Too Bad to Die (29 page)

“SMERSH,” he whispered. “I have heard rumors. But never have I met . . .”

“Be glad,” she said. SMERSH was the counterintelligence section of the NKVD. Few Russians knew it existed, but those who did were terrified by the name. The acronym stood for
Death to Spies
. SMERSH operatives had one job: to kill those who betrayed Stalin. “May you never have reason to meet us, Comrade.”

He swallowed hard. “You wish to speak to . . .”

“Lavrentiy Pavlovich,” she said clearly.

He let her pass.

It never occurred to him to search her.

Siranoush kept her hands in her coat pockets as she strode up the embassy drive. It was a cold morning, this second of December, and her fingers were chilled. Her right hand gripped the butt of her gun. It was Arev's old Nagant M1895.

—

O
NCE OUTSIDE
the center of Tehran, the idea of civilization vanished abruptly and gave way to a treeless plain, barren at this time of year, the road to Gale Morghe airstrip spooling out in front of Schwartz. There were no other cars. A vague suggestion of hills, dark on the horizon. The occasional herd of Persian gazelle. Schwartz kept the sedan at a steady forty-five-mile-per-hour clip, the noise from the engine loud enough to make conversation difficult. When he glanced in his mirror, he saw Roosevelt dozing, his hat off and his head lolling. In the passenger seat beside him, Hudson was more alert, glancing through his window from time to time like a tourist confounded by lack of subject.

“Looking for something?” Schwartz yelled.

“Caracal,” Hudson said.

“What?”

“A caracal. Type of cat. Like a lynx or a cougar. They're native to this place.”

“Ah,” Schwartz said. They were coming up on a bend in the road, and he knew Gale Morghe wasn't far now—a matter of a mile and a half. There was no one ahead and no one behind. A hundred yards up ahead there was a turnout from the road. He had just seen it when he caught the flash of Hudson's hand reaching into his breast pocket.

He had almost turned to look at him when he felt the steel cylinder against his right temple.

“Pull over,” Hudson shouted.

Schwartz hesitated. “You really want to do that, Mike?”

“I said,
Pull over
.”

“Okay. If that's how you want this to go,” Schwartz bellowed. He pulled the wheel hard and fast to the right. The car squealed and spun in a tight three hundred and sixty degrees, the movement so sudden and vicious Hudson was unprepared. His gun wavered toward the roof, and Schwartz abandoned the wheel, allowing the tires to follow their ordained momentum. He grasped Hudson's wrist with both hands and slammed it hard against the car's dashboard. The gun flew out of Hudson's grip.

Schwartz jammed on the brakes and felt the car skid sideways. They were facing the wrong way on the road. Correction: he'd spun roughly five hundred degrees.

Hudson sprang for his neck.

“Mike,” Schwartz gasped as the hands closed around his throat. “You don't want to do this.”

“Let him go,” Roosevelt said. “Let him go, or I'll shoot.”

He had pulled his personal revolver from his coat and had it jammed, now, in Hudson's neck. Never mind that he was clinging to the back of the front seat as a climber clings to a cliff edge, using all the strength of his fingertips to pull his body forward; his paralyzed lower half had not cost him much. He was grinning ferociously at Sam, and there was such a look of elation in his eyes that Schwartz merely reached for Hudson's slack hands and removed them from his windpipe.

“Thanks, Mr. President,” he said. “How about I take care of that thing for you now?”

—

0850
HOURS.

“This woman begged to see you in person, Iosif Vissarionovich,” Beria said. He was standing before the great desk in Stalin's embassy office. There were papers scattered all over it—he recognized his son's handwriting. Translations. Transcriptions. Nothing really worth reading. Abuse of himself, of course—it amused the Americans to ridicule him in his own hearing. Toward Stalin they were respectful. He wondered how Sergo felt, writing down the insults leveled at his father. Conjugating them in two languages.

“Why?” Stalin asked. His flat, hard gaze traveled indolently from Beria to the girl standing two yards behind him. She was stiff and expressionless, the gun she had carried in her coat pocket held steadily to her own head. Sergo's finger was on the trigger. He and the girl were roughly the same age, and it would be interesting, Beria thought, if he told his son to kill her. A demonstration for the Marshal of what family loyalty could do.

“She says—”

“I am an officer of SMERSH, Excellency,” the girl interrupted.

Beria glanced at her. Two spots of color were burning now in her cheeks.

“So?” Stalin offered indifferently.

“I worked with Colonel Zadiq before his murder last night.”

“Zadiq is dead?” Beria asked tonelessly.

“He was tortured by Nazi commandos he was attempting to intercept. His son also was killed. A useless woman, I was left behind in the NKVD headquarters.”

“How do you know this?”

“Zadiq told me the location of his safe house. When he did not return, I went to the place. I found him dying.”

“Beria,” Stalin interrupted. “Do I give a shit about the death of an NKVD officer?”

“No, Excellency.”

“Then why do you bore me with this bitch?”

Beria glanced at the girl. Then at his son. Sergo's hand was trembling. The weight of the gun held aloft, perhaps, for so long a time. Or the weight of what it could do.

“You are boring us, bitch,” Beria said.

The girl had the stones to smile faintly. She looked straight at Stalin, and it seemed to Beria that if looks were a knife, Iosif Vissarionovich would be bleeding by now.

“Zadiq had only enough breath for a few words,” she said. “‘
Long Jump.
0900 hours. The embassy gate.' I do not know, of course, what it means. But I know, from his blood, that it is a matter of life and death.”

There was a short silence.

Stalin grunted. “The time?”

“Five minutes to nine.” Beria was looking at his son. Sweat had settled like mist on Sergo's forehead. Anxiety for the girl? He should tell him to kill her. It would be good for the boy. Put some steel in his veins. He was too much his mother's son.

Stalin slapped his desk. “Then we go. You first, Beria. You can shield me with your body, eh?”

“It would be my honor, Iosif Vissarionovich.” Beria inclined his head.

“Cocksucker,” Stalin said genially. “I'll ask Churchill to drive through the gate first. With his little Sarah, who refused to eat at my table. No loss if they're blown to bits, eh?”

He stopped short as he passed the girl. She was staring at the place where he'd been, her lip bitten between her teeth. Sergo still held the gun to her head. But his hand was shaking so badly, now, that if he'd actually cocked the thing, it might have gone off.

Stalin stroked his finger down the girl's cheek. “You did well, bitch. Spread your legs once or twice and you'll go far in SMERSH.”

Her head turned as swift as an adder's, and Beria saw, then, the hatred in them. Her lips parted, and for an instant he thought she would curse. Or spit.

“Fortune preserve you, Iosif Vissarionovich,” she whispered, “because your friends never will.”

Stalin threw back his head and laughed.

—

G
RACE
C
OWLES
had been unable to eat that morning. She had risen early and sent a coded cable to Alan Turing.
Fleming missing. Believed taken or killed by Fencer.

It wasn't as though Turing could do anything to help. Grace simply needed to tell someone who understood the few words. By the time Turing replied, she would already be in the air. Clutching her knees in Lord Leathers's plane—which still smelled of Ian's Laphroaig. Gazing down at the hills and forests of Iran as they sped away from her, wondering if he was alive.

Ten minutes before they were scheduled to load up in cars and brave the compound's gate—all but a few of them utterly unaware that an attack was coming—Grace slipped by the porter at the embassy entrance and hurried down the drive. The British military police manned one side of the compound entrance, the NKVD officers the other. Two guardhouses flanked the gate itself, and visitors to the embassies reported to one or the other before being admitted. Identities and appointments were verified via phone lines connected to the embassies themselves. It was all very modern.

Grace rapped on the guardhouse's rear door. A cautious face appeared around the edge of it—wearing a helmet and battle gear instead of the usual uniform.

“Yes, miss?” the guard said impatiently.

“I . . . I wanted to . . .” Why had she come, indeed? To reassure herself that everything was normal? That Turing was inventing things? That Michael had been right all along—not a traitor but a true friend, who knew Ian Fleming was lost in his own fiction?

“You've been warned,” she said to the guard. “About the possibility of attack.”

“Mr. Thompson sent down a message an hour ago,” the guard explained. “We're double-staffed and on the alert. There's a couple of jeeps full of snipers, too, stationed both directions along the road.”

Thompson was Churchill's bodyguard. Of course he would have informed the gate staff. Grace was useless here.

“I'm glad to hear it. Good luck.”

She glanced at her watch—five minutes to nine, and nearly time for the first cars to depart. She must hurry. Her luggage—

Then the sound of a lorry horn, wildly blowing, assaulted her ears.

She turned and peered through the bars of the gate at the street outside. Impossible to detect the military jeeps full of snipers in the crowd that had gathered—both sides of the road were lined with colorful groups of people, men and women and children, clapping their hands and shouting in various dialects, in Arabic and Farsi and even French. There were music and small pops as children tossed lighted firecrackers in the air. Any excuse for a celebration.

How horrible, she thought suddenly, if they're hurt by this—

The horn blared again. She looked to the left, where an ordinary lorry approached. Behind it, careening out of control, was another vehicle, probably headed for market. Its lorry bed was filled with goats.

And a man.

He was in torn and filthy clothes, but Grace saw immediately that they were Western, not Persian. And he was hanging over the side of the lorry's cab.

Grace's pulse quickened. Even upside down and from the rear, she recognized those shoulders. That head.

The guards ran pell-mell out of the gate, rifles leveled. The NKVD soldiers, too, were moving.

“Don't shoot!” she screamed. “He's a British officer!”

—

T
HE GOATS
had done their work. When the last frayed edges of the rope parted from his wrists, Ian reached for the knife hidden in his sock and slashed at the bindings on his ankles. The fact of his fever and his wounds could not be ignored. His hands shook, and his vision was blurred. His body from the waist down throbbed relentlessly, and the friction of his trousers on his raw backside was both maddening and banal in its familiar pain. But he would not lie down and take the death Otto had planned for him. He would not die a traitor.

Ian lurched forward through the forgiving goats and grasped the edge of the cab. He could see the former NKVD lorry ahead of them—they would not yet have noticed he was standing with his hands free. There were only two men in the cab below. The point was to keep the lorry from arriving at its destination—he felt sure it must be the British Embassy, because they were rolling through a tony section of Tehran, the preserve of the wealthy and the foreign. There were people lining the sides of the road now, and up ahead he could see what looked like a massive stone gate.

He should try to take out the driver first. By the time the passenger reacted, the lorry would be out of control. It might crash, and if there was a bomb hidden somewhere it might explode and kill them all. But it would not kill Churchill.

He peered over the side of the cab and realized that it was not a British lorry—the driver of this one sat on the left. Fortunate; Ian's left hand was the only one he could trust. He edged in that direction, swaying with the movement of the vehicle. The driver's window was open, and his arm rested casually on the edge. Summoning his giddy body, Ian leaned over the lorry's bed, knife raised. He plunged it as forcefully as he could into the man's left biceps.

The arm was flung upward with a howl. Ian pulled out the knife blade and plunged it again, this time into the cab—and into the man's neck.

The lorry swerved and the horn blared; the driver had fallen forward onto the steering wheel. Then the lorry turned violently in the opposite direction. For an instant it was possible it would somehow find balance. But the tires were old. Ian was thrown back among the goats and huddled there on his hands and knees, feeling the slow-motion whirl of the lorry as it began to overturn. The animals were bleating with terror, scrabbling on their cloven hooves as the world upended. A horn grazed his temple. Then they were all tossed like garbage into the air. The last thing Ian saw was the ground coming up to meet him.

—

“D
ON'T SHOOT!
” Grace cried again, but the NKVD troops did not understand her, and as the lorry overturned and slid, metal groaning under the impact of the road, a rifle shot rang out.

There was a muffled
crump.
A millisecond's hesitation. Then the engine of the still-sliding truck exploded in a ball of flame. As Grace dove for the withered grass behind the guardhouse, a single lorry door arced upward and struck the iron bars of the compound gate with a resounding clang.