I grabbed Anna by the straps of my Roots backpack — good thing she’d been wearing it or the laptop would have been toast — and yanked her into motion. “You shouldn’t be here! Run!”
“We shouldn’t be here!” Anna yelled, breaking into a sprint.
Running down Lesi Ukrainky, I heard the Lada’s engine-RPM red-line. It mounted the sidewalk in hot pursuit. We were hemmed in on our right by a palisade of apartment buildings and by the boulevard to our left. An opening into a courtyard lay dead ahead. I grabbed Anna’s hand and yanked her in behind me. The Lada bounced off the curb and skidded by.
I knew from previous shortcuts that the courtyard was a typical Soviet inspired vertical sided crater formed by several apartment blocks enclosing a common area. The buildings, like the apartment we’d abandoned twenty four hours earlier, were accessed by stairwells and shafts. There was only one opening at the bottom of each shaft and no connecting corridors. Only one way in and only one way out, through heavy steel self-locking doors at the bottom of each shaft. I scanned light sources for one that reached all the way to the ground, desperate for a stairwell door left ajar.
When I’d lateraled right, into the courtyard with Anna, I’d heard the Lada’s doors slam. Now it was hollered threats accompanied by jack-booted feet pumping pavement, crushing ice. It was like the thugs were right on us when I saw a sliver of light. One of those steel doors, left ajar. I whirled, colliding with Anna. Begging the door not to shut, I jammed my hand into the crack and hauled it open. We flew through into the stairwell, pulling the handle hard behind us. The door slammed locked just before the skinheads piled into it.
“Go, go, go!” I yelled, pointing up the stairwell. Anna scrambled for the stairs and I punched the top floor button in the elevator and jumping out before its doors closed.
We climbed five or six floors up through the crumbling cement stairwell. The skinheads’ pounding on the entrance below went silent. Like hikers treed by a grizzly, we waited and listened.
Anna sat on the sixth floor landing. The upper floors might have been abandoned. There was no light other than an eerie mercury vapor glow oozing in through filthy stairwell windows. “Well, what now?” Her feet rested on the top stair, she hugged her knees.
“I have no idea.” I eased myself down beside her. It invoked an interesting symphony of pain.
Anna might have sensed it. She put her arm around me and my layers of insulation, sighed and lowered her chin to my shoulder. “I guess we wait.”
Eventually we descended. I cracked the door to the courtyard, half expecting the business end of a handgun to poke through. Nothing… we were okay, so far. “I knew this wasn’t a good idea.”
Anna said nothing.
“What do you think? Should we go back?” I opened the door enough to see most of the courtyard.
“Back to where?”
“The subway, downtown, I don’t know.”
“The Grand Eastern?”
“Obviously not.” I gently closed the door, I wasn’t ready to enter the courtyard and hear it lock behind us. “But I wonder if we should go for the film or just forget it and get out.”
A woman with a small dog emerged from the elevator, stared at us standing there before flinging the door wide open. “Make sure you close it hard behind you or it doesn’t lock.” The dog and woman left. The door slammed and locked.
“She’s right about it not locking. Good thing for us.”
Anna smiled then got serious. “Okay, we need that film unless they are already at the apartment. Can you find out if they have been there?”
“How?” I shrugged.
“Phone someone. You are a spy. Do what you do.”
“I’m not a spy. I don’t do this. Besides, I’ve got no one to call. We’ll head for the apartment and if it looks like anyone’s been there, get out fast.”
With Sergei at the station, we’d either been followed or he’d been expecting us at that stop. Either way, our pursuers didn’t know about the film and must have assumed we wouldn’t be stupid enough to go for the apartment after being detected. At least, that’s what I was counting on.
Anna started out first, walking into the freezing night toward the apartment. On the lookout for trouble, I watched her go and then followed slowly, moving inconspicuously and keeping to the shadows.
The Prokuratura loomed over the street, bathed in sodium vapor light. “Okay, we’re home. What do you think, Jess?”
“I think we go in. Carefully.”
Anna entered the code and hiding behind the door, pulled it open. The old familiar stairwell, no sign of trouble. We crept up the stairs to the fourth floor. Peering around corners, we watched for any of the tufted upholstery-over-plate-steel apartment doors open a crack, ready for ambush. Muffled squawking from TV sets leaked into the stairwell along with the usual sounds of domestic life. Our door was locked and apparently untouched. Taking a deep breath I inserted the key and turned it.
Everything was just as we left it. The abandoned laundry had acquired a stronger stench, though. Rooms and closets checked, we changed into clean clothes. Anna, her hunger taking a backseat to danger, went for the fridge and began wolfing down whatever she found. I hauled out the cupboard and reached behind for the canisters of exposed film. I was sure they were gone, then what? No, there they were! I tore them loose and packed them in the lead lined Pelican case. “Film’s safe in the film-safe. Time to go.”
“Just a second.” Munch, munch, munch.
Hearing Anna toothing into whatever she’d found had me ravenously hungry. I tossed the Pelican case down the hall into the vestibule, veered right, and made a beeline for the open fridge. Sinking my teeth into a hunk of well aged asiago, Russian orders, course and distinct, erupted in the stairwell. It sounded like several men and they weren’t Ukrainian.
“Dinner’s over. We’ve got company!” I crammed the rest of the cheese into my mouth.
Swearing, banging and crashing from the floors below got louder. Doors were kicked and slammed. Tenants added to the cacophony with their own shouts, threats and expletives. The intruders, moving from door to door, were looking for a couple of women. I had a pretty good idea which ones. When they kicked at our door, Anna shrieked. I tried to muffle her, but too late. One of them heard and barked an order to, “Open up, or you’re dead!” followed by the promise that there would be no trouble.
We held our breath.
Then, gunfire.
“This is bloody serious!” I yelled at Anna. “Balcony! Drop ice on the cars. Make the alarms go off. Get attention!”
I lifted the receiver on the land-line phone: dead.
“Stay down. Go!” I added, careening around the corner toward the entrance hall and the film case I’d left there. Plaster and splintered wood blasted from the vestibule into my face. Whatever the caliber, the bullets were cutting through both the steel outer door and the solid hardwood inner door with enough force left over to crater the opposite wall, and they were coming from something seriously automatic.
“Shit!” I screamed, dropping and scrambling backwards on my butt. With my foot, I hooked the strap on the Pelican case and dragged it with me. The first crash made it sound like the thugs were using a telephone pole for a battering ram. Anna ran toward me and froze. I reached for her ankles and yanked her down. She fell hard. “Stay down! They have fucking artillery. Don’t think these walls will stop those bullets!”