SHE sat in one of the shadowy booths for an hour or more, watching. What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like. It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.
Just after half-past eleven, when the place was at its busiest, she made her move.
She circled the dance floor, smoking, holding a bottle of mineral water. Holy Mother, she thought, there were girls in here tonight who barely looked fifteen. She was practically old enough to have given them birth.
She was coming to the end of this life.
A man with dark curly hair poking through the straining buttons of his shirt came over to her but he reminded her of O'Brian and she side-stepped him through a cloud of aftershave, in favour of a big south-east Asian in an Armani suit.
He drained his drink - vodka, neat, no ice, she noticed: noticed it too late - and he got her on the dance floor. He quickly grabbed her backside, a cheek in either hand, and began digging his fingers into her, almost lifting her out of her new shoes. She told him to cut it out but he didn't seem to understand. She tried to press her arms against him, push him back, but he only increased his grip and something gave in her then, or rather joined - a kind of merging of the two Zinaidas -Are you a good Bolshevik, Anna Safanova? Will you prove it? Will you dance for Comrade Stalin?'
- and suddenly she raked the fingers of her right hand down his smooth cheek, so deep she was sure she could feel the glossy flesh clogging beneath her nails.
He released her then all right - roared and doubled over, shaking his head, spraying beads of blood around him in a series of perfect arcs, like a wet dog shaking off water. Someone screamed and people rippled away to give him space.
This was what they had come to see!
Zinaida ran - across the bar, up the spiral staircase, past the metal detectors and out into the cold. Her legs splayed like a cow's and gave way on the ice. She was sure he was coming after her. She dragged herself back up on to her feet and somehow made it to her car.
THE Victory of the Revolution apartment complex. Block Nine. In darkness. The cops had gone. The little crowd had gone. And soon the place itself would be gone - it had been jerry built even by Soviet standards; it was going to be pulled down in a month or two.
She parked across the street, in the spot where she had brought the westerner the night before, and stared at it across the roughened, freezing snow.
Block Nine.
Home.
She was so tired.
She grasped the top of the steering wheel with both hands and laid her forehead on her bare arms. She was done with crying by then. She had a very strong sense of her father's presence, and that stupid song he used to sing.
Kolyma. Kolyma,
What a wonderful place!
Twelve months of winter
Summer all the rest.
And wasn't there another verse? Something about twenty-four hours of work each day and sleeping all the rest? And so on and on? She knocked her head against her arms in time to the imagined beat, then rested her cheek against the wheel, and that was the moment that she remembered that she had left her bag with her gun in it back at the club. She remembered it because a car, a big car, had drawn alongside her, very close, preventing her from pulling out, and a man's face was staring at her - a white blur distorted through two panes of dirty wet glass.
SILENCE WOKE HIM.
"What time is it?'
'Midnight.' O'Brian yawned noisily. 'Your shift.'
They were parked beside the deserted highway with the engine off. Kelso could see nothing, apart from a few faint stars up ahead. After the noise of the journey the stillness was almost physical, a pressure in the ears.
He pulled himself upright. 'Where are we?'
About a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty miles north of Vologda.' O'Brian snapped on the interior light, making Kelso flinch. 'Should be about here, I figure.'
He leaned over with the map, his big fingernail pressed to a spot that looked entirely blank, a white space split by the red line of the highway, with a few symbols for marshland dotted on either side of it. Further north the map turned green for the forest.
'I need a piss,' said O'Brian. 'You coming?'
It was much colder than in Moscow, the sky even bigger. A great fleet of vast clouds, pale-edged by the moonlight, moved slowly southwards, occasionally unveiling patches of stars. O'Brian had a torch. They scrambled down a short bank and stood urinating, companionably, side by side, for half a minute, steam rising from the ground before them, then O'Brian zipped up his flies and shone his torch around. The powerful beam stretched for a couple of hundred yards into the darkness, then dissipated; it lit nothing. A freezing mist hung low to the ground.
'Can you hear anything?' said O'Brian. His breath flickered in the cold.
'No.'
'Neither can I.'
He switched off the torch and they stood there for a while. 'Oh, daddy,' whispered O'Brian, in a little boy's voice, 'I'm so scared'
He turned the light back on and they climbed the bank to the Toyota. Kelso poured them both more coffee while O'Brian lifted up the rear door and dragged out a couple of the jerrycans. He found a funnel and began filling the tank.
Kelso, nursing his coffee, moved away from the gasoline fumes and lit a cigarette. In the darkness, in the cold, under the immense Eurasian sky, he felt disconnected from reality, frightened yet strangely exhilarated, his senses sharpened. He heard a rumble far away and a yellow dot appeared far back on the straight highway. He watched it grow slowly, saw the gleam divide and become two big headlights, and for a moment he thought they were coming directly at him, and then a big truck, a sixteen-wheeler, rushed past, the driver merrily sounding his horn. The noise of the engine was still faintly audible in the distance long after the red tail lights had vanished in the dark.
'Hey, Fluke! Give us a hand here, will you?'
Kelso took a last draw on his cigarette and flicked it away, spinning orange sparks across the road.
O'Brian wanted help lifting down one of his precious pieces of equipment, a white polycarbonate case, about two feet long and eighteen inches wide, with a small pair of black wheels mounted on one end. Once they'd pulled it out of the Toyota, O'Brian trundled it round to the front passenger door.
'Now what?' said Kelso.
'Don't tell me you've never seen one of these before?'
O'Brian opened the lid of the box and removed what looked like four white plastic trays, of the kind that fold out of aircraft seats. He slotted these together, creating a flat square about a yard across, which he then attached to the side of the case. Into the centre of the square he screwed a long, telescopic prong. He ran a cable from the side of the box to the Toyota's cigarette lighter, came back, flicked a switch and a variety of small lights blinked on.
'Impressed?' He produced a compass from his jacket pocket and shone his torch on it. 'Now where the hell is the Indian Ocean?'
'What?'
O'Brian glanced back along the M8. 'Right the way down there, by the look of it. Directly down there. A satellite in stationary orbit twenty thousand miles above the Indian Ocean. Think of that. Oh, but the world's a small place, is it not, Fluke? I swear I can almost hold it in my hand.' He grinned and knelt by the box, moving it around by degrees until the antenna was pointing directly south. At once the machine began to emit a whine. 'There you go. She's locked on to the bird.' He pressed a switch and the whining stopped. 'Now, we plug in the handset - so. We dial zero-four for the ground station at Eik in Norway - so. And now we dial the number. Easy as that.'