disembarked a few miles from the border. When night had fallen, around five in the afternoon, he began to walk. With every step he took towards the enemy, he was both a freer and a more marked man.
As he crossed the dark, flat, snow-covered fields, he never thought for a moment whether he would ever retrace these steps. The deed was enough; the deed was the reward. But if he made it back again, then he knew he would be a very lucky man indeed.
Where he walked was bare farmland, bird-watcher’s country—and smuggler’s country too. The FSB’s Russian border checkpoints were strung at longer intervals on this stretch of less important borderland, but the border police, now firmly under the control of the KGB once again, could strike anywhere. What they were looking for was obvious smuggling, however, on a scale that required vehicles. Illegal trade across these borders consisted, in theory, of anything from pork fat to nuclear material. But it was always closer to the former, just petty stuff. The incentives of bribes for the guards along this stretch were not so great.
It was a long and lonely border, and it didn’t suffer from the nervousness of Russia’s borders with the Islamic republics. The villagers on the Ukrainian side were in many cases Russians like the border guards themselves. In Soviet times, Russia’s historic desire for control of Ukraine had resulted in the movement of Russian people west, into Ukrainian lands. Out here, on the eastern borders of Ukraine, it was as much Russian as Ukrainian.
And so the guards were more than content to stay in the warmth of their guardhouses on a freezing winter’s night. They didn’t need much excuse to remain at their fixed posts, rather than roaming the fields on the bleak chance of arresting some poor Ukrainian villagers engaged in petty smuggling who didn’t have any worthwhile bribe money.
Alone, at night, in an icy January fog that descended over the steppe, Logan guessed he stood a good enough chance. He wasn’t sure how far on the Russian side the border zone extended; that was his main concern. It varied from stretch to stretch. He might have to walk a few hundred yards or five miles or more once he was through, in order to be clear.
Under the thick fog he never knew the exact moment when he’d crossed the border into Russia. The fields within his impaired vision were flat and ghostly white. There was no visible moon, no features on the landscape.
Once, he thought he saw a light or lights in the distance, but he didn’t know if his eyes were playing tricks. But in case it was a checkpoint, he skirted away over the rough, frozen, snow-covered fields.
Whatever there was out there he couldn’t see; he knew there was nothing much apart from small, quiet villages, the inhabitants of which had long since retired for the night.
Later he thought he heard the sound of a car, and where the fog had drifted, he made out a copse of skeletal trees to the north of his route. He had no idea of time, or even, in the dark grey fog, of space. In his recklessness he felt immortal.
By the time the sky showed the faintest sign of change from night to day, the fog had begun to thin and he saw the dawn attempt to make an appearance through heavy cloud. By then he knew he was through. And as the dawn came up, a light snow began to fall, which thickened and blanked out the skyline, as well as the footsteps he’d left behind him.
He trudged along the edge of a field behind a high hedge and slowly began to make out the features of the landscape ahead where he could glimpse it through now thicker flakes of tumbling snow. There were a few trees, but it was mainly snow-covered tilled earth, and the new snow was already beginning to cover the frozen crystals of earlier falls.
In the distance, he saw a village, and he felt a soaring belief that nothing could touch him.
As he approached the edge of the village, he saw a farmer spreading seed for some chickens under a low, hay-filled barn. He was still too close to the border, Logan thought. He didn’t trust his accent not to sound foreign.
Skirting the farm, he came up into the village by a small church, its plaster walls crumbling beneath a snow- capped bell tower. There was nobody about. He looked at his watch. It was just after eight in the morning.
He walked on for three hours, until he’d passed two more villages, and at the fourth, slightly larger than the others, he entered by a small road that came into a square. He crossed the square, walked two hundred yards to the route out towards the east, and waited for a car.
Within half an hour he’d picked up a lift and negotiated a price to Voronezh. The driver was about his age and wasn’t going to Voronezh, but for two hundred roubles he’d take him.
Logan spoke in a thin, rasping voice, barely audible, and told the man he was on the way to hospital for an operation on his throat.
They didn’t talk on the road.
Time drifted slowly. They stopped for fuel, and Logan paid. The day never really dawned, but just hung with a mind half made up in a shallow, flat wanness that enfeebled the flat country around them. They made slow progress in the snow until it eased and were in Voronezh by the afternoon.
Logan offered to buy the driver a meal. He was starving, but he also needed one more thing from the man before he left. While they ate in silence, the man drank a few beers. When he went to the toilet at the back of the cafe, Logan removed the man’s wallet from a jacket hung over the back of his chair and slipped out his identity card, pocketing it. He replaced the wallet and, paying for the meal, thanked the man and told him he was going to look for a hotel.
He walked to the railway station by back routes, in the unlikely event the man would check his wallet and come looking for him. When he bought a ticket to Moscow, the ticket collector barely looked at his new card. He waited for an hour before the train pulled in.
In his exhaustion, he was elated. He felt the light-headedness of supreme, unreal optimism. He knew he would succeed.
Chapter 33
ON THE SECOND DAY of Logan’s disappearance, Burt knew what Logan was going to do. Concealed beneath his usual jovial good humour, Anna detected, if not self-criticism, then a sense of sorrow that a protege was on the course of self-destruction. Burt had tried with his great energy and expansiveness to guide Logan away from rash, impulsive behaviour, but it seemed that even his powers had not been enough.
“Logan is a loser,” he pronounced with unusual cruelty and, as usual with Burt, brought his focus to bear on what was possible; Mikhail and, most vitally, Icarus.
Marcie, despite her months of increasing conflict with Logan, was anxious, while Larry’s only reaction seemed to be a sense of frustration that it wasn’t going to be him who dealt Logan some physical harm.
“It’s the last we see of him,” he’d said to Anna with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation.
For herself, Anna was surprised at her reaction to Logan’s disappearance, and Logan would have been pleased if he’d known. Untroubled by her night of physical intimacy with him, she felt once more a fragile link between Logan and Finn. While Finn would never have sold anyone down the river as Logan had done, let alone a small child, what seemed about to become Logan’s final act on this earth had the heroic madness that had characterised Finn’s own end.
It was Adrian who, under questioning from Burt, had given Burt the information that led to his conclusion about Logan’s aim. When Adrian, recounting their discussion on the night before Logan disappeared, told Burt that he had given Logan the identity of Finn’s killer, Burt picked out this element of their conversation alone for analysis.
Adrian was a shit, he thought privately. He’d known just what he was doing when he gave Logan the name. He had found a shattered man and driven a stake right through the defenceless cracks of Logan’s mind.
But despite his fury with Adrian, Burt dismissed Logan now, and any further discussion about him. They— everybody—was to get on with the matter in hand, and with no further distractions.
The first task was for Anna to check the dead drop that she had arranged with Vladimir. With his arms opened expansively wide in what looked like an impersonation of a variety club performer, Burt fulsomely agreed that she should leave the apartment alone to make this contact.
The drop was only a few streets away from the apartment, and he wished her to know that in this, she was
