The eastern sky was growing lighter with each new blaze, and Kazankin found he could read his watch. ‘Almost eleven,’ he told Gusakovsky – they were slightly ahead of schedule. The moon would rise in twenty minutes, and on a clear night like this would make a considerable difference. But it would only be up for four hours, which they’d spend in the hopefully empty Institute, out of sight and searching for secrets. When it went down at a quarter past three, they would still have three hours of darkness in which to reach the sanctuary of the Grunewald forest.
They crouched there for what seemed an age, until Kazankin was satisfied that no one had seen them. He then led them across to the nearest porticoed entrance, and hopefully depressed the handle on one of the double doors. It swung slowly open. This implied human occupancy, but the complete lack of light suggested the opposite. Which was it? Had the Institute been closed down? Had its scientists decided that the war was over and gone back to their families? Or had the whole shebang been transferred to some safer location? That would explain the absence of security – there would be nothing left to guard.
There should at least be a caretaker, though. Some hapless old man, down in the basement, waiting for the all-clear to sound.
Kazankin disappeared into the darkness, and for what seemed like several minutes the others waited where they were, listening to the muffled sounds of his exploration. Finally the thin beam of the Russian’s masked flashlight blinked on, revealing a long corridor in which every door seemed to be closed.
‘Is it empty?’ Varennikov asked in a whisper.
‘No,’ Kazankin answered shortly. ‘There are no blackout curtains down in the offices, so we must lower them ourselves before we use any light. Now…’ He took the folded diagram of the building out from inside his jacket, flattened it against the corridor wall, and shone the flashlight on it. Several rooms at the western end, close to where they stood, were marked with crosses. So was the Lightning Tower.
‘I think we’re wasting our time,’ Russell heard himself say.
‘That is possible,’ Kazankin said coldly. ‘But since we have three hours to waste I suggest you and Comrade Varennikov start here’ – he picked out the nearest cross in the diagram, which marked a large room facing onto the inner courtyard – ‘and work your way down this side of the building to the tower.’
‘Where will you be?’ Russell asked, thinking about the possible caretaker.
Kazankin paused for a long moment, as if he was wondering whether to divulge the information. ‘Shota will stay here by the entrance,’ he said eventually. ‘I will check the building next door. According to our information, it has a lead-lined basement area known as the Virus House where certain experiments have been performed. If I can find it, and if anything looks interesting, I will come back for Comrade Varennikov. If not, you must be back here by three-fifteen. Understood?’
Russell nodded. It was the first time he’d heard Gusakovsky’s first name, and the extra intimacy was somehow comforting. Once he and Varennikov were inside the first office, Russell closed the door behind them and carefully closed the blackout curtains before trying the light. Unsurprisingly, the electricity was off – they would have to rely on their flashlights. Which was probably no bad thing, he decided. Most curtains bled a little light around the edges, and the brighter the source the sharper the glint.
Varennikov started rummaging through the desks and filing cabinets. They had not been cleared out, which might bode well, but the young physicist gave no sign of finding anything significant. Outside, the level of bombing seemed to have abated, although it might just have moved further away. ‘There’s nothing here,’ the Russian concluded.
They moved on to the next room, a laboratory. Once Russell had blanked off all three windows, Varennikov used his flashlight to explore the room. The various items of scientific equipment meant nothing to Russell, but the physicist seemed encouraged, and swiftly applied himself to sifting through several filing cabinets’ worth of experimental results.
To no avail. ‘Nothing,’ he said, slamming the last cabinet shut with a loud bang, and then wincing at his own stupidity. ‘Sorry.’
The next room was almost bare, the laboratory that followed devoid of anything useful. Only two small offices remained on this side of the corridor, and the first was replete with papers. Halfway through the first pile, Varennikov extracted a single sheet and sat staring at it for what seemed a long time.
‘Interesting?’ Russell asked.
‘Maybe,’ the Russian said. He put that sheet and several others to one side.
The next office was even more rewarding. Halfway through one folder of papers the Russian’s excitement became almost palpable. ‘This is very interesting,’ he murmured, apparently to himself. ‘An ingenious solution,’ he added in the same tone, taking out the relevant sheet and placing it with the one he had taken from the previous room. Others followed: the beginnings of a nuclear pile in more ways than one.
At the end of the corridor a door and small passage brought them into the Lightning Tower. The particle accelerator had been removed, leaving a vast echoing space, and only the metal stairway spiralling up the sides and the Manhattan-style island of filing cabinets in the centre of the floor precluded the tower’s re-employment as a fairground wall of death. The perfect metaphor for Nazi Germany, Russell thought. Once the petrol ran out, it had dropped like a stone.
‘It must have been huge,’ Varennikov was saying, a look of awe on his face. Almost reluctantly, Russell thought, the Russian turned his torch beam on the filing cabinets, and began rummaging through their contents.
He was soon lost in the task, throat clicking in apparent appreciation as he added more papers to the Moscow-bound sheaf. It took the better part of an hour to riffle through each cabinet, and by then the file was bulging, the physicist smiling. ‘We’ll have to be quick with the rest of the offices,’ Russell told him.
‘Yes, yes,’ Varennikov agreed, with the air of a man who already had what he needed.
Which, as they soon discovered, was just as well. The outside offices contained only administrative records. They found no further evidence of Heisenberg’s progress in creating a German atomic bomb, but they did discover what the famous physicist’s salary was. Russell thought about translating the Reichsmarks into roubles for Varennikov’s enlightenment, but decided it would be unkind.
They were in the last room when two things happened. First there was a shout, a few frantic words in German that included nein. And then, only a heartbeat later, the window blew in, sucking in the roar of an exploding bomb with a hail of shattered glass. Russell felt a sharp pain in his face, and heard Varennikov gasp. An instant later, a second bomb exploded, then another and another, each one sounding a blissful stretch further away.
Russell picked a small shard of glass from his check, and felt the blood run. He trained each eye in turn on the moonlit gardens – both were still working. Varennikov, his flashlight revealed, had lost his right ear-lobe, and the stub was bleeding profusely. He seemed more shocked than harmed.
Russell suddenly remembered the shout. He switched off his flashlight, carefully opened the door, and stepped out into the dark corridor. There was nothing moving, and no sign of Gusakovsky or Kazankin, but a thin wash of light filled the lobby area some twenty metres to his left. And there was a dark shape on the floor.