‘You.’ He pointed at a young soldier in the grey uniform and red armband of the Chinese Communist forces, who was dragging a bleeding figure from the wreckage. The wounded man was a Nationalist Army captain, judging by the colours he wore, and his gut had been torn open by the explosion. He was trying to hold in his bloody innards with his hands, cradling them, but one end of his intestines had slipped from his grasp and trailed behind him. It was unwinding as the young Communist pulled him free, yet the Nationalist captain didn’t scream.

‘You,’ Chang said again. ‘Stop that. You know the orders.’

The young soldier nodded. He looked as if he would vomit.

‘Only those who can walk will travel with us. The rest…’

In a slow, reluctant movement, while Chang stood over him, the young soldier slung the rifle off his back. Despite the ice in the air, sweat formed on his brow. He had the heavy features and broad hands of a farmer’s son, a peasant away from home for the first time in his life. And now this.

Chang recalled his own first killing, seared into his soul.

The soldier nestled the rifle to his shoulder exactly as he’d been taught, but his hands were shaking uncontrollably. The man on the ground didn’t beg, just closed his eyes and listened to the wind and to what he knew would be the last beats of his heart. Abruptly Chang drew his own pistol, leaned down to the captain, placed the muzzle at his temple and pulled the trigger. The body jerked. Chang bowed his head for a split second and commended the man’s spirit to his ancestors.

Death. It seemed to stalk him.


The train’s massive steam engine had bucked off the damaged track and plunged nose first down the bank, but just managed to stay upright. Behind it lurched the baggage wagon at an odd angle, but the only baggage it was carrying came in twenty long wooden boxes, four of which had splintered open in the crash. Chang’s heart raced at the sight of them. He leapt inside the wagon, feet braced against the buckled slope of the floor, and rested a hand possessively on one of the open boxes.

‘Luo,’ he called.

Luo Wen-cai, the young commander of the small assault force, clambered up awkwardly after him. A slow-healing bullet wound in his thigh hampered his usual quick movements, but nothing hampered the grin that shot across his broad face.

‘Chang, my friend, what treasure you have found for us!’

‘Tokarev rifles,’ Chang murmured.

This was even better than he’d expected. This haul would please Chou En-lai at Party Headquarters down south in Shanghai, and put rifles where they were needed – in the military training camps; in the fists of the eager young men who came to fight for the Communist cause. Chou En-lai would preen himself, and sharpen his tiger claws as if he’d hunted them down himself. This success would gain him even greater support from the mao-zi, the Hairy Ones.

The mao-zi. The words stuck in Chang’s throat. They were the European Communists, the ones who held the purse strings of the Chinese Communist Party. They were represented by a German called Gerhart Eisler and a Pole known as Rylsky, but both were mere mouthpieces for Moscow. That’s where the funds sprang from and where the real power lay.

Yet here was a train carrying troops and arms from Russia to Chiang Kai-shek’s overstretched Nationalist Army, who were sworn enemies of the Chinese Communists. It didn’t make sense, whichever way Chang turned it. Like a dog humping a goose, it wouldn’t fit together. He frowned, feeling a sudden unease, but nothing could dampen his companion’s delight.

‘Rifles,’ Luo crowed. He scooped one out of a box and ran a hand down its length, lovingly, the way he would a woman’s thigh. ‘Beautiful well-oiled little whores. Hundreds of them.’

‘This winter,’ Chang said with a grin for his friend, ‘the training camps in Hunan Province will be stocked as tight as rice in a tu-hao’s belly.’

‘Chou En-lai will be more than satisfied. It’ll do us no harm either to be the ones to bring him such a harvest.’

Chang nodded, but his thoughts were chasing each other.

‘Chou En-lai is a genius,’ Luo added loyally. ‘He organises our Red Army with an inspired mind.’ He lifted the rifle and sighted down its barrel. ‘You’ve met him, haven’t you, Chang?’

‘Yes, xie xie, I had that privilege. In Shanghai, while I was attached to the Intelligence Office.’

‘Tell us what the great man is like?’

Chang knew Luo wanted big words from him, but he could not find them on his tongue, not for Chou En-lai, the leader of the Party Headquarters in Shanghai.

‘He has the charm of a silk glove,’ he murmured instead. ‘It slides over your skin and holds you firmly in his grasp. A thin, handsome face with spectacles that he uses to cover his… thoughtful eyes.’

Slavish eyes. Slavish yet ruthless. A man who would do anything – anything at all, however brutal to others or demeaning to himself – for his masters. And his masters were in Moscow. But Chang said none of this.

Instead he added, ‘He’s like you, Luo. He has a mouth as big as a hippo’s and likes to talk a lot. His speeches run on for hours.’ He banged a hand down on one of the boxes. ‘Now let’s get these loaded on the pack animals before-’

A sudden explosion silenced his words. A dull thud outside that rattled the boards of the wagon. It came from somewhere close and both men reacted instantly, springing from the wagon, pistols in their hands. But the moment they hit the ground, feet scrabbling for grip on the ice, they halted – because immediately ahead of them, lying helplessly on its back among the rocks like an upturned turtle, was a tall metal safe. Its door had just been blown off and around it huddled an excited group of Luo’s troops.

‘Wang!’ Luo barked out to his second in command. ‘What in the name of a monkey’s blue arse are you doing?’

Wang was a stocky young man with thick eyebrows and a short bull neck that angled forward, making him look as though he were always just about to launch into a charge. He broke free from the group and marched over to his senior commander with a fistful of papers extended in front of him.

‘The safe came crashing out of that carriage.’ He pointed to a mound of mangled metal.

The leading carriage had borne the brunt of the first explosion that derailed the train. It had twisted upside down on the valley floor and emptied its contents – uniformed officers and a dark green safe – across the rocky surface, before lurching into a tangled heap that crushed whatever or whoever was left inside it.

Respectfully, but with a triumphant spark in his eyes, Wang held out his fist. ‘I took the liberty of removing its door.’

Chang An Lo seized the sheaf of papers from the soldier’s hand. His eyes skimmed the first page and abruptly the world seemed to slow down around him. Soldiers were still moving, herding their prisoners into battered lines, but it was as if they had lead weights in their boots, each step a slow effortful blur on the edge of Chang’s vision. He tightened his grip on the papers.

‘You were right,’ Luo Wen-cai growled. ‘There were documents on board.’

Chang nodded. He stepped forward, lithe as one of the mountain leopards, and seized the front of Wang’s jacket in his fist. The second in command’s eyes widened and his head sank further into his shoulders.

‘Did you read them?’ Chang demanded.

‘No, sir.’

‘Do you swear? On the word of your ancestors?’ The jacket was ready to tear.

‘I swear.’

A heartbeat. That’s all. And a knife would have slid between the tendons of Wang’s throat. He saw it in Chang’s black eyes.

‘I can’t read,’ the soldier whispered, his voice barely scratching the air. ‘I never learned.’

Two more heartbeats. Then Chang nodded and pushed the man away.

‘So,’ Luo said quietly, ‘your intelligence information was accurate. The train was carrying more than just military personnel to the Nationalists.’ He directed a scarred forefinger at the gaping mouth of the safe. ‘Look.’

Chang moved across the rocky terrain, his eyes no longer seeing the shattered bodies that criss-crossed his path. In the back of the safe, solid enough to remain undisturbed by the explosion that blew off the door, lay three burlap bags. He reached in and lifted one. It was heavy enough to strain the muscles of his forearm, and on the outside of it in dark brown ink was a string of words stamped in Russian Cyrillic script.

Chang shook the bag and heard its metallic clink. He knew what was inside without even looking. It was good Russian gold.

5

‘Tell me, Alexei, what do you remember?’

Lydia tried to keep the hunger out of her voice as she asked the question, but it was hard. The train had stopped. It felt strange to be standing here with her brother, in the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere, under a dark and starless Russian sky. But anything was better than remaining cooped up in that compartment for hour after hour. The novelty of train travel had worn off long ago, all that initial excitement and sense of discovery had been buried under a mountain of delays and disappointment. No, not disappointment exactly. Lydia shook her head and pulled her hat down tightly in a useless attempt to keep out the cold that crept relentlessly under her skin. She stamped her boots on the icy gravel and felt her blood rush briefly into her toes.

No, not disappointment. That was the wrong word. Carefully she sifted through her newly acquired Russian vocabulary and came up with dosada instead. Frustration. That was it. Dosada. It was new to her.

‘I wondered when you’d ask,’ Alexei said quietly. ‘It’s taken you a long time.’

There was something in his voice, something that dragged at the words.

‘I’m asking now,’ she said. ‘What do you remember?’

In the darkness she couldn’t make out his expression but she sensed a tension in the way he shifted his shoulders, as though something tight was rubbing against them. Something he wanted to be rid of. Was it her? Did she rub and fret and cause him pain?

Blackness had swallowed the landscape around them, so that Lydia had no idea whether mountains hunched over them or flat open plains spread ahead. Somewhere she could hear the murmur of a river. Several other passengers had climbed down from the carriages to stretch their legs while the train took on water, but their voices were muted. Lydia ducked her head against the wind and in doing so caught sight of Alexei’s gloved fingers down by his side, clenching and straightening, clenching and straightening. When she’d asked What do you remember? she hadn’t specified which memories, but she didn’t need to. They both knew. Yet now, staring at his fingers, it occurred to her for the first time that maybe he had no wish to share his memories of Jens Friis. Not with her.

Was that space in his head where his father lived too intimate? Too private?

She waited, aware of the shouts of the rail workers calling to each other as they swung the spindly arm back against the metal water tower on its thin, spidery legs. A lamp hung from a high wire above it and was swaying in the wind, sending shadows like ghosts skittering around their feet. She shifted her boots carefully to avoid stepping on them. Specks of soot were landing on her skin, soft as tiny black-winged moths. Or were they night spirits, the ones Chang had warned her about?

‘For months,’ she said, ‘we’ve been travelling together, yet never have we talked about our memories of Jens Friis. Not really discussed them, I mean. Not even when we were stranded for three weeks in Omsk.’

‘No,’ Alexei agreed, ‘not even then.’

‘I wasn’t…’ She hesitated, uncertain how to explain to him. ‘I wasn’t ready.’

A pause. The sides of the engine seemed to heave, sighing as it released its hot breath. Lydia brushed the soot from her cheek, while out of the darkness Alexei’s voice came to her with a gentleness she wasn’t used to.

‘Because your Russian wasn’t good enough?’

‘Yes,’ she lied.

‘I wondered.’

‘Tell me now.’

He took a deep breath, as if about to plunge under water. What was it he feared down there? What dangerous current from his past? She let her glove brush his sleeve, and at that moment on this icy scrap of dirt in the middle of this land that was theirs, yet not theirs, she had never felt closer to her brother. She felt something melt as her glove touched his sleeve, fusing them so tightly that she experienced a curl of surprise that her hand could move away from him without effort.

‘He used to visit,’ Alexei started quietly. ‘Jens Friis. In St Petersburg. My mother and I lived with her husband, Count Serov – the man I always believed was my father – in a grand mansion with a long gravelled drive. I’d watch for Jens from the upstairs salon window – it gave the best view of the approach.’