THE RUSSIAN STEPPES
IN THE MORNING, THEY REACHED A SMALL STATION EAST of the Volga, far enough from Nizhny Novgorod so that the stir the Tucker caused was not likely to reach the wrong ears. The tall man in the Hawaiian shirt opened the trunk in the front of the car and showed them two leather suitcases. “They won’t let you get on a train like that. You’d better take some clothes to the restroom and get cleaned up and changed.” He opened the suitcase monogrammed CC, and Sam chose some men’s clothes. The one marked JC contained women’s clothes for Remi. Mr. C. closed the suitcases and the trunk while Sam and Remi went into the station to change. The clothes were long on both of them, but they rolled the pant legs up a bit and came out looking nearly normal in time to see C.C. supervising the loading of his car.
The Tucker was loaded onto a special railroad car used for moving heavy equipment, chained down, and covered with a tarp to protect it from dust and rain, then locked inside and sealed.
The Fargos and the Cs, who had rescued them, waited a few hours in the terminal for a train called Rossiya No. 2, which was the Moscow-to-Vladivostok run. It would take seven days and cover 6,152 miles. Their new friends, the Cs, who seemed knowledgeable about every spot on earth but didn’t mention when they’d traveled there, watched the special railway car added to the train and then helped Sam buy two berths on the first-class sleeper, called a Spliny Wagon, as far as the Russian city of Omsk.
As soon as they were on the train and moving steadily across the Russian steppes, Sam asked C.C. if he could borrow his cell phone. He went into his private sitting room, sat beside Remi, and turned on the speaker. He called the number that the man in the American consulate in Moscow had given him and said, “This is Sam Fargo.”
“One moment, please.”
The operator switched him immediately to another line.
“Hi
, Sam. This is Hagar.”
“Hello,” said Sam. “Thanks for taking my call.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m on the Trans-Siberian Railway with my wife, who is perfectly healthy and unharmed. I also thought you should know that the gentleman who was her host, Mr. Poliakoff, had some bad luck. There was a fire at his house, and some injured employees.”
Hagar said, “I understand it burned to the ground and the police are investigating mysterious substances stored in his basement.”
“Interesting. Well, thanks very much for helping me when I needed it.”
“We would have liked to do more, but I guess Mr. P. wasn’t as big and bad as he thought. Our mutual friend at Langley sends congratulations to you and his respects to Mrs. Fargo.”
“Thanks.” Sam ended the call, and then dialed the house in La Jolla.
“Sam! Is it you?”
“It is. And Remi’s here with me, on a train.”
“Thank God. Where are you going?”
“The next stop. Where we were headed when all this happened.”
“Are you sure you want to—”
“We don’t feel as though we ought to quit just because the other side got nasty. So we’re still heading in the right direction. Our route may be just a bit less predictable.”
“Can I send Pete and Wendy to help?”
“Just send some equipment, for the moment. Get us a hotel in Taraz, Kazakhstan, and send everything there. We’ll need an industrial fiber-optic inspection borescope with rigid telescoping metal tubes. It will need a camera and a light, no more than six millimeters wide. We might need about five meters of extension. Also, a laptop and a magnetometer.”
“Consider it done.”
“And load onto the laptop anything you can find out about the city of Taraz or Attila’s father or the archaeology of that part of the world. We’re going to need a sharp learning curve if we hope to accomplish anything.”
“We’ll get back to work on it right away,” Selma said. “When Remi disappeared, we set aside the treasure hunt.”
“Thanks,” said Remi. “Now I’m free, and we’re both fine, so we can get back to what we were doing.”
“Terrific,” said Selma. “Let me give Albrecht and the others the good news, and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can.”
Sam returned the phone to C.C. Soon, Sam and Remi sat still, watching the steppes outside the window, the land near the train sliding past but the view in the distance unchanging. The plain was always in motion, the winds blowing across the acres of grass and rippling it like the waves of an ocean. The distances were enormous. Sam and Remi would fall asleep, and when they awoke there would be the same sights—the grassy flatlands, the sky, and what seemed to be an endless supply of rails and railroad ties making the wheels clatter beneath their car.