‘Probably not.’
‘How dangerous are these people?’
‘Well, they do not share our taste for academic freedom if it contradicts the wishes of their globalist masters.’
‘Can you protect me?’
‘Not 24/7.’
‘But some of the time, right?’
‘We have one man from Europe working with local supporters.’
‘Europe?’
‘I think he is Belgian by birth. He was trained by our brothers in Norway.’
‘A political soldier?’
‘A vanguardist!’
‘I fully understand. I will take precautions. I am not speaking until the final day, anyway, so it gives me plenty of time to sit in my room and prepare.’
‘Yes, you are the plenary keynote.’
‘Indeed!’
‘But you will attend tomorrow, no?’
‘Most certainly, there are several very interesting papers being presented. I am looking forward to it.’
‘Good, I was very worried you would be scared off!’
‘Well, of course I am concerned, but there is very little I can do about it now.’
Grigori’s familiar guttural laugh broke out across the room causing heads to turn. ‘That is more like it, famous British stiff upper lip!’
• In a replay of the Mongol invasion of 1238, the 900-year-old Collegiate Church of St Demetrios and the Cathedral of the Virgin are destroyed by Muslim terrorists;
• The Church of St Boris and St Gelb on the Nerl River is the scene of a mass rape of schoolgirls taken by force from a suburb of nearby Orgtrud;
• Twelve Orthodox priests are discovered hanging by the neck from the green and gold domes of the St Euthymius Monastery;
• Thousands gather around miracle-working icons at the Valdai Monastery, believing the end times have come.
Yulia Gavrilova, a plump and officious conference attaché, was ushering the delegates across the Astoria’s lobby, clucking like a mother hen, counting them as they stepped up onto the metal footplate of a minibus with university markings. ‘I’m afraid we have to take precautions’, she was warning. ‘RASH protesters are blockading the venue.’
‘And the politsiya?’ asked Ulrich Hoffman, striking a match to light the tobacco in the pipe bowl hanging before his grizzled chin.
‘They have Kamaz personnel carriers.’
‘That’s 13mm armoured plate’, the smoker coughed. Tom knew Hoffman to be an expert on the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement. A widely respected veteran of the identitarian movement, his family had been among the hundreds of thousands dispossessed and murdered along the length of the Danube after 1945.
‘And Kord 6P50 machine guns’, remarked Francine Karre, a dark-haired Parisian, reputed to be a rising political influence in France’s Resistance. Her frequent appearances on Canal Plus defending militants like Sabine D’Orlac, known as La Petroleuse, had caused consternation in the Conseil Representatif des Institutions juives de France. Tom was particularly interested in her paper on Henry Coston. He had already read several of her monographs on Jacques Ploncard d’Assac and Yves Guerin-Serac, a founder of the OAS.
The driver banged the door, ready for their short journey down Nevsky. The sky was trying hard to rain, spitting Baltic phlegm at the windscreen.
‘The Symposium’, Yulia was explaining, ‘will proceed as per the pre-arranged programme. Please’, she said, handing out some pamphlets and timetables, ‘these are some updates written in English.’ The mini-bus heater was going full blast, filling the narrow cabin with a dry, unctuous odour bearing the taint of adolescent sports bags. Francine waved a folder in front of her face until another man in a brown trilby and tweed jacket asked in splintered Russian for it to be turned off. The English Professor eyed the man in the hat carefully before introducing himself.
‘I don’t think we’ve met?’ The young man extended his hand.
‘Peter Janssen’, he said in accented Dutch English. Tom noticed the bulge in his jacket.
‘Identitair Verzet?’
‘Something like that!’ They smiled knowingly at one another before Tom turned, looking out through the condensation on the window. The bridge to the left led over to the strelka. The shops to the right were full of Western products that no one could afford. A large red crane twisted clockwise on the English embankment, winching a pontoon out over the river. Tom was thinking how he had nearly rejected the offer to come to Russia as the bus took a tight right onto the esplanade. Back then, his mind had been set on flying to Buenos Aires rather than St Petersburg. An old contact had asked him to attend a live television debate on the controversy over paying a special pension to the surviving members of the nationalist student group that had hijacked an Aerolineas flight and diverted it to the Malvinas Islands, displaying the Argentine flag, ‘in an act of national recovery and dignity’ back in 1966. Indeed, the Professor had always greatly admired Dardo Cabo’s Tacuara, so the offer was tempting. He recalled reviewing his options in a Bayswater bedsit where he had stayed the weekend with a young Ukrainian blonde called Nadezhda. She had come to his attention at a meeting of Carpatho-Pagans at Kings College. Later, they had a drink together in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, and she confessed she was heavily involved in translation work for the Strike! Website. He remembered she had been wearing a black motorcycle jacket and carrying a copy of Political Thought of the Ukrainian Underground. From that moment, the East had become his magnetic north. Within weeks, he was in contact with various Pan-Slavic groups, and had been invited to give a paper in former Leningrad.
‘The space technology industry was a big employer here’, Hoffman was explaining as he looked out over the columns of people trudging like shell-shocked soldiers to the front. ‘A friend of mine at MIT wrote a book arguing that if the CIS countries could harmonise their intellectual creativity, their average GNP growth would be triple that of the USA inside a decade.’
‘I think things have deteriorated considerably’, Peter Janssen corrected. ‘Russia’s research in science and technology was recently evaluated as being equivalent to Holland’s’ Hoffman shook his head.
‘Sign of the times.’
The bus came to a sudden halt outside a crenelated lemon wall, more like a castle under siege than a seat of learning. Outside, hordes of protesters hurled abuse, waved red flags, and tried to squeeze by the security cordon to throw rotten eggs at the van’s windows. ‘No more reactionaries like Prokhanov, Dugin, Glazyev, Fursov, Platonov, Narochnitskaya, and Father Tikhon—to hell with Den Fascisti… Shut down Pavlov—Rossiya is dead!’ Tom glimpsed placards bearing the crossed-out faces of Viktor Alksnis, Yuri Vlasov, and Igor Artemov with the salutation ‘RIP’ scrawled beside their images. Yulia stood, her back arched, at the front of the bus.
‘Please do not be concerned, we are perfectly safe’, she said, to comfort herself as much as the guests. ‘We will wait just one moment until the police have cleared a path.’ Just then a rear window shattered, and a steel rod bounced about on the floor of the cabin. Janssen was up on his feet, hitting out at the hands pulling at the side of the vehicle, his blade slicing through fingers yanking on the metal.
‘Go!’ he was shouting. The driver pulled forward, the gates opening and the police sweeping down from the side-streets, beating at the crowd with riot shields and truncheons. Once they were inside, Yulia opened the sliding door. One by one they fell out, crumpled, shocked, and gasping for air. Janssen waited until everyone was clear, then slipped his knife back inside his sleeve. Tom followed the others through a side door into a narrow corridor where an old babushka took their bags and coats.