by Dan Latus
‘I see the name is familiar to you?’
John nodded.
‘Olsson was a colleague, and a friend of mine. Give me one good reason not to shoot you.’
The way the rifle settled ever more firmly in his arms, the way it was pointing ever more steadily at his chest, John knew the man was deadly serious. He was like the men he had just killed.
‘I found Olsson’s body,’ he said steadily, ‘but I wasn’t the one who killed him.’
‘No, of course you weren’t.’
The man was unmoved. His gun never even wavered. The hands holding it were rock steady, the eyes behind them fixed and piercing.
John tried again. ‘I simply found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Yep. You got that part right. And now you’ve done it again.’
‘Look, I admit I took the money. But by then it was no good to him. He was already dead when I found him.’
‘Yeah.’
He sensed the man was running out of patience. He could see his finger tightening its hold on the trigger. This wasn’t someone you could bluff or argue with. The evidence for that was just outside the door. What else could he tell him, he thought desperately.
All he could think of doing was to try to tell it like it had been, back there in a time he had almost, but not quite, managed to forget.
‘You don’t know how it was for me at that time,’ he said, taking a deep breath. ‘I’d been running for twenty-four hours. People after me – like the ones you just shot. No money. Nothing, in fact, but the clothes on my back, and a car I’d stolen off the street in Lviv. I was desperate.
‘I stopped at this crummy little ski chalet because it looked cheap. I had ten euros in my pocket, just enough to pay for a night there. There was only one other guest, and he turned out to be dead.
‘Just after five in the morning I was on my way out, ready to start running again. I saw him still sitting in a chair, like he had been the night before. I went into his room to see if he was all right, and I saw he had a bullet hole in his head. There was nothing I could do for him.
‘When I looked for a passport, or an ID card, to see who he was, I started finding money and passports galore. I realized I’d found a lifeline.’ He paused, shrugged and added, ‘What would you have done, in my circumstances? Called the cops?’
After a long pause, the man said, ‘Where were you running from? And why?’
‘Lviv, in Ukraine. I worked for a businessman there. A Russian gang came through – sent by the same guy as that lot out there, in fact! – and murdered him and everyone they could find. They wanted control of his businesses in the east, amongst other things. I was just lucky enough not to be there when they called.’
‘The guy you worked for? What was his name?’
‘Sirko, Viktor Sirko.’
He could see it was a name that meant something. The man knew, or had known, of Sirko. He felt a glimmer of hope for a moment. Then it died.
‘I don’t believe you. You’re full of shit.’
‘It’s the truth,’ he said doggedly.
‘Give me one good reason not to pull the trigger right now.’
John shrugged helplessly. He had already played his only card.
‘Maybe I can!’ a voice called from the stairs.
‘Keep out of it, lady! Look after your boy.’
‘I can prove my husband is telling the truth.’
‘Get back upstairs. You’re wasting my time here.’
‘You need to listen to me.’
‘And why is that?’
‘I am Vlasta Sirko,’ she said defiantly, ‘the daughter of Viktor Sirko, if that means anything to you.’
‘Well, well! Fancy that,’ the man murmured.
John stared at Sam, aghast at her intervention. She was putting herself in the line of fire.
‘Sam!’ he began to protest. ‘The man’s right. Look after Kyle.’
She overrode him, ignored him.
‘I know my husband is telling the truth, because I, too, was in Lviv when the Russians came. I know exactly what they did there.’
The man’s eyes strayed at last, to stare at Sam for a moment.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I guess you’d better tell me the rest of the story. But first, let’s take a look at your husband’s arm.’
Chapter Thirty-One
‘I’m John Tait, but I suppose you know my name.’
‘Yeah. George Riley.’
With Riley’s help, John peeled off his jacket and blood-soaked shirt. Sam found a First Aid kit, army issue. Working together, she and Riley staunched the bleeding and cleaned the wound, and then bandaged it.
‘You were lucky,’ Riley said. ‘It will hurt a bit for a while, but no bone damage. Just soft tissue.’
‘It was intended to be just the start of things,’ John said grimly.
‘Yeah. He planned on shooting you a bit at a time. Wouldn’t have taken him long, either.’
He tore the blood-soaked sleeve off John’s shirt and discarded it. ‘What I would like to know,’ he said in a conversational aside to Sam, ‘is what those guys wanted from you.’
Sam shrugged.
John wondered if she was hiding something. He looked at her. ‘Sam, what is it?’
‘Let’s just sort ourselves out,’ she said briskly. ‘Everything else can wait. I’m going to see to Kyle now.’
‘So what did you do with the money?’ Riley asked, sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘I haven’t seen any sign of it.’
Joining him, John sighed and said, ‘I’ve still got most of it. I couldn’t find a safe and legal way of spending it.’
‘That’s honest. So, you worked for old Viktor, eh?’
‘I did. He was a good man. If he hadn’t got himself killed, he could well have been President by now.’
‘Maybe.’ Riley frowned and added, ‘Jack Olsson was on his way to see Sirko, or on his way back. If you didn’t kill him, who did?’
‘No idea. I’ve wondered that for a long time. What puzzled me at first was that whoever did it hadn’t taken the money. Then it occurred to me that someone else must be coming along for the money, and I’d better get out before they arrived.’
‘Yugov?’
‘I didn’t know that then, but I do now.’
Riley nodded.
They both looked round then, as Sam came down the stairs. ‘Kyle is sleeping,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to make some coffee?’
‘Sure,’ Riley said. ‘Then you can tell me what those fellas out there wanted so badly from you.’
Sam made coffee for them all, and then she sat down alongside her husband, across the table from the man who had saved their lives.
‘So,’ Riley said. ‘Where is the key? And what’s it for?’
John had been wondering about that himself. It bothered him that Sam seemed to have kept something secret from him. But that was how it was, and Yugov knew of it.
Another thing, he thought. Kuznetsov had made no mention of the money, and he had discounted him. He’d been ready to write him off, in fact. It had been Sam he wanted. What the hell was this key he’d been demanding?
‘Not the key to the lock up?’ he asked her now. ‘Where the money is?’
She gave a small shake of her head and looked down.
Riley gave her a moment to consider. Then he said, ‘You’d better tell us.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Suit yourself, lady, but silence ain’t going to do you or your family any good. Yugov will still be around, and he can soon replace the men he lost here. They want that key pretty bad, it seems to me. They won’t give up.’
‘What about you?’ Sam said defiantly. ‘What do you want?’
‘Me?’ He stared at her for a moment. ‘I’m here to shoot your husband. That’s my job.’
‘Why? He knows nothing!’
‘For killing Jack Olsson. My boss wants him dead. Tell me about this key and maybe I won’t shoot him. It�
��s your choice.’
It was unnerving, John thought, how he could sit there drinking their coffee and talking like that. But he’d never let go of his rifle. It wouldn’t do to underestimate him, or start thinking they were in the clear.
‘You’re comfortable with it – your job, I mean?’ he asked mildly.
‘I’ve been doing it a long time, son. Killing people don’t mean so much to me.’
‘I feel sorry for you!’ Sam said bitterly.
Riley shrugged. He wasn’t here to make friends, the gesture seemed to imply.
‘There is no bloody key!’ John said suddenly, fiercely, resenting how the discussion was developing. ‘I can tell you that now. If there is, she doesn’t have it! We don’t know what the hell they were talking about.’
‘Maybe you don’t, but she does,’ Riley said, rapping the table with his rifle. ‘She knows. If she values your life, as I suspect she does, she’ll tell me. Otherwise …’ He finished with another shrug.
‘What?’ John said, stung. ‘You think you can take me?’
‘Probably.’
‘I may only have one good arm at the moment, but …’
He grabbed for the rifle. Riley batted his hand away with it.
‘Stop it!’ Sam snapped. ‘Stop it now, both of you.’
‘That’s better!’ Riley chuckled, amused.
She shook her head and said wearily, ‘Yes, I do know about the key.’
‘Rubbish!’ John said heatedly. ‘Stay out of it, for God’s sake.’
‘No, John. I can’t, not now. I’ve tried, but I can’t do it any longer.’
‘Sam, you don’t know what you’re saying!’
‘I do. I wish I didn’t, but I do.’
‘What’s the key to?’ Riley asked quickly.
She took a deep breath and said, ‘The entrance to a cave.’
‘Where is this cave?’
‘Sam!’ John snapped, horrified.
She shook her head at him, and said, ‘It’s in Ukraine.’
Riley nodded with satisfaction, thinking now they were getting somewhere. Sweet Jesus. This promised to be something special.
‘What’s in the cave?’ he asked.
She shook her head. It was a question too far, for the moment at least. She had admitted enough.
He didn’t bother asking where the key was. That would come out eventually. A cave, eh? What the hell was in it? Something important, something valuable. All Sirko’s earthly possessions, perhaps?
‘What’s in it?’ he asked again.
‘Weapons,’ John said bleakly. ‘Armaments.’
Sam threw him an agonized glance. He ignored it.
‘I always knew there was such a place, somewhere,’ he added. ‘I just didn’t know where it was, or that my wife knew about it.’
‘That true?’ Riley asked Sam.
She nodded.
‘Right, lady,’ Riley said decisively, laying the rifle aside at last. ‘Pick up your boy. Let’s go home. We have a lot to talk about, and this isn’t my idea of the best place to do it.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Before they left, the two men took a couple of spades from the tool collection in an outhouse and buried the bodies a little distance away from the house. It was hard work, and illegal, but it had to be done. They couldn’t afford either to report the deaths or allow them to be discovered. Too much was at stake.
The ground was hard, despite the surface mud and water, and the soil thin. A pick would have made for faster progress than spades alone, but they didn’t have one.
‘I’m getting too old for this kind of thing,’ Riley complained, pausing for a rest.
‘Done a lot of it, have you?’
‘More than my share.’
John could believe that. The other man was no innocent abroad.
‘Maybe you have, too?’ Riley added.
John shrugged and said, ‘I thought I was finished with all this ten years ago.’
‘Yeah. You and me both. I was living happily in retirement until I got the call.’
‘About Olsson?’
‘Yeah. Like I said, he was a friend as well as a colleague.’
They shut up then, and got the job done. After that, they collected Sam and Kyle, and started the journey home.
‘You’ll forgive me,’ Riley said, when they reached the house, ‘if I ask that one of you is always here with me in the kitchen.’
They both looked at him.
He said, ‘I don’t want to risk you two conspiring against me. I don’t want even the possibility of that.’
John snorted with derision.
Sam said, ‘We understand. It is better this way, I think. We must all show our cards on the table, yes?’
Riley nodded. ‘That’s it. Much better if we understand each other, and can trust what’s being said.’
John shrugged. If that was what they both wanted, it didn’t bother him. It made a kind of sense, he supposed.
‘Is your boy ready for bed?’ Riley asked Sam.
‘He is.’
‘Then put him to bed. We’ll talk when you’re done.’
The two men sat around the kitchen table, just as they had in the old farmhouse. They sat largely in silence, waiting for Sam to return.
‘You hungry?’ John asked.
‘Not especially. You?’
John shook his head. ‘Let’s get the conversation going. We can eat later.’
Sam returned, took a seat at the table and looked at the two men expectantly.
‘I’m George,’ Riley said in a friendly manner. ‘He’s John. How do you like to be called, ma’am?’
‘I used to be Vlasta, but I’ve been Sam for a long time now. So call me Sam.’
‘Fair enough. So now we’ve got the introductions out of the way.’
‘Not quite,’ John said. ‘You know who we are, but who are you? Who do you represent?’
‘I’ll be frank with you, John. I’m a retired United States intelligence agent – it doesn’t matter exactly who I work for. Right now, I represent Jack Olsson. Nobody else. I came here, at the request of our old boss, to seek justice for Jack.’
‘Justice?’
‘I came to take you out, John. Let me be frank about that, too. Washington had information, at last, that seemed to tell us what had happened to old Jack all those years ago. I came to put it all to rights.’
‘That’s honest,’ John said, shaking his head.
‘Yeah. But first I wanted to check that the info was correct. It wasn’t. Somebody else – not you, I now believe – killed Jack. So,’ he added, raising his hands, palms out to them, ‘here we are.’
There was a few moments pause while these initial exchanges were absorbed. Then George said, ‘What about this cave, Sam? What can you tell us about it? I believe it may have something to do with why Jack was killed.’
Both men gazed at her. She gathered her thoughts and touched the back of John’s hand with her fingers, as if in apology.
‘My father had considerable business interests, as you probably know. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, after Ukraine became independent, he built up his business empire very successfully. He had many interests. Inevitably,’ she added with a shrug, ‘some were concerned with the arms trade. That was not illegal. It was just another business. My husband was recruited and employed by my father for a time as a security consultant. John could provide a Western perspective, and my father felt he needed that.’
‘Perspective on what?’ George asked sceptically. ‘The arms trade?’
John shook his head. ‘That came into it a little, but mostly it was defence and economic strategy. I’d been involved in that sort of work for the British Government, after military service, but defence cuts after the end of the Cold War meant that a lot of people like me in military intelligence were made redundant. I had to do something for a living, and Viktor made me a very good offer. I enjoyed working for him, too, until it all went pear-shaped.’
John shook his head. ‘I had an idea that something like it existed. Just from bits of information I picked up here and there. But that was all. I didn’t know where it was, or what was in it in any detail.’
Sam winced, as if she felt now that she should have been more forthcoming with him. John tried to disregard it.
‘The cave?’ George said, looking at her.
‘It is a very dangerous place.’
‘Because?’
‘Because it is a place where my father stored a lot of military equipment and weapons, a very secret place.’
‘Not secret enough, though, if Yugov knows of it.’
She nodded. ‘That is true, but he can’t know much. His big mistake was that when he attacked my father’s headquarters he killed everyone who knew the cave’s location. Except me,’ she added.
‘And you have the key to the door, as well as knowing the location, which is why he has come all this way?’
Sam nodded.
‘You’ve said nothing all these years,’ John said in a rebuke he couldn’t help making.
‘I’m sorry, John. I just didn’t like to think about it, and I believed it would be better if the cave’s existence was forgotten. No good could come of anyone finding it, and accessing all those weapons.
‘In time, I did forget about it. At least, I stopped thinking about it. There was so much happening. We had a new life here, and then Kyle arrived. There was no need to mention a cave full of guns in a region we were never likely to visit.’
‘Be that as it may,’ George said, ‘somehow the knowledge has been resurrected, and has come to Yugov’s attention. And, by coincidence, Yugov has discovered where you people live, just as that was discovered in Washington. Isn’t that curious?’
‘Must have been a leak,’ John said heavily. ‘It’s no coincidence.’
George nodded. ‘I agree.’
He went on to tell them of Olsson’s body being identified, and of the DNA evidence linking John to it.
‘All this might never have happened,’ George concluded, ‘if your burglar, a few months ago, had chosen another house to raid.’