Cold (36 page)

‘So?’

‘Go ahead. I will come to you in an hour.’

‘Venny, thank you. I am an old fool but I think I am falling in love with you.’

‘Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers – you will be the death of me.’ And she cut the call.

He emailed the report and attachments three times: to the only good newspaper left in the whole of Russia, to the Moscow office of a great international broadcaster and, via a new email identity, to himself.

It was late when he filed it, and that was, it turned out, a cardinal error. The office of the only good newspaper was closed and the file would only be inspected in the morning, but the good officers of the state security service, they never slept. They hacked into the file, speed-read its contents, hit alarm bells, removed the file, sent a series of corrupted files similar in name but not in content to the same address in order to cover their deceit, and made an urgent phone call to colleagues in Rostov.

The leading correspondent of the great international news organisation was keen to attend Zoba’s talking shop, an annual event where the great man pressed the flesh of the world’s media. He pretended to listen; they pretended to ask questions. She scanned the report’s first sentences, knew that it would engender the ill-will of those in power, yawned, then sent it to her computer’s recycle bin.

Venny arrived at Gennady’s hotel, as she said she would, one hour later. The thought of seeing Genya excited her. He was a force of nature, bold, unscared – and that was something very unusual in Russia these days. But there was also an essential goodness about the man that shone through. The disgraced pathologist smiled at her own folly and remembered a joke that she and her friends would say at school if they had a pash for a boy: ‘If I had a pencil case, I would write his name on it.’

Venny had just pulled up outside the hotel when she saw three police cars, two black SUVs and an ambulance screech to a halt at its front entrance. Police officers in uniform, men in black suits and sunglasses – they would be FSB – and two men in white coats who, to Venny, distinctly did not look a byword for medical excellence, emerged from their vehicles and climbed up the faux-marble steps.

She undid her seatbelt, switched off the engine but didn’t open the door. Better wait and see. They worked quickly. Within two minutes, she saw two spooks and the medics emerge from the hotel, at their centre Gennady’s stocky figure, his arms locked high behind his back, half crawling, half running. The medics and spooks led Gennady towards the back of the ambulance. One of the medics ran forwards and opened the rear doors, and at that moment Gennady renewed his efforts against his captors, kicking out at them, using his legs to bounce off the vehicle.

Venny got out of her car and ran to the side of a burger van, where she had a line-of-sight view but was concealed by the other customers, who stopped munching to gawp at the spectacle of the reluctant patient.

A third spook – bald, thickset, with arms like barge hawsers – ran over to the melee and produced a heavy rubber cosh and thwacked it against the base of Gennady’s skull, twice. He fell limp and was laid down on the stretcher, belly down. Through the still-open doors of the ambulance Venny saw one of the medics prepare a syringe, roll back one of Gennady’s shirtsleeves and jab it into his arm. Then the doors were closed.

The convoy fired up its sirens and zoomed off into the traffic, causing a bus driver to stand on his brakes and slew his bus half across the road to avoid an accident. Venny watched the convoy hightail it for some moments before she started slowly walking back towards her car.

As the reality of what she had just witnessed dawned on her, she hurried up, dropped her car keys in anxiety, stooped down, picked them up, scrambled into the car and gunned it so hard its tyres screeched on the asphalt as she sped off in hot pursuit. The convoy had left so fast that there was no trace of it, and she zipped through the streets of Rostov, fearing that she would never find it again.

But luck, of a kind, was with her. An ancient tractor pulling a trailer full of slurry had stalled halfway across a narrow railway crossing, causing a tailback in both directions. The goons from the convoy were out of their vehicles, roaring at the driver in the tractor cab – an old, grim-faced man – to get a move on. He ignored them, got out of his cab, tinkered with the tractor’s innards until he seemed satisfied, then clambered back into the cab, taking his time, every step laborious and slow, as Venny’s car joined the back of the queue. She could have kissed the tractor driver for his truculence, a superb performance of contempt for authority without giving them any specific reason to trouble him.

The tractor chugged off the crossing and the traffic got moving again, but Venny’s tail-job was much easier now she had sight of them. Within fifteen minutes the convoy turned off towards the airport, swept past the main passenger terminal and headed to an area where a private jet was parked. The convoy crawled to a stop while a security man opened a wire gate. Venny parked two hundred yards short of the fence, not wanting to bring attention to herself. The convoy was through the gate and headed off towards the jet.

Venny turned off the ignition, struggling to come to terms with what was happening in front of her eyes. Then she snapped into action, her fingers scrabbling in her bag until she found her mobile phone. She fiddled with the buttons, found the camera app and hit record. Squinting at the screen on the phone, she narrowed in the focus, and through that saw the ambulance drawing to a stop by the jet, its doors opening and Gennady, now strapped into a stretcher, carried out and up the stairs into the belly of the jet. Venny switched her attention to the aircraft’s registration number. She’d read somewhere that you could track planes on the Internet. It might be possible to find out where in the biggest country on earth they were taking Gennady. If not, he had no chance. Getting the focus right was fiddly and her concentration was total, when a soft click sounded behind her, a rear door opened and closed, and the suspension of her little car sagged heavily to one side.

‘But why would a pathologist be so interested in filming a jet?’ said a man’s voice. ‘That’s the puzzle.’

The stench of sweat and lavender was overpowering.

COUNTY DONEGAL

T
hey had run out of their last charcoal the previous night and had three matches left. If they didn’t find some driftwood, then they would suffer from the cold. Joe rose at sunrise and walked round the perimeter of their island, seeing if any flotsam and jetsam had escaped his notice on previous searches.

Nothing. At the shingle beach he stripped off and marched into the sea, the shock of the cold making him gasp. He swam out fifty yards, nodding to the seals bobbing up and down as if they were familiar commuters on the Northern Line back in London, then spinning round to examine the length of the northern shore. There, hidden from him when he had looked for it on the island, jammed in a cove – oh joy – was a wooden pallet. That could keep them warm for weeks.

He swam to it, wrestled it out of the rock and, dragging it behind him, returned to the beach, feeling ridiculously proud of his trophy. He left the pallet on the flat rock where Katya loved to sit when the sun was out, and stooped underneath an overhang to get to the side of the rock pool in the shade. A cormorant sulkily flapped out of the way. Sunlight made the fishing line all but impossible to see, and besides, he’d had his best luck there, and turned into a man of stone.

Joe had never lived so simply in all his life. No electricity, no phones, no TV – just wood for a fire, and fish, crabs and cockles to eat. Would Seamus keep his promise and return? How could they possibly make it to Utah? When would Reikhman and his men find them? All of those questions mattered to them, very much, but the most important thing in the world right now was the suspense: would he get a bite on the line?

Three hours later, Katya emerged from their tiny castle and her eyes widened with delight when she saw the pallet drying in the sun. She put her hands together and clapped, and he inclined his head, acknowledging her applause as if he were a violinist playing in a quartet.

No sooner had she settled on her rock – it was strange how routines developed, even when life was so primitive – than his line began to thrum. Joe jagged it towards him and soon the mackerel joined its brothers, five of them lying in a row. He’d hidden them from her, but there were few pleasures greater in this new life of theirs than surprising her with an unexpected gift. The mackerel, toasted on kebab sticks homemade from splinters from the pallet, was delicious, washed down with rainwater, made briny from sea spray. They picked over every morsel of flesh, not daring to let a sliver of fish go to waste.

Reilly got more than his fair share, of course. Katya slipped the dog her last bit of mackerel and smiled at Joe. ‘You make a good caveman.’

Joe grinned at her and returned to his overhang.

Reilly heard it first, the gnarl of Seamus’s outboard, in the wee small hours of the night. The dog let out one soft bark and then stopped, as if even he appreciated the need to be quiet.

Joe and Katya were up in seconds, gathered up the sleeping bag, and were waiting for the dinghy before it nudged against the rock by their home. Accustomed to darkness by now, they jumped into the front and waited for Reilly, never that fond of boats, to join them. The moment the dog was in, Seamus handed Joe a bottle of Bushmills and Katya a chocolate bar.

‘So?’ yelled Joe over the buzz of the outboard.

‘They’ve gone,’ said Seamus. ‘They left two nights ago, but I’ve been waiting for a fishing boat to give you a ride. I’ve found one that can take you farther west.’

‘Somewhere warm?’ asked Katya.

They couldn’t see his smile in the gloom, but they could hear it in his voice: ‘Not quite. Iceland.’

They saw the fishing boat rising and falling in the big Atlantic swells to the west of the island, the deck awash with navigation lights and a searchlight tunnelling through the darkness. Having the rendezvous on the seaward side of the island made good sense, away from prying eyes on the mainland, but sea conditions out here were dangerously rough for the small dinghy. Seamus yelled at them to get ready, and they poised to jump. On the word ‘Go!’ Joe propelled Reilly over the side, and he and Katya leapt for the side of the boat.

Two fishermen in yellow oilskins helped them on board, but immediately as they found their feet on the swaying deck, the door of the wheelhouse opened and a fierce-looking man with beetroot cheeks poked his head out and yelled at Joe, ‘Nobody told me about a fecking dog!’

Joe replied, ‘The dog stays with me.’

‘Does he bite?’

‘No.’

The wheelhouse door slammed shut. Only then was Joe free to realise that he had not said goodbye to his brother. Out to sea, the dinghy was just a darker black against the blackness, rising and falling, falling and rising.

YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL NUMBER FIVE, SIBERIA

D
isco ball John Travolta in a white suit dancing dancing dancing staying dead staying dead staying dead buttercup cranberry vodka fish fish fish ganglion dukhi carotid saffron green a grave opens and an old woman stares at him and says I’m not your daughter idiot and a boy with a hole in his face is eaten by a crocodile and a yellow-faced girl opens a door and out of the corner of his right his left one is so fuzzy and cufflinks tied to his wrist cufflinks the wall next to his bed will not stop wobbling and the ceiling won’t stay rises and dipping an earthworm’s squiggle the file burns in acid in acid in acid walls hag zipped chests nerve gas white scarlet bat-black etch wretch retch the floor ripples and a boy with kohl around his eyes and lipstick on his lips and a Kalashnikov in his hands rises up from through the linoleum and hisses at him while a fat man looks on and a Yakut throws a spanner spins plane falls toys dead naked dead some more and shots ring out and a dead boy lies on top of his dead father and sing the Soviet anthem lights are too bright but the idiot with the ack-ack gun is too stupid to fire at them so his lads will die wants to masturbate and tries to move his hands and the wall wobbles dangerous throat hurts gags wrists don’t work legs don’t work don’t don’t don’t dead boy old lady in grave heads spin ceiling buckles walls are no longer white but no can’t dance if you’re chained to a bed crocodile bites the grave chains handcuffs chains he’s chained to the bed hand and feet heads they’re spinning closes eyes and the bat-black walls crouch in and he’s falling falling falling in a helicopter in Afghanistan and it crashes and the fucking dukhi will kill them all cell door opens and a grey-haired nurse with a sadist’s smile in a white nurse’s outfit wheels in a wheelchair and unlocks his chains and places him in the chair and somehow relocks a new encumbrance of chains and wheels him away and he’s moving so fast he feels sick and vomits shit shit shit caviar fish fish bum over himself and on to the corridor and the wind keeps hissing in his ears and they pass a woman being wheeled the other way and her mouth is drooping and spittle and froth are gurgling from her blue lips and he she is Venny and he loves her and she is gone and he is wide awake and although he can’t see through his left eye and he feels like shit he knows they’ve pumped him and Venny full of chemicals and that’s the cause of the chaos inside his head and he knows they have the tape of the psycho killing his daughter in the lift and the name of the psycho is Reikhman and that’s why they’re fucking with his head and Venny is his friend his lover and she and him are fucked and because deep down Venny and he are not not not mad not mad not mad sane sane sane in a world ruled by the madmen he passes windows and somehow he knows because the light is strong and eastern that they are in Siberia because he was once a general and they enter a room whiter than white so white it hurts hurts hurts and there is a man in white like a god like God who are you his voice a Hero of the Soviet Union so that’s who I am your psychiatrist and you have a paranoid personality disorder no you’re not a proper psychiatrist you’re a dickhead and he vomits again but through the vomit he knows that it is the first coherent thought he has had for days and they killed his daughter they killed his daughter and the nurse sadist and the man in white rolls back his sleeve and the syringe plugs into his bloodstream and buttercup ganglion dukhi carotid saffron green disco ball John Travolta in white staying dead.