Masaryk Station (John Russell) by David Downing Page B

drew back out. He couldn’t remember which detective novel had introduced him and his school friends to this trick, but in the thirty years since it was the first time he’d performed it.
    He unlocked the door, slipped through, and re-locked it from the inside. It was pitch dark within, and after wasting a few seconds hoping his eyes would adjust, he resorted to the flashlight. The door in front of him was, he assumed, the one he’d noticed behind Kozniku’s left shoulder during their meeting. This was also locked, but the same tricked worked its magic. Kozniku’s office was windowless, but there was enough light seeping in through the glass panels of the connecting door for him to see his way. This door wasn’t locked, so he walked across Luciana’s office to check that the outer one was.
    ‘Okay,’ he murmured to himself, stepping back into Kozniku’s inner sanctum. He hesitated for a moment over whether or not he should shut the connecting door—leaving it open would give him warning of unexpected arrivals, while shutting it would make it less likely that anyone would notice his use of the flashlight. Close it, he decided—who would turn up at this time of night?
    First the desk, he told himself. Then the cabinets. He had no idea what he was looking for, but hoped he would know if he saw it. The man’s absence had been too good an opportunity to miss.
    Russell tried to leave each drawer as he found it, which wasn’t that difficult—Kozniku had everything arranged just so. A sudden burst of laughter in the street gave him a jolt, but also reassured him; the interior wall were clearly thin enough to prevent his being caught in the act.
    Two minutes later, he heard more voices—it was like Piccadilly Circus out there. He was just thinking that they seemed surprisingly close when he picked up the sound of a turning key. A few seconds later, the light went on in Luciana’s office, and spilled through the windows of the connecting door.
    Russell froze. If anyone opened that, at least he’d be standing behind it, but that was the best he could say. For the moment at least, no one in the next room seemed inclined to do so—in fact they seemed more concerned with trying to understand each other. There seemed to be three of them: Luciana, who sounded annoyed to be there, and two males, who sounded annoyed with her. They were all trying to speak English, and mostly failing in the attempt. The men had Balkan accents, and Russell recognised Serbo-Croat when they spoke to each other. Oh great, he thought. He’d spent half that morning listening to a British journalist recount, with wholly reprehensible glee, some of the worst atrocities carried out by the Ustashe. And here he was, at their mercy. Why the hell hadn’t he brought his gun with him?
    Time to leave, he told himself. And quietly as a mouse. He was just about to make his move toward the back door when the connecting door swung open, and someone seemed to exhale only inches from his head. A switch clicked, flooding the office with light, but before he had time to raise a fist it clicked again, restoring the relative darkness. He heard his own sigh of relief, but by then the men were talking again.
    Russell took another deep breath and tiptoed across Kozniku’s carpet to the other door. Thanking fate he hadn’t locked it, he eased the door wide enough to slip through, and was just congratulating himself on making no noise when the key fell out of the lock, and struck the corridor tiles with a loud ringing sound.
    ‘Pažnja!’ one male voice exclaimed, and the connecting door crashed open.
    Russell’s hand was already on the outside door. After almost falling through it, he accelerated down the ginnel, conscious of someone shouting, and reached the entrance just as a silhouette filled it. His momentum threw the man backwards, away from Russell’s flailing fist, and into the street. The man’s gun clattered away across the wet cobbles, and rebounded from