Page 79 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Hey, you!’

A gun safety catch clicked off behind him. He put his hands up and took a deep, slow breath.

‘I’m one of your researchers, you flighty bastard,’ he called, letting his voice go high with what hopefully sounded like indignation. ‘Can you maybe not shoot me on my first day?’

‘You’re what?’ the voice said, anxious.

‘My name is Kolkhanov, I specialise in the effects of radiation on human tissue, you can check. I’ve just come over from the Lighthouse.’ He held out his staff badge. ‘They only gave me coordinates, I couldn’t find the front door. Just that track. Where am I meant to be?’

‘I’ll take you,’ the young soldier said, looking relieved. ‘They’ve given you the wrong directions. This is the back door.’

Valery would never have found the door himself. It was set into a bank of earth at a steep angle, half hidden by the roots of a dying oak tree. When the soldier opened it, there was nothing beyond but a long, long corridor, leading back towards the Lighthouse.

‘What?’ he said.

‘It’s under the lake,’ the soldier explained.

The way was cold, and it only turned colder. The ground was covered in steel grating, which whickered under his boots like a railway line when a train was coming. Punctuating the corridor, just too far apart from each other, electric lights buzzed in the dark. Valery began to have a sense of weight above him. The lake. Here and there, the passage dripped, and patches of the floor grating were ginger with rust. The air smelled of earth and mould, even though the walls had been panelled with steel bulkheads. He wondered if that was to protect the wiring of the lights from the damp, or people from the radiation. The further he went, the more he thought he could taste the burnt-metal taste of radiation damage, and the harder it became to recognise it was imaginary.

He had Shenkov’s security lanyard looped around his knuckles, inside his pocket. He couldn’t remember doing that, but he had been gripping it so hard he couldn’t open his hand any more. When he reached the door, he wanted to turn back.

Instead he buzzed the intercom.

‘Er – hello?’ said a puzzled voice through the crackly wiring.

Here we go. He had done harder magic tricks than this; he had.

‘Can I come in please? It’s freezing out here.’

The lock hummed and opened. On the other side, three people looked up from their workbenches. One of them was Dr Resovskaya.

‘Hi,’ Valery said, as his heart slammed into his sternum. ‘Found you.’

‘You can’t be here,’ someone squeaked.

Just inside the door, two soldiers had trained their rifles on him. He locked his hands behind his head and looked past them to Resovskaya.

‘Elena, I was – I thought about what you said, I haven’t been able to stop, and I couldn’t think of anything else I could do to convince you I didn’t mean to harm your trial. I just came to help, if you want another pair of hands.’ He paused. ‘You can tell me to fuck off, but then I’ll have to follow you around with tea all the time and you’ll be annoyed. Please … let me help.’

There was rank alarm across her face. He didn’t blame her. She had expected never to see him again. Now, she must have been trying to work out if he knew anything about the arrest, who had fended it off, how, why, if it had happened and he had, eel-like, managed to writhe his way out of it, or if it had been held up earlier in the bureaucratic chain and he had no idea. He saw it when she pulled down the politic mask.

‘Valery, you really mustn’t break into secret government facilities,’ she said, managing to sound genuine and warm.

He had known she was a good liar, but this was impressive.

‘Who is he?’ one of the other researchers asked, quite high.

‘Not a security risk,’ Resovskaya said, shaking her head. ‘Have you told anyone about this, Valery?’

‘No, but please don’t shoot me. I’ll be much more useful with all my brains on the inside.’

‘Oh, just … you are a nuisance,’ she said, smiling. She sighed. ‘Come on then, since you’re here.’

‘Hah,’ Valery said happily. It wasn’t hard to pretend. Not having two guns aimed into his face was a very happy feeling. Behind the guns, the soldiers looked confused.

Resovskaya herded him by his shoulder into the next room. It was a little office kitchen, with three kettles on the side and a fridge that hummed. ‘Is this how you got round Shenkov, just being rather sweetly insane?’

‘Yes,’ he said, far more shortly than he had meant to.