He knelt, firing through the gap between two steps, into the centre of the dark shape. The gun was very loud in the cold air, seeming to halt the traffic. Something plucked away from the rail beside his head in the same moment as there was a little spit of flame from the shadow of the man's coat. Then a purpled face as it caught the light of the street lamp, and the body falling backwards, something metallic skittering away across the frosty concrete of the path. He clattered down the last flight, the Stechkin making separate flat concussions as he held it and the rail in one gloved hand, steadying himself.
He did not bother to inspect the form on the ground, but ran away from it, his feet uncertain, the momentum threatening to spill him on the ground at any moment. He skidded round the side of the flats into the wall of lights and noise of the Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He thought he had heard a summons behind him, but could not be certain. He slipped the gun into the pocket of his coat where he could reach it easily, and weaved his way through the thick flow of traffic. In front of a bus, the lights glaring in his face, then a car screeching as the brakes were applied — suddenly the traffic coming from the opposite direction, and a moment of disorientation. Then three lanes of halted traffic, and he was a minute from the Kievskaia Metro station.
He began to walk, head bowed, fur hat settled firmly on his head, hands in the pockets of his thick overcoat. He was on his way home, an ordinary citizen.
Behind him, the dark stain of the overcoat lumped on the path had decided everything. Now, he was irrevocably determined upon a course of action. He was an outlaw now, a murderer. The single act gleamed in his confusion like a beacon. It did not matter, his moral assessment of the act. This had moulded his mental proportions like the hands of a potter; he had to find Gorochenko, and stop him, and help him escape.
He passed through the barrier, a marble bust of Lenin in a small alcove just beyond it, and descended the escalator to the platform. The station was crowded with home-going workers, and he saw the KGB men, two of them, eyes swivelling hopelessly as they tried to identify and assimilate each face that passed them. They would know that now, for perhaps an hour and a half, they had very little chance of sighting him and making a positive ID.
He stood against the wall on the platform, the crowd washing in front of him, bunching like seaweed moved by a gentle sea, keeping warm, staring at the map of the metro on the opposite wall, reading the paper, talking. They were only, in his eyes, camouflage. Only he was real in the scene.
The train sighed into the station, strips of bright light from the crowded, fuggy carriages elongating, separating as the carriages slowed. The doors slid open. He glanced swiftly along the platform in both directions. He was so far ahead of them, there was no disturbance. Even though, by the time he reached Revolution Square station, they might have sealed the exits.
He had no time to worry about it. The doors slid shut behind him.
A woman, against whom his side pressed as the train jogged, sensed the imprint of the gun for what it was, and looked up at him. His face was set, his eyes staring, and she knew that he must be KGB. She never looked at him again. Rather, she tried to edge a little from him in the packed compartment.
Darkness — Arbatskaia — darkness.
No evidence of special, concentrated activity. They were slow, too slow. The violent death of the man on watch had caught them unprepared. Anna Dostoyevna was a name on a long list, and they were looking for Gorochenko there. Instead, they had found him, and he had killed one of them. Orders were needed. Kapustin was in a car somewhere, being fed the information that a KGB man at the Vosstaniya flats was dead, and had undoubtedly been killed by Vorontsyev. Units all over the centre of the city would have to be alerted.
He bent his knees slightly, as if urging the train to greater speed, his body suddenly possessed by his race against the unwieldy net dosing round him.
A bright glare of platform lights, and the name sliding as if in oil past the window — Revolution Square. He grimaced at the appropriateness of his destination. He pushed to the door, panicking momentarily as his arms were jammed into his pockets by the pressure of bodies. Someone glanced round at the pressure of the Stechkin's ugly shape, then looked ahead as they saw his eyes. He stumbled on to the platform, hemmed in by the crowd, a bobbing mass of fur caps and hats and woollen scarves ahead and alongside him.
He turned left with the crowd's momentum, then broke from them as they passed through to another platform, for another train. He looked up. A few individuals, strung loosely like irregular beads on the necklace of the escalator. He stepped on, watched his feet as the stairway froze into steps, and then kept his eyes ahead of him, up the long steep flight towards the exit. He could feel the colder air of the street above, and the gun was hard in his hand.
He walked up perhaps a dozen steps, until he was close behind a middle-aged man with a battered briefcase and wool len mittens, and a woman in a shapeless brown coat. Then the stairs smoothed to a run, and he was on the tiles of the foyer. Slowly, it seemed to him, he moved behind the man and the woman towards the exit, a narrow space between two glass booths. The occupants of the booths wore Metro staff uniforms. There was no policeman at the foot of the steps to the street.
Perhaps, moving back into the centre of the hive, he had wrong-footed his pursuers. They would expect him to flee outwards on the metro, flung off from the hub by the centrifugal violence of his action.
Then, as he passed his ticket to the unseeing man in the booth, he saw Alevtina's face in front of him, as if the girl had stepped out from behind some screen or appeared like a camera trick. She was with another man from the Frunze Quay whose name Vorontsyev could not recall. Her mouth opened in a greeting that changed to sudden despair as she remembered her quarry and her duty. Her hand went to her waist, and Vorontsyev saw the holster, and Alevtina reaching for a gun. Someone bumped Vorontsyev in the back, and he turned as if attacked, seeing the bent-headed individual slip past him, a curse on his mouth, rubbing his arm from the collision. By then it was too late.
Alevtina had the Makarov out of the holster, and the other man, moving to one side, was drawing his automatic.
'Please, Major—!' The girl said, her eyes wide with desperation. It was a selfless plea. Vorontsyev, his own gun still buried in his clothing, caught on the lip of the pocket, hurled himself against her, easily knocking her off balance. In the same moment, the gun came free and he fired from behind Alevtina at the man. Someone screamed as the gun went off, and went on screaming as he fired twice more. The man was flung over the barrier near the glass booth, somersaulting backwards into an untidy, graceless heap on the other side.
He heard Alevtina say, 'Put down the gun — put down the gun!' It was a high-pitched voice, shocked and appalled. Vorontsyev looked at her, half-up from the tiles, the gun levelled at him. And he knew he could kill her.
Instead, he ran for the exit, leaping the few steps. Behind him, and distinct from what followed, he heard the explosion of the gun above the screams that were coming from bystanders.
Then his leg went, and he lurched against the wall, gripping the iron gate folded back from the station entrance to support his sudden weakness. He looked down. Nothing. Yet his sock felt wet, and he was certain the shoe squelched as he tried to walk. Pain shot through his leg, burning into thigh and groin. Alevtina had shot him. He whirled round, stumbled, and a man stared at him uncomprehendingly as he passed. She was standing at the foot of the steps.
Vorontsyev shot her twice. The girl seemed surprised rather than hurt. Then she was unmistakably dead. He turned away, stifling the sob in his throat, the extended gun warding off pedestrians. He limped badly almost at once, and the numbness of the bullet's passage had already gone. His nerves shrieked with the pain of his own weight on his left leg.