Siberian Red

STOP
    Pekkala stopped reading. The Blue File. This was the first time he had heard a mention of it since before the Revolution. He hadn’t even known the Blue File was still in existence, although it didn’t surprise him to learn that the Tsar had failed to destroy it, as he should have done, in those final days of his captivity at Tsarskoye Selo. The Tsar had been such a meticulous keeper of records that getting rid of anything he’d written down would have gone against every instinct he possessed.
    Pekkala gave a quiet grunt of admiration that Kirov had managed to track down this information in the labyrinth of Archive 17, especially since that meant dealing with Professor Braninko, its notoriously uncooperative curator.
    Even more astonishing than the mention of Grodek was the fact that one of the Okhrana agents on that mission had survived. Until now, he had believed they were all dead.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Klenovkin. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

On a clear winter’s day
     
     
    On a clear winter’s day, a car filled with heavily armed Okhrana agents raced through the streets of St Petersburg.
    Pekkala was crammed in beside a young officer whom he had never met before. The task of the Okhrana agents was to clear the ground floor, not thought to be occupied, and make their way swiftly up to the apartment rented by Grodek and his mistress.
    ‘Do you think he will come quietly?’ asked the officer.
    ‘No,’ replied Pekkala. He did not believe it would be possible to arrest Grodek without sustaining casualties. Neither did he believe that Grodek would allow himself to be taken alive.
    As they spoke, the young officer was loading his Nagant pistol. When the wheels of their car bounced over a pothole, a bullet slipped from the officer’s fingers and fell into the seat well below. The men were too closely packed for him to bend down and retrieve it. The Okhrana agent swore quietly at his own clumsiness. Then he glanced across at Pekkala.
    ‘Last year,’ the officer explained, ‘one of my colleagues closed a car door on my fingers.’ He held up his hand as proof.
    Pekkala could see that the man’s thumb and index finger had been deformed by the bone not setting straight.
    ‘The doctors tell me I have nerve damage,’ continued the officer. ‘Sometimes I can’t help dropping things.’
    ‘I see,’ said Pekkala.
    ‘To tell you the truth, Inspector, I am also a little nervous.’
    Before Pekkala could reply, they rounded a corner and Grodek’s house slid into view.
    The officer closed the cylinder of the revolver and placed it in the holster strapped under his armpit. ‘Well,’ he told Pekkala, ‘I will see you on the other side.’
    The three cars screeched to a halt outside Grodek’s house. The Okhrana agents immediately piled out and began battering down the door.
    As they had planned in advance, Pekkala moved around to the rear of the building, in case Grodek tried to escape along the canal path. He took cover behind a stack of crates containing salt used for preserving fish which were caught in the summer months at the mouth of the Neva River. In winter, due to the ice‚ none of the boats could get up the river. At that time of year, the whole wharf was deserted.
    Once the agents were inside, they raced up the stairs to Grodek’s apartment on the second floor.
    From his hiding place, Pekkala heard a heavy, muffled thump inside the building. The windows seemed to ripple. This was followed a fraction of a second later by a concussion which threw him off his feet. Jets of fire belched out of the windows. Glass sprayed over the street. Dazed and lying on his back, Pekkala watched a door sail over his head and into the canal.
    Grodek had planted a bomb. Only seconds before the blast, he and his mistress, Maria Balka, had managed to escape through a side window.
    By the time Pekkala got back on his feet, the two fugitives were already running away down the street.
    After a chase, Pekkala caught up with Grodek and arrested him, but not before Maria Balka met her death in the icy waters of the Moika canal. She’d been killed by her own lover, so as not to let her fall into captivity.
    Having witnessed the devastation caused by the bomb blast, Pekkala did not even consider that any of the Okhrana agents could have survived the explosion. When Chief Inspector Vassileyev confirmed that all of the agents had perished, he was only reporting what Pekkala already knew. Or