Read the next chapter of MOSCOW RULES, the new Marc Dane serial novella…
On a mission to fulfil a request for his employer on the streets of Moscow, Marc Dane finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…
In Part 6, Marc learned that Rubicon’s old adversaries Aleph are involved in the hunt for Sergei Morozov’s secret leger – but the latest clue to the whereabouts of the file adds even more layers to the dead man’s intricate puzzle…
Read on for Part 7 of MOSCOW RULES; future chapters will be released via this blog, but if you’d like to get early access, sign up to the James Swallow Reader’s Club at this link or type your email address in the box at the bottom of this page.
MOSCOW RULES part 7 – LULL THEM INTO A SENSE OF COMPLACENCY
Somebody with a colder heart might have let the café owner perish and hope the FSB agents didn’t check the basement – but Marc Dane was never going to be that kind of man, and he loathed the idea of being trapped below while Gurik did whatever he wanted.
To get out of this alive would take timing and guile. Setting things in motion, he climbed the stairs loudly enough to be certain that the Russians heard him coming. Emerging from behind the bar, he found the old man kneeling with Gurik’s silenced pistol at his head, and two more FSB agents pointing other guns in Marc’s direction.
Gurik’s comrades were a man and woman of similar ages, both possessing that unnerving manner of looking ordinary and predatory at the same time. The man had short, dark hair and could have been an accountant; the blonde woman wore the harried aspect of an over-worked mother, and they were dressed in nondescript outfits that would blend into any Moscow crowd. He could have passed either one on the street and never sensed anything amiss.
Marc raised his hands. “Let’s not do anything hasty.”
Gurik prodded the old man with his gun, switching to English. “Very selfless of him, eh, grandfather?” Gurik snapped his fingers and pointed at Marc. “Search him.”
The male agent handed his weapon to his partner and stepped up, methodically patting Marc down.
“I did not bring them,” implored the old man.
“No, he betrayed nothing,” Gurik spoke over him, pitching over a stacked chair so he could sit astride it. “His neighbour did that.” The senior agent pointed into the alley. “The fool who sells the washing machines across the way, he is paid to watch this place.” Gurik grunted with amusement. “Not so secret after all.” Then his smirk faded, growing cold. “We have eyes everywhere, Englishman. Are you so stupid to think you could escape us?”
The male agent emptied Marc’s pockets, laying out on the counter his pocket change, the roll of American dollars, the two smartphones. He gave a curious look at the crumpled fold of tin foil and the toy plane, but dutifully lined them up beside everything else.
“The man whose throat you cut outside the Meridian Hotel was the cousin of my wife,” Gurik went on. “I will get nothing but grief over that, because of you.”
“No weapon,” said the male agent, completing his work.
“You disposed of it.” Gurik eyed him.
Marc fixed him with a steady look. “You don’t have eyes everywhere, no matter what you say.” He folded his arms. “If you did, you’d know I didn’t slot your guy. He parked his motor in a security blind-spot, and that’s how Aleph’s boys managed to take him out without anyone seeing.” He deliberately threw in the name of the private military contractor to see how Gurik reacted.
The Russian cocked his head. “You say it was them. They would say it was you.” He gave a shrug. “Who to believe?” At length, Gurik produced the tag from the vodka bottle. “You hid this from us. Rykov was too quick to let you go. I told him we should have stripped you naked and dumped you in Gorky Park.”
“Don’t blame me for your sloppy work,” Marc shot back.
Gurik unfolded the card and read the quote on it. “The world will be saved by beauty.”
“Dostoevsky,” Marc said, with a sniff.
The Russian’s smirk returned. “Do you know the title of the book this line comes from?” When Marc didn’t respond, he actually chuckled. “It is called ‘The Idiot’. Perfect for you, eh?”
“I don’t have Morozov’s ledger,” Marc told him, ignoring the jibe. “And clearly you don’t either. So neither of us is being particularly clever right now, yeah?”
Gurik rose and walked to the counter, pawing irritably at the items atop it. “That decrepit, senile old dog! He hated anything modern. He was hard work. Everything on paper, always leaving a trail. I was glad to see him retired. He was… What is the word? An anachronism. Morozov and his kind are a drag on progress.”
“What does that make you, then?” Marc looked Gurik up and down. The hatchet-faced man had to be the same age as him, in his mid-to-late thirties. “Bit old to be the new boy.”
“We are the sons and daughters of the New Russia,” the other man hissed, including himself and the agents in a sweeping gesture. “Not yesterday’s men, clinging to old ideals and communist fantasies. Rykov understands this. He will soon follow Morozov into anonymity, but unlike that old fool, he accepts his lot. When the time comes, he will step aside.”
“You want your boss’s job,” said Marc. “Finding the ledger, that’d be a good way to show you deserve it.”
“There is too much dead wood,” muttered Gurik, and he directed a terse nod at the old man kneeling on the tiles. “Remnants that should be cut away. They curse us, Englishman, you understand? Your nation is no different. The old guard think they are still fighting the Cold War, but they are too blinkered to see the changes in the world. And their allies, the rich men lining their pockets, are only too happy to let it be.” He made a spitting noise. “They are leading Russia toward collapse.”
“But things will be different when you’re in charge, right?” Marc eyed him, then snorted. “You’re deluding yourself, pal. Old Russia, New Russia, it’s the same bear in a different coat. You’re as big a liar as Morozov was, you just have another name for it.”
Gurik’s face coloured and he took an angry step toward Marc, his knuckles whitening around the grip of his pistol. He checked himself and tamped down his annoyance. Instead, he picked up the toy plane, turning it over in his fingers, finding the word embossed on the fuselage. “Monino…”
“The museum?” the female agent said quietly, breaking her silence – and with it, a flash of understanding went off in Marc’s thoughts. Suddenly, he knew exactly where Sergei Morozov had been leading them.
“I think,” said Gurik, drawing out his words, “that you, the Idiot, and this old wretch here, will be shot while resisting arrest. You are impediments, best removed.”
“Got everything figured out, have you?” Marc met his gaze. “All the angles covered?”
“A lesson a Russian learns as soon as they are weaned,” Gurik retorted. “Fate rewards patience. No-one of import will mourn your disappearance.”
As the words left Gurik’s mouth, the stolen Aleph phone let off a low buzz that made it vibrate across the counter. The sound drew everyone’s attention, and Marc retreated a step.
“I’m not what you should be worrying about right now,” he told Gurik, as the bright headlights from a vehicle outside washed through the café’s windows. Marc heard the thud of car doors slamming and boots crunching on asphalt.
Gurik snapped his fingers again and the female agent was moving, sliding up to the half-shuttered front door to peer out into the snowy evening, her gun at the ready. Her eyes widened, and she looked back at Gurik, holding up her hand with all fingers raised, the thumb tucked in. Four targets approaching.
Before anyone could react, a sudden, snarling chorus of supressed automatic fire came from outside, the metallic ripping growl deadened by the falling snow. A hail of bullets splintered the threshold, shattered glass and keened off the steel roller-door, ricocheting across the cramped interior of the café. Gurik’s agent took a glancing round across her throat and she went down clutching at her neck, the wound fountaining crimson.
Marc threw himself at the foot of the counter, scrabbling to find his smartphone and whatever else he could reach up and grab as bottles and glassware exploded over him under the onslaught of silenced gunfire.
Gurik ducked, shooting back through one of the windows, as the other agent went to his partner and dragged her into cover, blind-firing his own weapon into the alley. In panic, the café owner stumbled to his feet and lurched toward the back of the room, but he went down again just as swiftly as red blotches bloomed on his body. He died as he fell, collapsing across a stool.
There was no other safe way out of the place, Marc had clocked that troubling detail the moment he had entered – but there was another narrow staircase in the far corner, leading up into darkness. He slid along the floor staying as low as he could, cutting his hands on pieces of shattered glass.
“It’s them,” he heard the male FSB agent say. “Did they follow us?”
Not exactly, thought Marc. Before revealing himself to Gurik, he had deliberately peeled off the metal foil wrapped around the stolen Aleph sat-phone, allowing the signal from the tracking circuit inside to become detectable. He knew Aleph’s mercenaries would investigate, but he hadn’t expected them to come in guns blazing.
I am an idiot, he chided himself, they always shoot first, and sod asking questions!
Gurik threw a look back and caught Marc making his retreat. “Stop him!” he barked.
The FSB agent hesitated, then swung around and fired as Marc threw himself at the staircase. A bullet smacked the wooden frame, peppering him with splinters, but he hauled himself up the flight on all-fours, rolling on to a tiny landing on the level above. The agent didn’t come after him; Gurik and his people had more than enough to deal with.
The first floor of the building was as cramped as the one below, the space crowded with a single bed, cupboards, shelves and a kitchen alcove. A window looked over the alleyway, and through it Marc saw the shiny black shape of a UAZ Patriot SUV. The vehicle’s headlights blazed white fire, catching the shape of shadowed figures as they advanced toward the café’s entrance. Each held a compact submachine gun with a lengthy suppressor, and they kept up covering fire as they moved.
He backed away. There was another window in the bedsit’s tiny toilet, barely large enough to fit through, and Marc wrenched it out of its frame, his fingers sticky with blood. He dove out through the gap head-first, hearing the crash of the front door below falling in as he went.
Marc landed in a pocket of grimy snow atop a steeply sloping roof that adjoined the café, the washing machine store and the nearby apartment block – and immediately he started sliding toward a drop that would toss him into the alley, in full view of the Aleph mercenaries.
He scrambled against gravity, reaching for the ice-rimed bars of a metal balcony leading to a darkened flat on the block’s lower levels, and a puff of frost spurted up from a section of the roof. Then another and another, and he realized someone was beneath him, randomly firing silenced shots through the wood and metal framework.
Marc fought for purchase, but the snow on the sloped roof started moving as one whole slab, taking him with it toward the drop to the ground. He grabbed at the balcony before it was out of reach, painfully wrenching his shoulder as he pulled at a hard angle. The snow-mass fell away with a dull thud and his heels hit the slippery metal of the roof, scraping as he pushed himself up. More shots cracked and pinged through the sheet steel, but Marc ignored them, reaching the balcony, yanking at the edge of a window frame.
He got his fingers into a gap and it came open, sliding wide. Marc rolled through into a stiflingly warm room, immediately assailed by the reek of boiling vegetables.
He landed on his back on a grubby rug in the middle of another small apartment, and an elderly woman hove into view, brandishing a cast iron frying pan with clear intent to smack him with it. Marc crabbed backwards, bumping into an armchair as she let loose with a torrent of invective he couldn’t begin to follow. There was an old gent in the chair, snoring open-mouthed, dead to the world and oblivious to what was transpiring.
Marc waved off the combative babushka, staggering through the living room and into a short hallway, halting at the front door. The angry woman followed, yelling loudly enough that the armed men downstairs wouldn’t miss it. Marc tried to look contrite, and dug in his hoodie pocket – the roll of cash he’d retrieved on the way out of the café was still there, and he offered her a generous bribe to shut up.
She gave him a withering look, folding her arms. Marc sighed and doubled the offer.
This time the negotiation took, and the babushka snatched the payment from him so fast, Marc felt the impulse to make sure she hadn’t taken his dive watch off his wrist into the bargain. Unlocking the apartment door, he decided to add something more to the deal, and helped himself to the sleeping man’s raincoat. That earned him a new burst of ear-splitting invective, but he was already moving, jogging down a covered walkway that ran the length of the building.
The woman’s cries were joined by men’s voices, and he knew his window for escape was rapidly closing. Marc went down the concrete stairs at the other end of the walkway two at a time, until he bolted out and on to the street, on the far side of the block.
They’ll be on me in seconds. Marc dragged the old man’s coat over his shoulders and cinched it in tightly, scowling at the stale odour it gave off. He pulled up the collar and then, fighting against every impulse in him to run like bloody hell, Marc slowed to a steady pace and started toward the nearby metro station, stuffing his lacerated hands into his pockets.
He was halfway there when the black SUV roared past him, skidding to a halt outside the rear of the apartments. He heard slamming doors and hushed, angry voices, but he kept walking, merging once more into the trickle of travellers, disappearing back into the warm embrace of the subway.
