every servant in the house had been called into the busy platoon in the dining hall.
He moved without sound along the rank of Romanov portraits. Midway along the gallery stood a small table supporting a half life-size bust of Peter the Great; he debated moving the table across the corridor but decided against it-there would be time to dodge around it. He went on to the drawing room door and stopped to listen: heard voices within but not the words. The oak was thick and sturdy.
He looked both ways along the corridor and lifted the Luger from his belt, testing the silencer to be sure it was screwed tight; locked his grip, flicked off the safety and lifted his left hand to knock.
14
Irina had not been able to single out the bald man in the dining hall until he called attention to himself by rising from a table across the room and walking toward the door behind him. She watched him talk to one of the waiters and she saw the waiter’s gestures; when the bald man nodded his thanks and went on through the door she settled back in her chair in relief.
It occurred to her a moment later that he would have behaved just that way if he had been trying to allay suspicion. And she remembered the dent in his jacket again.
Abruptly she excused herself from the table and hurried across the room. She went through the door into the corridor beyond it-but he had gone.
The nearest bathroom was just beyond the corner. She knocked and when there was no reply she tried the knob. The room was empty. Now her alarm was real and she was running toward the front of the villa. The end of the servants’ hall admitted her to the ballroom and a dozen surprised musicians stopped chewing their dinners to watch her run across the corner of the great room to the door beyond-the front gallery, past the statuary and across the foyer to the villa’s main entrance.
Sergei Bulygin stood just outside the door smoking a black Spanish cigarette. He came to attention when Irina appeared.
“Come along Sergei, I think there’s trouble upstairs.”
They had crossed half the length of the foyer when she heard the shouts above, the pound of running footsteps.
15
It had come without warning. They’d been getting down to details: Anatol had said, “Oleg, you must uncover your mysterious contact in the Kremlin.”
“I cannot. I have given him my word. His position is fragile there.”
Alex had suspected there had to be someone like that. Oleg had been tossing out bits of information that could only have come from a source inside the Soviet government.
Vassily said, “I will have to know who the man is-I have to be in touch with him.”
“I will not divulge it here. If you do not know his name you cannot drop it accidentally in the wrong places,” Oleg said and that was when there was a knock at the door.
Anatol was nearest and more agile than old Prince Michael; he went to the door and opened it unsuspectingly-you couldn’t talk through those doors without shouting-and then suddenly the door slammed back and Anatol was thrown off his feet and Alex saw the man with the gun.
All the old instincts sent him diving across the rug toward Vassily: “Down! ”
But Vassily was tired, his reactions had slowed and he didn’t understand the threat quickly enough-he hadn’t been facing the door.
Alex wasn’t across half the distance when the pistol chugged, muttering twice through its silencer.
The bullets hammered Vassily Devenko, spun him to one side in the chair; there was a gush of blood the color of death where the two slugs had torn into the heart.
He saw disbelief and anger in Vassily’s face. Rage drove him half to his feet and then the splendid body failed him and Vassily stumbled and fell back across the chair.
Alex exploded with an unthinking wrath. The doorway had emptied: the assassin hadn’t waited to see the results of his work. Alex leaped over Anatol and careened into the gallery and saw the assassin running toward the head of the stairs. There was a small stone bust on a stand: Alex scooped it up and hurled it and ran after, uncaring of the gun in the fugitive’s fist.
The stone bust caught the running man in the small of the back. It pitched him forward off balance and he caromed off the heavy bannister rail onto the stairs: he pitched out of sight, tumbling, legs flying and Alex had the angry satisfaction of hearing the pistol clatter loosely down the stairs. He ran full out…
He reached the head of the sweeping stair and checked himself against the rail and had a momentary tableau impression: the assassin lying awry across the steps, one foot high in the air; Irina staring in shock from the foyer below; huge old Sergei Bulygin reaching for the fallen pistol.
The assassin’s leg pivoted and he collapsed motionless against the bannister posts, his neck twisted at an acute angle.
Alex said to Sergei, “You won’t need that.”
He walked down the stairs stiffly to the sprawled figure. Sergei met him there. Irina watched from the marble floor of the foyer-expectant, intent.
“Yes,” Sergei said, bending over the assassin. “This one is dead.”
“God damn it.”
“What?”
He’d spoken it in English; he only shook his head. “He can’t tell us anything now, can he?”
Irina’s hand had gone to her throat. “Alex-”
He went down to her: took both of her hands. “He’s killed Vassily.”
For a moment it was as if she hadn’t heard him: she stared into his face. Then slowly she turned away from him. He saw her shoulders stiffen. “It’s my fault. If I’d trusted my intuitions-if I’d only acted a little faster.”
“What?”
She shook her head. “I thought I saw a gun under his coat-I just wasn’t certain enough. I didn’t do anything about it until it was too late.”
“It isn’t your fault, Irina.”
“Isn’t it?” She gave him a level glance. “I don’t want to see him, Alex.”
“No.”
“Hadn’t you better get this one away from here?”
He hadn’t thought. Now her meaning grenaded into him. Irina said, “You don’t want the Spanish police here- not tonight. There are too many vulnerable people here-the Guardia Civil would take great pleasure in embarrassing them.”
What she hadn’t said was that the Guardia would take even more pleasure in arresting him for the murder of this one on the stairs. He’d been persona non grata ever since he’d walked out on the Falangist army.
Irina said, “No one’s heard anything. The villa is too solid. I’m going back into the dining room.” But she was searching his face with great intensity. “Vassily knew he was going to die.”
“He told me that.”
“You’d better go up then. But hold me first, Alex-I need to borrow your strength.”
He pressed her against him. After a moment she drew herself up and moved away. “I’ll be all right. Go on.”
Sergei threw the dead man across his shoulder and carried him upstairs. Alex caught up at the landing.
A few of them were trickling out into the gallery from the drawing room-Oleg and General Savinov and Anatol. They looked dazed but a fierce gleam of enraged satisfaction illuminated Oleg’s face when he recognized Sergei’s burden.
