Cold (44 page)

‘That, if I’m not mistaken, was Grandma,’ said Zeke with wonder in his voice. ‘And Grandma’s angry.’

THE MAMMOTH MUSEUM

F
OMO, they called it: ‘Fear Of Missing Out’. Grozhov stared at the phone in his hand, blinking out image after image: Reikhman’s thumbs throttling a beautiful woman; a drawing of an old man being tortured, a gas mask on his head; a BUK rocket launcher trundling through a small town in Ukraine; an old woman in a grave with a blue nose; a thickset Russian with brilliant blue eyes telling the camera, in deadly earnest, ‘This is not my daughter’; and an old British Enfield rifle in the Russian’s arms, with the letters ‘POF’ stencilled into it.

The moment the images were uploaded onto the Internet, a mild-mannered geek in the British Midlands who made it his business to look out for this sort of thing started work. Within an hour, he had identified the content originator as retired General Gennady Semionovich Dozhd, Hero of the Soviet Union, First Class, and had pinged them around the world.

The geek travelled to the shops in Leicester not in a Mercedes but a bus; he was also an unstoppable force for the dissemination of information, sharing what those in power know with the powerless.

This distraction lost Grozhov two, three seconds. That was enough.

He now remembered exactly who the caveman with the axe was.

‘Stop!’ he yelled, reaching for his gun.

The Siberian leapt from the stage, spear locked under his arm. Grozhov fired and fired again, shooting Uygulaan in the chest, but his momentum was too strong, the spear piercing the fat man’s belly all the way through to his spinal cord. Uygulaan fell face down, spurting blood from his chest, dead.

Onstage, the mammoth was still plodding towards Zoba. Stunned by the spearing of his gatekeeper and backing away from the mammoth, Zoba tripped and fell to his knees. Something pathetic and pitiful about Zoba’s posture stayed the second caveman for a moment or two, and then images of how this man had deformed Russia flashed through the general’s mind: his daughter, throttled to death; Max, the boy soldier, blinded in a pointless war; an old lady poisoned for no good reason; Yellow Face; the young man turned into a krokodil . . .

The general lifted up his axe high to bring it crashing down on Zoba’s head, but the lost seconds counted against him. Bekhterev emerged from the audience, leapt up onto the stage, raised his gun and fired, killing Gennady stone dead.

Zoba, head down, trembled as the dead piled up, but the killing was not quite over. Bekhterev’s forehead flowered red and he tumbled over the prostrate president. His killer was Grozhov, crippled for life but still capable of eliminating a rival, a fact omitted in the official report into the incident. The FSB had been unable to find any trace of the pathologist Venny Svaerkova. It seems she had faked her death then vanished. That, too, was omitted from the final report. Grozhov wrote it, of course. Zoba’s nerves were so shattered by the failed assassination attempt by the two cavemen that Grozhov ordered rest, and covered for his leader’s mental incapacity with a week-long news blackout. No one in the official Russia media noticed. No one dared.

BEAR LAKE

T
wo figures slowly emerged from the twilight, walking towards the burning log cabin: Mary-Lou, tiny, grey-haired, a hefty shotgun in her hands; in front of her, Reikhman, his hands in the air.

Zeke, Joe and Katya came out from the log cabin and hurried down the steps, away from the heat at their backs.

‘Mr Reikhman, we meet again,’ said Zeke.

Mary-Lou had her shotgun trained on the back of the Russian’s head the whole time.

Reikhman ignored Zeke. He was scowling at Katya and Joe, but when he saw Reilly he smiled.

‘Mr Reikhman, I have just one question for you,’ Zeke said. ‘Back in the day, who was the second American in Kabul? Who is your friend in the CIA?’

‘And, if I tell you,’ said Reikhman, ‘what do I get in return?’

‘A one-way ticket to Moscow.’

‘Well then . . .’ But that was as far as he got before his face exploded in a pink mist.

Mary-Lou’s shotgun was knocked out of her hands and fell to the ground, then a Magnum was pressed against her face.

The second American, holding the Magnum, smiled wanly at the three people standing across the way, their bodies silhouetted by the light from the burning cabin.

‘Mr Weaver, you have the better of us,’ said Zeke. ‘I always suspected Crone.’

‘You didn’t think I had the balls, did you?’ said Dave Weaver.

‘True enough,’ said Zeke. ‘May I ask why? Was it the money?’

‘Bullets and old rifles to Kabul. Who cared what the source was? Who gave a damn?’

Zeke looked sad. ‘I did, I suppose.’

‘You did. You were never a realist. A dreamer and now you’ve got nothing. You’ve lost the lot, Zeke, and it’s time—’

Mary-Lou jabbed him in the side with an elbow but he was too supple and quick for her. He grabbed a fistful of grey hair and twisted her round, still using her torso as a shield, his Magnum pointing now at the base of her brain.

‘Leave the old lady! Kill me instead!’ It was Katya, marching towards him.

Weaver’s jeopardy was that he couldn’t be sure of killing both women.

‘Kill me, you stinking American coward!’ Katya shouted.

Weaver stayed still, retaining his grip on Mary-Lou’s hair.

‘Kill me!’ Katya said again. ‘If you don’t . . .’

Weaver threw Mary-Lou to one side and held his hand cannon steady in Katya’s direction, then blew a hole right between her eyes.

Joe leapt for the shotgun, grabbed it and fired upwards, blasting a hole in Weaver’s abdomen, then another in his belly, then reloaded and hit lungs and head, then reloaded and shot Weaver twice, one for each eye.

And so there they were, only a small group of the living: a dog and an old man hugging his wife and a young man clutching a dead woman and sobbing so loud that the very stars themselves were tempted to call out to stop him hollering so.

COUNTY DONEGAL

T
hey set off at sunrise, Seamus powering up the outboard. Joe clutched the green box to his chest, Reilly shivered slightly at his feet.

Joe’s phone blinked, signalling a message from Zeke. The old man was back at Langley now, and was wondering whether Joe might be able to do a spot of work for him, and here was the code for a flight ticket to DC whenever he felt like it. Joe half smiled and switched off his phone.

The mighty ocean was kind, for once, just rising and dipping with the moon’s ancient rhythm that predated humanity and would almost certainly outlast it. The easterly flank of the island –
their island –
was lit up by a deep pink from the rising sun. They rounded it, heading to the shingle beach facing north.

Seamus stayed in the boat with Reilly while Joe jumped into the sea, soaking his trousers, and strode ashore, still clutching the box to his chest. In silence he stood on the shingle and waited until the sun’s rays burst onto the outcrop of rock overlooking the beach. Then he walked into the gentle swell, unscrewed the lid of the box and, wordless, cast Katya’s ashes into the water.

A big, thick cloud obscured the sun, and suddenly he felt cold, colder than ever before.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Cold
is a work of fiction inspired by things I’ve seen with my own eyes and whispers I’ve picked up in Russia. It’s dedicated to three people I had the honour to meet but who are now dead: Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in her Moscow flat in 2006; her great friend, Natasha Estemirova, found with bullets to her head not far from a road in Ingushetia in 2009; and Boris Nemtsov, shot dead within 100 metres of the Kremlin in 2015. There’s a character in the book called Zoba, who, like every other character, is made up. Let one thing be absolutely clear:
Cold
is not about Vladimir Putin.

The novel looks hard at the face of modern Russia, but it has other themes, too: the madness of ideological supremacy, the unbrainwashing of terrorists, the never-ending struggle to uphold human decency. Joe Tiplady is based on someone I met in a bar in Belfast and came to admire. He was an IRA man who went to North Korea to learn how to kill the British. He hated North Korea and realised that they were brainwashed, that however bad the treatment of Irish Republicans in the North by the British and the Protestant ascendancy, it was never as bad as the way Kim Il Sung’s regime treated its own people. Once he worked that out, he began to realise that he, too, was a victim of IRA brainwashing. And so he stopped killing.

The real Joe Tiplady, after whom my hero is named, was an astonishingly fit friend of my son who died of a heart attack at the age of 26. His tragedy highlighted sudden cardiac death – which the charity CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young) works to raise awareness and provide support for. He was a boxer, quiet with a sheepish smile, stubborn as a mule, funny, brave, good. You got the sense that if you fell out with Joe, things would not be good for you. All of these traits turn up in the fictional Joe Tiplady.

Zeke Chandler is also based on real flesh and blood, an ex- Mormon, ex-CIA man I met in Utah who held himself with a quiet integrity. Zeke, towards the end of his life, sees through the murky foundations and cultishness of the thing he’s been brought up in and falls out with his own people, still owing fealty to the Angel Moroni. And yet – and something like this happens in
The Book of Mormon
too – when Zeke’s Mormonism is mocked by the uber-cynicism of an FSB/KGB killer, it seems pretty clear which organisation is darker.

Katya – Wolf Eyes – is loosely based on a ferociously brave translator I worked with in 2000 when I went undercover to Chechnya that year. She introduced me to young Chechen men who had been cruelly tortured by the Russian secret police. Their stories were so grim I could only get to sleep with the help of the best part of a bottle of vodka and a pile of P. G. Wodehouse books. If anyone who heard my BBC Radio Five documentary,
Victims of the Torture Train
, reads
Cold
, they’ll realise that the torture scenes are not make-believe.

Three books lit the way for
Cold
’s back story on the Soviet war in Afghanistan:
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War
by Svetlana Alexievich, who recently and deservedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature; Rodric Braithwaite’s
Afgantsy
; and Artyom Borovik’s
The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan
. Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash in 2000. Another journalist whose work helped inform my novel, Antonio Russo, also died in 2000 in disturbing circumstances, his body found showing signs of torture not far from a Russian military base in Georgia.

The general is a composite, partly based on a Russian merchant seaman I met when I was a kid on holiday in Spain. The Russians were devil-folk back in the early 1970s, but this man tolerated my schoolboy Russian and was funny, stolid, utterly human. Another bit of the general is to be found in a man I never met, an FSB/KGB archivist in Arkhangelsk who got into trouble with the authorities after helping ordinary people – Americans, Poles and Russians – trace their relatives, who were swallowed up in Stalin’s gulag.

The first words in
Cold
come out of Stalin’s mouth: ‘Gratitude is a dog’s disease’.

The long, dread shadow of Stalin falls on the book. Russia remains twisted and deformed in the twenty-first century because its people have never had a proper de-Stalinisation programme, unlike the Germans who opened their minds to the evil of Hitler. Gratitude is no disease, of course, and I have to mark my thanks to my dog, Bertie, who once, terrifyingly, vanished from home when I was working in Moscow and then, wonderfully, un-vanished. Thanks, too, to my agent Humfrey Hunter, my publisher Jane Snelgrove and my truest critic, Tomiko Newson.

The thrill of writing a novel is simple: you create a made-up universe but one built out of known particles. Much of it is pure invention. But I did make a film about the Yellow Faces, Russian teenagers whose faces went yellow when they drank bootleg alcohol, ostensibly medicinal handwash, which poisoned 10,000 and killed around 1,000. And the general does bump into the crew of a missile launcher in Ukraine shortly before a foreign airliner is shot down by mistake. And people who challenge power in Russia die, inexplicably. But, to repeat,
Cold
is not about the rule of Vladimir Putin. It’s just a story I made up.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Sweeney is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. As a reporter, first for the
Observer
and then for the BBC, Sweeney has covered wars and chaos in more than eighty countries and has been undercover to Chechnya, North Korea and Zimbabwe. He has also helped free seven people falsely convicted of killing their babies in landmark legal trials in the UK. Sweeney became a YouTube sensation in 2007 for losing his temper with a senior member of the Church of Scientology. His first novel,
Elephant Moon
, was published to much acclaim in 2012. His hobby is falling off his bike on the way back from the pub.