The next day Seneca came into Giles's office and found a large manila envelope with his name on it. There were legal documents of various kinds, related to the operations of the Aegidian Corporation, and a note: 'Off to Krasnoyarsky Krai.'
The events of the next several weeks are impossible to trace with any exactness, but I believe that, having made his way somehow to Moscow, Giles boarded a train at Moscow's Yaroslavsky Station for a relatively leaisurely trip of at least two days to Krasnoyarsk; but as this leaves gaps, he may well have stopped at other places along the way. But at the Krasnoyark station a curious event makes it possible again to say something of his actions.
Giles had hardly stepped off the train when he was met by Ivan's thugs, two large and brutish-looking men, or, rather, Wolves, wearing rather nicer suits than almost everyone around them. A short discussion in Russian followed. It was simple and to the point: he was told that he would be coming with them, and he cheerfully agreed.
As they began to escort him through the station, however, Giles brushed past someone else, a businesswoman coming back from Novobirsk on a business trip, perhaps. She was, in any case, dressed in a stylish, albeit not very expensive, suit, and she was with a group of others, both male and female, also dressed in good but understated suits. It is difficult to say much about them because there was nothing extraordinary about them. They went their way and Giles and his escort went theirs, and that might have been the end of it.
A few seconds later, however, the entire station was startled by a blood-curdling scream rising high above the ordinary passenger noise. It was the woman Giles had brushed past; she was brushing at her suit and screaming about paukí. Her startled companions attempted to calm her down, but could not; she continued to scream about spiders. Then it began to spread, as those who had touched her also began to be in the grip of terror. With each person it was something different, but each one began to scream as well. Some began to run. Whoever touched them, whomever they touched, also began to experience the madness.
Soon, however, the commotion was spreading by other means than touch. Sanity is no security against panic. It was a very early hour, so the station was not as busy as it might have been, but there were plenty of people who were departing or arriving, greeting or bidding goodbye. As the screaming spread, most of these wholly sane people began to panic, convinced, as we all would be, that something terrible was happening. They began to push and to shove and ultimately to stampede out of the station.
In all the chaos, Giles had vanished away. There were injuries, mostly from the stampede, but no deaths, and the Russian government blamed events on terrorists from some obscure border area; hallucinatory gas was as specific as they would get -- hallucinatory gas, no lasting ill effects. But several of those who had been there and who were able to give more coherent reports claimed that in their hallucination had were herded this way and that by a terrible monster with shining eyes and the form of a wolf, and thus you and I know better.
The thugs, having lost their prey, made their way to a shady restaurant near the station. Virtually all of the restaurants near the railway station in Krasnoyarsk are shady; businessmen of illegitimate trades haunt them, usually concerned one way or another with various kinds of trade in drugs and weapons, although sometimes concerned with even less decent ways of making money from another's misery. This restaurant was no different from any of the others; if anything, the criminal clientele was much higher class than is often found in such places: high enough not to have to dirty their own hands, although low enough that they still must meet in person those who do. It was a clean place, run well, and would no doubt have made a decent standing in a more respectable criminal neighborhood, as a place for politicians to have lunch.
In the back of this restaurant was a little room for special guests, and the thugs went directly for this room. It was not a large room, only big enough for one large table and a small bar, and there was only one person in it: a great, fat, white-faced man with dark circles under his eyes and a fearsome jawline. On the table in front of him was a stack of folders and papers, as well as a teacup, a little china pot of somewhat tacky design, marked kipitok in Cyrillic letters, and one of those fifty-gram shot glasses that are ubiquitous in Russia. The cup was full of tea but the glass was empty. The room was rather dark; the only source of light was a window, through which the early morning light was beginning to filter; but it was covered with light curtains.
"You are alone," the man at the table said.
"He escaped," one of the thugs said. "I do not know how."
"Unimportant," the man at the table said. "I am not the one Ivan will kill for it."
The thugs fidgeted.
The man at the table carefully lifted his teacup and looked into it reflectively for what could only have been a deliberately long moment. Then, taking the most delicate of sips, he said, "Ivan expected that it would not be easy to capture Him. Do you think the Wolf King the sort of Wolf who could be outmaneuvered by two idiots? You have played the role that was intended for you, by serving as an alarm. We now know that Aegidius has come to the Krai, and surely not alone. What is more, we know that He wishes us to know that He is here; otherwise we can very well expect that He would have made a more subtle entrance. You see that the Wolf King warns us. All of this," he said with a wave of the hand, "expected, all of it. Now you must let Ivan know, and quickly. A car is waiting for you. And if the Wolf King gets there before you do, you may count yourself among the dead."
So it was that the thugs set out north; and so it was that someone with keen hearing, who had been outside the window, set out north as well.
