Cold (10 page)

Chivers listened intently and, not for the first time, thought to himself there was no folk stranger than the Mormon people of Utah.

ARKHANGELSK, RUSSIA

E
very window of the presidential palace burns light. They are not expected. Gennady gives the orders; they scale the walls and move through the gardens under the cover of what splashes of darkness they can find. A peacock squawks in alarm and they freeze; a scimitar-flash of steel shuts up the foolish bird for good.

They move forwards, one hundred metres from the outlying buildings, maybe less, then some damn fool fires tracer rounds at the palace, and the presidential guards switch on three searchlights, a fraternal gift to bolster security not three months before. Night becomes day; his whole form shines with reflected light.

‘Take cover, lads,’ he roars. ‘Hide!’ And he rolls into a hollow of shadow and a machine-gunner opens up, bullets going
zip-zish-zish
over and into their heads.

Too many of his boys are dying – dying foolishly for nothing.

Bam-bam-bam,
their Shilka fires at anything, everything, nothing, until the idiot in charge works it out and the little tank takes out the searchlights, one by one, and they can crawl forwards again. But surprise is lost.

The great doors to the palace are locked and barred, but Uygulaan the Yakut finds a way in: some kind of side door, a steep drop down. They’re in. This Yakut is the craziest, the bravest of all his lads. He will be made up to sergeant if he survives this madness.

Gennady whistles and his lads follow him until twenty men are packed in a small room in the basement. He nods at Uygulaan, who kicks open the door – nobody there – and they surge out, up the stairs, and then they’re in a great hall with a winding staircase the width of an airport runway – hey, that’s how wide it feels – lit up by seven chandeliers hanging from the ceiling two storeys up.

The presidential guards are on to them now, lobbing grenades down from a gallery on the first floor, the blasts made more lethal by the smooth marble floor. More boys are hit. Christ, he might be down to a dozen men. One of his lads fancies himself as a sniper. He takes cover behind a statue of an Afghan warrior from the time of Genghis Khan and zeroes in on the first chandelier. The sniper – good lad – sends a bullet that slices the chain holding the chandelier in two and the whole thing comes crashing down, hitting the marble below with an immense crash. And then he does it again and again . . . five, six. The extinguishing of the seventh chandelier casts the palace into a raw and terrifying darkness, broken only by the odd magnesium flare lighting up Kabul, casting its brilliance through the broken windows of the palace.

They storm the staircase, Uygulaan ahead of him, and now the Afghans are putting their hands up. He’s under orders not to bother too much about prisoners, but he and his lads are warriors, not butchers, and he yells, ‘Watch them closely but if they’re going to surrender, let them.’

They order the guards to lie on the floor, face down. They count them: one hundred prisoners, and now only nine of his men still unhurt. The president and his little boy, five years of age if that, are in the master bedroom, bigger than his flat back home. They’re cowering in their pyjamas. Both man and boy hold up their hands; the little boy is weeping. Gennady uses his free arm to signal they will be OK, and Uygulaan pats the boy on the head.

The president takes out a cigarette from a gold case, offers him and Uygulaan one, but they both refuse. They don’t quite know why. A few minutes later comes a detachment of twenty KGB special troops, not a speck of mud or blood on any of their uniforms, and some way behind them waddles a man in his late fifties. He is both immensely fat and immaculately groomed, in a three-piece suit, maroon tie and black leather coat, with hair so dark it must have been dyed. The narcissism and the fat don’t go together so well.

‘Good of you to turn up, Grozhov,’ he says, and he can see that his boys find this worth a smirk.

‘Thank you, Colonel, your work here has been noted.’ Grozhov’s voice is high-pitched and prim, almost girlish, the accent Georgian. ‘They’re going to make you a Hero of the Soviet Union. But for the moment, kindly leave us to our discussions.’ Thus bidden, he and Uygulaan walk out of the master bedroom, and an enormous blond KGB sergeant and Grozhov walk in.

‘Close the door behind you,’ calls out Grozhov. They do so. Uygulaan sniffs the air and pulls a face and then he smells it, too: Grozhov’s peculiar scent, the lavender perfume not quite masking the stink of a fat man’s sweat. A shot rings out, echoing through the darkness, then a cry, then a second shot.

The door opens, and Grozhov and his bodyguard are leaving. Beyond them, Gennady sees the president lying dead on a white rug, blood seeping into the fabric, his little boy on top of him, also dead. He walks into the presidential bedroom and goes to yell ‘Killer!’ at Grozhov, but his mouth fills with sand and nothing comes out, and then he is awake and the phone by the bed is ringing, ringing, ringing. Just as he goes to pick it up, it stops.

Not always the same nightmare, but this one, this was the most common. The stink of lavender and sweat and spent ammo, the sharpness of the shots ringing out, it all seemed so unbelievably real. Gennady hurried to the bathroom, immersed his face in water so cold it made him gasp.

Still daylight outside. What kind of madness did he have, suffering nightmares in the day? He returned to the bedroom and stared at the phone. It sat silent, by the photograph of the three of them: his wife, now dead, and their only child, his daughter. He threw some clothes on and walked over to the window.

Coat flapping in an iron breeze, an arm pointing the way to the future of the last century, or maybe the century before that one. Only a fat seagull emptying a Rorschach test of bird shit on Lenin’s bald head robbed the Leader of his revolutionary dignity.

From the twenty-third storey of the block of flats in the dead centre of Arkhangelsk, you were afforded two views of the great Russian experiment. To the south stood monumental Lenin, always in a hurry, always towering above the little people scurrying this way and that, hiding from the Arctic cold. To the north stood the old – mostly dead – fish docks, sheds of red brick gouged by empty eye sockets of broken windows, garlanded with graffiti, a nest for junkies and drunks rotting out their last winter, if they were lucky; beyond them, rusting hulks waited for the scrap men, cranes angled against the cold; and, farther off, an archipelago of shivering nothingness: the gulag of the far north. Up there, no one knows how many died. No one counted.

That wasn’t quite true. Gennady turned his back on Lenin, crossed the flat and gazed out due north. He’d fought in Afghanistan but had ended up out of front-line service, running the military-cum-secret-police archive in Arkhangelsk. It should have been a cushy number but he had become fascinated by the great beast of history locked inside the cage: the evidence, collated and detailed, the lists, the photographs, of hundreds of thousands of the dead and the dead to come. Poles, Americans, but worst of all old Russians would come knocking at his office door, asking for a scrap of information that might help a grandson or niece lay to rest their relative. Gennady would have to shake his head, say
nyet
.

He’d sought official permission to put the archive online. That had not been refused. Modern Russia doesn’t work like that, mused the general. But nor had it been permitted. A properly trained archivist would have done nothing. But, seeing that he was an old soldier, he’d thought,
Screw it
. Perhaps he was being unfair on librarians. Whatever, he’d found he could no longer keep the beast locked up.

He started counting the dead.

Gennady would stall a relative’s request for information, then formally say no and watch them shuffle off into the cold, then hurry out of the office on an ‘errand’, to smoke or have a quick nip of vodka and, when no one was looking, hand over a plastic bag of photocopies: most often photographs; sometimes, if they were lucky, a cache of love letters never received, or a hidden diary – but always, always the date of death.

Pretty soon, word of Gennady’s foolish humanity had got around and he was charged with corruption and misuse of power in a state office. But there was a row about it, articles in the local press were soon picked up by the international media, and the sour-faced paper-pusher at the prosecutor’s office called him in and dropped all the charges. That very day he got a phone call from Moscow saying that his request for early retirement had been approved. So the truth about the dead had been locked up, again.

The day that happened he phoned his daughter Iryna, and she told him what she always told him: ‘Write a book about your war, Dad. Write a book about what you did, what you went through.’

And the funny thing was, he’d just finished it. One hundred and five thousand words:
We Were the Zinky Boys.
The title? Three decades on and he still hated that they had flown his boys home in the cheapest possible coffins. The wrongness of this was grinding into his soul when he realised his mobile phone – cheap and old, like him, but it worked, it didn’t tell you your sodding star sign – was ringing.

‘General? General Dozhd? Gennady Semionovich Dozhd?’ A robot’s voice, metallic.

‘Yes – speaking.’

‘General, I have bad news.’

‘Who is this?’

‘No matter. General, I am so sorry to tell you . . . bad news about your daughter. They will tell you a car crash. But that would be a lie.’ And then Machine-Throat cut the call.

Gennady rang Iryna’s mobile. No answer. Her flat. No answer. Her office. No answer. He called her mobile one more time, listened to her voice message – soft, breezy, full of fun – then left a message: ‘I finished the book you ordered me to write. Call your old man. Call the author.’

No one called back. Outside, the sun began to fall out of the sky. He went to his freezer and found what he was looking for: a full litre bottle of vodka. Soon, everything would be black.

LONDON

H
iding behind a wide tree trunk, its bark flaking and strangely disfigured, Joe realised they hadn’t spotted him. This time, he had the advantage. Reilly was darting between the trees, endlessly chasing squirrels, endlessly frustrated that he had no vertical take-off facility, as Wolf Eyes walked slowly west, parallel to Constitution Hill, the two shadows following on behind.

Just by Joe’s feet were the remains of a bright red balloon that had gone pop, attached to a long piece of nylon string. He ripped off the fading red plastic of the punctured balloon and stuffed the string into the pocket of his duffle coat.

Reilly was a good two hundred yards from him, maybe more. If he made his move now, he would have a start on the two men. They looked as if they could move fast if they needed to, as well as steal a man’s dog. Still, better now than never. He put his fingers to his lips and blew, one long whistle and one short.

Reilly knew that tune. He stopped, cocked his ears and then began to run, his legs see-sawing, the fastest little dog in the whole of London. Joe could not help but smile as the black splodge of fur rocketed towards him.

The woman and her shadows stood rooted, puzzled but not yet alarmed by what the dog was up to. Reilly came to him and reared up, pressing his forelegs against Joe and licking his hands, his tail wagging like a windscreen wiper at double speed. They’d cut his fur in a silly style that made him look a little bit different, but the way Reilly licked Joe’s hands he was still the same fool of a dog.

Joe slipped the string around the fancy new red collar. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the two men start to run towards him, moving fast.

His mobile rang. Instinctively, he answered it.

‘Joe? It’s Terri. Are you sure it’s the fact-finder? Joe?’

You fool, Joe, you fool. Not the time to answer the phone
.

‘You see, I’m sure . . .’ Terri continued. ‘Well, I’m not one hundred per cent, but I had it down as the preliminary.’

They were one hundred and fifty yards away now, maybe closer.

‘Terri, gotta go—’

‘. . . but as your union official—’

‘Bye.’

He started to run, running faster than he’d ever run in his whole life. Man and dog ran to the edge of The Mall, but the great avenue to the Palace was clogged up by a phalanx of red-coated guardsmen clumping towards Horse Guards Parade. One look behind him told him all he needed to know. If he hung around and waited for the guardsmen to pass, the twins would be on him in half a minute, if not less.

He raced forwards, Reilly matching him in speed, darting through the ranks of soldiers. But the physics of forward motion by the mass of guardsmen and sideways intrusion by a man and a dog wasn’t going to end well.

Joe and Reilly got halfway across when one guardsman stopped dead lest he tread on the animal. The soldier immediately behind cannoned into him, and within a few seconds The Mall had become a diagram of the Large Hadron Collider, Reilly ricocheting off the tumbling redcoats yet remaining uncaptured, the ever-elusive dog particle. The swearing was out of the standard model.

Man and dog vaulted over the cursing guardsmen, got to the far pavement, and ran down the stone steps into St James’s Park and up along the edge of the lake. But as fast as Joe and Reilly were, the twins seemed to be faster, gaining on them, ruthless at pushing strangers out of their way. The string attaching dog to man meant they had to dodge around bunches of tourists, while the twins could move faster, unencumbered.

A straggle of schoolchildren from Salamanca blocked the path at a chokepoint by the bridge across the lake. Joe and Reilly wheeled wide around the kids, only to be confronted by a Latvian TV crew interviewing a puce-faced British tabloid royal reporter with the Palace in the background, the cable linking the camera to the sound man blocking their path. Man and dog crashed through the shot, skipping over the cable.

Two lovers from Paraguay were taking selfies in the middle of the bridge – a man in a wheelchair and his wife from Seoul waiting patiently for them to finish – when Joe and Reilly careered into and out of their framings.