“What happened?” There were people shouting around her, and I was already moving away, Pravda under my arm.
“She must have fallen, the poor dear,” someone said in English, voice raised in the excitement of the moment. “Imagine it happening when we are on the Trans-Siberian Express, yes dear, that’s right, the Trans-Siberian, this poor woman just fell from the train to the platform, and she almost died! I tell you, I was so frightened for her!” and I thought, I hope she lives, but she won’t be able to talk to anyone any time soon, or mention the Russian-speaking girl who paid her baksheesh on the train and disappeared in Ekaterinburg. It was past midnight, six hours after we’d left Perm.
I bought another Pravda on the train and wasn’t surprised to discover no mention of Azrael’s death, or Metatron’s either. It was obvious to me after being inside Lubyanka that the Russians were just as concerned as we were, and they were better at keeping unwelcome news quiet. Now I let the paper drop onto a bench, where it left a damp impression in the frost.
I walked away from the train, leaving the station, and felt rather than saw her following me under the arches.
I didn’t have a lot of time and, though she was good, she was a local agent, not Bureau, just another agriculturalist or horticulturalist specialist or whatever it is they find to do in their official capacity in those two-horse Siberian towns.
“Have you got everything I asked for?”
Her accent was pure Oxford and colder than the snow. “Yes. Come with me.”
She led me across the road into the foyer of a hotel. It looked abandoned. “You have less than half an hour,” she said, “so we’d better hurry.”
She took me upstairs to a small room--if there were staff at the hotel they were long-asleep at this hour--and brought out the equipment I’d asked for.
I spent the next twenty minutes altering my clothes and my hair, amazed as always by the transformation these small changes could make, but also aware that it wouldn’t help deceive a trained operative.
Or an angel.
“I’ll get rid of your things as soon as you’re gone,” she said.
I nodded. “Thanks.”
She suddenly smiled. “No worries--it gets a bit boring down here. This is the most exciting thing I’ve had to do since the piping burst six months ago.”
“Agriculture?”
“Irrigation. We’re trying to build a model drip network for...oh, forget it.”
I smiled. “Got long to go?”
“Six more months. Then somewhere hot, I hope. Africa, or the Middle East.”
“Hope they fly by,” I said. I picked up the bulky rucksack and adjusted the straps. “Be seeing you.”
“Good luck.”
She came with me, a few paces behind, back to the station and conferred with a short man standing in the shadows. He nodded twice and, without turning, she waved her hand in the air.
Eldershott was still on board. I couldn’t acknowledge her--for one person to see me was enough, and her lookout made one too many--and I stepped onto the platform.
“Hello!” I called in English, and waved. I wore a smile like a new summer dress. “Wait!” and the new concierge, a tall, pale man with a thick dark moustache standing by the folding metal stairs leading into the cabin, looked at me in puzzlement, then waved me in when he saw my ticket.
I had the same cabin, as I’d specified to Seago back in Moscow. Marija Zita got on the train at Yaroslavski train station and got off at Ekaterinburg.
And Janet Gordon, English, twenty-eight, with a short blonde bob and comfortable, expensive hiking gear got on in her place. The only person who would have noticed was gone, and though I felt sorry for it, I knew it was necessary. She was gone and all anyone else had seen, if they’d seen anything at all, was Marija Zita.
I had the cabin to myself; the other three seats-cum-beds were reserved and wouldn’t be claimed. I could trust Seago with that, at least. I spent an hour familiarising myself with the new identity before disposing of the dossier, keeping only the new identity documents. Then I headed to the dining cart.
He was sitting alone, at the furthest table in the corner of the cabin, eating Solyanka soup. The night outside was monochrome: white strips of land glaring in an inky dark. I took the only free table, sitting on the other side of the cabin from him and two tables down.
There were three Mongolians in heavy coats sitting by the door, smoking and drinking vodka and arguing. Next to them, a group of Western European tourists occupied three of the tables. I could hear German, Swedish and Dutch being spoken simultaneously, which would have been nauseating to follow, so I didn’t.
Behind me sat a couple of male backpackers whose gazes I could feel against my back. I’d pegged them down as soon as I’d gone in. Blond, a big build, clean-shaven, they could have been hikers but they looked too clean, too comfortable in their surroundings, and I knew I was going to have to assess them again, and if they didn’t check out, dispose of them.
“Da?”
“Oh, hi,” I said, looking up at the waiter. My voice carried across the car and was noted. “Could I have a soup? I don’t know the name for it, but I had a really lovely soup in Moscow before we left the station, do you know?” Looking at the pockmarked, stoic face hopefully: “Do you speak English?”
Eldershott hadn’t risen to the bait, so I glanced back towards him, a hopeful expression on my face, then rose and went to him. “Excuse me, do you speak English?” I shook his shoulder, pointed down to his soup. To the waiter: “This is it!” Still pointing: “Could you bring me one of these please? How much is it?”
“Odin Solyanka.” He noted it in his pad with a sort of grim determination and walked off.
There is a fine line you walk when you assume an identity. It has to be assumed completely, worn like a second skin, absorbed and displayed to the world without fault. The moment you slip, the moment you fall out of character, the moment suspicion falls is your last. The operation had shifted since Moscow, assumed a new shape and a new aspect, and I had shifted with it, going into second gear and putting a new play into motion, and I let Killarney fade into the core and let Janet Gordon, loud and charming and naïve, a master’s degree in archaeology, never before left England, everything new and wonderful, take over. I needed access to Eldershott, and Janet was desperate for some English conversation to re-live her exciting new experiences.
“What did he say?” I asked Eldershott, still holding him by the shoulder. He looked over at me, eyes narrowed behind unflattering glasses. It was the first time I’d seen him close and face to face, and I committed him to memory, etching his face, his clothes, his build into my memory.
Eldershott: dark hair and thinning on top, with a bushy moustache that tried to compensate, unsuccessfully, for the high forehead and the weak chin, eyes pale blue and smoky like haze over the North Sea. His fingers were blunt but well-kept, and he had hair growing on his knuckles. He looked at me without expression for a long moment before sighing loudly and saying, “One Solyanka. Solyanka is the name of the soup.”
“Thank you.”
He shook my hand off his shoulder and returned to his bowl, lifting up a spoon in silent determination, turning his back on me. Hoping I would go away.
I wouldn’t.
Check for weapons: none that I could see, and none on the two blond backpackers who were now obviously checking me whilst trying to look as though they weren’t.
That changed things. I had to think quickly, trying to figure out where they came from. They could have been Russian, but I had a feeling that, whilst Eldershott’s presence in Lubyanka was indeed thanks to the Fourth Directorate, him leaving it wasn’t. We went straight from the prison to the station and got on the train, there was no time for anyone to mount an operation and yet here they were, like two concrete blocks cast in the same mould, two big blond twins, and I knew that sooner or later it would come to a standoff between us.
I still didn’t know enough and I needed the information; I needed to understand Eldershott and who he was running from.
Or where he was running to.
“Are you English?” I tapped him on the shoulder again--Janet Gordon just trying to be friendly. “Do you mind if I sit with you? What’s that that you’re reading?” There was a rhythm to it, a kind of breathless excitement and a propensity for rapid-fire questions that didn’t require immediate answers.
“I really don’t think….” he began, but I was already in motion, sitting opposite him and waving to the waiter to signal my new location--as if he couldn’t tell--all the time keeping up a monologue directed at Eldershott. “Can I see the book? What is it? Oh, it’s old, isn’t it! It’s so lovely!” the last pronounced as two separate words, a long accent on love and a slightly shorter one on the suffix.
As I spoke I picked up the book and examined it, running a finger along the pages to see if anything was laid inside the pages, which there wasn’t, and noting the title and the name of the author.
Military History since the Coming.
A picture, possibly authentic but more likely a photo-realist later impression, of Allied soldiers dropping their guns on the muddy ground before the Archangel Metatron, as he manifested before them.
“You’re a historian?” My food finally arrived and I thanked the waiter with an awkward “Spasibo” that made Eldershott look at me again, suddenly.
“No,” and, “Do you speak Russian?” The eyes narrowed again behind the glasses like clouds forming over a blue-grey sea.
“A little,” I admitted. “My grandmother’s maiden name was Kobach. She often spoke it to me. When I was younger. Do you?”
“What?”
“Speak Russian.”
“I speak quite a few languages,” he said, stating a fact or trying to impress me, it didn’t matter; what did was that he had taken the bait now and was talking.
He had taken the bait and it was time to leave him to chew on it for a while, so I ignored him and concentrated on the food.
It came with a plate of the dark, sour bread only the Russians could make so well, and I scooped up a spoon of Solyanka--sausages, ham, onions, olives, there was little that didn’t make it into this soup--and I soaked up the sour cream and lemon broth with the rest of the bread and washed it down with water, and when I was done, I signalled the waiter for another.
“Oh, and dva peva!” I called after him.
Eldershott was examining me again, his hand resting between two pages of the book; they were full of scribbles in the margins. I decided it might be handy for me to examine the book more thoroughly later.
“One is for you,” I said, as the waiter brought over two large bottles of Baltika beer and deposited them on the table.
Again, I seemed to startle him. I couldn’t read him; he seemed to be a mixture of meekness and aggression and he moved between the two almost without noticing. “Thank you, Miss...?” he trailed off, leaving me to fill him in.
“Gordon. Janet Gordon. Pleased to make your acquaintance,” I said, formally, then smiled as he offered his hand. “As a thanks for helping me out,” I said, pushing one of the beers towards him. “Mr...?”
“Morcombe,” he said. “Thanks again.”
“Well, Mr Morecombe, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Then the second bowl of soup arrived and I concentrated on that, ignoring him and yet observing his reactions, his signals. He wasn’t tense but he was on some kind of edge, and that made him unpredictable; his fingers kept tracing invisible runes in the open book, and his eyes blinked like two flies trying to escape from solidifying amber.
The second bowl helped, and the beer was good. When I finished eating, I sat back against the window with my feet up on the seat.
“I’m an archaeologist,” I said into his silence. “I’m going to work on a dig they have in the Gobi desert. Are you planning to stop in Ulaan-Bataar, too, or are you going on straight to Beijing?”
His ticket was all the way and so was mine, now, but I had a suspicion he wouldn’t be going that far, and his reaction when I mentioned the Gobi was interesting, the eyes shifting to the window where the snow kept blowing in the icy wind. His fingers kept scribbling, faster and faster, on the pages of the book.
The Gobi, then?
Perhaps. But I didn’t think so.
Either way, he didn’t answer, and when he finally looked at me, his eyes were haunted, the orbs as large as moons in a pearly cloud, and he breathed once, deeply, and then his fingers stopped their motion and fell silent and he slumped in his seat, his head almost hitting the table and blood coming out of his mouth.