Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia: Thursday 29 October
4:00 P.M. local time
Borz Zakaev kept a heavy foot on the gas as he headed east toward Yasnaya Polyana. It was only late afternoon, but already the light was beginning to fade from the white, cloud-laden sky.
This entire oblast gave him the creeps, with its dark bogs and empty, silent houses. He’d heard it said that before the war, East Prussia had been one of the most intensely cultivated and heavily populated regions in Europe, second only to the Netherlands. No one would believe that now.
He put his foot down harder and heard the blip of a siren. Casting a quick glance in the rearview mirror, he saw a militia van with flashing red and blue lights coming up behind him, and swore.
The snow began to fall late in the afternoon.
Stefan stood in the soaring doorway of the abandoned granary and watched the big, fluffy flakes float down to cover the world in a hushed wonder.
It had been sometime before dawn when the old farmer reigned in to let Stefan and the pup down some two kilometers before Yasnaya Polyana. “You’re going home, aren’t you?” said the farmer.
When Stefan only stared up at him, the old man laughed, displaying a scant collection of stained, gaping teeth. “If someone’s after you, home’s the first place they’ll look. You know that, don’t you?”
Stefan tried to swallow the sudden lump in his throat, failed, and simply nodded, his lips pressed tight together.
“You take care, you hear?” said the farmer, and spanked the reins against his mules’ rumps.
The old man had only confirmed Stefan’s worst fears. And so, even though he was so close to home that he imagined he could practically smell his mother’s freshly baked bread and hear the honking of the geese as she walked down to the pond at feeding time, Stefan and the pup had come here, to the vast ruins of what had once been the royal stables of Trakehnen.
The stud farm was the birthplace of the famous warm-blooded Trakehner horses, begun back in the eighteenth century by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I. Stefan had heard it said that at one time the village of Yasnaya Polyana had been called Trakehnen, too, back in the days when Kaliningrad had been a German land and the stud farm had housed more than twelve hundred horses and three times that many people.
Now, the horses and their handlers were all gone. The dilapidated old mansion, with its towering stucco walls and moss-covered red-tiled roof, had been turned into a school. But the rest of the vast stud lay deserted beneath the falling snow, a crumbling ruin of brick stables and grain silos and overgrown, empty pastures.
Stefan felt the dog’s cold nose thrust against his hand. Hunkering down, he threw an arm across the pup’s shoulders and drew it close. From here he could look out across the fields to the old riding ring and the school beyond. “What do we do now? Hmmm, boy? Any suggestions?”
But the pup only gazed up at him with silent, trusting brown eyes.