They traveled along the almost arrow-straight tunnel, the only illumination coming from the broad beam of the self-propelled car’s headlight. Holliday kept the throttle pushed about halfway forward, and according to the speedometer they were going ninety kilometers per, which translated into roughly fifty-five miles per hour. At the forty-five-minute mark that meant they’d gone about forty miles from the original station beneath the Kremlin. On the seat outside the operator’s compartment Eddie had fallen into a half-conscious doze, rocking gently with the motion of the train, his big head lolling, his eyes closed.
As they rolled onward Holliday tried to assess the chaos they had left behind them in the subway station. By now the Spetsnaz team would have reported to their bosses and the word would have gone up the chain of command-someone had hijacked Stalin’s secret subway from more than half a century ago and was hightailing it up the line to wherever it ended up. Personally Holliday didn’t care. At the first opportunity he wanted to get off the damn thing and figure out some way to get himself and Eddie safely behind the walls of the American embassy.
There was a heavy clanking from the tracks beneath the wheels and suddenly the throttle moved under Holliday’s hand, dropping halfway back to the neutral notch. The car slowed. A minute later there was a second sound from the tracks and the throttle smoothly moved back under his hand. The car slowed to a walk, and ahead Holliday could see that they were coming into a station. As they moved up to the platform Holliday released his hand from the throttle. The car rolled on for a few yards and then stopped. The doors hissed open. Wherever they were going, this was it. The platform was dark.
Holliday switched on his miner’s lamp, then stepped out of the driver’s compartment and helped Eddie to his feet. They stepped off the train. The platform was completely barren-no signs, no gates, no nothing, just an arch of dark-glazed brick and a single exit. There were half a dozen lights in the ceiling behind wire screens, all of them dark. The place felt like a tomb.
He and Eddie made their slow way to the exit, the light on Holliday’s helmet painting the way. Eddie’s breathing was ragged, but at least he was still conscious. The exit was in the exact center of the platform-an alcove and four steps leading to a small vestibule. The vestibule was square with a low ceiling, and was completely without decoration. There were two doors, one obviously for an elevator, the other more like a hatchway, with a large round locking wheel in the center. There were faded Cyrillic letters above the wheel.
“Can you read what it says?” Holliday asked.
“Bomboubezhishche,” read Eddie, not hesitating at all over the mouthful of a word. “Bomb shelter.”
Holliday pressed the single button beside the elevator doors and remarkably they creaked open. He helped Eddie inside the plain gray steel compartment. There were two buttons on the wall. He pressed the top one. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise.
* * *
The United States Embassy in Moscow consists of a ten-story office block, a connecting, windowless security block, a series of low barracks-style offices, all surrounding a central courtyard and further surrounded by a tall brick wall. There is only one means of access and egress to the complex-the front gate, which in turn has several well-hidden anti-suicide bombing measures as well as a SWAT team on twenty-four-hour duty. To get into the main building, any guest or official must first pass through a sally port, which allows movement of only a single individual at a time and in one direction.
The bachelor and guest quarters at the embassy were located at the far end of the complex and offered only the most basic amenities-bathroom, shower, bedroom with a single narrow bed, a desk and a telephone. The decor was resolutely beige. The telephone in the room being occupied by Brinsley Whitman Havers rang at three twenty-five in the morning. Whit had been having trouble sleeping, knowing that his man was in play, and he picked up on the second ring. It was the security office, a man named Tapsinger.
“Yes?” Whit said.
“You’d better get over here pronto, sir; there’s a lot of back chatter in the air about your boy.”
“Which one?”
“The target, as I understand it, Holliday.”
“What kind of back chatter?”
“FSB back chatter, sir, and it’s coming out of the Kremlin itself. Scary stuff, sir. Seems he’s hijacked Stalin’s old private subway train. There’re bodies everywhere. This stuff is going all the way back to Washington. Somebody’s in it up to his eyeballs. It’s starting to sound like a first-class international incident.”
“Shit,” said Brinsley Whitman Havers. What was it Kokum had said about the real reason they had case officers? To have someone to flush down the shithole when the whole thing came apart? Something like that. “I’ll be right there.” He sighed, already seeing the water swirling around the bowl, and him along with it.
39
The elevator opened up into someone’s pantry. Holliday could tell it was a pantry because the walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with cans and jars and boxes. The cans all had black-and-white illustrations of their contents on paper labels, as did the boxes. It was hard to tell about the jars, because over the years most of them had burst, their contents long turned to mold, the mold vanished into the air, leaving nothing but shriven remains behind, like mummified human organs in an Egyptian tomb. Everything in the little room was covered in a thick coat of gray dust. It had been a long time since anyone had taken food from here.
The only exit from the pantry led into a good-size kitchen equipped with thirties- or forties-era gas appliances. There was a wooden table and four straight chairs in the center of the room. Like everything else, the table and chairs were thick with dust. The floor was gray linoleum, the ceiling raw-pine beams and rafters. The windows above the big dry sinks were small, the plain dark curtains pulled.
The kitchen led in turn to a broad carpeted hallway with a set of stairs going up on the right. There were two doors beyond the stairs, one leading to a plainly furnished living room, the furniture old, upholstered and dreary. The other door led to a study. A velvet-upholstered banquette stood at the end of the hall beneath a row of wooden pegs still hung with heavy winter coats. Holliday eased Eddie down onto the banquette, his back against the patterned wallpaper.
“You rest here for a minute,” said Holliday. “I want to look around a bit and then we’ll be on our way.”
“Lo que usted diga, mi amigo-whatever you say,” the Cuban answered weakly.
Holliday turned back and went into the study. There were windows on two walls and here the curtains were pulled back. It had snowed since they’d gone underground hours before, a thick, soft blanket of it at least six inches deep, the scattered birch trees throwing long, skeletal shadows. The study was filled with the strange blue light that comes when moonlight reflects off newly fallen snow, and the room had a surreal, almost sinister quality.
The study was large, with open beams like the kitchen and a pine plank floor covered in carpets of various sizes. There was a fireplace, a huge wooden desk, a high-backed leather chair and two straight chairs in front of it. Dust coated everything.
He went to the desk and stood behind the tall leather office chair. There was a circular brass pie rack complete with a sandpaper striker and a handful of wax-headed phosphorous matches, a photograph of an elderly woman and the most telling object of them all, one that Holliday had seen a thousand times before: a photograph of a bald-headed man wearing a white shirt, loosened multicolored tie and mirrored sunglasses sitting on a garden chair with a dark-haired young girl in ponytails, perhaps ten years old, sitting on his lap. The man had his arm possessively wrapped around her midsection. Behind him a secretary wearing headphones was transcribing dictation, and at a round rattan table a man in a gray uniform complete with Cossack boots was smoking a curved pipe and poring over a sheaf of papers spread out on the table in front of him.