local time The Tatar kept a heavy foot on the gas all the way back to the city of Kaliningrad, his shoulders hunched, his hands clutching the wheel. Sheltered by the row of warehouses, he’d survived the explosion with only a few scrapes and bruises. But the Mercedes he’d been sitting in had been pretty badly pummeled by debris. They drove back to Kaliningrad in one of the blue-and-white militia vans with the siren wailing and Andrei shouting into his cell phone for so long that, by the time they thumped over one of the bridges crossing the Pregel River and onto the island of Kneiphof, the Russian was hoarse. “I’m supposed to be at a meeting that started ten minutes ago,” he said as the van swooped in next to the curb. “You get out now.” “Here?” said Jax, looking around. Once, Kneiphof had been the island heart of old Königsberg, a jewel of medieval and renaissance architecture and learning. But the graceful, ancient university buildings were long gone, bombed to dust by the Allies, while the Russians had dynamited the city’s famous castle back in the 1960s and replaced it with a concrete governmental monstrosity frequently described as the ugliest example of Soviet architecture in existence—which was really saying something.
What do You think about The Solomon Effect (2009)?
