“Roger, waiting,” Mountain growled quietly.
Grim minutes past. The spetsnaz men stood still and silent. Kold pulled out two jade baoding balls from his pocket, each the size of an egg, and began to roll them on his palm, phlegmatically looking at a wall.
“Perhaps, it is better for us to move to another room?” the Lawyer asked.
“This is the most suitable room for ensuring your safety,” Mountain answered.
The Lawyer knew he was asking in vain for in the bunker for sure there were countless additional tunnels, technical corridors, ventilation systems and other passages connected with each other, and the security people know best. But to just sit there and be silent when beyond the door, perhaps, there was someone who came here for Kold’s life, was very hard, if not intolerable.
It was obvious to the Lawyer that the ‘unauthorized penetration’ was connected with Kold. If nothing had threatened the life of this man, he wouldn’t have been hidden straightaway from journalists, diplomats and others. Of course, he had made things safe, having securely hidden the compromising evidence and making sure of its publication in case something happened to him, but at the same time no one has repealed the old maxim, as old as the world, attributed by the writer Anatoly Rybakov to Stalin in the novel Children of the Arbat: ‘No person; no problem.’
Kold’s death would also instantly lower the amount of scandal hanging over the activity of the U.S. National Security Agency, and significantly reduce the belief of people in the accuracy of exposed materials published in the mass media.
It’s one thing when it’s done at the instigation and with comments of a real employee of the intelligence agencies, someone who actually worked with the surveillance programs, and absolutely another when behind revelations there are only questionable journalists of dubious reputation, who are also no doubt homosexuals.
No sound reached them from behind the locked door. The spetsnaz men stayed as still Madame Tussauds waxworks. Man-mountain snuffled. And the baoding balls tapped in Kold’s hand. Minutes passed.
The Lawyer had not touched alcohol several months but suddenly thought that nothing could be better now than a glass of good red wine – for ‘nervous anaesthesia’, as one of his high-ranking clients, the famous specialist and expert on body relaxation, used to say.
Red wine was much better for this, than, for example, cognac or whisky, because it kept clarity of thinking and in moderate doses didn’t impair coordination. The Lawyer realized that coordination might really be needed at any moment, if there was any chance of getting out of this mess alive.
The most reliable way to destroy an objectionable person is with an explosion, and the more powerful it is, the better. Both the mafia and terrorist organizations around the world have made it their choice in recent years, having graduated from training snipers to training high quality demolition engineers and suicide bombers. The fact that the technologies and techniques for programming a normal person to suicide and transforming him into a walking weapon came to terrorists from their curators in the intelligence agencies of various states was no secret.
“If a drugged fanatic with about ten kilos of explosive on his paunch gets into the bunker, there’ll be hell,” the Lawyer thought. “But there are different explosives. Some plastic explosive will rip everything to shreds here, though regular TNT can do a lot of damage in a closed room…”
The Lawyer knew firsthand about TNT and closed rooms from the time he had served in the Strategic Missile Troops of the Soviet army, where they’d had classes in case of attempts to capture command bunkers by enemy saboteurs.
The Lawyer cast a sidelong look at Kold. He had closed his eyes and was twirling and twirling the baoding balls, representing Buddhist renunciation of the world, but his skin was very pale and his thin nostrils trembled, indicating that he was literally shaking with tension.
A muffled thud several minutes later from the corridor made the Lawyer flinch. One of Kold’s jade balls fell on the table, rolled and banged against a glass.
“Easy, everything’s under control,” Mountain made a soothing gesture with his free hand as if he was parting waves, and then reached into his jacket and pulled out a square black pistol.
Kold gulped noisily. The spetsnaz clanked their safety catches. Along the corridor hurried footsteps pounded, and it seemed to the Lawyer that he heard a stifled cry. At that moment Mountain, who was listening to something on his headset smiled a child’s disarming smile and said with obvious relief:
“That’s it, all-clear!”
The Lawyer barely noticed as he and the shadow soldiers with their automatic machines left the room – he was suddenly visited by a thought about this pale guy with the jade balls in his hand that now sat opposite him at the table on the minus seventh floor in the secret Cold War bunker: around this one guy, thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, were participating in the most highly complex intelligence, diplomatic, geopolitical games, the results of which no one could undertake to predict.
But the fact that no one will undertake it doesn’t mean that in such a game it’s all left to chance. No, no there are no accidents, it’s all too weighty, and even experienced players are burnt. There’s too much effort and money spent on training, and it is even possible that someone gave their lives so that the game took place.
“And I’m not sitting here accidentally. It is very possible that my appearance in this bunker was predetermined long before Kold even boarded the Hong Kong Airlines plane and set foot in Russia,” the Lawyer mused.
Kold got up quickly, went to the bedroom and a few seconds later returned with a big-bellied bottle of Irish whiskey. He thumped it on the table with a look as if he was going to drink until he was unconscious.
“But you don’t drink?” the Lawyer was surprised.
The surprise was sincere. In the data-file on Kold he had read before the first meeting, it was specifically stated that Joshua practically never drinks alcohol.
“In this case it is medicine,” Kold said in low tones and unscrewed the green lid from the bottle.
“Couch syrup?” said the Lawyer, whose conversational English left much to be desired (although he perfectly understood Kold and quite clearly stated his thoughts), deciding to flaunt the slang phrase which had recently got to him in some article. But right there in these circumstances it was hardly relevant and he apologized: “Forgive me if this joke isn’t entirely successful.”
“I appreciate your diligence in studying English,” Kold parried icily. “But it is better to refrain from using doubtful idioms until you master English perfectly. Sometimes they can be taken wrong.”
He poured himself and the Lawyer two fingers, lifted a glass and then instead of a toast gave a quote from Lao Tzu:
“‘He who overcomes others is strong, he who overcomes himself is mighty’.”
“‘Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it’,” the Lawyer responded with a quote from the same source and gulped down his whiskey in one go.
The fiery stream slipped down his gullet and blew up in his stomach like a thermal bomb. The Lawyer looked at Kold. His companion drank standing, in small sips which made his sharp Adam’s apple twitch, threatening to tear the skin from his thin neck.
After dealing with the whiskey, he looked at the Lawyer with eyes watering, and noisy breaths and asked:
“What do you think? Will they come back?”
“I think they won’t.”
“So strange,” Kold sat down, rubbing a cheek with his palm. “Why would they want to kill me… It is meaningless!