“No, they won’t. But losing doesn’t make them wrong, merely on the wrong side of the law.”
“Your law.”
“The party’s law, comrade. Someone has to decide what is permitted and what is not,” he said matter-of-factly, easing himself off the desk, “and for us it can only be the party.”
The telephone rang. It was for him. She walked across to the window, looked out on the sunlit street, listened to him repeat an address in Serpukhovskaya.
“We’ve found the room where your husband’s comrades were living,” he told her. “And the five are now six. An Indian,” he added quickly, obviously noticing her alarm. “I am sorry. I will inform you myself if your husband is found.”
Before or after having him shot? she wondered, as the click of Komarov’s heels faded on the stairs.
The house in Serpukhovskaya was an old one, and the single bourgeois family who’d occupied it before the revolution had given way to ten or more families living in single or paired rooms. The children playing in the stairwell fell silent as the Cheka men climbed, then burst back into noisy life the moment they reached the room at the top. Komarov could smell the corpse from outside the door; the Indian was laid out on one of three old mattresses.
This face was locked in terror.
“Take him to the morgue,” Komarov told two of his subordinates after taking a long look. He went to the window for a gulp of fresh air and stood there for a moment, enjoying the view across the rooftops, before turning to examine the room.
There was a three-legged table and a homemade brick stove, its ramshackle pipe chimney disappearing through a rough-hewn gap in the roof. A rusty typewriter sat on a cupboard that had lost all its drawers. Taken for fuel, Komarov assumed, like the missing floorboards in the corner; over the last three winters Moscow rooms had been turned into stage sets by the hunger for wood. On one raid earlier that year, they’d found a room with three armchairs, each positioned over a neatly cut hole in the floor.
He stirred the ashes in the stove—nothing. He lifted each mattress, and under the third found a scrunched-up piece of paper bearing the words Gone to Library. The American, Komarov decided. There was something about the large scrawl that suggested a foreigner.
“Nothing,” Maslov muttered.
“On the contrary,” Komarov said, passing him the piece of paper.
“How does that help us?”
“Think,” Komarov suggested.
Maslov thought. “If we find the library, we might get a better description,” he said sceptically.
Komarov sighed. “If we find the library, we might find out what they’re planning.”
Maslov looked at him blankly.
“If you were planning to cause some trouble, in a place that you didn’t know well, you would probably do some research.”
Several miles to the north, McColl heaved himself up and over a brick wall. What had been a garden was now a jungle, and as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he could hear the animal population taking evasive action. Which was all to the good. Those quadrupeds that had survived the last few winters in Moscow would have sharp reflexes and even sharper teeth.
The back door of the house sprung open at a touch. He stepped inside, heard the scamper of more tiny feet, and carefully worked his way toward the front, where a faint yellow light shone through the glassless window above the boarded entrance.
The front room was similarly lit and empty but for a large framed painting of a white country house, which hung drunkenly askew on the wall to his left. Most of the floorboards had been cut from the floor, leaving what looked like a series of runs for the rats.
The back room was completely dark, so he decided to risk a match.
The flare revealed a hundred square feet of functioning civilization: a bed, a chair, a table bearing books, an oil lamp, and a crust of bread. There was a threadbare carpet on the floor and heavy curtains pulled across the window.
McColl lit the lamp and started to search.
It took about twenty minutes—a notebook and papers were stashed beneath a loose floorboard. He doused the lamp and left the same way he’d arrived, dropping into the darkened alley behind the row of houses and emerging back onto Bogoslovski Street. Thirty minutes later he was back in his room at the Hotel Lux, the door wedged shut, his find spread across the bed. Suvorov had possessed seven sets of false identity papers.
The notebook contained a series of messages, coded on the left-hand pages, decoded on the right. The last of these was longer than most. McColl read it through twice, then sat staring into space, stroking his lower lip with his little finger. It was more than a little unnerving to see the order for his own elimination written out in black and white, particularly when the writer was supposedly on the same side.
Not that he had a side anymore, but the bastards at Five didn’t know that.
McColl had been surprised and vaguely amused by Cumming’s original request to check on a Five operation in Russia. What sort of idiots spent their time and energy on supposed enemy soil plotting against their own compatriots? It had seemed absurd, still did. He’d agreed to come only because of Brady’s involvement.
And because it got him out of Wormwood Scrubs.
So. What was Five planning? It had to be something unusually important—or unusually sordid—for Kell’s people to declare open season on the Service. Or to even consider using someone like Brady.
But what?
He went back to the earlier messages in the notebook. Most of the recent ones concerned an operation styled “Good Indian.”
He remembered Ruzhkov reporting that Brady’s Indian comrades were not enamored of Gandhi. Could that be what they and Five had in common?
What was that phrase that the US general had coined? That the only good Indian was a dead one?
Komarov had imagined that there were about ten libraries still functioning in the city; there turned out to be more than fifty. Since the spring they had been rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the civil war, their book stocks preserved with a fanaticism that Dzerzhinsky would struggle to match. Maslov, of course, found only irritation in the unexpected scope of the search, but Komarov, staring out of his office window at the fierce summer rain sweeping across the courtyard, felt rather pleased; on any list of civilization’s prerequisites, he thought, public libraries would come higher than most. It was a sign that the revolution could be normalized, that the best of the past would still have a place in the new society.
It took his men slightly over thirty-six hours to track down Brady’s library.
Both women on duty that afternoon remembered the American comrade, and yes, he had been consulting books on India and Central Asia: accounts of journeys, of the Russian conquest of Turkestan; historical and political studies of the British Empire in India; even some ancient histories of the general area. He’d always been most courteous.
“They’re headed for India then,” Maslov said as the car carried them back to the M-Cheka offices. It was still raining, but with none of the morning’s vigor.
“Apparently,” Komarov muttered.
“Then our job is over. It’s just a matter of alerting Tashkent and the Frontier Cheka.”
Komarov wondered if Maslov had any idea how long the relevant frontier was. “Perhaps,” he said mildly.
A message was waiting on his desk: the train carrying Marusya Dzharova had finally reached Samara. The two men went up to the wireless telephone room and waited patiently while the operator connected them with the Volga city. Once established, the line was remarkably clear: Vitaly Kozorov, the chairman of the Samara Cheka, sounded as if he might be in the building next door.