McColl threw himself forward, shoving the door as he did so. Something swished past his head, and the room fell back into darkness.
“Rafiq!” McColl whispered loudly as he struggled to his feet. “Akbar,” he added more softly, using the Indian’s code name.
The response was an attack. Something flailed through the air and crashed into McColl’s left shoulder, sending spasms of pain through his upper arm. He threw a punch into the darkness and felt it connect, but the something hit him again, on almost the same spot, and he went down.
A black shape loomed over him. McColl lunged forward, grappling for a hold, and they both fell across a bed, before tumbling onto the floor beyond. A foot dug into his stomach, pushing him into a wall, and suddenly a hand was at his throat, a shadow rising and falling against the ceiling. He squirmed aside, trying to knee his assailant in the balls, but managed only to lever him sideways.
McColl rolled free across the bed and back down onto the floor. As the other man came around the end of the bed, McColl threw out both legs, aiming at the shins. The man stumbled, tried and failed to keep his balance, and fell through the curtains, striking the frame of the half-open window with a soft, sharp crack.
It was a sound that McColl had heard only once before, and guiltily remembered ever since: playing for the school football team, he had wildly thrown himself into a tackle, and badly broken another boy’s leg.
With the curtains now divided, he could see the prone body arched across the sill. Was the man dead or merely unconscious?
Still breathing heavily from all the exertion, McColl grabbed hold of the feet, pulled his attacker back into the room, and drew the curtains. Grabbing a sheet from a bed, McColl rolled it up and laid it across the foot of the door before turning on the light.
His assailant had been a short, powerful-looking man with thinning blond hair and a wide, typically Russian face. His head was now at an unnatural angle; the crack had been his neck. McColl turned him over to get a better look at his face, and received another shock. The last place he’d seen these features was on a photograph in Cumming’s office. The man’s name was Pitirim Suvorov, and he was one of Five’s men in Moscow.
What had he been doing in Rafiq’s room?
And had he known whom he was attacking?
McColl could ponder such questions later. He went to the door and put an ear against it. He couldn’t hear movement or voices, and if no one had turned up by now, it seemed unlikely that they would. If his struggle with Suvorov had been overheard—and it beggared belief that it hadn’t—then the listeners had decided it wasn’t their business. Which, McColl decided, wasn’t that surprising—the foreign delegates in the surrounding rooms would consider any investigation the prerogative of their hosts.
Repressing a keen desire to get out while the going was good, he embarked on a search of the room.
A jacket hung on the back of the door yielded some Kerensky notes, a few kopek coins, and an unopened packet of Russian cigarettes. On the small table between the beds, there were piles of Congress literature and three books, all in English: Dickens’s Bleak House, a compendium of Gokhale’s speeches, and H. G. Wells’s Kipps. McColl flicked through the pages in search of handwritten notes, but there were none.
The only suitcase was Rafiq’s—his name was stenciled inside the lid, along with a Lahore address. Inside it McColl found a pair of opera glasses, a small wooden Ganesha, and a crumpled map of Tashkent. The rest was clothes. There was nothing to suggest that Rafiq wasn’t the foreign comrade the Russians thought he was.
McColl put the map in his pocket, thinking it might help bolster his cover, and turned his attention back to the dead man. If neither Rafiq nor Nasim returned that night, a housemaid would probably find the body next morning—the Bolsheviks, as far as he knew, still employed such people. Later, of course, would be better: the longer the corpse stayed undetected, the longer the Cheka would take to identify its owner.
So what should he do? Removing the corpse from the room would cut the connection between Rafiq and Suvorov, and help to muddy the waters, but where could McColl move it to? A bedding cupboard? The out-of-order lift?
And why take the risk? Dragging a corpse down hotel corridors was the sort of behavior that got you noticed.
The only thing he could do was hide it in the room, which meant under one of the beds. He dragged it between the two, then rolled it under the one that stood against two walls and bent the legs away from the open end. It was now invisible to anyone standing, which was probably the best he could hope for.
Standing once more with his ear to the door, he could hear nothing stirring outside. A quick silent prayer to whatever God looked after spies, and he was quietly stepping out of the room and into a gratifyingly empty passage.
A few seconds later, back in his room, he found himself starting to shake.
Rafiq was dead when Piatakov got back to Brady’s room.
“I didn’t think he’d make it,” Brady said as he finished packing his bag.
“Are we just going to leave him there on the bed?” Piatakov asked. Was he imagining it, or had both pillows been under Rafiq’s head when he left?
“Why not?” Brady replied.
Piatakov grunted his agreement and asked himself whether it mattered if Brady had hastened the Indian’s death. Not a lot, he decided. Spies and traitors knew the price of failure.
“Those coins on the table are yours,” Brady told him.
Piatakov tipped most of them into his shoulder bag, saving just a few for his pockets. With their small denominations, they wouldn’t last long—a half-decent fortune-teller might see further robberies in their future. If they had one.
But the walk to the yard was less fraught than he expected, the silence of the postcurfew streets offering plentiful warning of Cheka or militia patrols, either motorized or on foot. As they passed a billboard bearing the slogan let those who are not for us leave russia, Brady murmured, “We’re trying.”
An hour after leaving the house, Piatakov was sitting in a boxcar doorway, his legs dangling over the side, as the train threaded its way out of the vast Paveletsky yards. Brady was already asleep inside.
Another departure, Piatakov thought, another moment like the one in 1916, when he’d known in his heart there was no going back.
After that leave-taking, there’d been several months when he’d doubted the choice and his reasons for making it. His father, who’d pressed Sergei in vain to join the service after his older son was lost at sea, had died only a few weeks before, and Piatakov sometimes feared he had joined up when he did mostly to spite the old man.
They certainly hadn’t gotten on in those last few years. As a child Piatakov had worshipped this large overbearing man, who appeared out of nowhere with his tales of other worlds, but he had gradually come to know his father for who and what he was. Or perhaps not gradually—something fundamental had changed after he listened in on one particular conversation between his parents. He couldn’t remember what it was about, but he knew that his mother had been right and his father wrong, and that her way of seeing the world was the one he instinctively shared. His father had the practical intelligence, but he’d barged his way through life, seeing little and closing doors behind him. His mother had been too generous for her own good, but the world had been a better place for her presence.
Piatakov had been about fourteen when he’d overheard that exchange, the age at which boys usually swap their affections in the other direction. But then, he’d always been a misfit, like the man now snoring behind him.