Finally the SUV stopped. Without removing the blindfold, they led Lena out of the car. The snow crunched under their boots.
“Don’t forget my purse, please,” she asked.
“Go on, go on,” they told her and gave her a light shove in the back, with a hand, not a gun barrel.
A weak light leaked through the blindfold. They led Lena out from the cold and into someplace warm, guiding her by the elbow. Only now did she feel how tired her arms were from being handcuffed behind her back. Her shoulders ached miserably. Even though the handcuffs were loose, the cold steel weight of them was repulsive.
“Take the handcuffs off,” she asked softly. “I won’t run away, and I’m not going to fight you.”
“You’ll manage,” they told her, and they stopped and pushed her roughly into an armchair. “Sit quietly.”
A minute later, the door slammed. Lena was left alone, God knows where, handcuffed and blindfolded. She tried to get more comfortable in the chair, but it was impossible. Her shoulders ached more and more, and her hands were numb.
She remembered how once, during the summer semester, she’d studied all night for an exam sitting by an open window in the kitchen that looked out on the Garden Ring Road. That night, right before dawn, was strangely tense and quiet. Suddenly, in that quiet, she heard a distinct tapping. Looking out, Lena saw a man walking down the deserted sidewalk right under her window.
He was walking very slowly, holding a slender cane and cautiously tapping the asphalt in front of him. It was a blind man, but he had clearly only gone blind recently. He was learning how to walk down the deserted streets in the night. Back then she suddenly felt vividly, to the point of horror, the black, desperate loneliness of blindness.
Many years had passed since then, but that lonely blind man on the nighttime Garden Ring was firmly etched in her memory. Now, as she sat blindfolded, her entire being felt the danger emanating from the world around her.
She didn’t know how much time had elapsed. She was hungry and her mouth had dried up. It was quiet. She’d thought there wasn’t anyone else in the building, but then she heard the click of a door lock. Then quick light steps. Someone was silently untying the knot at the nape of her neck. Carefully, trying not to pull her hair.
At first, Lena thought she really had gone blind. The light in the room wasn’t bright, but it killed her eyes. The pain lasted several minutes. Lena squinted and wished she could wipe her eyes, but her hands were still shackled behind her back.
When she was finally able to see she saw a tall, round-faced young woman dressed almost exactly like her, in jeans and a long, loose sweater. She was wearing woolen socks and men’s house slippers.
“Please, give me something to drink and take the handcuffs off,” Lena asked. “It’s not like I’m going to run away.”
The girl shook her head and pointed expressively to her ears.
Great, a deaf-mute, Lena thought sadly, and she finally looked around the room in which she’d probably spent a few hours.
The room was tiny and nearly empty. Besides the armchair Lena was sitting in, there was only an iron cot with a striped mattress and not a single window. A bare lightbulb in the low ceiling gave the room its only light.
Lena swallowed hard and jerked her shoulders. The young woman looked at her calmly and thoughtfully. She had clear blue eyes. She went out, locking the door behind her. Five minutes later, though, she returned with a glass of water, which she brought to Lena’s lips. It was slightly sour mineral water. Lena gulped it down. Putting the empty glass on the floor, the young woman took a small, flat key out of her jeans pocket, unlocked the handcuffs, removed them, and left. The lock clicked behind her. Lena was left all alone.
She stood up, kneading her numb hands, and walked around the room. The walls were covered in beige oil paint. Up near the ceiling, Lena noticed a tiny round window, more like an air vent. And there turned out to be one more door in the corner. Pushing it cautiously, Lena discovered a tiny toilet and sink. There was hot as well as cold running water.
That means I’m somewhere in town, she thought. But we left Tobolsk, and we couldn’t have gotten to Tyumen in an hour and a half. Actually, I could be anywhere at all. Mafiosi can put in plumbing and hot water anywhere they want if it suits their needs, even the desert or the remote taiga.
All she could do was wait and see what happened. Lena washed her face and hands with warm water, removed her jacket and boots, and lay down on the striped mattress. She looked at the yellowish ceiling, trying not to cry.
Michael shuddered at the first gunshots. Sasha pushed the car to its top speed. Behind them, at the intersection, a police car cut off the dark brown Zhiguli. Michael pulled a muscle in his neck turning to look out the back window into the darkness of the night highway. He saw gunfire, and bullets flashed in the gloom like trailing falling stars.
“Maybe we shouldn’t bother to stop by the hotel for our things,” he suggested. “I can see something very bad is going on.”
“There’s another car waiting at the hotel,” Sasha replied. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be okay.”
“Why did you leave Lena there? Why didn’t she come with us?”
“That was her decision.”
“But you knew everything. You should have insisted, taken her by force!” Michael wouldn’t calm down.
“It was her decision. She’s a grown woman.”
Somewhere in the distance, on the highway, there was an explosion.
“What is it?” Michael exhaled. “I think war’s broken out! You, Federal Security lieutenant, can you explain to me what’s going on?”
“No,” Sasha honestly admitted.
“Your calm astonishes me!”
“That’s part of the job.” Sasha shrugged and lit a cigarette in the closed car.
Three agents were waiting for them at the hotel. Sasha handed Michael over to them, and they escorted him to his room. It took him three minutes to pack his things. Their Mercedes rushed Michael to the Tyumen airport in two and a half hours. They encountered no pursuit or gunfire along the way.
The plane flew to Moscow through a starry, velvety night, above heavy March clouds, the immense, snow-drifted taiga, and icy Siberian rivers. Michael looked out the black porthole and saw his own blurred reflection. He was thinking about Lena and was worried. He’d realized long ago that asking questions was useless.
On the outskirts of Tobolsk, a hundred meters from the Veterans Home, the SWAT team was working under a searchlight and trying to figure out why, out of the blue, an old empty Volga had blown up on the shoulder of the highway, right in front of five Federal Security agents sitting in a vehicle very nearby. The explosion was powerful, deafening, but they still hadn’t found any victims.
Twenty meters from the Veterans Home front door, in the dense, high bushes by the main drive, they discovered the body of Major Ievlev.
Sasha Volkovets woke up the old woman, Gradskaya, and heard her report that Lena had left at about ten thirty, saying she’d take the bus back to the hotel.
Naturally, the guard at the door hadn’t seen a woman in black jeans and a brown leather jacket leave the building.
She’s got herself in a real mess, the first lieutenant said to himself, and he spat through his teeth at the hard, trampled snow.