‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘we’ll just have to crash his party.’
CHAPTER 51
The distant blast of a car horn woke Valera. She had no idea where she was, just that she was no longer in the dark room, tied to a chair and surrounded by faceless, shouting figures. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but for the first time in a week she didn’t feel completely exhausted. If it wasn’t for the thick purple bruises on her wrists she might even have thought the dark room had just been a bad dream.
She was lying on top of a narrow, soft bed. Her clothes were dry and her shoes were still on her feet. She felt clean, really clean. There was no grit under her nails, no foul stench lingering in her hair.
She swung her legs off the bed – they were heavy, but they moved – and took in her new surroundings. The room was empty apart from the bed. The walls were bare, the floorboards exposed but varnished. There was a large sash window on one side of the room, and a door on the other. Valera slipped off the bed and stepped lightly round the room. She tested the door. It was locked. She peered through the window, looking for something that would reveal where she was, but all she could tell was that she was on the first floor of a house in the middle of a narrow street and, judging from the short shadows she could see on the few cars below her, it was the middle of the day.
She’d expected someone to come after her, but not the head of the KGB scientific directorate. And she definitely hadn’t expected to watch a bullet pierce his skull and shower her in blood and brains.
She couldn’t imagine the KGB killing one of their own so openly and brazenly, which meant someone else must now be holding her captive. The Swedes were the only people who knew anything close to the true extent of her breakthrough and what it was worth – not even the GRU or KGB knew how far her work had really progressed – but they already had her. She may not have served up all of her secrets on a plate, but she was cooperating with them.
She remembered the American woman and British man who, just like Medev, had appeared out of thin air in Skansen. Who were they? And who were they working for? For all she knew, they were another distraction, working with the people who kidnapped her, and right now she might just be enjoying a temporary reprieve before being thrown back into the dark room.
She tried to untangle the knots in her head. She could still see the broken domes of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood and the grown-up Ledjo reaching out to her when she closed her eyes. And she remembered the voices merging into two, then one, and the feeling of hands untying her and telling her everything was going to be alright. But could she be sure that had really happened?
Then she realised something more disturbing than everything she’d been through in the dark room. When she tried to picture the boat on the lake in her mind she couldn’t see it. It hadn’t changed, morphed into something new and unfamiliar. It wasn’t buried in the mess of memories and nightmares that had taken over her mind. It was just gone, as if it had been ripped out of her. She was missing something else too. Ledjo’s backpack.
Valera didn’t know if she was being watched somehow or if her captors were on the other side of the locked door, waiting for her to bang or wail or completely break down. She couldn’t cry even if she wanted to. She was too angry. She stood in the middle of the room, shaking with rage, until she couldn’t hold it in any more and she let out a deep, guttural scream. The door didn’t open. No one came to silence her, or comfort her, or drag her back to the dark room.
Now sure she was alone, she went back to the door, But instead of twisting the knob again, she kicked it, slamming her heel into it again and again until the panel it was embedded in fractured and the whole mechanism clattered onto the floorboards.
The door swung open and Valera peered out into the short landing on the other side of it, still half-expecting some unseen guard to jump on her. She ignored the other doors and other rooms on the first floor and ran for the stairs that would lead her down to the ground floor and out onto the street. But they didn’t, because the bottom of the staircase was blocked by a huge slab of metal. It looked like a giant guillotine had sliced through the house, intended solely to block her way.
There was a door embedded in the thick metal, but no handle for Valera to turn or attack. She still kicked it, purely out of frustration, and heard a dull, deep echo on the other side.
She retreated upstairs. This time she went room to room in search of an escape route. At the back of the house were a small bathroom and kitchen, which, save for a quietly humming fridge, were as bare as the bedroom she’d woken up in. The only other room on the first floor, between the bedroom and bathroom, had been set up as a kind of living room. There were two chairs, a low table, and a large shelf full of well-worn books. They were all in English – the first real clue Valera had found about where she was.
The living room also had a large sash window. This one looked out onto a narrow, shaded yard. Valera shook the frame, trying to force it open, but it wouldn’t shift. She hit the glass with her fist, but it didn’t shatter. She even picked up one of the chairs and hurled it at the window. It fell onto the floorboards without leaving a scratch. She dragged it into the bedroom and tried to launch it out into the street, only succeeding in breaking one of the legs.
She was starting to feel claustrophobic, her deep tiredness beginning to creep back. She went back to the kitchen, still hunting for anything that might help her get out of this strange, empty house. She scoured the cupboards, but they were all bare. She tried the tap in the sink. A thin dribble of lukewarm water came out. It felt like she was back in her house in Povenets B.
She felt a familiar pang in her stomach and opened the fridge. Astonishingly, it wasn’t empty. On the middle shelf was a small plate of sandwiches, half a loaf of bread, and a jar of jam. Valera inspected and then discarded the bread and sandwiches. She didn’t trust them – the bread was too white and neat, the sandwiches filled with some kind of square-cut, processed meat. But she couldn’t resist the jam jar. She picked it up, unscrewed the lid, and inhaled the rich, cloying smell of sugar and berries. Her sense of smell was dulled from the burning embers she’d breathed in as she’d searched the ruins of Ledjo’s school but the pungent aroma was still almost enough to overwhelm her. Then she scooped a handful of the cold, sticky substance into her mouth.
The slick feeling on her tongue took Valera instantly back to her first spring in Povenets B, when the sun was starting to get hot and the days were getting longer. She had sat on the scrub in front of her bungalow, smearing jam made from Zukolev’s private supply of raspberries that she’d kept over winter onto chunks of rye bread as Ledjo showed off his Young Pioneers neckerchief, which Valera had made for him the night before. He’d marched up and down as Valera clapped and laughed, chanting the Young Pioneers’ motto, ‘Be prepared!’, over and over between bites of jam and bread.
Valera kept scooping jam into her mouth until the jar was empty. As the last of it slid past her tongue she came back to the present. She almost cried, remembering how proud Ledjo had been and that for a brief while she had been happy in Povenets B. She had no idea who was holding her, or what they had planned for her, but as she sucked her fingers clean she promised her son that she’d be prepared for whatever happened to her next.
CHAPTER 52