The Serpent's Curse (23 page)

“Wade, get over here!” his father yelled, and Wade saw the mustached policeman spin around on his heels as if he'd heard Wade's name—seemingly impossible in all the noise. The man stared in their direction until he fixed on Wade. The men in parkas were there again, too, striding toward Wade.
Oh, no. No.

Lily threaded her way through the crowd. Wade saw Becca's ponytail swinging. They were together, at least. Where was Darrell? The protestors were moving again in waves. He swam against the tide of bodies, trying to reach the girls, while Darrell was suddenly deep in the crowd, abreast of their father. The demonstration was all around him now and frightening. Strange faces yelled angrily. He felt a punch in his side. Spittle sprayed his cheek. He looked up. The men in parkas were closer. But his father wasn't where he'd last seen him.

Jumping to see over the crowd, he yelled, “Dad!” then heard a sudden loud pop. Becca whirled around toward him, cringing, while Lily slid past a cluster of protesters to Darrell. There was his father again, reaching backward for them but being dragged farther away. Wade muscled through the crowd and snagged Becca's sleeve. “Bec, let's get out of this. There's a subway over there somewhere.”

“You want to eat?
Now
?”

“No, a metro!” Wade said. “We can ride it back to the flat—”

They broke free of the jostling bodies and ducked between close-set stone buildings, hurrying to where the subway arrows pointed. He searched the crowd. His father, Darrell, and Lily were already across the street, looking back to find him and Becca. Wade waved his arms, but they didn't see him. There was another pop, then a shout. He couldn't see the men in parkas. Groups of demonstrators were spilling around quickly as if they would start running. Then Wade spied the stairs. Together he and Becca entered the heated subway. He held her by the hand, afraid without his father and the others, but responsible for himself and Becca. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, heat washed over them, and being underground had never felt so good.

“This is like Boston a little,” Becca said nervously. “They call their subway the T.”

“Good. Then you lead.”

She cracked a smile. “I think we follow the noise down the stairs.”

After paying for tickets with pocket change, and snatching a color-coded map of the subway system, they jumped down the nearest steps to the platform. They huddled behind a vending machine for minutes before boarding the first train that came screeching to a stop. It was immaculate and filled with passengers.

“If this station is called Okhotny Ryad, we'd better get off at the next station, wherever that is,” said Becca, reading the map on the subway wall. “It's pretty far anyway. We'll either walk back or take a cab to the flat. Maybe the demonstration will have moved on by then.”

“That was crazy, huh?” Wade said. “Those guys were chasing us, weren't they?”

“I didn't see them, but Darrell seemed to. There were so many people.”

They were crammed together face-to-face in the standing-room-only car. It was a sea of thick coats, knit caps, shopping bags, and teetering bodies as the train lurched forward. Wade wasn't sure exactly why, but he suddenly wanted to say something comforting to Becca. All he came up with was “How's your arm?”

She cradled an area between the elbow and shoulder of her left arm. “It itches, so that's a good sign, right? Like it's beginning to heal?”

“Good,” he said, trying to smile. The truth was that her bandages, when he'd glimpsed them under her coat, were dark, as if she had bled some. “We need to find another clinic to have it looked at. The Austrian couple who run the hostel will know where to go.”

She shook her head. “I don't want to slow us down—”

“Becca. You won't. We need to protect you.” Was that comforting? He didn't know. He tried to follow up with something more promising than what he was thinking when the tunnel outside the windows brightened, and the train began to slow.

“We'd better get off,” she said, rummaging through her bag. “The next stop is way beyond Red Square, and too far to walk back. And I actually don't think we can hail a cab. I must have lost my phrase book in the crowd, and I didn't get to the taxicab page. We don't want to end up even farther away.”

Wade snorted a laugh. “Agreed.”

He eased through the passengers to be ready to jump off when the train stopped. Before it did, the door from the next compartment opened with a breath of air, and Wade's heart thumped. The tall policeman with the bushy mustache pushed in. His gray overcoat flapped open to reveal a thick leather strap across his chest. He gripped something like a phone in his hand, reading it and then staring into the crowd.

“Becca . . .”

“I see him. Did he follow us down here? He's either with the police . . . or he's part of the Red Brotherhood.”

“Or both. Watch out for guys in black parkas.”

The train screeched to a stop. The doors groaned aside. Wade instinctively took her arm, but it was the wrong one. She winced, and he let go. He jumped onto the platform and turned for her, but a block of people pushed past him into the car, and Becca was forced away from the doors.

“Becca—” He tried to push his way back onto the car, but she was crowded even farther from the doors. He couldn't get on. She couldn't get off. The whistle sounded. The doors began to close. “Becca!” Then the mustached man jumped from the rear door of the car onto the platform. With a single look at Becca, Wade charged away into a warren of tunnels as the subway roared off into the dark.

S
now was falling heavily when Wade stumbled up the metro stairs to the street. The flakes were large and wet and flying in his face and down his neck. He pulled his woolen cap low and ran up the sidewalk to the nearest corner. His shirt was soaked through. Everything was soaked, though his chest was a block of ice. He looked back. No one else came out of the subway. He searched the intersection.

“Wait!” someone yelled in English. Or was it “Wade”? He didn't look back. Panicking, he hurried down the sidewalk, slipping, nearly falling. He reached the next intersection. Footsteps thudded behind him. Several sets. Running this time.

At the first break in traffic, he tore across the wide avenue to a park on the other side. He ducked behind a shuttered kiosk. The mustached man paced the far corner, his overcoat flapping and flapping, scanning the intersection. Was
he
the one who had called to him? Why would anyone “wait” for someone pursuing him?

Trying to keep the kiosk directly between him and the tall man, he made himself small and ran as quietly as he could in the opposite direction. He soon found himself in a maze of grim gray buildings that resembled a movie set for the apocalypse.

He ducked into the first side alley he saw. Narrow, barren. Cold.

He'd lost his breath and couldn't get it back. Not from running so much, but deep inside. As if his lungs were failing him.

“Wait!” the voice called.

He stormed deeper into a cement quadrangle and glanced back, and something told him to turn at the first corner. He slipped on the ice, smashing his knee on the pavement. The pain speared up his side. On his feet again, turn, and down the passage, then turn again. His legs were lead. The snow was heavier, wetter. He started to remember the warmth of Rome, that night outside the Museo Copernicano, when they'd slept under the stars. Of being together with Darrell and Becca and Lily. But there wasn't enough of his brain to do anything but run.

He was running on bone. He stumbled to the end of the alley, hoping for an outlet. There was none. It ended in gray stone, a coffin of concrete. Heavy footsteps crashed behind him. Many more than before. Twenty paces behind him. Ten. Five. Three.

Wade rested his head on the cold cement wall, then spun around with a cry—“Help me!”—as a group of men in hooded coats closed over him.

B
ecca raced through the slushy streets. The demonstration had broken up as quickly as it had formed. She found the safe house, but Wade hadn't returned.

Roald was on the phone to the police, getting nowhere.

“They have him,” she gasped. “The police or the FSB or the Brotherhood. They took him!” She told them everything, and Darrell started doing his caged-animal thing. He eyed the tiny window of their room as if he was going to jump out of it. Then he shot her a look as if it was somehow
her
fault that Wade wasn't there. As if
she
should be lost, instead.

She understood. Brothers. She was nearly as close to Lily as she was to her own sister, Maggie. If anything happened to her . . .

“I couldn't get off the train,” she said. “The crowd was pushy, and I—”

“We know, Bec,” Lily said, patting her hand. “It's not that—”

“Of course it's not that!” Darrell practically shouted, then breathed out sharply. “It's this dumb freezing place. Wade could be anywhere—”

The door swung in. Becca jumped for it, but it was a man in a parka and black combat fatigues and boots. Behind him were several other men dressed the same. “Put down the phone,” the first one said to Roald. “Gather things. Come with us. No time.”

“But—” Roald began, the phone halfway to its cradle.

Darrell shook his head crazily. “No! I'm not leaving! I'm not going anywhere without Wade!”

The lead man pulled his pistol out of its holster. “No words. Put down phone. Chief Inspector Yazinsky has ordered us to bring you to station.” Becca then watched as the man did an odd thing. He put a finger to his lips, and whispered, “Red Brotherhood are entering lobby downstairs. They are coming. We do not want firefight in building. Please. Hurry.”

And that was it. She went electric and so did everyone else. They threw their things together. The men—were they even real police?—shut off all the lights but one and hovered at the windows and doors, guns drawn.

The man made a hissing noise. There was a shout from outside their room. The men at the door crouched. A shot exploded through the door frame and crashed back out the window. The men at the door returned fire.

“Stair escape through bathroom,” the lead man said. He pushed them efficiently through the room and into the bathroom, where he slammed the bottom sash up as far as it would go. Eight inches. Not enough. He raised a jackboot and kicked it out entirely. Glass splattered onto an iron landing. “Mister first,” he said, “then others.”

Roald slipped through the opening into the whirling snow and waited on the landing for Becca and Lily. They took the iron steps down to the next landing and the next, while Darrell followed with the officer. An unmarked car was waiting at the bottom. The gunfight above had stopped and been replaced with yelling and the sound of multiple sirens approaching through the snowy streets.

“Who are you?” Roald said as they were hustled into the back of the cruiser. There was no answer. The driver started up, the electronic door locks engaged, and the car slid away, leaving the officer who had helped them on the street, trotting into the hotel, his weapon raised. The cruiser was nearly around the corner when Becca felt the air shudder. Glass and wood and fire blew like a rocket's ignition out of their room, showering the street with flaming debris.

Darrell screamed, “They bombed our room! Those freaks bombed our room!”

A second blast blew fire out everywhere. The cruiser picked up speed and they were on another street and another. More sirens. The driver tore through several blocks north from the safe house, down the hill from Lubyanka Square, whizzing past the ragged remains of the demonstration, slowing only as they entered a wide plaza. In the center of the plaza was a big box of a building. There was a range of brightly lit double-arched windows across the front and a heavy square tower sprouting from the roof. The area in front of it was filled with taxicabs.