Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (30 page)

But Russia gave him perspective. She was so huge, so brutal, so layered in history, beauty, terror and blood. So like Ireland, and yet nothing like it at all. For Russia owed nothing to the Western mindset. The Russian mind was inscrutable, owing to neither East nor West for its philosophy and way of viewing the universe. Russia was Russian, and could not be defined by the tenets of the rest of the world. She was a fact, a great dark Mother, whose mind and soul was slippery and often not understood even by her own.

“Yasha.” A voice, strong, commanding, yet filled with a remembered laughter, came to him out of the snow and the dark.

There were only two people on the face of the planet who called him Yasha. One had been partly responsible for raising him, the other stood here now, outlined in the dark against the blowing pines. He had met Andrei Alekseyevich Valueve when they were both eighteen years old. They had three years of sublime friendship in which both were lucky to emerge with limbs and spirits intact. Since then this was all they were allowed, one night a year here near the Finnish border in a low log house whose eaves hung heavy with ice and pine boughs that scraped the roof.

“Andrushya,” he replied, voice carrying quietly through the delicate spirals of snow that danced around the two of them.

They stood thus for a moment, Andrei Valueve’s guards a dim blur behind him, the six feet of snow separating Jamie and his dearest friend filled with a wealth of memory and regret.

Then Andrei, always and in all essentials Russian, stepped forward to clasp Jamie in a bear hug which Jamie returned with equal ferocity. Emotion engulfed the men, from the sheer relief of seeing each other alive, and reassuring themselves that all nightmares could be woken from, even if both were very aware that such things were seldom true in the waking world.

“How is our soldier-boy? Have you left him in a brothel or afloat on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean?”

“He was alive when I left him,” Jamie said, his grin a flash of impudent white in the sea-darkened visage. “He’s more scared of you than anything, so be a nice boy, Andrei, and take care of him.”

“I will, just as I always do.” He grinned back at Jamie, their shared history all around them suddenly thick with the memories of adventures that had often bordered on madness. “Now come inside before we freeze our
yaeechkas
off.”

The dacha belonged to a friend of Andrei’s but was never used except for this one night each year. Some mysterious person readied it for them so there was no creeping damp or ice-coated windows, rather a warm, snug interior filled with rugs and heavy furniture, food and drink for the night and the following morning and of course, a chessboard.

Inside, they shed their heavy coats, boots and hats, and turned to assess one another.

“Still the prettiest bastard on the face of the planet, excepting myself,” Andrei said and flashed the white grin that had charmed any number of women out of their clothes and senses.

“I do my best,” Jamie replied and grinned in return, the tension starting to leak out of him.

Jamie pulled two bottles of Connemara Mist from Vasily’s great coat and handed one to Andrei. The other he gave to Andrei’s guards, old soldiers who would welcome the whiskey’s fire in their bellies and joints, especially on a frigid night such as this one. He always brought a few bottles because it bought them privacy for at least part of the night.

Andrei disappeared into the kitchen, giving Jamie a minute to look around and catch his breath.

Andrei returned with a tray that held caviar and thinly-sliced black bread, two glasses and a bottle of vodka.

“Let us sit and eat and drink—but most importantly, let us play.” He put the tray down beside the chessboard and rubbed his hands in anticipation of the night ahead.

The chessboard was Andrei’s, a beautiful confection of Baltic amber squares interspersed with onyx. The entire thing shone like a mirror and weighed close to forty pounds, heavy enough that no one thought to notice a few extra ounces.

Jamie sat and leaned back in the chair, stretching his legs while Andrei poured them each a generous measure of vodka. He took the glass from Andrei and sighed in anticipation. It did not disappoint. The vodka was smooth, near frozen, gelled to perfection, creamy with the silk of silver birch coal in its under notes. Andrei always brought him a bottle of this, the only alcohol he drank these days.

There was at first a mellow quality to the evening, the light from the fire flickering drowsily, and the old camaraderie between the two of them present enough to form a third entity in the room, a troika of memory and affection.

“Do you hear from Colleen these days?” Andrei asked lightly. Too lightly.

“No, but she is well and, I think, happy now.”

“And what of you my friend, are you happy now too?”

“Near enough,” Jamie said, “and you?”

“Near enough,” Andrei replied, with only the slightest undertone of mockery. He took a swallow of his vodka after moving his bishop into a confrontation with Jamie’s knight and eyed Jamie speculatively. “So, what is her name?”

Jamie looked up sharply. “Was I talking about a woman?”

Andrei nodded, blue eyes remarkably sober. “Yes, I think you were.”

Jamie looked down at the board with his hand tight around the glass of vodka. “Her name,” he replied after a strung silence, “is Pamela.” He noted with annoyance that Andrei’s face was alight with interest. It meant that he was about to ask uncomfortable questions. Questions Jamie had no desire to answer.

“I am going to just say this, and then I don’t want to talk about her anymore. She’s married to another man. She loves him and anything beyond friendship is impossible between us, and even friendship has become insupportable.”

“Does she love you?”

“Obviously not,” Jamie said. “She’s married.”

It was Andrei’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Where the heart is concerned there is nothing obvious at all, and so I’ll ask again, does she love you?”

“Yes, I suppose she does, but it’s irrelevant, isn’t it?”

“Love is never irrelevant,” Andrei said, and his tone alerted Jamie to the fact that they weren’t really talking about his own love life, or rather, the lack of it.

“You sound like a romantic, Andrei, not a state you’ve been bothered by before, so now tell me—what is
her
name?”

Andrei laughed. “Her name is Violet.”

“And what of your Ilena and the girls?”

“They are well looked after. Ilena does not know, and so it need not matter.”

Jamie leaned forward, rolling his glass in his hands, casually surveying the room to make certain the guards could not overhear.

“Are you mad, telling me this here?” he asked, easing his grip on the tumbler for fear of shattering it.

“Yes, I’m mad, completely and entirely mad, like a March hare.”

Every year he waited for the words, every year he waited for Andrei to tip his queen into the waste ground and tell him he was ready to escape. And every year he left with fear in his heart that next year at their appointed time, Andrei would not appear because Andrei would be dead.

It was a terrible game the two of them played, choreographed down to a dance whose moves were meaningful on several levels, for each move told a very specific story. Each move telegraphed information to the player across the board, who must never let his concentration falter lest he miss a subtlety. At all times, they kept up a seemingly relaxed patter, a strain in itself. But they had perfected a sharp and stinging banter long ago which always held in its under notes a far more serious conversation.

It had started as a lark, something that Andrei’s acrobatic mathematical mind found amusing. Code was in his blood, both the formation of it and the unlocking. Jamie’s mind, equally nimble, had taken each challenge thrown at him by Andrei. Challenges that often involved great physical risk and acts that were definitely outside the boundaries of law.

To this particular game they had added the quote as the key that unlocked the interior door to their shared history. Now here, a long way past those two schoolboys, Jamie waited and then his heart stopped for a moment for Andrei, still chatting as though he hadn’t a worry in the world, had tipped over his queen. Jamie smiled and said something inconsequential through lips that were frozen with sudden panic.

Andrei’s eyes met his, the blue flame in them glowing as though cupped in a dark hand. There was a smile on his face, but it wasn’t one that reassured. As though there had been no halt in their conversation, Andrei said,

“I am, of course,
mad as the mist and snow
, but what else would you expect of a Russian?”

Many years ago, when they had worked out their code on paper and then burned it, each piece, according to its movements, had several meanings. The queen, tipped over in this fashion and coupled with the quote meant only one thing—‘I am ready.’ Ready to leave Russia, ready for the plan to go into effect. He wondered suddenly what had changed, what had finally tipped Andrei into defection from a country that he both loved and hated in equal measure. The woman? Could that be it? There was no doubt something had changed immeasurably since last year.

Sitting here still, drinking his vodka, was akin to free-falling down a mountainside and being expected not to react. Andrei was apparently studying the board with great concentration, yet the queen still lay upon her side as though he had merely knocked her over accidentally and forgotten to pick her up.

Jamie said something. He wasn’t even sure what, for adrenaline was hammering in his ears like the roar of the ocean breaking against a rocky shore.

With Andrei’s words, the last piece fell into place. The Yeats quotation was one they had agreed upon years ago on a mad night when they had nearly died.

How many years ago were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and snow?

Jamie sat barely breathing, for he had long ago despaired of ever hearing those words cross Andrei’s lips. Coupled with the tipped queen it could only mean one thing—there would be no time for planning. They would have to go tomorrow.

They played through to the end of the game. They had to, there was no choice with eyes upon them. Jamie focused on the game as well as he was able, sipping his vodka and allowing Andrei to re-fill the glass twice. Andrei won the game, though narrowly. Afterward, they made a show of sleepiness and bid the guards a formal goodnight.

Andrei hugged him as he always did at any parting, no matter how brief.

“
Spokoinoi nochi,
Yasha.” Good night, Jamie. And so to bed with a million unanswered questions ricocheting around in his head.

“
Spokoinoi nochi,”
he replied, voice relaxed and tired. It was an effort to appear unconcerned, to move easily, to stretch and tell Andrei he would beat him tomorrow at yet another game. It would be a miracle if the guards didn’t simply sense the tension that strummed the air, tight as the strings of a violin.

He readied himself for sleep but kept his day clothes on, his boots by the side of the bed so that he could slip them on at a second’s notice. The room was small, the bed a narrow one but comfortable and warm, the latter quality being the virtue that mattered most in this country.

He lay on the bed, blind to the low, dark-timbered ceiling, heart still thumping hard, adrenaline running like a steeplechase through his blood, and thought about the path that had led the two of them to this night.

On the other side of the wall, another man remembered, his boots by his bed, his heart in his throat.

Like two stars burning in opposition
, it was inevitable that Andrei Alekseyevich Valueve and James Stuart Kirkpatrick, existing within such a small galaxy as Oxford, were going to collide. It was just as inevitable that the resulting smash would be seen for miles around.

Andrei Alekseyevich was a genius, one of the new mathematicians known as ambidextrous for his facility in both pure and applied mathematics. Genius at Oxford wasn’t entirely rare, but Andrei had that extra facet—the divine spark of intuition that illuminated his mind with a light like that of a dying star—incandescent and burning, and as surely as the heavens were distant, it set him apart. As did the fact that he was Russian and would be emerging from behind the Iron Curtain, a rarity granted only by his father’s stature in the Communist Party.

Andrei, entirely comfortable with the status his genius, his looks and his White Russian ancestry had bestowed upon him from birth, was less comfortable about sharing his bit of the stratosphere with a man similarly endowed. Granted, James Kirkpatrick was the darling of the English department and wasn’t infringing upon the sacred ground of Andrei’s discipline. Still, he was managing to make his presence known and felt.

Standing six feet in his stockings, with a shock of white-blond hair and the high imperious cheekbones of his Slavic forebears, Andrei had long been able to take for granted his pull on the opposite sex. Add to this his genius and natural charm and he had never had to brook competition of any sort. Enter James Kirkpatrick.