by Stevens, Tim
The idiots, Janos and his crony, were trying to cross the road after the umbrella guy but were too scared of getting run over to do it properly. Bartos’s driver showed some guts, barrelling into the traffic, the rear of the BMW caroming off a sports car’s panelwork.
There was the guy, half kneeling by the kerb, pedestrians describing a wide arc around him as though he was radioactive.
Bartos had the gun out from under the dash, a stubby Ruger P95. Good American hardware, punchy and reliable. He held it low in a gloved hand in the footwell between his knees. Would ditch it out the window the moment the cops got near. His driver was braking already, drawing up to the guy on the pavement.
The van cut in so suddenly that for a second it looked inevitable that they’d tailend it. Bartos’s driver braked and banked hard to the right and the BMW’s front passenger wheel hit the kerb, jarring the car to a stop. The impact flung the gun from Bartos’s hand into the footwell. He ducked to retrieve it and when he lifted his head the van was leaping away, its door rolling shut. The guy was gone from the pavement.
The BMW’s engine had stalled. His driver’s mouth was set in a curve of fury as he fired it up again. He spun the wheel and the first few metres were half on the pavement, sending people scattering. The BMW cleared the three cars that had pulled into line behind the van and was once more behind it.
Bartos said, ‘Ram it if you have to.’
The van’s rear window was blacked out. The bodywork was covered with rust. Piece of shit hippymobile. Looked as old as the 1970s, too.
The driver muttered, ‘Brace yourself, boss,’ and put his foot down.
*
The rear seat was torn and bursting like a collapsed loaf. Calvary rocked and bounced off it as the van swerved.
He craned back. Through the rear window the BMW curved in off the pavement and was behind them once more. Two men, the driver and another. The passenger was big, wearing sunglasses.
Calvary said, ‘Got weapons?’
‘What?’ The woman. She was driving.
‘Guns.’
‘Not here. Back at base.’
Not much bloody use then, are they? he wanted to snarl. He cast about among the junk at his feet. Newspapers, soft drink cans, stinking polystyrene fast food containers.
The man up front – young, his English American accented – peered round. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘Looking for something to stop them. You’ll never outrun them, not in this wreck.’
‘They’ll leave us alone when they see the cops.’
‘You willing to wait for that?’ Calvary snapped his fingers. ‘Come on. Something heavy. Anything.’
The impact threw him forward against the back of the driver’s seat, and the woman let out a cry. The collision shunted the van forwards and slightly sideways. Calvary crawled back on to the seat and looked back. The BMW had dropped away, its front bumper at an angle, its bonnet creased. But it was coming on.
‘They’re going to do it again,’ he said.
The woman had kept the engine running and she swung them back onto the lane. All around cars were veering away or simply stopping, allowing the madness to pass by. The young man was scrabbling in the glovebox, spilling detritus: road maps, tickets of various kinds.
‘Got this,’ he said, handing it back.
It was a torch, a chunky one. Metal with a rubber grip. Calvary hefted it.
The BMW rammed them again, then, and this time there was a bang and the van sagged and listed to the right. Its end fishtailed and the woman pulled at the wheel frantically. The stink of burning rubber added to the assortment of smells inside.
‘I can’t hold it,’ she yelled.
‘You’ll have to.’ In the swinging view through the rear window Calvary saw the BMW drop back again and then resume its pursuit. It too had taken some damage, the bumper skittering away across the road as he watched, one of the headlights completely stove in.
Calvary turned so that one leg was above the back of the seat, braced his hands.
He waited until the BMW had closed the distance to perhaps five yards. Then he pistoned his leg out and felt his boot strike the glass of the window. It cracked and splintered as glass used to in car windows, back when he was a very small boy. Two more kicks and the shards sprayed out into the wind, the air rushing in.
He knelt on the back seat, hefted the torch once more.
Below, the big man in the passenger seat stuck an extended arm out his window. Aimed a handgun at the remaining rear tyre.
Calvary hurled the torch at the middle of the BMW’s windscreen.
The gun went off at the precise moment the torch struck. The noise from the blast was ripped away in the wind. The shot sang clear. A nebula of cracks burst across the windscreen. Beautifully symmetrical.
The arm with the gun was withdrawn and Calvary could hear the shouting. The BMW swerved and shook. They were on a single-lane road now and the BMW was perilously close to the kerb. The crazed windscreen looked opaque. Visibility through it must be zero.
Two things happened then. The van’s rear tyre, the one that had burst in the second ramming, peeled free and flapped away like a crippled scavenging bird, the bare rim of the wheel screeching against the tarmac. And the BMW’s mangled front slammed into the base of a lamppost, the rear wheels lifting off the ground before the car dropped, dead.
Sirens were everywhere, dopplering from all directions, coalescing.
TEN
Wenceslas Square was misnamed, Krupina always thought. It was a boulevard, really. She wasn’t much of a walker but she liked to stroll up its length towards the grand, brightly lit National Museum at the end. Used the time to think. The evening cold penetrated her coat to her bones, and at one point she was seized with a coughing fit that made the crowd part into two streams around her.
Yevgenia had given her what there was on the database about Martin Calvary, and Krupina had followed this up with a couple of calls to old contacts in Moscow. Nobody knew him or had ever met him, but there was information one directorate might hold that another one didn’t, even within the same organisation. So it proved in Calvary’s case.
A classic proletariy, in the old terminology, Calvary was the son of an English decorator father and a receptionist mother. The mother, intriguingly, was a Russian immigrant. Calvary was from Leicester in the Midlands, and had attended but not graduated from a technical college in Birmingham. He’d then enlisted with the British Army.
What little was available from SVR’s contacts within the British Ministry of Defence indicated that Calvary had served from 1998 until five years ago, and had risen to the rank of first lieutenant. He had distinguished himself as a rifleman in the Royal Green Jackets in Kosovo in 1999 and later in Afghanistan, first in 2005 and then in 2007 when, as an officer in the newly formed Rifles regiment, he’d been part of Operation Achilles, the renewed push against the Taliban in Helmand Province.
Then, in the summer of 2008, he’d left. Honorably discharged. No breath of a scandal. No details available at all.
And reappeared, no longer a serving soldier, near the scene of the Kreutzmann hit in Copenhagen. Kreutzmann, the old Stasi officer, had employed his own security, some of whom had links to SVR or FSB. They had sifted through their collections of surveillance footage from the days before and the period immediately after the murder, and he’d come up more often than most.
Krupina couldn’t hold out any longer. She walked to a kiosk and bought a pack of Marlboros. Belomorkanals were hard to come by, and her next shipment wasn’t due till tomorrow. She lit up. The smoke barely tickled her throat, let alone her nerve endings.
So: Calvary’s potential as a hit man had been spotted during his time in the army, and he’d been headhunted. By SIS, probably, though there were lots of people who might want an old Stasi dead – many of them Germans – and so it was conceivable that Calvary was working for some other agency, or even freelancing.
He was here, then, to take ou
t Gaines, who knew the identity of the British mole in the Kremlin. This suggested strongly that SIS were handling him. Probably they’d bought Gaines’s silence through bribes or threats before, but weren’t satisfied. Wanted him out of the picture entirely.
It didn’t explain what had happened on the tram. Who the armed men were who hijacked it, why there’d been gunfire. Were they accomplices of Calvary’s, joining him on board and helping him kidnap Gaines? It didn’t fit.
She’d pulled strings at the airports, Prague’s and the others, to get Calvary’s name and face on the danger lists. But the Czech Republic was a landlocked country with porous borders and an almost infinite number of escape routes. She’d never stop him leaving.
And yet… something in her, something nagging, told her he hadn’t left. Hadn’t completed his business here in the city. Might not, in fact, have got his man at all.
She could muster little excitement at the prospect of the chase. Hanging over everything was the fact of Oleg’s death. No goodbyes, just a life terminated in a semi-random act of violence.
One of the best espions she’d ever known. The phrase came back to her.
And... something else.
That was what had been nagging at her.
She turned and began the nearly kilometre-long journey back to the office at close to a trot, fumbling out her phone as she did so.
*
‘You’re doing what?’
‘Burning it.’
Calvary put his lips around the end of the hose and drew deep, feeling the heavy warmth spread down the rubber. He pulled his face away in time to avoid a mouthful, angled the hose end into the cut-off plastic milk bottle. The petrol began to course out.
The young man and the woman – a few years older, but still young, perhaps in her late twenties – had been peering round the lip of the alley, watching for police. The sirens sped by in both directions but there’d been no interest shown in this dark passageway between tall blocks.
She’d ridden on the rim of the wheel until the front tyre had begun to howl in sympathy. Calvary said, ‘Down there,’ jabbing his finger at the alley’s mouth. She spun the wheel and the van rocked into the blackness, one side scraping sparks off the wall.
While they were looking out – not that it would do them any good – Calvary rummaged in the bins at the end of the alley for what he wanted. A container, in this case a two-litre plastic bottle, and a length of hose. He used the jagged edge of a tin can lid to trim the hose and saw off the neck of the bottle.
‘It’s my van.’ The kid ran a hand through his sprawling mop of black curls. He was spare, hip-looking in skinny jeans and T-shirt.
‘No it’s not.’ Calvary wielded the bottle like a chainsaw, shaking petrol over the van, inside and out. Using what he had sparingly. ‘It’s now the property of the city of Prague, specifically its police department. Along with all the DNA inside. Yours, hers and mine.’
He held out his hand without looking at the boy. ‘Give me a light.’
‘What? I don’t –’
‘The van stank of weed. Come on.’
‘Jeez...’ But the kid handed over a lighter, decorated with a bas-relief of cannabis leaves.
‘Back,’ said Calvary, and flicked the roller. He dropped the lighter and herded them towards the street. The heat licked at their backs, and Calvary heard the crackle of blistering paint an instant after they turned into the low afternoon sunlight.
He let them take the lead, matching their pace.
‘How far are we going?’
‘Twenty minute walk,’ said the woman.
Calvary said to the man, ‘You said it was your van?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How come she was driving?’
The woman cut in: ‘Because she is the better driver.’ Her English was good but with a Czech accent. She was tall, nearly Calvary’s height. Dark hair hanging loose, dressed in a suede jacket, jeans and boots. There was a slight resemblance between her and the boy, Calvary thought; something in the nose, the mouth.
To the boy Calvary said, ‘The number plate will have been caught by every security camera we passed. The police will be looking for you already.’
He grinned back. ‘Uh-uh, dude. Unregistered car, fake plates. Untraceable.’
Well, that’s something. ‘Why?’ said Calvary. ‘Are you criminals?’
Another laugh. ‘No. We just don’t trust the State, man.’
They ignored red lights, wove their way precariously across traffic. Overhead a helicopter chattered through the early evening sky. It looked like police.
‘He means,’ the woman said, ‘our enemies, the ones chasing you, have connections everywhere. Maybe in the vehicle licensing department.’
Calvary was disorientated, thought they were somewhere south of the hospital where it had all kicked off. It was a slightly grubby commercial district, fleets of lorries rolling down the roads in boiling clouds of dust.
‘Who are you?’
She said, ‘I’m Nikola. This is Max.’
‘No, I mean who are you?’
‘Your enemy’s enemies,’ said the boy. ‘So, your friends.’
Calvary thought, Spare me. He didn’t push it, concentrated on an inventory of his injuries. Nothing disabling, but there’d be aches later that might restrict mobility. He’d have to watch for that, keep his joints in motion.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Calvary.’
‘Like where Jesus got crucified.’ The boy was grinning again.
The woman, Nikola, had been murmuring into a phone. She put it away.
‘We are activists,’ she said. ‘We publish an independent newsletter. Reflektor. You are from England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you will not have heard of us. Even most Prague residents haven’t.’
Max said, ‘We’re kind of a single-issue group.’ When Calvary didn’t ask, he went on: ‘Committed to bringing down Bartos Blažek and his empire.’
Calvary was silent. Max stared at him. ‘You – don’t know?’
‘Who that is? No.’
‘Shit, you really are from out of town, dude.’ He glanced at Nikola. ‘He’s the head of the biggest organised crime syndicate in the city. The country, even.’
Nikola finished: ‘And that was him. In the car behind us.’
*
A bulb blew with an audible pop as she flicked on the lights. The office was low-ceilinged, crowded but neat. Four workstations were positioned to make maximum use of the space available. The IT equipment looked up to date or close to it. A couple of older televisions hung on brackets. Even with the illumination from the fluorescent lights the room had the feel of a basement, which it was.
The walls were corkboarded almost from floor to ceiling, and virtually every inch of board was in turn covered with a cutting or photograph of some sort: newspaper and magazine articles, posed portraits, paparazzi shots. The faces were unfamiliar apart from two that kept cropping up: the scarred potato features of the huge man he’d fought in the bookshop, and the feral-looking smaller man whom he’d slammed in the car door and who had followed him into the shop with his crony.
And, most frequently of all, he noticed another large man, mid-forties, running to fat, dressed sometimes in shiny suits, sometimes polo shirts. He hadn’t had a clear look at the passenger in the BMW but he knew this was him.
‘Blažek. The Kodiak,’ said Max. He shoved a swivel chair across. Put your feet up, man. You look beat.’
‘No time.’ Calvary began to prowl about the office, taking in the pictures. The articles were all, or nearly all, in Czech so they meant little to him. ‘How did you happen to be there just at the right time?’
‘Back there?’ Max looked at Nikola, who’d hung up her jacket and was over at a tiny kitchenette, putting the kettle on. ‘Do you think we should –’
‘We have been following this man.’ She tapped a shot of the scarred giant. ‘Pavel Kral. One of Blažek’s th
ugs. He is medium level, not among the lieutenants but more than just a footsoldier. We’ve been tailing him all morning. This afternoon he took a phone call and set off for the hospital. We saw him enter the bookshop. Then you came out with the other two following, and Blažek himself appeared and tried to grab you. Whoever you were, we could not let them take you.’
‘What she means,’ said the kid, ‘is that it gave us great satisfaction to stick it up Blažek’s ass.’
Nikola: ‘What happened to this man? Pavel?’
‘I put him down,’ said Calvary.
Both of them were looking at him with new expressions.
‘For good?’ said Max.
‘No.’ He accepted the hot mug Nikola passed him. Black coffee, and sugared. He grimaced but sipped anyway. ‘Why were you following him?’
Nikola leant back against the kitchenette counter, bounced lightly on her heels. ‘We are four, in this office. Jakub you will meet shortly. The other man, Kaspar, has disappeared. He was investigating Pavel Kral’s involvement in an armed robbery. An involvement that is suspected but unproven.’
‘Dumb asshole thought he was some kind of master pickpocket.’ Max shook his head. ‘He was going to steal Kral’s bank cards, hack his accounts, link him to the purchase of a getaway car. Crazy stuff. We told him it’d never work.’
‘He disappeared this morning. Left the office and did not return. Does not answer his phone,’ she said. ‘We believe Kral has taken him.’
*
‘How long have you been doing this work?’
Calvary had accepted the offer of a chair in the end.
‘The newsletter has been running for three years, now,’ she said. ‘Jakub and I started it, then Max and Kaspar came on board. We publish irregularly. Sometimes monthly, sometimes every three months. It depends on the activity of Blažek’s organisation.’