St. Clair, he noticed in his peripheral vision, appeared to have a friendly arm around the shoulder of his Smedlov, and was swinging him around, laughing as though he had just been told a particularly ribald joke. The third man, who was making directly for Sobeskaia now, suddenly found his approach blocked by the deadweight of his colleague, whose neck had been snapped by the former SAS sergeant. The dead man-he was most certainly dead, thought Harry-dropped to the floor, tripping the last NKVD agent and a waiter carrying a tray of drinks. The enormous crash of shattering glass brought a momentary lull to the roaring buzz of the party, but only for a second or two. Plunkett appeared with a couple of offsiders, raised both eyebrows at the carnage in the corner, and tut-tutted Harry.
“The idea was rather to avoid an incident, you know.”
“He choked on a particularly long ribbon sandwich,” Harry replied, nodding at the body of the Russian spy on the floor.
Plunkett’s people were already muscling away the walking wounded from Beria’s snatch team. Or hit squad. Or whatever they were. Most of the onlookers who had no idea what was going on backed off. A couple of them offered their medical expertise, and one woman fanned herself into a complete faint. Adding to the confusion.
“This is a bit of a dog’s breakfast,” Harry declared. “Viv, watch my back, would you?”
He turned on Sobeskaia, taking him by the lapel and dragging him away from the ambassador.
“You couldn’t even be bothered wearing a proper dinner jacket,” he rebuked the terrified boyar. “Typical. I hope you’re going to be bloody worth it, my friend. With me-we’re out of here. Now.”
Harry propelled the Russian toward a pair of swinging doors from which waiters would occasionally emerge with trays of drinks and canapes. He shot an inquiry over his shoulder back at Plunkett. “You secured the kitchens, right?”
“Of course.”
“Marvelous. Let’s go.”
The sudden movement, on top of the excitement of the recent confrontation, sent waves of confusion and concern through the packed masses inside Babington’s. A stone’s throw from the showdown with the NKVD, it would have been impossible to know what was happening; but people on the other side of the room soon knew that something was happening. Harry dragged Sobeskaia along behind him, with the huge bulk of Vivian St. Clair providing protection in the rear and Plunkett keeping a watching brief. The confused babble of the party guests quickly increased as the remaining Russians attempted to follow. SIS muscle intervened, leading to some ugly pushing and shoving, which generated further shouts of complaint and cries from distressed bystanders. Harry let it all fall behind him as he pulled the defector into the kitchens, almost knocking another waiter to the floor, and grabbing a handful of devils on horseback as he hurried past an unattended platter of food. He was very hungry.
A waitress screamed, and he realized his white dress shirt was covered in the blood of the man he’d stabbed in the arm. So much for discretion.
“Thank you, thank you,” Sobeskaia kept babbling. “Thank you, Prince Harry.”
“He’s not really a prince anymore, you know,” said St. Clair, in disturbingly good humor. “He’s more of a celebrity really. Like you’d find on The Apprentice, if you had any decent fucking telly here.”
“Try not to do his head in, please, Viv. There might be something in there we need later.”
“What is this? What does this mean, about my head?” Sobeskaia asked, panicked.
There was a scuffle at the doors behind them, and Plunkett begged off to join his people in neutralizing the other Soviet gate-crashers.
“Oh, just in case I don’t get a chance later on, sir … er, Harry,” the David Gower look-alike said. “It’s been nice working with you, despite the chaos and madness and the general air of cocking everything up.” But he said it with a boyish grin, which Harry recognized from his own extensive repertoire.
The two ex-commandos now hurried their charge over to a fire exit.
“Thank you, my prince, thank you,” he continued to babble.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Harry. “Don’t make me roll my eyes …” Then he turned to St. Clair. “Have a bit of a sticky beak out there in the alley, would you, Viv? See if there are any villains lying in wait.”
“Got it, guv,” he said, before slipping out through the fire door.
Only now did Harry give Sobeskaia his full attention for the first time. “Right. Listen up, you. I don’t know what fucking game you’re playing. I don’t know what you’ve got that you think we might need. But if you want to get out of this place alive, you’re going to tell me now. Not a week from now, or during the debrief. Right now.”
11
North Rome (Soviet sector)
Ivanov muscled the deadweight of the corpse back into the shadows under the building’s portico. The NKVD man’s bladder and bowels had let go in death, forcing Ivanov to drag the body by the head, which he had snapped off the spinal column. The loose, detached feeling of dragging so much mass around on a thin column of ruptured meat was unsettling but not unfamiliar. He was cautious not to befoul himself with the man’s bodily wastes. The clothes he had stolen from his last victim were already a little rank.
Taking a moment to scope out his surroundings, Ivanov considered his options. Via Rodi traversed the Soviet sector, from the southwest to the northeast about six blocks north of the Wall, where it abutted the edge of the Vatican. There were fewer apartments in this part of the city, the buildings tending toward larger, boxy, modern structures given over to official use. It was, thankfully, something of a dead zone at this time of night. There were fewer witnesses to raise an alarm and fewer eyes to follow his progress as he attempted to exfiltrate the area. There were also, unfortunately, far fewer options to dispose of the body. This part of North Rome was not like the rats’ nest Franco had led him through earlier, with hundreds of dark, twisting alleys and Byzantine passageways in which he might hide a multitude of sins.
Ivanov scanned up and down the quiet street, his eyes playing over the blank, unlit facades. Leafless trees stood sentinel outside the anonymous-looking buildings, most of them five or six stories high. Unlike the streets of Free Rome, which were gridlocked with traffic day and night, very few vehicles were parked along Via Rodi. He counted two vans in the livery of the city government, one slab-sided Trabant sedan and, away in the distance, what looked like a horse-drawn cart. Without horses. Nowhere suggested itself as a quick and dirty dumping ground for a recently murdered secret policeman.
Ivanov was beyond overwatch. He could not call in the cleaners as he might in the Allied sector. He couldn’t even stuff the corpse into a garbage bin. For the duration of the GATT conference, the local authorities removed all the trash cans and Dumpsters from the streets at the end of each day. The regime declared it a security measure, and rounded up a hundred or so “suspected insurgents” to back up the claim, but really they just wanted to discourage any scavenging by the city’s impoverished and hungry inmates. It was not a good look for a worker’s paradise.
He examined the doors of the building in front of which he stood. They were massive, nearly twice as tall as him, constructed of dark hardwood, securely padlocked. No joy to be had there.
There was nothing for it. He resolved simply to drag the body a little deeper into shadows and abandon it. A quick search yielded up some currency, a Makarov pistol with two spare clips, and a transit pass that would allow him free use of any form of public transport. The last was of marginal usefulness. The buses and trains in the Soviet sector ran sporadically, but fares were cheap. He could afford to ride them for a month with the cash he had in his pockets.