Fox Hunter

by Zoe Sharp

  That was the theory, anyway.

  I was taken to a guest suite and left to my own devices. Needless to say, the door was firmly locked once I was inside. The suite was made up of a large bedroom with sitting area and fireplace at one end, the decoration leaning heavily toward the intricate plasterwork and gilt end of the scale. The fireplace was empty, sadly, and devoid of anything readily combustible. They really didn’t want to provide me with any weapons I might improvise.

  I explored, casually. The window offered a view down onto the courtyard, where I could see the G-Wagon that Ushakov had used to run me up from the gatehouse. The window did not open, and although the frame looked like wood, closer inspection revealed it to be disguised steelwork, the panes of glass too small for me to climb through unless I crash-dieted and was given a thorough rubdown with goose grease.

  Adjacent was a bathroom—all marble and mirrors—accessible via a door that looked like part of the wall. The wardrobe contained the kind of fluffy bathrobe you’d get in an upscale hotel, and a selection of clothing that looked roughly my size, including a slinky evening dress and heels. They looked little worn, but not new. I couldn’t help wondering what had become of their previous owner.

  I had a sudden picture of a scene from an early James Bond movie—Dr. No—where the eponymous villain provides 007 with a dinner jacket, then wines and dines him before having him severely worked over. If I was going to get a pasting, I decided, I’d rather do it wearing my own clothes.

  I also found a tiny camera concealed high in the corner diagonally opposite the doorway, as well as two microphones, one of which, disturbingly enough, was behind the light fitting over the sink in the bathroom. I hopped up onto the vanity unit to take a closer look, then curled my forefinger and thumb into my mouth and blew the loudest, shrillest whistle I could manage, directly into the mic. I’d been practicing, so the best I could manage was pretty bloody loud.

  Childish, I knew, but anyone who wanted to eavesdrop on me while I was on the loo deserved to suffer partial hearing loss.

  Having whiled away the best part of an hour, I lay down on the bed, fingers laced across my stomach, ankles crossed, and stared at the intricately carved wooden ceiling. If nothing happened soon, I contemplated taking a nap. Most soldiers—and ex-soldiers, come to that—won’t pass up the opportunity to either sleep or eat. You never know when you might next have the chance. Plus it tends to alleviate the boredom caused by long periods of inactivity punctuated by short bouts of fear.

  Whoever was watching the feed decided that allowing me to rest undisturbed was probably not a good idea. Or maybe it was the guy on the receiving end of my ear-splitting whistle. Either way, it was only fifteen minutes or so after I’d lain down that I heard a key turn in the lock and watched the door swing inward.

  I rolled off the bed and onto my feet, knees soft, hands ready. When I saw the identity of my visitor, I was glad I had done so.

  “Mr. Parris.”

  “I’ll take ‘Colonel Parris’ if you don’t mind.”

  “I understand you resigned your commission when you left the army, Mr. Parris. Without being officially granted the right to continue using your rank in civvy street, you’ll take what you can get.”

  He regarded me steadily, the same way he might once have studied a disappointing recruit.

  “I would remind you that I may be your only friend here, and would advise you not to rile me unnecessarily.”

  “With friends like those . . .” I murmured. “Besides, I get the feeling that without Gregor’s intervention, I’d currently be chained to a wall in a damp cellar rather than enjoying my present surroundings.”

  He gave a rueful smile. “You may have a point there,” he allowed. “Tell me, my dear, did you fuck the old man as well, to procure such an easy ride?”

  The insult, so pleasantly delivered, knocked me sideways like a slap to the face. I felt the squirt of adrenaline as a prickling of my scalp, a beat in my fingertips. The blood dropped out of my face then flooded back in an angry, heated wave. I had to wait for it to subside before I trusted myself to speak.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever had an ‘easy ride’ out of anyone, regardless of whether I fucked them or not.” I paused, then, more in annoyance than wisdom, tossed out, “After all, I got well and truly fucked by you, didn’t I?”

  I was thinking of his support for the four men, but his next words utterly threw me.

  “Oh, I beg to disagree with you there. If I hadn’t taken the course of action I chose, I would have been forced to arrange some manner of training accident for you, wouldn’t I? And the bureaucratic red tape attached to any kind of fatality outside of an actual theater of war was quite monumental, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  His tone invited sympathy with his predicament. But his words hit me like blows from a sledgehammer rather than a modest palm cracked across my cheek. Parris watched the emotions that must have been flitting openly across my face.

  And he laughed.

  “Even now, you can barely comprehend it, can you? The lengths I had to go to in order to be rid of you. I never wanted females under my command. Not in training and certainly not out in the field. A damned liability, attempting to do a man’s job with all their pathetic whining about gender equality, yet at the same time quite incapable of carrying the same load, and demanding constant access to sanitary products, for God’s sake. But you were foisted on me from above, and, like any good soldier, I had to improvise.”

  “Why me?” I whispered when my voice came back to me, albeit at less than half power. I swallowed past the stone in my throat, tried again. “There were two other women who passed Selection besides me. What did I do to deserve being singled out? Did you just stick a pin in a fucking list?”

  Parris didn’t answer right away. He strolled to the window, clasped his hands behind his back as he stared out, although I doubt he registered the view.

  “You seemed like a bright girl—you must have realized you were the only one I had to worry about. Those other two were never going to set any records, make any waves. But you, my dear—you were a different animal altogether.”

  He turned then, pierced me with cold and bitter eyes. “You were the one who was going to change things. You were the one who looked set to perform not just as well as the men but better than the majority of them, with the resultant appalling effect on morale. I could not let that happen—not on my watch.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  THE SMALL CONVOY OF TRUCKS ARRIVED AT VENKO’S FORTRESS around ten the following morning. Somewhere between getting off the boat and reaching Borovets, they had been fitted with mammoth tires and snow chains. Even so, I was surprised they’d made it.

  Three of them rumbled into the courtyard below my window, the sound booming off the stonework as it rose. Cab doors slammed and shouts of greeting and celebration floated up, too, along with a mist of air warmed by bodies and engines.

  It was cold otherwise, and fat flakes of snow swirled and eddied in the vortices caused by the buildings. All the people wore heavy coats, big hats, their faces muffled and gaits disguised by the partially frozen slush underfoot. Walking was done carefully, arms splayed for balance. Impossible to recognize any of them.

  It seemed strangely appropriate to be staring down at the tableau. I’d spent most of a sleepless night with my brain hovering on the ceiling, staring down at my own body. Now, it felt as if someone had split me apart from myself and put me back together not quite fully aligned, so everything was slightly off center, out of whack.

  Disengaged, I replayed every action and reaction I could remember, from the moment I’d passed the brutal Selection process and arrived in Hereford for my training, to the collapse of the disastrous civil trial against my four attackers. Picked it all apart, analyzed and second-guessed, and then put it back together with new facts holding it all in place. Certain things made more sense than they had back then.

  And, more recently, it was clear why Donalson
had introduced Parris’s name in that apparently random fashion in the kitchen of that bleak farmhouse on Saddleworth Moor. Snatches of Sean’s more cryptic comments in Hackett’s villa in Madaba came back to me—about knowing the right person to go after.

  A chill rippled across my skin at the thought that they had all known, and I seemed to be the last to find out. Paranoia made me wonder if Sean had told Madeleine, if she in turn had told Parker. A whole chain of meaningful whispers that went both over my head and behind my back.

  It was hard to know if I was more ashamed now of the original assault or my own ignorance of the machinations behind it.

  Down in the courtyard, the trucks were backed slowly under cover, their reverse warning buzzers shrill. Unfortunately, the workshops or garages into which they disappeared were directly underneath my window. Even with my face squirmed against the glass, I could see little of the procedure, and nothing of what was happening inside.

  I perched on the window ledge, aware of the radiated nip from the cold glass, and kept watch. The trucks did not reappear. Neither did the men who had been driving them. The snow continued to pile up softly on the ground, soon melding the tire tracks and footprints until they could hardly be distinguished. It was like seeing the outline of ancient foundations from the air, long after they’ve been reclaimed by fields. Not exactly the height of entertainment.

  When I heard the key rattle in the lock again, I rubbed the windowpane with my sleeve to clear the greasy smudge left by my cheek and hopped down. I settled for leaning on the radiator below the window instead, arms loosely folded.

  To my relief, it was not Parris again who entered but Ushakov. I don’t know why I should have been reassured by that. After all, Parris had gone to some lengths to avoid killing me in the army, all that time ago, while I got the impression the Russian had no feelings on the matter one way or the other. If Gregor’s orders for him in Kuwait had been different, I had no doubt he would have done his best to carry them out.

  He stood just inside the doorway and scanned the room before he focused fully on me. A careful man with a serious expression. It was how he’d managed to live so long.

  “Gregor wants you.”

  I raised an eyebrow and didn’t immediately make any moves, mainly out of pure pigheadedness. I’d been brought supper on a tray the evening before, which I’d done little more than pick at, partly because my encounter with Parris had made my stomach churn at the thought of food, and partly because I hadn’t been sure about what pharmaceutical additions might have been made to it. In the past, I’d been on the receiving end of midazolam—a pre-op relaxant that induced compliance along with amnesia. I had no desire to wake later and be unable to remember something I’d apparently been willing to do.

  Not with Ivan Venko on the loose.

  Breakfast had provoked the same fears, and the same response. Hunger probably made me more awkward than I might otherwise have been.

  “What for?”

  “When Gregor calls, you answer,” Ushakov said. “You walk, or I drag you by your ankles.” He shrugged. “Your choice.”

  I might have thought he was joking, but I reckoned any latent sense of humor had been rigorously expunged in training. It was not a quality the Russians seemed to prize.

  Besides, there were a lot of stairs in this rabbit warren of a place, and I had no desire to thump the back of my head on every tread if he made good on his threat.

  I pushed away from the radiator and walked toward the door.

  “Gregor will expect you to . . . look nice.”

  He took a pointed look down at my rumpled clothes. I was not prepared to strip for the camera, so I’d slept in them, taking off only my boots and zip-up fleece.

  “Good for him. Every man should have ambition—however unachievable,” I said. “I am not a doll he can dress up when he wants to play with me.”

  Ushakov shrugged again, didn’t push it. His silent companion from yesterday was waiting outside in the corridor, and the three of us walked downstairs in single file, with me the filling in the thug sandwich.

  They took me back to the same room, where Gregor waited on the same brocade sofa, before the same log fire. I wondered if he’d even been to bed. His clothing was almost the same—a slight variation on a similar theme. My father, I recalled, tended to wear the same things as he got older. More so now that he had retired. A comfort zone rarely ventured beyond.

  Gregor did little more than nod to acknowledge my arrival. I was not invited to sit, and I preferred to stand anyway. Harder to be pinned down that way.

  A few minutes passed, during which time the only noises were the logs shifting in the grate and the tick of what looked like a Louis XV clock on the mantelpiece, all gilt and cherubs.

  Then one set of doors opened and four men came in. Ivan and Parris I was expecting. And Hackett, of course, laughing a little too loudly at something Ivan had just said. He punched the man next to him lightly on the shoulder in a display of macho camaraderie. And that did throw me, both the friendly gesture and the recipient, because I never expected to see that combination outside of a really disturbed night’s sleep.

  The man Hackett was being so pally toward was Sean.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  FOR A MOMENT I COULDN’T SPEAK, COULDN’T MOVE, COULD HARDLY even breathe. I experienced the same disconnection from my body I’d had during the night, so that I viewed the scene from high above it, like a movie, with the men approaching their patriarch and the woman standing meekly to one side.

  It was hard to work out if it was worse to see Hackett again, or to see him looking so at ease with Sean. A photo finish with little to decide it.

  “You are later than expected.” Gregor’s voice, a low grumble, made them quiet but did little to actually dampen their bonhomie.

  “Relax, Papa. The journey was long and not without difficulties,” Ivan said, “but all is well. They are here now.” He flopped down onto the sofa opposite as though he himself was exhausted from battling out of a war zone at the wheel of one of the trucks. A poseur, but a dangerous one.

  “Not quite ‘all,’” I said. “What happened to the rest of the trucks?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, woman?” Hackett demanded. Something about the question surprised me. Not the question itself, but the asking of it. I realized it was the first time he’d addressed me, looked at me directly, since we’d faced each other across a British courtroom.

  “The numbers are simple enough that even you should have no difficulty understanding them,” I said. “You got off the boat in Odessa with five trucks and arrived here with only three. Where are the other two?”

  There was a brief silence that prickled in the air, then Ivan began to clap in slow and languorous insult.

  “Oh, very good.” Contempt dripped from his voice. “How long, I wonder, was your devious little mind working to come up with that lie?” He looked to his father. “See—she is a scheming bitch, like I told you. First she tries to tell you that I killed Clay, and now that we have disappeared two whole trucks. Poof!” Another overdramatic click of his fingers. “Like David Blaine.”

  Gregor’s head turned in my direction, expression heavy. “How do you know number of trucks that landed at Odessa?” There was something reluctant in his tone, as if he felt compelled to ask but did not want to know.

  “Do you think I would arrive here with no intel?” I asked mildly. “Five trucks boarded a Black Sea ferry in the port of Rize in northern Turkey and disembarked yesterday morning in the Ukraine.”

  “Why did you fail to mention this until now?” Gregor asked. His rheumy eyes met mine briefly and I thought I saw pain in them, but as fast as it came it was gone.

  “Perhaps because I did not think any of your own people would be foolish enough to try to deceive you.”

  “Hah!” Ivan jacked to his feet, stabbed a finger in my face. I refused to blink at the spittle flying my way. He turned, spread his hands to his father. “If five trucks h
ad miraculously appeared, she would have told you there should be seven, eh?”

  “Well, I don’t remember us shedding a couple on the road,” Hackett said easily. “What about you, Sean?”

  Sean had not spoken to this point, but neither had he taken his eyes off me. Now he continued to hold my gaze for several moments before he shook his head. “Three,” he said.

  He might as well have put on a black cap and told me I’d be taken from this place to a place of execution . . . I ripped my eyes away from Sean.

  “Out of interest, how much was Clay supposed to have stolen from you?” I asked Gregor. “It wouldn’t happen to be just about enough to fill two trucks, by any chance?”

  “You are a LIAR!” Ivan’s accusing finger was back in my face. I barely resisted the urge to grab and twist, just to feel the bones snap and the ligaments tear. Just to hear his screams drown out the ones rebounding inside my skull.

  I don’t know what showed on my face, but he stepped back automatically, wary. Then he scowled, furious with himself—but more furious with me—for invoking such a reaction.

  “She always was one for making up stories,” Hackett said. “They were good—just not quite good enough, if you take my meaning. Convincing enough to drop you in the shit, but didn’t stand up to close inspection. By that time, of course, it was too late. The shit was flying and some of it stuck.”

  I pushed away the lies, delivered in that snide tone I remembered so well. What worried me more was the fact everyone present seemed to be taking it at face value. I hadn’t felt this outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and outgunned since the army. But what knifed me deeper than anything else was the look of disdain on Sean’s face.

  “I was told she waited until I was posted, then claimed I’d bullied her into sex. Like Hackett says, that kind of shit sticks. It finished my chances of promotion, that’s for sure.”

  I could hardly credit it was Sean who’d just spoken, and I struggled not to gape at him. When we’d met again for the first time since the army, he’d admitted that was the line he’d been sold about my behavior. He’d been posted weeks before I was attacked, hadn’t been there, hadn’t known.