‘There’s our DNA,’ Banin mumbled to himself.
Caught off balance, Ryumin tumbled to the ground. Using a bar stool, he hoisted himself up, then after making a rude gesture at the Americans, he left. The Americans talked to each other for a minute, then followed.
‘That’s all I’ve got,’ Vasnetsov said, stopping the tape.
‘You don’t have any cameras outside?’ Banin asked.
‘Outside? There’s enough crap happening inside for me to worry about what happens outside.’
Fair enough, Banin thought. ‘Okay, Mr. Vasnetsov, you’ve been very helpful. Thank you for your time.’
Banin made a move to leave, but Vasnetsov grabbed his arm.
‘Wait! What about my tapes? What about the other crimes?’
Banin yanked his arm from Vasnetsov’s grip. ‘I’ll send an officer down to collect the evidence — tell him about it.’ Then he walked out the room with Abram following, leaving Vasnetsov grumbling to himself.
‘Look’s like we’ve got ourselves a motive,’ Abram said, struggling to keep up with Banin’s quick strides.
‘It looks that way,’ Banin said, but he wasn’t convinced. Why would these people, these Americans, come and visit Ryumin in a grotty bar in the middle of nowhere? And why would they try to kill him? And who was the white-haired man? The TV said he was RFSA, but his DNA said he was US government. And where the hell did Aleks Dezhurov fit into all this? It made no sense, none of it did. Whatever was going on had got under Banin’s skin, and he needed to work it back out again. There was no backing out now.
‘Shit,’ he muttered to himself.
When Sean came to, it was pitch black. It was also hot, close, and there was a musty smell in the air. He struggled, but he was bound with his hands behind him to a post with what felt like rope. A thin crack of sunlight beamed in ahead of him. Everything was quiet.
‘Did Sean say when he was going to be back?’
Aleks peered through the blinds, watching cars trailing by at the end of the road, hoping one of them had Sean in it.
‘No, he didn’t,’ Novitskiy said as he read the morning paper.
Aleks left the blinds and returned to pacing the room. ‘He can’t have meant to be gone for this long. It doesn’t feel right.’
‘It’s only been a day,’ Grigory said from the kitchen. He was cracking eggs into a frying pan, which filled the room with a loud sizzling. ‘He was gone longer than that last time.’
That much was true, but he had gone to America, not half an hour down the road. Aleks wandered back to the blinds to look through them again. ‘I think something’s wrong,’ he said.
Novitskiy threw his paper on the table. ‘Well what do you suggest we do? He didn’t say where he was going, what he was doing, and probably for good reason.’
‘But, he’s just a kid…’
‘He’s not just a kid,’ Novitskiy said. ‘He may look like one, but he’s not. He can look after himself.’ He retrieved his newspaper and shook it back open.
In a flash decision, Aleks grabbed his jacket and walked to the door. ‘I’m going out.’
‘You won’t find him,’ Novitskiy said from behind his paper.
‘What about your eggs?’ Aleks heard Grigory shout as he shut the door behind him.
Something didn’t feel right, not at all. Something felt very wrong, in fact. Novitskiy was correct about one thing: Sean wasn’t just a kid, and so far he’d managed to keep himself out of trouble. Whatever it was he was doing, he’d missed something, been caught out. Aleks needed to find him before he landed in real trouble, if he hadn’t already.
He started Grigory’s truck and turned it around. He waited, engine running and road open ahead of him, frozen in his seat. Novitskiy was right about another thing: what could he do? He slapped the steering wheel out of frustration, and the horn gave a pathetic honk. He knew exactly what he needed to do, even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself. It was simple: he had to go to the police. It was going to be suicide. He was a wanted man, but a lifetime in prison without the blood of the innocent on his hands was far more preferable than freedom and the weight of a guilty conscience. At least, that’s how he felt right at that moment; before he had a chance to change his mind, he put the truck into gear and set off for Moscow.
Chapter 25
The Director of the Baikonur Cosmodrome gave himself a mental pat on the back. They’d done it again, and he watched the last few wisps of trailing smoke dissipate with a sense of pride and satisfaction. It had been touch and go, but the deadline had been met and TMA Eleven M had left the ground without fault. The whole thing did, however, leave him feeling twenty years his senior.
‘I’m getting too old for this,’ he muttered to himself.
Sally dreamed that she was on a boat, lost at sea. There was a storm, and the waves crashed higher and higher around her, rocking the boat, tossing her from side to side. The waves rose over the edge of the hull, falling as foam around her, on her, soaking her to the bone. But the water was warm, and it caressed her, folding around her in soothing blankets that gave her a feeling deep inside that was wonderfully comforting. She felt safe.
She awoke in Mikhail’s arms, and she savoured the warmth of his breath on the back of her neck until she could no longer ignore the complaints of her bladder. She slid free of Mikhail’s gentle grasp, unzipped his quarters enough to slip through, zipped it shut again and took herself to the toilet, giggling as she enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness for the first time since she’d arrived — she really was walking on air.
Finished, she floated on down to the galley to fix herself some breakfast. She was hungry, and her stomach gurgled as she heated up some honeyed porridge. She wasn’t normally a porridge fan, but today she fancied it. It wasn’t long before the pouch of steaming paste was emptied, consumed with a gusto usually reserved for quiet nights in with ice cream and a good movie. Pouch deposited in the waste disposal, she decided that she would go down into the MLM and have another look at UV One. It had been a while since she had last been down there, and her intrigue piqued at the thought of seeing it again.
Swooping down the tunnel and into the ball at the end, she span and cushioned her deceleration with her bare feet, bringing herself to a stop with graceful agility. She smiled: her control in a weightless environment was improving day on day, and it was very satisfying to pull off a complicated manoeuvre like that one. When she got back to Earth, walking would be boring by comparison. At the reminder of Earth, which was glowing bright through the window, her thoughts turned to Novitskiy, Gardner and Chris. She hoped they had got home safe, and that Gardner and Chris were recovering well. The pathetic state of those three as they had left saddened her, and she looked beyond Earth to the lifeless craft floating on the black sea.
‘What is it you’re looking for?’ she whispered to herself.
She almost expected a response and felt a little disappointed to receive none. UV One, its colourless surface catching the light of the occasional star, shimmered dully, a distant reflection in an interstellar puddle. Perhaps it was a dead relic, floating without aim through the cosmos, searching for life and trying to communicate its pre-recorded message. The beings that created it could be — and probably were — long dead; perhaps even the whole species was gone. This singular vessel could be all that was left of an extinct race, a drifting artefact of a once-great civilisation. She reached out to touch it, pressing her finger on the glass, covering it. When she lifted her finger away, it was still there, still following. She sighed.