Severance Kill

by Tim Stevens

  ‘As I told you, Llewellyn. He’s gone. Whoever it was that snatched him — and it wasn’t the Russians — they’re long gone. I can’t — ’

  ‘Hold on. You say it wasn’t the Russians?’

  ‘No. It was a Russian that got shot dead. This was another group.’

  For a moment he though they’d been cut off. He glanced at the phone’s screen.

  Llewellyn said, quietly, ‘This makes things… complicated.’

  You’re telling me.

  Calvary said, ‘A hijacking and kidnapping, by an unknown group. I’ve no idea who they were, and you clearly haven’t a clue either. My role here’s finished, Llewellyn. I’ll do another hit, if I have to. But not this one. It’s over.’

  His phone buzzed and he glanced at it. A text message had come through.

  Llewellyn said, ‘Open it. It’s from me.’

  There were no words, just a picture. The front page of one of the red-top tabloid papers.

  Two words, in capitals: BLOODY MURDER. Below the headline was the photo Calvary had seen before, the one of him exiting the block of flats where Al-Haroun, the Songwriter, had lived. A smaller, inset picture showed Al-Haroun’s body, lifeless eyes staring at the camera, neck grotesquely twisted.

  Not wanting to, Calvary tapped the screen to enlarge the picture. The text was blurred at this resolution but the first lines were legible. This is the unknown man caught on camera leaving the flats where.

  Llewellyn’s voice came at him through the picture. ‘There still?’

  Calvary raised the phone to his mouth. ‘You utter bastard.’

  ‘It’s a mockup, of course. But it’ll be tomorrow morning’s first edition. We won’t give a name, yet. That’s the next step.’

  ‘You prick.’

  ‘So, you see, Martin, it really is rather important that you find Sir Ivor. And despatch him.’

  ‘I closed his eyes. The Songwriter’s. I closed them, and you opened them, for the photo.’

  ‘Anything I can help you with, don’t hesitate to ask.’

  Calvary said nothing.

  ‘Good luck, Martin.’

  The connection broke.

  SEVEN

  Outside, the streets were taking on a hostile appearance as the darkness settled over the city. Krupina rubbed away a patch of condensation on her window.

  ‘Do I need to do any liaising with the Embassy?’ Beside her, Tamarkin’s calmness masked similar feelings to hers, she knew.

  ‘Not as long as his legend holds up.’ Like all of them Oleg had a cover story, an address and a history in Prague. He had an up-to-date visa.

  Tamarkin had reached the area in his car fifteen minutes before Krupina arrived by cab. They hadn’t got close to the tram. The police were already cordoning the scene off. But they’d watched, and soon two bodies were being carted into an ambulance on stretchers. In each case the blanket was over the face, which meant only one thing.

  ‘How much are you going to tell HQ?’ SVR headquarters was in Yasenevo, southwest of Moscow. It suddenly felt a long distance away to Krupina.

  ‘Nothing, at the moment. I want to be able to offer them some good news first.’

  He laughed without mirth. ‘Ever the optimist.’

  The others, Arkady and Lev, were scouring the area, trying to pick up from snatches of conversation what exactly had happened. Eyewitnesses put the numbers of assailants at between two and ten. One said they were definitely Muslim, another that they were armed with machine guns. Her men relayed this information to Krupina as Tamarkin drove the two of them back to the office off Wenceslas Square.

  Tiny, shy Yevgenia, the closest thing to a desk jockey in Krupina’s team, was already working on the identikit composites on her PC, based on the information provided by Arkady, who apart from Oleg was the only one of them to have seen the foreigner who’d been tailing Gaines. Quite what his relation was to the men who’d stormed the tram was anyone’s guess. But he was their only lead, and as far as Krupina was concerned was responsible for Oleg’s death until proven otherwise.

  Yevgenia was generating possible identikit images of the man using standard software. Arkady was viewing them on his smartphone and giving her feedback.

  ‘Hair a bit shorter. Also, the chin’s too round. Sharpen it a little.’

  Despite herself, Krupina was fascinated. The image on the screen morphed almost imperceptibly as Yevgenia’s fingers flew over the keys. The face was monochrome. Arkady hadn’t seen the eyes close enough to identify the shade and it would be a mistake to speculate, so better to leave colour out of it. The head rotated in 3D — Arkady had seen it mainly in profile — and the jaw and occiput changed shape according to his instructions.

  Krupina gazed at the face. Though it wasn’t familiar, the man was British, she was sure of it.

  ‘Gleb.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Get me the biographies and pictures of the known British SIS operatives in Prague. Might as well throw in French and German as well.’

  ‘Long shot.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Think he could be a Yank?’

  She glanced back at the screen.

  ‘No. He looks too grim.’

  *

  Bartos, the Kodiak, stood in the basement with the three men in a semicircle before him. One, whose name Bartos couldn’t remember, if he’d ever known it, had his right shoulder wrapped in thick layers of bandage through which blood was seeping pinkly.

  ‘So what the fuck?’

  Janos spoke up immediately. ‘The source was good. We learned the target was on the tram, and we boarded without initial incident.’

  ‘“Without initial incident”. It sounds like a traffic report.’

  ‘Sorry, boss.’ It was always boss in front of the other men. Never dad. Bartos insisted on it. ‘I took charge of the target myself, when a passenger attacked us with some sort of spear. A home-made affair. Looked like an umbrella shaft.’

  ‘You were attacked by a single man… armed with an umbrella.’

  Janos jerked his head at the injured man. ‘He got Milos in the shoulder. And he killed Istvan.’ He jabbed a finger at his throat.

  ‘Istvan’s who, exactly?’

  ‘A good guy. Couple of bank jobs.’

  There’d be nothing to tie the dead man to Bartos. It was one of Bartos’s tenets that everyone was deniable. Still, at that time the mdnt time an had been working for him, had been one of his employees, and had been killed. Bartos took that personally.

  ‘And Istvan fired his gun when he went down. Hit a civilian.’

  Bartos wasn’t interested. ‘This umbrella guy. You say not a Russian.’

  ‘Didn’t look it.’

  ‘You remember his face?’ He swept his gaze across each man. They almost fell over themselves nodding, the injured man wincing in the process.

  ‘Good. Find him, and bring him to me.’

  Janos said: ‘We shook him off the car, and he got hit by a tram. Probably hurt.’

  ‘Excellent. Shouldn’t have any difficulty finding him, then.’

  He turned away, began to lumber out. Then he stopped.

  ‘Janos.’

  He didn’t turn, but heard the man approach. Could smell the terror.

  He put a hand on Janos’s back and walked him to the far side of the basement. He murmured: ‘You fucked up. But you also did good, getting me the Englishman. I ought to rip your balls off and give you a medal.’ He clapped his palm between his son’s shoulderblades, hard enough to make Janos gasp. ‘Even-Steven. Get me this umbrella guy and you’ll be well into the black.’

  *

  Back outside on the street, he took a call on his phone, recognising the number on the screen.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Got the product? The Brit?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good.’ A pause. Then: ‘You realise one of your guys shot a Russian dead on the tram.’

  Bartos stopped in his tracks.

  ‘Not
only that, but he was SVR. Oleg Ruzhovsky.’

  ‘Ah, for Christ’s — ’ Bartos stared about him, the rage building. Don’t smash the phone. Don’t.

  Into the silence he snarled: ‘My men said some stranger attacked them.’

  ‘Yes. That’s a bit of a mystery to me, too. But he wasn’t anything to do with Ruzhovsky. Somehow Ruzhovsky stopped a bullet from one of your boys’ guns.’

  A civilian, Janos had said. He hadn’t known it was a KGB who’d been shot.

  ‘Look after the merchandise.’

  Bartos headed for his car. He said: ‘Any idea yet why this Brit, Gaines, is so important?’

  ›‘No. But I’m looking into it.’ In a moment: ‘What do your guys say about the attacker on the tram?’

  ‘Nationality not clear. Not Czech or Russian, probably. Tough, a professional.’

  ‘What did he have? Gun-wise?’

  Bartos bit his lip.

  ‘You there?’

  Bartos said: ‘They think it was a sharpened umbrella.’

  ‘An…’ In the background Bartos heard coughing, or something like it. ‘Did you say an umbrella?’

  ‘It was sharpened. Weaponised.’

  ‘Right.’

  The voice sounded like it was choking. Bartos shouted, ‘What?’

  He thought he caught something about Mary Poppins before he cut the call. He stood, T-shirted in the cold, the Kodiak, and wished he had something nearby to assault.

  Nobody laughed at him. Nobody.

  When this is over, you’ll pay. God, how you will.

  *

  Calvary had crossed back over the river and was somewhere south of the Old Town, in a modern shopping district. He kept moving, not with any particular destination in mind but not aimlessly either. Physical motion kept his thoughts flowing; at the same time he wanted to stay close to the scene of the attack without getting too close and possibly being recognised.

  He stepped through the glass doors of a department store and felt the warmth and familiarity draw him in. Escalators soared past layers of shops, many of them with recognisable names.

  His holdall was back at the hotel. It contained nothing of value, and nothing incriminating. He’d registered there using a credit card which bore an alias. The receptionist hadn’t asked for his passport, which was in his own name and which he kept in his pocket. He felt fairly confident that nobody would trace him to the hotel or pin a name on him.

  Besides, the police would be more interested in finding the hijackers and kidnappers, not the have-a-go hero who’d confronted them.

  Calvary wandered into an electrical appliance shop. Deep at the back were the televisions. He browsed among the plasma screens, some the size of cars. Several were tuned to a local news channel. A lone reporter stood at the scene of the hijacking, the tram almost concealed behind her in a cocoon of police officers and emergency vehicles. He watched, not understanding the words. No photographs came up on the screen, no identikit pictures.

  Calvary smiled and waved away a hovering shop assistant, then stepped into a quiet corner where there were radios on display. Nobody bought radios any more. He drew out his phone, connected to the internet, and looked up hospitals in Prague.

  He didn’t know if any of the masked men he’d encountered had been injured seriously enough to warrant hospital attention, or if they’d even seek it in the circumstances. But it was possible — just — that the man he’d skewered through the throat had made it to an emergency department. A long shot, and it might mean doing the rounds of several of the city’s hospitals.

  It wasn’t as though he had a lot of options.

  His search came up with five hospitals within a few miles of the attack, three of which had emergency departments.

  *

  Krupina stood, hunched, behind Yevgenia, gazing at the monitor. Faces flicked across the display so quickly she wanted to ask the girl to slow the program down. She didn’t, because she knew the software was analysing each face in a fraction of a second, comparing it to the identikit picture, and would stop as soon as there was even a vague match.

  Tamarkin nudged her elbow with something and Krupina looked down, hoping for cigarettes. Instead he proffered a paper plate with a prepackaged sandwich.

  ‘Never got you your order earlier.’

  She ate standing up, watching the monitor, while Tamarkin ran the office, moving from desk to desk, co-ordinating the search for Oleg’s body, listening for any Embassy mutterings. A little after three p.m., twenty minutes into the search, Yevgenia said, ‘Something, boss.’

  Krupia’s attention had been wandering. She leaned on the back of the girl’s chair, peered at the monitor.

  The identikit image was on the left. On the right was the latest in a series of photos of known British, French and German intelligence agents. Known to SVR and FSB.

  Almost by definition the pictures the Russian services obtained of their enemies were less than optimal. They were seldom mug shots, unless the agent had been arrested. More often they were grainy, poorly lit snapshots taken on street corners, in airport queues, at the scenes of crimes. This one was no different. The man in the database photo was of indeterminate age, no younger than thirty. It was a three-quarter view from an angle above the horizontal. The face was looking up and away from the camera. Fair hair, undistinguished features. He was on a street somewhere, on the move.

  Yevgenia tapped keys and another picture replaced the first. This one was clearer. It was a profile view, seemingly close up but probably taken with a zoom lens, of a man leaning on the rail of a boat in bright sunshine. He appeared lost in thought. Hair brown and short, mouth set, eyes hard.

  Yevgenia began to summarise the legend out loud. ‘Martin Calvary. British. First picture taken in September 2009 in Copenhagen, near scene of murder of Gerhardt Kreutzmann. The old Stasi colonel. Second picture a chance sighting on a ferry from Malta to Sicily in March last year. Calvary strongly suspected to have links with British SIS and possibly to be an active agent.’

  ‘Show it to Arkady,’ Krupina murmured. Yevgenia mon. Yevgeoved the mouse, clicked.

  She touched her phone, connecting her with Arkady. ‘Got it?’

  Krupina waited. The phone had its speaker function switched on so she would hear the reply.

  Arkady said, ‘Yeah. That’s him.’

  EIGHT

  Bartos shovelled carbonara into his face, an early supper on a heated outdoor restaurant terrace where his status guaranteed him a degree of privacy. Across the table was his brother, Miklos. Thinner than him, with more hair. But not the boss.

  ‘Want me to take over?’ Miklos fingered the stem of his wineglass, the fidgeting betraying his craving for a cigarette. Bartos didn’t allow smoking within ten feet of him and certainly not at the table.

  Bartos sucked up a tube of penne. ‘Not yet. Let’s give the kid a chance to prove himself.’

  ‘So what’s he doing?’

  ‘Checking the hospitals with his guys, to see if this umbrella asshole’s turned up in any of them. He got hit by a tram according to them.’

  ‘Long shot.’

  Miklos was next in line for the top job in the family, unless Bartos hung on in there long enough for his own firstborn, Janos, to become a contender. Then there’d be a battle, and it would be something to behold. Bartos liked Miklos, knew the family and the business would be in safe hands with him in charge. But not yet. Still, he spoke more freely with his brother — about business as well as personal matters — than with anybody else, even Magda.

  ‘So when are you going to approach the Russians?’ Miklos signalled to an invisible waiter behind Bartos: it’s on me.

  Bartos finished chewing and swallowing before he answered. ‘Haven’t decided yet. I’d like to find out what’s so important about this Gaines guy, this Brit. Why they want him so badly.’

  ‘The Worm has no idea?’

  ‘Says he’s working on it. Meantime, I want to do my own investigating. I’ve got a
feeling this umbrella guy has something to do with it, is involved somehow. If you believe Janos and his boys, this wasn’t just some wannabe hero who jumped a bunch of hijackers. He was a pro, armed with a shiv, who put down one of Janos’s men, injured another and almost stopped them getting away.’

  ‘The Russians will be looking for us, too.’

  ‘Fuck the Rusaks.’ He glowered at his empty plate. It was true, though. He didn’t care much that a civilian had been shot in the crossfire on the tram. Shit happened. But the Worm said the man had been SVR. Russian intelligence. They didn’t drop it, when you’d killed one of theirs. Now his bargaining power would a b!be limited. He’d demand a high price for Gaines. But he’d also have to insist on the Russians staying off his back in future.

  His phone went off. Bartos listened.

  ‘On my way.’

  He put the handset away, was already rising. ‘Son of a bitch. They’ve spotted the umbrella guy.’

  *

  The man Bartos Blazek called the Worm was at that moment sitting with his eyes closed, picturing Calvary.

  A British agent, sent to capture or kill an expatriate Brit who was wanted by Moscow. Was wanted so badly that the unofficial SVR was in charge of taking him.

  The Worm didn’t enjoy his dealings with Blazek. He found the man’s coarseness revolting, his arrogance a character flaw of such magnitude that it would surely bring him down one day. But he paid well. Paid magnificently, in fact. And however much Blazek might despise the Worm in turn — and it was obvious that he did — it was clear that he valued their association.

  The Worm’s information had led to Blazek’s interception of the product — the Brit, Gaines — but the problem was that neither the Worm nor Blazek knew why Gaines was so important to Moscow. The Worm had the better chance of finding out, but even he would struggle. Until Gaines’s precise value was established, Blazek couldn’t enter into a transaction with the SVR.

  Couldn’t, or wouldn’t. The Worm found the man’s stubbornness infuriating. Gaines was of critical importance to the Russian state, of that there was no doubt. Blazek would be able to command an astronomical price even without knowing the full details. But Blazek was a businessman, as he never failed to remind the Worm. And a good businessman never did business without being fully aware of the stakes. Blazek had made clear, furthermore, that until he’d sold Gaines to the SVR, the Worm wouldn’t see a penny of his payment.