December. James Steel

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       Chapter Eight

      Sergey settled back into his luxurious white leather chair and watched the lights go out across London.

      His Gulfstream G550 intercontinental jet had got one of the last take-off slots of the day at London City airport. For once, the snow had stopped falling and it was a clear, dark evening, so he had a perfect view through the porthole as the aircraft banked over the East End and they shut off the electricity substations one by one.

      A whole block of Dagenham suddenly winked out, the orange grid of street and house lights all went in an instant, leaving just a few car headlamps floundering in the murk.

      Well, oppressed people of Britain! You won’t have to put up with that for long if my plan works out! Sergey broadcast in his head.

      As the plane levelled off, Bayarmaa sauntered in from the kitchen section at the front of the aircraft in a tight black cocktail dress with a tray of Sergey’s homemade vodka, pickled mushrooms and meats. She knew him well enough to see that he wanted to be left alone so after stroking his hair and kissing his cheek she slunk back out again. Sergey followed her slim backside with a dangerous look in his eye. He hadn’t yet got through the lust phase with her; he knew he would move on, but he was enjoying it at the moment.

      Other things occupied his mind now, though; he took a shot of vodka and chewed on the food slowly as he thought. The softly lit cabin was a good brooding cocoon as they hurtled out over the North Sea towards Moscow. His face darkened and he pursed his lips, staring into the night and thinking hard.

      Although he had been full of bravado with Alex he was actually deeply troubled about the forthcoming encounter with Krymov. He thought about what the summons could mean; it was hard to tell, as the President was such an erratic character.

      Sergey wondered at his own capacity for duplicity. He was a good example of Soviet era ‘double think’—the ability to think opposite thoughts at once. He had grown up with it as a boy: the ability to swear passionate allegiance to Marxist-Leninism at school and then go out and indulge in the raw, black-market capitalism that was necessary to survive it.

      He remembered an Uzbek expression that one of his operations managers from a refinery there had told him: Uzbeks can say one thing, think another and do a third.

      Sergey was a prime example of such flexibility. Sometimes he lived the part of a supporter of the regime and enjoyed the intellectual trickery of misleading them so much that he felt he had lost touch with what he really believed in. Only at odd moments of solitude, like this, would he call to mind the feelings that drove him. He suddenly felt the whole weight of the coup resting on his shoulders—he had a moment of self-consciousness like an out-of-body experience.

      What the hell did he think he was doing?

      He was trying to overthrow the government of Russia. No one had done that since the Bolsheviks in 1917. He could be on the brink of a major civil war. Even after the Bolshevik victory, it had taken two years of vicious fighting that had raged across the whole country and taken millions of lives. Was he about to inflict the same on his beloved Mother Russia?

      Sergey had the capacity to dream great dreams, but the flipside of this was that he was prone to moments of black doubt, when the grand scale of his ideas seemed to crush him.

      He was really just a small-town boy from Voronezh, a decaying industrial town, smack bang in the middle of the steppe. As a child he had a phenomenally high IQ and was very sensitive. He had watched everything intently, noticed things quickly and made connections unprompted. His mother felt unnerved by how closely he watched her when he was a baby, how fast he put two and two together.

      He used to watch his father playing chess with mates from the steel mill in the kitchen of their tiny workers’ flat. Once, as a two year old, he had been given jumbled up chess pieces in a box to play with whilst his mother peeled some potatoes. When she turned round she found that he had set all the pieces out accurately on the board and had begun moving them correctly: pawns forward and back, knights two forward, one to the side, and bishops diagonally. She stared at him, disconcerted. He had looked up, smiled at her sweetly and carried on as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

      At primary school he ate up the curriculum. His teachers were very pleased with him, but then aged eight he became very frustrated; he would look at his classmates sitting quietly, looking around with vacant and content expressions or stumbling to learn things that he took in at a glance, and he would be suddenly filled with anger against them. They seemed such hateful dullards to him.

      ‘Do you even think? Is there anything going on in your heads?’ he would shout at them in his mind.

      He fell into sudden rages and would rush at quiet, slow boys in his class and attack them for no reason, beating and kicking them. He was suspended from the nursery section of School 17 several times that year until he had had enough wallopings from his teachers and his father to know better.

      After that he gave up trying to solve the problem of life and took to flippancy as a way of displacing the boredom and frustration in his head. He became the class clown, winding his teachers up, coasting through school, underachieving and driving his parents mad. But underneath his easy wit and idiotic banter, he felt the pressure of existence keenly; subconsciously he questioned why he existed and found no answers.

      The lack of a solution distressed him. As a boy he would jump onto the slow-moving flatbed trains grinding through the points outside his family’s concrete apartment block on the edge of town, and let himself be carried out onto the steppe. Then he would jump off and walk miles out into the endless, flat grassland, forgetting about how and when to get home and sleeping out under the stars.

      He watched the sunset over the steppe, a painting of vast colours being shifted across the heavens by an unseen hand. The shades heaved and convulsed: yellow to orange to pink СКАЧАТЬ