‘But Your Honour, where are the guards?’ Yekimov asked, gazing around. ‘It’s kind of odd. An arms depot with no guards.’
Instead of answering, Rybnikov jabbed him in the throat with a finger of steel, then turned towards the privates. One of them was just about to lend the other some tobacco – and he froze like that, with his mouth hanging open, so the crude shag missed the paper and went showering past. Vasilii Alexandrovich hit the first one with his right hand and the second with his left. It all happened very quickly: the corporal’s body was still falling, and his two subordinates were already dead.
Rybnikov dropped the bodies under the wharf, after first tying a heavy rock to each one of them.
He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
Right, then, it was only half past ten and the most troublesome part of the job was already over.
It only took ten minutes to collect the Delivery. Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived at the Moscow Freight Station in tarred boots, a long coat and a cloth cap – a regular shop counterman. He carried the sacks out himself, wouldn’t even let the cabby help, in case he might ask for an extra ten kopecks. Then he transported the ‘maize flour’ from the Brest line to the Ryazan-Uralsk line, because the Delivery’s onward route led towards the east. On the way across to the other side of the city, he repacked the goods and at the station he checked it in as two lots, with different receipts.
And that put an end to his scurrying about from one railway station to another. Rybnikov wasn’t in the least bit tired; on the contrary, he was filled with a fierce, vigorous energy – he had grown weary of idleness and, of course, he was inspired by the importance of his actions.
Expertly dispatched, received on time, competently delivered, he thought. That was the way invincibility was shaped. When everyone acted in his own place as if the outcome of the entire war depended on him alone.
He was slightly concerned about the ‘dummies’ summoned from Samara and Krasnoyarsk. What if they were late? But it was no accident that Rybnikov had chosen those precise two out of the notebook filled with snaky squiggles. The Krasnoyarsk man (Vasilii Alexandrovich thought of him as ‘Tunnel’) was greedy, and his greed made him dependable, and the Samara man (his code name was ‘Bridge’) might not be outstandingly dependable, but he had compelling reasons not to be late – he was a man with not much time left.
And his calculations had proved correct; neither of the ‘dummies’ had let him down. Rybnikov was already aware of this when he left the station for the agreed hotels – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. The hotels were located close to each other, but not actually adjacent. The last thing he needed was for the two dummies to get to know each other through some grotesque coincidence.
At the Railway Hotel, Vasilii Alexandrovich left a note: ‘At three. Goncharov’. The note at the Kazan Hotel read: ‘At four: Goncharov’.
Now it was time to deal with the man with the alias of Thrush, the consignee of the Shipment.
In this matter Rybnikov employed particular caution, for he knew that the Social Revolutionaries were kept under close surveillance by the Okhrana, and the revolutionary riff-raff had plenty of traitors among their own ranks. He could only hope that Thrush realised this as well as he, Rybnikov, did.
Vasilii Alexandrovich made a call from a public telephone (a most convenient innovation that had only recently appeared in the old capital). He asked the lady to give him number 34-81.
He spoke the prearranged words:
‘A hundred thousand pardons. May I ask for the honourable Ivan Konstantinovich to come to the phone?’
After a second’s pause, a woman’s voice replied:
‘He’s not here at present, but he will be soon.’
That meant Thrush was in Moscow and prepared to meet.
‘Please be so good as to let Ivan Konstantinovich know that Professor Stepanov wishes to invite him to his seventy-third birthday.’
‘Professor Stepanov?’ the woman asked, bemused. ‘To his seventy-third?’
‘Yes, that is correct.’
The go-between didn’t need to understand the meaning, her job was to pass on precisely what he said. In the figure 73, the first numeral indicated the time, and the second was a position in a list of previously agreed meeting places. Thrush would understand: at seven o’clock, at place number 3.
If anybody had eavesdropped on Rybnikov’s conversation with the man from Krasnoyarsk, he probably would not have understood a thing.
‘More account books?’ asked Tunnel, a sturdy man with a moustache and eyes that were constantly half closed. ‘We should raise the price. Everything’s so expensive nowadays.’
‘No, not books,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, standing in the middle of the cheap hotel room and listening carefully to the footsteps in the corridor. ‘A special delivery. Payment too. Fifteen hundred.’
‘How much?’ the other man gasped.
Rybnikov pulled out a bundle of banknotes.
‘There. You’ll receive the same again in Khabarovsk. If you do everything right.’
‘Three thousand?’
The Krasnoyarsk man’s eyebrows twitched and twitched again, but they didn’t rise up on to his forehead. It’s not easy to gape in astonishment with eyes used to watching the world through a peephole.
The man whom Vasilii Alexandrovich had christened Tunnel had no idea about this nickname, or about the real activities of the people who paid for his services so generously. He was convinced that he was assisting illegal gold miners. The ‘Statute on Private Gold-Mining’ required prospecting cooperatives to hand over their entire output to the state in exchange for so-called ‘assignations’ at a price lower than the market level and with all sorts of other deductions into the bargain. And everybody knew that when the law was unjust or irrational, people found ways to get round it.
Tunnel occupied a post that was extremely useful to the Organisation – he escorted the postal wagons along the Trans-Siberian main line. When he carried notebooks filled with columns of figures from the European part of the empire to the Far East and back, he assumed that this was financial correspondence between the miners and the dealers in black-market gold.
But Rybnikov had fished the postman out of his own cunning little notebook for a different purpose.
‘Yes, three thousand,’ he said firmly. ‘And no one pays money like that for nothing, you know that.’
‘What do I have to carry?’ asked Tunnel, licking his lips, which had turned dry with excitement.
Rybnikov snapped:
‘Explosive. Three poods.’
The postman started blinking, thinking it over. Then he nodded.
‘For the diggings? To smash the rocks?’
‘Yes. Wrap the crates in sackcloth, like packages. Do you know tunnel No. Twelve on the Baikal Bypass Line?’
‘The “Half-Tunnel”? Everyone knows that.’
‘Throw the crates off exactly halfway through, at marker 197. Our man will pick them up afterwards.’
‘But… er, won’t it go off bang?’
Rybnikov laughed.
‘It’s obvious you know nothing about using explosives. Haven’t you ever heard of detonators? Go off bang – don’t talk nonsense.’
Satisfied with this reply, Tunnel spat on his fingers, preparing to count the money, and Vasilii Alexandrovich smiled to himself: It won’t go off bang, it will make a boom that sets the Winter Palace shaking. Then just let them try to rake out the smashed rock and drag out the flattened wagons and locomotive.
The Baikal Bypass Tunnel, which had been built at huge expense and opened only recently, ahead of schedule, was the final link in the Trans-Siberian. The military trains used to line up in immense queues at the Lake Baikal ferry crossing, but now the line pulsated three times faster than before. The Half-Tunnel was the longest one on the line; if it was put out of action, the Manchurian army would be back on short rations again.