77 north, p.9
77 North, page 9
‘Pascha, please escort Dr Carr to her room and see she is safe,’ Golubev continued.
Alice gave me a nervous smile, then let go of me as one of the other guards stepped forward. He took her arm and led her along the corridor to where it widened out, presumably the lobby and lifts. She looked back over her shoulder.
I gave her a terse smile and turned back to Golubev, glancing at the pistol in the woman’s fist.
‘If anything happens to Dr Carr…’ I said.
Golubev held up his hand. ‘Anya here will ensure she is quite safe.’
Shouts erupted in the lobby; suddenly people were running in all directions. Security guards, some in suits, others more like Arctic commandoes togged out in cold-weather gear, were slung with submachine guns.
The woman Golubev had called Anya spoke rapidly in Russian. Golubev replied, ignoring me entirely, then turned to shout commands to the other security personnel, who buzzed away again. A team looked to be gathering at the end of the corridor, zipping up white parkas and slamming magazines home into submachine guns. Shit was obviously going down, but what kind?
Finally Golubev turned to me.
‘My apologies, Mr Chambers. I need your help with something.’ A smile cracked his face but made it nowhere near his eyes. ‘Come with me.’
‘Where are we going?’
Anya waved her pistol, and I took the hint; wherever we were going was no business of mine. I followed Golubev to the front of the two-storey lobby, past a long walnut reception desk. I turned to walk backwards, taking in an enormous tiled wall mosaic stretching the full height of the space. It was the Earth, as seen from above the North Pole. Russia and most of the Pole was coloured red, completely dominating the globe from this angle and harking right back to Stalin’s Red Arctic propaganda. The gold hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union sprouted leaves, cradling the planet, with a shining star marking the North Pole.
Bright lights flashed, reflecting off the mosaic. I spun to the doorway to see headlights turning outside.
‘Put these on,’ Golubev said.
One of the guards was holding out a white Parka and overtrousers. Golubev himself was being helped into one while waving commands at a group of guards by the stairs.
I took the coat. Evidently we were going outside.
‘It’s minus thirty out there and I’m wearing loafers with no socks,’ I said.
Anya shouted to one of the security team on the reception desk, who jogged over and knelt down, untying his laces.
‘Put his boots on,’ said Golubev.
I bent to pull on the disgustingly warm boots.
‘Don’t worry, you won’t have time to feel the cold.’
‘Always with foreboding menace,’ I muttered, but Golubev was already marching away towards the back of the lobby. I looked at the main doors and headlights outside, then back at Golubev, now speaking with the small group of heavily armed soldiers that’d been gearing up.
I pulled the laces tight then followed Anya’s waving pistol to Golubev.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
She grunted and pushed me forward.
‘Mr Chambers,’ Golubev called out. ‘Please, this way.’
Flanked by his guards, he led me across the back of the lobby, underneath a huge floating staircase that rose through the central tower all the way up several stories. Music and voices drifted from the ballroom but back here, with the temperature and the sense of abandonment, of isolation, the place felt dead.
‘You seem to get on well with Dr Carr,’ he said, with a crease of an almost-smile. ‘You know each other?’
I just nodded.
He pushed open a door, holding it for me. ‘When hosting events such as these, we like to accommodate guests in, if not luxury, then at least in safety and as friends. We are, after all, working towards the same goal.’
‘What goal is that?’
He overtook me, holding an arm out to herd me along. ‘Well, we each get what we want. In my case, it is money. In your case, it is weapons for General Kayembe, who pays you for doing so. Which makes your goal money, exactly the same as mine. This makes us friends.’
The music from the ballroom had disappeared. I turned to see Anya locking the door behind us before striding to catch up.
I nodded at Golubev. ‘I’m glad to hear that.’
‘But friends do not have secrets.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Please bear that in mind.’
‘I’m only here because Burton – Dr Carr’s previous escort – was killed. I think it’s you who owes me answers.’
‘Mr Burton’s death was not suspicious.’
‘So how did he die?’ I stopped. ‘I gather there was a fire?’ He carried on walking so I grabbed his arm, there was a shuffling of weapons from the security guys behind me.
He shook his head at them then shrugged me off. ‘Drunk as a fish and smoking in bed. There is nothing to suggest it was anything other than a tragic accident.’
‘Just like that security guard burning out there on the ice was an accident?’
He stopped and spun. ‘You have no doubt heard the rumours,’ he lowered his voice. ‘You know strange things are said to happen here…’ He looked at the ceiling for the right word. ‘Certain… phenomena. But that’s all they are: rumours.’
‘Until the next person turns up burned to death?’
He grunted and led me onwards in silence, the only sound being our footsteps and the eerie moan of the wind assaulting the walls outside. We were in the other wing of the hotel, where the tiled floor was grimy, with decades of uncleaned muck clinging to yellowed plastic signs on the wall. Golubev paused at yet another door. Its newer sign said, No Entry, in English. I presumed that’s what the older Russian sign above it said, too.
He rested his hand on the wall. ‘You have heard the stories about the hotel, I take it? The reason the pilots will not land here. The older pilots, the ones who remember what happened.’
‘All I’ve been told are children’s ghost stories,’ I replied.
‘Oh, they’re not stories, Mr Chambers. These things happened.’ He grabbed the handle and opened the door, the temperature plummeted. Beyond was a corridor decorated exactly the same, but all life had been sucked from it, the saturation and warmth dialled right down. He took a torch from a hook on the wall and clicked it on, illuminating dust that swirled as we walked in. More torches clicked on as the guards shuffled through behind us, the cold LED beams giving off all the warmth of the blizzard outside. The door closed behind us, the harsh blue-white light bleaching whatever colour there’d been. I looked at Anya, still gripping the pistol, still in her suit, but appearing not to feel the cold.
‘The hotel was completed in the early 1970s, a shining example of what I think you would call Brutalist architecture,’ said Golubev, striding into the gloom. ‘But the architecture was seldom seen, given its latitude.’ He waved a hand around the corridor. ‘I used the word “hotel” loosely, you understand. Barensky Hotel, it is a joke people made. But it was an important position. There was at the time a large Naval base just north of here, a resupply station for the Northern Surface Fleet and scientific vessels, as well as submarines, obviously. There is a large space defence program about thirty miles away, and several ballistic missile silos. The Severny atomic bomb testing ranges are west of us. All abandoned now. There were also large mines on the islands. Copper, lead and zinc. And oil, lots of petroleum offshore.
‘The hotel was built to house visiting military officers, business owners, executives and politicians.’
‘I can just see the who’s who of Moscow clamouring to visit.’
He stopped at a corner and shone the torch back towards the door we’d come through. The guards had unslung their submachine guns and were stood either side of the corridor warily. Anya pushed through them, fishing in her pocket.
‘She is a Yakuts, she doesn’t feel the cold like we do,’ Golubev chuckled. ‘Yes, this was not a popular destination, but busier than you might think. Until it was shut down, of course.’ He turned and shone the torch the other way as Anya passed me. The corridor here hadn’t been touched in decades. Wallpaper was peeling, the paint was bubbled and discoloured, bare light fittings hung from the drooping ceiling. It ended in a huge steel door, the kind you’d see on a ship or submarine. ‘In 1975 the building was turned over to the KGB. A couple of years later there was an… incident.’
‘What kind of incident?’
Anya inserted a large key into the steel door. There was a thunk as bolts withdrew, the temperature dropped again as she swung the door open. It groaned on its hinges, yawning into a black chasm.
I zipped the jacket tight and pulled the hood up. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, my breath fogging in the air.
Golubev motioned the guards forward, who surrounded us as we walked into the darkness. He looked at me and smiled, as cold as the steel door.
‘We are going to see my head of security, Mr Volkov.’
My stomach dropped, my blood instantly as cold as the ice crusting the concrete.
Chapter Fourteen
Severnaya Zemlya, Siberia
Present day
I shifted around in the jacket, feeling the pressure of the pistol at my spine and weighing up my options. There was nowhere to go. Two guards in front, one either side of me, and two behind, all with weapons up and ready, as Golubev led us deeper into the labyrinth.
The corridor beyond the steel door was not the gateway to Hell, unless Hell really was a derelict Seventies hotel. It looked identical in décor to those we’d come through, though as I was prodded along I could see exposure to the elements had taken its toll. The further we went, the worse it got. Wallpaper had peeled in huge sheets in some places, leaving dark cracked walls. It may never rain here, but that didn’t mean it was dry. The ceiling sparkled with frost, somewhere in the distance the wind moaned, a cold breeze tickled through my hair.
The heavy door closed behind us with another solid thunk from the lock, with Anya on the warmer side.
We marched round corners and along dark corridors, torches flashing as we weaved around the fallen masonry of collapsed sections of floors above, as well as rotten doors hanging from their hinges.
Golubev dropped back and took my arm, leading me through the dark interior with his torch on the floor. The howling wind tore through the cracks and windows above us. There was an odour in the cold air, difficult for me to distinguish with a near-frozen nose, but like the faint scent of cooking.
‘I said there was an incident,’ Golubev said. ‘As you have no doubt guessed, this side of the hotel suffered a terrible accident some time ago.’
‘A fire?’ I asked. The smell of burning was stronger now, as if it was seared into the walls.
He stopped and nodded. The sound of the wind rushing above had increased. I realised there were no walls here, but it was somehow more claustrophobic with the black surrounding us, dancing torch beams of the guards heading off in all directions.
One of the guards set a box down on the ground and knelt by it. Suddenly, a bright white light filled the space, forcing me to squint. A large, battery-powered work-lamp. I turned away to let my eyes adjust, taking in what had been a large room.
Dust and snow danced in the beam, blown around by the misty breath of the troops lurking uneasily in the gloom. The far edges of the room were still in shadow but the empty windows nearby were decorated with elaborate plasterwork. Some of the red and white paint remained, but mostly the walls were blackened with age and, I presumed, the results of that fire. Smelled like bacon, weirdly.
As my eyes adjusted, I could see there was none of the rot associated with ruins in milder climates, no moss or lichen or slimy mould. I realised now why there had been such a thick steel door separating what would have been one building at one time, with various interconnecting rooms and corridors. Now that door would seal out these ruins, this cold.
A couple of Golubev’s security guys were talking excitedly to each other in Russian. I turned to them and stopped.
Several metres away, on the ground in the middle of the pool of harsh bright light, was a steaming pile of clothes. I held up a hand and realised the dust and snow dancing in the light was not dust and snow at all, but tiny charred flakes. My nose wrinkled. All of a sudden the stench of burnt bacon made sense.
‘My head of security,’ said Golubev, putting a hand over his mouth.
I took a deep breath and moved closer. A burned face grinned at me, lips and skin and hair all gone, the white eyes and teeth shining brightly. He was looking at me, into me, accusingly. The top of his suit was so mangled and burned, it was difficult to tell where it ended and skin began. Wisps of smoke and steam still drifted from the remains of his clothes.
I looked at Golubev and frowned.
‘My men extinguished the fire before it claimed the body entirely.’ He took his hand away from his mouth. ‘This is Mr Volkov.’
I looked across the corpse, putting my own hand to my mouth. ‘I don’t want to seem insensitive, but how do you know it’s him?’
‘His clothes, his shoes. And this.’ He gestured to one of the other men, who rolled up the smouldering corpse’s trouser leg. On the side of his shin was a tattoo of a star sliced through with Russian script. ‘A gang symbol,’ Golubev said.
He spoke with one of his men, who went on for a while in Russian, pointing to the windows and back outside. Golubev listened carefully, nodding, but the only phrase I caught was Belyy bies, ‘white demon’. Something flashed in my brain, but it faded as I tried to focus on it. A memory, or possibly an old story I’d heard.
Whatever had burned Volkov hadn’t reached any further than his chest.
‘Strange way to murder someone,’ I said. ‘Or are you suggesting this was an accident, too?’
Golubev narrowed his eyes. ‘In the disused ruins of an Arctic hotel with no sources of ignition, I would suggest it is an even stranger way to have an accident.’
‘Which suggests Burton’s death was no accident either.’ As if anyone had really believed it.
He nodded grimly and looked at the leader of the team, who was casting his head around nervously. ‘This is Gregori, who as of ten minutes ago is my acting head of security. He saw the man who did this.’
I cocked my head. ‘Saw him?’
Golubev said something to Gregori, who lifted his ski goggles onto his head to reply, and shook his head.
‘He didn’t see his face. He and another man were patrolling outside,’ he pointed to the windows behind us, ‘they saw the flames.’ He paused to consider something, and asked Gregori another question. When the answer was received, he nodded, then started speaking English to me again. ‘My men jumped through the windows and ran to see what was on fire. As they did they saw the killer. They lost him in the ruins.’
‘What did the killer look like?’
Golubev didn’t have to ask Gregori; evidently he’d already been told. ‘Old clothes. Cold-weather gear, Soviet military style.’
‘How does he know?’
‘Mr Chambers, you are English and not entirely unfamiliar with your nation’s military dress, so I presume you would know what an English soldier during the Cold War would look like. Gregori was in the special forces in the Arctic for over ten years. If he says the killer was wearing old Soviet-style gear, then he was.’
‘You misunderstand. I meant, how does he know this other man was the killer?’
Golubev paused to consider this. ‘I suppose this is not certain.’
‘Hmm.’ I nodded.
‘But who else would be out here with the body at such a time?’
‘Who indeed?’ I muttered.
‘What do you think?’
‘About what?’
‘Well, this.’ He waved his arm around.
‘I think I’m bloody freezing my nuts off.’
‘Mr Chambers. Clearly, I am asking for your help.’
I looked from Golubev to the troops standing around, all nervously looking behind them, fingers still not straying far from triggers. I looked down at Volkov’s perma-grin.
‘I’m afraid he’s beyond help, Mr Golubev.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘You seem to think I’m a detective.’
Golubev looked round his men and leaned in closer. ‘You are in a unique position, Mr Chambers. You arrived this evening, after these strange events began. Also, Mr Volkov was killed while I was with you.
‘All of this means you are one of the only people in the Barensky Hotel who I can be sure is innocent of Mr Volkov’s murder. Your predecessor was also probably killed by the same person, so you have an interest in this crime. So you will help me, yes?’
The irony would have warmed my soul were it not approaching minus thirty. ‘I won’t help you, no. I’m here to look after Dr Carr and right now I’m not doing that. There’s a killer on the loose and I’m out here. I should be in there.’
His voice took on a new tone. ‘Mr Chambers, do not mistake this as a request.’
‘I’m telling you, I have no experience in this…’
‘Let me put it another way. You will do this, or,’ he looked me up and down and smirked, ‘without trousers, I suspect it will not be long before frostbite takes hold in your extremities.’
I smiled. ‘General Kayembe told me you could be persuasive. Well, let’s see what we have then.’ I crouched, muttering a string of obscenities as my frozen nostrils got within more effective range of the charred flesh. ‘Has anyone moved him?’
‘No one has touched the body, except to confirm his identity. When they found him they sought help, then stood guard. They are not idiots.’
‘Uh huh,’ I nodded, looking along the ground at the scuffled boot prints in the dirt. ‘I don’t suppose you can identify any tracks?’
‘Gregori looked but found nothing identifiable.’
‘No tracks in the snow outside?’
‘Pozharnyy,’ said Gregori.
Golubev gave Gregori a look which cut him off. He asked a question, waited for the reply, then shook his head. ‘The killer just… vanished.’
