She might have been kidding herself, but such prospects still seemed unreal. Komarov hadn’t said anything in front of Maslov, which might mean nothing, but certainly gave him the option of turning another blind eye and allowing her to resume her work.
And that, she supposed, was what she wanted. Or was it? When she’d been dragged away from Moscow, there’d been no doubt in her mind. Being press-ganged into a hunt for her renegade husband had been downright annoying, and she’d known the hunt itself would probably have a heartbreaking ending, but once it was over, she would soon be back at her desk on Vozdvizhenka Street.
The doubts had slowly crept in. Nemtseva’s fate had shaken her, and so had her comrades’ reports of cutbacks in Zhenotdel funding. The film show in Tashkent had restored some of the hopes dented by the delegate murders, but the riot and its aftermath had, for the moment at least, left those hopes hanging by a very thin thread. Were the Zhenotdel’s best years coming to an end? If so, if doors were now closing instead of opening, was Moscow where she wanted to be? As a sympathetic male comrade had once told her, pushing against a badly stuck door, you might force it open; banging your head against one that was locked would probably give you a concussion.
And then there was Jack. Would she be asking these questions if he hadn’t reappeared in her life? She had chosen the revolution over him, taken the once-in-a-lifetime chance it offered to do something utterly new, to make the most of herself and the world. But would she do so again, if the choice was now between him and years of frustration? If the postimperial Jack looked a better prospect than the man she’d abandoned in 1918, the revolution she’d abandoned him for seemed a poorer one in almost every respect.
She told herself that quitting Russia would not mean quitting politics, that over the next few years, the causes she wanted to fight for might do better elsewhere. That she would get to see her family, that she would finally get to live with Jack, after almost eight years of their on-off affair. That she wouldn’t be giving up, that throwing in a towel was okay as long as you picked up another.
And yet. She would be giving up; she would be conceding defeat. And conceding defeat wasn’t something she knew how to do.
She lifted her gaze to the star-filled heavens. As things stood, any choice she made was purely academic. Even if they allowed her to leave, why would they let Jack go? All governments believed in punishing spies they caught, and he had freely admitted he was one. Even if Komarov wanted to, he couldn’t just shove Jack across the border with a flea in his ear.
No, either Jack escaped or he was done for, and he must know it, too.
Was there anything she could do?
There was no one she could go to, no heads she could bang together. What mattered was what Komarov chose to do with Jack, and whether he caught up with Sergei, and what happened if he did. All she could do was wait, and as she knew very well, patience had never been one of her virtues.
To the south the line between mountains and stars slowly rose. The traveling party stopped to eat by another ancient well tower, and McColl listened to the soldiers debating whether Kerki was more of a dump than Karshi. As they trekked onward, he imagined he could feel Maslov’s blank scrutiny, Komarov’s impatience, and Caitlin’s dismay, each a moving ball of emotion, rolling on across the empty wastes.
The first hint of light was showing on the eastern horizon when Komarov maneuvered his horse alongside McColl’s. “The Turcoman says we’re only an hour away from Kerki,” the Russian said conversationally. “You didn’t seem very surprised,” he said, shifting subjects without shifting tone.
“I was surprised you waited so long. When did you find out?” McColl asked.
“Before we left Moscow.”
McColl shook his head, then laughed. “Sherlock Holmes,” he murmured to himself.
“When did you realize I knew?” Komarov asked.
“The morning we left Tashkent. Your disciple couldn’t look me in the eye anymore.”
“He’d never make an actor,” Komarov admitted. “I think that’s why you’re good at what you do,” he went on in the same conversational voice. “Because your disguise feels more real than who you actually are.”
McColl said nothing to that, just hoped it wasn’t true.
“But you’re finished with all that now,” Komarov said, sounding almost sad that their contest was over.
“It’s your world.”
“Yes it is, but that’s not what I meant.” Komarov was staring at him in the growing light. “I suspect that you’ve run out of people you can put your faith in. Either as friends or enemies.”
McColl thought about that for several moments. “You may be right. But not completely, not when it comes to enemies.” He paused as he guided his pony around the skeletal remains of a sheep. “I watched Aidan Brady knife an American riot cop in 1914. That summer he damn near killed me in Ireland and then murdered two cops in England. In 1918 he had another go at shooting me and shot an eleven-year-old boy instead. And my erstwhile colleagues in London, when they finally caught him, decided he’d be more use alive than dead. Instead of the hanging he so richly deserved, they gave him this job. When my old boss found out and asked me to come here, I only said yes because it was Brady.”
Komarov was silent for a minute or more. “If you didn’t have Brady, I suspect you would find someone else—people need to put faces to what they abhor. Years ago, before the war, when I was still a city policeman, a political prisoner asked me how many enemies I had in Brazil. None, I told him, as far as I knew. He explained to me that the Russian government, which paid my wages, had colluded with other capitalist powers to force down the world coffee price. As a result the plantation workers were earning even less of a pittance than usual, and their children were dying in droves from starvation. Now, why, this man asked me, would those children’s mothers consider me anything other than an enemy?”
McColl smiled. “What did you say?”
“I said this was all very abstract, and what could I, personally, do about the world coffee price? He said: ‘Join the revolution.’”
McColl looked across at the Russian. There was no kindness in his face, but neither was there any trace of evil. There were deep lines around the eyes, etched by fatigue and something more corrosive, and the eyes themselves seemed to be pushing outward, as if they were trying to escape from the memories that lay behind them. “I think I’ve lost my chance to do that,” McColl said wryly. “Maybe you’ll put in a good word for me.”
“Maybe I will. There is something you could tell me—just to satisfy my curiosity, you understand. Just between us.”
“Yes?”
“Did you kill two members of the Trust in Arkhangelskoye in the summer of 1918?”
McColl could remember the room, the older man calmly explaining why Moscow was a harder city to starve out than Petrograd was. “I did. They were planning to poison all the fields around Moscow, and they had the stuff to do it.”
“From your people?”
“The French actually, not that it matters.”
“And it was you that left the supplies of poison in the car on Bolshaya Lubyanka.”
“It seemed the safest place,” McColl said.
“May I ask why? Why you killed your allies and thwarted their plot, I mean.”
McColl took his time to answer. “I had Caitlin to think about. And the boy I’d just brought to Moscow, the one that Brady shot. We all want to win, to see our ideas triumph, but there are some things you can’t do… or at least I can’t.”