- no: that was all us, I swear. You and me. I knew nothing about what we'd find.'
Kelso closed his eyes. It was a nightmare.
'When did he call?'
'At the very beginning. It was just a tip. He didn't mention Stalin or anything else.'
'The very beginning?'
'The night before I showed up at the symposium. He said:
"Go to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism with your camera, Mr O'Brian" - you know the way he talks - "find Dr Kelso, ask him if there is an announcement he wants to make." That was all he said. He put the phone down on me. Anyway, his tips are always good, so I went. Jesus -' he laughed ' - why else d'you think I was there? To film a bunch of historians talking about the archives? Do me a favour!'
'You irresponsible, duplicitous bloQ4y bastard-'
Kelso took a step across the compartment and O'Brian backed away. But Kelso ignored him. He'd had a better idea. He dragged down his jacket from the luggage rack.
O'Brian said, 'What're you doing?'
'What I would have done at the beginnings if I'd known the truth. I'm going to destroy that bloody notebook.'
He pulled the satchel out of the inside pocket.
'But then you'll ruin the whole thing,' protested O'Brian. 'No notebook - no proof- no story. We'll look like complete assholes.'
'Good.'
'I'm not sure I can let you do that -'
'Just try and bloody stop me -'
It was the shock of the blow as much as the force of it that felled him. The compartment turned upside down and he was lying on his back.
'Don't make me hit you again,' begged O'Brian, looming over him. 'Please, Fluke. I like you too much for that.'
He held out his hand, but Kelso rolled away. He couldn't get his breath. His face was in the dust. Beneath his hands he could feel the heavy vibrations of the locomotive. He brought his fingers up to his mouth and touched his lip. It was bleeding slightly. He could taste salt. The big engine revved again, as if the driver was bored of waiting, but still the train didn't move.
IN MOSCOW, COLONEL Yuri Arsenyev, clumsily juggling technologies, had a telephone receiver wedged between his shoulder and his ear, and a television remote control in his plump hands. He pointed it at the big television screen in the corner of his office and tried hopelessly to raise the volume, boosting first the brightness and then the contrast before he was at last able to hear what Mamantov was saying.
.... flew up here from Moscow the moment I heard the news. I am therefore boarding this train to offer my protection, and that of the Aurora movement, to this historic figure, and we deft the great fascist usurper in the Kremlin to try to prevent us from reaching together the once and fi4ture seat of Soviet power .
The past twelve hours had already delivered a succession of unpleasant shocks to the chief of the RT Directorate, but this was the greatest. First, at eight o'clock the previous evening, there had been the anxious call reporting that Spetsnaz HQ had lost all communication with Suvorin and his unit in the forest. Then, an hour later, the first television pictures of the lunatic raving in his hut had begun to be broadcast ('Such is the law ofcapitalism - to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism...) Reports that the man had been seen on ~lie Moscow sleeper had reached Yasenevo just before dawn and a scratch force of militia units and MVD had been assembled at Vologda to stop the train. And now this!
Well, to take a man off under cover of darkness in some piddling little halt like Konosha or Yertsevo - that was one thing. But to storm a train in daylight, in full view of the media, in a city as big as Vologda, with V. P. Mamantov an~1 his Aurora thugs on hand to put up a fight - that was something else entirely.
Arsenyev had called the Kremlin.
He was therefore hearing Mamantov's ponderous tones twice - once via the television in his own office and then again, a fraction later, coming down the telephone, filtered through the sound of an ailing man's laboured breathing. In the background at the other end of the line someone was shouting, there were general sounds of panic and commotion. He heard the clink of a glass and a liquid being poured.
Oh, please, he thought. Not vodka, surely. Please. Not even him. Not this early in the morning -On the screen, Mamantov had turned and was boarding the train. He waved at the cameras. The band was playing. People were applauding.
Holy mother -Arsenyev could feel the lurching of his heart, the clenching
of his bronchial tubes. Getting air into his lungs was like sucking mud through a straw.
He took a couple of squirts on his inhaler.
'No,' grunted the familiar voice in Arsenyev's ear, and the line went dead.
'No,' wheezed Arsenyev, quickly, pointing at Vissari Netto.
'No,' said Netto, who was sitting on the sofa, also holding a telephone, patched through on a secure military circuit to the MVD commander in Vologda. 'I repeat: no move to be made. Stand your men down. Let the train go.
'The right decision,' said Arsenyev, replacing the receiver. 'There could have been shooting. It wouldn't have looked good.' Looking good was all that mattered now.
For a while Arsenyev said nothing as he contemplated, with increasing unease, this final fork in his life's road. One route, it seemed to him, took him to retirement, pension and a dacha; the other to almost certain dismissal, an official inquiry into illegal assassination attempts and, quite possibly, jail.
'Abandon the whole operation,' he said.
Netto's pen began to move across his pad. Deep in their fleshy sockets, like a pair of berries in dough, Arsenyev's little eyes blinked in alarm.
'No, no, no, man! Don't write any of this down! Just do it. Pull the surveillance off Mamantov's apartment. Remove the protection from the girl. Abort the whole thing.'
'And Archangel, colonel? We've still got a plane waiting up there for Major Suvorin.'
Arsenyev tugged at his thick neck for a few seconds. In his perennially fertile mind, the form of an unattributable briefing for the foreign media was already beginning to take shape: 'reports of shooting in the forest. . . regrettable incident.., rogue officer took matters into his own han~... disobeyed strict orders ... tragic outcome ... profound apologies...'
Poor Feliks, he thought.
'Order it back to Moscow.'
IT was as if the train had been held in check too long, so that when the brakes were finally released it lunged forwards and then stopped abruptly, and O'Brian, like the clapper of a beli, was slammed into the front and back of the compartment. The satchel flew out of his hands.
Very slowly, creaking and protesting~ and with the same infinitesimal speed as when they left Archangel, the locomotive began to haul them out of Vologda.
Kelso was still on the floor.
No notebook - no proof- no story-'
He dived for the satchel and scooped it in one hand, got the fingertips of his other up on to the door handle, and was attempting to rise when he felt O'Brian grab his legs and try to drag him back. The handle tipped, the door slid open and he flopped out on to the carpeted corridor, kicking backwards frantically with his heels at O'Brian's head. He felt a satisfying contact of hard rubber on flesh and bone. There was a howl of pain. The boot came off and he left it behind like a lizard losing the tip of its tail. He limped away down the corridor on his stockinged foot.
The narrow passage was clogged with anxious 'soft' class passengers - 'Did you hear?' 'Is it true?'- and it was impossible to make quick progress. O'Brian was coming after him. He could hear his shouts. At the end of the carriage the window of the door was open and he briefly considered hurling the satchel out on to the tracks. But the train hadn't cleared Vologda, was travelling much too slowly - the notebook was bound to land intact, he thought: was certain to be found -'Fluke!'
He ran into the next carriage and realised too late that he was heading back towards 'hard' again, which was a mistake because 'hard' was where Mamantov and his thugs had boarded - and here, indeed was one of Mamantov's men, hastening down the corridor towards him, pushing people out of his way.