8:30 AM
Lord's entrance to the metro was a station in the northern part of town. The subway train was packed in a suffocating closeness with stinking commuters. He clung to a steel pole and felt the clatter of wheels to rail. At least no one seemed threatening. All of them appeared wary. Like himself.
He left the Metro at the Historical Museum and crossed a busy street, passing through Resurrection Gate. Red Square opened beyond. He marveled at the recently rebuilt gate, the original seventeenth-century white towers and redbrick archways having fallen victim to Stalin.
The compactness of Red Square had always struck him as odd. Communist television spectaculars had made the cobbled space look endless. In reality, it was only a third longer than a football field and less than half as wide. The imposing redbrick walls of the Kremlin stood to the southwest side. On the northeast rose the GUM department store, the massive baroque building resembling more a nineteenth-century train station than a bastion of capitalism. The north end was dominated by the Historical Museum and its white-tiled roof. A double-headed Romanov eagle now decorated the top of the building, the Red Star gone the way of the communists. At the south end stood St. Basil's Cathedral, an explosion of pinnacles, onion domes, and spade-shaped gables. Its collage of colors, flooded in arc light and splashed onto the blackness of a Moscow night, was the city's most recognizable symbol.
Steel barricades at either end prevented pedestrians from entering the square. Lord knew the area remained cordoned off every day until one PM, when Lenin's tomb closed.
And he saw that Hayes was right.
There were at least two dozen uniformed militsya in and around the boxlike tomb. A small queue of visitors had already formed in front of the granite mausoleum. The building sat on the highest point of the square, nestled close to the Kremlin wall, a row of towering silver firs standing guard on either side, flanking the walls beyond.
He rounded the barricade and followed a tour group toward the tomb. He buttoned his jacket against the chill and wished he'd brought his wool coat, but it was back in the compartment of the Red Arrow he and Ilya Zenov had briefly shared. Bells chimed in the clock tower above the walls. Tourists wearing oversized down jackets and cameras milled about. Garish colors clearly tagged them. Most Russians seemed to favor black, gray, brown, and navy blue. Gloves were a giveaway, too. True Russians shunned them, even in the dead of winter.
He followed the tour group to the front of the mausoleum. One of the militsya ambled toward him, a young, pale-faced man dressed in an olive-green greatcoat and blue fur shlapa. He noticed the lack of a weapon, the guard's function purely ceremonial. Too bad.
"Are you here to tour the shrine?" the guard asked in Russian.
Though he understood him perfectly, he decided to feign ignorance. He shook his head. "No Russian. English?"
The guard's face stayed frozen. "Passport," the man said in English.
The last thing Lord wanted was to attract attention. He quickly glanced around, searching for Taylor Hayes or anybody coming his way.
"Passport," the guard said again.
Another guard moved in his direction.
He reached into his back pocket and found his passport. The blue cover would immediately identify him as American. He handed it to the guard, but nerves caused his grip to slip and the booklet dropped to the cobbles. He bent down to retrieve it and felt a swoosh as something whipped past his right ear and sank into the guard's chest. He looked up to see a ribbon of red pouring from a hole in the man's green coat. The guard gasped for breath, his eyes rolled skyward, then his body folded to the pavement.
Lord spun around and spied a gunman a hundred yards away atop the GUM department store.
The gunman leveled his rifle and re-aimed.
Pocketing the passport, Lord rushed past the crowd and leapt up the granite steps, shoving people to the ground and screaming in English and Russian, "Gunman. Run."
Tourists scattered.
He dived forward just as another bullet ricocheted off the glazed stone beside him. He landed hard on the black labradorite of the tomb's foyer and rolled inside just as another bullet obliterated more red granite at the doorway.
Two more guards rushed up from inside the tomb.
"There's a gunman outside," he screamed in Russian. "On top of GUM."
Neither guard was armed, but one darted into a small cubicle and dialed a phone. Lord inched toward the doorway. People were racing in every direction. But none was in danger. He was the target. The gunman was still on the roof, wedged between a row of arc lights. Suddenly a dark Volvo station wagon zoomed out of a side street south of GUM, directly in front of St. Basil's. The car screeched to a stop and two doors popped open.
Droopy and Cro-Magnon stepped out, then sprinted toward the tomb.
He had only one way to go, so he bolted down the staircase into the bowels of the mausoleum. People were crowded at the base of the stairs, fear in their eyes. He shouldered past them, turned twice, and entered the main vault. He raced around the walkway that encircled Lenin's glass coffin, giving the waxy corpse only a momentary glance. Two more guards were on the other side. Neither voiced a word. He bounded up a slick marble staircase and popped out a side exit. Instead of turning right, back toward Red Square, he darted left.
A quick glance confirmed that the rifleman had spotted him. But the angle wasn't right. The shooter needed to move, and Lord saw the man do just that.
He was now in the green space behind the mausoleum's receding tiers. A stairway, chained shut, rose to his left. He knew it led up to the rooftop reviewing platform. No point going there. He needed to stay low.
He ran forward toward the Kremlin wall. When he glanced back he saw the gunman take up a new position toward the end of the arc lights. Lord was now in the area behind the tomb. Stone busts commemorated the graves of such men as Sverdlov, Brezhnev, Kalinin, and Stalin.
Two shots rang out.
He dived to the concrete path, using the trunk of one of the silver firs for cover. A bullet raked the tree's boughs, careering off the Kremlin wall behind him, while another ricocheted off one of the stone monuments. He couldn't go right, toward the Historical Museum. Too open. Left allowed the mausoleum to work as a shield. But then the gunman wasn't as immediate a problem as the men he'd seen climb out of the Volvo.
He turned left and ran straight ahead, down a narrow path among the graves of party leaders. He stayed in a crouch and moved as fast as he could, using the tree trunks for protection.
Emerging on the other side of the tomb, shots started again from the GUM roof. Bullets chipped away at the Kremlin wall. The gunman couldn't be that bad a shot, so Lord reasoned that he was being herded in a predetermined direction, one where Droopy and Cro-Magnon would surely be waiting.
He glanced left beyond the granite reviewing stands toward Red Square. Droopy and Cro-Magnon spotted him and raced his way.
Three police cars roared into the square from the south, their lights flashing, sirens blaring. Their appearance halted Droopy and Cro-Magnon's rapid approach. He stopped, too, huddling close to a stone monolith for protection.
Droopy and Cro-Magnon looked back toward GUM's roof. The gunman high above signaled, then disappeared. They apparently took his cue and beat a retreat to the Volvo.
Police cars roared into the square, one obliterating a freestanding barricade. Uniformed militsya poured out, weapons in hand. Lord looked left, back from where he had come. More militsya were running toward him down the narrow path parallel to the wall, their greatcoats unbuttoned, breath condensing in the cool, dry air.
And they were armed.
There was nowhere for him to go.
He raised his hands above his head and stood.
The first policeman to approach slammed him to the ground and burrowed the barrel of a gun into the nape of his neck.