THE Land Cruiser pulled up sharp, tyres spitting rubber and dirt. Two men got out and strode into Katya’s with a flourish. Chaikova took Katya’s hand and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Sorry to hear about Ruslan,’ he said, his craggy face expressing genuine sympathy. ‘I really liked the boy.’
She dipped her head, thanked him, and looked awkwardly at Tallis. His face burnt with shame.
‘Tallis.’ Chaikova beamed, striding over, hugging him and making him wince. As Tallis looked over his shoulder he saw Orlov standing there, cigar plugged into his mouth.
‘Isn’t this a bit outside your comfort zone, Grigori?’
Orlov flashed a grin. ‘My dear fellow, I’m safeguarding my investment.’ The helicopter he’d promised him, Tallis remembered. ‘Anyway, I like you, Tallis, and when Chaikova said you needed a little help, I thought, Why not?’
‘And you.’ Chaikova turned his massive head to Darke. ‘You must be Tallis’s friend.’
‘Sorry for dragging you out here to get us,’ Darke said.
‘It’s alright,’ Orlov said with an ironic smile, sending a cloud of smoke into the atmosphere. ‘Chaikova enjoys adventures.’
‘So how do you propose we get through the checkpoints?’
‘Piece of cake.’ Orlov lapsed into colloquial English with a grin, drawing himself up to his full height, puffing out his chest a little so that his gold necklace and wristband rattled expensively. ‘We have plenty of vodka and cigarettes on board.’
Darke exchanged a look with Tallis that suggested Orlov was cracked. ‘It’s fine,’ Tallis assured him with a relaxed smile. ‘Grigori is a most persuasive man. He has a lot of contacts.’
‘Getting out of the country may prove more difficult,’ Chaikova said. ‘Some flights have been suspended. Communications are not good.’
‘If we can get to the Embassy, we’ll be fine,’ Darke said.
‘I wouldn’t bank on that,’ Orlov said, less lively.
‘There’s a problem?’ Tallis frowned. He could feel Katya’s eyes on him. The tension between them was unbearable.
‘You have a lot of enemies. Timur Garipova came sniffing round, asking a lot of searching questions.’
Tallis shared a complicit smile with Darke. ‘He won’t be searching any more.’
‘Mother of God,’ Chaikova said, part fear, part admiration. ‘No wonder the country’s in uproar.’
Orlov was more sanguine. ‘Never liked the creep anyway, but we’ve also had, or rather Kumarin has received, some strange calls from your firm.’
That would be Asim trying to make contact, Tallis thought. ‘What sort of strange?’
‘Wishing to know your whereabouts.’
‘It’s fine,’ Tallis said, dismissive.
Grigori shrugged and looked at Chaikova. ‘OK,’ he said, looking around at everyone. ‘Are we ready?’
The others went on ahead. Tallis hung back. He wanted to look at Katya and make one last attempt. ‘Still time to change your mind.’ He sounded upbeat. He felt in despair.
‘I know,’ she said softly, opening her arms, letting him hold her, clinging to him as if her life depended upon it. His shirt became wet and he knew that she was crying. He drew away a little, smoothed a lock of gold behind her ear.
‘Come with me, Katya,’ he whispered, nuzzling her neck.
She said nothing, seeming to hesitate. Hope briefly blossomed inside him.
‘You’re entitled to a life, too,’ he pressed.
She looked at him intently, staring right into the heart of him then, shaking her head sadly, she let her arms fall to her sides. ‘Go now. Go quickly.’
Choked, he turned on his heel and walked to the waiting vehicle. He did not look back.
Chaikova was decent enough not to pass comment, simply handed him a bottle of Stoli. Darke remained silent. Orlov, alone, oblivious, talked about his favourite subjects—Svetlana, his latest art acquisitions, and the state of a recent building project. A thick fug of smoke built up around them. After a while, even Orlov dried up. Tallis was glad of the vodka. Like an anaesthetic, it dulled his physical senses. His intellect, however, remained pin-sharp. To relieve the hurt he felt, he turned his mind to work. He’d done the job, completed the mission, averted conflict, yet still the mystery remained. Who was the lone assassin? Who was responsible? How had Fazan come by what had proved to be clearly false intelligence? Not that he was a stranger to such situations. False intelligence had been responsible for Tallis’s original decision to quit the police three years before.
He glanced across at Darke—asleep, face slumped against the glass—wondered, not for the first time, who exactly he’d spirited away.
After negotiating two checkpoints without incident, they drove through Mozdok and turned off the main road and down a dogleg, past a small truck company with a yard and mesh fencing where they abandoned the Land Cruiser.
‘It’s fine, I know the owner,’ Orlov assured them.
They walked a short distance past a sewage works then down a dirt track with high hedges and fields to a gateway, beyond which the Agusta 109 was waiting, rotors running. The pilot, a young Russian with blond good looks, wore a Panama hat, light linen suit over a navy shirt. Reminded of an old TV advertisement when he was a kid, Tallis thought the man from del Monte had turned up.
They all climbed in, putting on headsets to communicate, Orlov in front in the passenger seat, giving the orders. As Tallis was lifted into the air, he briefly fell asleep.
Their first port of call was Chaikova’s dacha. Dawn was breaking, sunshine falling in vertical bars giving the impression of mullioned windows. As soon as they touched down, Chaikova insisted they eat. While he prepared breakfast, Tallis called Asim, waited for the call to be routed, Darke at his side, listening in.
‘Mission accomplished,’ Tallis said.
‘I thought we’d lost you.’
Not a chance. ‘Understand you’ve been trying to get hold of me.’
‘Only by telepathy. I didn’t know where the hell you were, remember.’
‘Right,’ Tallis said, making light of it, feigning that he was too knackered to worry about that now. ‘I’ve got Darke with me.’
‘Good,’ Asim said, clipped. ‘And?’
‘He’s innocent. I can personally vouch that I was with him when the killer attempted to murder Ivanov. Whatever intelligence Fazan’s received about Darke, it’s wrong.’
‘Asim, you still there?’
‘Sure, look, can I call you back?’
Tallis pulled a face, gave the number. ‘One other thing, Darke wants to speak to Fazan. Is he at the Embassy in Moscow?’
‘Already taken up his post in Berlin. Don’t worry, I’ll make the necessary arrangements for you both to come in.’
Come in? This was starting to feel like they’d done something wrong, that they were fugitives. Tallis was getting a really bad vibe. ‘Fine,’ he said, breezy. ‘You’ll get someone to pick us up?’
‘Sure, give me your co-ordinates.’
‘What? Sorry, can’t hear you…line’s breaking up…Have to…’ Tallis put down the phone and stared at Darke.
‘What’s the matter?’ Darke said.
‘Something’s off. Asim’s not acting normally.’
‘Think he’s under pressure?’ Darke said.
Tallis thought and shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘OK, let’s think this out. Fazan approached your guy and asked him if he could borrow you to find me because he thought I’d turned rogue.’
‘And to avert international disaster.’
‘Understated, but I get the drift.’ Darke flashed a smile. ‘And who had the intelligence?’
‘Fazan.’
‘Who supplied the intelligence to Fazan?’
‘Source unknown. What are you suggesting?’ Tallis said. ‘That Fazan set this whole thing up as a smokescreen? Why? To discredit Asim, or you?’
Darke scratched the side of his face. ‘Rather an exotic way of thinking.’
‘And who the hell is carrying out all the hits?’
‘Supposing Fazan is responsible…’
‘Is he capable? I mean, you’ve got to be good.’
‘Not that good. Anyone with the right expertise can set a bomb, cut someone’s throat, punch someone in the leg with a hypodermic.’
‘You’ve got to be young and fit. Is he?’
‘I heard in his day he was pretty good in the field.’
‘Alright,’ Tallis said. ‘So say Fazan is doing the killing for reasons we haven’t even begun to work out, but would he seriously have a crack at the Prime Minister?’
Darke let out a sigh. ‘No, I agree with you. That doesn’t tally. Besides, he’d be easily identified at such a public gathering.’
‘Which brings me to my next question,’ Tallis said. ‘Why go to Asim in the first place, why involve me?’
‘To make it look good. Puts him on the side of the angels.’
‘But he didn’t need to. He could have orchestrated the hits and simply left it at that. The Chechens are always getting the blame. By sending me to find you, he was actually drawing attention to you and taking a risk of exposure. He must have known there was a chance I’d actually defy the odds, find you and bring you back.’
‘And point the finger in his direction.’
‘Precisely. Back to square one.’
‘Do you think your contact, Asim, is on the level?’
In this business, you had to trust someone, and Tallis trusted Asim implicitly, which was why he felt as if Asim were sending some kind of coded message when he talked about them coming in. Then there was the whole business of those mysterious calls from Shobdon. Had the operation been compromised right from the start? His thoughts went immediately to Blaine Deverill, the spooky Walther Mitty character who’d quizzed him in the canteen.
‘Know how to pilot a helicopter?’ Tallis asked Darke.
‘No, why?’
‘We’re flying to Berlin.’
Orlov wasn’t happy. Since Tallis had proposed the idea he’d been chain-smoking cigars like a laboratory-tested beagle. ‘What if you don’t come back?’
‘I will, I promise,’ Tallis said.
‘What if you don’t? What about my helicopter?’
‘I’ll have it delivered.’
Orlov blew another gust of smoke into the atmosphere. They were in Chaikova’s large sitting room, maps and military paraphernalia on one wall, iconic pictures of 1950s starlets on the other. Tallis, Darke and Orlov’s pilot were bent over a map, working out a route. Orlov cast Tallis one of his curious smiles. ‘I think you’re really James Bond, Tallis.’
James Bond, Jason Bourne, how come I don’t get the girl, then? Tallis wanted to say. Katya’s luminous face briefly materialised in front of him. He bent over the map again, redoubled his thinking. The distance from Moscow to Berlin was approximately a thousand miles. Taking into account a wind speed of twenty knots, travelling at one hundred and fifty miles an hour, he reckoned they should average three hundred miles in two hours. If they could refuel with the rotors running, they’d arrive in Berlin in roughly eight hours, and if he radioed ahead to Asim, transport from Reinsdorff to the British Embassy could be laid on. However, he was still feeling jittery about making an approach.
‘Where can we pick up Av-Gas?’ Tallis asked Orlov’s pilot.
‘Minsk, Brest, Warsaw.’
Darke glanced up at Tallis. ‘What about a flight plan?’
‘We’ll fly outside the zones—means dropping to a lower level. I’ve done it before. It’s not a problem.’ Except last time he’d been refreshed and healthy and rested. Last time it had been a bit of fun.
‘Here,’ Chaikova said, striding towards them, looking like Rambo. He’d spent the last ten minutes rooting in the armoury. ‘In case you run into trouble,’ Chaikova said, dumping a cache of weapons on the table in the middle of Poland.
‘My God, what sort of trouble?’ Orlov coughed, obviously alarmed his nice expensive helicopter was going to be turned into a sieve.
Nobody took any notice of him.
‘Bloody hell! Is this what I think it is?’ Darke picked up a gun, handed it to Tallis who studied it with professional interest and handed it back.
‘Heavy sniper rifle,’ Darke said, weighing it in his hands. ‘And the cartridge is a brute. My guess it’s a silent semi-automatic.’ He looked up at Chaikova. ‘Val Silent Sniper. Good to blast through body armour even at ranges of four hundred metres or more.’
Chaikova grinned, his eyes disappearing into one of the seams in his face. ‘And for you,’ he said, picking out a Heckler and Koch MSG90 military sniping rifle and passing it to Tallis. In common with its close cousin, the PSG1, the rifle was outstanding for its accuracy. It had a range of settings to twelve hundred metres.
Orlov let out a groan and bit down hard, almost severing his best Havana.
Clean, fed and watered, and starting to feel slightly more human, Tallis and Darke took to the skies shortly before eleven. The weather, which had started that morning with crisp clean sunshine and puffy white clouds like dandelion clocks quickly deteriorated to a universal grotty grey.
‘Visual is critical so keep a lookout,’ Tallis said, rubbing his eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep.
‘If I do, give me a prod, but make it gentle,’ Tallis flicked a smile. ‘No sudden movements.’
They were sixty miles north of Smolensk, flying over the Przhevalsky National Park when Tallis clocked something to his port side. Fuck, he thought. Wasn’t a transport helicopter, or the search-and-rescue model, this was the real deal—armed, armoured and fitted with built-in machine-guns and six external weapons racks with S-5 rockets. These guys weren’t out for a jolly. ‘Spot on,’ he let out, praying that they hadn’t detected him. Jolted into action, Darke reached for his rifle as Tallis manoeuvred the helicopter into cloud cover. Perhaps they’d simply go away, Tallis thought. Perhaps they were looking for someone else. If they’d seen him, or picked him up via his transponder, and already launched a missile they were doomed. Probably too late, he quickly flicked off the transponder.
‘What do you reckon?’ Darke said, alert. For safety reasons he’d been travelling with the safety catch on. Now he depressed it for fire. ‘Any way I can take a shot at them?’
‘Only if I get up on the blind side. I don’t want to risk it unless they have hostile intent.’ No point trying to attack simply for the hell of it, he thought. They had overwhelming firepower on their side. The best course of action was outrun and outrange.
‘Might be too late by then.’
Tallis privately agreed. He thought about radioing them to see what their game was but was reluctant to blow his cover. Emerging from the cloud, he decided to drop low, making him a more difficult target. As soon as he did so, the Russians exploded from behind a bank of cloud, hot on his tail.
‘Shit,’ he cursed, sweat erupting from his brow. Seeing the missile launch, he peeled off and turned in sharply so that he was facing his attacker and flying at a perpendicular angle towards the enemy. The missile hit where they had been rather than where they were. Hanging out of the machine, Kumarin was bellowing orders. So that’s where it all went pear-shaped, Tallis realised. Kumarin, Grigori Orlov’s engineer and the guy responsible for negotiating the helicopter deal, had been in on the act right from the very start. With a dull shudder he wondered about Orlov. It would be rational to suspect his involvement, too, except Tallis didn’t quite buy it. Orlov had bent over backwards to help him.
Darke let off a round, forcing Kumarin to dodge back into the cockpit, singed, maybe, but unharmed.
‘Motherfucker! Might as well be armed with a peashooter.’
‘Hang on. I’m dropping low.’ At least there was no sunshine to reveal their shadow, Tallis thought, and even though the enemy helicopter was swooping down after them, it would have more difficulty with locking onto a low-flying target. His idea was to get as much terrain between them and an incoming missile. Failing that, they’d have to get sneaky. And lucky.
‘How far to the border with Belarus?’ Darke said.
‘About a hundred and twenty miles.’
‘Pity. If we can fly there, the military will soon sort them out. They might be more Soviet than Stalin, but they’re fiercely nationalistic even against the Russians.’
‘What makes you think they won’t sort us out?’ Tallis said, tracking along the river Dnepr at less than six hundred feet, temporarily vanishing inside some low-lying mist. Good, he thought, no sign of the enemy. ‘Looks like a gully ahead,’ he said. ‘We’ll land, wait for them to pass over and get behind them.’
He switched off the engine, allowing the helicopter to glide down gracefully, quiet and serene, before switching it back on, the engine immediately kicking into life as the helicopter went into a hover. On landing, Tallis kept the rotors running.
‘I’m climbing in the back,’ Darke said. ‘It will give me more manoeuvrability.’
Sure enough, a minute later the Russian helicopter flew overhead. Tallis counted to twenty then took off again, raising the collective control, increasing the power and pitch on the blades so that enough air was pushed downwards to lift the Agusta.
‘Fuck me, where are they?’ Darke let out, scanning the skies, his finger light on the trigger.
Playing cat and mouse, Tallis thought. No sooner had he climbed to two thousand feet than he saw the Russians behind him on his starboard side. In seconds they’d be above and on six o’clock. Curtains, he thought, then watched with amazement as Kumarin, his face blown away by a silent shot from Darke, tumbled out of the open door and plummeted thousands of feet. The attack helicopter immediately began a tight turn in response.
It was the diversion he needed. Spotting the forest of Katyn ahead, he moved the collective control once more to decrease altitude and let the Agusta plunge down towards the trees. Like most of Russia, the forest had an unsavoury history. The earth was saturated with the blood of thousands of Poles shot by the NKVD, predecessor of the KGB, and Russian prisoners of war massacred by Nazis.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Darke shouted out.
‘Playing chicken,’ Tallis called back. Let’s see who’s got the biggest balls, he thought.
As predicted, the Russians, having peeled away, also dropped down. Gritting his teeth, Tallis increased speed and headed for a narrow country road on the edge of the forest, forcing the helicopter down almost to ground level, the rotors skimming the tops of hedges. The enemy was playing the same game, except that the machine wasn’t as responsive as it ought to be. It was dipping and rising dangerously, like a bucking bronco. Either too old, or too knackered, or, Tallis thought, hope rising, with his passenger decorating the landscape, the pilot had lost his bottle. If it came to it, a wellflown fully operating helicopter was every bit a match for a badly piloted wreck of an attack machine.
He turned minutely and glanced at Darke. Neither of them spoke. Nerves had taken over.
They were at the entrance to the forest. The path ahead was roughly the same width as the rotors. If that suddenly narrowed, Tallis knew he was done for. Bracing himself, he flew into the sea of green, the Agusta’s paintwork perfect camouflage. With the Russians continuing the pursuit, Tallis adjusted the throttle and increased power, his eyes straining to see a way ahead.
The path widened out into a clearing. Seizing the opportunity, the attack helicopter speeded up, lining up for a kill shot. Tallis blinked, taking his last breath, waiting for a fast single fare to eternity. But nothing happened. Something was wrong. The system must have jammed or bust. Suddenly the trees began to close in, the path ahead funnelling. When Tallis abruptly rolled sideways, peeling up and away, the Russians’ rotors clipped the trees. The pursuing helicopter seemed to buck one last time before ploughing straight into the ground, where it exploded in a ball of flame.
They were refuelling at Warsaw when Asim’s voice suddenly crackled over the radio. His tone was dry and cynical.
‘You wouldn’t happen to know anything about a Russian attack helicopter coming down over Katyn, would you?’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ Tallis said, cool.
‘The undeniable fact you were in the vicinity?’
‘Coincidence. What happened to you earlier? You sounded a bit odd,’ Tallis said, deftly changing the subject.
‘I was in a meeting with C.’ The head of the Secret Intelligence Service? Tallis ignored a worried glance from Darke. ‘There’s been a fresh development.’
‘Yeah?’ Tallis said.
‘Where are you heading?’
‘Berlin.’
‘The Embassy, I trust.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I’ll have you collected soon as you touch down on German soil.’
Tallis gave the co-ordinates.
‘Darke here,’ Graham burst in. ‘Like to tell us what the hell is going on?’
‘Good afternoon,’ Asim said smoothly. ‘A Russian professor by the name of Dr Turpal Numerov was scheduled to give a series of lectures in Berlin at Humboldt University. This morning he walked into the Embassy, claiming political asylum. Apparently, he says he worked for the FSB.’