04
North Rome (Soviet sector)
They made the relative safety of the sewer tunnels a bare minute ahead of their pursuers. Ivanov quickly judged there to be at least a platoon of NKVD paramilitaries coming after them. The storm troopers forced entry into the sewer system by the crude but effective method of blowing up a drainage grate.
“Move!” he’d yelled at Franco when he heard the satchel charges thud and clang on the iron bars.
His guide needed no prompting. He was already heading around the nearest bend, splashing up great fantails of foul-smelling black water and scattering rats before him. Ivanov followed, his ears ringing as gunfire crashed out, cutting off the sound of a woman’s screams.
What just happened?
He had been tasked to contact a Russian man, Sobeskaia—a factory owner of some sort, someone important enough to be in town for the GATT conference—and to establish his bona fides as an ongoing source. Was the whole meeting a trap? They were supposed to make first contact with this man Sobeskaia’s mistress at the back of the hotel where the couple were staying. Had it been a trap?
Possibly not, since the NKVD had sprung it well before he arrived. Perhaps something had gone wrong at their end too. As Ivanov fled headlong into the darkness of the buried levels of eternal Rome, he did not much care. What mattered now was getting the hell out.
He powered up his NVGs, using infrared this time, and at once he could see that Furedi had done so too. Nor had the Italian needed to be told not to use the LLAMPS setting. If they stayed at this level, with some light filtering down from above, the heat signatures of the men chasing them would stand out starkly.
He heard shouts and the thudding of boots dropping into the drain behind them as Franco steered them around another bend, gesturing furiously for Ivanov to follow. He gave the impression of a man who knew where he was headed. That was good, because Ivanov had no f*cking idea. The angry discordance of voices soon resolved itself into the harsh, stentorian barking of one man. A voice Ivanov recognized immediately.
Skarov.
The shock of realization was almost great enough to stop him in his tracks, but the crack of a single pistol shot, followed by Skarov’s curse, and two more shots immediately afterward pushed him on. Ivanov bet that somebody had disobeyed an order to hold fire, and the NKVD spy catcher had summarily executed him.
He bit down on a curse as his head bumped and grazed the rough brick ceiling of the drainage pipe. Stars bloomed behind his eyes and a stinging pain told him he’d opened up his scalp. It would need disinfecting. The passage narrowed around them. Franco was already bent over double in front of him. To keep up, the much larger Russian man was forced to crouch low and duckwalk as quickly as he could. He concentrated on making as little noise as possible, on not stomping on the wet bricks as he hurried along but rather pushing himself forward like an ice-skater accelerating across a frozen lake. A couple of body lengths ahead, Franco passed through the underground world like a deeper shadow on the darkness, leaving no trace at all. His field craft was exceptional, thought Ivanov. For a petty criminal, he would have made a good special forces scout.
This way, the Roman gestured, before diving into a pipe that opened into their larger conduit at hip level. Ivanov followed the slightly blurred, cherry-colored figure without hesitation. The shouting behind them had died down but not because Skarov and his men had given up. They were listening and waiting.
The pipe was slimy and smelled awful in a way that was slightly different from the usual miasma of the sewers. Even with the night-vision goggles, visibility contracted to almost nothing. Ivanov could feel the passage narrowing around his shoulders, but he forced himself forward anyway, trusting in Furedi to get them away. He could feel soft, obscene shapes and lumps of organic matter under his hands, but there was no way of telling what they were.
A barked command to give themselves up reached out from somewhere behind, but it was not followed by shots or the sudden flooding brilliance of spotlights.
He forced himself forward by inches.
The crawl through this section was long enough that Ivanov had time to ponder the presence of his old nemesis behind him. Better that than to dwell on the increasingly cramped and claustrophobic surroundings.
Alexi Skarov it was who had driven him from the Rodina, where whole armies of soldiers and spies had proven themselves unable to lay hands on Pavel Ivanov during the late 1940s. As he ghosted through the heart of Stalin’s vast charnel house, Ivanov had lit the fires of half a dozen Chechnyas and Georgias. He had inflamed the murderous passions of jihadists, separatists, and insurgents, along with mere criminals and gang lords. With these efforts he piled up a mountain of corpses and bled out whole divisions of the Red Army, spreading death and chaos from the occupied wastelands of Japan, through Siberia, down into Afghanistan and even once within the walls of the Kremlin itself.
He had so infuriated Lavrenty Beria that the poison dwarf had offered not just a huge monetary reward for his capture but the precious freedom of real choice to any man who delivered Ivanov before him. Millions of roubles hung like the sword of Damocles above his head, but also the prospect of freedom to anyone who betrayed him. Deliver Pavel Ivanov into the hands of the NKVD, promised Beria, and not a finger would be raised against you should you wish to take your reward and leave for the so-called “free world.”
It was quite a compliment, in a way. He had really pissed them off.
But material reward was not Skarov’s motivation. The demon in the tunnels behind Ivanov now was much more dangerous than any bounty hunter or freedom seeker. Alexandr Dmitry Skarov was Stalin’s executioner-in-chief. He hunted Ivanov not for money or freedom but because for him it was the right thing to do. Skarov was a true believer in the revolution. And he would spill oceans of blood to prove that belief and to secure the people from the mistakes of any false history revealed by the Transition. Or the Emergence, as it was generally known on this side of the Atlantic. To Stalin, to Skarov, to millions of other believers, the arrival of the uptimers, the way they had torn the settled order of events into bloody shreds, was proof positive that the forces of history revealed by the dialectic were undeniable. The revolution could not fail, and so it had not. Time had wrenched itself apart to set things right.
They were f*cking crazy, Ivanov knew. But crazy dangerous.
A giggle slipped from his lips, which he stifled into a snort. It was possible, Ivanov admitted in the quiet moments of rare solitude, that he might well be a little bit insane himself. Just possibly.
He shook it off.
Skarov had hunted him without relent, killing Vendulka and the rest of his original team one by one over the years until Ivanov was all that was left. He recruited others—there were always others and Ivanov knew what to promise them, even if the words rang increasingly hollow. They died as well, and Skarov had driven him from Russia, then from all her conquests. Nowadays, Ivanov was only able to snipe at the Communists from the edges of their continental gulag, darting in and out of cities like Rome, which lay on the border with the free world. And now here Skarov was, on the very borders of the evil empire, reaching out into the free world to try to lay hands on him again.
Strange that he had lasted this long. He’d expected to die in Siberia with his Cossack allies years ago. If he were a religious man, he might’ve believed there was some sort of plan. But there wasn’t, he had decided long ago. There was only chaos, and the mission.
The tightly constricted crawl space conjured up images of Skarov embracing him and squeezing and squeezing until the last breath was gone from his body. Just as Ivanov feared he would not be able to squeeze through, he felt Franco’s hands grip his shoulders with the strength of iron claws, pulling him forward until he popped out of the confined space like a cork. Tumbling down a curved slope of old worn cobblestones, he fetched up in a puddle of decomposing meat and vegetable matter.
“We are below the markets here,” Franco said in a low voice. For an instant, Ivanov latched onto the hope that they had somehow passed beneath the Wall and into the NATO-controlled part of the city. Or at least underneath it. But Furedi quickly killed that hope.
“Not the People’s Market. My people’s market.” The mafia scout was grinning, as though he had just told one of the funnier jokes Ivanov should expect to hear in his life.
Ah, thought the Russian, a black market. An actual undeclared marketplace, where food and medicine and other goods smuggled in from the free south by the Trimbole family could be sold for massive profits, or sometimes simply distributed to secure the loyalty of those whose hunger had been eased. There was a reason the OSS preferred to work through operators like Franco and his kind on this side of the Wall. This was their world and their people. They were always going to be the A-Team here.
Looking around them, Ivanov found himself in a stone chamber no bigger than a child’s bedroom. Steel grates barred three gaping holes underfoot. They looked like ancient wells, with iron bars rather than surrounding walls to prevent anyone’s falling in. His eyes watered with the stench of rotting food. It was difficult, with the combat goggles set to infrared, to pick out individual items from the septic sludge under the tread of his boots. But here and there he could see a lettuce leaf hanging limp over an iron bar, crushed eggshells, or the splintered bones of what looked like a leg of lamb. Looking upward, Ivanov discerned the outline of what appeared to be two large steel plates just above them, close enough to reach out and touch.
“A storeroom up there,” explained Franco. “We smuggle supplies in there and other places. We give the people a good price. Good for us and good for them. Good enough that they look after us. Especially now. Come.”
Ivanov followed him to a set of steel rungs buried in the rock face. They climbed quickly. Franco used his shoulders at the top of the improvised stepladder to force open a heavy wooden shutter. Ivanov had not seen it in the gloom. They crawled up and out into a room that was obviously at street level. Windows, opaque with dust, admitted the last dying filaments of daylight. The Russian could smell faint traces of coffee, cured meat, and cheese, but the room was as bare as the abandoned church in which they had holed up earlier. Franco secured the wooden cellar door with a thick iron latch. It had obviously been left open for him, and Ivanov began to wonder at just how much pre-op planning La Cosa Nostra had done for what was supposed to be a simple contract job. An escort mission.
“Follow quickly now, Russian. Your friends will not be far behind.”
The temptation to assure Furedi that they were not his friends was strong, but Ivanov held his tongue. His fate was now almost completely in the hands of this gaunt-looking stranger with iron-gray hair.
Franco tapped on a metal pipe by the only door, a coded sequence of some sort, and Ivanov shook his head as he recognized a ship’s speaking tube. Franco lifted the hinged metal cap at the end of the tube and blew into it as if he were playing a trumpet. Listening with the intensity of a safecracker, he had an answer in a few short, harsh words in the local language. An argument of sorts ensued, but it seemed that Ivanov’s guide had the better of it, given his satisfied nod when he flipped down the cap again.
“We wait. Not long. They send help.”
Ivanov said nothing, taking the opportunity to rearm himself from his small backpack, a precaution that Franco was happy to follow. The Italian took out a handgun and fixed a suppressor. As the mission principal, Ivanov enjoyed the privilege of carrying the big artillery. He had chosen an MP5K-PDW over the more commonly used reengineered Uzis preferred by other operatives. Heavy firepower in a tight, compact package; a simple fold of the stock had made his passage through the Roman underground much easier and more secure.
Pausing for a moment to clear away any filth and muck that might interfere with his weapon’s operation, he covered the tunnel they’d just exited with the suppressed muzzle, prepared to provide a proper welcome to any interlopers. Tweaked by the OSS Field Operations shop for the reliability normally found in an AK-47, Ivanov’s MP5 could generate a cyclic rate of fire of 800-plus rounds per minute, easily emptying the drum mag’s 100 rounds in less than 20 seconds. With a muzzle velocity of 375 meters per second, anyone who attempted to follow them would find a stiff wall of copper-jacketed hollow points ready to persuade them otherwise.
“Nice gun,” Franco commented. “My capo has two just like it.”
“I do not doubt that,” Ivanov said quietly.
They stood in silence for another five minutes, listening for the approach of Furedi’s allies, who would presumably appear from the street. And listening even more intently for the NKVD to come bursting up from below.
A soft knock at the door—another coded cadence by the sound of it—and Franco admitted two men dressed in dark, threadbare civilian suits. Like Furedi, both were middle-aged, with sunken cheeks and eyes with all the light burned from them.
It didn’t feel like a setup, but Ivanov was careful to keep all three grouped within a tight firing arc. For their part, they did nothing to arouse suspicion, such as separating and approaching him from different directions. Still, he kept the safety thumbed off while the Italians conducted an urgent council of war in low, hurried tones.
“It is settled. We go back now,” Franco announced when they were done.
“Where? To do what?” Ivanov asked. He was willing to defer to this man’s judgment in matters of navigation, especially under fire, but picking a fight with the NKVD, and with Skarov in particular, was shading into the realm of strategic decisions that were well beyond the guide’s responsibility.
“To kill them,” replied one of the new arrivals. He was the slightly older of the two, Ivanov thought: a little taller, somewhat sturdier too. He didn’t have quite the harrowed and hungry look of Franco and the junior man. He looked well fed and well used to being obeyed.
“I am all for the killing of NKVD,” said Ivanov. “It is what I live for. But you will not live for long if you go back down there now looking for a fight. You will fight and you will lose.”
The three Romans exchanged a guarded look as though they thought themselves in the presence of a dangerous fool.
“Perhaps,” said the man he now took to be their leader. “But we agreed to help you because you were sent to us as a man who has killed many Communists. This is good. You have brought more Communists for us to kill. Also good. They are below our feet right now—we are watching them. So let us do what you were sent to do. Let us kill them all.”
Dusk was quickly gathering outside on the quiet streets. A gloomy darkness pooled around them as Ivanov tried to reason with the mafioso.
“Today I did not come here to kill Communists,” he began. “And you know that. Today I came to talk to a woman called Anna, the woman of an important Party man, to learn something from him. That did not happen, and I don’t know why. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead, but that man remains the reason I came under the Wall.”
“We are the reason you came under the Wall,” said the mafioso. “We gave you Franco because our friends the Americans told us it would help to kill more Communists. You cannot speak to this man you were looking for now. But that does not matter. Providence has set another goal before us. We must go now. While we still know where they are.”
Ivanov held up his hand. “All right. We will go back down. But there is a man down there, a Communist called Skarov …”
“We have heard of him,” said the leader, almost dismissively. “A man with many sins to answer for. Perhaps today he will answer for them.”
“Perhaps,” Ivanov conceded. “But first he needs to answer to me. Killing a handful of Beria’s snakes means nothing if you do not clean out the viper’s nest. If I can get to Skarov, find out from him what happened to the man I was supposed to meet, I might learn something that will bring us all much closer to the day we can kill or drive away all of the Communists. Not just the few down in the sewer below us.”
The other man’s face was becoming lost in the gloom. His eyes, already dark and sunken, seemed to disappear as the last of the light faded away.
“All right then,” he said. “I can make no promises about what will happen. Only the good Lord can know that. But we will try to preserve the life of this Skarov so that he might make his confessions to you.”
The man’s strange choice of words and his demeanor gave Ivanov pause for a moment. There was something about this man, something familiar, he thought. He was no mere killer. He seemed more than that. And then Ivanov caught the resemblance as Franco turned slightly to listen to the street outside.
It was Marius Furedi. The priest. It had to be.