She might have broken his heart three years ago, but the damned thing was just about mended, and probably needed retesting. She might be married now, but the fact that her husband was one of the men they were hunting suggested the marriage had seen better days.
And then there was Fedya and Brady. Reason enough, he’d thought, when agreeing to the job. It still was.
A last adventure, he thought, and if he survived, he would try something different. He was almost forty, but these days that wasn’t so old. He would do something with the years he often felt he didn’t deserve, those years that Jed and Fedya would never get to live. Something grounded in kindness rather than cruelty. Something that wasn’t a game played by boys in adult bodies.
Outside a whistle shrieked, and a few moments later the train staggered into motion. He moved himself next to the window and, for the next fifteen minutes, watched Moscow’s bedraggled suburbs slide past. Soon they were steaming past scattered farmsteads and gentle birch-covered hills, the occasional dacha set beside a dull brown stream, an old manorial house clinging to a lee slope, surrounded by tall, waving trees. Of people the land seemed curiously empty—already the train seemed headed into a void, into that vastness where the Mongol arrows had whistled, south and east toward desert wastes and cerulean domes.
Sorochinsk
It had been light for over an hour, and the other occupants of the carriage seemed to be sleeping. Caitlin had already visited the kitchen three cars down, and sweet-talked the cook into bringing meals to her compartment. She would still have to leave her sanctum when nature called, but not for anything else.
She picked up the note and read it again. “Dear Caitlin,” it began, “I know that finding we’re both on this train will be a shock. It certainly was for me. And I’m sure that your first assumption—an understandable one considering our past—was that I’m here on some anti-Bolshevik mission. This is not the case. I’m here in Russia as a personal favor to my old boss. It’s all about Indians plotting something in India and has nothing to do with the Bolshevik government. In fact, as far as I can tell, your government has as much interest in foiling this plot as I do. If we can meet casually—on the platform at one of the stops might be best—I will explain the whole business and try to answer any questions you might have. After that—after we’ve officially met, so to speak—then we should be able to share the odd cup of tea without raising any suspicions. Love, Jack.”
She put the letter down again. She should tear it up, she thought. Throw the pieces out of the window.
She believed him. Or would it be more accurate to say that she didn’t think he was telling deliberate lies? The last time he’d appeared like a jack-in-the-box he’d said much the same, only to later admit that he’d been fooling himself. Was he doing that again?
He was right about one thing—it had been a shock. Her life at the moment felt like a stream of unwelcome surprises: Sergei caught up in robbery and worse, the Zhenotdel under threat, Komarov virtually kidnapping her. And now Jack McColl appearing out of the blue, Jack who she’d thought was safely locked in the past.
Russia might be getting a breathing space, but her own life was being turned every which way.
“If it’s drowning you’re after, don’t torment yourself with shallow waters.” Where had that come from? It was something Aunt Orla had been fond of saying many, many years ago, when Caitlin was a child.
A brave heart, her aunt had called her the last time she’d been home. And maybe sometimes she was. But not at this moment. Her first instinct now was to hide herself away, to keep herself locked in the cabin until they reached wherever it was they were going. She had brought along a suitcase full of work, so why not make use of the time?
She opened the case, took a long look at the contents, and clicked the clasps shut once more. For the moment at least, it felt like news from a foreign country, one whose language she could barely speak.
The hours passed slowly, and she kept dozing off, often waking with a start when the train jerked into motion. It seemed to be stopping at every settlement it came to and spending more time stationary than moving. At several of the stops, she caught glimpses of McColl through the gap between her curtains, usually alone but sometimes talking with other passengers. There was something different about him, but she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was. There was sadness there; he carried himself as if something were pressing down on his shoulders. Maybe he always had, but it wasn’t how she remembered him.
He was doubtless waiting for her to come and join him, but she wasn’t ready to engage with him again, not over this or anything else. And the thought of seeing him day after day—sharing “the odd cup of tea,” for God’s sake—was more than her not-so-brave heart could cope with.
Nor had she any desire to socialize with Komarov or his wretched assistant. They might be on the same side, they might all agree that Brady and Sergei should pay for their crimes, but relishing the hunt wasn’t something she could share. Caitlin was afraid that she’d be standing over her husband’s corpse before all this ended, and however far apart they’d grown, that would never feel right.
Just see it through, she told herself. And then get back to your job.
McColl took a sip from his tumbler of vodka, stared at his reflection in the glass, and realized that the train had stopped yet again. He walked out to the vestibule and pushed his head through the open window in search of an explanation. There was none to see: beyond the orange glow thrown out by the engine fires there was nothing but darkness, no station, no signal, no dwellings.
It had been a long and frustrating day. Earlier that evening one of the drivers had told him that the train had traveled only eighty miles since leaving Moscow almost thirty hours before. Since then, it had probably managed another five. A walker setting off when they had would be quite a way ahead.
He’d seen no sign of Caitlin. At every one of the all-too-frequent stops, he’d strode up and down the platform hoping she would join him, but all to no avail. The good news was that she hadn’t betrayed him—if she had, he’d be in irons. The bad news was that seeing her after all this time had upset him more than he’d expected, awakening thoughts and feelings he’d hoped were dead and buried.
Things would be better, more real, he thought, once a past was not the only thing they had in common. But that could only happen if she came out to talk.
He heard footsteps behind him and knew they weren’t hers.
It was Komarov, bearing a bottle and chess set. “Do you play?” the Russian asked.
“Badly,” McColl replied. Playing chess with the Cheka didn’t seem like the wisest of moves.
“Then we’re well matched,” Komarov said, ignoring McColl’s lack of enthusiasm. He sat himself down in the opposite chair, smoothed out a checkered square of cloth, and began extracting wooden pieces from the lacquered box.
McColl felt bound to acquiesce. He hadn’t played chess for years. His uncle had taught him originally, on winter evenings in the parlor of the Polmadie house, and he had made his first friends at Oxford through the chess club, one of the few university institutions that hadn’t seemed to require a blood certificate as qualification for membership. Most of those friends had been Jews, fellow outcasts at that shrine of good breeding.
Komarov was holding out his fists. McColl picked white and began. As he moved his pawn forward, the train lurched into motion again.