NINE
845 Words
My room looked calm and sane to reassure me that tourists were safe to roam the city's main streets.
It could happen in London, I thought. It could happen in New York, Paris, and Rome. What was so different about Moscow?
I threw my coat and room key onto the bed, poured a large reviver from the duty-free whisky, and sank onto the sofa to drink it.
The attack had been perhaps an a*******n attempt. Without glasses, I could have been a pushover. They could have got us in the car. And the drive? To what destination?
Did Amber expect me to stick to the task until I was dead? Probably not, I thought, but then I don't think Amber underestimated the whole situation.
More than anything, I could be lucky again. But, failing that, I had better be careful. My heart gradually steadied, breath quietened to normal.
I drank the whisky and felt better.
After a while, I put down my glass and picked up the box containing a pay-as-you-go mobile I had purchased at the airport and switched it on. I had charged it up on the flight over and spent a great deal of the journeys reading the instruction book as this was the first mobile phone I had ever bought.
Started methodically beside the window, I made slow comprehensive sweeps of the walls. Top to bottom. Every inch.
There was no static.
I switched the phone off and put it down. No whine was inconclusive. It meant no listening probe embedded in the plaster, and it meant no listening probe switched on.
I went slowly to the bed and lay awake in the dark, thinking about the driver and the passenger in the black car. Apart from general awareness of their age, twenty-thirty, and the height of five-nine, they left me with three clear impressions. The first was that they knew about my poor eyesight. The second was that the savage quality I had sensed in their attack was a measure of the ferocity in their minds. And third, they were not FSB agents.
They had not spoken, so their voices had given me no clue. They had worn the sober garb of the Russian man-in-the-street. Their faces had been three-quarters covered, with the result that I had seen only their eyes, and even those, very briefly.
So, what did I think…? I pulled the quilt over my shoulders and turned comfortably on to one side. The Russians, I thought drowsily, didn't behave like that unless they were FSB, and if the FSB had wanted to arrest us, they would not have done it in that way, and they would not have failed. Deterrents like labour camps, psychiatric hospitals, and the death sentence would dissuade anyone else.
The following day, after a reasonably meagre breakfast, Amber and I went to GUM separately to not attract too much attention. At breakfast, the concierge handed us an envelope, each inviting us to a function at lunchtime, on the insistence of the Deputy Prosecutor General. I felt it was not something we could refuse.
The inside of GUM was not a department store along Western lines, but like those in the Far East; a massive collection of small shops all under one roof. A covered market, two storeys high, with intersecting alleys and a glassed roof far above. Drips of melted snow fell through the cracks in the heavens and made small puddles underfoot.
I bought a shirt, and Amber purchased a new outfit for the function and waited outside to display no interest in me and set off again when I came out. I had been pretty sure that someone was watching us, but I wasn't yet sure who that might be. Shopper's blocked every perspective, and it worked both ways. If I couldn't see our tail, then our follower couldn't see us.
Amber squeezed through a long queue of stolid people and stopped outside a shop selling folk arts and crafts. Although she stopped so that I could join her, her gaze directed towards the goods in the window, not at me.
"I take it we have to go," the disapproval in her tone was not directed at me, but at the thought of being in the same room as the odious Ozdoyev.
"I don't think we have a great deal of choice," I say. "You do know Ozdoyev will try and smooth talk you into handing over the hard drive?"
"Of course, I do," she said, "but they are not going to get it."
"Good," I said, just a few more hours after that, and then we'll be heading back to London.
"Thank God for that."
We made our way back to the Majestic, and I kept a few paces back as a precaution. Our tail picked us up somewhere between Gum and a pedestrian tunnel. I caught a glimpse of him behind us underground—a split-second of unruly curls and a scarf bobbing along in the crowd. If I hadn't been looking, I would never have noticed.
- Writer
