by Tim Stevens
In such circumstances, death couldn’t come soon enough.
*
Oleg Ruzhovsky was her third-in-command, one down the pecking order from Gleb Tamarkin. He was too old to be a serious contender for career advancement, which was a pity, Krupina thought. A pity, and a relief. Oleg was perhaps the best espion she had ever met, a bluff Volgograd expatriate with a feel for surveillance that was partly in his nature, partly the product of years of meticulous honing.
Oleg’s rough voice had to compete against the traffic in the background, which seemed to be building up even at this hour.
‘There’s access up the fire escape at the back. No telling which room’s his bedroom, though. But there’s a light on somewhere, so he might be awake.’
‘I want you round the front. That’s where he’s likely to emerge, the front door. Put Lev or Arkady round the back.’
‘Understood, tovarischch.’ He used the word — comrade — without irony. Ruzhovsky was fifty-four and old school.
‘No publicity. None at all.’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Yes.’
She thought for a moment, then said, ‘And no guns.’
After a pause: ‘Agreed.’
The pause was because an SVR officer felt naked without a firearm, even if he didn’t use it.
Darya Krupina rung off, sat back in her chair and lit a Belomorkanal. She prepared to do what every covert agent in the world is expected to do, and which she had never got used to.
To wait.
*
The hunting knife had a six-inch blade and would never have been on open display in an airport shop in Britain. Calvary had spotted it in a window when he was making his way towards the exit. A lucky find.
It wasn’t the weapon he’d chosen, however. A close-quarters stabbing in a public place was always going to be difficult to get right, and a fatal thrust would be even harder to achieve with a blade of that length. Plus, there’d be blood, lots of it, and it would taint him as he tried to make his escape through the crowds.
He sat on the edge of the bed and unfurled his next purchase. A good quality men’s umbrella, ivory-handled, with a shaft some three feet long. Not cheap. Using the tip of the knife, he pared the nylon of the umbrella’s hood away from the steel spike at the top of the shaft, then carefully snapped the spokes off one by one at their roots on the sliding cylinder that opened the umbrella.
He used the knife to whittle the stumps into tiny barbs. Then he set to work on the spike itself, stropping the blade of the knife against the steel, honing the point to razor keenness. When he was satisfied, testing the tip against his thumb and drawing a bead of blood, he performed a few practice thrusts.
Up beneath the breastbone, through the abdominal wall and the diaphragm, the sheet of muscle separating chest from abdominal cavities. With luck he’d get the heart, but even if he didn’t, a slight jerk downwards would rip the ringlet of barbs through tissues and organs like a steel claw. If the target didn’t die immediately, if by some miracle the crowds stayed calm enough to summon medical help, and if by yet another stroke of luck he made it to hospital alive, there’d be nothing for the surgeons to work on. Lungs shredded and haemorrhaging, bowel and spleen leaking like a colander.
Calvary’s last acquisition at the airport had been a pack of gauze and tape. He padded the tip tightly and slipped the shaft carefully into the sleeve that had come with the umbrella. When the time came, a thrust would push the tip through the end of the sleeve to expose it. There’d be no need to draw the shaft like a sword from a scabbard.
One o’clock. Time to get into position. Carrying the sleeved umbrella with the tip pointing downwards, he left the room.
*
›Bartos decided to put Janos in charge. It might seem an odd thing to do, while he was trying to decide what to do about his son and about the flagrant disrespect the boy had shown him. But Bartos believed in giving people he was angry with a chance.
He issued Janos his instructions, telling him to handpick his men. He saw the gratitude in his son’s eyes, the appreciation that he was being given autonomy. And the promise: I’ve pissed you off, andI won’t let you down.
When Janos had left, Bartos walked over to the bay window of his office and stared out across the wakening city to the south. As always, his eyes were immediately drawn to the grand silhouette of the Prazsky Hrad, the city’s main castle, soaring over the rooftops on the right.
Excitement always made him want to smoke, but he’d given up in order to get Magda and his physician off his back. Instead he bit into an apple. A poor substitute.
Bartos hated Russians. He hated them for what they had done to his country, ruling it like a colony for their own ends, trampling over its glorious culture in the name of their absurd ideology, coming in with tanks and guns to pacify the natives in 1968, the year of Bartos’s birth. He had hated Russians since the twenty-third of March, 1988. That was the date he’d received official confirmation that his application to join Statni bezpecnost, the secret police, had been rejected. No reasons were given, but he knew what they were. The Soviets, the Rusaks, the ones who vetted all applications, saw him as uncouth, a thug. By the time he’d made a success of himself, had forced his way to his current position, the Soviets were long gone. Gone as a significant force. But here and there they lingered, in person and in influence, like the stench of a latrine.
Today, in a few hours, he would have his revenge. He would snatch the Rusaks’ prize out from under their noses, send them squalling and blubbering in panic. About the target, the Englishman, he cared little. He’d had little to do with these people, saw them as neither a threat to be confronted nor potential allies to be cultivated. They came to his city in droves each year, drank at his bars, used his women, scored his drugs. They were customers like any other.
First, he would take the Englishman. Then he’d find out how much he was worth to the Rusaks, how badly they wanted him.
What they were willing to give in return.
FIVE
Calvary’s map told him there was a coffee shop on the corner of Gaines’s street. He slipped in through the side entrance, avoiding the street itself. It wasn’t crowded and there were booths available, but he chose a stool at a table facing the window. From this point he had a direct view, at an angle, of Gainesn ans apartment block.
One thirty p.m. Calvary sipped coffee. He wore pullover and jacket, cargo trousers, running shoes. Dull colours, but he’d avoided the all-black look. It was too obvious. The umbrella shaft in its sleeve stood propped against the wall at his feet.
After half an hour a waitress — young, plain, tired-eyed — came over. He gave her his most winning smile, tried Russian: he was sorry, but he had no Czech. She warmed immediately, responded in kind. Went off to fill up his cup.
Calvary was fluent in Russian, a tongue he’d learned from his mother who had come to England from Moscow in the late seventies. She hadn’t defected, quite; the application her own parents had made for permission to emigrate had suddenly been granted to her after more than a decade of consistent refusal. It was probably something to do with a brief period of detente at the time in the run up to the SALT talks. His mother had met and married his father and gained permanent residence in Britain, and had brought Martin up with just enough respect for her own culture that he didn’t feel like a misfit among his peers. By the time he joined the forces at eighteen, the Russian side of his lineage wasn’t a drawback any longer.
The waitress came back with his refilled coffee cup and he took it gratefully. He was going to be there a while.
*
By two o’clock he’d identified one of them.
The middle-aged silver Audi up on the pavement hadn’t moved, even though there was a man in the driver’s seat. A head that turned every now and again towards the block where Gaines lived. There was nobody else in the car, as far as Calvary could see.
The car was on Calvary�
�s side of the road, parked facing the coffee shop and far enough back that the driver didn’t have to crane round to watch the entrance. The plates were those of the Czech Republic. SIS might use a car like this.
A street cleaner with elaborate equipment blasted the pavement with water, making two slow passes. Calvary though he looked genuine.
At three fifty he stiffened. A mousy man swaddled in a heavy coat emerged from the entrance. But a woman followed close behind and linked arms with him, and as they sauntered by Calvary saw the man was at least twenty-five years younger than Gaines. He forced his breathing under control. The lashings of caffeine were making him hypersensitive.
Four fifteen. He risked a trip to the lavatory, stretched, bounced on his toes, rolled his head on his neck. When he got back to his stool, where he’d riskily left the modified umbrella, he saw the watcher in the Audi was still there. Which meant Gaines probably hadn’t left either.
At five forty-two, as the shadows in the street stretched to breaking point, four people emerged from the doors, smiling and gesturing as though acknowledging that they’d reached the entrance together and now deferring to one another’s right to leave first. The second one was in his seventies, small and slightly stooped. Face round and closed in on itself beneath the brim of an old-fashioned trilby.A trilbynt›
Gaines.
*
‘Visual,’ Arkady’s voice erupted in her ear through a blurt of static, and Krupina recoiled. She’d been hunched over the desk, head close to the teleconference device, but there had been silence for so long that the intrusion took her by surprise.
‘Subject turning right down Ostrovni Street. On foot and unaccompanied.’
Oleg’s voice came through: ‘I have him too.’ He was on foot, in the window of a department store several blocks up the road.
‘Hold off.’ This was Tamarkin, cruising off to the west in his Toyota, his role that of a floater, ready to move in as and when the net began to close and they needed assistance.
‘Thank you for that, Gleb,’ she muttered. ‘Keep your distance, all of you, at least one visual contact at all times. Oleg, you’re the principal at the moment. Arkady, follow in the car. Ditch it if you have to.’
After a moment Lev confirmed visual contact, having eased in from the back. She leaned back in the swivel chair.
‘All right. Oleg’s in charge now. Do us proud, people.’
She fired up a fresh smoke.
*
Llewellyn’s briefing had mentioned that although Gaines used the city’s extensive public transport network with ease and to great advantage, he was a walker who sometimes favoured his legs even when he had a long distance to travel. After fifteen minutes, when Gaines had passed several bus and tram stops, Calvary concluded the man had chosen today for a constitutional.
The late afternoon was chilly and crisp, the dimming sky smudged with cloud but clear for the most part. Modern architecture began to give way to the more venerable lines of the medieval Old Town. Calvary kept a distance of close to a block, closing in when the crowds grew thicker, dropping back when they slimmed down. Gaines had an odd gait, rapid with a slight lope. Calvary wondered if he’d been injured, or if he was nervous. From time to time the head turned and he caught the face in profile, the glasses thick and flashing. The mouth was small and pinched shut.
Gaines passed two Metro station entrances. Calvary was hoping he wouldn’t use the Metro. It could become difficult to track him, and he didn’t want to carry out the hit on one of the trains. The opportunities to make a quick exit would be limited.
The crowds were becoming more consistently dense as they moved into the heart of the Old Town. Calvary watched the man lope across a large, breathtakingly picturesque square, which he took to be the Old Town Square from what he remembered of his perusal of his guidebook. One edge was dominated by a pair of Gothic towers, the Tyn Church. Across from this stood the Old Town Hall and its astronomical clock. Calvary decided the planooided thce deserved some exploring. Pity about the circumstances.
He made his way across the square, dodging piles of manure from the horses that drew the tourist-trap carriages, before he could lose Gaines.
That was when he spotted the two tags.
*
‘There’s someone else in the field.’
Krupina sat up again. It was a cliche, but her scalp crawled.
‘Tell me.’
A second’s silence, then Oleg’s voice came again. ‘One man. European, exact nationality difficult to be sure of. Thirties. Medium height, compact. Moves like a soldier.’
‘How do you know he’s in the field?’
‘He’s been behind the target for at least the last kilometre. That’s when I first noticed him, anyway. Could be longer. Using tradecraft, keeping back.’
European, exact nationality difficult to be sure of. That meant he was possibly British. It was as she’d feared.
‘He’s definitely tagging Gaines, not one of you?’
‘Almost certainly.’
Her fingers reached for the almost empty pack of coffin nails. ‘All right. Maximum discretion. One of you drop back if need be. You’re using a box?’ A box formation: two shadows behind the target and two in front, all moving in the same direction as the target.
‘Yes.’
‘Drop a spider on the target when you have a chance.’ The spider was the microtransmitter they favoured, a speck with leglike hooks that would cling to clothing. It transmitted location data via satellite up to a range of ten kilometres.
A slight pause. ‘Yes, tovarischch.’
Damn. Being a control freak. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to tread on your toes.’
‘No harm done.’
Krupina clasped her hands as if in prayer, absurd though that would be.
Don’t lose him. For the love of God.
*
The square heaved with gawking tourists in pairs and small groups, rushing waiters, hustlers pushing rip-off tours or taxi services. For a moment Calvary felt a flare of panic, thinking Gaines had slipped away. But there he was, disappearing down a narrow cobbled souvenir alley.
The first of the followers was on Calvary’s left, approximately parallel to him and twenty or so feet away. Short, hair in a brutal buzz cut, expression hewn from a mountain wall. Fifty, fifty-five years old. The second was a little further back on the right. Calvary had noticed him while sweeping his gaze behind him — it was a natural thing to do, with all there was to be marvelled at in a setting like this — and had confirmed his presence with a second, more subtle glance. This one was taller, slimmer. Late twenties, perhaps. Dressed in a hooded parka.
Calvary was well aware of the hazards of racial profiling. Not the political hazards, but the genuine mistakes that could be made when you pigeonholed someone on first sight into an ethnic or racial category. It could lead to complacency, which might have disastrous consequences. Nonetheless — of course there was a but — he identified the two men immediately, on instinct, as Russians.
In any case it didn’t matter. Whoever they were, they represented a hazard. They were tagging the man he intended to kill. If their ethnic background was surprising, if they didn’t appear to be the SIS or Chapel agents he’d been expecting, it was a detail, no more. At least for the time being.
It added a complication, because he was going to have to shake them off before he made his move. And that meant getting them out the way without losing track of his target, Gaines.
A lost-looking backpacker stepped into his path, map proffered like a sacrificial offering. He sidestepped smartly. The alley exiting the square was too narrow for more than three people to walk abreast in either direction, and Calvary allowed the squat pursuer — Squat — to enter first. Past the bobbing heads, Gaines’s trilby wove into and out of sight.
Gaines turned into a broader thoroughfare. The younger of the two pursuers, Parka, crossed the street and Calvary saw him moving parallel to them on the opposite side. It was as though h
e was trying to corral Gaines without Gaines’s even realising it.
Was it Calvary’s imagination or had Gaines picked up the pace a little? He was perhaps fifty yards ahead of Calvary, Squat between them, and there seemed to be an added urgency to his movement. Calvary saw him duck his head as though he was consulting his watch. Then he turned his head to the left, peering at the road as he walked, and Calvary understood. He was looking for a tram.
Squat appeared to notice it, too, and began to narrow the gap between him and Gaines. Gaines looked back, slowed, and stepped towards the kerb. A designated tram stopping point. Behind Calvary, he heard a bell sing through the jabber of people and traffic.
The tram, modern looking in sleek red and white, slid into position at the kerb with a hydraulic wheeze. Gaines joined the short queue stepping up between the sliding doors in the side.
Calvary strode straight past, almost barging Squat. For an instant he felt the man’s gaze at his back.
*
Krupina was doing what pacing she could in the confines of the offit b of thece when Oleg’s voice came through.
‘I’m on board a tram with the target. The other party didn’t get on. Walked past.’
She thought about this. ‘Did he make you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘Where’s he now?’
‘Can’t see him.’
She breathed slowly, through pursed lips. She didn’t like this.
‘How close are you to the target?’
‘Visual contact. Not close enough to drop a spider on him, if that’s what you mean.’