Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin

by Anthony Horowitz

  “Why should they?”

  “They’re not stupid. They’ve already discovered you were a shareholder.”

  “So what?” Sharkovsky didn’t sound concerned. “There were lots of shareholders. What exactly am I supposed to have done?”

  “You wanted them to raise productivity. You wanted more profit. You ordered them to change the safety procedures.”

  “Are you accusing me, Mikhail?”

  “No. Of course not. I’m your closest advisor and your friend and why should I care if a few peasants got killed? But these people smell a story. And it would be seriously damaging to us if the name of Estrov were to be mentioned in the British press or anywhere else.”

  “It was all taken care of at the time,” Sharkovsky replied. “There was no evidence left. Our friends in the ministry made sure of that. It never happened! Let these stupid journalists sniff around and ask questions. They won’t find anything. And if I do come to believe that they are dangerous to me or to my business, then I’ll deal with them. Even in London there are car accidents. Now stop worrying and have a drink.”

  “I ordered tea.”

  “It should be here. I’ll call down.”

  It was a miracle I hadn’t been caught listening outside. If Karl or Josef had come down the stairs and seen me, I would have been beaten. But I couldn’t go in quite yet. I had to wait for the echoes of the conversation to die away. I counted to ten, then knocked on the door and entered. I kept my face blank. It was vital that they should not know that I had heard them talking. But as I crossed the carpet to where the visitor was sitting, the cup and the saucer rattled on the silver tray and I’m sure there can’t have been any colour in my face.

  Sharkovsky barely glanced at me. “What took you so long, Yassen?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I had to wait for the kettle to boil.”

  “Very well. Get out.”

  I bowed and left as quickly as I could.

  I was shaking by the time I returned to the hall. It was as if all the pain and misery I had suffered in the last three years had been bundled together and then slammed into me, delivering one final, knock-out blow. It wasn’t enough that Vladimir Sharkovsky had been endlessly cruel to me. It wasn’t enough that he had reduced me to the role of his mindless slave. He was also directly implicated in the deaths of my mother and father, of Leo and of everyone else in the village.

  Was it really such a surprise? When I had first heard his name, it had been at the university in Moscow. He had been talking to Misha Dementyev on the telephone and Dementyev had been implicated in what had happened. Nigel Brown had warned me too. He had told me that Sharkovsky invested in chemicals. I should have made the connection. And yet how could I have? It was almost beyond belief.

  That night, as I stood at the table watching him tear apart the salmon that I had just tasted in front of all the other guests, I swore that I would kill him. It was surely the reason why fate had brought me here and it no longer mattered if I lived or died.

  I would kill him. I swore it to myself.

  I would kill him.

  I would kill.

  МЕХАНИК

  THE MECHANIC

  I barely slept that night. Every time I closed my eyes, my thoughts turned to guns, to kitchen knives, to the forks and spades that were used in the garden, to hammers and fire axes. The truth was that I was surrounded by weapons. Sharkovsky was used to having me around. I could reach him and have my revenge for Estrov before anyone knew what had happened.

  But what good would it do? Josef and Karl – of course I knew which was which by now – were always nearby and even assuming I could get to Sharkovsky before they stopped me, they would deal with me immediately afterwards. Lying in my simple wooden bed, in my empty room, looking at the cold light of day, I saw that any action on my part would only lead to my own death. There had to be another way.

  I felt sick and unhappy. I remembered Fagin with his leather notebook, reading out the different names and addresses in Moscow. Why had I made this choice?

  Once again, and for the first time in a very long while, I thought about escape. I knew what the stakes were. If I tried and failed, I would die. But one way or another, this had to end.

  I had just one advantage. By now I knew everything about the dacha and that included all the security arrangements. I took out one of the exercise books that Nigel Brown had given me – it was full of English vocabulary – and turned to an empty page at the back. Then, using a pencil, I drew a sketch of the compound and, resting it on my knees, I began to consider the best way out.

  There wasn’t one.

  CCTV cameras covered every inch of the gardens. Climbing the wall was impossible. Quite apart from the razor wire, there were sensors buried under the lawn and they would register my footfall before I got close. Could I approach one of the guards? No. They were all far too afraid of Sharkovsky. What about his wife, Maya? Could I somehow persuade her to take me on one of her shopping trips to Moscow? It was a ridiculous idea. She had no reason to help me.

  Even if I did miraculously make it to the other side, what was I to do next? I was surrounded by countryside – the Silver Forest – with no idea of how near I was to the nearest bus stop or station. If I made it to Moscow, I could go back to Tverskaya Street. I had no doubt that Dima would hide me … assuming he was still there. But Sharkovsky would use all his police and underworld contacts to hunt me down. It wouldn’t bother him that he had been keeping me a prisoner for three years and he had treated me in a way that was certainly illegal. It was just that we had made a deal and he would make sure I kept it. I worked for him or I was dead.

  For the next few weeks, everything went on as before. I cleaned, I washed, I bowed, I scraped. But for me, nothing was the same. I could hardly bear to be in the same room as Sharkovsky. Tasting his food made me physically sick. This was the man responsible for what had happened to Estrov, the unnamed investor my parents had been complaining about the night before they died. If I couldn’t escape from him, I would go mad. I would kill him or I would kill myself. I simply couldn’t stay here any more.

  I had hidden the exercise book under my mattress and every night I took it out and jotted down my thoughts. Slowly, I realized that I had been right from the very start. There was only one way out of this place – and that was the Bell JetRanger helicopter. I turned to a new page and wrote down the name of the pilot, Arkady Zelin, then underlined it twice. What did I know about him? How could I persuade him to take me out of here? Did he have any weaknesses, anything I could exploit?

  We had known each other for three years but I wouldn’t say we were friends. Zelin was a very solitary person, often preferring to eat alone. Even so, it was impossible to live in such close confinement without giving things away and the fact was that we did talk to each other, particularly when we were playing cards. Zelin liked the fact that I was interested in helicopters. He’d even let me examine the workings of the engine once or twice, when he was stripping it down for general maintenance, although he had drawn the line at allowing me to sit in the cockpit. The security guards wouldn’t have been happy about that. And then there was Nigel Brown. He knew a bit about Zelin too and when he’d had a few drinks he would share it with me.

  Arkady Zelin

  Soviet Air Force. Gambling?

  Saratov.

  Wife? Son.

  Skiing… France/Switzerland. Retire?

  This was about the total knowledge that I had of the man who might fly me out of the dacha. I wrote it down in my exercise book and stared at the useless words, sitting there on the empty page.

  What did they add up to?

  Zelin had been in the Soviet Air Force but he’d been caught stealing money from a friend. There had been a court martial and he had been forced to leave. He was still bitter about the whole thing and claimed that he was innocent, that he had been set up, but the truth was he was always broke. It was possible that he was addicted to gamblin
g. I often saw him looking at the racing pages in the newspapers and once or twice I heard him making bets over the phone.

  Zelin owned a crummy flat in the city of Saratov, on the Volga River, but he hardly ever went there. He had three weeks’ holiday a year – he often complained it wasn’t enough – and he liked to travel abroad, to Switzerland or France in the winter. He loved skiing. He once told me that he would like to work in a ski resort and had talked briefly about heli-skiing – flying rich people to the top of glaciers and watching them ski down. He had been married and he carried a photograph in his wallet … a boy who was about eleven or twelve years old, presumably his son. I remembered the day when I had come into the recreation room with a huge bruise on my face. I’d made a bad job of polishing the silver and Josef had lost control and almost knocked me out. Zelin had seen me and although he had said nothing, I could tell he was shocked. Perhaps I could appeal to him as a father? On the other hand, he never spoke about his son … or his wife, for that matter. He never saw either of them; perhaps they had cut him out of their life. He was quite lonely. He was the sort of person who looks after number one simply because there is nobody else.

  I could have scribbled until I had filled the entire exercise book but it wasn’t going to help very much. Sharkovsky had a number of trips abroad that summer and each time he left in the helicopter, I would stop whatever I was doing and watch the machine rise from the launch pad and hover over the trees before disappearing into the sky. I had nothing I could offer – no money, no bribe. I knew that there was no way Zelin was going to fall out with his employer. In the end I forgot about him and began to think of other plans.

  We came to the end of another summer and I swore to myself that it would be my last at the dacha, that by Christmas I would be gone. And yet August bled into September and nothing changed. I was feeling sick and angry with myself. No only had I not escaped, I hadn’t even tried. Worse still, Ivan Sharkovsky had returned. He had left Harrow by now and was on his way to Oxford University. Presumably his father had offered to pay for a new library or a swimming pool because I’m not sure there was any other way he’d have got in.

  I was in the garden when I first saw him, pushing a wheelbarrow full of leaves, taking it down to the compost heap. Suddenly he was standing there in front of me, blocking my path. Age had not improved him. He was still overweight. We were both about the same height but he was much heavier than me. I stopped at once and bowed my head.

  “Yassen!” he said, spitting out the two syllables in a sing-song voice. “Are you glad to see me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I lied.

  “Still slaving for my dad?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He smirked at me. Then he reached down and picked up a handful of filthy leaves from the wheelbarrow. I was wearing a tracksuit and, very deliberately, he shoved the leaves down the front of my chest. Then he laughed and walked away.

  From that moment on, there was a new, very disturbing edge to his behaviour. His attacks on me became more physical. If he was angry with me, he would slap me or punch me, which was something he had never done before. Once, at the dinner table, I spilt some of his wine and he picked up a fork and jabbed it into my thigh. His father saw this but said nothing. In a way, the two of them were equally mad. I was afraid that Ivan wouldn’t be satisfied until I was dead.

  That was the month that Nigel Brown was fired. He wasn’t particularly surprised. He was no longer tutoring Ivan, and his sister, Svetlana, had been accepted into Cheltenham Ladies’ College in England so there was nothing left for him to do. Mr Brown was sixty by now and his teaching days were over. He talked about going back to Norfolk but he didn’t seem to have any fondness for the place. It’s often interested me how some people can follow a single path through life that takes them to somewhere they don’t want to be. It was hard to believe that this crumpled old man with his vodka and his tweed jacket had once been a child, full of hopes and dreams. Was this what he had been born to be?

  I was having dinner with him one evening, shortly before he left. Arkady Zelin had joined us. He had returned from Moscow that morning with Sharkovsky, who had flown in from the United States. Mr Brown hadn’t begun drinking yet – at least he’d only had a couple of glasses – and he was in a reflective mood.

  “You’re going to have to keep up your languages, Yassen, once I’m gone,” he was saying. “Maybe they’ll let me send you books. There are very good tapes these days.”

  He was being kind but I knew he didn’t really mean what he was saying. Once he was gone, I would never hear from him again.

  “What about you, Arkady?” he went on. “Are you going to stay working here?”

  “I have no reason to leave,” Zelin said.

  “No. I can see you’re doing well for yourself. Nice new watch!”

  It was typical of my teacher to notice a detail like that. When we were doing exercises together, he could instantly spot a single misspelt word in the middle of a whole page. I glanced at Zelin’s wrist just in time to see him draw it away, covering it with his sleeve.

  “It was given to me,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  “A Rolex?”

  “Why do you interest yourself in things that don’t concern you? Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  For the rest of the meal, Zelin barely spoke – and when he had finished eating he left the room, even though we’d agreed to play cards. I did an hour’s German with Mr Brown but my heart wasn’t in it and in the end he gave up, dragged the bottle off the table and plonked himself in an armchair in the corner. I was left on my own, thinking. It was a small detail. A new Rolex. But it was strange the way Zelin had tried to conceal it, and why had it made him so angry?

  I might have forgotten all about it but the next day something else happened which brought it back to my mind. Sharkovsky was leaving for Leningrad at the end of the week. It was an important visit and he much preferred to fly than go by road. During the course of the morning, I saw Zelin working on the helicopter, carrying out a routine inspection. There was nothing unusual about that. But just before lunch, he presented himself at the house. I happened to be close by, cleaning the ground-floor windows, and I heard every word that was said.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” he said. “We can’t use the helicopter.”

  Sharkovsky had come to the front door, dressed in riding gear. He had taken up riding the year before and had bought two horses – one for himself, one for his wife. He’d also built a stable close to the tennis court and employed one of the gardeners as a groom. Zelin was standing in his overalls, wiping his hands on a white handkerchief that was smeared with oil.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Sharkovsky snapped. He had been very short-tempered recently. There was a rumour that things hadn’t been going too well with his business. Maybe that was why he had been travelling so much.

  “There’s been a servo actuator malfunction, sir,” Zelin said. “One of the piston rods shows signs of cracking. It’s going to have to be replaced.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “No, sir. Not really. Anyway, we have to order the part…”

  Sharkovsky was in a hurry. “Well, why don’t you call in the mechanic … what’s his name … Borodin?”

  “I called his office just now. It’s annoying but he’s ill.” He paused. “They can send someone else.”

  “Reliable?”

  “Yes, sir. His name is Rykov. I’ve worked with him.”

  “All right. See to it.”

  Maya was waiting for him. He stormed off without saying another word.

  I didn’t know for certain that Zelin was lying but I had a feeling that something was wrong. Every day at the dacha was the same. When I say that life went like clockwork, I mean it had that same dull, mechanical quality. But now there were three coincidences and they had all happened at the same time. The helicopter had been fine the day before but suddenly it was broken. The usual mechanic – a brisk, talkative man wh
o turned up every couple of months – was mysteriously ill. And then there was that new watch, and the strange way that Zelin had behaved.

  There was something else. It occurred to me that it really wasn’t so difficult to replace a piston rod. I had been reading helicopter magazines all my life and knew almost as much as if I’d actually been flying myself. I was sure that Zelin would have a spare and should have been able to fix it himself.

  So what was he up to? I said nothing, but for the rest of the day I kept my eye on him and when the new mechanic arrived that same afternoon, I made sure I was there.

  He came in a green van marked MVZ Helicopters and I saw him step out to have his passport and employment papers checked by the guards. He was a short, plump man with a mop of grey hair that sprawled over his head and several folds of fat around his chin. He was dressed in green overalls with the same initials, MVZ, on the top pocket. He had to wait while the guards searched his van – for once, their metal detectors weren’t going to help them. The back was jammed with spare parts. He didn’t seem to mind though. He stood there smoking a cigarette and when they finally let him through he gave them a friendly wave and drove straight across to the helicopter pad. Arkady Zelin was waiting for him there and they spent the rest of the day working together, stripping down the engine and doing whatever it was they had to do.

  It was a warm afternoon, and at four o’clock one of the housekeepers sent me over to the helicopter with a tray of lemonade and sandwiches. The mechanic – Rykov – came strutting towards me with a smile on his face.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “My name is Yassen, sir.”

  “And what’s in these sandwiches?” He prised one open with a grimy thumb. “Ham and cheese. Thanks, Yassen. That’s very nice of you.” He was already eating, talking with his mouth full. Then he signalled to Zelin and the two of them went back to work.

  I saw him a second time when I came back to pick up the tray. Once again he was pleased to see me but I thought that Zelin was more restrained. He was quieter than I had ever known him and this was a man I knew fairly well. You cannot play cards with someone and not get a sense of the way they think. I would have said he was nervous. I wondered why he wasn’t wearing his new watch today. By now, the helicopter was almost completely reassembled. I lingered with the two men, waiting to take back the tray. And it seemed only natural to chat.