“That’s what?”
“They turned off the main circuit breaker. No igniter.”
In a single avalanche of sound, the doors on both sides of the kitchen banged, assaulted by men using heavy objects as battering rams. They heard many footsteps outside, men dashing toward the back of the house. Sam used the charging lever to load the first round into the chamber of the Škorpion he had taken from the guard. He reached up to turn the knob of the pantry door and opened it a crack. The fans had stopped and the white flour was suspended in the perfectly still air, so thick it was difficult to see across the room, difficult to breathe. In an instant, Sam foresaw what was about to happen. He yanked the door shut, held Remi down and kept his body over hers. “Stay down.”
A kitchen window shattered onto the floor, and a machine pistol began to spray bullets and sparks of burning powder into the room—Bwaah!—and those sparks were enough.
The flour suspended in the air exploded in a huge, fiery blast. It blew the kitchen doors outward, one into the dining room and the other into the back stairway, tearing the wood from its hinges and knocking the six or seven men senseless who had been trying to batter the doors in. The men at the rear of the kitchen fared worse because in the instant that the explosion blew the glass out of the windows, much of the wall blew out too, and was burning. The parts of the kitchen that still stood were burning too.
Sam pushed off the floor, lifting the pantry door off his back. Remi struggled to sit up. They were both white as ghosts, every inch of them covered with flour. He looked out at the damage. “Can you run?”
“Like a scared rabbit.”
They dashed from the pantry, ran for the hole that had been the back wall, and then they were out into the night. The fire was already growing inside the mansion, and as they ran they could hear battery-operated smoke alarms going off all over it in a growing chorus. They sprinted across the garden behind it, running for the darkness.
Remi grabbed Sam’s hand. “The stable is over there,” she said as she veered toward a long, low building. Sam ran harder.
Behind them there were injured men being dragged out of the smoke-filled building into the air, many of them coughing and many battered and cut by flying doors and windows.
Remi and Sam slipped into the stable, where they could see a row of ten stalls with horses in them. The big noise had startled the animals, so they tossed their heads and looked at the two intruders with big rolling, frightened eyes. Far down the row, there was a horse kicking the gate of his stall, making a sound like gunshots.
Remi walked along the stalls, talking to the horses. “Hello, boy. What a big, smart boy you are. And handsome too.” She reached up and patted each horse, murmuring sweet words to all of them. In a short time they seemed to be calmer, but outside the disturbing human noises continued—shouts, running feet, smoke alarms.
Sam held the Škorpion in his hand as he watched through the partially open door. “They’re not turning on the power.”
“Would you?”
“Probably not. The dark should help us get out the back of this building and into the fields.”
“What would help more is if you’ll saddle your own horse.”
“Horse?”
“We can’t outrun them, we don’t have a car, and can’t get to one without getting shot. A horse can run across country where there are no roads. Sasha says the railroad tracks are that way and they lead to a station.” She swung an English saddle over the horse and cinched the strap. “Be good, big guy. Be calm.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Sam.
“I wasn’t talking to you, but be calm anyway.”
Sam went to the wall of the stable where the tack hung, selected a saddle, blanket, bit, and bridle. He approached a horse and it reared and kicked the wall.
“Over here,” Remi said. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”
Sam went to the other stall and said, “All right, you big, beautiful monster. You and I are going to be best buddies.” He saddled the horse and put on the bridle. “Now we’re going to run away from about a thousand Russian guys before they kill your nice new friends.”
Sam and Remi led the two horses to the far end of the stable, away from the house, the fire, and the commotion. Remi led her horse outside, mounted him, and waited. Sam, a far less experienced rider, hoisted himself up into the saddle, and his horse spun around. He needed to hold the reins with both hands to control the horse, so he tossed the gun aside. “Hold on, buddy. I’m your friend, remember?” The horse seemed to decide then he would be willing to go away from the house and set off at a canter.
They were in a large pasture where the horses no doubt were allowed to run during the day, so the horse’s newfound calm was probably familiarity. Sam patted the horse and talked to him. In the next paddock, Sam could see barriers for steeplechase jumping and he felt a twinge of anticipation that things were not about to get better for him. Apparently these were jumping horses, and as a child Remi had been an avid rider. The only one in the paddock who had no idea what he was doing was Sam.
Sam again heard voices shouting, but this time it sounded as though they were near the riding area. Several times Sam heard the crack as a bullet passed nearby and then the rattle of machine-gun fire. He saw Remi’s horse speed up, galloping toward the fence at the end of the field.
Remi’s horse soared over the white rails. Sam spent a second noticing that the whiteness of the fence, reflecting some of the light from the fire, made everything beyond it look black. He couldn’t make out Remi and her horse very well. Sam’s horse followed with him astride it, willing the horse to believe, against all reason, that Sam was confident and experienced. To his amazement, the horse ran up to the fence and leapt into the air. As Sam became airborne, he heard Remi yell, “Lean forward!” so he did, and then the horse landed, front hooves first and then the back, and Sam managed to hold on.
The horses ran on, not as fast as they had at first but still about as fast as Sam could tolerate. The field looked to him like an endless sea of blackness. The horses ran for two miles or so without meeting an obstacle. In the distance, far to their right, Sam and Remi could see lights on a roadway. It was hard to tell whether the occasional headlights had anything to do with them, but the road never got any closer and the lights never turned toward them or stopped. Remi and Sam slowed down, and then they dismounted and walked the horses in the darkness for a while to let them rest and cool down. When Remi felt the horses were ready, she mounted her horse and began to ride forward, slowly picking up speed again. Sam mounted and followed.
* * *
SERGEI POLIAKOFF walked outside the burning manor house, keeping a distance of thirty feet from the flames that were licking up its sides and flickering along the peak of its roof. The back of the house seemed to have been kicked outward by the explosion. What there had been to explode, he had no idea. Since the fire had begun, it had set off a couple of caches of ammunition, but they had been quick, rapid-fire volleys, like strings of firecrackers, not big explosions. Maybe the gas had not been turned off completely. He would probably never know.
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 when 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.”