ‘She’s just a kid,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Just a kid,’ Vladimir agreed. ‘Tell me, Sam, when was the last time you were in Russia?’

  ‘It was 1899,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Call me Sam,’ he’d told Tanya, when he’d visited her in her sick bed, and they’d seemed to be getting on so well with each other.

  ‘No, I can’t do that,’ Tanya had replied, and there hadn’t been any animosity or aggression behind it – it had just seemed like a simple statement of fact.

  And yet she called Vladimir by his first name!

  ‘Have you pieced it all together yet?’ Vladimir asked.

  ‘You’re … you’re not just Agnes’s daughter,’ Blackstone said to Tanya. ‘You’re mine, as well.’

  ‘My mother didn’t blame you for leaving her, but I did,’ Tanya said. ‘I hated you for it. But now I see that she was right, and I was wrong. We are in such a dirty business – and to be true to yourself, you had to keep yourself clean.’

  ‘Would it … would it be all right if I held you?’ Blackstone asked her.

  ‘I would like that very much,’ Tanya replied.

  He raced over to her, flung his arms around her and felt a happiness he had never experienced before.

  ‘Be careful, Sam, you’re crushing the life out of her,’ Vladimir said, with a mixture of amusement and envy.

  Blackstone released his new-found daughter and turned to Vladimir.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘There’s nothing to thank me for,’ Vladimir replied gruffly. ‘If I hadn’t have thought you were up to the job, I would never have entrusted you with it.’

  He opened the desk drawer again and produced a thick envelope.

  ‘These are your travel documents,’ he said. ‘Tickets, false passports, money – everything you will need to get you safely to England.’

  A small avalanche of snow suddenly fell past the window on its way to the street below.

  ‘They’re on the roof!’ Vladimir said.

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘General Kornilov’s men,’ Vladimir said. ‘I never thought he would go about it like this. It would have been so much easier – so much less dramatic – to try to kill me out in the open. But, of course, he wants drama – because he wants to impress the tsarina. He’s as mad as she is.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ Blackstone said, ‘even a mad general would never think of doing that.’

  Vladimir stood up and walked around the desk, the travel documents in his hand.

  ‘Take these,’ he urged Blackstone. ‘Take them now.’

  The windows imploded, and the room was suddenly filled with an angry metal buzzing and the stink of cordite. Blackstone threw himself on Tanya at the first hint of the attack, but, even so, several bullets had already whizzed past them by the time they hit the floor.

  The firing continued. The chandelier overhead swung to and fro as the bullets hit it, and then it crashed to the ground with a heavy thud, leaving the room lit only by the pale moonlight.

  ‘Are you all right, Tanya?’ Vladimir asked worriedly, as soon as there was a lull in the firing.

  ‘Yes,’ Tanya said.

  ‘And you, Sam?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Blackstone said, turning towards the dark shape that was slumped against the wall. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Unfortunately, I was not so lucky,’ Vladimir said, and now Blackstone could hear the strain in his voice. ‘I have been shot in the stomach, which, as we both know, will ultimately prove fatal.’

  ‘Oh Vladimir!’ Tanya sobbed.

  ‘There is no time for pity – and no time for an agent as good as you are to give way to tears,’ Vladimir interrupted her harshly.

  ‘I’m sorry, Vladimir,’ the girl said.

  ‘There’s no time for apologies, either,’ Vladimir said. ‘During the next round of covering fire, the general will try to get some of his men in through the front door, but he will soon regret it.’

  The firing began again, round after round slamming into the back wall of the study, and now there was the noise of heavy feet rushing up the stairs.

  Vladimir spoke, but his voice was so weak that Blackstone could not hear what he said.

  The firing continued, and the hammering on the door shook the whole apartment.

  They would be using a short battering ram, and whatever Vladimir believed, they would get inside eventually, Blackstone thought.

  The explosions were so loud – so ear-shattering – that, for a moment, Blackstone believed they must come from right within the study. And then he realized that it was not the study but the corridor that had been blown up.

  The firing stopped, as if the men outside were puzzled by the explosions and did not know what to do next.

  Vladimir chuckled, and that chuckle soon became a painful
gurgle.

  ‘The walls and door are lined with steel,’ he said, ‘and the corridor, as you must have realized, was booby-trapped. I imagine it will have killed eight or ten of them. Now they will wait for reinforcements before they try anything else.’

  But the reinforcements would come, Blackstone thought – and then it would all be over.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to ease your pain, Vladimir?’ he asked.

  The Russian said nothing.

  ‘Vladimir?’ Blackstone repeated.

  He was answered by silence.

  ‘He’s … he’s dead,’ Tanya gasped.

  Well, at least it had been quick, Blackstone thought – at least he hadn’t had to suffer for hours, as men with stomach wounds often do.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Don’t move an inch.’

  On hands and knees, he made his way slowly around the wall to what was left of the windows. When he had reached a point at which he could look out on to the street, he stopped.

  After the recent fall of snow, the prospekt glistened in the moonlight like a tranquil and unwavering sea made up of a million tiny jewels.

  There was no movement on the street, nor any in the houses opposite, but he knew that in both those places there were men with rifles watching the balcony and just waiting for him to make a move.

  He wondered if he could trade his own life for Tanya’s. But there would be no trading done that night. The general already had his life in his hands – and Tanya’s, too – and was mad enough to want anything that had ever been associated with Vladimir wiped off the face of the earth.

  So he would die, and the daughter he had only just discovered was his daughter – whom he already loved with an intensity that was almost frightening – would die as well. It seemed a cruel fate – but then fate could be cruel.

  ‘Sam?’ croaked a voice from the other end of the room.

  So Vladimir was not yet dead, after all.

  ‘I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘It’s time for you and Tanya to make your escape,’ Vladimir said.

  The poor man was obviously delirious, Blackstone thought.

  ‘We’d prefer to stay with you until the end,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Vladimir said. ‘It can’t be the end – not for Tanya. I … I need my control panel to my railway, Sam, and I cannot reach it. You … you must give it to me.’

  There could be no harm in pandering to the wishes of a dying man, Blackstone thought, as he crawled back across the room and handed the control panel over to the Russian.

  ‘At the back of each engine shed, there is a gate,’ Vladimir said, ‘and if the locomotives hit those gates with enough force, they will open them.’

  ‘And then what will happen?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Then the engines will fly through the air and land in the street,’ Vladimir said. ‘But it is what happens before they land that is important.’

  ‘I see,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘When I tell you to, you must both turn your backs on the prospekt and cover your eyes,’ Vladimir said. ‘You must count to three, and then you must jump over the balcony on to the street and make your escape.’

  ‘We’ll see how it goes,’ Blackstone said.

  Vladimir grabbed his arm. ‘You must promise me,’ he begged.

  ‘Trust him, Father,’ Tanya said. ‘Trust Vladimir. He will get us out of here. I know he will.’

  Trust him, Father!

  They would not escape, Blackstone thought, but if Tanya died with the hope of escape still in her heart, then that was something at least.

  ‘I promise,’ he said.

  Vladimir touched the control panel, and trains from all over the apartment began to speed towards the engine sheds against the outside wall. It was difficult to be sure in the faint light, but Blackstone thought there must have been at least a dozen trains on the move, and he marvelled at the way the dying man could still control them all.

  Six trains were approaching the shed.

  ‘Now!’ Vladimir said urgently.

  Feeling a fool, Blackstone turned away from the window and covered his eyes.

  ‘One …’ he counted silently.

  He heard a slight click as the first engine hit its gate.

  ‘… two …’

  Even with his eyes covered, he was aware of the white light that seemed to fill the study.

  ‘… three!’

  ‘Now!’ Vladimir urged. ‘Go now!’

  From the balcony, Blackstone could see soldiers with rifles walking around in a daze. The street was as bright as day, but that was nothing to what it must have been like when the phosphorous flares on the locomotives ignited.

  He led Tanya across the room and lowered her off the balcony. Only when she had hit the soft snow below did he jump himself.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let’s get moving!’

  They scrambled to their feet and began running down the street. Several times, they had to swerve around the blinded soldiers, but Blackstone could tell from the way they were moving that their vision was starting to return.

  There was a side street thirty yards ahead of them, and if they could make it to that, they would be out of the soldiers’ sights.

  A bullet flew past them, and then another.

  ‘Keep running, Daughter,’ he said.

  ‘I am, Father,’ Tanya replied.

  They had another ten yards to go before they would have some cover, Blackstone calculated – ten yards to go before they reached the gateway to a new life.