The Romanov succession

The air was warm and a little damp coming off the Med. Irina found Alex’s hand and clasped it quietly. The Mercedes sighed in the road and the hair whipped around Irina’s face but she didn’t scarf it or tie it back. They passed under the lee of the mountain with Sergei monopolizing the talk and then they were curling along a river with the low sun stabbing through a spindle tracery of brush and trees. Small clouds scudded over the peaks. Alex felt deaf in the wind.

Sergei said, “The General Vassily Ilyavitch was not yet at the villa when I left. He is expected.”

“Yes,” Alex said. He turned and found Irina’s face deathly calm, chiseled in profile.

Sergei turned the car smoothly toward a massive open gateway. Flashbulbs erupted around them and Irina stared without expression past the photographers: they were beneath her recognition. They angered Alex-petty mongrels scrambling for scraps-but he didn’t let it show. A guard waved Sergei through and when he switched off amid the herd of big cars below the porte cochere the engine pinged with heat contractions and Alex heard music and a multitude of voices muttering from the villa. Colorfully costumed guests walked amid the profusion of formally shaped flower beds in the garden.

The car swayed when Sergei got out: he was a huge old man, a Kuban bear with his kind brown eyes and his wide Russian peasant face. The door opened under Sergei’s hand and Alex got out and waited for Irina; she swiveled to emerge and gracefully smoothed her elegant grey skirt. “You’ll enjoy the villa-it’s rather grand. Sergei, perhaps we can slip in by the kitchen? We’ll have to dress.”

But Sergei was looking past them toward the hills beyond the garden. Alex followed his gaze and saw a solitary horseman cantering down the distant bridle path.

“Heroes are always sculpted on horseback, aren’t they,” Irina said. “Isn’t it just like Vassily to arrive like that.” Then she laughed and the echoes rang back.

4

The assassin saw the horseman from the open veranda above the garden. The rider threaded the hillside pathways with a Cossack cavalryman’s precision. The evening sun outlined him sharply on the crests-a tall horseman with heroic shoulders and the equestrian posture of a field marshal.

A long low ridge made a wall beyond the meadows and when the rider disappeared behind it the assassin knew it was no good waiting for him to reappear. Devenko was on the alert and he wasn’t simply going to ride boldly up to the villa. Devenko had a guerrilla’s appreciation of distraction and deception. While a hundred guests stood rooted waiting for him to ride out of the shadows of the ridge Devenko would be galloping circuitously toward the back of the villa; he’d leave his horse tethered somewhere in the woods and they wouldn’t see him again until he made his entrance through an unexpected doorway.

He knew that much because he’d made a study of Devenko. The man was a curious amalgam of melodramatic dash and practical caution. Too proud not to make his appearance here today; too careful-because of the prior attempts against him-to make an easy target of himself. That was why it had to take place inside the villa. There’d have been no point in waiting in ambush by the road because Devenko had anticipated that and had come on horseback rather than by car.

It was much too difficult to get a bead on a man if you didn’t know him. That was what the assassin’s employers didn’t understand; it was why the first two attempts had failed: they hadn’t given the assassin sufficient information.

The first shot had been in London. They’d given him a photograph of Devenko, a place and a time-“You’ll have no trouble. You’ve got five days to arrange your getaway and the exact scheme-that’s up to you. But he’s got Haymarket tickets on the twenty-ninth. The interval’s at nine-fifty and the curtain comes down at eleven-ten. You might think about catching him on his way back to the car afterward-at least that’s the way I’d handle it. But it’s your gambit.”

It was only a voice on a telephone. He’d tried to get more: “Where does he live? What’s his routine? What’s he like?”

But the employer refused to be drawn. “You’ve got all you need to go on. You’re supposed to kill him, not marry him-what difference does all that make?”

So he’d botched the first one because he’d had no way of anticipating the speed and agility with which the target was capable of reacting. He’d paced the target toward the underground garage until the moment came when no one else was abroad in the blacked-out street. Then he’d quickened his pace and drawn the gun but the target heard all of that and without even looking behind him he’d dived between two parked lorries and that was that: the assassin ran forward and snapped a running shot but he knew he’d missed and then the target was out of sight in the heavy shadows and you couldn’t go running through the streets of London brandishing a 7.62 Luger with a big perforated silencer screwed to the barrel.