He was so far ahead of them, there was no disturbance. Even though, by the time he reached Revolution Square station, they might have sealed the exits.
He had no time to worry about it. The doors slid shut behind him.
A woman, against whom his side pressed as the train jogged, sensed the imprint of the gun for what it was, and looked up at him. His face was set, his eyes staring, and she knew that he must be KGB. She never looked at him again. Rather, she tried to edge a little from him in the packed compartment.
Darkness — Arbatskaia — darkness.
No evidence of special, concentrated activity. They were slow, too slow. The violent death of the man on watch had caught them unprepared Anna Dostoyevna was a name on a long list, and they were looking for Gorochenko there. Instead, they had found him, and he had killed one of them. Orders were needed. Kapustin was in a car somewhere, being fed the information that a KGB man at the Vosstaniya flats was dead, and had undoubtedly been killed by Vorontsyev. Units all over the centre of the city would have to be alerted.
He bent his knees slightly, as if urging the train to greater speed, his body suddenly possessed by his race against the unwieldy net dosing round him.
A bright glare of platform lights, and the name sliding as if in oil past the window — Revolution Square. He grimaced at the appropriateness of his destination. He pushed to the door, panicking momentarily as his arms were jammed into his pockets by the pressure of bodies. Someone glanced round at the pressure of the Stechkin's ugly shape, then looked ahead as they saw his eyes. He stumbled on to the platform, hemmed in by the crowd, a bobbing mass of fur caps and hats and woollen scarves ahead and alongside him.
He turned left with the crowd's momentum, then broke from them as they passed through to another platform, for another train. He looked up. A few individuals, strung loosely like irregular beads on the necklace of the escalator. He stepped on, watched his feet as the stairway froze into steps, and then kept his eyes ahead of him, up the long steep flight towards the exit. He could feel the colder air of the street above, and the gun was hard in his hand.
He walked up perhaps a dozen steps, until he was close behind a middle-aged man with a battered briefcase and wool len mittens, and a woman in a shapeless brown coat. Then the stairs smoothed to a run, and he was on the tiles of the foyer. Slowly, it seemed to him, he moved behind the man and the woman towards the exit, a narrow space between two glass booths. The occupants of the booths wore Metro staff uniforms. There was no policeman at the foot of the steps to the street.
Perhaps, moving back into the centre of the hive, he had wrong-footed his pursuers. They would expect him to flee outwards on the metro, flung off from the hub by the centrifugal violence of his action.
Then, as he passed his ticket to the unseeing man in the booth, he saw Alevtina's face in front of him, as if the girl had stepped out from behind some screen or appeared like a camera trick. She was with another man from the Frunze Quay whose name Vorontsyev could not recall. Her mouth opened in a greeting that changed to sudden despair as she remembered her quarry and her duty. Her hand went to her waist, and Vorontsyev saw the holster, and Alevtina reaching for a gun. Someone bumped Vorontsyev in the back, and he turned as if attacked, seeing the bent-headed individual slip past him, a curse on his mouth, rubbing his arm from the collision. By then it was too late.
Alevtina had the Makarov out of the holster, and the other man, moving to one side, was drawing his automatic.
'Please, Major — !' The girl said, her eyes wide with desperation. It was a selfless plea. Vorontsyev, his own gun still buried in his clothing, caught on the lip of the pocket, hurled himself against her, easily knocking her off balance. In the same moment, the gun came free and he fired from behind Alevtina at the man. Someone screamed as the gun went off, and went on screaming as he fired twice more. The man was flung over the barrier near the glass booth, somersaulting backwards into an untidy, graceless heap on the other side.
He heard Alevtina say, 'Put down the gun —
Instead, he ran for the exit, leaping the few steps. Behind him, and distinct from what followed, he heard the explosion of the gun above the screams that were coming from bystanders.
Then his leg went, and he lurched against the wall, gripping the iron gate folded back from the station entrance to support his sudden weakness. He looked down. Nothing. Yet his sock felt wet, and he was certain the shoe squelched as he tried to walk. Pain shot through his leg, burning into thigh and groin. Alevtina had shot him. He whirled round, stumbled, and a man stared at him uncomprehendingly as he passed. She was standing at the foot of the steps.
Vorontsyev shot her twice. The girl seemed surprised rather than hurt. Then she was unmistakably dead. He turned away, stifling the sob in his throat, the extended gun warding off pedestrians. He limped badly almost at once, and the numbness of the bullet's passage had already gone. His nerves shrieked with the pain of his own weight on his left leg.
Across the street, the lights of the Moskva Hotel reached into the darkening sky. He put the gun away. It was as if he had donned a disguise. Now, only the fact that he lurched against people unsteadily attracted their notice. Forty yards from the entrance to the Metro, he was anonymous again.
Even when the siren of the police car seemed to point him out as it wailed past, heading for the scene of the incident. Somewhere in him, he felt a part of him sliding into emptiness, as if he had received a physical blow to the head, and his consciousness lurched sickeningly; but more insistent was the pain in his calf, and the icy wetness in his shoe — the strange sensation of the trouser leg clinging wetly — and more imperative was the lighted bulk of the Historical Museum across the square from him.
It was five-twenty. He was too late, they would already have closed the entrance and be shunting out the last visitors — perhaps another five minutes for a respected academician or historian. But no one would be going in now.
At the traffic-lights of the pedestrian crossing from the Lenin Museum corner to the History Museum, he felt chilled and weak and purposeless. And then he remembered it was a Wednesday. The museum closed at seven, Wednesdays and Fridays. He leaned gratefully against someone's back as relief flooded him. The woman turned her head, and he touched his fur hat in apology, trying to smile and realising how unwell he looked; as if his face had been mirrored in hers.
A green silhouette on the pedestrian lights, fuzzily unclear to his eyes. He stepped out, then was bundled back again as another siren screamed up the scale and a police Zil tore past them, round into Revolution Square. Then the crowd moved forward again, warily watching the stationary traffic.
He leant against the wall of the museum for a moment, as if recovering his breath. He inspected his shoe and ankle. A tiny pool of darkness seemed to well round the sole of his shoe as he watched, and he looked stupidly back to the gutter and the pedestrian crossing, convinced he could see the betraying spots. He shook his head. No, nothing. Moving the injured leg with both hands, as if it were a wooden limb, he smeared the little pool, and stepped forward. No one seemed to notice him. Probably they would think him drunk, or ill, if they did.
He moved swiftly — at least the pain seemed to come in quick gouts now, suggesting speed of movement — his limp comically exaggerated. The main facade of the museum overlooked Red Square, a long flight of grandiose steps up to the pillared entrance. A mock-Russian style, designed by an Englishman. He saw the steps before him with pain rather than relief. They were almost bare of people — one or two loungers, near the bottom, a few students passing in or out of the doors, some figures bent with study and the very weight of history. And the glass, revolving doors in the shadows under the pillars of the porch.
Slowly, careful of the treacherous early frost, looking back every few seconds, he mounted the steps. He was leaving only the occasional blood-spot. He had left two or three footprints clear in his blood after he had paused in the street, but not now. His leg ached more familiarly, as if with cold — except when he placed his weight on it. He kept close to the balustrade, using the handrail to assist him, swinging the wounded leg before him. He concentrated on the immediate task, narrowing his awareness; that way, he did not think of Alevtina, dead like Ilya and Maxim, but killed by her own superior. Yet he did have a vague sense of living beyond the immediate future, living beyond a new expansion of consciousness in which he would perceive, in a pitiless clear light, the moral nature of what he had done, what he was doing. The puritan in him was poised to reassert itself.
It would have to wait, he told himself, gritting his teeth — I have to get to the fucking toilet and bandage my bloody leg!
