December (16 page)

Somehow Lara never quite got over seeing the Ostankino tower.

When the car from the TV station dropped her off in the car park in front of it, she walked towards the monolith and had the feeling that the Earth was sure to buckle under its fifty-five thousand tons.

She forced the feeling away, telling herself that she was just terrified because of what was going to happen that night. The raid was all set to take place and she would be playing her key role in events the following morning. In the meantime she had to go through a normal day’s work, doing a lunchtime TV slot, whilst pretending that she didn’t know that the country was about to be plunged into a murderous civil war.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

She swallowed and tried to adopt an unconcerned look as she went up the shallow steps onto the two-hundred-metre-wide concrete base of the tower and walked over to the reception.

The tower was shaped like a vast sceptre; it loomed over the whole of Moscow; you could see it from across the city on a clear day. The sky was overcast and it was snowing lightly now, so the top of the tower was lost in the clouds, but it was basically just an enormous concrete tube with three wide bands of satellite dishes and radio antennae spaced
along its shaft. These transmitted the signals for eleven television stations, twelve radio stations and seventeen satellite TV channels to the Moscow region, and then on to relays across the whole of the rest of Russia.

As Lara got near, she craned her head back and could see, above the bands of transmitters, just under the cloud base, the five floors of offices for the TV and radio stations, complete with the Seventh Heaven restaurant. They bulged out from the tower like a great jewel near the top of the sceptre. It then narrowed in again to a final two hundred-metre spire but this was lost today in the grey murk overhead.

The base of the tower splayed out wide like a funnel, it looked like the bottom of a power station cooling tower and had huge curved arches cut into it. She walked through one of them, up to the four-storey wall of plate glass inside it, and went through a sliding door into the ultramodern reception area. Huge video screens were mounted all around it, displaying live feeds from all twenty-eight TV channels.

It was full of media types coming in and out: the older, grey-haired guys sporting ‘liberal dissident chic’ with black polo necks and scruffy suit jackets with the sleeves rolled up. The younger, trendier men wore ‘media cool’: ragged-bottomed jeans and smart blazers, with gelled-up hair and goatee beards. More than half the crowd were sharp-styled media girls with either spiky, asymmetric haircuts and heavy kitsch clothing or just slobby jeans and T-shirts.

Quite a lot of the TV station staff knew that a rebellion was in the offing but none had been told that it would all start that night. Grigory Bezukhov, as director of the station, was in charge of organising everyone when the coup happened. As Lara walked through the turnstiles, she managed to make herself mutter ‘Hi’ to a few people and exchanged more significant nods with others that she knew were in on the plot.

Somehow she couldn’t manage her usual smile to the uniformed porters but scurried past them with her head down instead. The two men exchanged glances and shrugged, as she walked across to the bank of huge lifts. She squeezed into one, careful to keep her eyes averted from anyone else, next to a make-up artist with short, blonde hair scraped down over one eye and a lime-green pashmina draped over her shoulders. The door closed and the express lift catapulted them up 347 metres in less than a minute. She felt her knees buckle slightly under the Gs.

She walked out of the lifts in the central shaft of the tower and into a huge double-height space that spread out like a ninety-degree slice of a pie looking south over the whole of Moscow. The curve of the outside of the slice was one large glass wall; sections of it were closed off to form studios but otherwise the rest of the room was open plan, with a huge newsroom with rows of journalists sitting at desks covered in computers and all the usual paraphernalia of office junk: calendars, family photos, coffee cups. On her right, a glass wall ran along the side of the slice; on the other side of it was a studio that housed the phone bank for the big charity telethons she hosted, with a massive videowall to display the results.

Today, though, she was going to be doing a much more modest lunchtime TV interview with a well-known soap star who had recently come out of rehab and was trying to make a go of things again. The thought of such trivia at a time of crisis irritated her intensely but she forced herself to put her fear on one side and concentrate on the task in hand.

As she walked out of the lift she turned right and glanced up at the rear wall of the director’s gallery that overlooked the big telethon studio. She stiffened slightly and then forced herself to relax again. Behind the glass wall she could see that Sergey was up there talking with Grigory. They
were standing close to each other with their heads down and arms folded, talking urgently. Grigory wore his trademark rumpled, black Armani suit with his curly black hair splaying out over his heavy-set shoulders. He stroked his stubble nervously and glanced sideways over the newsroom.

Seeing Lara, he touched Sergey’s arm to interrupt him and then mouthed, ‘See you later,’ to her. He tried to smile reassuringly but it didn’t work. He looked terrified. Sergey also looked unhappy as he waved to her.

What is Sergey doing here? He isn’t supposed to get here until everything starts tomorrow.

Her stomach clenched in anxiety but she did her best to smile back. She had to go on air shortly so there was no time to stop.

She walked round the central lift shaft to the rooms at the other side of the tower, where the make-up studios were located; she felt like asking her make-up artist to slap a wall of it on her so that she could hide her nerves.

Lara smiled as the camera pulled back from her and her guest and the studio lights went down.

She then yanked her earpiece out, quickly unplugged herself from the desk mike and ran out of the studio before she had to make any more small talk with the soap star.

In her anxiety to find Sergey, she busted open doors and pushed past people in corridors. They looked back at the normally poised TV star with astonishment. She hurried up into the gallery where she had last seen him with Grigory. The big director was sitting hunched over a control desk, watching a show go out on the bank of screens in front of him.

When she burst in, he quickly put his headphones on the desk, stood up and ushered her out with a warning finger pressed over his mouth.

‘Where is he?’ she asked anxiously.

‘He’s upstairs. He’s gone outside to think.’ Grigory pointed up to the roof terrace over their heads.

Grigory and Lara hurried down the stairs, back into the newsroom and past the coat racks to collect their heavy parkas. Although it was mid-afternoon it was still minus eight outside and snowing.

They ran up the stairs to the roof of the TV centre. Sergey was alone, leaning against the guardrail, looking at the fading view over Moscow and smoking thoughtfully. From up here the whole of the city was spread out in front of them: the streets of the suburbs and then, in the distance, the floodlit, golden domes of the many churches and cathedrals, and the sinister Gothic skyscrapers of Stalin’s Seven Sisters. He looked down at the thousand-foot drop to the car parks in front of him and let go of his cigarette butt. The red dot spun into the void and vanished.

Lara ran over to him and clutched the arm of his coat. ‘What’s happening? Why are you here now?’

Sergey turned round and grinned nonchalantly. ‘I have to go to drink with Krymov tonight. We are celebrating Raskolnikov’s death tomorrow.’ He said it as if he were just going to a pub that night.

Lara’s eyes widened. ‘Well, you can’t go,’ she said simply, as if he were trying to defy a law of nature. ‘The raid’s happening. You’ll be with him when he finds out and he’ll kill you. You can’t go!’ She held out her hands in exasperation.

Sergey gave a comic grimace and shrugged. Then he held up an index finger and declaimed with mock seriousness, ‘Yes, and as Gogol says in “St John’s Eve”, we are not going to a wedding: “a black raven will croak over me instead of a priest; the open plain will be my dwelling, the grey storm clouds will be my roof; an eagle will peck out my eyes; the rains will
wash my Cossack bones and the whirlwind will dry them.”’

He grinned and started singing an old folk song: ‘“Black raven hovering over me, You won’t eat my flesh…”’

Lara shrieked in frustration and clenched her fists but he ignored her and carried on singing.

She looked around her and then hit him with her open palm on the side of his head, then grabbed a fistful of his hair and bent his head down. Her voice was a horribly shrill shriek as she jabbed a finger at him and screamed as if she were admonishing a disobedient child.

‘Sergey! You stupid bastard! You’re not going mushroom picking! He will
kill
you! Do you want to kill yourself ? Do you want that?’

Sergey went limp under her attack and kept his head down. Eventually she let go of his hair and stepped back, breathing hard, her face flushed red with anger.

Sergey straightened up slowly, the side of his face was red from her blow and his hair was askew, but he accepted her violence as a sign of vitality and did not object to it. His earlier bravado had gone, though, and he looked at her meekly, pushing the hair out of his face.

‘Lara,’ he began imploringly.

She stood back, breathing out into the cold air from her exertion and glowering at him with dangerous eyes. Some of the fear that had built up in her over the last few weeks had been released, though, and she was more able to listen. Grigory stood back from it all, he knew what the two of them were like.

Sergey realised that he had to be more practical. He held the palms of his hands out to her and began in a pacifying tone, ‘Krymov has given me a direct order. He already suspects something is up and if I don’t appear he’ll
know
it is and take action. The whole revolution will be prevented
from happening—I
have
to go. If I have to make a blood sacrifice to the Russian nation then I will.’

Lara looked back at him, not giving any sign of acceptance.

‘Lara, what is the purpose of living?’ He looked at her with an earnest, quizzical expression on his face.

She was caught off guard and frowned. ‘What?’

Sergey stretched out a hand. ‘Why are we doing all of this?’

‘Why are you asking me that now?’ Lara was exasperated.

‘No, I’m not questioning it. I have been thinking about this for a long time—and this quarrel has crystallised it for me.’

Lara knew there was no point interrupting him until this was over so she watched him warily.

He gained confidence. ‘The purpose of living is to go from what we know—’ he swept a hand to his right to take in the whole view of Moscow—‘this stuff, this material world—to go from what we know to what we
suspect
we know.’ His index finger sprang up alongside his head to indicate an inkling. ‘You see,
that
is the issue. The question is not what is out there—the truth is always out there—it is just a question of: do we have the courage, the faith, to believe in it?’

His tone became more conversational. ‘You see, that sounds obvious but in practice there is a huge void placed between what we know and what we
suspect
we know. And our challenge is to cross that void, to overcome that uncertainty, to have faith.’ His face shone as he built up to a climax. ‘That is the only way that we can externalise our vitality, that we can reach that greater vision, that magnificence of soul that is
Russkaya dusha
!’

Lara could not argue against him any more. He had accepted his fate—that he might have to die to save the revolution—and in the face of this magnanimity her worldly concerns seemed petty and inconsequential. She knew he had won.

As ever, in these encounters with Sergey, she was thrown back into herself by his fervour. It had always been like that
with him. It was how he had taken her soul in the first place and she began to feel pain again as his words tugged at the scar of that old wound.

Grigory could see that they had come to an accord and that it was time to move them back to more pressing practical matters. He walked towards them and the movement broke the tension.

Grigory was always a very generous character, used to handling sensitive creative egos. ‘Sergey, that was great, just beautiful, just beautiful. I loved it. Now, we need to think about when things are going to happen tomorrow.’

Sergey and Lara both nodded.

Grigory continued, ‘So, the email from Alex says he thinks he will have completed the raid and taken off from Krasnokamensk at 7.30 a.m. tomorrow. They are five hours ahead of Moscow, and the flight time is also five hours, so they will arrive here at 7.30 a.m. Does that work?’

Presented with a simple practical question, Lara could get going again. ‘Yes, we need to make the morning rush-hour news broadcasts. If we can get Raskolnikov into the studio straight away then we can go on air at once—maybe 7.45 a.m.? We have to hit everyone at the beginning of the day or all the media effect of a live broadcast will be lost. We need people going into work talking about it so that they can either come straight out onto the streets or at least spend the rest of the day watching it on TV.’

‘Hmm.’ Grigory furrowed his brows. ‘Right, I will email Alex now and tell him he needs to get that plane in here as fast as he can or we are lost. We can’t afford to have our big broadcast go out late.’

He turned to Sergey and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘And, Sergey, you will have to get yourself away from Krymov as fast as you can tonight or you are lost as well.’

Lieutenant-General Fyodor Mostovskoy knew that the attack on the prison camp would start that night but he did not hurry to get to his post at Moscow Air Defence Command.

Fyodor never appeared to get excited about anything.

The expensive call girl that he had just shown out of the door felt chilled by her recent encounter with him. With his thin features, pale skin and hair and lack of animation, it had felt like doing it with a corpse.

Even though this would be the riskiest night of his life, Fyodor had not hesitated from booking her; he never had any problem compartmentalising the different areas of his life.

It was late afternoon, but he took his time, dressing fastidiously in his airforce uniform. Although it might have seemed an odd time to go into work, air defence was a twenty-four-hour business and none of his subordinates questioned him; they were all too terrified of his chilling stare. Fyodor was that unusual creature in the Russian military, a teetotal hard worker, and this contributed to his capacity to unnerve his colleagues.

He did up his tie precisely as he looked out of the window of his apartment off Ulitsa Kosygina at the bleak winter view over the Moskva River. It was dark already and he could
see the lights of the waterfront opposite through the gently falling snow. The area was the preserve of top government officials, bankers and businessmen. Fyodor was one of the youngest generals in the airforce and hadn’t pushed his way up to the top so fast for nothing; he knew what he wanted and enjoyed the trappings of power. His official driver and limo were ready waiting for him in the basement garage as he walked slowly down the corridor to the lift.

The black Zil swept out onto Leninskiy Prospekt. Fyodor enjoyed the feeling of being screened from view behind the small black curtains as they drove through the frozen Moscow streets. Although his features never showed it, the whole experience of the coup exhilarated him. It was a high-stakes game of poker that he had calculated would make him billions of roubles if his gamble paid off. It would also allow him to take cold and very bitter revenge on that idiot Krymov, who had failed to respect him in the allocation of spoils from the United Aircraft Corporation.

The rush-hour traffic going out of town was light because of the petrol rationing. They headed southwest, over the MKAD ring road towards an area of pine woodland. Passing the turning into the village of Kommunarka, they continued on and then turned right through a band of trees into a fenced-off military installation with a sign that merely read: ‘Moscow Military District Depot 5’.

The car pulled up at a guard post with a striped road barrier and his driver passed his ID out, as Fyodor waited dismissively behind his black curtain. They drove through into a large empty factory shed and parked.

When Fyodor got out, his expensive leather shoes clicked on the cold concrete and a small stream of frozen breath followed him like a scarf fluttering in the wind. He walked over to where more armed guards stood by a door and slotted
his security tag into the wall. The factory shed was actually just a cover over a low reinforced-concrete bunker to shield it from satellite observation. He walked inside and through more security checkpoints, a metal detector and then had his retina scanned before he finally came into a room with a lift door.

A guard snapped to attention and he entered the lift and settled back to wait for the long descent. Eight floors down, the door opened and he walked out through another security checkpoint into the Moscow Military District strategic command bunker. This was the place that, in the event of a nuclear war, command would initially be handed to. The huge semi-circular room had rings of officers sitting at desks all facing a massive screen with various computer map displays showing the disposition of Russian air, sea and land forces around the world, as well as the last known position of potential enemy units: NATO forces marked in red and Chinese in orange.

It was full of officers from all the services: navy, army, marines, FSB, MVD, GRU and airforce, and had the subdued lighting and feel of a library. People stared at computer screens on their desks or talked quietly on secure phone lines. The main status board updated every five seconds, blinking as it refreshed. He shrugged off his greatcoat and handed it to the pretty female NCO by the coat racks and then walked over to his usual desk in the inner ring in front of the main screen and sat down to await events.

Nothing in his demeanour showed, but Fyodor took a distinct pleasure in knowing that somewhere in Siberia right now a small team of armed men was preparing to shatter the tranquillity around him and that, as a result, enormous amounts of money and sweet revenge would be flooding his way.