As with the temptation to open the throttle wide, Swanson understood that some things could move too fast. Even at 70, the press of cold air was eating through the insulation of his suit and leaching away his body heat. He would have to slow down. Now that he was flying solo, he would slow everything down, and try to bring this wild mission under control.
On the roadside berm, a green sign with white letters read: Narva 10 km. Swanson kept going until he spotted a distance marker of three kilometers — less than two miles. He cut the speed and steered the motorcycle off the main highway. He would go into the city, as instructed, but very carefully.
7
“Go up in the castle,” Ivan had directed. Swanson had not spent much time in castles. He was more familiar with Cinderella’s palace in Disneyland than those in the real world, where centuries had passed them by. They were anachronisms in modern warfare. After weaving lazily through the back streets of Narva on the R nineT, he looped around the big Route 1 traffic circle, and there it was, a big and brooding stone fortress that had been anchored beside the fast-flowing river for more than seven hundred years. On the far side of the river was another one. It was in Russia.
He parked the bike and just rested on it, studying the structure and imagining having to go against such a defensive bulwark with a spear or bow and arrow. Good luck with that! The Danes, Germans, Swedes and Russians all passed through those old stones at one time or another, and none had managed to stay. Finally, the bombs, tanks, artillery and sheer explosive power of World War II had ruptured the walls and ruined the castle. Restoration was still incomplete. Time and technological change might conquer such a place, but Kyle did not have a lot of time on his side. Neither, however, was he trying to conquer it. Swanson would go inside tomorrow as a tourist, for what was a castle good for these days other than to serve tourists?
It was almost four o’clock, and the sky was thick with black clouds, foretelling probable rain. Cruising the downtown area, Kyle found a coffee shop near the river, a small place with a picture of the Swedish Lion painted on the street window and beneath it was taped a small cardboard sign: Speak English Here. He nosed into the curb, peeled away some of the heavy gear and went inside. It was small but neat, and he was the only customer. He chose the table at the rear, with his back to the white wall and facing the street outside, an automatic choice for a man who lived with danger. A young woman at the counter glanced his way, shoved her cell phone in a back pocket and ambled over, looking at him curiously. “You are English or somewhere.”
“Good guess. I’m Canadian. I saw your sign,” he replied pleasantly. “How did you know?”
“First, I have never seen you before, so this is probably your first time in Narva, yes? Also, you have no beer belly and do not stink like a Cossack, so you are not a Russian; you have neat hair, look healthy, but are too dark to be Scandanavian and too pale to be a Slav. I see all people. You are early in the season, too, are you not? This is only April, and the predapokaliptichesky is in July.” She handed him a little menu that had thumbnail pictures of food and drink, and when he raised his eyes at the long, strange word, she translated. “Our Narva International Motorcycle Festival. Your expensive European bike is outside.” She crossed her arms and cocked a hip, waiting. “You want beer?”
“Sure,” he said. “What do you have that is a local brew?”
“Saku is good, and is cheap.” The girl was only about twenty, slender, with the long legs of youth, huge smoky eyes and long brown hair that tumbled to her shoulders. “If not for the motorcycles, why are you here? I would never come to Narva on a holiday.”
“It is my work. As you say, the bike festival, your predapwhatever. I am a freelance magazine writer and I’m doing some advance work.”
Satisfied, she walked to the counter and called out the order. An old man with a drooping Kaiser Wilhelm mustache pulled a foamy beer into a glass, and the server brought it back and took a seat across the table. She lit a cigarette and checked her phone while Kyle tasted the beer. Not bad. “My name is Anneli Kallasti,” she said, examining his face as if measuring it. “You are?”
Kyle took a second, deeper swallow of the amber liquid as he considered the answer. She was a cyber-type, obviously quick with her cell phone. She would immediately run it through Google, which would confirm the cover story, but also it would risk pinging the CIA net back home and give them his GPS numbers. In the age of computers, staying totally off the map was getting ever more difficult. “I am Simon Brown, from Toronto.”
“Simon Brown, you should not be telling people that you are a writer. They may think you came to Narva to write about politics. Our municipal election is a very important thing this year.”
Kyle laughed. “Politics? I saw a lot of leaflets tacked to poles and posters on walls and guessed that it was about candidates. That stuff is beyond me, Anneli, and it is boring, at least to me. I just do motorcycles and tourism pieces. Tomorrow I will go see the castle.”
“Politics can be dangerous here.” Her eyes darted around the shop and the sidewalk beyond and her face grew serious. “I give you this. Leave your tourism and bikes and do Narva politics now. The world will be watching.”
What the hell is she talking about? “Sorry, but no politics. Can I buy something to eat here?”
“Our politics are more interesting and important than bikes. Finish your beer,” she said, rising and making a round trip to the counter. She came back with a tourist street map and wrote quickly on the back. “Go out and do some tourism reporting. See this memorial. It is the most important in our city.” She leaned forward and rested on her elbows. “Then you return back here in two hours and take me to dinner. Meanwhile, I give you a few more places to go and see.”
“There is a difference of about twenty years in our ages, Anneli. I’m not looking for a good time.” He took a look at the map. She had placed an X on the location of the coffee shop, circled a few other points and traced a line from his current location to the memorial.
She tapped a few numbers on her phone, then settled back after reading the screen. “There are many hundreds of Simon Browns in Canada. So, yes, Mister Brown, although you are not totally unattractive for sex, this is not a romantic date, and I am not a prostitute. I will take you to meet my boyfriend. You will need to hire me as a translator because not many people in Narva speak English. Also, he is in politics. He is going to be our new mayor!”
Narva bore concrete scars and more sour memories than charm. It was almost destroyed when the Red Army took it back from the Nazis during World War II, only to later designate it an off-limits industrial zone. Incredible pollution of the land and air, and poverty for the people, followed. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Russians pulled out, taking whatever valuable industry they could salvage along with them, while burying the radioactive waste from a failed nuclear facility. Communist apparatchiks who had run the city remained in control. The legacy of decades of Soviet rule was a uniform architecture of big, square and rectangular buildings, many of them still empty, concrete signatures of collective failure.