Severance Kill

by Stevens, Tim

  ‘I’m aware of our numbers. Our limited resources. We need backup. Bodies on the ground, mainly.’

  Tamarkin said, ‘We ask the Embassy?’

  ‘No. I go crawling to Moscow tugging my forelock. Appeal directly for assistance.’

  Arkady let out a slow whistle between his teeth. ‘This Gaines must be someone special if you think you’ve any chance with that approach. With respect, boss.’

  ‘And I know you’re fishing with that remark, Arkasha, but it’s still “need to know”.’

  *

  Calvary lay in the darkness, listening to the shuffling and settling of the other three in their respective rooms, to the muffled sounds of the late-night city beyond the windows.

  Three people. Two men and a woman. Journalists, not fighters. However much they liked to style themselves as guerrillas. Two handguns between them.

  Against them, the biggest organised crime operation in Prague. And Russian intelligence, probably SVR.

  All that he had to do was find Gaines and kill him, making sure the Russians knew it was him who’d done the deed.

  That was all he had to do. Except he didn’t have a clue where they were keeping Gaines.

  Calvary had been given the spare bedroom, a box-like space with a single bed. Max and Jakub took the floor and the sofa in the living room. They turned in at half past one, with plans for a five a.m. start. Calvary hadn’t made the call yet, wasn’t planning to until the last moment. He wanted Janos to be working against a deadline, with little time to think through his decision or call up an army of reinforcements.

  As often happened, Calvary was so tired that he found sleep difficult. He lay entirely still, fully clothed save for his boots, allowing his weight to sink into the bed. Eyes closed, he modulated his breathing. Pictured his heartbeat slowing to the bare minimum needed to keep his circulation going.

  Eventually he slipped into a state between wakefulness and deep sleep. As usual, the images came. Not dreams, but memories, from more than four years earlier.

  *

  The sweat stung his eyes and his lips and he shouldered it away. Late May, and the temperature had soared in the last week to the mid-twenties Celsius. Far from the life-sapping hell August would bring, but stifling nonetheless.

  The late morning sun washed the walls of the scorched buildings in gold. The scorch marks were from a different kind of heat: the kind generated by human beings in order to damage one another. The street Calvary was walking down had been the scene of an ambush six days earlier, involving an IED attack on a Snatch Land Rover. He thought he could see fragments embedded in the stone walls. Fragments not from the explosive but from the vehicle itself.

  A month earlier the Americans had come. A battalion of U.S. Marines, despatched to support Calvary’s own rifle battalion and the rest of the British and Afghan troops in the southwest of the country. Not the surge of eleven thousand men that would flood in a year later, but a formidable force all the same. They’d stormed the town, Garmsir, to find that the Taliban had already withdrawn. Soon it became apparent that they hadn’t gone far.

  Garmsir. It meant hot place in Pashto. The name was apt for more than one reason. For the last four weeks the place had been a battleground. The Americans and Calvary’s people had been trying to take on a more civil role, that of supporting and protecting the thousands of Afghan civilians returning to the town for the first time since the retreat of the Taliban. Work was in progress to set up local government once more, to build and train a police force, to ensure that the Afghan army that would be left behind was equal to the task of defending the town.

  And the attacks came, in tidal waves and in lone breakers lapping at the shore. Yesterday there was a car bomb attack on a recruitment queue. Today, a pitched battle in the streets, involving high-quality Russian artillery. Tomorrow there might be a grenade thrown through the window of a perceived collaborator’s home at dinnertime, killing his family along with him.

  Calvary stepped back from the road as a convoy of lorries lumbered past. Locals, mostly, with Marines riding shotgun in front and behind in Jeeps. He half waved, half saluted, got a forest of raised thumbs in response.

  Walking towards him, on the other side of the street, Calvary saw Willis, his sergeant, hazy through the dust. As Lieutenant, Calvary was in command of B Company for that day’s patrol. Willis nodded. Calvary was well liked by his men. He suspected he was held in similar esteem by Major Farnborough, the head of the Company. Not that Farnborough would ever show it if he was happy with anyone’s performance.

  Calvary hefted his rifle, partly to ease the stickiness under his arms. He carried the L86 Light Support Weapon, a gun he preferred over the usual L85A2 for its accuracy.

  He called to Willis as they drew near: ‘One more circuit, then get Barnesy to relieve you. Grab yourself some lunch – ‘

  On the last word, and past Willis’s grin, he saw the car fishtail round the corner, pluming dust behind it. An old Ford Cortina, so filthy its colour couldn’t be discerned. Two men protruding from the windows, one aiming a Kalashnikov assault rifle down the road, the other hoisting something bulkier. A rocket launcher. To Calvary it looked like one of the new RPG-28s. An anti-tank gun.

  Behind the car, half hidden by the corner, stood another man, eyes wide, forefinger pointing down the street.

  He yelled and dropped to his knee and was squeezing the trigger as the man with the Kalashnikov opened fire. The unmistakeable clatter bounced off the walls of the low canyon that was the street. Bullets stitched in a horizontal arc, ripping through Willis’s back and flinging him rolling and sprawling in the dirt.

  Calvary’s first, second and third shots smashed into the gunman’s head and chest, smacking him back against the side of the car. His wet torso flopped doll-like out of the open window as the Cortina juddered over Willis’s body. As the car shot past him Calvary saw the driver, crouched low behind the dashboard. He drew a bead and fired, watching the driver’s head shear off inside the car.

  Just as the man with the RPG fired.

  The sucking noise followed the report of the firing mechanism so closely that it was hard to distinguish the two sounds. Then the Jeep at the end of the convoy upended itself, the blast flipping the rear of the vehicle vertically upwards and driving the entire car into the lorry in front of it.

  Calvary put two bullets into the man with the RPG, one messy one through the top of his head, the other between his shoulder blades as he twisted away. Then he rolled and dived and continued rolling, towards the end of the street, almost making it before the fuel tank of the lorry went up a second after the driverless Cortina ploughed into both Jeep and lorry.

  The sound wave was colossal, a thump of bass like a physical punch, counterpointed by the screech of shattering glass and rending metal. The fireball raked across Calvary’s back and out into the square at the end of the street. He kept low, feeling shrapnel spinning over him like hot hail.

  He didn’t waste time looking back. Instead he ran out into the square at a crouch, seeing civilians scattering and screaming, some standing around, shocked and bewildered. A group of Afghan squaddies was sprinting towards him, shouting.

  Down one of the grimy streets off the square, a man was running. A boy, really, the one he’d seen at the top of the street behind the Cortina. Guiding it, egging it on.

  Calvary flung himself prone on the steaming gravel, levelled the rifle. Put one eye to the SUSAT telescopic site.

  The boy was sprinting like an ungainly fawn, skinny legs bare below ragged cutoff trousers, feet huge in outsized trainers. He craned back over his shoulder. His beard was wispy, a pantomime disguise, though it was probably real enough.

  His eyes were wide, yellow not with triumph but with terror.

  The Afghan squaddies skidded in the gravel beside him, jabbering at him in Pashto. He recognised one of the few phrases he’d learned.

  ‘Wélem.’

  Shoot.

  The ring of the sight felt h
ot against the bone of his eye socket. Once more the boy turned to stare back. Once again, pure terror.

  He was unarmed. Wore too little to be carrying a weapon.

  ‘Wélem.’

  Calvary lifted his face away form the sight, got to his feet. Down the street the boy turned and disappeared. The soldiers snarled, took off after him.

  *

  Three U.S. Marines, one British soldier – Sergeant Willis – and seven civilians were killed in the attack. Lieutenant Calvary was praised by both his commanding officer and his counterpart in the marines for his prompt action. Calvary didn’t think he’d made any difference. If the three men in the Cortina had survived, they could hardly have done any more damage.

  Nobody mentioned the young man who’d run away. Nobody knew about him, apart from a handful of Afghan soldiers.

  Four weeks later Calvary was attending a briefing with the other two rifle Companies. Major Farnborough conducted it, together with an American and an Afghan counterpart. A new series of photographs had been obtained, a new set of identities were to be learned and memorised.

  Calvary watched the slide show with the others. He saw the deliberately graphic images of flayed and twisted bodies. Of limbless collaborators, strung up from trees by their necks. Of smoking rubble where villages had been. All fresh, all recorded in the last fortnight.

  Then came the parade of faces. Some blurred, captured at a distance with secret lenses. Others close up, sullen or smiling.

  Pelabo Ghilzai. Aged twenty seven. Known as ‘Little Boy’ for his thinness, his gamine physical awkwardness, the smoothness of his skin. The yellow eyes were shy, the mouth nervous. But smiling.

  So precocious that despite his age he was already a senior strategist in the local Taliban chapter. The one devoted to reclaiming Garmsir town, and district, from both the foreign invaders and their milksop collaborator cronies.

  In another two weeks Calvary was gone. Stepping off a plane at Gatwick and into a room with Llewellyn.

  *

  He didn’t jerk awake at the memory of the explosion, or of the boy’s face on the projected slide. That had all stopped a long time ago. Sometimes Calvary would have memories of the hits he’d done, and in some of those the boy’s face would be superimposed on those of his victims. He wondered why his unconscious had to be so obvious about its workings.

  Instead he switched to wakefulness gently but promptly, like the turning on of a light. He checked the time on his phone. Four thirty. Three hours’ sleep; it would have to be enough.

  His face was gummed to the pillow and he realised he’d forgotten to attend to the nicks on his cheeks from the glass of the restaurant’s window. Picking his way through the dark, he found the bathroom and did what he could with cotton pads and a bottle of antiseptic in the cabinet. He attempted a shave.

  When he emerged, the other three were up and dressed, in conference in the living room. Two laptops were open in front of them.

  Max pushed across a mug of coffee and a plate of hot rolls. ‘We’ve been looking at suitable venues. Jakub’s found the best one.’

  Jakub turned the laptop towards Calvary. ‘Premiéra parkhouse. Fifteen minutes from here.’

  Calvary looked at the images. Yes, it was as good as anything. He’d asked them to look for somewhere that was likely to be uninhabited early in the morning, and which had good vantage points.

  *

  The streets were waking up but still shrouded in dark. They belonged to cleaners, cabbies, the occasional ambulance. Eventually Jakub pointed down a side street and Nikola pulled the Fiat in. The district was residential bordering on commercial.

  Ahead was a six-storey building with the dull, concrete appearance of public parking lots everywhere. The information online had said the opening hours were eight a.m. until one a.m. Calvary climbed out of the Fiat, motioning the others to stay where they were, and walked over to the entrances where the lowered booms blocked access to the ramps beyond. Yes, the sign confirmed the opening hours. A few cars were scattered here and there in the gloom beyond, but otherwise the parkhouse appeared deserted.

  Calvary went back to the car and told them what he wanted them to do.

  FIFTEEN

  The Toyota saloon sat with its rear-view mirror angled precisely, giving a clear view of the Fiat two hundred yards behind.

  Tamarkin watched Calvary climb back in, and considered his options.

  Krupina had dismissed them at two a.m., ordered them to get the sleep they needed before an early start in the morning. By early start she meant eight a.m. At the office. Two hours from now. Even if he didn’t make it on time, he’d say he had been doing some investigating on his own, visiting informants, seeking a paper trail, anything that might give them access to the mobster Blažek.

  He had no idea what Calvary and his trio of oddball sidekicks were doing at the hotel. But he had to assume that Calvary would recognise him – perhaps he’d been watching when they had found the discarded bug the night before – and so he couldn’t approach more closely. Couldn’t follow Calvary if he went back into the hotel.

  It had been a simple matter to plant the tracking device on the Fiat outside the club. Tamarkin had been on his own in the Toyota after Arkady had gone in. He kept the tracker under the seat for use at short notice. A low dash alongside the parked cars had brought him alongside the Fiat, unnoticed either by its occupants or by Krupina and Lev, parked in the Audi at the other end of the road. He fitted the tracker to the Fiat’s undercarriage where it remained held in place magnetically. Back in his Toyota he’d opened his palmtop computer, established that the signal was working.

  It was insurance, his own way of keeping track of the car even if the bug on Calvary’s person was discovered. It had proved a good idea. After they’d found the discarded bug and returned to the office, Tamarkin had checked the progress of the Fiat. Once Krupina dismissed them, he followed the signal, found the Fiat parked in a quiet residential street. Empty, and with no indication where Calvary and the others had gone.

  So he sat there, all night, allowing himself to slip into the controlled doze he’d mastered after years of stakeout work. At a little after five thirty they’d emerged.

  Ten, twelve hours. That was Krupina’s estimate of how long it would take for reinforcements, SVR personnel rustled up at short notice, to arrive. Even if her best guess was right, there were still five hours left.

  A dozen SVR operatives would take Calvary down, without difficulty. Tamarkin could contrive some story about how he managed to track Calvary to the hotel. It would be infinitely preferable to an assault by Blažek’s cack-handed, untrained thugs. But Blažek’s people could be here in half an hour. Perhaps sooner. Krupina’s troops weren’t even in Prague yet.

  Tamarkin watched Calvary, the woman and the other two men leave the Fiat and head for the entrance to the car park.

  It gave him a little time.

  *

  Calvary had asked for an unused pay-as-you-go phone. Nikola kept a stash of them in her flat. She handed one over.

  He’d done a quick survey of every floor of the parking lot, the others in tow. Two side-by-side lifts at the far end gave access to each floor, as did fire stairs adjacent to them. On the roof the early morning air was chill. The turrets of the old town loomed in the distance across the rooftops.

  He led them back down to the fifth floor, one below the top.

  Calvary dialled the number on the card he’d found in Zito’s wallet.

  In a moment, a sleep-furred voice: ‘No?’

  ‘Is this Marek Zito?’ As usual Calvary used Russian. Zito had looked in his thirties, was therefore old enough to have had the language forced upon him as a boy and be at least reasonably proficient.

  ‘Yeah?’

  In the background, an annoyed woman’s mutter.

  ‘Listen carefully. I’m not going to repeat myself. I’m the man who took your gun and wallet off you in the club last night.’

  The shout blasted hi
s ear. He could imagine the man leaping out of bed, knocking things over.

  ‘I want you to call your boss. Janos, not his father. Tell him to ring me on this number immediately. I have an offer for him. For him alone. Not Bartos.’

  He cut the call.

  They watched the phone in his hand. It rang less than two minutes later.

  ‘Who are –’

  He recognised the voice.

  ‘As I said to your friend, listen. Just so we get it clear from the start that I am who I say I am, I chucked a tray of burning drinks into your lap last night, disarmed your gunman, and generally made you look like a complete idiot in front of your cronies. Probably earned you a spanking from Daddy, too, I’d imagine. Ring any bells?’

  Silence.

  ‘Good. Now I’ve learned I don’t have anything to fear from you, I want to propose an arrangement. Is anyone listening in on this conversation? Are you on speakerphone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m at the Premiéra multi-storey car park on Chodov Street. The top floor, on the roof. I’ll be here for half an hour. It’s now six ten by my watch. Six forty, I’m gone.’

  ‘What’s this –’

  ‘Just listen. I can tell you why the man you have, Gaines, is so important. But I’ll tell only you. Not your father, not your uncle Miklos. Oh, and I want payment for it. Five hundred thousand koruna, cash.’

  After a beat: ‘I can get this.’

  Calvary knew he had him.

  *

  They stood saying nothing for a few seconds afterwards. It hit Calvary, the realisation of what he was planning. Of how risky it was.

  Jakub walked to the chest-high wall that ran along the perimeter, peering down as if Janos could be out there already.

  ‘Can’t believe you said come alone.’ Max laughed, but there was a shake in it. ‘Bad line, man. Too many movies.’