Cold Read Free Page B

do that, she’d driven off. He stared at the old Ford until it took a right three blocks away, and then he walked towards the building of the Strengthening Church Members Committee.

SOUTHERN RUSSIA
    A dawn of rare beauty, a great red sun bursting out from thinning fog. Through the rear window of the Mercedes SUV, Reikhman watched the silver birch go by, then a duck pond, frozen, then little wooden houses with yellow, peach and grey window frames peeping out where roof overhangs prevented the snow from masking them. The houses looked as fragile and make-believe as if wrought from gingerbread. The Mercedes turned off the asphalt road and lurched along a mud track, deeper into the forest, wheels spinning as they tried and failed to gain traction in a sump of snow and mud.
    The driver swore, engaged the handbrake, switched to four-wheel drive, and slowly the Mercedes clawed out of the sump, passing a wooden hovel, all but derelict, no sign of life apart from a faint puff of woodsmoke from an ancient chimney. No one in the Mercedes gave it a second glance.
    Behind a net curtain thick with grime, Ludmilla Estemirova, an ancient widow in her ninety-fourth year, watched the fancy SUV slip and slide in the hollow in front of her house. The NKVD lorry had got stuck in that very hollow in 1933, when they had come to take away her father after he had complained to the local soviet that everyone in the village was starving. No good came of it, all those years ago. No good would come of this fancy car, either.
    She watched it disappear down the lane, and acting on some strange, dimly perceived yet ferociously powerful instinct – that the truth should be told, that history should not lie – she took out pencil and paper and scribbled down the last part of the number plate: EK61 . She put the paper in a box, lifted up the floorboard by the stove and stashed it there, where her father had stashed the tsar’s portrait, which had never, ever, been found, and only then did she sit down in the armchair, ordinarily home to a fat old tomcat, and she dabbed her tears with a grimy handkerchief at the memory of her loss.

    ‘How much farther?’ asked Reikhman.
    ‘Ten minutes,’ said the driver, Konstantin, glancing in the rear-view mirror at the passenger in the back seat. Reikhman sensed scrutiny; the driver fixed his gaze on the track ahead. Reikhman noted that Konstantin, a handsome sort with long hair, was trading a lot of smiles with the woman operative, Iryna, who sat up front next to him. Konstantin was local; Iryna was based in Moscow. If something was going on between them, the driver had worked fast.
    ‘He lives alone?’ Reikhman said.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Iryna. ‘But Pyotr was very talkative last time we saw him.’
    ‘Hmm.’
    Iryna was from the Special Directorate, and young, in her late twenties. Dyed blond, slight moustache, but a slim, lithe body and heavy breasts. Her eyes were of the brightest blue; she had a lovely, lazy smile that oozed sex, which is why he had selected her in the first place. She was a trusted operative. Still, even the Special Directorate made mistakes, had their weaknesses. Him too.
    The Mercedes slowed, coming to a halt at a wooden shack in a sorrier state than anything they had seen all morning. God, how Reikhman abominated this human scum, the wretched poor. They triggered memories of what he himself had escaped from, and above all things, he hated being reminded of that.
    ‘Who are you?’
    Pyotr was still the classroom bully, after all these years. A big man, too, with not much fat on him, standing at the door in baggy long johns that had seen better days and then some. But Pyotr knew what a Makarov could do and hissed ‘What the fuck?’ when Reikhman pressed the muzzle of the pistol against his belly.
    ‘Cuff him.’
    They pushed the target back into the shack and sat him down in his overheated kitchen. Iryna closed the door. A bare wooden table dominated the room, complemented by a