The captain was looking up the name on a typed list in a folder of stiff polythene sheets. His finger ran along his lower lip with the regularity of a typewriter carriage. What if he had the names of the executives-? How could he? The captain looked up.
‘You expect shipments to arrive in this weather?’
Lock shrugged.
‘No. But some came in before the weather changed. I’ve only just gotten around to them.’ He grinned.
‘It seems a very early time of the day to be troubling yourself and your driver,’ the captain mused, his eyes straying to the window. In a clear patch in the porthole-like window. Lock saw Marfa’s shadow within the car and two of the GRU soldiers leaning down to the driver’s window. He hoped fervently their interest was sexual. And that Marfa’s nerve would hold up.
‘Sure.’ He gestured expansively with his hands, appeared shamefaced. ‘OK, so someone higher up, a V-P, kicked ass. I have to get out there on the double. My job might be on the line.’
The military contempt for the chicanery of civilian life was evident, like a bruise on the captain’s features. This disorderly application of pressure, authority, made him contemptuous of the man Lock was assumed to be.
‘Can I get going?’ Lock asked tentatively.
The captain toyed with the passport, opening and closing it, his dark features narrowed in concentration. How much did he know? He didn’t have descriptions, maybe, but he knew an American was involved. The cramped interior of the trailer seemed hotter, almost stifling, the storm very distant despite the occasional quivering of the vehicle in the wind’s buffets.
Lock felt the seconds elongate, as if time dripped like a faulty tap.
Then the captain threw the passport onto the desk.
‘Very well, Mr Evans. You may continue with the work of saving your career. Sergeant, show the gentleman out.’
Thanks.’
Lock stood up and made for the door. The sergeant intercepted him, tugging on a parka and pulling the hood over his head as he did so. Then he came down the steps behind Lock, following him to the car. The two soldiers rose to slouched attention beside it.
‘She’s your driver, yes?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Sure.’
They stood beside the car. Maria’s features were small with cold and tension.
‘You’re in a hurry?’
‘Yes’
The sergeant was inspecting the car. He bent by the rear wheel and took the tyre valve between his fingers. Then he looked up, his broad, thick-nosed face jntent, greedy.
‘OK, so how much?’ Lock asked, then remembered to protest;
‘The captain know you play this game every time there’s a roadblock?’
‘You will tell him?’
‘This place is corrupt as hell!’ Lock protested.
‘And everyone in it,’ the sergeant added philosophically.
Lock got out his wallet and took two ten-dollar bills from it.
The sergeant shook his head. He took out another ten. The sergeant, snow epauletting his shoulders, rose to his feet and took the bills, slipping them at once into his pocket.
‘A good remainder to your journey,” he said, smiling. Then he held the door of the car open like a hotel porter.
Lock collapsed into the rear seat and the door was shut behind him. The windows instantly clouded. His heart thudded in his chest as he said: ‘Pull away slowly — slowly.’ The sergeant’s arm was raised and the barrier imitated his gesture, sliding upwards towards the two giraffe-necked lights. The rear wheels skidded.
‘Slowly, dammit!’ he growled, his own tension uppermost.
The car wobbled beneath the upraised barrier. Gradually, as Lock turned in his seat, the glare of the lights diminished back down the road, the snow pouring more and more thickly behind the Cadillac.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry.’
The girl said nothing. Lock felt no relief, no anticipation, only an exhausted weariness — and a sense of foreboding.
FOURTEEN
Blue Remembered Hills
Even in. Afghanistan, at the height of a winter snowstorm, the mountains had periodically and reassuringly loomed out of the blizzard and driving sleet; implacable and familiar. Here, he realised, there was nothing. There just wasn’t a landscape, hardly even a shadowy clump of stunted firs. The tundra stretched flat and empty all the way to the Gulf of Oh and the Kara Sea; and began at the perimeter fence of Novyy Urengoy’s airport.
Lock shuddered in the rear of the old Cadillac. The heater was little more than a futile protest against the weather that enveloped them. Marfa sat blowing on her woollen-gloved hands in the driving seat. Dmitri’s mobile phone — or was it the Major’s? — was pressed against Lock’s cold cheek, so that the stubble rasped. Beyond the fence against which Marfa had parked the car, aircraft looked as small and lost as gulls sitting out a storm on unmoving pack ice.
‘You think that’s feasible?’ Lock asked, breathless at the proposition.
Perhaps his encounter with the GRU in their trailer had unnerved him more than he suspected or admitted. He could not be certain — maybe it was the narrowing perspective Vorontsyev’s plan offered, the run up the blind alley. There’s no way out, once we do that.’
‘It’s the only way,’ Vorontsyev explained patiently. ‘We then won’t have to confront Bakunin’s troops. We got here an hour ago. Lubin’s been scouting. He counted three APCs, a half-dozen UAZs, even a piece of medium artillery, parked behind a commissary truck. That means as many as fifty GRU troops in the immediate area. I suggest we avoid the airport buildings, Lock.’
There was a pained, cynical irony in his tone.
‘OK, OK!’ Lock blurted in irritation. ‘I’m just saying there’s no way out of your locale, none at all.’
‘It hinges on Turgenev. If he’s there, then we can use him to get us out. At least, keep us alive. If we can’t take off … It is a damn aircraft. Lock, in case you’d forgotten!’
‘So, Bakunin lets us fly out, no problem?’
‘Bakunin takes his money, power and orders from Turgenev.
Once we have Turgenev, we have checkmate, //you let Turgenev remain alive, Lock. Dmitri, Lubin, Marfa — ‘ The girl’s head twitched at the sound of her name, as the car rocked in a buffet of the wind.’- and myself, would be trusting you with our lives, once we got aboard the aircraft. Can we do that, Lock?’
It was absurdly simple, even if he didn’t like it. He had to agree to let Turgenev live, or effectively kill them all. There was no other way of gaining Vorontsyev’s vaunted proof. He clenched his free hand into a fist beside his thigh, grinding the knuckles into the denim-clad muscle. It was that, above all, thai he did not want — Turgenev as a hostage, Turgenev continuing to breathe … and being taken to Moscow or somewhere else where he would have influence, connections, powers of bribery and escape. He would, he knew, be letting Turgenev make a home run. Beth’s murder would never be avenged.
‘Lock? Well, what’s your answer, Lock?’
‘He’ll get off, scot free!’ he protested in a wailing voice that startled the girl upright in her seat.
‘Maybe. Maybe not. He’ll be stopped. Lock. Isn’t that what you want?’
‘I want him dead,’ he admitted.
‘And us, in that case,’ Vorontsyev replied gloomily, almost as if he accepted the implacability of Lock’s hatred.
Vorontsyev was parked inside the airport perimeter, near the cargo hangars. Even with night-glasses, Lock would not have been able to see that far through the flying, pre-dawn murk. He could see only dim, retreating lights that seemed to be swallowed by the storm and the darkness, and a short length of the fence in either direction. And a solitary clump of twisted, snow-laden firs.