The Ninth Circle

by Dominic Adler

  So I waited. My impatience with surveillance was gone. I wondered what Sam was doing right now. If she’d spotted the watchers Marcus had said would cover her. If the watchers weren’t there, if I’d been betrayed, I’d kill Marcus too. Inside the helmet I could feel the blood pounding around my skull, like war drums.

  All the time Alisa’s voice was in my head, like background music. I guessed that it was good that it hurt me when it happened. That freaky, numbing pain that hits you when somebody so alive, so vital, dies in front of you. At one point, after Clarkie was killed in Maysan, I stopped caring. The letters to bereaved families became impossible unless I’d drunk a bottle of vodka, and even then I’d laugh while I wrote them.

  I wondered if I would die out here.

  I decided that I didn’t mind if I did as long as Volk joined me, down into the Ninth Circle.

  I checked the timer on my Dosimeter, the reading higher than before. I’d been lying in the snow for an hour, the guy in the playground losing his patience and walking about, stamping his feet. I know an impatient smoker when I see one, the guys hands sweeping across the visor of his respirator.

  The other two men came out of a doorway. They joined the third and stood talking.

  I thumbed the fire selector on my AK to automatic and pulled the stock tight into my shoulder, curling my other hand over the top of the hand-guard. Getting to my feet, I lined up the figure with the rifle at knee height, knowing that on automatic the weapon would fire high. I squeezed the trigger. The staccato of gunfire filled my ears as I swept the AK74 from right to left. Bullets sliced through the thighs and guts of the first target and clipped the second in the chest, the impact throwing him onto his back. The third guy bristled and disappeared back into the doorway, like a startled cat.

  I slid a fresh magazine into the receiver of the AK and stepped forward. The man I’d shot in the chest was trying to get up. I fired a three round burst into him. He twitched and was still, the snow stained red. Training the rifle on the doorway, I walked slowly towards the bodies.

  The first man I didn’t recognise, but I guessed was the guide, Oleg. His rifle lay next to him in the snow. The second was Pieter Van Basten, his dead eyes staring over my shoulder. I shot him again, in the head, just to be sure. Then I patted down the bodies, but found nothing.

  I stepped into the school, debris crunching underneath my heavy boots.

  The classroom in front of me was empty, apart from some upturned tables and a doorway. Covering the gap with my rifle, I crept through. Looking down I saw drops of blood on the floor, congealing between the cracks in the rotting linoleum. They led to a heavy fire door. A sign said EMERGENCY SHELTER in Russian, a cold war hangover from when they still thought a nuclear war was survivable.

  Beyond the door was a flight of stairs, leading down to the shelter. The blood trail stopped halfway down the stairs, my boots echoing on the raw concrete steps. “Volk,” I called “you’re injured?” I wondered where the server was, whether Volk could destroy it, or had a computer connected to the internet down here.

  “Come in Winter” said Volk calmly, “come and join me.”

  The shelter was a long, narrow room lit with guttering storm lamps, strange shadows dancing against the white-painted walls. Sat behind a school desk was Fyodor Volk, his helmet on the surface in front of him. He was nursing his hand where it had been struck by a bullet, blood stains on the sleeve of his protective suit.

  “How did you know we were following you?” I said, weapon trained on his chest.

  “That creature, Pechkin” he laughed, “he crawled straight out of the ooze of the Ninth Circle. He’s worked for me for a year now. All he wants is money and whores.”

  “He’s a dead man,” I shrugged.

  “Good. You can take your helmet off in here,” he said. “The radiation is very low. It’s one of the reasons why I chose it.”

  “And what’s the other reason?” I said, I training my Kalashnikov on him. I undid the neck-clasp and pulled off the respirator cowl. The air was damp and cool. It smelt tangy and metallic in my nostrils, but was refreshing after the stuffiness of the respirator. I gulped air hungrily.

  He smiled, “why? This is my old school. Is Pieter dead?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Volk’s head slumped to his chest, his hair falling across his brow. His hand slipped under the desk.

  “Keep your hands …” I barked as a bullet whipped past me, the desk flying forward as Volk kicked it over.

  I fell to a knee and returned fire, the muzzle flash like a dragon’s breath from the AK. The desk splintered into shards of wood and plastic as gunfire chewed into it. Volk had rolled to one side, clawing at a bullet wound in his calf. A stubby black pistol lay next to him.

  He was laughing.

  I kicked the pistol towards the door.

  “This wasn’t as I imagined it” he said, “I never thought you’d find Shakuvo.”

  “Where’s Van Basten’s server?” I said quietly. “Tell me and it will be quick.”

  “May I take some morphine?” he replied.

  I grunted that he could.

  Volk checked his pouch pockets and pulled out a medical kit. He injected a large bore needle into his arm and sighed. “Did Pieter die quickly?”

  “Yes, I shot him in the heart and brain, it would have been quick.”

  The Russian nodded sadly and dragged himself into a sitting position, back to the wall. “The server is behind me, under those boxes. Pieter figured out the ninth level of security, but the code was never written down. He’d memorized it.”

  “What was in it?” I said. I stepped back, as despite his injuries Volk looked strong. He rotated his handsome head on his neck, tensing his muscles. White teeth flashed in the torchlight.

  “We’ll never know” shrugged Volk, “if it was worse than the previous eight then even I fear for the future of Russia.”

  The pile of mildewed cardboard boxes covered a small metal hatch. I turned a wheel and it hissed as it opened. Inside was a compartment containing a black ballistic bag.

  “Have you rigged this to explode too?” I said, carefully examining the bag.

  “Not at all” said Volk, “there is a simple four terabyte hard drive and a small external drive. They are encrypted and the FSB files are copied to both. And there is no internet signal here, and no computer. They can’t be hacked. They are sealed in lead-impregnated resin, so they aren’t radioactive.”

  “Where’s the encryption key?”

  “Here” he said, passing a thumb drive from his pocket with bloodied fingers.

  “Why so easy?” I replied.

  “Because Pieter is dead” he whispered, “and because you are what you are, Winter. Information is like a bird flu virus, or HIV. If you have the information, whoever you give it to, it will be leaked and spread. Even if it won’t be as we planned. And there are things there I’d be happy to see on the web. It was Pieter’s wish.”

  I took the thumb drive. “How can you be so sure?”

  “It was leaked, wasn’t it? Secrets are like water – they always find their own level.”

  “And you wanted Belov dead because he was stopping Pieter from controlling his own information.”

  “Partly,” smiled Volk, dark eyes boring into mine, “but there’s something else. Something much, much … worse. It’s all on the file. Take a look when you get out of here, maybe back to the seaside in England. I know you like it there.”

  Volk’s eyes were like pools of churning black water, his smile warm and sweet. He reached forward and touched my face and I felt faint. In my mind I was back on the gurney, talking to the black-masked Demon.

  He understood me so well.

  “Give me that rifle” he said gently, like the weapon might hurt me, “you don’t need it, Cal.”

  Volk was my friend, it was making sense now.

  “You know Turov was going to betray you, don’t you?” he said, the words musical and soft, “she tol
d me when I gave her some medicine that night. She wanted the server for her SVR masters. She would have killed you for it, Winter. It was lucky for you, for all of us, that Oleg killed her back there. She was a lying, murdering bitch …”

  Something snapped. It was if there was a camera on my shoulder showing the scene, Alisa and I together in the bedroom at Bailey’s safe house in England. Warm. Safe, even.

  Woozy, I staggered forward. I saw Volk’s snarling, ghostly-white face. I snatched the rifle back and smashed the steel-shod butt into it. He feinted backwards, lashing out with his booted foot, hitting my ankle and sending me to my knee. Grabbing the black ballistic bag he darted to the stairs, snatching at the pistol as he went. He fired wildly at me, his face a bloody mask. The bullet hit the ground and bounced into my upper arm. It felt like I’d been kicked with someone wearing a knife on their boot. I rolled to the ground, wrestling with the Kalashnikov and returning fire.

  But Volk was gone, the servers with him.

  I wriggled out of the suit sleeve and examined my arm. The low-calibre slug had penetrated the thick reinforced fabric of my protective suit. The lead blob was stuck in my arm, a livid welt marking where the ricochet had struck. Pulling the round out of the pulpy, black-and-mauve flesh I pulled the suit back on and found an adhesive repair pouch in the chest pocket. I stuck several on the hole and patted them down, fixing the patches in place with the sealant tape we’d used on our ankles and sleeves. The simplicity of the work concentrated my mind, bringing me down from the hypnosis.

  I took some more gulps of the cool underground air before tugging the respirator back on my head.

  Volk’s respirator was at my feet. Following the fresh blood-trail up the hard concrete steps, I reappeared under the shadow of the reactor. The towering black slab seemed bigger in the watery sunlight.

  The blood-spattered footprints leading towards it dragged me nearer.

  And the Dosimeter shrieked as I advanced, a high-pitched tattoo warning of danger. I switched it off.

  I cleared the small copse of trees, where the tracks disappeared into a maze of low warehouses on the outskirts of the reactor plant. A line of rusting trucks sat next to a security fence, signs warning of radiation and certain death.

  Inside the first warehouse I picked up the blood trail, hand prints suggesting that Volk was moving on all fours. Holes in the roof allowed light to flood through, winter-bare tree roots creeping along the edge of the interior. In the distance I saw a figure staggering out of a doorway. I aimed and fired a snap shot, my bullet hitting the metal-framed door.

  The emergency repairs on my protective suit appeared to be holding, the pain in my arm getting no worse. I jogged along the side of the warehouse, panting now, my visor blurred by condensation and smeared blood.

  We played cat-and-mouse, through the warehouses and goods yards. As I neared the reactor shroud I felt a throbbing noise in the earth, like a distant heartbeat. I knew that occasionally technicians had to visit the main reactor to carry out maintenance on the shroud, but I saw no sign of life.

  In the distance I heard the pop of pistol shots.

  Following the sound, I reached the edge of the security fence. A gate hung open, the padlocks shot out. Again, blood spatters in the snow led the way, towards a service road and then yet another fence.

  More shots.

  Fyodor Volk stood at the last gate, smoke curling from the barrel of his handgun. A flurry of dirty snow flakes swirled about him. He fell into the steel mesh door and was through, running for the sake of running. Shouldering the AK I went to fire a three round burst.

  The weapon jammed. I fell to a knee and tried to clear the blockage, a round stuck in the breech. I couldn’t budge the bullet with my gloved fingers. I tried pulling the action backwards and forwards angrily, sitting in the snow. Dumping the rifle with disgust, I clambered towards Volk like a drunkard.

  Fyodor Volk lay crumpled by the protective ditch surrounding the reactor core, a twenty metre drop into an ice-covered abyss. It was like the moat around a castle, except I saw it contained dead animals and sharp pieces of metal debris and scaffolding. A bloated dog carcass was half-submerged in the ice, dead black eyes staring at us.

  “This is it” he groaned, bloody hands scratching at the black ballistic bag. His pistol lay next to him, the slide snapped back telling me it was unloaded. His Dosimeter trilled constantly.

  “Give me the bag,” I panted.

  “I can feel it, the radioactivity” he murmured, a lazy smile on his handsome face, “it itches. It should have taken me when it took my family.”

  I stepped towards him, but he was finished. His face was pale from blood loss, his shattered hand laying like a crippled bird on his chest. Behind us the dark concrete shroud buzzed with hidden, malevolent energy.

  Shoving my boot into his ribcage, I shuffled him nearer the edge of the pit. “Alisa wanted me to say her name when I killed you.”

  “I told you, didn’t I? About love?” Volk hissed. “Men like us are an aberration are we not, to kill so easily and yet flourish? We are monsters. I learnt too late … the only use for that power is to protect the ones you love.”

  “Or avenge them,” I said.

  “Of course,” smiled Volk, eyes wide, “read the files. Remember Sergei Belov.”

  With one final shove, I kicked him over the side of the icy pit.

  “Alisa,” I said as Volk fell, his mouth open in a silent scream.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  I staggered back to the school, the black ballistic bag clutched to my chest. In the bomb shelter I found the dead men’s rucksacks containing food, water and a satellite phone. Picking up the supplies, I returned to the town square and loaded Alisa’s body into the jeep. The drive to the perimeter road took fifteen minutes, with no sign of the OMON guard force or anybody else. Checking the Dosimeter I took off my helmet and rubbed the cold, oily sweat from my face.

  I punched a number into the satellite phone.

  “Where the Hell have you been?” said Marcus.

  “I have the server” I said, “the FSB files, all of them.”

  “I want to destroy them myself. Are you sure there are no copies or duplicates?”

  I slid the spare external drive into my map pocket. “No, Marcus. Just the main hard drive, it wasn’t attached to a computer and it was the only item here. It’s sterile.”

  “Are you OK?” asked the MI6 officer. He sounded satisfied.

  “Minor injuries, but I’ve been exposed to some radiation. Alisa is dead.”

  “Where do you need pick-up from?” he said quietly, “and get hosed-down as soon as possible.”

  “Kazan, Tatarstan.”

  “I’ll call you on this line with extraction details, wait out.”

  I found the gap in the fence and drove out onto the road, back to the petrol station where more interior ministry troops were sat eating. Seeing a jeep with air force markings they just looked up from their food and waved. I waved back.

  I was ushered into the airfield by a guard, and drove up to the Antonov. The pilot and loadmaster were stood in a hut, warming their hands on a brazier and smoking my cigars.

  “Colonel Turov is dead” I said, pointing at the jeep, “but our mission is complete. I need to return to Kazan, to inform her superiors.”

  “Of course,” said the pilot sadly. “Our orders are to ask no questions. I will arrange for her body to be put on the plane.”

  “She’s been exposed to radiation,” I said.

  “We have special body bags for that” said the loadmaster gently, “we’ll get a decontamination unit on standby at Kazan.” He put an arm around me and offered me a tin cup of vodka-laced coffee.

  I nodded and sipped from it. “Thanks” I said, “she was a good friend.”

  I sat next to the lead-lined body-bag containing Alisa Turov’s irradiated body on the flight back to Kazan. Even in death she carried the stain of Fyodor Volk and Shakuvo.

  Pulling out a dog
-eared notebook, I wrote a brief, fictional report in Russian for the SVR outlining what had happened. I explained that the FSB files had been wiped by Volk in order to cover up details of his crimes. The only true part was where I highlighted Alisa’s bravery and resourcefulness. When we landed near Kazan, a crew of airmen set up a decontamination arch. We all stripped in the snow and showered, men in protective equipment brushing us down with long hard brooms. I stood silently as hot, chemical-smelling water ran down my pale, bruised body. My eyes were fixed on the black ballistic bag.

  “There is a Mister Pechkin here for you,” said the Captain as I dressed in a spare Russian air force flight suit and boots.

  “Excellent” I said, “thanks for all your help.”

  The air force officer saluted smartly and left.

  Pechkin was sat in his dirty 4 × 4, smoking a cigarette. “Where’s the Colonel?” he said warily.

  “She’s dead.”

  “Well there goes my transfer. Did you find it?”

  “Find what?” I said.

  “Whatever it was you were looking for” he laughed, “I ask too many questions sometimes I guess. Where do you want to go?”

  “The warehouse, please, Mister Pechkin. I need to write a report for your bosses. And Colonel Turov’s body needs collecting from the airfield.”

  “Sure, no problem” he shrugged, “a shame about Turov, eh?”

  “Yes, a terrible shame, Pechkin.”

  Half an hour later, at the warehouse, I strangled him. I stared into his piggy eyes as he pissed himself with fear. I left my report for the SVR on his corpse, adding that he was a traitor who had leaked intelligence to Fyodor Volk. Amongst the booty in the warehouse I found some warm civilian clothes, luggage and sturdy outdoor boots. I packed the hard drives carefully away, next to a new Japanese laptop I took from the stash of electrical goods.

  Then I ate a bar of chocolate and waited for the phone to ring.