Blood of the Czars by Michael Kilian

Author:Michael Kilian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504019217
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

10

Tatty sat transfixed, watching the ice fill with blood.

Sergeant Lev had gone to the telephone. There were armed militiamen all over the building. She had passed two at the entrance. Yet the man was telephoning. That meant something. What it meant she would decide later. At this instant, she knew only that, if she was to survive, to escape, to live, he could not be allowed to complete his call. He was dialing.

He had set her pistol on the table. That was a mistake. She picked it up and got to her feet. There were moral questions about what she was to do, but she hadn’t time to consider them. There was the possibility that she might threaten him away from the telephone with the gun, that she might overpower him in some way, find something with which to knock him out. But there were no longer even seconds left. He had stopped dialing.

Aiming the pistol with both hands, she fired twice. The first shot hit him in the small of the back, causing paralysis and pain. The second, the trigger pulled as the gun rose in recoil, struck the back of his head, splashing blood against the wall. She should run now, but where? To the embassy. But Meadows was at the embassy, and Meadows had given her the gun. Meadows was Ramsey’s man. There might be many of Ramsey’s people at the embassy. Where then, with so little time to think? No time, so she must make her own call. She had no one else, nothing else. It was crazy, but everything else was crazier. She had to know what to do. Stepping over Lev’s body, fighting back images of another man’s dead body lying atop her own in France, she frantically began to dial. There was no answer at the first number. She dialed the second. Spencer answered on the fourth ring. She could not understand why police were not crashing through the door.

“Jack, thank God.”

“Czarina. I should have thought you’d be making merry with the good chairman right about now.”

“Jack, Griuchinov’s dead! He’s been shot, murdered! I killed the man who did it. I don’t know what to do!”

Spencer paused a second or two, then swore. “Where are you?”

“In the Kremlin.”

“The Kremlin? For God’s sake, Tatty!”

“It just happened, Jack. What do I do?”

He paused again, then said, “Get drunk, Tatty. Grab a bottle of vodka and go to as good a place to get drunk in as there is in Moscow. Do you know what I mean?”

“No. Yes! You mean—”

“Be quiet! Gather up everything you have there, everything that could be identified with you. Then go where I said. Go now. Hurry. Run, Tatty! Run!”

She found her coat and hat in a front closet and pulled them on hastily. Throwing the pistol into her purse and snatching up a bottle of Stolichnaya, she searched through the rooms of the apartment until she found the kitchen, a pantry beyond that, and a rear door leading to a dark, gloomy set of service stairs.

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