Free Masaryk Station (John Russell) by David Downing

the door behind him, and went in search of the hotel proprietor.
    Boris, when told the unfortunate news, was surprised, annoyed and alarmed in roughly that order, but he didn’t try to walk away from the problem. His face turned white when he saw the body, but a quick retch in the water basin more or less restored him. That would have been his own reaction before the First War, Russell thought. Bodies were supposed to be in one piece.
    ‘Wrap him in his blanket,’ Boris said, once he’d recovered, ‘I’ll get another.’ Russell had rolled up Palychko and the bloody sheets by the time the proprietor returned with a second layer and some twine to tie up the ends. ‘I could call a staff meeting in the lounge,’ Boris suggested. ‘Once they’re all in there, we could carry him down the back stairs and out to the hotel van without being seen.’
    ‘You’re a natural,’ Russell told him.
    And the plan worked. Fifteen long minutes later, the two of them were manhandling their huge Christmas cracker down the back stairs, out through the empty kitchens, and into the back of the van. ‘You wait in the cab,’ Boris said. ‘I’ll tell them the meeting has been cancelled.’
    He was back almost instantly, and soon they were on the road heading north.
    ‘Where should we go?’ Boris wanted to know.
    ‘You must know the area. Just find us a quiet place, off the main road, where we can dump him.’
    ‘All right.’ A few minutes later he turned the van up a narrow side road. ‘Are we going to bury him?’
    ‘That sounds like a good idea.’
    ‘But we don’t have a spade.’
    ‘Then I guess we can’t. Where does this road go?’
    ‘To a farm eventually. There are others off to either side.’
    Looking right, Russell could see smoke rising from a distant chimney. ‘Just find a place to turn around,’ he said. ‘And we’ll dump him in a ditch.’
    Boris did as suggested, but after they’d unwrapped the parcel, rolled the corpse into a stream bed, and covered it with branches torn from a nearby bush, he still seemed unhappy. ‘What will the police think when they find him?’
    ‘If they bother to think at all … Just another victim of the war, I suppose. Aren’t the local partisans still settling scores?’
    ‘He doesn’t look Italian.’
    ‘True, but there’s nothing on the body to identify it, and no one local will know who it is.’
    ‘What about the blankets and sheets?’
    ‘Call another staff meeting and stick them in the hotel boiler.’
    ‘I suppose …’
    ‘Look, if the worst come to the worst, just say you found him in his room and brought him out here to save the hotel some bad publicity. It’s not as if you killed him. All they’ll do is slap your wrist.’
    ‘You don’t know our police.’
    ‘Maybe. If there’s any real trouble, get hold of your American friends. They’ll sort it out if they have to. He was their contraband.’
    ‘You’re right,’ Boris said, as they turned back on to the main road. ‘Bastard Americans.’
    Russell’s second meeting with Bob Crowell was less convivial than the first. Not that Crowell said much—he just sat there looking disappointed. His colleague, a younger man named Tad Youklis with a shaven head and angry blue eyes, did all of the talking, and seemed incapable of mincing his words.
    Russell had arrived at the safe house expecting another day of Kuznakov’s evasions, but the Russian plant had been spirited away over the weekend, and by now was doubtless lapping up all the wine, women and song that the CIA could deliver. And instead of Dempsey and Farquhar-Smith, he had found Crowell and Youklis lying in wait, demanding a thorough accounting of Palychko’s grisly demise.
    Russell saw no reason to leave anything out, or otherwise play with the truth, which might have been a mistake.
    ‘What do you call a babysitter whose baby gets tortured and killed?’ Youklis asked him sarcastically.
    ‘I don’t know—is it a riddle?’
    ‘A