Snow Falcon

Khamovkhin with more noise. Because he had passed one sleepy-eyed, half-awake Englishman on the flight of stairs, and the adrenalin bad worked, time seeming to escape him, and he had bludgeoned his way to this moment. He listened.

Nothing, but his hearing was still ringing from the explosions of the rifle.

'Get dressed — get dressed, or I'll kill you now!'

Khamovkhin, as if slapped by the voice, went back into the bedroom. Galakhov crossed to the door as Khamovkhin switched on the light in order to dress. He pushed it wide, and leaned against the door-frame, his eyes flickering from the figure of the Soviet leader as he dressed to the outer doorway which yet remained free of shadows.

'Hurry up — hurry up!' Adrenalin running away again, and panic-thinking. He wasn't going to kill Khamovkhin now, he was going to use him as a hostage to get out. Something had decided that — the same stupid animal in himself that had used the gun because time seemed about to run out. 'Hurry.'

Khamovkhin looked up at that. Galakhov saw the flicker of ginning hope in his eyes. Then the man pulled on his jacket.

'That'll do!'

'My jacket — my topcoat. You don't want your hostage to freeze to death, do you?' He turned to the wardrobe, and reached in for his coat.

What was that — noise on the stairs? Someone must have heard! Then Khamovkhin, tidying the collar of his topcoat, donning his fur hat, as if on his way to some public appointment in Helsinki, was standing next to him — a look of amusement in his eyes. Galakhov jabbed the rifle into his ribs, making the old man's breath exhale in a gasp. But the look in the eyes did not change from their damned superiority, their amusement. Galakhov was baffled.

'Go to the door,' he ordered. Khamovkhin did so, then waited, pausing as if for some stage entrance. Enter the statesman — Galakhov placed the rifle against the old man's spine, then he called out.

'You're there, of course — Air Aubrey and Air Buckholz?'

Silence.

'Galakhov?' They knew his real name, then. 'Air First Secretary — are you unharmed?' Aubrey, the Englishman.

'Yes, Air Aubrey. I am afraid that — who did you say, Comrade Galakhov? — I am his hostage, shall we say?'

'Shit!' Buckholz or Anders.

'I'm taking him out now! If you listen very carefully, you'll hear me switch to automatic. Kill me, and he dies anyway.'

'I know how rifles work, Galakhov!' he heard Buckholz say.

Then don't take any chances.' He jabbed Khamovkhin in the back. 'He's coming out first — and the rifle is placed against his spine. Clear a path for us. Right — move!'

Eighteen: The 24th

Vorontsyev awoke with a start, his head jerking upwards so that he banged it against the wall. He had opened his eyes, but there was a deep blackness in the room, deeper than he remembered. Frantically nigging back the cuff of his coat, he stared at his watch, the luminous figures slowly swimming to an approximation of a circle of numbers. His mind tried to reject the information, but the body groaned with realisation. Three-twenty — no, three-twenty-five. He had slept, undisturbed, for nine hours.

His back ached, and his neck was stiff. He moved his left leg, and the pain shot through him, seeming to erase the restorative sleep in a moment. He rubbed the back of his neck, groaning softly to himself. It was too ridiculous to contemplate, the unforgivable slide into sleep when he needed to be strong, alert.

He climbed upright, hands pressed against the wall behind him, until his left leg stuck out awkwardly, and his frame was shaking with the effort. He banged his palms against the wall in impotent fury. Gorochenko — he had perhaps two hours, no more than that.

Forty-seven halls, countless store-rooms and cellars. He could be anywhere 1 He dared not consider that he might not be in the building at all.

He bent clumsily and picked up the gun, gripping it tight as if in an affirmation of purpose. He hurried now, banging against the edges of crates, then slurring his foot across the concrete. Despite the remaining warmth of the boiler-room, he was cold, and shivered. It was dark because the street lights in Red Square were out. He groped along the wall until he found the doorknob, cool under his hand. He turned it, holding his breath.

Still unlocked.

He went down the passage, rubbing the sleeve of his coat against the lagging of the pipes, tasting the dust he disturbed as he breathed in. Then the outer door, open, closed behind him. The flight of steps, lit by a frosty moonlight, chill and ghostly, the imitation marble glinting in flecks, as if frost-covered. He leaned against the wall, and pushed himself up each step, hurrying, oblivious to the pain — perhaps encouraging it as a punishment for his dereliction of purpose, the weakness of the physical organism — swinging the leg forward, leaning the body-weight on it, then upright, back to swing the leg again.

He was breathing raggedly, and there was a chill sweat across his back, and his brow was damp. The shoe seemed to squelch loudly again, noises like the slapping of a wet rag against a dirty windowpane. He waited until the panic of his blood died, then he looked up, and studied the high, pillared hall which contained great lumps of statuary, the rows of glass cases containing the earliest history of Russia — ivory, stone, pottery. High windows let in the deceptive frosty moonlight, seeming to render the hall into monochrome and chill him.

He shuffled as quietly as he could across the hall, towards two doors in the far wall, near the stairs ascending to the first floor of the museum. When he reached them, he ran his fingers over the little brass plates as if reading braille. 'Private'. The gun pressed against his chest, his body dose to the door from beneath which came a strip of yellow light, he turned the handle, and pushed.

He almost fell into the room, gripped tight to the door handle, and stood upright. A small room, fuggy with the warmth of an electric fire and a samovar. Slightly hazed with cigarette smoke he was sure it wasn't his eyes because the tobacco smell was pungent. Two faces looking up from steaming mugs. He must have caught them just after a security patrol. He dosed the door behind him, and leaned back against it. Neither of the two men had moved more than to half-turn to face him. After the slight, surprised scraping of chairs, there was silence, except for the faint noise of the samovar in the corner.

Two men, both in their late fifties or sixties. They seemed two aspects of one personality — medium height, he suspected, medium build, greying hair, thin. For all they interested him, they might have been twins. They were simply hands, reaction-times, and a lack of guns. He said, because somehow it seemed an inevitable remark, 'Where is he?'

Because that was what he had seen in the moment when they were real, and separate, before his dogged mind and furious purpose dissolved their identities; he had seen them glance at one another, as if in knowledge.

There was a silence. He thought he had imagined it, was wrong. Then one of the men — he distinguished him, with difficulty, as the one with the broader face, and thicker grey hair — said quietly, 'He said — if you came, we were to take you to him.'

Vorontsyev sagged visibly against the door, the gun dropping to his side. Ridiculous. He had only to ask for an interview with his father. Crazy. They had been waiting for him. Without consciously considering the action, he reached into his coat and bolstered the gun.

One of the men nodded.

'Where is he?' Vorontsyev asked in a thick voice, still leaning against the door.

The smaller of the two men, his wispy hair stranded across his head, said, 'Above us. He's safe.' He looked at the trouser leg, and the smudge of dirty red around the heel of the shoe. 'You're wounded,' he observed dispassionately. He spoke like a policeman. Vorontsyev did not bother to consider how they had been suborned by Gorochenko. Now, all he wanted to do was to come face to face.

The man who had answered him first stood up. Surprisingly, he was taller than Vorontsyev.