“I think it’s crazy,” said Holliday. “It would never work.” They were standing in the green-tiled basement preparation room of Dimitri Chaplitzky’s mortuary. Dimitri’s brother, Ivan, their waiter at the Central Hotel in Sredneuralsk the day before, was also with them, along with his dark-suited, dour-faced brother. Dimitri Chaplitzky bore a remarkable resemblance to Ichabod Crane in Walt Disney’s version of the Headless Horseman tale. As well as the two brothers, there were two of Dimitri’s clients, both dead, both male, both extremely ugly and both turning the color of Stilton cheese.
“No, not crazy, please, misters. My brother, Dimitri, and me are doing it again and again.”
“But how do you get past the roadblocks?”
“It is simple, misters. Between here and Moscow there are only three major towns: Perm, Kirov and Nizhniy Novgorod.”
“Okay.” Holliday nodded. “I get that.”
“Yes, okay, okay, but listen to me. To the roadblocks between here and Perm we are a katafalk, how you say, hearse taking bodies back to Perm for insertion in the ground or krematsiya or whatever family wants. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Between Perm and Kirov we say the body is going to Kirov.”
“And from Kirov to Nizhniy Novgorod. .”
“Yes, yes. We have papers for all places.”
“What if they look in the coffins?” Holliday asked.
“They will not.”
“Why?”
“It is tradition in Russian Church not to embalm the bodies.”
“But we’re not dead-yet,” Holliday said.
“When we are. . moving other things we make sure they are not opening the grob, the coffin, another way,” said Ivan.
“How?”
Ivan nodded to his brother, who went to a tall stainless-steel refrigerator. He opened the door and removed a large plastic bag. He brought the bag across to one of the empty preparation tables and set it down. Holliday and Eddie stared. The bag was full of a variety of human feet in various stages of putrefaction.
“Santa Maria, madre de Dios,” whispered Eddie.
“Feet?” Holliday grimaced.
“Yes, feets,” said Ivan, smiling. “Grieving families do not notice they are missing. We also have cousin with shoe store. Vy ponimaete, gospoda?”
“Da.” Eddie nodded. “We understand.”
Anton Pesek, sixty-something son of a high-ranking official in the Czech State Security Service, the Statni bezpecnost, and brought up during the Communist era, took the train from Prague to Moscow even though it involved the tedious business of buying a Belarus travel visa and then paying a bribe to the border guards. If it weren’t so predictable it might have been funny when the visa ended up being out of order, but as it was the process was simply boring. There had been several terrorist attacks, including a suicide bombing at Domodedovo, Moscow’s main airport, but so far no one had seen fit to plant bombs or seek martyrdom with a few pounds of Semtex strapped to their hairless holy chests at Belorussky railway station. Besides which, entering Moscow at the train station was much more discreet than at the airport, where video security abounded. As a professional assassin Pesek had to bear such things in mind.
Anton was a dapper man, slim, a little on the short side, with a well-trimmed Vandyke beard, hair graying at the temples. He had a predilection for slot machines, expensive shoes, American cigarettes, and Bacardi and Coke, the last two severely cut back lately after several queasy and somewhat frightening moments alone in hotel rooms and one emergency room visit while on vacation in Tuscany with his wife and fellow assassin of somewhat dubious sanity, the Canadian Daniella Kay.
Pesek sported a two-inch scar on his neck, usually covered by the collars of his expensive Turnbull amp; Asser shirts. The scar was the result of a fight he’d had in Venice some years before with Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday. The knife, Pesek’s own, had come within half a centimeter of his right carotid artery, and had the blade come any closer or gone any deeper Pesek wouldn’t be worrying about his intake of Marlboros or Bacardi and Coke; he’d be occupying his assigned space in the family plot at Cemetery Sarka in Prague. Pleasant enough when the leaves turned in the fall, but it wasn’t on his list of preferred destinations.
Holliday was his reason for being in Moscow, but not for revenge. Being injured or killed was part of the pact you made with the Old Man of the Mountain when you took up the assassin’s creed. Pesek bore the American no malice-he had in fact saved the man and his cousin Peggy from a fate worse than death in Prague’s notorious Pankrac Prison the year before.
This time his assignment came from the chain-smoking priest Thomas Brennan, who ran the Vatican Secret Service for his odious master, His Eminence Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada, the Vatican secretary of state. The job had been simultaneously irritating and interesting.
“Holliday is on the trail of a holy relic that he must not be allowed to discover. All we know at the moment is that it involves the Kremlin Romanov Egg, also known as the Uspenski Cathedral Egg. He may well attempt to appropriate the egg.”
“You mean steal,” Pesek had replied.
“Yes.”
“Where is it at present?”
“The Armoury at the Kremlin.”
“Buona fortuna a lui.” Pesek, who spoke Italian as fluently as he did English or Russian, laughed. “There is no chance.”
“Nevertheless, Mr. Pesek, we would appreciate your assessment of the situation.”
“I am an assassin, not a thief, Father Brennan.”
“We will pay you extra for your assessment.”
“For whatever it is worth.”
“For whatever it is worth. Regardless of your report it will be necessary to remove Colonel Holliday from the equation.”
“You mean kill him.”
“Yes, kill him.”
Pesek left the train station by taxi and traveled to the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, where he rented a large corner suite on the top floor that looked down Tverskaya Street and not only gave him a perfect view of the Spassky Tower and the main public entrance to the Kremlin, but also offered a bird’s-eye view of the Tverskaya metro entrance, Holliday and his new c?ernoch friend.
Pesek settled down in the lavish living room of the suite with a bottle of ice-cold Coca-Cola and two small bottles of Bacardi. What was the old Japanese proverb? If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by. Eventually Holliday would come, and eventually he would die.
27
John Holliday strolled across the interlocking paving stones of Red Square and tried not to think of the decided queasiness in the pit of his stomach. The reaction didn’t come from the faint odor of rotting human feet that he was sure clung to his skin even after three showers. He knew that instead it came from sitting in on too many intelligence briefings, squinting at grainy photographs and trying to identify the types of missiles mounted on carriers paraded through the square on May Day each year, or identifying which bigwigs had appeared on the podium and which ones had been discreetly airbrushed out.
The tall, thick walls of the Kremlin, the stone mass of the government-only GUM store, and the goose-stepping guards in their silly peaked caps marching back and forth like toy soldiers in front of Lenin’s tomb were as familiar to him as a recurring nightmare, even though he’d never been here before. It was like a monstrous case of vertigo that was way out of his control.
The Chaplitzky brothers had taken Holliday and Eddie to the rural dacha village of Peredelkino, about twenty kilometers from Moscow. According to the Chaplitskys, the dacha, an outsize log cabin, had once belonged to an obscure Russian writer in the 1970s, but now it looked more like a warehouse, most of the rooms stacked with boxes of iPads, laptops, GPS units, BlackBerrys and other electronic devices.