Cold (40 page)

He hurried into the bathroom, took the toiletries Masha had bought for them on the ship, and stuffed them in a plastic bag. They had so little stuff that all their possessions could be dumped into one skimpy bit of plastic.

She was awake but she wasn’t moving.

‘We have to go, to leave the ship, now.’

‘There’s no point.’

‘Listen, I saw a drone just now. Up on the deck. It had a camera, it followed me around. It’s them. We’ve got to run.’

In the corner, Reilly started to shiver. He hated it when they rowed.

‘I am sick of running,’ Katya said. ‘Running for what? They will kill us. No question. So, why run?’

Joe felt an extraordinary surge of anger.

‘What have we been doing since London?’ He was desperate to keep his voice quiet, not disturb Masha next door, but he couldn’t contain his contempt for Katya’s mulish abandonment of hope: ‘Your boyfriend had those people killed, he had me kidnapped. They were torturing me – you, too – and then we were lucky, we were given a chance, and now we have a plan, to get to Utah, to find this CIA man, and we’re halfway there and now you’re giving up? What is it? You can’t be bothered? Don’t you want to stay alive?’

‘No. I don’t.’ She said this with such solemnity, such bleakness that it fuelled his fury, so much so that he leapt onto the bed and slammed his right fist into the pine headboard.

The door opened and Masha stood there in her dressing gown, her hair wrapped up in a towel like a turban, her porcelain knuckles gripping a wheeled walking frame. Ordinarily, her clothes and make-up cloaked just how old she was, but at this time of the morning she looked every bit of her eight-five years. No hiding her age – no hiding, too, her anger.

‘What in darn’s name is going on here?’ She motioned at Katya. ‘She told me that you were on the run from a jealous boyfriend. So like a fool that I am, I took you in, I’ve sheltered you. But it’s worse than that, isn’t it? The line about the jealous boyfriend, that’s just baloney. You’ve played me for a sucker. Who are you running from?’

The two of them held their tongues and stared into space, neither willing to be the first to tell the old lady how deep in trouble they were.

‘I heard every word,’ the old woman continued. ‘You’ve got a big mouth on you, Irishman. People got killed, you got kidnapped, torture, a drone. What kind of ex-boyfriend sends a drone to Greenland for gawd’s sake? Who is this? Tell me, who are you running from?’

They remained silent.

‘Well, screw you. I’m phoning security. I’m going to have you thrown off this ship. You can tell the police the cat’s got your tongue.’

She moved her walking frame stiffly towards the phone that lay on a small table beside their bed. With infinite slowness, she lowered herself onto the bed and her arthritic hands scrabbled towards the receiver. Never had Joe seen something so undesired take place with such sluggish remorselessness.

He could not bring himself to place a hand on her. But he had to speak out. ‘Do that,’ he said quietly, ‘and we’re both dead. You too, like as not.’

She turned her head to stare at him directly. ‘So who are you running from? Eh?’ He shook his head and the old lady turned her head back, and with infinite slowness dialled a number and said, ‘Hello? I’ve got a problem . . .’ That was as far as she got. Katya leaned over, wrenched the phone from Masha’s hand and replaced it on the cradle and said, ‘Zoba. We’re running from Zoba, or at least Zoba’s men. My former boyfriend, he works for Zoba. We don’t know why, we don’t understand it, but he wants something from us. What it is, we don’t know. You hand us over to the police here, they will find out, get what they want and then kill us.’

The phone started to ring, and ring. Joe and Katya watched as Masha turned her body, slowly picked it up, then put it down without speaking. She turned back to them: ‘Zoba’s people?’

‘Officially, Reikhman is a tax inspector,’ said Katya.

‘And unofficially?’ asked Masha.

‘Unofficially, he is the state executioner. He’s angry with me and wants me back and would kill Joe, would kill any man, for daring to have me, just once, but there is something more to this. It’s not just Reikhman. Behind him is Zoba, and what he wants from us, we have no idea.’

Masha looked from Katya to Joe and back again, an old lady whose greatest fear was that her loneliness and grief had caused her to be a fool.

‘Are you conning me?’

At that moment, a heavy knocking came from the suite’s outer door. Masha tried to stand up clumsily, Katya helping her, and her gnarled hands gripped the walking frame. She was spinning it round when they heard the outer door unlock and open.

Joe and Katya hurried into the walk-in wardrobe, leaving Reilly scratching at its door with his paws, worrying what new, strange game this was. Then the door to their bedroom opened and the two of them heard a man’s voice, concerned: ‘Ma’am, are you OK? There was a telephone call from this suite. You sounded very anxious. Is there something wrong?’

‘No, I just couldn’t find my hearing aid. I’ve found it now. Thank you for coming and checking up on me, but I must get dressed. Can’t miss breakfast, it being free and all.’

A long pause followed.

‘You’ve got visitors?’

‘Last night. Some friends dropped by. They’ll pick up their stuff later. Thank you for your concern but I’m quite dandy. Now leave me be, or I’ll miss breakfast. It takes me an age to get ready.’

‘Well, any worries, just pick up the phone.’ The voice did not sound too convinced.

After a moment, Joe and Katya heard the outer door click shut and then the wardrobe door opened and Masha was standing over them as they crouched, her head haloed by the bedroom light. ‘My father was shot in 1937,’ she said. ‘Shot for nothing. I remember my mother weeping after they’d taken him away. She remarried a Russian diplomat, they were in Tehran during the war. In 1945, we all had to go back to Moscow. Instead, my stepfather got us out to America. Stalin, Zoba don’t seem much different to me. If you’re running from Zoba, you’re safe with me.’

‘Thank you, Masha, thank you from the bottom of my heart,’ said Joe. He and Katya emerged from the wardrobe, Reilly giving them extra licks because he had clearly enjoyed the unusual game. Katya embraced the old lady. But Joe had something else to say: ‘If they come here and find us with you, you’re not safe. None of us is safe. We must leave the ship.’

‘And go where?’ snapped Masha. ‘You reckon you can hang out in this godforsaken dump? The next port is Halifax, Nova Scotia – four days’ sailing. In Canada, you might have a chance. Greenland? No way.’

The wisdom of that hit home.

‘We can’t keep on hiding here,’ said Joe. ‘They know we’re on the ship.’

‘How come?’

‘The dog show. The photo of Reilly biting the MC, I’m in the background. It’s in the ship’s newspaper, and that’s online. They have face-recognition programmes, they would have been searching the Internet for weeks. And now they’ve found us. Just now I was walking Reilly on the deck and a drone was following me around, filming me. It could only be them.’

‘So?’

‘We don’t sleep here. Not tonight. If we don’t think they’re on the ship, then we can come back tomorrow night.’

‘Where are you going to hide?’ asked Masha.

‘Somewhere else on the ship. It’s better that you don’t know. You can smuggle food for us. And look after Reilly.’

‘OK. By the way, some of the staff know you’re here.’

‘What?’ Joe could not hide the astonishment from his voice.

‘The maids, the staff who clean the suite. Listen, I’ve been on this damn thing for a year. Miami, Rio, Cape Town, Morocco, Venice, London, Amsterdam, whatever. I know them like family. I give ’em good tips – best tipper on the boat, they say. I told them to keep shtum about you. They will for my sake, but if people start asking questions – well, folk talk, don’t they?’

‘All the more reason for us to hide. We’ll be gone by the time you come back from breakfast. But we’ll leave Reilly here.’

‘You sure that’s a good idea?’

‘It’s not going to be easy hiding the two of us until we get to Canada.’

‘OK,’ Masha said, ‘I’d better get dressed. Paid all this money, don’t want to miss out on breakfast. I’ll bring you my leftovers.’

‘We’ll be gone by then. Give them to Reilly. He prefers sausages.’

‘So, is this goodbye?’

Joe tried to shake his head but Katya brushed forwards and hugged her and kissed her, and then the old lady left and they were on their own.

Joe studied her, silently.

‘Say it,’ said Katya.

‘I thought you didn’t want to stay alive.’

Head cast down, she said something in Russian.

‘What’s that?’

‘Something my Auntie Natasha used to say. “Before you die, you cannot get enough of breathing.”’

‘So, second thoughts?’

‘Maybe. I don’t . . . I don’t want you to die.’

‘And what about my foolish dog?’

‘Nor your foolish dog,’ she said and glanced at Reilly, who wagged his tail, somehow picking up that he was the subject of the conversation. How dogs did that, Joe didn’t know.

‘Well,’ said Joe, ‘that’s something.’ And he stared out of the porthole and wondered to himself where on the ship they were going to hide.

YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

E
very muscle ached from the Calvary of electricity-tricked spasm, his throat was parched dry, his head pulsed with a scouring pain, ebbing and surging, in step with the rhythm of his heartbeat. Added to that, a vague yet certain knowledge that they had twisted the cords of his mind. But worst of all was the light, a glare of unbearable brightness bearing down on his eyeballs, so overpowering it made his retinas fizz and spin. He turned his head away from the glare and saw something that made him both burst into tears and vomit – vomit intensely, vomit unremittingly – until his stomach was empty and he could only retch up bile.

The woman lay on a stretcher beside his; like him, her hands and feet were handcuffed to it, but unlike him she was quite still. Her face was a peculiar grey colour.

Someone came and wheeled the stretcher back to his cell and unlocked the cuffs. He stood groggily, then collapsed, losing consciousness. Time froze, then galloped ahead, then moved at the pace of a rockface eroding. Two days, three days, ten days . . . he lost all sense of time and place.

Was Venny dead? He thought over what he had seen, reconstructed the moment he’d seen the woman, lying still, her face deathly grey. It was his memory of the stink of the dead, a smell he knew so well from Afghanistan, that turned his uncertainty into fact. On the twelfth day he concluded Venny must be dead. She would not have been so had he not asked her to identify the old lady they’d found in his daughter’s grave, had she not ended up falling in love with him. Bleak enough for anyone, anywhere – bleak beyond the saying of it for a man who had lost his only child and was banged up in solitary having had his brain fried. But – and at this point he gripped his head in his hands, because the stark newness of the thought hurt him – they had meant to show him her dead body. That must mean they were afraid, somehow, to kill him; their goal was to drive him quite mad. And that was knowledge worth having. He stared at the cell door, wondering what fresh horrors they had in store for him.

The door opened and a fat Yakut in late middle age wearing medical whites stood over him. The tip of one thumb was missing.

‘What the fuck?’ asked Gennady.

‘I’m your new psychiatrist.’

‘What happened to the old one?’

‘He’s a bit tied up,’ said the Yakut and smiled, and as he did so a gold tooth glinted. Then the lights went out.

LABRADOR SEA

T
win crescents of witch’s green burned in his irises, flickered, died, then grew stronger. The crescents billowed up into pillars of viridescence, streaming into his eyes, filling their confined living space with a glow of the utmost eeriness. Joe pressed his face against a porthole and gasped in wonder.

Greenrise.

The light draped itself across the night sky, towering above them, rendering the great ship and the mighty ocean as small as a toy boat floating on a duck pond.

‘What is this?’ asked Katya.

‘Northern Lights. You’re from Russia. You should know.’

‘Grozny is in Russia’s deep south. I’ve never seen this before.’

Their new hiding place was a lifeboat, high above the ship’s deck, commodious but cold, their only rules that they must show no lights and stay on the side facing the sea.

‘Let’s go out.’ Joe gently worked a thick lever and a door swung open. He secured it against the lifeboat’s bulkhead with a soft click, and the two of them sat on the bilges, cuddled up against the Arctic cold, and took in the greatest light show on earth.

It was so cold the sea creaked, or so it seemed. They gazed on, rapt, as the great green dragon of light fired up and flickered down, leaving cinders of light on the horizon one second, then pulsing massively across the whole sky the next. The ship itself seemed to fall quiet in awe at the spectacle. The creaking sound gave way to a swishing noise that seemed to echo the changes up above.

‘Is it making that sound?’ whispered Katya.

‘I don’t know,’ said Joe. He tried to remember the last time he felt so much in awe of nature.

And then they heard an entirely different and very familiar noise, a soft whimpering.

‘That’s Reilly,’ said Joe. ‘You stay here, I’ll go.’

Getting on and off the lifeboat without being noticed was no mean feat. It was held high above the deck by a stanchion at either end. To get off, you went down. Joe walked aft, stood on tiptoes and jumped, gripping the stern stanchion like a monkey at the zoo and slowly slipping down to the main deck. It was empty, not so surprising considering the lateness of the hour, not far off two o’clock in the morning. Once on deck, he followed the sound of the whimpering. Reilly was on his lead, held by Masha. The moment Joe hove into view, Reilly’s tail went into overdrive. He leapt up, put his paws on Joe’s thighs and licked his hands. Joe patted him gently on his noodle head.