‘OK,’ he offered eventually in a choked, reluctant voice. Then more strongly, ‘OK. I agree. It’s the only way.’
‘Good,’ The relief was apparent, even in the pinched, maidenish voice given him by the mobile phone connection. Lock even heard the sigh of his next breath. ‘That’s good. You’d better come in.’
It was as if they had barred his membership to something, leaving him uninitiated and an outsider.
‘You think the gate will swallow my story one more time?’ he asked. ‘Do I risk it?’
‘They’re relaxed, confident,’ Vorontsyev reported. ‘But, if you don’t want to try, rip out a length of the perimeter fence and walk here-‘ He paused, listening to someone, either Dmitri or Lubin. Lock could vaguely hear another voice, then, more closely, Vorontsyev’s agreement. ‘Maybe you should walk. Just in case. Marfa knows the airport layout. We’re next to a line of fuel bowsers.’
‘Turgenev has to be with them, Vorontsyev.’
‘Of course. We’re behind the Russair cargo hangar. Don’t keep us waiting.’
Lock switched off the humming phone and tapped the girl on the shoulder. ‘You OK?’ he asked solicitously, even though his mouth was sour with what he could only regard as defeat.
‘Yes!’ she snapped.
‘Don’t bite my head off, lady. I just wanted to know whether you could handle this or not.’
‘I can handle it.’ She turned in her seat. The windscreen beyond her was blank with snow. ‘I’m all right. Really, I’m all right.’
‘Sure,’ he replied without irony. ‘OK, let’s go.’
‘What about the car?’
‘It’s just a shape against the fence — leave it where it is.’
He opened the door and clambered out into the blizzard, staring around him in the darkness. No murky dawn was yet rivalling the dim glow of the perimeter lights. He turned up his collar and thrust his gloved hands into the pockets of his topcoat.
Hunched into himself, he began to trudge along the fence, looking for a gap, a torn piece of mesh, the girl plodding behind him.
There’d be plenty of breaks in the wire, the small-scale smugglers would have made them over the months and years of cigarette and hashish illegalities.
The weight of a sense of betrayal strengthened, bowing his shoulders. Beth’s murder was to go unrequited, Turgenev was going to get away with it. The taste of that was colder than the snow on his tongue. God damn it to hell, he cursed. God damn it all to hell …
His interior landscape, stretching into the future, was as empty and featureless as the tundra that reached away around him on every side.
Hamid was standing beside the grey Mercedes like a chauffeur, but that was not the image that came back to him as he was shrugged into his topcoat by one of the servants. Instead, he heard his mother’s voice, her annoyance with him merely her fear of displeasing his father. Pyotr, the car is waiting for you Pyotr!
The last more as a plea than an injunction.
As a boy, he had stepped out of the main door of the block of flats in Moscow on many snowy pre-dawn mornings like this, and a man clapping his hands together for warmth would have been standing beside a battered minibus, his face pinched and angry at the delay. It had not been a car, whatever his mother’s affectations beyond the pretensions of middle-ranking Party membership. His schoolfellows’ faces would be peering through the fugged and iced row of windows, some of them smirking. You’ll be late for school ~ again … So would run the litany of her peculiar orthodoxy of obedience — to his father, the Party, the Kremlin; to everybody she knew to be superior in status to herself and her husband. And his mother had known, with the nicety and obsession of a stamp collector, every minute gradation of office, income, accommodation among the various circles of the Inferno that had been the Secretariat of the Soviet Communist Party, its civil service.
He donned his fur hat. Glanced at the murky sky, still more lit by rig flames and the glow of the town than by the dawn.
But the snow was easing, he was certain, and the wind, though it remained forceful in its gusts, was more fitful, coquettish almost after the directness of the blizzard. The weather window would open and Hamid and the scientists would be gone …
He became aware of the reason for the memory. It did not lie in his irritation with Hamid, or the Iranian’s pose beside the limousine. It was that the scientists, all six of them, were seated in a minibus parked behind the Mercedes. It had arrived at the lodge only minutes earlier. The windows were tinted and he could not see their faces. But that vehicle had evoked his childhood in Moscow. He smiled, but with lingering bitterness. The memory of his stifling, orthodox, unquestioning home had never been rendered neutral by the solution of time. It remained acidic, stinging. He remembered Leonid Turgenev’s gratitude for his Party card and his menial promotions and millimetric measurements of financial improvement, his ruthless driving of his only son to succeed in just the same manner as himself … his disappointments at the young Pyotr’s love of sport, his laziness at school, his poor reports, his indiscipline. The beatings, the harangues, the lectures, the instilling of creeping, blackmailing guilt … then his irrational pride when his son became a trainee officer in the KGB 1st Directorate School.
He had hated his father. Towards his mother, the cipher, the imprint of her husband, he had felt the smallest tenderness and the greatest irritation. They were both dead now. He grinned as he approached the car, so that the Iranian was puzzled by the expression of humour. Wouldn’t that be a simple, even simplistic explanation for his joy in capitalism? The antithesis, the complete refutation, of his father’s crabbed, servile ideological loyalty, his puritanism, his utter lack of hedonism.
He slapped Hamid on the shoulder, surprising the man.
‘In two hours, my friend, you’ll be above the clouds and on your way to Tehran. Don’t look so damn gloomy!’ he laughed.
There was no longer any sense of humiliation, or subservience to the Iranian; no reminder of meniality and the past.
Memories of his father always turned on their axis like this.
They still possessed an initial sting, like a needle being inserted into a forearm vein … but the effect was like a narcotic drug.
Pleasure, a dreamy confidence, a joy at his power, authority, wealth. How his father would have hated him now, and what a crying shame the old bastard hadn’t lived to see — well, the Mercedes would have been enough, pulling up outside that grimy concrete block of flats!
‘Come on, Hamid — let’s get you on your way!’ he called in the greatest good humour as he climbed into the limousine.
Lock chewed on the lumps of baguette, filled with a hard, rindy cheese and moistureless tomato, swallowing them gratefully, each mouthful awakening rather than abating his hunger.
Vorontsyev was watching him with a sardonic amusement that did not occupy his flinty grey eyes. Behind the forced humour, the Russian’s face was drawn and grey with the enervation of the pain in his arm and ribs. The dawn seeped slowly, an ineffectual thin dye, into the cloud-heavy sky. The snow no longer blinded, but blew like flimsy material through which the contours of the airport were visible. Snow-laden aircraft, the tower, the terminal building, the snowploughs, a tank, a piece of self propelled artillery, petrol trucks.
There was no sense of increased or urgent activity. They were not expected. However, Lock accepted that Vorontsyev’s estimate of around fifty troops was probably correct. They were alone in the car, which smelt of dirt and cracked plastic seating and stale food and bodies.
‘Can’t be done, it’s too risky,’ Lock said eventually, when he had eaten the last of the baguette. The front of his overcoat was covered with big crumbs. ‘We’d be walking into a blind alley, with no way out. Can’t you see that?’