Harry cut him off. “That’s enough of that-just tell me: What the fuck is going on with the tungsten? It has to be something more than penetrator rounds or you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be trying to get out and buy yourself a new life in the West.”
Sobeskaia, who up until that point had looked merely terrified, now began to look both frightened and calculating.
“It is too much, too big,” he replied. “I need debriefing in a safe place. I have much to tell.”
Harry dug a thumb into the man’s biceps to emphasize just who was controlling this negotiation.
“You won’t get a chance to tell anybody anything until you get to a safe house, and I’m not taking you anywhere until I know whether it’s worth it. Quite frankly, comrade, there’s a very good chance I’m going to get my arse shot off tonight. It’s a fine-looking arse too. I spend a lot of time keeping it in trim and my girlfriend will be jolly fucking upset if some filthy Smedlov shoots a big bloody hole in it. So before we go anywhere, before you begin the first day of your new life as a pampered turncoat on some beach in bloody Australia, you’re going to tell me everything you know. Just. In. Case.”
The businessman grinned, or at least tried to. It was a weak, unconvincing effort. His eyes shifted left and right, and he jumped a little as the fire-exit door suddenly opened.
“Still looks clear out here, guv,” reported St. Clair.
“Thanks, Viv.”
“Don’t thank me, Your bloody Highness. Just make sure they pay my invoice promptly when I send it for this little bit of freelancing. Seven-day terms.”
“Your check is in the mail.”
Harry laid his gaze back on the quivering Sobeskaia, allowing the Russian to see the smile in his eyes die when he turned away from his old friend.
“Is complicated, and much difficulty,” blurted Sobeskaia. “Much I do not know, much I have to tell. This is not place and, really, we must go now. I can tell all, later.”
“Aggregate it for me, Comrade Huff Po.”
Sobeskaia stared at him as if the prince had begun to speak a different language, which in a way he had. The argot of uptime. Harry found himself regressing to the future whenever he was stressed.
“What is the tungsten for?” Harry repeated. “What processes were you applying to it in your secret lair under the volcano or on the seafloor, or wherever the fuck it was you came from?”
He could hear renewed reports of discord and struggle over by the swing doors to the dining area. He stole a quick glance over his shoulder and spied Plunkett fighting with an Asian-looking man who was about one-and-a-half times his size. The SIS agent was giving nothing away, though, matching his attacker blow for blow. The cocktail party beyond the doors seemed to have descended into chaos.
“Let’s start with something you can answer, then,” said Harry. “What the hell are you doing here? You were supposed to make contact with our people in North Rome, at your hotel. What happened with that?”
“I was betrayed. She was going to betray me, anyway,” replied the Russian, looking genuinely bereft.
“This is your girlfriend, your mistress? The one who made contact with us initially?”
Sobeskaia nodded. “Anna. I loved her. We were going to escape together. But Beria got to her, turned her against me.” His voice took on an unpleasant, wheedling edge. The fingernails-on-blackboard tone of a weak man whose failures were always someone else’s fault.
“So you used her as a decoy. Sent her to a meeting you were supposed to make, and what, you scarpered off over here?”
“It was not like that,” he protested. “She loved me, she did. But Beria forced her into betraying me. If I had gone with her to that meeting at the Grimaldi, I would have been captured, along with whoever you sent.”
Ivanov, thought Harry. That would explain the fireworks on the dark side of the Wall tonight. The onetime Spetznaz officer had either walked into a trap or seen it and sprung it early. Harry shook his head. There were times when operating down-time was not just frustrating, but life-threatening. Little or no satellite cover, scant overwatch, if any at all, and the most primitive of extraction procedures. A gun, some directions, and a pat on the back for good luck.
“What were you going to tell our man?” Harry asked. “We had the tungsten shavings already. You must have had more to say. And you’re not leaving until I get it, now.”
Plunkett appeared at his elbow, bruised and bleeding from a cut to his scalp, his shirt and jacket torn. But he was upright and moving. The man he had been fighting was not. Harry took a quick sight picture of the chaos and madness now spreading into the kitchen. Plunkett’s NKVD opponent was lying on the tiles, his head neatly split by a meat cleaver.
“Things have gone a bit wobbly, I’m afraid,” he said. “Best we get a move on.”
“St. Clair is keeping an eye on the service lane,” said Harry. “It’s clear for now. We can get out through there if you can organize some cover for us. It looked like there was half a regiment of Beria’s finest loitering around out the front. Be sure to have some of your lads covering the rear as well. Or they will very soon.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” replied Plunkett, absenting himself again.
“You heard the man, Sobeskaia. We’ll see what we can do-and we’ll do what we can. But not until I know it’s worth it. Or that you are worth it. What is Beria doing with all the tungsten? If it’s being run through the Functional Projects Bureau, it won’t be something simple like armor-piercing rounds.”
The defector seemed to weigh his options and find them wanting. He took a deep breath, which came out in a loose ragged rush.
“It is big,” he said. “Everything is so big with this. The production schedules, they are not possible for us. But Beria, he will not listen. Three of my best foremen have gone to the gulag now because they have failed to deliver on schedule.”
Harry resisted the urge to cock an eyebrow at that. Sobeskaia almost certainly selected the names of those foremen himself, to avoid a spell at the gulag himself. Cheap shitty toasters and blame-shifting were the two areas where Soviet production methods led the world.
“Keep talking,” he said, as St. Clair stuck his head back in the kitchen.
“Got some movement out here, governor.”
“You going to be all right, Viv?”
The commando-turned-businessman smiled and extracted a Metalstorm P50 personal weapon from the voluminous interior of his dinner jacket.
“Wish I’d thought of that,” said Harry.
The P50 was an uptime model composed of exotic composites and ceramics. Only a few dozen of them came through the Transition, as best he knew. St. Clair had almost certainly stolen his. It would not have registered on the primitive metal detectors employed by embassy security to pick up junk like Makarov pistols.
“Carry on then,” said Harry, shifting his attention back to Sobeskaia. “You were telling me about the production schedules. What else is so big about this project?”
“Big in all ways. These things they want-tungsten rods-they are huge, like telephone pole. But the machining is precise. Tolerances too great for my equipment and workers. I do not choose my workers, you understand. They are sent to me, many of them.”
“Oh, I understand the concept of slave factories, Mr. Sobeskaia, don’t worry about that. Just tell me about the rods.” A queasy tension had taken a grip on Harry’s stomach, though. It grew worse as the boyar spoke.
“I do not know what for Beria needs these giant rods,” he said. “I am only part of the production process. At Prozpekt Elektric, we provide the machined rods to specification, or else. It is bad enough when I have to provide hundreds. But now they want thousands-tens of thousands.”
Harry’s balls tried to crawl up inside his body and his stomach did a slow flip forward. “The machining of the tungsten rods, what did that involve?” he asked. “What did you have to do to them?”