Westbound Cargo Train — 200 Miles West of Vostok | August 20, 2011 | Before Dawn
The hole took twenty minutes to dig. The permafrost started at forty centimeters, which meant he was working by hand through the first layer and using the camp shovel Piotr had lent him for the rest.
He was fifty meters into the treeline, beneath a spruce that had been here long enough that its roots had organized the surrounding soil into a specific and stable architecture. The hole needed to be deep enough to resist casual detection and stable enough not to shift with the freeze-thaw cycle. He had estimated this correctly. He usually did.
Into the hole: the MP7. The CIA comms unit, which he had already removed the battery and SIM infrastructure from and confirmed dead. The tactical vest. The Valkyrie operational documentation, which would survive the conditions in the waterproof sleeve for long enough that it would be a problem if it were ever found, and which was therefore going into the ground.
He paused with the tactical vest in his hands.
He thought about the six men on the train. Miller. The other five, whose names he had read in files and whose deaths he had been unable to prevent because the operation had been designed to produce them, and the prevention would have required a different set of choices made much earlier than the moment the gas was released. He had made the choices available to him in the time he had. He had killed his own teammates because they were already lost and because the alternative was to join them, and Simmons needed to be left alive long enough to be understood.
He put the vest in the hole. He covered it.
He kept: the cash. The passport. The knife. The locket.
He stood over the covered hole in the dark and the cold, under the spruce, in a forest that would not remember this in a year, and thought:
Alen Richard died in that ravine. Valkyrie is missing in action. Whatever Simmons intends to do with what Carla reported about my immunity — he will do it thinking I'm gone.
This was the operational value of being dead. You could observe from outside the framework that had been trying to use you. You could rebuild your understanding of what you were looking at without any of the constraints that came from being inside it.
He turned to Baba Anya, who had walked with him to the treeline because she was seventy-three years old and had decided this was her right.
"I have nothing to give you," Alen said. "I owe you a debt I can't repay."
She touched his face with one hand — the specific touch of a woman who had been touching the faces of people she was letting go for a long time. "Live, synok," she said. "That is enough."
He walked six miles to the rail line in the hour before dawn. The lumber train slowed at the curve — he had observed this curve yesterday, noted the speed reduction, calculated the sprint distance and the grip requirement for the boxcar latch. He matched the train's speed. He caught the latch. He pulled himself in.
In the boxcar: cold, dark, the smell of pine. He sat with his back against the wall and the train moving under him and let himself be carried west.
By noon he reached the Moscow outskirts. He did not go into the city center — cameras, facial recognition infrastructure that had improved significantly in the past five years, the specific risk of someone who looked like a man who had been living rough for eleven days appearing in an environment calibrated to identify anomalies. He went to an address he had memorized from KGB archive cross-reference in 2007, for exactly this category of contingency: a broker who worked in the gap between official travel documentation and unofficial movement requirements.
An hour later he had a ticket to Heathrow purchased with cash, confirmed on a departure board he had verified himself. He used a public restroom in a shopping center three kilometers from the airport — cut hair, shaved, wire-rimmed glasses that had been in the cash pouch since 2003. He changed into the clothes that Piotr had given him, which were civilian, practical, and carried no operational fingerprint.
At the security checkpoint: John Kane, Canadian architect, returning from a project that had not gone well. Tired. Unremarkable. Moving through the cracks in the surveillance architecture the way he had been trained to move, the way he had spent nine years practicing.
He walked through without incident.
He found his seat. The aircraft pushed back. He looked out the window at the Moscow runway lights receding and thought about the word
forward,
which was what Baba Anya had said, and which was the correct direction.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Chapter Thirty-Nine follows...