The Tombs (A Fargo Adventure) Page 25

  The explosion was an outrage, an insult so egregious that he hadn’t quite found a way to react to it. His handpicked, highly trained, well-paid squad of bodyguards and operators had failed utterly against one man on foreign soil, arriving on foot, to take back his wife.

  The word wife set off a new set of concerns. His wife, Irena, and his children had been in Moscow, visiting her parents, and he felt relieved knowing that. But in a few days she would be coming home. And this—this ugly, horribly damaged building—was home.

  His stupid men had formed into squads now and had begun fighting the fire with garden hoses. He watched them imitating well-trained troops, and felt affronted by their tardy and useless discipline and their lack of professionalism.

  Next, faintly at first, and then louder and louder, he heard the wails of sirens. His men looked at one another, grinning at the realization that help was coming, and kept spraying water. Poliakoff ran across the yard and clutched the arm of Kotzov, the head of his bodyguards. “Hear those sirens?”

  “Yes. They’ll have these fires out in a few minutes.”

  “No, you donkey. Don’t you remember what’s stored in the basement? Get your men to stop spraying water. Get them to soak what’s left of the ground floor with gasoline. Block the road from the highway to delay the fire trucks. We’ve got to give the house time to burn before the firemen and police get a look at those drugs.”

  Poliakoff stood in isolation as his men stopped fighting the fire and ran to siphon gasoline from the cars and trucks to add to it. This too was part of the outrage. These Fargo people had forced him to burn down his own house. What an indignity. He should have killed the wife as soon as he’d seen her.

  * * *

  MILES AWAY on the steppe, Sam and Remi saw train tracks across the road from them, the rails gleaming in the moonlight. “Sasha was right,” Remi said. “Here are the tracks.”

  “Yes,” said Sam. “But which way is the station?”

  “Both ways, silly. That’s how railways work.”

  “I meant the nearest station. But I guess it doesn’t matter. Nizhny Novgorod is that way, so we’ve got to go the other way.”

  As they started to lead the horses across the road, they saw the first headlights they’d seen in hours. The car originally appeared far away and then came closer and closer. They could tell immediately it was like no car they’d ever seen. It had three headlights—the usual pair, and then another one right between the two on the nose of the car. As the car came around the bend and pulled to the side to pass, the center headlight moved, pointing in the direction it was going.

  The car slowed and stopped in front of Sam and Remi. It was a dark bronze color, long and low, with a body that tapered and narrowed at the back, streamlined like a fantasy spaceship. It was brand-new-looking, but somehow the eye knew it was antique. It was a futuristic design from the past.

  At the wheel of the car was a man who had white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard. He was wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt that was illuminated by the light from the dashboard in the dark Russian night. He got out of the car and walked up to Sam and Remi. They could see he was very tall and straight. “Can we help you?” he asked quietly in Russian.

  “We’re Americans,” Sam replied hesitantly in English.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, you look as though you could use a hand,” the driver answered in English. Sam and Remi were reminded that their clothes and faces were covered with flour and soot and dust, stuck to them with sweat.

  The passenger door opened and a tall, beautiful woman with hair that was a platinum blond as light as her companion’s hair stepped out of the car. “What gorgeous horses,” she said. “Where did you get them?”

  “We stole them,” said Remi. “We’re running away from a Russian gangster and his men. They kidnapped me.”

  “You poor things,” she said. “We’ll get you two out of here. But we’ll need to do something about the horses first.”

  “Janet likes animals,” the man explained. “That pasture over there is fenced, and I see water reflecting the moon. We could set them loose inside.”

  The man helped them remove the top two rails. They led their tired horses inside and put up the rails again. They removed the saddles and bridles, then left the gear on the fence. Sam and Remi gave the horses a pat and a hug, and then Remi whispered to them for a moment.

  Sam and Remi came back to the road, and the man opened the door for them to get into the backseat. He got in front and drove off down the road.

  Remi said, “What kind of car is this?”

  “It’s a Tucker,” the man said happily.

  The woman said, “He likes cars.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “And we both like to travel. So when I learned this one was for sale, we decided to come pick it up ourselves. It’ll make a nice addition to my collection.”

  “How did a 1948 Tucker get to the middle of Russia?” Sam asked.

  “So, you know about them.”

  “I know they just had a year in production,” said Sam. “I’ve never seen one before.”

  “Tucker made fifty-one of them. Up until now, there were only forty-four left. This is going to be the forty-fifth. An astute Russian official in 1948 realized the Tucker was something special and had somebody buy one for him in the United States. I think he wanted to take it apart and copy it, but by the time the car got here he had gotten into trouble and was sent off to Siberia. The car has been in storage all these years.”

  “How are you getting it home?”

  “By rail from here to Vladivostok, by ship to Los Angeles, and we’ll drive from there,” the man said. “You’re welcome to ride along with us for as far as you’d like to go.”

  Remi said, “We’d be honored and delighted. We’re headed for the eastern end of Kazakhstan.”

  “I know this is going to sound odd,” said Sam, “but do we look familiar to you? I think we met you once before in Africa.”

  The man looked at them both in the rearview mirror. “Not that I recall. Lots of people think they remember me from someplace, but I think it’s probably just my beard. Anybody can grow a beard.”

  “Just sit back and enjoy the ride,” said the woman. “If you’d like a snack or something to drink, just speak up.”

  “Thank you very much, but I think I’ll just try to doze off a little,” said Remi. “Dawn is my bedtime.”

  As the sun came up, the 1948 Tucker drove on toward it, cruising smoothly, pushed along by its converted aircraft engine. Sam sat in the backseat, quietly marveling at the feeling of having Remi back again, leaning her head against his chest as she slept. Before too long, he would fall asleep too, but not yet. A moment like this was too good to cut short.

  THE RUSSIAN STEPPES

  IN THE MORNING, THEY REACHED A SMALL STATION EAST of the Volga, far enough from Nizhny Novgorod so that the stir the Tucker caused was not likely to reach the wrong ears. The tall man in the Hawaiian shirt opened the trunk in the front of the car and showed them two leather suitcases. “They won’t let you get on a train like that. You’d better take some clothes to the restroom and get cleaned up and changed.” He opened the suitcase monogrammed CC, and Sam chose some men’s clothes. The one marked JC contained women’s clothes for Remi. Mr. C. closed the suitcases and the trunk while Sam and Remi went into the station to change. The clothes were long on both of them, but they rolled the pant legs up a bit and came out looking nearly normal in time to see C.C. supervising the loading of his car.

  The Tucker was loaded onto a special railroad car used for moving heavy equipment, chained down, and covered with a tarp to protect it from dust and rain, then locked inside and sealed.

  The Fargos and the Cs, who had rescued them, waited a few hours in the terminal for a train called Rossiya No. 2, which was the Moscow-to-Vladivostok run. It would take seven days and cover 6,152 miles. Their new friends, the Cs, who seemed knowledgeable about every spot on earth but didn’t mention w
hen they’d traveled there, watched the special railway car added to the train and then helped Sam buy two berths on the first-class sleeper, called a Spliny Wagon, as far as the Russian city of Omsk.

  As soon as they were on the train and moving steadily across the Russian steppes, Sam asked C.C. if he could borrow his cell phone. He went into his private sitting room, sat beside Remi, and turned on the speaker. He called the number that the man in the American consulate in Moscow had given him and said, “This is Sam Fargo.”

  “One moment, please.”

  The operator switched him immediately to another line.

  “Hi, Sam. This is Hagar.”

  “Hello,” said Sam. “Thanks for taking my call.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on the Trans-Siberian Railway with my wife, who is perfectly healthy and unharmed. I also thought you should know that the gentleman who was her host, Mr. Poliakoff, had some bad luck. There was a fire at his house, and some injured employees.”

  Hagar said, “I understand it burned to the ground and the police are investigating mysterious substances stored in his basement.”

  “Interesting. Well, thanks very much for helping me when I needed it.”

  “We would have liked to do more, but I guess Mr. P. wasn’t as big and bad as he thought. Our mutual friend at Langley sends congratulations to you and his respects to Mrs. Fargo.”

  “Thanks.” Sam ended the call, and then dialed the house in La Jolla.

  “Sam! Is it you?”

  “It is. And Remi’s here with me, on a train.”

  “Thank God. Where are you going?”

  “The next stop. Where we were headed when all this happened.”

  “Are you sure you want to—”

  “We don’t feel as though we ought to quit just because the other side got nasty. So we’re still heading in the right direction. Our route may be just a bit less predictable.”

  “Can I send Pete and Wendy to help?”

  “Just send some equipment, for the moment. Get us a hotel in Taraz, Kazakhstan, and send everything there. We’ll need an industrial fiber-optic inspection borescope with rigid telescoping metal tubes. It will need a camera and a light, no more than six millimeters wide. We might need about five meters of extension. Also, a laptop and a magnetometer.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “And load onto the laptop anything you can find out about the city of Taraz or Attila’s father or the archaeology of that part of the world. We’re going to need a sharp learning curve if we hope to accomplish anything.”

  “We’ll get back to work on it right away,” Selma said. “When Remi disappeared, we set aside the treasure hunt.”

  “Thanks,” said Remi. “Now I’m free, and we’re both fine, so we can get back to what we were doing.”

  “Terrific,” said Selma. “Let me give Albrecht and the others the good news, and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can.”

  Sam returned the phone to C.C. Soon, Sam and Remi sat still, watching the steppes outside the window, the land near the train sliding past but the view in the distance unchanging. The plain was always in motion, the winds blowing across the acres of grass and rippling it like the waves of an ocean. The distances were enormous. Sam and Remi would fall asleep, and when they awoke there would be the same sights—the grassy flatlands, the sky, and what seemed to be an endless supply of rails and railroad ties making the wheels clatter beneath their car.

  After a few hours, with no warning they could detect, the train would slow down and come to a small station. There would be local people on the platform, all of them gathered to sell local delicacies and staple food—fresh fruit, bread, hot tea, and various kinds of pastries.

  The first time this happened, their new friends the Cs came to their sitting room. The woman said, “Let us pick some things for you. I promise you’ll like all of them.” The man whispered to Sam, “Stay here. Station yourself by a window and see if you recognize anybody you’ve seen before.”

  Through the curtained windows, Remi and Sam watched the transactions on the platform at the first stop. There were peasant families with their fresh-baked goods and fruit, and plenty of other dishes to choose from. The Fargos’ new friends returned with a picnic for them. They did the same a few hours later at the second stop. Sam and Remi scrutinized the faces but spotted nobody who was familiar, and nobody who was making it his business to study the passengers.

  After dinner, when they had spent nineteen hours on the train, C.C. came to their sitting room and held out his phone. “It’s a woman named Selma.” Remi took the call. “Hi, Selma,” said Remi.

  “Hi, Remi. Gather whatever belongings you have because you’ll need to get off at Ekaterinburg.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “No. A chance to leap ahead. Sam didn’t say anything about your passport. Do you still have it?”

  “Yes. He had my carry-on bag when I was grabbed. All I lost was my phone. Sam lost his too.”

  “They’re easy to replace. I’ll send each of you a new one at your next hotel. At Ekaterinburg, we have you on a plane to Astana. We want to get you there as quickly as possible.”

  “What’s in Astana?”

  “Your papers have been waiting for you there. We also want to get you out of Russia. It will be harder for Poliakoff to operate there, harder to find you, and harder for him to do anything to you if he does. He’s as much an alien there as you are. Call when you’re at Ekaterinburg Airport.”

  Sam and Remi had little to pack and they did as Selma asked. They went to the berth of their friends and told them they would be leaving at Ekaterinburg and thanked them for their help. Just before they pulled into the station, Sam said to the tall man with the white beard, “C.C., I think I should tell you that I don’t believe that the next time I get in trouble a pair of good-hearted strangers will just happen to be passing by to pick me up in a rare antique car.” The man with the white beard looked at him sagely. “I think that’s probably wise, given the odds.”

  “Are you CIA?”

  The man shook his head. “I’m a man who was taking a car to Vladivostok when somebody I met at the American Embassy in Moscow called to say that two Americans might be coming along that route who could use some help.”

  “Just that?”

  “Just that.” He looked out the window. “You’d better get going. People will be flooding the platform in a minute and you might want to slip out with them.”

  “We will,” said Sam. “Thanks for the ride, Mr. C.”

  Remi popped up on tiptoe and gave the white-bearded man a kiss, and they slipped out onto the platform, moving quickly with the rest of the crowd. They found their way to a stand outside the terminal that had a sign with a picture of an airplane on it and boarded the bus that stopped there. Sam watched how much money the other people were paying the driver and did the same.

  In a short time, they were at the airport. Without talking about it or making a plan, they had changed their way of traveling. They were much more watchful than they had ever been before. They went together to the counter, where they saw the names of destinations printed in both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, bought their tickets together, and then went toward the departure gates. If one of them went to a restroom, the other would wait just outside the door, noting each person who went in and listening for any sound of a scuffle.

  Their plane for Astana, Kazakhstan left after five hours. They were both quietly but deeply relieved to get airborne toward Kazakhstan. It seemed to them to be a step away from the conspiracy of criminals who had been trying to harm them since they’d arrived in Berlin weeks before.

  The city of Astana was all new and very busy. The airport had two terminals, international and domestic, so they went through the customs office, picked up their written invitation to enter the country and their visas, then made reservations on Air Astana for Almaty, the old capital in the southeast of the huge country.

  When they told the air
line’s English-speaking representative what their ultimate destination was, they learned that getting to Almaty was easy but that there was just one flight from there to Taraz a week. The Scat Air flight from Almaty to Zhambyl Airport in Taraz took only a couple of hours, but those hours were always five-fifty to seven-fifty p.m., on Thursday. They boarded their first flight for the six hundred five miles to Almaty and later checked into a hotel there to wait for Thursday to come.

  They called Selma from the hotel to let her know where they were: the Worldhotel Saltanat Almaty.

  “I’m sorry for the delay,” she said. “But, so far, that’s it. I’m working through a jet charter service to arrange an earlier flight, but I’m worried about attracting too much attention when you get to Taraz. Maybe we can get you in late at night.”

  Sam said, “We’ve just about decided to hire a car to drive us there. It’s just another six hundred miles. That’s two days.”

  “See who you can find,” she said. “Just don’t hire someone who will drive you into the wilderness and then cut your throats.”

  “We try not to,” said Remi. “We check their knives for stains.”

  “We’ll see what our hotel’s concierge can do for us,” Sam said. “If that doesn’t work, Thursday always comes.”

  “Very stoic,” said Selma. “Good luck. I’ll be working on the plane. And I’ll get new cell phones delivered to you at the hotel right away.”

  It took Sam and Remi an hour to work with the concierge at the Worldhotel Saltanat Almaty to find a driver. His name was Nurin Temirzhan, and the concierge said he was twenty-three years old and eager for the job of driving to Taraz. But like most Kazakhs, he spoke no English.