“He wanted to know if it was going to be a wet night,” Gorchakov said. “He knows me. I said it might be a little damp but he was to mind his own business.”
“Will he?”
“Oh, yes. He wants a promotion. I told him I’d try to do something if he proved he could keep his mouth shut.”
It was two in the morning before anything happened. Gorchakov was almost asleep. They had moved the van three times so that the work crew could change the huge banners. Tarp was leaning against the front of the vehicle, wanting sleep; Repin was standing a few feet out toward the square, staring down toward the wall.
A pair of automobile headlights appeared far down the square. Repin looked at them, then back into the shadow of the truck. The car drove into the square and stopped. Then, very deliberately, it turned and came slowly toward them.
“Behind the van!” Repin hissed. He pushed Tarp ahead of him. “Down!” he shouted at Gorchakov.
The Guards major was rubbing his eyes. When Tarp got around to the far side of the van, he opened the door and reached up and grabbed the shoulder of Gorchakov’s coat. “Down!” he said as he pulled the stocky Russian to the seat.
The car came on slowly, the way the police cars did, with a ponderous self-confidence. It almost stopped with its headlights shining on the van before it turned and went by them, and Tarp, looking past the fender, saw the pale shape of a face at the rear window as somebody studied the workmen.
“You think?” he said to Repin.
“Maybe.”
“There’s more than one.”
“I expected that. In fact, there are four.”
“All right. Let’s get ready.”
He went around the back of the van and came up on the driver’s side. The other car was visible only as a pair of red lights, still moving slowly. Tarp opened the door and got in, motioning Gorchakov into the middle.
“What are you doing?” the Guards major objected.
“Making sure you stay noninvolved.”
Repin was already getting in the other side. The black box was in one hand, the red light shining like an eye; he had the big pistol in the other. “I want your gun, Major,” Repin said.
“What?”
Repin reached into his leather coat and took the pistol out. Tarp ran his hands over the man’s ankles and calves. “You’re making a terrible mistake!” Gorchakov said.
“It’s for your own good,” Tarp growled. “This was the arrangement.”
The tube was in the wall diagonally across the square, a hundred yards away. The other car had made its turn at the corner to their right and was now moving slowly along the wall in which the tube was hidden. Tarp started the engine and the van rolled forward.
At that moment the other car’s lights went off.
Tarp needed no other evidence. He slammed the van into gear and stepped on the accelerator and the tires squealed. The van bolted and their heads snapped back, and then they were hurtling across the square in the darkness. He felt the tires strike a low curb, bounce over it, and rush on. He was driving one-handed because of the big pistol. Gorchakov had both hands up on the dash to brace himself.
Reflected light from the sky made the car a black blot against the darkness of the wall. He thought he saw movement near it. The car was parked well away from the wall itself and thirty yards back from the place where the tube lay, giving the men in the car an unlimited field of fire if they needed it.
Repin ducked as they came close. He had seen something that Tarp had not.
The windshield dissolved.
Tarp cut the van across the front of the car, his own right side missing it only by inches. As they passed it he heard two thuds against the van’s right side, but Gorchakov was shouting, “Go on, go on!” There were more thuds. My God, this thing’s armored,Tarp was thinking as he spun the wheel. They’re using silencers and this is an armored car. He sensed that Repin was flinching low on his side and Gorchakov was doing something to his face as he hit the brake and wrenched the wheel around; the van went into a skid just past the car and went on skidding over slick paving stones, careening toward the wall in a controlled spin until the right rear end hit the Kremlin Wall with a stolid boom like the closing of a vault. Then he accelerated again and the van leaped away from the wall, and he brought it to a stop between the dark shape of a man up by the wall, on Repin’s side, and the car and the men with the guns, on his.
Then Repin was out of the van and Tarp had his own door open. A door on the passenger side of the car started to open and Tarp fired three times, the Makarov going off in the constricted space of the van with an ear-bursting loudness.
The car lurched suddenly forward and turned to its left to go around him and get at Repin.
Tarp stood on the accelerator, and the van rammed into the car just behind the right front wheel.
The two vehicles accelerated over the pavement of the square, locked together. Tarp could hear the screech of metal and the heartbeat thud of a blown tire. A trail of sparks spattered along the pavement where broken metal dragged.
His door had slammed shut again. He rolled the window down and then put the Makarov out in his left hand and fired down into the car’s roof until the gun was empty, but the car was still trying to escape the grip of the van, and he knew that the driver was still alive. He looked wildly into the cab of the van, thinking he might somehow reload the Makarov, and he saw Gorchakov reaching under the driver’s seat and coming up with a shiny mass of metal in his hand. For an instant Tarp thought it was over: Gorchakov was holding a .44 magnum revolver, a gun so big it made the Makarov look like a toy.
Without a word Gorchakov handed him the pistol.
Tarp put two shots through the car’s roof and two into its engine block. The sound of the engine changed and then began to mount toward a runaway whine, and then the van was dragging the car instead of keeping pace with it. Tarp took his foot from the accelerator and let both vehicles come to a stop.
Tarp jumped from the right side of the car with Gorchakov holding the door. He came more slowly around the rear of the two vehicles, and as he passed the rear window of the car there was a shot and he fired twice and the big magnum rounds crashed into the sheet metal and there was no more shooting. The man behind the wheel of the car was dying. Tarp reached in and turned off the ignition. He could smell burned rubber and hot metal, and in the silence after the engine stopped he heard two men trying to breathe, dying.
Tarp sprinted across the square. A red light was blinking on top of the van already, planted up there by Gorchakov. Far away, the lights of two cars came on; at the other end of the square the lights on the banners were bright and brave, but the scaffolding was empty of workmen.
There was one figure standing by the wall. There was a puddle of darkness on the ground nearby and a vague, small shape of a lighter color where an ungloved hand lay like a flower.
Tarp slowed, walked a few steps, stopped, the magnum held ready.
“Repin?”
“Well?”
“Is it Telyegin?”
“Of course.”
Tarp walked slowly to him and looked down at the twisted body. It looked thin and without bulk, a pile of sticks with a coat thrown over it.
“Did he say anything?” Tarp said carefully.
“What would he have said?” Repin’s voice was very thin, as if his throat were constricted.