Severance Kill

by Tim Stevens

  ‘So I ask you once more, Max. How do we find your friend, Calvary? An address, a contact number. A car licence plate. Any of them will do.’

  The sweat beaded on the boy’s forehead. His mouth quivered.

  Bartos sat back on his heels. ‘Who are you, anyway? You and your late buddy Jakub? Do I know you? Has Bartos Blazek ever had anything to do with you before?’ He chewed the inside of his cheek, watching the wide eyes. ‘And how are you connected to this Calvary guy?’

  The silence stretched between them until it was close to breaking point.

  *

  Blackness shaded to slate like dawn in a stormy sky. The aural veil began to lift as well: a miasmic slurry of sound gave way by degree to human speech, then distinct voices.

  Calvary had been aware, intermittently, of travel. The ragged rumble of a vehicle’s chassis under his back. Hands beneath his armpits, lifting him. A supported propulsion forward and downward, his partially suspended feet tripping over steps that receded beneath him.

  By the time his vision cleared entirely and he was able to be certain of what he was seeing around him, rather than experiencing it in some sort of dream, his overwhelming sense was of nausea.

  He was in a windowless room of some kind, lit only by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cobwebbed flex directly above his head. By angling his eyes downwards he could make out flagstones. The sour, winey smell suggested he was in a cellar.

  He was seated in a steel chair with one leg shorter than the others. His legs were secured to the chair with plastic ties around the ankles. Thin, tough cord lashed his waist and chest to the back of the seat. His arms, curiously, were free. He flexed his elbows, rolled the shoulder joints.

  He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.

  Somewhere off in the darkness, fluid dripped in an intermittent rhythm.

  The uniformity of the shadow shrouding his immediate environment was torn open as a shape detached itself and stepped forward. A woman. The woman. Fiftyish, or past seventy. Of medivenetached itum height, dumpy, ungainly. The flesh hanging off her like peeling wallpaper. Blue ribbons of smoke twined towards the lit bulb from the cigarette between her fingers.

  ‘Mr Calvary. You’re awake, I see.’ She spoke English, her accent heavy.

  His eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. He could make out the horizon where the far wall and the ceiling joined. Over to the right, beyond the woman, sacks packed to splitting were piled man-high.

  To the left, he made out a small wooden table. An orange lead curled from a wall socket up to the surface of the table.

  The lead ended in a grey appliance, scarred and dull but instantly recognisable.

  An electric hammer drill.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The young man, Arkady, peeled out of the shadows beside the woman. In his right hand he bounced something. He tossed it at Calvary.

  Calvary caught it, left handed. He didn’t need to look at it to know what it was. A squash ball.

  He dropped it.

  So it was going to be the hand.

  Arkady had thrown the ball to see which hand Calvary used to catch it, reflexively, and thereby establish which one was dominant. They would think he’d have more to fear from damage to the hand he used the most. Calvary had anticipated this and used his left, non-dominant hand. This way his right hand might be spared.

  The woman raised the cigarette to her mouth. From behind Calvary’s right shoulder a second man emerged. Bigger, older. Possibly the driver of the car that had cut Calvary off outside the hospital wall. He grabbed Calvary’s right arm and forced it round behind his back. Then he seized the left hand. Secured them together with a plastic tie.

  It wasn’t going to be the hand, then. That had been a bluff, to get Calvary to relax a little. To make him feel as though he was in control.

  The man moved behind Calvary once more. Calvary turned his head. He could see the man pushing forward something heavy. A workbench of some kind, with an iron clamp protruding past the edge.

  The man’s hands forced his head round so he was facing forwards again. He felt the wooden edge of the bench against the back of his neck, felt cold metal press against his temples, smelled machine oil. Felt the jaws of the clamp tightening, compressing his head.

  He tried an experimental shake of his head, found he had no range of motion at all in any plane. All he could move were his eyes.

  Still the woman watched, the only movement her hand rising to her mouth to draw on the cigarette.

  The big man stepped into Calvary’s field of vision. He took up the drill. Hefted it. Thumbed the switch.

  The whine was ragged, as though the motor had done battle with hard d the swsurfaces scores of times before. The confined walls and ceiling of what Calvary assumed was the cellar amplified the noise.

  The man brought the spinning tip close to Calvary’s eyes. Stopped the motor for a moment. Protruding from the clamped jaws was a masonry bit, eight or nine gauge by the look of it. The tip was shaped like a blunt arrowhead, designed for boring holes through tiles.

  The man fired the drill up again, held it horizontal. Gripped Calvary’s hair in his other hand. Brought the blurred tip of the bit towards the centre of Calvary’s forehead.

  It was time to go.

  *

  In the last four years Calvary had carried out six hits for Llewellyn and the Chapel. The kills had required meticulous planning, incorporating sometimes months of research beforehand.

  Nonetheless, Calvary knew that at a metaphysical cocktail party someone would eventually approach him, gin and tonic in hand and ask: In between jobs, what do assassins actually do?

  Calvary would have an answer in such a situation. He had spent the time in between hits mastering his weapons, his tools of the trade. He had achieved a high standard of knowledge in geopolitics, in military history, in game theory.

  And he’d burrowed deep into the psychology and physiology of interrogation science, and implemented what he’d learned. Usually he’d been on the dishing-out end, finding out what he needed to know about the location of a target. Start extreme, with a serious threat to physical integrity — this was the most useful tactic in the interrogator’s arsenal. He’d employed it with Janos on the roof and with Tamarkin in the hospital room. And it seemed his captors, Krupina and her minions, were doing the same with him. No questions initially, just the promise of mutilation.

  Calvary had practised being on the receiving end of a hostile interrogation, though until now he’d never found himself in such a situation while on a job. The best advice he’d had was from an elderly Chilean man, a survivor of the Pinochet terror in the early seventies. From this man he’d learned the technique of dissociation.

  Most people he’d read of who’d undergone dissociation in whatever form found it unpleasant in the extreme. The Chilean dissident had described as a waking dreaming state, waking death, a sensation of cosmic, existential wrongness. It was a biological survival mechanism, kept alive in the species by its value in preserving the integrity of the psyche at times of extreme physical or emotional stress. It could therefore be usefully employed deliberately for the same reason, or to some other end, such as uncoupling the perception of pain from the recognition of what needed to be done to end that pain. Put simply, it enabled one to tolerate torture without providing the information that the torture was intended to elicit.

  Dissociation which is achieved voluntarily was, however, no less unpleasant than the other kind, said the Chilean. It required one to do something profoundly counter-instinctive, which was to focus inwards rather than outwards towards the threwarer atening stimulus. It involved disciplining one’s self to ignore something that all the senses scream was not to be ignored at any cost.

  The first thing Calvary did was turn the drill into a snake, a special type of snake that was deadly but could detect only moving prey. If he remained absolutely still, slowing his breathing so that not even his ribcage moved, it would be unaware
of his whereabouts. Calvary concentrated on stillness.

  The next thing he did was find a tunnel within himself. Calvary’s knowledge of human anatomy told him there were plenty of tunnels leading from the head to the rest of the body: the oesophagus, the trachea, the foramen magnum in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passed. He needed a narrow passage, one down which the snake would have difficulty following him. The foramen magnum was the narrowest and least flexible, so Calvary opted for it. He became a small huddled homunculus, perched on the bony lip of the orifice, aware of the approaching snake and aware that the only escape, terrifying though it seemed, was downwards. He made the homunculus that was himself lean back over the edge until he was past the point of no return, and drop into the void.

  Black walls with strange starry silver streaks in them rushed past as he built up speed. Calvary felt as though he were hurtling through time as well as space, plummeting away from the present with its immediate concerns — the drill/snake, Prague, Nikola and the others, Gaines — and towards a place in the distant, primeval past, where his sole concern was to perpetuate his life, existence becoming an end in itself. Calvary saw, or imagined he saw, primitive life forms as he descended: bizarre deep-sea beings festooned with machine-like attachments, blurred jelly shapes skittering past shrieking through enormous fanged maws.

  Then Calvary stopped falling.

  There was no trauma involved, no jarring. He simply ceased to drop, and hung in utter stillness. Around him, and above and below, the darkness was absolute. Calvary created a soft cocoon of gauzy light around him, a fire substitute evoked by his species memory to keep predators at a distance. Within the sheath of light he concentrated on making himself smaller, curling himself up into a ball, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped tight around his legs. He remained like that for a long time.

  After a while Calvary looked up. Far, far above there was a pinpoint in the blackness. He made his eyes able to see with telescopic vision. This allowed him to identify the pinpoint as a square window. Through the window he saw a tiny man, himself, tied to a chair. A woman and one other men stood off near a wall, watching him. Another man stood over the man in the chair and did something to him. As though through miles of ocean water, Calvary could hear shouting. He didn’t need to worry about hearing what was said; it would all be there in his memory when he eventually surfaced again. Calvary closed the window with his mind and retreated into his cocoon of light.

  The cocoon took on, slowly, a tangible physical character, like some alien material, impossibly soft yet clinging to every exposed surface. It was comforting. It insinuated itself into his ears, his nose. Then it crept between his lips and slipped around his tongue, worming its unnatural substance over and under his teeth. Calvary gagged. It crawled down his throat, suffusing both his gullet and his windpipe. It was suffocating him. He couldn’. Ht clingit swallow, couldn’t breath.

  Panic seared through him. Calvary began to rise, growing huge, barrelling back upwards towards the surface. A far-off part of him cried out, Not yet. He tried to listen to it, tried to stop and reverse and go back down and become small and safe, but there was no safety there and he couldn’t. Instead, Calvary focused on understanding what had been happening while he had been under, and on deciding what to do next.

  He had been injured. The extent didn’t matter for now.

  He had told them nothing about who was employing him, why he was after Gaines, or where Gaines was being held.

  He had to tell them something, because they would know he was nearing the end of his usefulness to them.

  It was time to come back and play his ace.

  *

  ‘Where is Gaines.’

  The drill’s whine was accompanied by the ripping noise of the tip of the bit breaking the skin. Calvary stiffened in his chair, his back arching as far as it could against the restraints.

  Krupina watched his face. His eyes were half closed, his teeth bared and glistening like a feral beast’s.

  ‘Why are you trying to find him.’

  A new sound, that of bone splintering. Through the cellar odour of stale wine and damp, the keener tang of burnt blood made her almost gag. The cellar was beneath one of the several safe houses Krupina kept across the city. They hadn’t used it before, certainly not for something like this.

  ‘Where is Gaines.’

  ‘Why are you trying to find him.’

  The same two questions, almost contradictory in what they implied, repeated like a chant.

  Lev had done this before. There was a real art to it, or a craft, at any rate. You had to know when to stop, so that you didn’t penetrate the dura mater, the outer covering of the brain. Or, worse, the frontal lobes of the brain itself.

  The Englishman’s face was obscured behind a caul of blood. His eyes were closed now, his breathing disturbingly slow and even.

  A professional. So pain wasn’t going to work, nor fear of mutilation.

  *

  Returning was always highly unpleasant, rather like being born: from the hot suspended cradle of safety to the violent, screaming world of light and pain.

  His eyes were gummed and stinging, his cheeks tacky and his mouth clotted with congealing blood. He couldn’t seecoum" a his forehead but knew what had happened. He felt violated, penetrated.

  The pain was terrible, a living untameable beast ravening through Calvary’s skull, down his neck.

  The woman, Krupina, looked down at him, her face expressionless. Then she said something to the younger man beside her, Arkady. The man drew a pistol from inside his jacket and stepped forward. He pressed the barrel against Calvary’s forehead, beside the hole there, flicked off the safety. The older man in shirtsleeves, the wielder of the drill, moved away.

  Calvary looked back up at Krupina, her face distorted as his vision began to blur.

  ‘I have a cell phone number that will get me through to Blazek,’ Calvary said. ‘It’s me he wants. I can set up a meeting with him. You can take him down then.’

  He didn’t dissociate then, just passed out.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Calvary fed himself water, lots of it, from a two-litre plastic bottle. He was perched on the chair, free from restraints: his head had been released from the clamp, the cords had been unwound, the plastic ties cut.

  They hadn’t offered him any kind of dressing. He’d probed the wound with a ginger fingertip. It felt enormous, a crater lipped with bony spurs, though it could only be a few millimetres across. He wondered how far it had penetrated. His fingers came away bloody, but there was no clear cerebrospinal fluid.

  He needed a dressing, and soon. Infection would be potentially fatal.

  They stood before him in a neat crescent, the woman in the centre. She was smoking. Calvary didn’t think she’d been without a lit cigarette since he’d woken up in the cellar.

  The older man, Lev, had woken him with open-handed slaps. At first they hadn’t untied him.

  Krupina had come very close. ‘Explain.’

  Calvary tried his voice, was surprised to hear it come out as normal, with no shake in it. ‘Blazek has two of my friends prisoner. He’ll be holding them as bargaining chips, but he doesn’t know how to contact me. I have their phone numbers. Blazek will be monitoring their calls.’

  He watched her eyes, saw the calculating going on in the heavy silence. Then: ‘What do you propose?’

  ‘I offer myself in exchange for my friends. A public place somewhere — you can decide where, I don’t know this city well enough. Blazek’ll come armed to the teeth, with all the men he can round up. You take him out. You’re Chekists, you’ll have access to whatever resources you require.’ He broke off. The pain was starting to bore through his head again. ‘Two things. I want a guaranteed safe passage out for my associates.’

  It was a ludicrous demand, and Krupina knew he knew it. She didn’t even bother to nod.

  ‘And I need a piece of equipment. Again, you’ll be able to ge
t it if you ask.’n›

  He told her, and explained what he needed it for.

  Her cigarette stub burned down and she dropped it, twisted her foot on the flagstones. With a nod to Lev she turned away, Arkady moving off with her, out of Calvary’s earshot.

  *

  Yevgenia had phoned an hour earlier, while the Englishman had still been unconscious. ‘They’re here, Ms Krupina. The six men.’

  Six trained operatives, plus Arkady and Lev. Krupina had little doubt they could do it, could face down Blazek. Her concern was with Calvary. What was he planning?

  To Arkady she said, ‘Tell Yevgenia to organise what the Englishman asks for.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘But with modifications.’

  She told him. Arkady nodded, understanding. A smile at his lips.

  Admiration. She seldom received any, insisted she didn’t need it. But it felt good.

  *

  ‘Your plan is approved.’

  It sounded ridiculously solemn. Calvary said, ‘We can speak Russian if you prefer.’

  ‘My English is not good enough for you?’

  Touched a nerve. Calvary raised his hand to his forehead. ‘I’m going to need a dressing for this.’

  ‘It is coming.’

  She’d returned without Arkady. Lev had taken a step back and stood watching him, arms folded. Krupina was taken suddenly with a hacking cough which she tried to suppress.

  He thought about offering her some of his water. Decided against it.

  She paced a little, then turned to him. ‘My associate in the hospital. Why did you kill him?’

  ‘I didn’t. Not deliberately. I was interrogating him. I pushed him too far.’

  ‘What questions were you asking him?’

  For the time being Calvary would keep Tamarkin’s betrayal of her to himself, a card to be played later.

  ‘What he’d found out about Blazek. I knew he was SVR and that you lot were looking for Gaines. I thought your friend might be able to help me with the information I needed.’ Calvary shrugged. ‘He wasn’t.’