He had had a promising future in the KGB. By hard work, by passing his exams, he had entered the favoured Guards Directorate. He had served in the personal protection squad of the Politburo member who was First Deputy Prime Minister. He had been tipped for mem-bership of the guard assigned to the General Secretary of the Party. And he had drunk too much, been smashed out of his skull. He had been reduced to corporal and transferred.
He was no longer the high flier. He no longer possessed the plastic card that gave him access to the luxury goods at the State Security Commissariat. He no longer lived in a three-bedroomed flat with a view over the park. One bottle of vodka, after a stint of 41 hours continuous duty, had greased him down the pole.
Caught drunk in uniform on the street, on his back in the gutter, and dumped with his wife and two toddler children onto a 23-hour train journey to nowhere, Yalta.
Of course it still burned. From the personal protection squad of a Politburo member, with the magic card and the right to carry a Makarov PM 9mm automatic pistol, down the chute to KGB corporal. He was unarmed. He was at the wheel of a sluggish Chaika car which needed a new gear box. He was a chauffeur, and held up at the lights on Botkin Street, and his job was to drive the ambassador from Great Britain.
The KGB corporal hit the horn to clear the dumb fools out of his way.
Holt didn't wait for the lift. There was too much of a queue. He went up the two flights of stairs, and down the corridor to the ambassador's room, knocked, went in
''The car's here, finally.'
'Relax, Holt. You are in one of the most unpunctual regions of a country noted for its tardiness. If we're there on time we'll be standing around on our own, scratching our backsides – not Miss Canning, of course, but you and me certainly.'
'I've checked the room for this evening, and the menu..'
'Don't try too hard, Holt, for heaven's sake. Foul-ups make life so much more entertaining… I feel a younger man already, damn nice air down here.'
'The ambassador slipped on his jacket, straightened his tie, knocked his pipe out into an ashtray.
'I'll go and rout Jane out.'
The ambassador frowned sharply at his private secretary. 'Damn it, Holt, haven't you been listening? I am not in a hurry. I want to make an entrance. I will not make much of an entrance if I am the first to arrive.
You may put it down, if you wish, to old imperial grandeur. But I do mean to make an entrance when I visit the worthies of the Yalta municipality. Got me?'
'Got you.'
'You've the Bridport stuff?'
'In my briefcase.' Holt wondered how on earth Bridport on the English south coast had made the decision to twin itself with Yalta, must cost the sad ratepayers a fortune in exchange visits.
'Then best foot forward, Holt.'
He snapped the door open. He went out into the corridor and rapped gently on Jane's door. The ambassador led the way down the corridor, no glance backwards, the Viceroy's procession, and Jane exploded out through her door, thrusting her small Olympus Into her handbag. Down the staircase, the ambassador leading, and Jane happily in pursuit.
Thanks be to God that we didn't forget our camera,'
Holt said. He was always useless at sarcasm.
'Don't be childish, Holt,' she said coolly, quietly so that His Excellency would not hear.
Down the stairs, across the foyer. The ambassador smiled warmly at a group of exhausted tourists speaking German and attempting to check in, and none of them had the least idea who it was that smiled at them.
Holt reached the door first, pulled it open and stood hack. He saw the driver moving to open the rear door of the vehicle. He saw a young man, dark-skinned, long hair, ambling across the road towards the hotel and holding a windcheater across his stomach. Distraction, because the ambassador had passed, playing the old-world gentleman, ushering Jane through first. Jane was out onto the steps, and hesitating, as if the light of the Crimea's lunchtime sunshine were too bright for her, as if she needed to adjust. Slow, stilted moments, and each slower than the last. Jane going forward and giving her winning grin to the driver, and the driver bobbing his head in acknowledgement, and the ambassador beaming, and Holt coming through the door. Each movement, each moment, slower. And the man who was dark skinned, with long hair, coming off the road and onto the pavement, and the windcheater falling past his knees and past his shins and past his ankles. And something black and stubbed and squat in his hands, something that he was lifting to his shoulder, something that was a protuberance from his head and mouth and nose, something that was a gun, for Christ's sake.
He stared at the man. He stared at the barrel of the rifle. No longer slow movement, the moment the world stopped.
Jane in front of the ambassador, Holt in the doorway, the driver with his back to them all, bent inside the car to smooth down the rug that covered the leather upholstery.
Everything frozen. No voice in Holt's throat. The warning scream locked in his mind.
Gazing into the face of the man, and then the flash, and the flash repeated, and the smoke. Then Jane spin- ning away, beaten and kicked and punched backwards.
Jane falling against Ben, and Ben not there to hold her upright. Ben fading from his feet, sliding down.
The glass shattering to his right and to his left, caving in. Holt shaking his head, because he couldn't understand… looking at the face that was topped by a wig that had inched over the right ear, looking at the scar on the man's left cheek, puzzling how a face came by a scar that looked like a crow's foot.
The rifle dropped to the man's side. He peered forward as if to be certain of his work.
All movement now, speed returning to the world.
The man ran.
In that moment Holt found in his ears the crash of the gunfire, and the cordite in his nostrils, and the scream from his throat.
He was on his knees. His body covered their bodies, to protect them.
So bloody late.
4
He lay across them, sheltering them, as if they were still in danger. Blood was on his hands and on the cuffs of his shirt, red on white. He had taken Jane's hand in his, an unresisting hand, as it was when she was exhausted or sleeping.
The scream in his throat had died with them.
He was aware of men and women, fearful, around him. They formed a circle at the level of the door, and on the steps, and on the pavement. The shoes of one of them crunched the glass fragments, and the shoes of another nudged the spent cartridge cases.
'Ambulance,' Holt said, in English. 'Get us an ambulance.'
The duty day manager called that the ambulance was sent for. Holt saw his face, quivering and streaming with tears. He saw that the driver was talking urgently into a personal radio, couldn't hear the words, could see the white-faced shock of the man. The street was blocked from Holt's view, only the line of knees and skirts and trousers and shoes for him to focus on. Empty ground between the legs and the feet and where Holt lay covering the bodies of Jane and Ben, empty ground laced with blood trickles and with shards of glass. He held tightly onto Jane's hand as the misery welled in him. He had seen the face of the man. He had seen the smooth pine varnish skin, and the eyes that were burnished mahogany, and the thin chisel of the nose, and the clip of the moustache. He had seen the scar hole on the man's cheek and had followed the lines that ran from in four lines, into the shape of a crow's foot.
There was the far away sound of a siren.
He had been behind Ben and behind Jane. He had been behind them and safe. He had seen the man with the aimed gun, and he had done nothing. Could not explain to himself how he had watched the slow ballet movements of the man raising the weapon and aiming, and done nothing. Desperate misery, and it had all been so slowly drawn out in front of his eyes. He squeezed Jane's hand, her fingers, hard enough for it to have hurt her, and she did not
