Vasilisk leaned forward and jabbed him in the solar plexus.
Kistler screamed and retched and tried to bring his knees up, curling himself into a protective ball, but the last of his strength had gone. Rizhin’s bodyguard yanked him to his feet and held him upright, though his legs failed him and he could not stand.
Kistler heard a strange sound and realised it was himself sobbing.
‘Shut up,’ said Vasilisk and jabbed him again.
On the slope above the guardhouse Maksim nudged Lom in the ribs and gestured with his chin.
Go! Go!
Vasilisk the bodyguard half-carried, half-dragged the unresisting semi-conscious Kistler through the rose garden and past the swimming pool. There was no one there. From half past ten to half past twelve there was tennis.
Iced tea at half past eleven.
Rizhin’s car was parked in the courtyard and Vasilisk had the keys in his pocket. He checked the time on his watch: 10.51.
He opened the rear door and bundled Kistler inside. Pushed him down into the footwell. Kistler groaned and retched again, spilling sour vomit down the front of his shirt.
Vasilisk took his place in the driver’s seat and settled down to wait.
Lom eased open the door of the gatehouse. Maksim entered first, pistol in his hand. The guards swung round in surprise: one reached for his holster, the other made a grab for the telephone receiver.
Maksim fired twice. Neat and precise.
Lom ripped the phone cable from the wall.
At 10.55 Rizhin himself came round the corner of the veranda into the courtyard. Vasilisk followed him in the rear-view mirror. Saw him glance across at the car and see his bodyguard in the driver’s seat. Puzzled, Rizhin started to come over.
Vasilisk turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred into life. He slipped the car into gear and headed for the tunnel entrance. A cool dark mouth in the rock. In his mirror he saw Rizhin standing in the middle of the courtyard watching him go.
Vasilisk increased the weight of his foot on the accelerator pedal.
The car roared forward. The barrier was down but the car weighed nearly three tons.
As the barrier splintered it occurred to Vasilisk in an abstract way that he was probably beginning the final two minutes of his life.
Lom walked up to the massive gate across the tunnel and pressed the flat of his hand against it, feeling the dry solid wood. Its grain and fine flaws. The bars of iron within it. The blackened studs. The wide sunlit air. The scent of cypress and resinous southern pine. Feeling and remembering.
In the dark time, after Maroussia went, Vissarion Lom moved fast across ice fields and raced through the snow-dark birch trees. Part man, part angel, part something else, body and brain saturated with starlight and burn, all the dark months of winter he ran the ridges of high mountains.
He pushed his fists deep into solid rock just to feel it hurt.
Ten days and more he had stood without moving on the thick frozen surface of a benighted lake. Cold dark fishes slid through darkness far below him and bitter black wind scoured his face with particles of ice.
Lom-in-burning-angel counted the needles on pine trees and ignited them one by one with an idle thought. Little bright-flaring match flames.
He had forgotten who he was and he didn’t care.
But slowly he had been moving south, and slowly the star-fire faded from the angel skin casing Lavrentina Chazia had made. In the early sunlight of that first spring five years ago Vissarion Lom shed his angel carcass and pushed it off a rock into the river.
He squirrelled the recollection of that dark inhuman time deep in the secret fastnesses of the heart where bitterness festers, and guilt. Kept it there, locked under many locks, along with the memory of all the winter slaughtering Lom-in-burning-angel did, or could have done and thought he might have. The iron smell of blood on ice.
After that long inhuman winter in the north without the sun, Vissarion Lom wanted to be nothing more than simply human again, but secretly he knew he never could be quite that. Possibly he never entirely had been: the earliest roots of himself were buried in oblivion and inexhaustible forest. As everyone’s are.
‘Turn your back and cover your face,’ Lom said to Maksim. ‘Splinters.’
Lom focused. Tried to drive all other thoughts and memories from his mind. Tried to calm the rising anxiousness and the beating of his heart.
There was only him and the gate.
He probed. Pushed. Nothing happened.
Changing direction, he gathered all the urgency, the growing white panic inside him, squeezed it all into a tight ball and forced it out from him. Hurled it into the timbers, deep into the corpse limbs of forest trees.
Burst open by the pressure of tiny air pockets–the desiccated fibrous capillaries suddenly and violently expanding–the heavy wooden planks of the gate exploded loudly from within, split open and shattered.
The rock tunnel behind the broken gate was dark and silent. It smelled like the mouth of a well.
‘What the fuck?’ said Maksim. ‘What the fuck did you do?’
‘Later,’ said Lom.
Where the hell was Kistler’s car?
They stood side by side for thirty long slow seconds.
‘Where is he?’ said Lom. ‘He’s not coming.’
Engine roar echoed, and the sound of gunfire.
The long black limousine was racing towards them. Lom glimpsed a face behind the thick windscreen as he scrambled aside. A tanned impassive handsome face. Cropped yellow hair.
The limousine slowed to a crawl. Maksim pulled open the front passenger seat.
‘Get in the back!’ he yelled at Lom.
Lom slid in alongside the collapsed form of Kistler, who was crouched on the floor. Dirty shirt and soiled trousers. Unshaven face grey. He looked up at Lom with glassy eyes. No recognition. There was a smell of urine and vomit in the car.
The driver didn’t look round but gunned the engine and raced off down the mountain.
The heat of the sun, now high in the sky, beat against the side of Elena Cornelius’ face. She could feel her skin burning. Insects buzzed and clattered in the grass, crawled across the back of her neck, sunk tiny probes into her arms and her ankles. She fought back the urge to scratch. All movement was dangerous.
She was still. She was nothing but eyes watching. She was part of the rock.
From five hundred yards she saw the gate shatter and the limousine emerge, slow to pick up Maksim and Lom, and hurtle away down the hill, jumping culverts, taking the hairpin too fast, scraping its side along the crash barrier.
The racing of the engine and the squeal of tortured metal echoed off cliffs and scree.
Elena Cornelius waited. Less than a minute later two vehicles came charging out of the tunnel mouth: a black Parallel Sector saloon and an open VKBD jeep with three men cradling sub-machine guns on their knees.
Elena moved the rifle slowly, sliding the graticule smoothly along the road, catching up with the windscreen of the leading pursuit car. The driver’s head was a shadow. She moved the scope with the saloon for a moment, matching speed for speed, then shifted her aim three car lengths ahead and lifted it half an inch.
Squeezed the trigger gently.