The Old Boys (16 page)

Darkness had fallen by the time we arrived at Mikhail’s garret, Harley looking a little wan after the long steep climb up the stairs. Mikhail’s flat was unlocked. And empty.

“Bad sign,” Harley said.

We went inside anyway. I looked out the window. Three dark figures lurked in the slushy street—our watchers. A couple of hours passed before we heard footsteps on the stairs. They were unmistakably the tread of a man with a wooden leg. Mikhail opened the door, switched on the buzzing lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, and found Harley and me waiting for him.

“
Ooof!
” he said when he saw us. “Why are you here?”

Harley said, “You mean you weren’t expectin’ us?”

“Are you crazy?”

Harley looked Mikhail up and down. “Where’ve you been?”

“Waiting. This is still Russia.”

Mikhail had regained control of himself. He looked less like a man who thought he was going to take a bullet, more like the disillusioned KGB colonel whom history, the thing he had trusted most, had stripped him of medals and uniform, dressed him in rags and locked him up in this rat-trap flat.

“Waiting
for what?” Harley asked.

“This.”

Mikhail pulled up his trousers leg and showed us the shiny metal shaft of a brand-new prosthesis. “Titanium, made in Germany,” he said.

“Looks like a good one,” Harley said. “How much did it set you back?”

“Every kopek you gave me.”

“No wonder you need more money,” Harley said. “Is it an improvement?”

“Anything would be an improvement,” Mikhail replied. “Orphans in Afghanistan have better prostheses than that piece of junk I was given.”

Mikhail switched off the light and peered out the window. The watchers were still there, small black figures in a field of phosphorescent white.

“You were followed,” he said.

“We know,” Harley replied.

Because I irritated Mikhail so, I was letting Harley do the talking until the Russian calmed down.

“There are three of them,” Mikhail said. “And now that they’ve seen my light go on, they know I’m home.”

“But not that we’re here. We didn’t touch the light.”

“Ha! That’s exactly what they would have noticed.”

“Does that mean you’re the only suspect in this building that’s got a thousand windows?” Harley said. “Calm down, Mikhail, and turn on the light. We have to talk.”

“We can talk in the dark.”

Harley got up, closed the curtain, and pulled the chain on the light fixture.

“Better to see faces,” he said. “Horace, here, has got a few more questions for you.”

“What questions?” Mikhail said, registering deep affront. Then greed conquered resentment. “For how much?”

“You’ll be taken care of in the usual way, honorarium in the
dead drop,” Harley said. “You wouldn’t want those roughnecks outside to find you with a pocketful of dollars.”

He fixed Mikhail with a headmaster’s all-seeing eye.
Better think twice, my boy.

“All right,” Mikhail said. “But it would be quicker to tell me what you want to know and let me summarize.”

I was not going down that path again. The night before, Mikhail had summarized us to sleep, spouting irrelevant detail like one of those old Steinberg cartoons in which a little man in the corner of the drawing spews nonsense into a balloon that fills up the rest of the frame.

“The questions won’t take long,” I said, “Just loose ends, really.”

I handed Mikhail a photocopy of the list of stolen nukes with their serial numbers that Paul Christopher had left for me in his table-leg safe. Charley Hornblower had puzzled out the, to me, illegible signature.

I said, “Is this an authentic document?”

Mikhail glanced at it, lips twisting in disdain.
How could it be genuine if a cretin like you has it in his possession?
But then his expression changed.

“Where did you get this?”

“The question was, is it authentic?”

“That, or a very clever forgery,” Mikhail said. “How much did you pay for this document?”

“It was a gift. Do you recognize the signature?”

“Y. A. Kirov,” Mikhail said.

I went to the gas ring he used for cooking, lit it, and burned the list of nukes. I didn’t want it found on me if I was arrested after I went downstairs.

Mikhail, hands trembling slightly, throat dry, looked like he needed a drink. We had brought no vodka this time. He had had little sleep the night before, and if his account of his day was correct, he must be worn out.

I said, “It was not just Kirov who was omitted from our discussions last night.…”

Mikhail
bristled. “Omitted? What are you implying?” “Nothing. But we took longer than we should have to come to the point, so I will come to it now. Did it not occur to you that criminals—what’s now called the Russian mafia—may have been the thieves?”

“Of course it did,” Mikhail said. “But this was not an American movie where criminals are smarter than the police. Darvaza-76 was a walled city, alarmed and guarded by the KGB with the strictest security measures. How would they get in?”

“By having a friend inside,” I said. “Just like in the movies.”

“Impossible. Even if they did get into the city, how could they penetrate the nuclear storage facility, which was the most closely guarded section of the installation?”

“How many people had access to the nuclear storage facility?”

“Only two could authorize access,” Mikhail said. “The base commander and the head of security.”

“One of whom is dead. The other is Yevgeny Alexeivich Kirov, whereabouts unknown.”

“Kirov was an officer of the KGB,” he said.

“And therefore above suspicion?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

“Just a man thinking of the future. Playing the game. Putting away a few million toward retirement.”

Mikhail smiled a long tight-lipped smile. “I see you’re a showoff all the time, not just on television,” he said. “You should be a little more modest about your brilliance.”

I had gotten under his skin. I made no reply, hoping that he would go on telling me off. I was not disappointed.

“Moscow used to be the safest city in the world,” Mikhail said. “However, now that these gangsters are in charge and money is everything, that is no longer the case. They use real bullets. People die. You should bear that in mind, my friend Horace. All foolish people should bear that in mind.”

He turned off the light and looked outside.

“They are gone,” he said. “Now you should go.”

By the light of a flashlight, we started down the sixteen flights of stairs. About halfway down, Harley called a halt.

“Got to sit down for a minute.”

His voice quavered. He sank onto the stairs, fumbled in an inside pocket, and handed me a bottle of pills. He held up one finger of his left hand. With his right hand he was clutching his heart. I shook a pill out of the bottle and placed it on the palm of his trembling hand. He put it under his tongue. After a moment he seemed to be all right, but his face was pale and his voice weak.

“Nitroglycerin,” he said. “Helps my angina. Had a little flutter there, nothin’ to worry about, happens all the time. Give me a hand.”

“Are you sure?”

He grabbed my arm and pulled himself upright. “Not stayin’ here.”

He was still unsteady. The stairs were steep. There were no handrails. As we started down again, I took his arm. He shook me off. Not much strength in the gesture, though. Harley was seventy-eight years old, but until this moment you wouldn’t have guessed it.

My satellite phone, set to vibrate instead of ring, vibrated. I got
it out and answered, expecting to hear Charley Hornblower or another Old Boy on the line.

Instead, a youthful but faintly familiar voice said, “Hi, Kevin here.”

Kevin?

He said, “Don’t hang up. I thought you’d be interested to know that the light in your friend’s window went off, then came back on again just now. Now it’s off again.”

“Maybe he’s gone to bed.”

“ One of the men who followed you here blinked back with a flashlight.”

Turning lights on and off was typical KGB tradecraft. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Harley what was going on.

He pointing to his chest. “Nice timin’.”

“Now two of your watchers are going inside,” Kevin said. “Are you on the stairs?”

Where else would we be? “Yes.”

“What floor?”

I saw no reason to tell him that. I said, “How many does that leave outside?”

“Just one. His weapon is drawn.”

I hung up. Harley had already turned off his penlight. I said, “Sit down, Harley. Stay out of this.”

“Not spoilin’ for a fight just now,” he said. “But I can do the talkin’.”

“We’ll see,” I said, wondering how much talking was going to be done. “If Mikhail comes down from the rear, trip him.”

I moved down the stairs, turning a corner onto the landing just below us. There was no sign of a light further down, but I could hear rapid footsteps and hard breathing. The two men were running up the stairs. I had no weapon, of course. When they reached the landing, breathing hard, I stepped back around the corner, pressed my body against the wall, and switched on my flashlight, holding it as far away from my body as possible. One of the men fired an entire magazine. Sparks flew from the barrel of the pistol.
Red-blue-yellow muzzle-flash lit up the shooter’s moon face, unshaven under a tall fur hat. High-velocity bullets ricocheted from wall to wall and ceiling to floor, drawing fiery lines on the concrete and filling the air with the smell of burnt gunpowder.

I dropped the flashlight and groaned loudly. An empty magazine clattered on the concrete floor as the shooter reloaded. The second man, the one who had held his fire, now rushed up the stairs, pistol held rigidly in the approved two-handed grip. I could see him clearly in the light of the fallen flashlight, and I guess maybe he saw me, too, before I kicked the gun out his hand, then smashed him in the nose. His gun went off when it hit the floor. The other man fired another full magazine, creating more pyrotechnics. The noise was deafening. My ears rang.

Without pausing to reload, this wild shooter threw himself up the stairs. He saw his friend lying on the floor and me on my feet and stopped in his tracks. I was taller than he was to begin with and stood above him on the stairs. I lunged and grabbed him by the skull and put my thumbs in his eyes. He tried to get away with a sudden violent spin of his whole body. His fur hat flew off. He was a big, compact, powerful man. I planted my feet and held on. Halfway through his bearish pirouette, the man broke his own neck. I felt it go and with it, the life from his body.

I dropped him and picked up his gun and held it on the partner, who lay facedown on the stairs. I spoke to the man in Russian. He did not answer. I gave him a hard kick in the ribs. No sound from him. His body hardly moved. He was dead, too, maybe struck by a ricochet.

Harley picked up my flashlight and shone it on the corpses. The dead men were leaking blood. One of them had his head on backward. He looked a lot like the man who had sat next to me on the train from Paris to Geneva. I fell to my knees and sniffed his open mouth. He smelled the same, too, a stranger to toothpaste.

“Quite a mess,” Harley said. “Better go get Mikhail unless you want him behind you.”

Harley
pilfered a full magazine from one of the dead men and handed it to me. That left him with the empty pistol. I hesitated.

“Go,” he said, and rolled over a corpse to look for more ammunition in its clothes.

My satellite phone vibrated.

“Kevin here. Heard shots. You guys okay?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll be right up. And don’t worry. The third man is out of it.”

By now Harley had harvested another magazine. He slapped it into the pistol.

As I mounted the stairway three or four treads at a time, adrenaline flowing, ears still ringing, I was even more terrified than I had been three minutes before when bullets were flying around my head. The stairway was as black as the Pit and just as silent— not a single light showing, not a curious head in sight.

Mikhail knew too much and had told me too little to be left behind, but he worried me. He was cornered—no place to go but up onto the roof—and that is never a good thing. The fact that he had only one leg didn’t mean that he was defenseless. I had to assume that he was armed, if only with a kitchen knife or his spare leg. There was only one way into his flat, through the flimsy door. I was a big target. If he had a gun I was dead. Even a whack on the head could do me in—not instantaneous death, perhaps, but unconsciousness at the very least and, consequently, capture by Mikhail or whoever came up the stairs next.

Far below, a single gunshot rang out, creating a string of echoes in the staircase. As in playing football and making love, it is best not to think too much when engaged in mortal combat. When I reached the top landing I did not stop to ponder the situation, but without even knowing why I was doing it until I had done it, took a running step or two, and launched myself horizontally, feet first, against his door. It splintered under my weight. I landed inside the room on my back.