Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

chance of success would be worth the risks.

Tonight she would have a long talk with the plumber and the handsome young man who called himself Roman.

The watcher had listened to Pavel Cherkasov tell his jokes at the breakfast table, had heard him give the name David Drovny, had watched him eat.

Cherkasov was a remarkably capable courier. He did not hide. He played the role of glutton and near- buffoon to perfection because his persona was both true gluttony and buffoonery. That Pavel Cherkasov was well-armed there was no doubt. That Pavel Cherkasov would be cautious with his mission was equally certain. The watcher knew that the courier was a professional, an illusionist, a magician who could improvise brilliantly and execute his plans without error.

The watcher had been informed that there were two policemen on the train. There had been no problem spotting them. They matched their descriptions. Rostnikov was a difficult man to hide.

The important thing was that Rostnikov and his assistant not know that they were in a game, that they continue to believe and pursue their difficult task and not think there was another player. The presence of the two detectives gave the watcher an advantage, a backup plan.

If the attempt to make the transfer was observed, even anticipated, the watcher could act swiftly, beat the policeman to the prize. It was what the watcher expected. But there could be mistakes. Chance could intervene. Rostnikov might make the interception, capture the prize.

And then, unaware of the game, the prize could be taken from the policeman. It was really only a matter of who had to be killed. Pavel Cherkasov? The two policemen? The watcher would have preferred simply killing Pavel, but the difference was not great.

The watcher had ample weaponry and could improvise. Sometimes improvisation proved to be the best procedure, especially if it resulted in the conclusion that the necessary death had been an accident.

The watcher had pushed a woman in front of a bus in Rome, lifted a lean, surprised man over a low wall along a tower walkway of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, dropped a heavy steel loading-ramp door on an American in Budapest, and worked variations ranging from overdoses of drugs to quite accidental drownings.

The watcher had not kept count. Numbers did not matter. If murder was a sin and there was a God to punish, than ten or twenty meant no more than the first. The same would be true if the watcher were eventually caught, which was always a possibility, a slight possibility but a possibility nonetheless.

It had been a long career, a highly successful career, and there was no reason to stop. Assassination was the watcher’s life. There were no hobbies or interests beyond a professional interest in the tools of destruction and the game, which included planning, tracking, and execution.

Money meant little. In the beginning it had seemed important, but it no longer was, though the fees for such services were high.

The train rattled on. A stop in twelve minutes. Shar’ya. It was time to move, find the courier, stay with him, not be spotted.

The watcher did not have a sense of humor, but there was something that approached amusement in the fact that four people were now looking forward to the inevitable transaction.

There was a good chance that Rostnikov did not yet know who the courier was. The fact that his assistant was still going from compartment to compartment in search of the suitcase supported that conclusion, but it was sometimes dangerous to make assumptions even though they seemed obvious. It was far better to act solely on the facts and be prepared for the human factor, the variants that could neither be controlled nor anticipated.

Chapter Four

Through the train the four winds blow

The arctic and the sirocco

Stalactite and stalagmite

Stalag camp and satellite

Pass the captives on death row

The gulag archipelago

The skulls of reindeer in the snow

The longboat drifts, the dead sea floats

“K her s nim, I don’t give a damn,” Misha Lovski tried to shout, but it came out as a faint dry croak.

He no longer had any sense of how much time had passed. Was it a day? A week? A month? The lights had remained on except when they came in to take his bowls, empty of food and water, and his bowl filled with excrement.

The music was ceaseless. His own voice. His own band. The words lost their meaning. He could not see the speaker. They were watching him. He knew it, felt it. And so he sat on his mattress folded over to cover his legs. He was feeling a definite chill. He was coming down with something. Maybe they had been putting something in his food. What the hell did they want? He wanted to dat’pisdy, kick ass, bash a head in with his guitar.

“I will not die,” he croaked. “I will not cry. I am a cossack, a free man, an adventurer, a kazak. I live at war. I am the cossack Illya of Murom of the bylina, the heroic poem, the best.”

I am a cossack, he told himself, a warrior of the Dnieper and the Don.

“We are a community of Russians, Tartars, Germans, Serbs, Georgians, Greeks, and Turks. Warriors. I know what you are doing. You are testing me to see if I am a real cossack, if I am worthy to meet the challenge, be a worthy warrior.”

He received no answer but the sound of his own voice and the shock of metal vibrations from the music.

“I am going to go to a cossack camp,” he said. “I am going to learn to fight with my fists, with the shasqua, saber, and the kinjal, lance.”

The music seemed to get louder.

“I will ride bareback, learn to fire guns, cross rushing rivers, sing cossack songs, embrace Christianity, and wear a true cossack uniform. You know why I am the Naked Cossack?”

The music grew even louder. Misha was talking to himself.

“Because I am not yet worthy of the uniform,” he said so softly that even he could not hear himself.

He tore at the corner of the mattress. Frenzy. Another idea. There was padding inside. Some material. Cotton, wool. He rolled two balls of the material and stuffed them in his ears. He did it openly, not trying to hide. He wanted whoever was watching to see this as an act of ingenuity and not as an indication that their torture was working. He folded his arms, crossed his legs, and stared at the door.

The sound was muted but not stilled. The music continued. He dozed in exhaustion and then awoke. His plan had to take place soon or it would be too late. He would be too tired or too crazy.

He had to be ready to move quickly, silently.

Misha had noticed something. Not for the first ten or fifteen times, but after that, when the lights suddenly went off and the music stopped while his bowls were taken and relatively clean ones placed in front of his bars. Whoever made the exchange always reached over and checked the door to his cell with a quick pull to be certain that it was still firmly locked.

Misha had tried it. The cell door was surely locked and he had no tools to work on it. It could not be long now. Someone would come. The ritual would be repeated. He would be ready. He had actually practiced walking barefoot, silent, learning the exact number of steps from the wall to the bars of the cell so that he could move across the floor in total darkness.

While he was going over his plan again, the lights went out. The music stopped. He had placed his bowls