‘You can have anything that shoots or blows, that’s agreed. For guns and suchlike, we’ll only take away what we bring. We want a quiet life – and these guns are noisy. They’re of no use to businessmen like us. Shall we drink on it?’
They emptied the small vodka glasses, drank in unison, and Korolev felt the alcohol warming his throat and stomach.
‘So how many guards?’
‘A few.’
‘Well?’
‘More than one, fewer than twenty. All we know is that they want to take the guns out of the city tonight and if there are forty crates – well, they’ll need some bodies to shift them.’
Once again Korolev had the feeling there was something he wasn’t being told.
‘Come, Kolya, all I have to do is call Marchuk or Mushkin and this city can be shut down so that not even a bicycle can move three feet.’
Kolya rubbed his chin, as if doing this would help him come to whatever kind of decision he was attempting to make.
‘I’ll be honest with you, Korolev, we want to deal with these people ourselves – we owe them a thing or two for the last week. On top of which, we don’t need the Chekists and your boys tightening the screws on the city at the moment – it would be bad for business. And we don’t want them poking around the catacombs either. We’ve things of our own hidden there, not that there’d be much chance of them finding our belongings, or their guns for that matter, but still… Nadezhda, explain to him.’
‘Chief, the tunnels are everywhere under the city. Every building you see above the ground came from within it, so you can imagine how many there are. Some of the catacombs are linked, but many are independent of each other, or the connections are well hidden. People get lost down there and are never seen again. If the guns are properly concealed, we might never find them.’
‘You see, Korolev? But with you and these little guns of yours, we should do it easily enough. Anyway, we know where they are right now. By tomorrow they could be somewhere else. There’s no time to waste.’
‘The guns stay with us?’
‘On my word. We want what we want, nothing more.’
‘You’re telling me you’re going to risk life and limb to foil a terrorist plot for nothing?’
‘Not for nothing, Korolev. We’re calling in a debt – a blood debt.’
Korolev grunted his disbelief – there was something else to this, he was sure of it. He considered standing up and walking away. If he slipped a clip into the machine gun there wasn’t much anyone could do about it, but his duty was to see that the traitors were stopped. An armed uprising, at this time and moment, might lead to a Civil War for all he knew, and he’d seen enough of the last one not to want to see another.
‘All right, Kolya, we’ll play it your way,’ he said, and felt for a moment as though he’d signed away his soul to the Devil.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was dark and damp and the tunnel they were making their way along had been cut for smaller men than Korolev, and he cursed as a drop of water went down his collar. After twenty minutes of walking bent over and regretting every spare round he was carrying, Korolev was not in the best of moods.
He was also becoming increasingly worried – after all, he’d no idea how to get out of this damned place if the matter in hand didn’t go according to Kolya’s sketchy plan. If he could see something, Korolev thought to himself, then perhaps he could get his bearings. He’d felt the draughts from passages they’d passed to the right and left, and once had even been surprised to look up and see the yellow glow of what might have been a street lamp, far above him in what must have been an air vent. But otherwise the only illumination was from an electric torch carried by the guide at the front of the column, and even that had been covered with a piece of grey cotton. All in all, it was the kind of situation that could eat into a man’s confidence.
But still they pressed on, inch by inch, step by careful step. And the further they went, the more Korolev was beginning to wonder if he’d ever be able to stretch himself up to his full height again.
He was almost at the point of despair when the man ahead of him stopped and turned to place a hand on his shoulder.
‘The Count wants you up in front.’ He spoke in a low mumble that Korolev presumed was meant to be a whisper. Korolev squeezed past him and three others before the shaded torch showed him a man lying crumpled on the floor and the faintest outline of Kolya’s face as he leant over a piece of paper that a grey-bearded old man was marking up with lines and crosses.
‘Greetings, Korolev. The place is up ahead. Not far, but we split here.’
‘What happened to him?’ Korolev asked, nodding down at the guide.
‘He served his purpose. Mole here knows where we are and how to go about the thing. This fellow wasn’t telling us the entire truth, so we sent him up to God to ask forgiveness for his sin.’
In the faint light Korolev saw that what he’d taken for a shadow was a puddle of blood spreading out from the dead man. Korolev nodded again, keeping his lips firmly pressed together – now wasn’t the time to be splitting hairs about how and why the man had died. Anyway, if the Chekists had got their hands on him his fate would have been the same.
‘We’re here,’ Kolya whispered, pointing at a cross on the page. ‘And they’re there.’ He pointed at another cross in the centre of a square box.
‘That’s a chamber about fifteen metres by ten. Two side rooms. Here and here. Not where this fellow told us, though. But Mole knows these tunnels as well as any man knows the streets above. I suppose the fellow thought he could lead us into a trap – more fool him.’
He drew two small boxes to the side and below the larger box to signify the side rooms. Three lines ran from the chamber on the rough map, and Korolev decided these must be the tunnels that led into and out of it. One of the lines led directly to the cross that Kolya had pointed out as their current location and the Thief now ran his pencil along it.
‘This is the passage ahead. If you stay here, Mole will take the rest of us through the side passages and we’ll have them trussed up nicely. Give us ten minutes to get into position and then come along the passage shooting and shouting while we hit them from behind… Or pick them off as they run,’ he added, after a moment of contemplation.
‘So we do all the work,’ Korolev asked, incredulous, ‘while you pick off the survivors?’
Kolya smiled and put a hand on the barrel of Korolev’s machine gun.
‘Would you hang around in a tunnel if two pepper grinders were coming along it spitting lead?’
‘No, but I might leave them a farewell present of a grenade without its pin.’
‘You’ve a better plan?’
‘We all hit at once – hard and fast. Get in as close as we can before we start shooting and then cut down anything that moves. Excepting each other, of course.’
Kolya nodded his agreement, and handed him a small torch from his pocket.
‘Make sure you know who you’re shooting at. I’ll leave Mishka with you. I know you two don’t love each other, but if anyone comes along the tunnel Mishka’s the fellow you want waiting with a knife in his hand.’
Korolev grunted, thinking that was just as good a reason not to have Mishka with you. Still, now that he thought of it, they could always send the rat in first when it came to the shooting.
‘You have a watch?’ Kolya asked, tapping the strap of his own.
‘Yes,’ Korolev answered, feeling slightly offended. He was a detective, after all. Where would he be without a watch?
‘Mole?’ Kolya went on.
The older man nodded.
‘Let’s set our watches now for half-past eight. In fifteen minutes we go in. Unless something happens sooner, of course. In which case we don’t wait for an invitation, right?’
