by L. A. Larkin
33
The man who answers the door to Heatherton’s four-bedroom, thatched cottage in the village of Abbotsley isn’t Heatherton. Wolfe is fairly certain that he and his wife, Patrice, are home; there are three cars parked on the gravel drive: a blue Volkswagen Golf, a silver Land Rover Discovery and a white Mazda 6 estate. She guesses the Mazda belongs to the undercover cop who has just answered the door and told her, in no uncertain terms, to leave Dr Heatherton alone. He knew about her conversation with Sinclair, which explains why the four scientists now have an officer with them twenty-four/seven.
Frustrated, Wolfe heads for her hotel on Trumpington Street in the Cambridge city centre, plonks her bag on the single bed and rings room service, ordering beer-battered fish and chips and a Kronenbourg 1664. She sits at a tiny faux mahogany desk, wondering what on earth she’s going to write for Cohen. She looks around the narrow room for inspiration, but the plain cream walls, faded striped bedspread with padded navy blue bedhead, and the tiny TV on wall brackets too high to see the picture clearly, aren’t helpful. But she can’t grumble: she chose this room because she can see her car in the rear car park, there’s a fire escape walkway beneath her window, the window locks, and there’s a spy hole in the door. Wolfe likes to have an escape route.
The sagging desk chair is uncomfortable so she shoves her backpack to one end of the bed and sits cross-legged, her temporary laptop balancing on her knees, and taps out the bones of an article titled ‘Police Guard Alien Bacteria’. It doesn’t mention Sinclair, both to keep her promise and because she doubts his outburst is anything more than paranoia. It asks why such intense security is necessary for apparently harmless bacteria. She knows the article is weak. Worse still, there’s a twinge of guilt: will it make the Ellsworth scientists’ lives even more fraught than they already are? Wolfe prepares an email to Cohen, asking for another day. But her message won’t send. No internet connection. Her personal wireless modem appears to be working, but she tries the hotel’s network, just in case. Still no internet access. Frustrated, she copies the article on to a USB and uses her smartphone to send the email.
Cohen’s response is fast and brief.
Email article now, as is.
Wolfe attaches the document, but doesn’t send it.
Leaning back into the bedhead, Wolfe is torn between her job and the people she has come to like and respect. There’s a knock on her door and a man calls out ‘Room service’. Wolfe peers through the spy hole before opening the door. She sees a painfully thin teenager with glasses, in a burgundy waistcoat, carrying a tray. She opens the door and he puts it on the desk. He takes the top off the beer bottle, gets her signature on the docket and leaves. The bottom edge of the door drags across the carpet as it shuts in slow motion thanks to the mechanical closer. At last she can relax. As she picks up the bottle, there’s a thud. Wolfe turns fast, sees a black leather boot and part of a leg jamming the door open. She instinctively hurls her shoulder into the door so the boot is stuck, then slams the thick glass bottle down on to the intruder’s knee. Beer explodes from the open bottle.
‘Ebat!’
Grankin!
Beer pours down her arm, the wall, the door and the assailant’s jeans, but the bottle hasn’t broken. Using all her strength to keep the door shoved tight against the boot, she raises the bottle again for a second hit.
‘Olivia! Stop!’
She knows the voice but doesn’t believe it.
‘Who are you?’
She cannot hold the door any longer.
‘Vitaly,’ he says. ‘I must speak with you.’
She releases the pressure a fraction. It slams back into the doorstop with such force, the stopper is ripped from the floor. Yushkov stands in the doorway, clutching one knee.
‘They torture me, and now you try to break my knee. Fuck!’
Wolfe has the bottle raised above her head, ready to strike again.
‘Stay where you are.’
‘Olivia, please. I must speak with you.’
‘Why me?’
‘On the plane, you spoke for me.’
Yushkov remains in the doorway, waiting to be invited in. How did he know where to find her?
‘What the hell?’ Wolfe lowers her weapon. ‘Come in, quickly.’
As Yushkov hobbles to the desk chair and sits, she takes her knife from her backpack pocket and points the sharp blade at the man SO15 and MI5 believe is a killer.
‘Casburn let you go?’
He nods. ‘I stink like a drunk,’ he says, touching his sodden jeans.
Yushkov is wearing a thigh-length black leather coat with fleece lining, dark blue jeans and shiny leather steel-capped boots. His shirt still has the front crease marks, as if it has just been removed from the packet.
‘You react very fast. You surprise me,’ Yushkov says.
Wolfe stays near the door, so she can escape if needs be.
‘How the hell did you find me?’
‘Easy. I rang the Post. Asked for you. The first person was not helpful. I rang again. Some guy told me you were in Cambridge. It was easy to guess where. The laboratory.’
‘You mean you’ve been following me all day?’ She is stunned. Why didn’t she notice?
‘This evening, yes.’
‘Damn.’ She gives Yushkov a hard stare. ‘I don’t like being predictable. It’ll land me in trouble.’
‘Michael, Toby, Stacy? They tell you nothing, yes?’
She nods. ‘Why the boot in the door? It wasn’t necessary.’
‘I think you will not speak to me now I am a terrorist.’
‘Are you a terrorist?’
‘I am not. But what are you?’
‘What?’
‘I had tip-off you are not what you seem. Maybe you are a spy. Your job is the perfect cover.’
She laughs. ‘God give me strength!’
Yushkov touches his knee and grimaces. ‘You have ice?’
Wolfe opens the minibar and finds a tray of ice cubes. She empties the entire tray into a white hand towel, wraps them up and hands the bundle to Yushkov, whose body seems to fill the tiny room.
‘You want me to take my trousers off?’
‘Vitaly, I’ve seen it all before. I don’t care.’
He shrugs. ‘Okay, I not strip for a lady in a long time.’
Yushkov removes his leather coat, places it on the back of the chair and then kicks off his polished boots. He undoes his belt and peels off his jeans, dropping them to the floor, revealing muscular legs and raw rings around both ankles. His wrists have the same circular flesh wounds. What has Casburn done to him? Oblivious to her scrutiny, he lifts his sore knee and rests his foot on the edge of the bed, then presses the towel full of ice on to his kneecap.
‘You got another beer?’ he asks. ‘I wear the last one.’ He grins up at her.
‘What did your last slave die of?’
But her sarcasm is lost on Yushkov, who frowns, confused. Sighing, she offers him a Budweiser from the minibar.
‘American beer! Tastes like piss.’
‘Then have this.’
She chucks him a miniature bottle of Absolut vodka. ‘Fussy for a suspected terrorist, aren’t you?’
‘Ha! You are very funny lady.’
He opens the bottle’s red screw-top and swallows the vodka in one gulp. Wolfe picks up his discarded jeans.
‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ she mutters. ‘I feel like your frigging mother.’
In the bathroom, she runs water over the beer-stained jeans, squeezes them out and puts them on the radiator to dry.
‘What’s with the new gear?’ she calls.
‘They bug my clothes, my boots, my home.’
Yushkov has her food tray close and is eating her dinner.
‘Not bad,’ he says, waving a piece of golden battered cod in the air.
‘Hey! That’s my meal.’
‘Then eat.’
She sits on the bed and tucks into what remains.
‘What happened to you?’ she says, chewing on a chip.
‘They fly me somewhere. A white, empty room. Tie my hands and ankles. Question me. Deprive me of sleep, water, food. Let me piss myself. More questions. Threats. Then I am released.’
‘This was Casburn and Flynn?’
‘Yes, and others. They take turns.’
SO15 and MI5, she guesses. Wolfe is no longer interested in food. ‘Where did they take you?’
He looks up, irritated. ‘I don’t know. They make sure I do not know. They put a hood on my head, drag me from one plane and shove me in another. I am in a sealed room. No windows. The lights are very bright and they play loud music, so loud I want to cover my ears but I cannot.’
‘My God!’
‘Then bang!’ He claps his hands. ‘They fly me to England.’
‘Why let you go?’
He shrugs.
‘Did they beat you?’
‘They slap me about. It is nothing.’
‘What did they want, Vitaly?’
He swallows. She watches his Adam’s apple bob. ‘They want to know where I take the missing bacteria.’
‘Missing?’
‘That’s what they said.’
‘How?’
He takes the last chip. ‘They tell me one canister is stolen. They were very certain of this. They think I give it to Sergey Grankin.’
‘Did you?’
Yushkov gives her a cold stare. ‘I did not. Russia has made me an enemy. Why would I help my enemy?’
Wolfe studies Yushkov’s worn, weather-beaten face for any sign he’s lying. She sees none, but if he is SVR, he has been trained to be convincing.
‘So why does Casburn think you did?’
‘Because he is an idiot,’ he says, tapping his forehead with a finger. ‘He thinks because I was born a Russian, I am a traitor to my adopted country. Easy to blame me. Easy to frame me.’
‘Is it a pathogen?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he tell you why the Russians want it?’
‘Nyet.’ He looks at the sash window. ‘You okay if I smoke? I open the window.’
He pulls out a packet of Marlboro’s.
‘Blow it away from the smoke detector,’ she says, pointing at the ceiling.
Yushkov nods and leans over to the sash window, flicks the latch and opens the lower half. The night air rushes into the over-heated room.
‘You want one?’
‘I keep telling myself I’ve given up,’ she says. ‘But what the hell.’
With the knife still in her right hand, she takes a cigarette with her left and Yushkov lights it. She shuffles around the seated Russian so she can smoke near the window.
‘They took your fags away?’
‘Da, and they did not give them back. Not very good hosts, I think.’
Yushkov smiles and inhales deeply, then studies the cigarette with disapproval. ‘Like American beer. Piss weak.’
She watches him for a moment, unable to make up her mind about him.
‘So why are you here, Vitaly?’
He flicks his head to the window and blows a plume of smoke at the night sky. ‘I need your help.’
‘My help? How?’
‘They let me go, but do not believe me. They hope I will lead them to the canister, but I do not have it.’
‘Were you followed here?’ she asks, peering into the floodlit car park.
‘I lost my tail.’
Wolfe frowns. ‘How? They’re surveillance experts.’
‘From Brize Norton they drive me home. They sit in their car and wait and watch. I find bugs in my flat, in my mobile, sewn into my coat and in the heel of my boots. So I ask a neighbour: can I use your car? I ask him to go to a cashpoint and withdraw all my money. Seven hundred pounds. I say, you do this and I give you a hundred. He does this for me. I pay him. I leave the back way and drive to shopping centre. Everything new.’ Yushkov waves a hand up and down, gesturing to his new gear. ‘Very cheap.’ He nods approvingly. ‘This Casburn, he forget something important. I know how to disappear.’
‘Why did you disappear, Vitaly?’
Wolfe remembers the top-secret document that describes Yushkov as a coward in Chechnya. Yushkov takes another deep drag on his cigarette and puffs out smoke circles.
‘It is not relevant.’
‘I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me,’ says Wolfe, stubbing out her barely smoked cigarette in a glass tumbler.
‘I want you to help me prove my innocence.’
‘And how do you propose we do that?’
‘By finding the real terrorist.’
34
Wolfe leans against the windowsill, studying the man everyone else has given up on. ‘And why would I help you?’
Yushkov draws on the last of his cigarette and extinguishes it between two fingers, dropping it into a glass tumbler at the bottom of which is Wolfe’s barely smoked cigarette, bent out of shape.
‘Because you want to know the truth. You have to know the truth.’
‘Don’t presume to know me.’
Her eyes flash an angry warning. She moves away from the open window and takes from the bar fridge a half-bottle of shiraz that’ll cost her twice as much as a full bottle from the local off-licence. Gone are the days when bar-fridge expenses went on journalists’ company credit cards. She pours it and takes a swig, her back to Yushkov, annoyed she has let him get under her skin. He seems to know her too well.
‘If you want my help, you have to be honest with me.’ She faces him. ‘Otherwise, get out of my room.’
‘You do not trust me?’
Wolfe laughs. ‘Are you kidding me? Nobody trusts you, Vitaly. Nobody but me would have you sitting in their hotel room. Casburn thinks you’re a murderer involved in some kind of terror plot. You want me to trust you? Then tell me the truth.’
He is silent for a long moment, then glances at the knife she still clutches.
‘If I wanted to kill you, you would be dead by now. That knife would not stop me.’
Her breath catches but she won’t let him see her fear. ‘You presume to know me, and you underestimate me.’ Wolfe raises the knife. ‘Get out.’
‘I am trying to make a point, Olivia. I am a soldier. I know how to kill. But I will never hurt you.’ He pauses, scanning her face. ‘Remember, I stopped Sergey.’
Her eyes open wide. ‘Stopped Sergey, what?’
‘From killing you.’
‘So you knew all along it was him, but you never said. Why?’
‘It’s complicated.’
Wolfe sits on the bed and chugs down some wine. It’s one step forwards and two steps back with Yushkov. Yet his secrets intrigue her as much as the truth - his truth - terrifies her.
‘I have a rule, Vitaly. It’s how I survive in this business.’ She looks him in the eye. ‘Never get involved. I broke it in Afghanistan. I wanted to help a girl who’d been raped, imprisoned and forced to marry her rapist. I told her story, then I went after her husband and the drug trafficking ring he’s part of. I realise now she was more to me than a source . . . ’ Her words trail off. She finds her way again. ‘You want me to prove you are innocent. But my job is to report what I see, not change the outcome.’
Wolfe looks down at the glass she’s clutching.
‘Why was it wrong to help this woman?’ Yushkov asks.
‘Because instead of writing the most powerful story I could, a story that helps victims like Nooria, I got mixed up in it and got her killed.’
Yushkov studies her face as if he is trying to read her mind. ‘Tell me about this girl.’
‘Why?’ Her stomach churns. She doesn’t want to remember.
‘Please. I would like to hear it.’
Wolfe tells him about Nooria’s short life and death, but finds it difficult to control the tremor in her voice.
‘She was very brave,’ Yushkov says. ‘But you? You are angry with yourself, I think?’
&n
bsp; ‘In Antarctica you told me that sometimes it’s best to walk away. What did you mean by that?’
‘You have a good memory.’
‘Was it about walking away from the Army?’
Yushkov moves the ice-filled towel aside and stands. ‘My knee is good now.’ He goes into the bathroom, leaves the damp towel in the basin and pulls his jeans off the hot radiator. Wolfe stands in the bathroom doorway.
‘Vitaly, do you want me to help you or not?’
He pulls on his damp jeans and does them up. ‘I cannot talk about it.’
‘Are you a deserter?’
A pause. The extractor fan hums. ‘Yes.’
He takes a step towards her but she doesn’t budge.
‘Get out of my way,’ he says quietly.
She can see the muscles in his thick neck tighten.
‘What drove you to desert?’
‘Nyet.’
‘The truth!’
Yushkov’s eyes are as hard as blue ice. He looks down, his jaw muscles tensing. Seconds pass.
‘We sit.’
He takes the chair, she the bed. He won’t make eye contact.
‘It is March 2000. I fight in Second Chechen War. I was with 160th Tank Regiment, commanded by Colonel Gerasimov.’
‘Gerasimov? I know that name. Something to do with a rape trial?’
‘Yes. A brutal man.’ Yushkov shakes his head as he stares at the worn carpet. ‘Gerasimov claimed the girl was a sniper. The truth is he saw her in the village of Tangi Chu and that night he went back with the duty crew, raped and strangled her in his vehicle.’ He looks up at Wolfe. ‘I was not one of the duty crew. But I was coward, too afraid to report him. Who would believe a soldier against a colonel?’
‘Then what?’ asks Wolfe.
‘I was recalled. Both Andrei and me.’
‘Andrei?’
‘My friend.’ The expression in his eyes has softened.
Wolfe remembers the group shot: Yushkov with his arm around a smaller, dark-haired soldier.
‘We think the Colonel send us away to die. He volunteers us for a suicide mission. In Afghanistan.’
‘But the Russian military hasn’t been in Afghanistan since 1989.’
‘Really?’ Yushkov rubs his bruised knuckles across his lips. ‘If you print this story, I am a dead man. You understand?’