The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [90]
He could never be sure whether he actually saw the thin cord stretched between the trees in front of him, or whether, with his new awareness, he just suddenly sensed danger. He heard the horse’s terrified whinny as he pulled its head sharply to the side and then they plunged together down the rocky bank into the deep-flowing stream. The horse rolled frantically in the water, struggling to its feet and shaking itself. Gripping a slippery boulder with one hand, Sergei managed somehow to hang on to the reins. The water was turbulent and icy, and a few yards downstream he could hear the roar as it tumbled and gushed into a gorge a hundred feet below.
Shivering with fear and cold, he climbed back on the horse and guided it through the mossy rocks to the safety of the bank.
He lay for a while across the horse’s neck, waiting for the fear to subside. Then he dismounted and walked back along the track to where he had seen the cord. It had disappeared. He examined the branches, noting the broken twigs; then he stared around him, his spine prickling, sensing that he was being watched. But there was no sound, only the noise of the water rushing over the gorge.
Sergei walked back thoughtfully to his horse. He had been brought up alongside the peasants at Varishnya; his father had treated them as family, he had looked after them well, and in return they had taken young Prince Alexei out hunting with them and let him help around the stables where they had taught him their peasant tricks. One was how to garrote a speeding horseman by the simple method of stretching a thin taut cord across his path, just at the height of his throat. It never failed, they had said, grinning at his awed young face.
He rode slowly back to the cottage. He knew there was only one person who might want to kill him.
Boris avoided his eyes at the supper table that night, but Sergei said nothing. The pattern of their relationship was set. Through the years, from school to university, his own rise through politics and Boris’s through the army, the rivalry had deepened. And there had been nothing Grigori Solovsky could do about it. Sergei knew Boris had wanted to murder him all those years ago, and he was still trying now. Every way he could.
There was no preliminary knock on the door. The head of the KGB simply strode in.
“Well, Boris,” Sergei said quietly, “our mother taught us better manners than that. I might have been in a meeting.”
“You weren’t,” he said, flinging the paper with the message onto his desk. “I’ve come to ask you if you know what this means. Or are you as much in the dark as the rest of us about Valentin’s actions?”
“You? In the dark?” Sergei laughed. “What an admission for the head of the KGB. I thought you were supposed to know everything.”
After placing his hands flat on the desk, Boris leaned across it, thrusting his face close to Sergei’s. “Don’t get smart with me, comrade,” he whispered. “I know everything about you and your son.”
Sergei looked him coolly in the eye. “Perhaps you are forgetting that the Party is meant to be the arbiter of the people’s aspirations? Is this business in the interests of our country, Boris, or is it a personal vendetta you are pursuing? I thought your job was to use your men to find the ‘Lady.’ And Valentin’s was to use his brains.”
Boris snatched up the paper, crumpled it into a ball, and flung it at the wastebasket. It missed and his face purpled with rage.
Sergei said mildly, “You never were any good at ball games.”
“Why did your son not secure the emerald?” Boris asked tightly. “Who the hell did he let beat him to it? And why?”
Sergei shrugged. “You know the game, and the players. Why not take a guess?”
“Valentin was not sent to guess. He was expected to carry out his task efficiently. Now we don’t even know where he is.”
Despite himself, Sergei laughed. “It’s a good thing the CIA can’t hear