Dead Centre - Andy McNab [32]
As he headed out of the room, the crew looked up at me with a mixture of embarrassment, fear and relief.
I glanced at the door handle and the electronic lock. It looked like the Russian equivalent of a VingCard Classic, the magnetic card reader used in most European and American hotels. If so, the locksets would be high security, with a full one-inch steel deadbolt and three-quarter-inch anti-pick latch for added strength. The electronics worked off standard AA batteries. Their flash memory allowed the lock to be accessed and reprogrammed directly at the hotel-room door.
I followed my escort to the lift. ‘Are you giving me a ride back to my flat? The Metro’s a fucking nightmare around here.’
Mr Lover Man had been with Mr T too long. He didn’t give it a nanosecond’s thought. ‘No.’
We headed down. At the main door, I zipped my parka up to my chin and adjusted the hood to hide my face from the cold. Then Mr Lover Man and I stepped outside. He took a pace or two towards the Range Rover, then spun on his heel.
‘Go now and bring back Stefan.’
The Audi was still two-up. The engine stopped as soon as I turned towards the Metro. A guy in a dark overcoat and beanie stepped out of the car and his mate, in sheepskin, followed suit. Mr T had obviously tuned into Comedy Central. These boys were the spitting image of Ant and Dec. Dec hit the key fob to lock up.
I crossed the road, heading the couple of hundred metres towards the sign with the large red M. I didn’t bother to check if Frank’s new celebrity couple were still with me. I took it as given. He clearly liked to keep a tight rein on all his people.
17
LUBYANKA WAS ONE of the first stations to be built in Moscow’s underground system in the mid-1930s. Because of the city’s unstable subsoil, it also turned out to be one of the world’s deepest. It took passengers more than five minutes to get from the concourse to the platforms. That was just what I wanted today. I wanted to lose my new best mates, but I didn’t want them to know I’d done it on purpose.
I reached the bottom of the stairs. This subway wouldn’t have got Crazy Dave’s seal of approval. There were no lifts anywhere. Most stations didn’t even have ramps. So even if he got down here, there’d be no guarantee Crazy Dave would ever resurface.
Another thing that was going to work in my favour was the fact that you could stay down here all day. You could interchange at will, and I might have to.
Ant and Dec wouldn’t find that strange. Visitors to Moscow who don’t speak or read Russian can find the Metro very intimidating. It’s a hub-and-spoke system, with the majority of lines running from downtown Moscow to the peripheral districts.
The Koltsevaya Line (No. 5) forms a twenty-kilometre ring that connects the spokes. There are twelve lines, each identified by a number, a name and a colour, and 182 stations. The locals often identified the lines just by colour, except for the very similar shades of green assigned to 2, 10, 11, and L1 – and at Kievskaya, where the light blue and dark blue lines converged and were almost impossible to tell apart.
It got worse. The colours on the platform signs weren’t always the same as the colours on the maps, and one station could be called two or three different names depending on the line on which one was travelling.
Out-of-towners and foreigners like me had to change platforms and retrace their steps every ten minutes. I quite liked fucking about down here for a couple of hours when I’d had enough of Dostoevsky and Gunslingers. It was a great place to see the wildlife. It also reminded me of the few fun times I used to have as a kid, bunking on the Underground all day, not having a clue where me and my mates would surface. Anywhere north of the river was the Outback, as far as we were concerned.
The entry gates looked like a series of turnstiles, but without the turnstiles. They were a row of card readers, with little gates between them. Some stations had futuristic glass panels that swung open once your card had been given the green