When he was thoroughly lost, in both reality and memory, Franco surprised him by turning off the ground-level passageway and heading up a staircase. They passed by open doors through which the Russian caught glimpses of family life in this ancient slum. Small rooms crowded with many children and old people, but very few men of working age. He smelled tomatoes cooking and garlic being fried, scents strong enough to overwhelm the mold and rot and the rank, barnyard odor of unwashed, tightly compressed humanity. There was little sign of the future forcing its way into this place. Even the cheap, crudely made consumer goods that had lately been pouring out of the Soviet slave factories into the West were nowhere in evidence.
After some more twists and turns, Franco put a finger to his lips, signaling for Ivanov to be quiet, as he pushed through a closed door on the top floor of a tenement that looked like it had been occupied by Rome’s poorest workers since Leonardo was a boy. There were fewer people up here, Ivanov realized. In fact, they hadn’t seen anyone on the stairs or moving about the hallway for the last few minutes. He followed Furedi into the tiny apartment, which was empty save for a couple of thin, stained mattresses and the detritus of what looked like US Meals Ready to Eat. The former Spetsnaz officer recognized the signs of a lay-up point. He also recognized the voice tube system as soon as Franco used it to talk to yet another hidden accomplice.
Curiosity, bordering on compulsion, tried to draw Ivanov over to the one grimy window to see if he might establish their location, but training and experience kept him rooted to his spot in the dark, just inside the door. He was still beholden to his guide to lead him to safety.
“Si, lo sara,” the Italian said quietly before closing the cap on the speaking tube. He then gestured for Ivanov to follow him cautiously to the window, where they took up positions on either side.
“Look, but be careful,” said Franco, jutting his chin out in the direction of the street. The old lace curtain was faded and rotting, allowing Ivanov to put one eye up to a moth-eaten hole, rather than having to twitch the fabric aside.
He was surprised to find they had a view overlooking the hotel where he was supposed to have met his contact. Sobeskaia, the businessman. The narrow street outside was blocked by an ambulance, an eight-wheeled BTR-60 armored car, and three long black sedans-prewar Mercedeses, by the look of them, a favorite of the NKVD for the fear they inspired. The Gestapo had often arrived in the middle of the night in exactly these models.
As he watched, medics carried a body out of the hotel on a stretcher. The corpse was covered in a bloodstained sheet. “Our man?” he asked simply.
“No,” said Franco. “Probably his mistress. Killed by your Skarov, according to our people in the Albergo. We do not know what happened to this Sobeskaia. But we are looking for him. We will find him.”
Ivanov felt himself adrift on a dark sea. Who the fuck were these people of Furedi’s in the hotel? He wondered whether his OSS controllers on the other side of the Wall knew what had happened yet. The Russian had no way of contacting them while he was in the field. This was a deniable operation, after all. His long history of freelance action against Moscow would lend credibility to the inevitable protests that he was a rogue actor, should he be caught. God knows, there were enough of them among the ten thousand uptimers marooned here a decade ago. But Ivanov also knew that Rome seethed with spies, and it was unlikely that he would have been let loose without hidden overwatch of some sort. Overwatch probably had no idea where Sobeskaia was either, but they would already know the mission was a washout.
Not for the first time, Ivanov had to swallow his frustration at the primitive methods of his contemporary allies. For all the great leaps in technology since the Transition, in many ways he was no better equipped than an agent smuggled into Berlin or Prague in his original time.
Franco waved one hand down at the street, where Ivanov could see a few sturdy old couples taking their evening stroll in defiance of the occupiers’ best efforts to intimidate them. Children ran about as well. Perhaps the very ones they had passed earlier. They certainly seemed to be playing the same game.
“We will find Sobeskaia,” Franco repeated. “Everyone looks for him now.”
Resentment and rage warred within Ivanov, and he struggled to maintain his detachment. The mission was a scrub. It had been blown somehow, and now Skarov, his oldest surviving nemesis, was scouring the city for him. Or at least the portion of it known as North Rome. It was time to accept defeat and tactically withdraw.
He was about to step back from the window when he saw Beria’s chief spy catcher emerge from the hotel. The sight of the tall, shaven-headed NKVD killer brought forth a galvanic, almost visceral response. He was a powerfully built man, like Ivanov, but high cheekbones and sunken eyes gave him a cadaverous look and accounted for his nickname within their closed and dangerous world: the Skull.
At the sight of his death’s-head visage, rage flared like hot flames, washing away Ivanov’s impatience and unhappiness with the way this operation had gone. Rage, intemperate and hard-favored, threatened to blind him as he stood there at the window in the gloom of the evening.
Skarov, dressed in black from his expensive, hand-stitched steel-capped shoes, to the knee-length leather coat that swirled about him like a cape. Skarov his nemesis-just a trigger pull away. He was a family man when not on duty, a dedicated father who played with his two boys and only daughter, who never strayed from his wife of eighteen years. However, as a Guardian of the Correct Future, Colonel-General Alexi Skarov’s duties often took him away from home and hearth, leaving his family to fend for themselves. Ivanov still had the souvenir from his visit to their dacha, nearly two years after Vendulka had met her end at Skarov’s hands.
As his eyes remained fixed on the Skull, he fondled the souvenir, which he kept in a small pouch hung around his neck. Ivanov felt the giddy urge to laugh again. He coughed and clamped it down.
“Come, we must go,” said Franco. He tugged firmly at Ivanov’s elbow.
But the Russian would not move. He stood as though rooted to the floor, axes in his eyes, staring at the Skull. He could feel his very organs seething and slithering over each other inside him.
The coat. That long black atrocity. He had worn it as a provocation. He had worn it because he knew they would be meeting somewhere today.
Dying would not be hard, Ivanov thought. I could die content tonight, if only I could take Skarov with me.
Ivanov had to clench his fists to stop himself from reaching into his weapons satchel and retrieving the submachine gun. Besides, he was too far away. As cathartic as it would’ve been to empty a whole magazine down into the street, the chances of killing or even hitting Skarov from this distance were not good. Not without killing a number of innocents. The bastard probably wore a ballistic vest in any case.
“Now …”
The Roman dug a thumb into his elbow joint, pulling Ivanov out of his dark reverie with a spike of electric pain that ran up his arm and into his shoulder.
“We must go now. More of them are coming.”
As he spoke, two heavy trucks, Ural-375 troop movers, lumbered around the corner and slowly edged their way forward through the narrow confines of the ancient cobblestoned back street, to join the fleet of official vehicles outside the Albergo Grimaldi. The massive six-wheeled trucks muscled their way past the pedestrians, wheels up on the paving stones of the footpath, forcing the old men and women taking passeggiatto to back themselves up against a wall or climb the front steps of the nearest apartment building to avoid being crushed. Even the swarms of children, who had braved slaps and occasional kicks from the uniformed NKVD guards at the hotel, kept their distance from the trucks. Every day someone in this city died under their wheels.