Josip Broz Tito Square was an uninspiring intersection southwest of the center with tower blocks as far as the eye could see in the hazy morning light. Leonberger parked along Ulitsa Profsoyuznaya, then sauntered across the six lanes and grassy median of Nakhimovsky Prospekt to reach the pharmacy Sofia Marinov had mentioned. Yesterday, he’d run to an internet café in order to take a look at the contents of Anna Usurov’s flash drive and found himself utterly confused by the gibberish of what was clearly an encrypted file. So he headed over to the FedEx office on Ulitsa Shabolovka and mailed the drive to the Library’s post office box. Afterward, he’d driven up to Pokrovsky Hills to track down Joseph Keller’s family. Their neighborhood was gated, with a fat security guard he could’ve knocked out in no time at all … but that was the old Leonberger. The new one, the one who served the world—he knew better than to cause a scene. So, responsibly, he picked up a couple of bottles of Dobry Medved and some takeout minced-meat chebureki, and went home to refuel, smoke Anna Usurov’s Marlboros, and drink himself to sleep. He still felt a little fuzzy this morning.
Even standing in front of it, he might have missed the sign for La Bohème beside the pharmacy. It was a small watering hole with large windows obscured by blinds. He looked around out of instinct—anytime he entered an unfamiliar place it paid to take the temperature—but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He pushed through the door and found himself in a simple bistro. A black-haired woman was playing a game on her phone behind the corner counter, and two guys who looked like regulars—blunt features, maybe thirty, in faux-leather bomber jackets—slumped in the corner with beers in front of them. And no one else.
The bartender smiled, and he ordered a beer. She set down a glass and a can of Baltika 3, and after taking his money without comment returned to her game. He took the can over to the blinds and peered out as he drank, but he couldn’t focus. Two things were wrong with the men in the corner. First, they were utterly silent, just watching him from behind. Second, their glasses were full. Two Russian men can’t sit for more than a minute without at least one of them swallowing half his beer.
So Leonberger drank, sucking down most of the can, belched loudly, then gave it back to the bartender and thanked her. As he left, heading for the sidewalk, he realized how lucky he was that they didn’t know his face.
But was he making the right move? What if Sofia Marinov showed up as soon as he drove off? He guessed they would sit watching her until, eventually, they gave up on him and put Sofia Marinov into the back of their car.
He stopped at the corner, waiting for the light, then turned to look behind himself. No one had left the bar yet. The light changed, but he didn’t cross; instead, he turned back and took a position at the corner of the apartment block, leaning against the wall and lighting one of Usurov’s Marlboros. In this area of town, there was nothing strange about an old man smoking on a street corner, waiting on nothing in particular.
It took ten whole minutes and two cigarettes for it to occur to him that something was indeed wrong. Sofia Marinov had not arrived, but two more men had. Hands shoved deep into their bomber jackets, so like the others’, they’d looked around as they went into the bar. No one came out. Then his phone rang. He checked—it was Marinov’s number.
“Are you lost?” asked Sofia Marinov.
“Um, running late. You said La Bohème, right?”
“Yes. The corner of Nakhimovsky and Profsoyuznaya.”
“Are you there?”
A pause, then: “Yes, I’m there.”
A chill went down his spine as he imagined her in some small room with more of those guys in bomber jackets, maybe tied up, the phone held to her ear. He said, “Five minutes,” and hung up. He pocketed the phone and hurried away, not waiting for the light to cross the big road and find his car. His mind whirred away, thinking through what they knew. They had his phone number, which meant they had his name. Which meant they had his car tags and, probably, his location. How did they not know his face yet? Luck, probably. Sometimes you got it.
So. What to do?
Shed everything.
He halted a couple of meters from his car and looked around. Up Profsoyuznaya, he saw the red M of the metro. Behind him, the door of La Bohème opened and one of the bomber-jacketed men stepped out to light a smoke.
Leonberger walked toward the metro station and disassembled his phone, pocketing the pieces. He didn’t look back again—that bar was dead to him now—and trotted down the stairs to take the long, narrow tunnel back again to the Profsoyuznaya subway platform, passing old grannies and chattering children as he wondered where he’d made his mistake. Had he made a mistake? Maybe this was a trap that had been laid last month, as soon as they killed Anna Usurov. Kill her and wait for people to come ask questions.
He needed to get out of town. South, ideally, to Bryansk, where he knew steelworkers who would keep him safe for a while. Long-term plans were beyond him; he only needed to find a place to hole up.
He caught the southbound train, which would take him to the end of the line at Novoyasenevskaya, where he would hustle over to the Butovskaya line at Bitsevsky Park, then ride to the terminus at Buninskaya Alleya. A lengthy walk north to the MSK rental desk, and with luck he’d be driving down the Ukraine Highway by five o’clock.
Easy, right?
It seemed so. He made the transfer to the Bitsevsky Park station, where a colorful mural of people with horses stared down at him, and by the time he reached Buninskaya Alleya he was quite sure that no one on his train was even aware of his presence. It wasn’t even ten-thirty yet, and he walked the half hour to the MSK desk without breaking a sweat. There was the pleasant stretch of green beside the highway, then the forest of tower blocks that reminded him of his youth, of growing up in concrete suburbs that, back then, were new and exciting and devoutly Soviet. Now they were how everyone lived in a city that had burst out of its seams and spilled all over the neighboring countryside. He picked up a bottle of Borjomi water from a kiosk and offered a Marlboro to an attractive woman buying a magazine. She laughed but otherwise ignored him. He didn’t care. The sun was bright over Bulevar Admirala Lazareva, and he was almost out of Moscow.
He had to wait behind an out-of-towner with a Petersburg accent, but not long, and the clerk who served him, a girl in her twenties, found him another Volkswagen Golf. When she asked, he lied, telling her he would be taking it to St. Petersburg. He hesitated when she asked for his papers, but only briefly, and as soon as she typed in his information he began running a mental clock. How long before that information was processed through the system and available to whoever was looking for him? Because he had to assume they were government. If they weren’t, then he had nothing to worry about, but it paid to assume the worse.
He was behind the wheel by eleven-thirty, and he drove back down Admirala Lazareva, passing the towers full of families. Ten minutes later he was on the Ukraine Highway, plotting where he would exit to reach the smaller access roads. He was fine. Everything was fine.
Then he heard the siren and saw the lights. A militia car was speeding up the highway from behind. He pulled to the slow lane to let it pass, and caught his breath when it pulled up beside him. There were two cops inside, and the one in the passenger seat—just a kid, really—pointed at him and signaled for him to pull over.
Leonberger smiled grimly at him, understanding everything.
The people after him were not private individuals; they were representatives of the Kremlin. When they took him away, he understood, he would never see the outside of his cell. He would not be told why—even his curiosity, by now raging in him, wouldn’t be satisfied. By now they would have taken a hard look at his bank accounts, and someone would have noticed some funny little Swiss account that he’d unadvisedly tapped a couple of years ago to put a down-payment on his overpriced apartment in Arbat. And of course by now they’d noted Elena and Nadia. Of course they had. Which meant they had something to hold over him.
He’d spent his whole life serving these people, and when power changed hands he’d endeavored to maintain his loyalty. But they’d changed too much, and he’d done the best he could and still failed. No, he didn’t want to pull over and let those children in their uniforms take him away.
He smiled and nodded at them but pressed hard on the accelerator. He could see the young cop shouting. The little boy’s window was down now, and his red face puffed up as he shouted and pointed. Leonberger gave him a wink, then turned sharply left, colliding with the police car at high speed. The cops spun off to the left, out of his field of vision, but so did he. The little Golf skidded and, as he tried to regain control, it hit something in the road and flew through the air, high and true, spinning.