Seago had said Ekaterinburg, but they already had someone waiting down the line when the train pulled into Perm station at six-twenty in the evening, Moscow time, just under twenty-four hours since I’d left the Russian capital. Snow covered the platform like a sheet of ice and snowflakes rushed in the air and swirled in complex eddies. The grey building was lit, but poorly; there were only two hawkers on the platform, looking shrivelled and cold in oversized coats.
There were few travellers either coming or going. I joined the back of a group of passengers going out for a stroll on the platform and bought noodles and peanuts and salami and bread; I didn’t want to show myself in the dining cart yet, my main aim right now was to disappear from view until we reached Ekaterinburg.
I didn’t bother with the Pravda, I didn’t want to make unnecessary contact, but I spotted him as soon as he showed up on the platform.
Unassuming. Ginger-haired, moustached Englishman--or possibly a Scot--mid to late forties. Probably an agricultural engineer doing low-level intelligence for MI6, now seconded to the Bureau for the sole purpose of greeting me on the platform.
He kept looking round, no doubt for the Pravda, and I packed up what I’d bought and hurried back onto the train, passing by Eldershott’s cabin as I went. He was on the top bunk facing in the direction of travel, and he was reading a book. His cabin-mate was an elderly Mongolian who sat on the lower bunk and sneezed as he pinched snuff from a small bottle between forefinger and thumb and brought it up to his nose.
I went back to my cabin--the Russian woman sharing it with me had got off at one of the small, five-minute stops that were dotted in the snow like the sudden enclaves of naked wood, and I made sure no-one else would be coming in by bribing the babushka whose job it was to keep order in the car and fill up the samovar with water, as well as to keep its fire stoked. The Russian economy, I sometimes suspected, depended entirely on the elderly babushkas and their endless little jobs.
I closed the door and locked it, then opened the bag and took the meagre portions I’d purchased on the platform.
I hadn’t eaten properly since Paris, and I was starving.
I didn’t bother with the pleasantries. I tore a large chunk of bread (and say what you want, the Russians still make the best bread) and cut a large slab of salami and shoved both into my mouth.
I’d filled up the noodle pot with hot water on the way to the cabin, and now I waited for them to cook whilst eating more bread and salami.
I ate the noodles with my fingers, then drank the water like a soup. I felt better. I sat with the door closed as the train rocked away into the endless snow, enjoying the rare interlude this journey had offered. I ate the peanuts. Peanuts have all the nutrients the body needs. Their shells gathered around me like the remnants of used mortar left behind from a long-ago war.
I had been on the Trans-Siberian once before, fleeing a deadly agent of the KGB’s Fourth Directorate, trying to stay alive and save the documents Conroy had managed to get from Star City before they’d found him. Now, I was beginning to feel inexorably lax, as if somehow the greater fear of the Archangels was enough to mute any feeling of immediate danger from their human subordinates. They called it the Great Game, and it was played only partially by humans, and I began to wonder who was playing against whom in this strange new war that was wiping out angels from both East and West.
But for now the game I had to play was patience, and I played it as well as I could as the train moved evenly onwards, through snow blizzards and the coming of the steppes, the landscape through the window looking like a giant white mirror, the air itself composed of slivers of sharp, deadly ice.
Once or twice I thought I saw figures moving in the eddies of snow, pale and beautiful beyond measure, with wings that beat evenly through the storm; but they moved in and out of my perception, an illusion of snowflakes blowing in the wind, and as I fell asleep, still propped against the table with peanut casings all round me, they came and haunted my dreams: angels, melting away like quicksand when I tried to grasp at their true shape, flying and swirling in the white silent storm.