Shadow Pass Read Free Page B

back of the chair. Suspenders stretched tight over his shoulders. As he spoke, he rolled up his sleeves, as if preparing for a brawl. “Before you start firing questions at me, Inspector Pekkala, let me ask one of you.”
    “Go ahead,” said Pekkala. He sat opposite the man, on the same kind of metal chair. The room was so small that their knees almost touched.
    Even though it was stifling in the room, Pekkala had not taken off his coat. It was cut in the old style: black and knee-length, with a short collar and concealed buttons which fastened on the left side of his chest. He sat unnaturally straight, like a man with an injured back. This was caused by the gun which he kept strapped across his chest.
    The gun was a Webley .455 revolver, with solid brass handlesand a pin-sized hole drilled into the barrel just behind the forward sight to stop the pistol from bucking when it fired. The modification had been made not for Pekkala but for the Tsar, who received it as a gift from his cousin King George V. The Tsar had then issued the Webley to Pekkala. “I have no use for such a weapon,” the Tsar had told him. “If my enemies get close enough for me to need this, it will already be too late to do me any good.”
    “The question I wanted to ask you, Inspector,” Nagorski said to Pekkala, “is why you think I would give away the secret of my own invention to the same people we might have to use it against?”
    Pekkala opened his mouth to reply, but he did not get the chance.
    “You see, I know why I’m here,” continued Nagorski. “You think I am responsible for breaches of security in the Konstantin Project. I am neither so naive nor so uninformed that I don’t know what’s going on around me. That’s why every stage of development has taken place in a secure facility. The entire base is under permanent lockdown and under my own personal control. Everyone who works there has been cleared by me. Nothing happens at the facility without my knowing about it.”
    “Which brings us back to your reason for being here today.”
    Now Nagorski leaned forward. “Yes, Inspector Pekkala. Yes, it does, and I could have saved you some time and myself a very expensive meal if you had simply let me tell your errand boy—”
    “That ‘errand boy,’ as you call him, is a major of Internal Security.”
    “Even NKVD officers can be errand boys, Inspector, if their bosses are running the country. What I could have told your major is the same thing I’m going to tell you now—which is that there has been no breach of security.”
    “The weapon you are calling the T-34 is known to our enemies,” said Pekkala. “I’m afraid that is a fact you can’t deny.”
    “Of course, its existence is known! You can’t design, build, and field-test a machine weighing thirty tons and expect it to remain invisible. But its existence is not what I’m talking about. The secret lies in what it can do. I admit it’s true that there are members of my design team who could tell you pieces of this puzzle, but only one person knows its full potential.” Nagorski sat back and folded his arms. Sweat was running down his polished face. “That would be me, Inspector Pekkala.”
    “There is something I don’t understand,” said Pekkala. “What is so special about your invention? Don’t we already have tanks?”
    Nagorski coughed out a laugh. “Certainly! There is the T-26.” He let one hand fall open, as if a miniature tank were resting on his palm. “But it is too slow.” The hand closed into a fist. “Then there is the BT series.” The other hand fell open. “But it doesn’t have enough armor. You might as well ask me why we are building weapons at all when there are plenty of stones lying around to throw at our enemies when they invade.”
    “You sound very confident, Comrade Nagorski.”
    “I am more than confident!” Nagorski barked in his face. “I am certain, and it is not merely because I invented the T-34. It is because I