‘Yes.’
A despairing groan comes from Gibson. He hunches forward, puts the gun on the table. Hanning sits very still; only his eyes move, flickering between Gibson and the pistol.
Svetlana flops into her chair. ‘Jeremy, does your government’s treachery extend to double-crossing my country too?’
Hanning shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. But think of the advantages to any country which has sole access to the secrets of the signallers.’
‘And the hard drive in the cave?’ she asks.
‘The intention was, and is, that it will be taken from you as soon as you have it. So you see, even if by some miracle you escaped from here, you would have no hard evidence to back up your story. It would just be a fantasy thing.’ Hanning’s body language is now defiant. ‘There’s absolutely no purpose in getting rid of me. You’re already defeated.’
Svetlana breaks the brittle silence. ‘Charlie.’
‘What?’ Gibson’s head is on the table, and his arms are cradling it as if to keep out the world.
‘I didn’t trust you when we came here. I thought you might disappear with the disk and try to grab all the kudos for yourself.’
‘So?’ His voice is indifferent.
‘So I made a copy of the disk. It’s in my room.’
Gibson is like a man rising from the dead. He sits upright, visibly swelling. He looks at Hanning as if the man is Satan incarnate, then laughs harshly. His hand goes to the pistol. He takes a deep breath and says, ‘Do it, Vash.’
In the fraction of a second it takes Hanning to understand Gibson’s remark, Shtyrkov is bringing the fire axe hard down, as if he is chopping wood.
Petrie had first fainted, then vomited on and off during the following hour while Svetlana and Shtyrkov had wrapped Hanning’s body in a grey blanket. Gibson and Freya had then seen to the scrubbing down of the kitchen table, chairs and floor, while Shtyrkov had taken Petrie by the arm, led him gently to a settee in the atrium, and described some of the things his grandparents’ generation had had to do in the Patriotic War. Petrie had listened to the horrors with his face buried in his hands.
Freya had then appeared with tea and biscuits, looking as if she had just been baking scones. The cosy normality of this had sent Petrie slightly mad. After a fit of hysterical laughter, he had calmed down sufficiently to drink the tea, giggling and spluttering into it now and then. He got to his feet and staggered apprehensively through to the refectory, while Shtyrkov headed up the stairs to change his blood-spattered clothes and have a shower.
It was impossible to connect the clean, polished refectory with a grisly murder. Petrie looked round in bewilderment. ‘Where is he?’
‘Don’t use the kitchen freezer,’ Gibson advised. He looked at Petrie closely. ‘I don’t think you’re up to this. Maybe Svetlana should go in your place.’
‘I’ll be fine. You need a tough, aggressive male to see it through.’
‘In that case Svetlana should definitely go.’
Svetlana shook her head. ‘There’s nothing I’d love more. But we’ve made the decision. Tom’s the expert on the decipherment.’
‘He’ll be fine,’ Freya said.
‘I’ll be fine. Thanks, Svetlana.’
Gibson adopted a businesslike manner although he was visibly shaking. ‘Okay, we have about ninety minutes. Let’s go over the maps again while Vashislav prepares the copy disks.’
Freya and Tom stood just inside the door they had entered five days earlier.
‘Final check-list,’ Gibson said.
Petrie unzipped his inside pocket. ‘Two disks. One with a sample, the other with the full works. Encrypted.’ He tapped a side pocket. ‘Purse with cash and all your credit cards. Pin numbers memorised.’
‘Freya?’
‘Two disks. One the full signal, the other a message from Vash to his friend in Murmansk, to prove authenticity.’
‘How will he know the message is really from you?’ Gibson asked.
‘It has things on it which only he and I know about.’
‘And Vashislav’s mobile,’ Freya added, feeling a side pocket.
‘With which you can send and retrieve e-mail on the move,’ Vashislav reminded her. ‘I’m sorry that there is only the one between you.’
‘Remember your passwords?’ Gibson asked. ‘One for decrypting the disks, the other for deleting them if you’re loading up under duress.’
Shtyrkov said, ‘I’ve used Blowfish encryption and put a compiled C program into the DVD. Insert the duress password and the program will flash “decrypting” on the screen while it’s busy writing zeros all over the disk.’
Gibson smacked his forehead. ‘I nearly forgot! The screwdriver!’
Freya fiddled with the waistband of her jeans. ‘It’s here, Charlie.’
‘Remember, Tom: fifteen. Not fourteen, not sixteen. Fifteen seconds precisely.’
‘We never did get that game of chess, Vash.’
Gibson said, ‘That’s it, then.’
There was a long, long silence. Shtyrkov eventually broke it. ‘I’d have slaughtered you.’
‘Never. I do a good endgame.’ Damn! Endgame was the wrong word.
But Shtyrkov smiled and said, ‘A good endgame won’t save you, Tom. It needs to be devastating.’
Freya’s eyes were moist.
‘Do this for us.’ Gibson’s voice was strained.
‘Either we’ll get you your immortality, Charlie, or we’ll die trying.’
Svetlana said, ‘It’s probably as well I never married, never had children. Maybe if you have a child some day, Freya…’
‘If it’s a girl she’ll be called Svetlana.’
Gibson said, ‘I think you’d better go.’
There was an exchange of handshakes. Petrie held Svetlana briefly, and then Gibson was opening the door and she was pushing him towards it, and they were out, Freya first. Cold air met them. As the door was closing Petrie looked back and glimpsed Shtyrkov, smiling at him. Then Freya was taking his hand and they walked along the path towards the archway.
Beyond the archway, an army truck was waiting, steam coming from its throbbing exhaust. The canvas flaps were back and there were about a dozen soldiers inside. Most were grinning in the direction of Freya. A bulky Sergeant directed them into a Land Rover. Freya sat next to a dark-skinned, swarthy driver in battledress. The driver nodded curtly. The vehicle grumbled into life and set off down the hill, the lorry following about thirty yards behind.
Past the little church, they turned left. The look-out tower, still snow-capped, was visible over the trees. Then the driver picked up speed on the narrow road and the castle was out of sight and they were heading north, towards an uncertain future.
32
The Madonna
In 1921, in the Demänovskà Valley in the northern part of the Czechoslovakian Low Tatras, a spelunker called A. Král penetrated a cave. The cave, or rather system of caves, turned out to be in four levels connected by steep passages, and to be over eight kilometres long. Bones showed that, long ago, the cave had been penetrated by some bear, which had no doubt wandered in the dark until it died of starvation. Over the years the cave was made accessible through a system of walkways, stairs and galleries, and the public could now visit the sinter waterfalls, the stalagmites and stalactites, the caverns, pools and streams of this Tolkien-like underworld.
In 1951, thirty years after it had first been penetrated, a connection was discovered to another cave system. Thirty-two years on again, in 1983, a speleo-diving team discovered yet another connection, and three years after that the system, now named ‘the Demänovskà Cave of Liberty’, was found to be connected also to ‘the Demänovskà Cave of Peace’. The limestone mountains, it seemed, were honeycombed with tunnels.