The poets game, p.24
The Poet's Game, page 24
Valentino turned on the radio and moved to the rhythm of the Euro pop tune.
“Do you like the music?” He looked in the rearview mirror. “It’s an old Pussy Riot song. I like their music but I hate their politics. Russia needs a strong leader who can crush the weak, soft-hearted, jerk-off, liberal scum.”
He turned to Matthews. “How about you? Do you like Pussy Riot?”
“Sure.”
Valentino tapped the steering wheel in sync to the melody. “Police are everywhere looking for the cockroaches scattered by the gas. A twenty-minute ride will take an hour if we hit a roadblock, but don’t worry if we’re stopped. I know how much you’ll have to put in their palm to get through.” His eyes glanced at the mirror again. “What’s that you’ve got?”
Grigoryev held up a cell phone he’d found on the back seat.
“Goose shit. It belongs to the last passenger. Motherfucker. He was an opera singer with his granddaughter. He treated me to an aria, so I gave him a break on the fare. Give me the phone. It’s worth a bundle on the black market. New phones need to be registered so they can arrest you if you order porn. The old phones are worth a mint.”
The driver laughed, but his smile disappeared when he looked at the mirror. “You don’t think it’s funny. You’re quiet. Are you going to a funeral?”
Matthews looked at his wristwatch.
“You’re late. That’s it. Here we go.”
The Mercedes accelerated into a turn onto Spiridonovka Street and slowed around the corner as it came onto a queue of cars at a roadblock.
“Police. This won’t take long. It’s the usual strip search, finger up your ass.” He laughed.
Valentino cut the line of cars when he saw an opening and was next to pass through the yellow barrier blocking the street. Groups of Interior Ministry troops idled on either side of the street, arms resting on automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, faces hidden in black balaclavas. Two teams of FSB officers demanded papers from the first car in line.
“They’re looking for dissidents,” Valentino said. His hands tapped the steering wheel and he began to whistle a tune. “It’s not far after this, a couple of kilometers.”
Valentino had brought attention to them by cutting the line. Matthews stared nervously at the unfolding scene. One officer interrogated the driver of the lead car, while a second officer leaned into the passenger window, finger across his trigger guard.
“What’s taking so long?” Valentino snapped. He put his head out the window. “Hey, I’ve got two passengers late for their mother’s funeral.”
Matthews leaned forward. “It’s okay. We have time.”
“I don’t have time. I know a shortcut. This is taking too long.”
Valentino had turned around in his seat and backed up the car, making two quick maneuvers so the car spun around and he proceeded where they had come from.
“Ostanovish. Halt.”
Two FSB officers in black berets waved down the Mercedes.
“What are you doing?” Grigoryev shouted.
“Don’t worry. It’s a shortcut. You know how much money I lose by sitting in this shitty queue.”
A tall FSB officer stood in the path of the car, blocking its escape, and he aimed his weapon. “Stoy!”
Valentino opened his window, smiling at the grim policeman, and pleaded his case. “These two gentlemen have an urgent appointment. I don’t need to use the Ring Road. We’ll just go a few blocks to the other side.”
“Papers.”
“Sure.” He produced his license, registration, and internal passport.
Two other FSB officers joined the first and waited for the documents to be examined.
“Get out.”
“What for? You’ve got my papers.”
“Get out.”
Grigoryev watched the driver step out of the car with visible annoyance. Then the driver’s mood changed, mumbling to whichever policeman was willing to listen that he was an Afghan war veteran and a big supporter of the government, making a crude joke, but the police ignored his bonhomie.
Grigoryev whispered to Matthews. “We’re next. My documents might pass scrutiny, but they’ll recognize you.”
Outside, an argument erupted between the driver and the three officers, who shouted down his indignant protests.
Grigoryev became nervous. A bead of sweat formed on his upper lip and he spoke softly. “It is time to walk away.”
“You’re out of your mind. Where do we go?”
“We’ve been here before. This exact spot.” He pointed to the statue of Yuriy Dolgorukiy. “Do you remember? It’s where we escaped from the KGB when we came out of the sewer.” He nodded across the street. “Behind the statue is the tunnel entrance. We step out of the car slowly, look calm, waiting for the interrogation to go on, and make our way to the statue.” He saw Matthews’s confusion. “There is the manhole cover that we came out of. You, me, and Mikhail. We had to run fast to escape the police when they saw us climb out. Now we will do the reverse.”
His face was pale and worried. “We can wait until they finish with the driver. Or get out and walk away. The manhole leads to the tunnels. There is a branch that leads under the Ring Road and will take us toward my wife’s nephew’s home.” He looked at Matthews. “Understand?”
The driver had gotten into a heated argument with the tall officer. “Let me see your face. I’ll report you.” Valentino pulled down his balaclava.
Two officers grabbed Valentino’s arms and threw him against the taxi’s hood. He fought back, yelling a string of ripe curses, but two more men arrived to restrain him, and the scene quickly became chaotic.
“Now,” Grigoryev whispered.
Matthews stepped out of the car first, pretending to distance himself from the unruly driver, and Grigoryev followed, stepping back from the altercation. Drivers and police in the immediate vicinity took great interest in the struggle, and watched fists strike the driver. A small crowd gathered. Matthews stepped back from the scene, slipping into the gathering crowd. More police arrived, and there was a brief moment of chaos when Valentino was thrown to the ground, cheek crushed against the asphalt.
Matthews and Grigoryev crossed the street. Two men in the dark night moving outside the perimeter of streetlights and they reached the huge bronze equestrian statue.
“Halt!” The voice came from behind.
“Run.”
A whistle somewhere and then the world around them got very small. They slipped out of sight around the statue’s stone base. Shouts in the night, flashlights carving arcs through the park’s darkness revealing lovers, but the two men were still unseen. Matthews stood over the sidewalk manhole.
“Down here,” Grigoryev said. Together they moved the cast iron cover and climbed down the ventilation shaft. Grigoryev went first and Matthews followed, pulling the cover back in place.
35 Underworld
Matthews held the ladder’s top rung and took shallow breaths to quiet the clamor in his ears. Overhead, a gruff voice shouted commands and boots came to rest on the iron manhole cover. Curses, voices, the chaos of a search for missing fugitives, and then footsteps moved away.
Cold air from deep in the earth cooled Matthews’s face as he climbed down the deep shaft. Light vanished as he descended, and then he was at the last rung and he let go, dropping to the floor. His cell phone screen went black and he was enveloped in primordial darkness. Water dripped nearby; a bat swooped past, and the quiet of the place was loud in his ears. He swiped his cell phone, excited a dim glow, and his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark world. He was still for a moment, seeking something to hold on to, and then the world began to take shape with echoes, smells, and vague surfaces. Old memories of Moscow’s underground returned with a childhood fear of the dark.
He’d entered the tunnels with Grigoryev and Sorkin as adventurous teenagers hoping to find the Kremlin’s rumored rail line, and he visited again as a young intelligence officer recruited by Moscow station chief George Mueller to look for underground communication cables. Mueller had been part of the team in 1955 that advised the CIA’s effort to excavate a tunnel from Berlin’s American sector to Altglienicke in the Soviet sector, where the Soviet armed forces were headquartered, hoping to locate and tap key communication cables. Mueller had supervised Matthews’s underground reconnaissance, eager to reprise one of the CIA’s boldest Cold War operations. Matthews had never found Stalin’s bunker or high-capacity cables, but he found a few telephone wires, an ancient grotto with a skeleton, and one door that led to the wine cellar underneath the Metropol Hotel. He had drawn a map of the tunnel system that he submitted with his final report. The project was abandoned when senior White House officials feared that discovery of their phone tapping would jeopardize the thaw in Cold War hostilities.
* * *
“Grigoryev?”
Falling water could be heard somewhere, but sound had no provenance in the dark, and he couldn’t locate the source. Cones of faint light traveled down the darkness where ventilation shafts penetrated the ceiling. Even his breathing was loud in the quiet place. Brick walls covered in moss rose to a vaulted roof, thick with bats. One passed close to his head, lifting his hair. A stream eddied over rocks in the center of the cavern and then he saw that they had entered at a fork in the main tunnel.
Louder. “Grigoryev!”
“Here.”
Matthews shifted his cell phone and saw the Russian sitting on a large rock, massaging his leg.
“Remember this spot?” Grigoryev nodded toward the converged tunnels. “The bastards might have seen us enter, but they won’t know which tunnel we take.”
They walked for thirty minutes along the stream, moving carefully over rocks slick with moss, and paused frequently to orient themselves. Walked, listened, and then walked farther. They heard sirens on the street above, and at one point, they stopped to gauge the danger, but then continued, guided by the ventilation shafts’ dim light. The tunnel sloped down and took them deeper underground. Matthews had forgotten the stress of making an escape from a hostile city, and he knew the price of failure was high. But if the trick was done well, the cost was unimportant. And he’d done it before, failing once, and that disaster came back to haunt him as they scrambled over slick stones. He felt his way forward, as if walking blindfolded. He’d never gotten used to mortal danger. Cold sweat, chills, and devouring fear took over his senses. More than once, he’d sworn off agency work to avoid moments like this—and now, like a bad dream, the feeling was back. The word duty came to him with a hollow ring.
Ahead, another tunnel intersected through a gaping hole blasted from rock, and from it came the sound of a waterfall. Matthews pointed his cell phone’s light into the cavity and looked for features that he remembered from the maps he’d drawn. They moved through the ragged opening and had gone a short distance when they summited an iron trestle that carried a rail line over a stream that spilled into a shallow gorge.
Matthews stood on steps carved from bedrock. Grigoryev was at his side limping and favoring his good leg. His cell phone illuminated the rail tracks and then he pointed it in the opposite direction. The tunnel was wide enough for two train tracks, and signal lights disappeared in both directions—red one way, green the other.
They stood by the tracks, awed at coming upon what they’d missed years before. Below them, the stream passed through flood-control locks operated by giant rusted gears. Water flowed over the top of the sluice gate and dropped into a pool.
“This way,” Grigoryev said. Then under his breath, “Shit.” He pointed at a blinking red light high above the tracks. “Motion detector.”
Matthews stood perfectly still.
“They know we’re here.” Grigoryev pondered which direction would take them north under the Ring Road and beyond the police encirclement. Across the tracks, a massive wood door was sprung open, rusted hinges pulling out from stone settings. “That leads to the street.”
“You’re sure.”
“No, but more sure than you.”
“Listen.” Matthews put his hand on Grigoryev’s shoulder, stopping him as he went to cross the tracks. In the deep silence of the underground, distant voices could be heard. Soft, but growing louder, men taking orders, but then the distant voices were gone. Exhaustion and the enveloping darkness played tricks on them. A dull, deep rumbling broke the quiet. Matthews turned his head and cupped his ear, listening. They were on the edge of the trestle and the rail beneath him began to hum and vibrate, and then the steel clicked and ached.
“There.” He pointed.
A glowing beam of light appeared around a bend in the tunnel, its bright headlamp filling the darkness. The hot light came closer, moving slowly, and then the dark shape of a locomotive was visible behind the powerful beam. A shrill whistle pierced the quiet.
Matthews and Grigoryev scampered out of the path of the huge locomotive lumbering toward them with frightening menace.
“Here,” Matthews said, taking refuge behind a boulder, but his voice was drowned by the screech of wheels scraping on curved iron rails. Blinding light filled the tunnel.
The locomotive, followed by a second, rumbled past slowly, its giant wheels clacking as it crossed the trestle, and beams underneath strained and groaned against the great weight. The boxy locomotives pulled sleek, silver passenger cars with red-and-white detailing. No identifying marks were painted on the sides of the locomotive, and window shades of passenger cars were drawn. The roof of one car had the white dome of a communication antenna, and the whole collection of cars and locomotives passed like a ghost train.
Grigoryev pointed at the last car, modified to include an anti-aircraft gun, muzzle lowered for the tunnel.
“Putin’s armored train.” Grigoryev spat. He hurled a stone at a window, but it bounced harmlessly off the safety glass. The train lumbered past and made its way slowly down the tunnel.
Across the tracks, the wooden door had been thrown open. Flashlight beams carved the darkness and settled on Matthews and Grigoryev, illuminating them like actors surprised to be caught on an empty stage. Cold light bathed them and for a moment they stood stunned and motionless.
A chorus of voices rose. The man in front shouted, “Halt!” In the rear another voice cried, “It’s them,” and then curses followed and an officer gave the order not to shoot.
Matthews couldn’t see the figures through the blinding flashlight, but he recognized Colonel Zhukov’s tenor voice. Matthews shined his light in their direction to even the score—each bright light an obvious target, but hiding the physical details of the person. He drew Grigoryev down to his side behind the boulder. Gruff voices ten meters away, alive with the excitement of hunters who’d cornered their prey.
Grigoryev’s first shot came with a muzzle flash and an explosion of sound. Flashlights went out and then loud cries, shouted commands, and scattering police. One man stumbled and fell, cursing loudly. Darkness settled in the space—adversaries across the tracks invisible in a darkness punctuated only by the glow of red-and-green signal lights.
Matthews saw the lights blink as men crossed in front, approaching from both ends. A second man fell in the dark, cursing in pain, and then there was a splash in the river under the trestle. A voice somewhere closer, yelled, “There! There!”
Matthews ducked behind the boulder as a flashlight beam found him, and it was followed by a gunshot that whizzed by. The brief illumination revealed Colonel Zhukov waving his arms, pointing.
“You can’t escape,” he yelled. “This is over. For both of you. You’ll be treated fairly.”
“Fuck him,” Grigoryev growled. Louder, so Zhukov heard. “Fuck off.”
A second shot. A third. Brilliant flashes from one end of the tunnel and then a volley of gunfire erupted. It was impossible to know how many guns were discharged. Stray bullets ricocheted against the walls and several hit the iron gears, pinging loudly.
“Give up, Dmitry Ivanovich,” Colonel Zhukov said in the silence that followed. “You’ll be judged fairly. We know everything. Don’t dishonor your father’s name.”
“Leave him out of this.” Grigoryev reached around and fired his pistol.
“This way, come,” Matthews whispered to Grigoryev, helping him to the stone steps, retracing the direction they’d come from.
Grigoryev resisted, clutching his leg. Matthews saw the wetness on Grigoryev’s trousers and felt warm blood. Matthews couldn’t tell how serious the wound was.
“You go,” Grigoryev said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky. I won’t make it.” He sat against the rock and lifted his pistol. “I’m a good shot even in the dark. Ten bullets. Seven left. Six for them. One for me. Better to die here than in a basement cell. It’s the same death, but here I get the pleasure of shooting a few of the bastards.”
Matthews heard boots crunch the gravel between the tracks. He saw Grigoryev’s face, shadowed in the meager light, eyes alive with grim determination. Voices louder now, closer, two flashlight beams in the darkness.
“They’re here,” Grigoryev said. “Go.” Grigoryev slipped off his track jacket and handed it to Matthews. “It has what you want if you’re lucky enough to escape. It’s no use to me.”
Grigoryev pulled Matthews close and whispered. “You’ve been a terrible friend. Look what our acquaintance has gotten me.” His sarcasm became a plea. “Tell Viktoria not to expect a pension from the shitheads I worked for.”
Another gunshot, closer, and voices approaching.
Matthews slid down the first two stone steps and then carefully took the next few in a crouch, holding the rock wall and feeling his way down. Dim light from the ventilation shafts guided his steps to the river. He kept to the sides of the tunnel, attuned to the sounds around him. Water flowing around rocks, his nervous breathing, a bat passing close by. He proceeded that way for a short time, guided by light from the widely spaced shafts, and he saw a ladder that led to the street.
Behind him, bursts of gunfire. Muzzle flashes that briefly illuminated the walls of the tunnel. Automatic fire came in volleys and was returned by pistol fire. Then a brief silence followed by a single shot.
