A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  ‘No, Schneider called me only a moment ago — it must be less than ten minutes since he saw the American in Vorontsyev’s room.’

  ‘That may already be too long,’ Turgenev’s voice replied, and Bakunin scowled at the receiver he momentarily held away from his cheek. ‘What measures have you instigated?’ The cold formality was deliberately aloof.

  ‘You’d better decide their outcome, don’t you think?’ Bakunin sneered, swilling the remainder of his coffee in the mug he held in his free hand.

  ‘Very well. Bring matters to a conclusion immediately.’

  Was there someone in the room with him?

  ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You want the American eliminated?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Anyone in the vicinity — ‘ There was someone with him.

  ‘Vorontsyev?’

  ‘Later. Thank you for letting me know. Just make sure it’s successful.’

  Turgenev switched off the phone and placed it on his desk, which he then walked behind as if it would provide him with a barrier. The blizzard, still gathering strength, flung the snow across the large window of the study, through the glare of the security lights. He sat down and smiled apologetically at his visitor, who had remained all but oblivious of the call.

  ‘I’m sorry for the interruption, Hamid. You were saying …?’

  The Iranian, dark-featured, as compact as a coiled snake, adjusted his tinted designer spectacles. He was unshaven rather than bearded and his shirt collar was buttoned beneath the jacket of the grey silk suit.

  ‘My friend, I was simply relaying the impatience of Tehran in the matter of the consignment that is overdue.’ He smiled, placing his fingers together in a steeple; a mullah of the Office for the Protection of the Iranian Revolution rather than an agent or case officer. Hamid wa’s as ruthless, cunning and effective as the best of the KGB had ever been — like himself, he observed.

  But there was something chillingly sincere in his abuse of power, his acts of espionage, suppression, torture. Hamid, like so many Iranian intelligence officers, believed the ideology. Faith, of course, in his case. It was all for Allah and Islam, the killing, the imprisonments, the exterminations.

  It made Hamid and his kind, including the dead Vahaji, more difficult to deal with. His thoughts returned to the image of the coiled snake. To disappoint these people was as risky as thrusting one’s hand into a sack containing a cobra.

  ‘I understand the impatience. Hamid my friend, I do not seek to make excuses. The heart attack of one of those people delayed matters — but it was the lack of security, the indiscreet nature of your own officer’s behaviour that has meant greater care, slower progress.’ He shrugged and spread his hands in the air in front of him. ‘I have successfully added to the little stock of people you expect to take delivery of. There are now six key people in Novyy Urengoy ‘

  ‘Here?’ Hamid asked greedily.

  Turgenev shook his head. He detested dealing with Hamid and Iran precisely because of their sincerity, their hungry urgency.

  ‘No, not here. But safe.’

  ‘Then I would like to take delivery of them at once, if they are top people?’

  ‘I give you my word they are. Your weapons programme will be accelerated by perhaps as much as a year.’ He grinned disarmingly.

  Charm rarely worked with the Iranians — only results satisfied, gained influence. And even though Turgenev felt himself poised to move beyond the influence in the Islamic world that Iran could supply, and was all but ready to play a much larger game, he could not afford to dissatisfy. Which irked like a wasp sting. Hamid’s eyes glittered. He touched his chin with a rasping sound. The wind outside was a low, distant moan, as of an animal dying in great, lonely pain. ‘I do deliver what I promise, Hamid — I always have.’

  ‘Agreed. Then, at once.’

  ‘You’ve seen the weather, Hamid — where can you take them in a storm like this promises to be?’

  The Iranian’s eyes gleamed with anger.

  ‘I do not know — and do not ask — what difficulties there have been, or how much jeopardy has arisen as a result of Vahaji’s death and the police investigation — ‘ Turgenev kept his features expressionless. Hamid possessed more background than he had supposed. ‘- but I must ensure that these people are not discovered.

  They are safe only in Tehran. Your not entertaining them here tells me as much.’

  Turgenev began an expansive, soothing gesture, but merely placed his hands on the desk, fingers spread.

  ‘If planes can’t fly, you can’t move them, Hamid my friend.’

  ‘A plane must fly — as soon as possible.’ He scowled over Turgenev’s shoulder at the blizzard.

  That I can’t guarantee.’

  ‘There are guarantees on both sides, my friend. This is one of yours. There has already been too much delay.’

  Despite everything, Turgenev admitted with a sense of weakness he loathed, he still required the goodwill of Iran and Pakistan. Especially, he needed to counter growing Chinese influence in Islamabad that was already leaking through to Tehran. He must remain pivotal in the assistance given to nuclear weapons programmes in both countries for the foreseeable future. And he needed the drugs that came as payment to ease the spread of his influence in America. The heroin was the bluntest of instruments, and perhaps the most effective. Much remained dependent on Tehran and people like Hamid in the Office for the Protection of the Islamic Revolution.

  ‘I’ll arrange for detailed weather forecasts, maps, satellite information. Hamid, I will do what I can ‘

  ‘Then I am certain that it will be sufficient.’ Hamid smiled.

  Turgenev was unable to entirely resist the image of a snake’s mouth opening as it struck. He stilled his body which wanted to squirm in his subordination to the Iranian. He had to please them, as a servant would have pleased a master, or a whore a client. They were a strand of the web, but angering Tehran would set the whole of the web quivering with suspicion of his lack of cooperation, with rumour and doubt. Then, as if to brand him with the mark of a’ bondman, Hamid said softly: ‘The woman is here, the one I requested?’

  ‘Of course, Hamid. She is waiting in your room, I imagine.’

  The Iranian stood up. He was little more than five feet in height, slightly built. His hand was cool and dry — like scales on a … Turgenev shut away the recurrent image and shook Hamid’s hand firmly.

  ‘I will say goodnight, my friend. You will arrange for the meteorological details?’

  ‘Of course. A pleasant night to you.’

  When the Iranian had left, Turgenev went to the sideboard and poured himself a large — vodka, he decided, and threw the liquor to the back of his throat where it burned satisfyingly. A Russian drink, he told himself, to rid his mouth of the taste of the Iranian and his own humiliation. He poured another vodka and turned to the window.

  Damn the blizzard — damn Hamid equally.

  And Lock …

  … Bakunin had better make no mistake there.

  The car remained parked where it had lurched against the snow laden fence surrounding the dacha, its outline little more than a huddled white shape. The room was still cold, despite the log fire Dmitri had lit and the oil stove on a sheet of newspaper in the middle of the old rug. Their wet footprints had dried to vague reminders on the polished wooden floor.

  Lock was chilled to the bone by a coldness that seemed part of the house and its recent history rather than an accident of the blizzard. They ate in virtual silence on a bare table at one end of the long room; baked beans, sausages, potato. Lock was hungry almost to viciousness. The younger man, Goludin, who had driven the car from the hospital along treacherous roads out of Novyy Urengoy, seemed morose and depressed, wary of Lock as if warned he carried infection. He was a lugubrious blank sheet of paper that had absorbed the ink of Dmitri’s mood.

  Which burst out ag
ain as he said heavily, fork emphasising his meaning:

  ‘You’ve brought us the news we didn’t want to hear, American!

  How powerful our leading citizen is! Did we really need to know that? I ask you, does it help us? Turgenev was out of our league before you came … now? God alone knows!’ Lock spread his hands defensively.

  ‘I needed your help. You think I’d have asked for it if I wasn’t desperate?’ he replied. ‘A handful of half-assed detectives in a hick town. This place needs Wyatl Earp and his brothers, not you guys.’

  The only American we’ve got is you, Lock — and you don’t seem up to all that much, even if you do speak good Russian!’

  Dmitri spat back, potato flicking onto his chin as he spoke.

  ‘That makes two of us, man, two of us.’

  The ensuing silence was lengthy, tightening around them like a drying shroud.

  ‘So I’m not Schwarzenegger,’ Lock murmured eventually.

  ‘And you’re not Alexander Nevski. Given those shortcomings, what do we do about our mutual problem?’

  ‘Aiexei — Major Vorontsyev — issues the orders. I told you, we’re hamstrung. Now you’re here and you’ve been seen to be here, it’s just a matter of time before —’

  ‘Then we’d better take the fight to them, hadn’t we?’

  Goludin said woefully: ‘How can we get to Turgenev? It’s impossible.’

  Dmitri nodded vigorously, wiping his chin. ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ he pronounced. ‘You heard him.’

  ‘So, we wait until the hospital patient makes up his mind what to do?’ Lock snorted. ‘You have to have leads, man! People you can lean on, a way of opening this thing up!’ He hesitated.

  Uncommunicative as Dmitri Gorov had been, the smuggling of the scientists the Russians had stumbled on was more unnerving than the heroin. Turgenev paid for the heroin with the brains of men and women who had worked on the Soviet nuclear programme. He controlled Novyy Urengoy, and his means of doing so was the GRU. Turgenev was a tsar in this place, an autocrat … and he would be protecting himself against the discovery of a crime that even Moscow couldn’t ignore. ‘OK, you tell me what we can do,’ he concluded, sighing.

  Dmitri seemed satisfied, but without response. Goludin pushed his plate away and got up from the table. His boots squeaked on the polished floor as he walked towards one of the windows. His shadow moved across the wall, thrown by the firelight and the lamps. Dmitri ruminatively picked his teeth with a match. Lock stared at his own hands, clasped as if in prayer on the table.

  ‘There’s got to be some way,’ he announced as if cheated.

  ‘Some road we can open up to get to him. You must have evidence ‘

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘It’ll all be buried deep by now,’ Lock admitted.

  ‘Your case is just like ours. Lock. Powerless. You can’t even go home, if all you say about yourself is true.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘And you still think there’s something we can do?’

  Goludirr’s shadow moved on the wall, slowly and comfortably like that of a parent, enlarged and authoritative. Lock heard the young man say:

  ‘Shall I feed the rabbit, Dmitri?’ It dissolved all sense of comfort the shadow had offered.

  ‘What? Yes, if you like. There’s some stuff in the ‘

  There was a noise that Lock was slow to identify. Goludin’s bulky shadow on the wall behind Dmitri seemed to enlarge further, but that was no more than a trick of the light, or -

  Lock turned in his chair as Dmitri began to get to his feet.

  Goludin was skating across the floor towards them, his arms raised, his face distorted by agony. Then the rug tripped him and he blundered heavily to the floor. The bullet had spent itself against the wall above the fireplace. The shattered window was crazed as if with frost. Goludin lay still on the floor at Dmitri’s feet. An instant later the windows shattered inwards at the insistence of a hail of bullets. Icy air flooded in as Lock crouched to the floor.

  Dmitri, his face pressed close to Lock, his hand on Goludin’s collar as if he intended dragging him upright and back to life, shouted:

  ‘Put the lamps out! I’ll douse the fire!’

  Lock nodded, crawling away from Goludin’s body across the polished floor, his hands sensing splinters. He pulled one lamp, then a second to the floor, fumbling with their unfamiliar switches. He heard the log fire roar aqueously, then sizzle into a dim glow. The room was in darkness. Snowlight seeped in, the noise of the wind and the rustle of the distressed curtains masking everything. Then Dmitri was beside him, lumping across the floor on all fours like an arthritic old hound. His breathing was ragged.

  ‘No bloody time leftV he cried in a shouted whisper. ‘Have you got a gun?’ Lock shook his head. ‘You useless bastard!’

  Dmitri’s rage had all the anger of a man helpless against a storm or an earthquake. Which had obviously been visited on him by Lock. Then he crawled away and Lock heard scrabbling noises before he lumbered back on his haunches and pressed something metallic and cold into Lock’s hand.

  ‘Makarov 9mm,’ he instructed, ‘eight rounds. Here — spare clip. Can you use it?’

  ‘I can use it.’

  ‘They’re heavily armed — that was an assault rifle hole in Goludin, poor bastard.’

  ‘Is the place surrounded?’

  ‘I’m just about to check. You watch the front of the house.

  We’re cut off from the car.’ He crawled away, eventually into another room. His eyes had been big with fear and anger, but there was the beginning of the trust of mutual risk. Then he heard Dmitri’s mobile phone punctuating the wind, like a failing distress signal.

  ‘Alexei — I Get out of there now! I don’t care how, just get out!

  What? Is Marfa there? Good — now get out. Where? Yes I’ Lock raised his head slowly until his eyes were level with the windowsill. He could hear Dmitri as he collided softly with some item of furniture. He could see nothing through the curtain of blown snow, hear nothing other than the wind. He shivered in the icy temperature, aware of the body on the floor just a few feet behind him. He squinted. The hazy light from the town outlined the igloo that their car had become, and there were other, more distant shapes similar in size. But there was no sign of movement, people. Military intelligence troops. Lock shivered once more, then was startled by the noises of Dmitri’s return.

  ‘I can’t see a damn thing out there!’ Dmitri whispered. ‘You?’

  Lock shook his head. ‘There won’t be just one or two of them, Lock, they’ll have come by the busload!’ Talk was keeping his desperation at some slight distance, that much was evident. ‘A barracks outing, and that bastard Bakunin in charge! Because of you I’

  ‘Calm down, man!’ Lock shouted back in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, let’s think of some way to get out of here, not how to do their job for them!’

  Heavy, dragged breaths for a time, then, with barely suppressed anger still evident in the voice: ‘OK — OK. Any ideas?’

  Then a sudden movement removed any lingering caution as he fired and the moving white bundle seemed to hunch into itself before falling into the snow beyond the garden fence. Rifle fire flickered like a row of candles in the blizzard. Lock and Dmitri lay together on the floor, their bodies shuddering with the impact of the bullets into the wooden walls, the floor.

  Gradually, the noise was replaced by the sound of the wind.

  And Lock heard, with a rage that was like fierce excitement:

  ‘You stupid bastard!’

  ‘Sure. I counted six separate locations — what about you?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘It’s six … and maybe the same out back. At least as many strung out around the house. That’s a dozen and more. This guy Bakunin — he doesn’t take prisoners, right?’ Dmitri shook his head. ‘Then they’ll be changing positions now, having given themselves away — take someone out, if you can. From the other window
‘

  Lock raised his head beside the window. A flicker of fire and the impact of a bullet against the far wall, the sound of a ricochet.

  He fired at the spot where the muzzle flash had originated but the two bullets disappeared silently into the snow. Ducked back as more gun flashes leapt out. The bullets hummed like insects in the room. Dmitri fired once and cursed a miss. Their reply was fourfold and the big man crouched beneath the window like some catatonic mental patient.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yes — you?’

  ‘OK.’ Two lost animals calling to one another. ‘You think they’ll close in?’

  “I don’t know!’

  ‘How do we get out?’

  ‘God knows.’

  Lock, lying on his stomach, could smell old polish on the floor, old cooking in the furniture, mustiness.

  ‘I should watch the back of the house,’ Dmitri offered reluctantly.

  ‘Sure.

  Do that.’

  ‘I can’t call anyone … It’d be risking their lives, too.’

  ‘Sure. Watch the back’

  Something, entering through the shattered window, burst near the fireplace. The room exploded in a blinding, white phosphorus light. Lock slapped at shards of flame on his clothes. The skin on his hands burned. Dmitri was exposed as by a flashbulb.

  The explosion filled Lock’s eyesight, making him unable to see the fire it had started.

  ‘Incendiary grenade-!’ he heard Dmitri shout. Goludin’s clothes were smouldering, so was the rug, Lock realised as his eyesight returned. There were other fires, dotted over the room, flaring up quickly. The curtains near him were ablaze.

  ‘No choice!’ he shouted. ‘Back door!’ Then: ‘What’s out back?’

  ‘Garden — a shed, vegetable plot — ‘ He sounded like someone from a realtor’s office. ‘Fence, low enough to climb over — OK?’

  ‘It’s all there is — get going!’

  The room was being greedily consumed by the fire. Two shots, as if poked in their direction to stir them into movement. They’d be waiting out there ‘I’ll go through the door, you try a window.’ Lock swallowed saliva, and at once his mouth was dust-dry. They crawled side by side to the kitchen door, Lock following Dmitri through it.