‘We’ll see. Lubin — you drive. Dmitri, open the door-‘ He shuffled his own forgotten broken arm to greater comfort.
They’d have to drop onto the snow-covered tarmac but that wouldn’t kill any of them. He glanced at Lock. ‘Do you want him tied in his seat?’ he asked. Lock slowly shook his head.
‘Very well. Marfa?’ She nodded.
The noise of the passenger door being opened and the bellowing entry of the storm drowned all sound, all thought.
The curtain flared in the wind. Vorontsyev pushed Turgenev into his seat, paused for an instant beside Lock, who merely smiled, a boyish, unworried expression. He heard Lubin jump, then saw Marfa disappear through the door. Dmitri glanced back at Lock and Turgenev, then disappeared. Vorontsyev paused at the raging gap in the fuselage, blinded and disorientated, then jumped, collapsing at once into the new snow, his ankles shot though with pain.
He was helped to his knees and looked back. The stewardess and her companion were standing in the doorway. He waved his pistol and their figures vanished. He heard the engine of the Mercedes fire. Dmitri was sweeping the snow from the windscreen with swinging movements of his arm. Marfa was beside him and he shook off her proffered hand. They reached the car as Lubin began revving the engine. Snow was flung out by the rear wheels and the car skidded slightly sideways.
‘Get in!’ he bellowed to Dmitri who was still clearing snow from the windows. ‘Lubin — straight down the runway, don’t stop until you reach the fence, then go through it! Understand?’ Then he heard distant, toylike detonations. The car seemed plucked at, assailed by small pebbles. Dmitri’s features flattened into caricature against the passenger window, then slid out of sight.
‘Dmitri-!’ he yelled, opening the door, looking down to inspect the dead features that stared up at him. Two shots passed above his head, shattering the window on the other side of the car.
‘Go, go!’ Marfa was screaming at Lubin.
‘No!’ Vorontsyev cried out, but the car lurched forward, leaving Dmitri as a shapeless lump in the snow, diminishing.
More shots Lock heard the shooting, at first with great clarity, then more distantly as the steward slammed the passenger door shut.
He heard the Mercedes accelerate, then that noise, too, was lost in the babble of panic from the aft cabin. He switched his attention — slowly, with a great effort of concentration — to Turgenev.
And shook his head.
‘Don’t call — them, uh? Stupid ‘
Turgenev sat back in his seat. Lock had no more than minutes now; his blinking the cabin into focus was a nervous tic, regular and compulsive. His face was ashen, there was blood on his chin which he had not bothered to wipe away. His breathing was irregular, less of a struggle but like a fading signal from a distant transmitter. Turgenev knew he had only to wait for five, ten minutes — gestured with his eyes to warn the steward, who had appeared behind Lock. The man nodded his understanding and retreated behind the curtain.
‘Don’t count on it,’ Lock said quietly.
Lock listened to the subsiding babble from the other cabin.
Soon, they’d open the door and bellow their identities into the storm, hoping not to get killed. Or they’d tell Bakunin or whoever was out there they had only one dying man to content themselves with … Soon.
‘You’ll never know if they made it,’ Turgenev offered.
‘Neither will you — Pete.’ He suppressed a threatened fit of coughing. He heard his lighter, slower breathing. It wouldn’t be long now, not long at all. ‘Beth. Why?’
‘What? Oh — that was handled badly, John. It shouldn’t have happened.’
‘It did, though …’
‘Yes, it did. Look, John, I can still save your life!’ It was talk, just talk. ‘I can get you to hospital, I can keep you alive, John!’
‘You — emptied my … life, Pete. It isn’t anything ~ any more.’
He heard the steward move behind his seat and managed a louder voice: ‘Crazy to try!’ He smiled as he heard the man retreat to the aft cabin. There was the silence of a tense audience in the rest of the Learjet.
‘John, this is crazy. You’re crazy. This revenge thing. It isn’t how things work…’ His voice insinuated. There was a not unkindly authority in its tone. ‘Lock, you — people like you you’re just romantics … This doesn’t solve anything, even begin to. The world is shit. Lock. Everywhere, in every way. You used to think Afghanistan was a good war, that you had God on your side, that you were helping …’
Lock watched Turgenev lean closer to him, as if confiding some important truth.
‘It was bad through and through, John, that war. It was the world in microcosm … Let me help you ‘
Lock blinked with a furious, futile rapidity. He felt himself retreat from the cabin. The ringing of the telephone set in the arm of Turgenev’s seat was very distant and quiet.
Turgenev’s hand moved to the phone. Lock struggled to attend to the movement, lurching more upright — to be doubled up in a blind, uncontrollable fit of coughing. Blood on his hands, on the gleaming barrel of the pistol … Then hands on him, a hand grabbing for his pistol -
which fired. Lock saw nothing, heard the noise of the gun, twice, felt a weight fall crushingly onto his back … lost consciousness.
The steward snatched up the receiver, gabbled into it. Turgenev’s body had toppled sideways into the narrow aisle. Lock’s had slid down in his seat so that his blind eyes stared up at the steward. His young, expressionless face saw blood dribbled down the dead man’s chin.
‘Yes, yes.-! Both dead! Both — we are all safe, yes, Colonel, we are all safe!’
Relief coursed through the steward. He put down the receiver, then stepped over Turgenev’s sprawled body towards the door.
He opened it, shivering in the icy cold.
A moment after the impact of the projectile, the aircraft was engulfed in flame.
POSTLUDE
The superiority of the rich, being … unmercifully exercised, must inevitably expose them to reprisals.’
Wrapped in his overcoat, he sat on the barrel of one of the cannons ranged before the facade of the Arsenal; the cannons had been captured from Napoleon’s army during its terrible winter retreat from Moscow. He stared up at the windows of the Palace of Congresses. Light snow flurried bt ween him and the towers and pinnacles and massive buildings of the Kremlin.
Lubin’s baby was grumpily cold, wrapped like a bundle of washing in his mother’s arms, held up beside her cold, pretty dark face. Marfa, hands thrust into the pockets of her grey coat, long scarf wrapped again and again around her neck and shoulders, studied him in a silence as weary as his own.
‘What did the deputy minister have to say?’ she asked eventually.
Hooded crows cawed from the high gutters in a mockery either of her question or his anticipated reply.
‘He said the Interior Ministry, the whole Federation, owed us a great debt.’ He shrugged and grinned acidly. ‘He told me I’d been promoted to Colonel, you and Lubin to Detective First Class. He hinled we could all look forward to Moscow postings, just as soon as the papers came through.’
He looked up at them. The news had not disturbed the lines of cold and disappointment on their faces. Katya Lubin alone appeared innocently pleased.
He had been released from hospital a week ago. He had spent those seven days in an endless round of pointless debriefings and meetings; now, he felt the sour, disillusioned ennui of an unsuccessful salesman, someone peddling religious tracts. No one really wanted to listen. After all, they insinuated, Turgenev was dead, the American’s body or what was left of it had been flown home, and Bakunin was to be disciplined for his excess of zeal and poor judgement in storming the plane. But even that was understandable, for there appeared to have been a bomb on board … He had struggled not to laugh aloud at that politest of fictions.