Misha had not said a word since leaving the meeting room. As they stepped around the last curve of the newly constructed concrete stairwell, she was totally unprepared for what she saw next. She let out a gasp. A large open vault door, perhaps six feet in diameter, set in the middle of a recently cast grey concrete wall, stretched floor to ceiling, from one side of the building to the other.
‘A Mosler,’ Misha said proudly, pointing at the name engraved on the vault door. ‘One of these even survived the blast at Hiroshima.’
A man pushing a trolley with two of the boxes she had seen being taken out of the van exited the service lift and steered past them and the two armed guards at the strong room door.
‘After you.’ Misha gestured with his hand, a huge grin on his face.
She stepped inside the steel and concrete sarcophagus; it was a step up from the old lock-up she remembered on the English Embankment. The intensity of the light inside was almost painful. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She blinked hard, not believing what she was seeing. In a space as large as the warehouse above, piles of dollars lay on open shelves wrapped tightly in clear polythene. The man with the trolley emptied a box of dollars onto a large counting table, where two men sorted through mixed denominations.
Misha took one of the packets off a shelf and threw it to her. She caught it.
‘Ten thousand US dollars. Hold on to that; it will help oil the wheels of our new venture.’
She was dumbfounded.
‘It’s not all mine… I hold some for other people. I’m officially a bank now – Moika Bank… Grigory’s idea.’
She looked around the room again, trying to calculate how much might be sitting there.
‘There must be what… fifty million here?’ she guessed wildly.
‘Not even close! Let’s walk over here.’
Misha led her to the back of the vault and a small safe embedded in the concrete wall. Misha spun the dial lock with his fingers.
‘Russian dolls,’ she said.
‘Yes, a safe within a safe. Ivan, Grigory and I have the code for the main vault but this one is just you and me, Vika.’
She stood there about to ask what it contained and the combination number, but he had already turned his back on her and was halfway back to the steel door.
Chapter 21
SMOLENSK
Misha rose from the table. He was freezing. A lone paraffin heater struggled vainly to cast off the winter chill gripping the small barrack meeting room and the Arctic air that forced its way past the newspaper stuffed into the gap between the rusting metal window frame and the sill itself. The state of decay only seemed to reinforce the low mood that had set in when he and Viktoriya had landed at Smolensk an hour earlier. Like some ghostly armada, row upon row of rotting aircraft fuselages lined the taxiways and airfield, engines stripped and cavities boarded over, standing there useless, abandoned and desolate, somehow a symbol of what the Soviet Union was or had become. Misha wondered how long it would be before the whole edifice collapsed and whether he would be dragged down with it.
Outside, a soldier shouted something towards the sentry box. In the near distance, snow-capped domes cast themselves against a deepening grey sky and blue and brown high rises. The Dnieper eased its way lugubriously towards them.
‘I think I’m going to die of cold,’ Viktoriya said, hugging herself for warmth. ‘How long do you think he will keep us waiting?’
‘We’re early,’ he reminded her.
Outside, the crunching of tyres alerted them to a jeep pulling up in front of their hut. A young man in his early thirties wearing a padded khaki winter Afghanka and a grey fish fur ushanka climbed out and bounded up the narrow cindered path towards their hut. Misha wondered if he had been sent by the colonel to collect them.
‘I see they’ve put you in the warmest room,’ he said with a wide grin on his face. He was tall, perhaps six foot two, broad-shouldered with thick dark eyebrows and close-cropped black hair. His blue eyes darted between him and Viktoriya. The two red stripes and three gold stars on his chest gave him away.
‘Colonel Marov?’ Misha said, extending his hand.
The young colonel pulled off his gloves and shook hands.
‘I think we should go somewhere a bit more comfortable, certainly somewhere warmer. The city is only a few minutes away. I know a restaurant; the food’s passable, not great… if you haven’t eaten lunch yet?’
‘That would be fantastic,’ said Viktoriya with obvious relief. The colonel’s natural exuberance had already begun to snap them out of their low mood.
The restaurant was warm, hot even. They peeled off their winter coats and hung them over their chairs. A young waitress, recognising the colonel, made a beeline for them.
‘Sausage and cabbage with rye bread or hot cheese pasties today, Colonel.’
‘Like the rest of the week, Alisochka.’
‘The sausage is new, sir.’
Misha noticed that the colonel had used her diminutive name. Alisochka’s eyes hardly left Marov’s.
‘Have you seen the freighter cab yet?’ the colonel asked once they had made their choice. ‘Not that there is much that can be done with it… spare parts, perhaps.’
On arrival they had been directed to the burnt and bullet-ridden Kamaz in the military vehicle park close to the gate. It was a wonder anyone had survived, Misha thought.
Viktoriya shook her head. ‘I doubt even that. Can you dispose of it?’
He nodded.
‘You were in the forces?’ he said, turning to Misha.
‘Conscript, rose to the rank of corporal, two years in Afghanistan, 1981 to 1983, more of a fixer than a fighter.’ Misha reflected on how he had become a sort of unofficial quartermaster with generally more success than the official version at procuring anything from cigarettes to mortars.
‘Well, fixing is often a lot more useful, and now… still the fixer?’
‘Colonel, you probably have a better idea about what I do than I do.’
There seemed little point in beating about the bush. After all, how many Leningrad freighters had the colonel seen carrying merchandise across the border from Western Europe?
‘The last time I looked at a manifest it was computers, fashion, perfume, CDs, players, TVs… and oh, brandy,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, a faint crease of amusement on his face.
The door opened, and a man walked in and took a table in the far corner of the room.
‘How many men under your command, Colonel?’ Viktoriya asked. ‘You have quite a border to patrol.’
‘Twenty thousand regulars and conscripts,’ he replied, as though it were nothing in itself. The colonel turned and looked at the man who had just walked in. He was reading a newspaper, a steaming hot cup of tea in front of him.
He turned back to address Viktoriya.
‘And you are a friend of Konstantin Ivanivich Stolin?’
Viktoriya blushed, taken by surprise, not knowing quite how to respond. He had clearly done his homework.
‘The three of us all went to school together,’ Misha cut in. He’s the main reason I ship my stuff through Smolensk. He and the local military have Leningrad pretty much under siege when it comes to freight: land, sea or air. You, on the other hand, seem more reasonable, Colonel.’
Misha noticed that the man in the corner had not turned the page of his newspaper.
‘KGB…’ said the colonel. ‘Old habits die hard… at least it keeps them out of trouble.’
‘Are you a security risk?’ Viktoriya half joked.
‘We all are… the question is to whom? There are so many opposing views and factions.’