Severka urban sniper school was built around a deserted town. In Soviet times it had been home to a thriving community of scientists studying the effects of radiation exposure; now it was a ghost-town, peopled only by life-size target dummies, strategically situated behind plate glass windows and at the wheels of rusting, skeletal vehicles. It was an eerie place, silent except for the wind which whistled between its empty buildings.
Oxana’s basic training was with the standard-issue Dragunov. Soon, though, she graduated to the VSS, or Special Sniper Rifle. With its exceptionally light weight and integral silencer, it was the ideal urban marksman’s weapon. By the time she left Severka she had fired thousands of rounds under a variety of operational conditions, and in less than a minute was able to arrive at a firing point with the VSS in its polystyrene case, assemble the weapon, zero the sights, calculate windspeed and other vectors, and squeeze off a lethal head or body-shot (‘one shot, one kill’, in the words of her instructor) at a range of up to four hundred metres.
Oxana sensed herself changing, and the results pleased her. Her observational ability, sensory skills and reactive speeds had all been extraordinarily enhanced. Psychologically, she felt invulnerable, but then she had always known that she was different to those around her. She felt none of the things they felt. Where others would experience pain or horror, she knew only a frozen dispassion. She had learned to imitate the emotional responses of those around her – their fears, their uncertainties, their desperate need for affection – but she had never experienced them. She knew, however, that if she was to escape notice in the world it was essential to wear a mask of normality, and to disguise the extent of her difference.
She had learnt, very young, that people could be manipulated. Sex was useful in this regard, and Oxana acquired a voracious appetite. Not so much for the act itself, although this had its satisfactions, as for the thrill of pursuit and psychic domination. As lovers, she liked to choose authority figures. Her conquests had included schoolteachers of both genders, a Spetznaz colleague of her father’s, her pistol-shooting instructor at the Industrialny sports club, and – most satisfyingly of all – the female psychotherapist to whom she’d been referred for assessment in her first year at university. Oxana had never felt the slightest need to be liked, but it gave her profound satisfaction to be desired. To see the look in her conquests’ eyes – that final melting of resistance – that told her that the transfer of power was complete.
Not that it was ever quite enough. Because for all its fierce excitement, that moment of submission invariably marked the beginning of the end of Oxana’s interest. The story was always the same, even with Yuliana, the psychotherapist. By yielding to Oxana, by surrendering her mystery, she made herself undesirable. And Oxana had simply moved on, leaving the older woman bereft, her personal and professional self-esteem in tatters.
After the sniper course, she learnt about explosives and toxicology in Volgograd, surveillance in Berlin, advanced driving and lock-picking in London, and identity management, communications and coding in Paris. For Oxana, who had never left Russia before her appointment with Konstantin at the Chusovaya Bridge, the international travelling was dizzying. Each course was taught in the language of the country in question, testing her linguistic aptitude to the limit and, more often than not, leaving her mentally as well as physically drained.
Throughout it all, patient and imperturbable on the sidelines, was Konstantin. He maintained a professional distance between himself and Oxana, but was sympathetic towards her on the handful of occasions when the pressure became too much, and she demanded, coldly, to be left alone. ‘Take a day off,’ he told her on one occasion in London. ‘Go and explore the city. And start thinking about your cover-name. Oxana Vorontsova’s dead.’
By November, her training was almost over. She had been staying in a dingy one-star hotel in the Paris suburb of Belleville, and travelling every day to an anonymous office building in La Défense, where a young man of Indian origin was teaching her the finer points of steganography – the science of concealing secret information in computer files. On the final day of the course Konstantin appeared, paid her hotel bill, and accompanied her to an apartment on the Quai Voltaire, on the Left Bank.
The first-floor apartment was furnished with spare, minimal chic. Its occupant was a tiny, fierce-looking woman of about sixty, dressed completely in black, whom Konstantin introduced as Fantine.
Fantine stared at Oxana, appeared unimpressed by what she saw, and asked her to walk around the room. Self-conscious in her faded T-shirt, jeans and trainers, Oxana complied. Fantine watched her for a moment, turned to Konstantin, and shrugged.
And so began the final stage of Oxana’s transformation. She moved into a four-star hotel two streets away, and each morning joined Fantine for breakfast in the first-floor apartment. At nine o’clock every morning a car came for them. On the first day they went to the Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann. Fantine marched Oxana round the department store, ordering her to try on a succession of outfits – daywear, casual, evening – and buying them whether Oxana liked them or not. The tight, flashy clothes to which Oxana was drawn, Fantine dismissed without a glance. ‘I’m trying to teach you Parisian style, cherie, not how to dress like a Moscow streetwalker, which you obviously know how to do already.’
By the end of the day, the car was piled high with shopping bags, and Oxana was beginning to enjoy the company of her ruthlessly critical mentor. Over the week that followed they visited shoe-shops and fashion houses, couture and prêt-à-porter shows, a vintage emporium in St Germain, and the costume and design museum at the Palais Gallieri. At each of these, Fantine offered an unsparing commentary. This was chic, clever and elegant; that was crass, tasteless, and irredeemably vulgar. One afternoon Fantine took Oxana to a hairdresser in the Place des Victoires. Her instructions to the stylist were to proceed as she chose, and to ignore anything that Oxana suggested. Afterwards, Fantine stood her in front of a mirror, and Oxana ran a hand through her short, blunt-cut hair. She liked the look that Fantine had put together for her. The Balenciaga biker jacket, the stripy T-shirt, the low-rise jeans and ankle boots. She looked… Parisian.
Later that afternoon, they visited a boutique selling scent on the rue du Faubourg St Honoré. ‘Choose,’ said Fantine. ‘But choose well.’ For ten minutes Oxana stalked the elegant shop floor, before stopping in front of a glass display cabinet. The assistant watched her for a moment. ‘Vous permettez, Mademoiselle?’ he murmured, handing her a slender glass phial with a scarlet ribbon at its neck. Cautiously, Oxana touched the amber scent to her wrist. Fresh as a spring dawn, but with darker base notes, it spoke to something deep inside her.
‘It’s called Villanelle,’ said the assistant. ‘It was the favourite scent of the Comtesse du Barry. The perfume house added the red ribbon after she was guillotined in 1793.’
‘I shall have to be careful, then,’ said Oxana.
Two days later, Konstantin came to collect her from the hotel. ‘My cover name,’ she said. ‘I’ve chosen it.’
*
As she crosses the Piazza Verdi in Palermo, her heels clicking faintly on the cobblestones, Villanelle glances up at the imposing frontage of Sicily’s, and indeed Italy’s, largest opera house. Palm trees rise from the piazza, their leaves whispering faintly in the warm breeze; bronze lions flank the broad entrance stairway. Villanelle is wearing a silk Valentino dress and elbow-length Fratelli Orsini opera gloves. The dress is red, but so darkly shaded as to be almost black. A spacious Fendi shoulder bag hangs by a slim chain. Villanelle’s face is pale in the evening light, and her hair is pinned up with a long, curved clip. She looks glamorous, if less showy than the socialites in Versace and Dolce & Gabbana thronging the mirrored entrance hall. First nights at the Teatro Massimo are always an occasion, and tonight’s offering is Puccini’s Tosca, one of the most popular operas of all. That the title role is being sung by a local soprano, Franca Farfaglia, makes the occasion unmissable.
Villanelle buys a programme and moves through the entrance hall to the vestibule. The place is filling fast. There’s a buzz of conversation, the muted clink of glasses and an aroma of expensive scent. Ornate wall-lights paint the marble decorations with a soft lemon glow. At the bar she orders a mineral water, and notices that she is being watched by a lean, dark-haired figure.
‘Can I get you something more… interesting?’ he asks, as she pays for her drink. ‘A glass of champagne perhaps?’
She smiles. He is thirty-five, she guesses, give or take a year or two. Saturnine good looks. His shirt is impeccable and his lightweight blazer looks like Brioni. But his Italian has the rasp of Sicily, and there’s an edge of threat in his gaze.
‘I won’t,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’
‘Let me guess. You’re obviously not Italian, even though you speak the language. French?’
‘Sort of. It’s complicated.’
‘So do you like Puccini.’
‘Of course,’ she murmurs. Giacomo Puccini, opera composer. Born 22 December 1858, died 29 November 1924… ‘Although La Bohème is my favourite work.’
‘That’s because you’re French.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Leoluca Messina.’
‘Sylviane Morel.’
‘So what brings you to Palermo, Mademoiselle Morel.’
She is tempted to terminate the conversation. To simply walk away. But he might follow, which would make things worse. ‘I’m staying with friends.’
‘Who?’
‘No one you’d know, I’m afraid.’
‘You’d be surprised who I know. And trust me, everyone here knows me.’
Half turning, Villanelle suddenly allows a smile of recognition to light her face. She waves towards the entrance. ‘Will you excuse me, Signor Messina. My friends are here.’ That was less than convincing, she reproves herself as she edges through the crowd. But there’s something about Leoluca Messina – some long acquaintanceship with violence – that makes her want him to forget her face.
Will Greco come, Villanelle wonders, moving through the crowd with vague purpose, scanning the faces around her as she goes. According to Konstantin’s local contact, who has had several of the front-of-house staff discreetly bribed and questioned, the mafia boss comes to most of the important first nights. He always arrives at the last moment and takes the same box, which he occupies alone, with bodyguards stationed outside. Whether he has actually booked to come tonight has, frustratingly, been impossible to establish. But his protégée, Farfaglia, is singing the lead soprano role. The odds are good.
At considerable cost, Konstantin’s people have secured the neighbouring box to the one Greco favours. It is on the first tier, almost directly adjacent to the stage. With ten minutes to curtain-up, and with the box on her left as yet unoccupied, Villanelle enters the nest of red plush. The box is at once public and private. At the front, perched on one of the gilt chairs, with the scarlet-upholstered rail at chest level, Villanelle can see and be seen by everyone in the auditorium. If she leans forward past the partition, she can see into the front of the boxes on either side of her. With the house lights extinguished, however, each box will become a secret world, its interior invisible.
In the gloom of that unseen, secret world, she slips her bag from her shoulder and takes out a lightweight Rüger automatic pistol with an integrated Gemtech suppressor and inserts a clip of .22 mm low-velocity rounds. Returning the weapon to the bag, she places it on the floor at the base of the partition separating her from the box to her left.
*
In the nine months following her rebirth as Villanelle Faure, she killed two men. Each project was initiated by a one-word text from Konstantin ending in the letters CT, followed by the transmission of detailed background documents – film clips, biographies, surveillance reports, schedules – from sources unknown to her. Each planning period lasted about four weeks, in the course of which she was armed, informed of any logistical support she might expect, and provided with an appropriate identity.
The first target, Yiorgos Vlachos, had been buying radioactive cobalt-60 in Eastern Europe with a probable view to detonating a dirty bomb in Athens. She had put an SP-5 round through his chest as he changed cars in the Piraeus port district. The shot, taken with a Russian VSS at a range of 325 metres, had involved an all-night lie-up under a tarpaulin on a warehouse roof. Later, reliving the event in the safety of her hotel room, Villanelle felt an intense, heart-pounding exhilaration. The dry snap of the suppressed report, the distant smack of the impact, the collapsing figure in the scope.
The second target was Dragan Horvat, a Balkan politician who ran a human trafficking network. His mistake had been to take his work home with him, in the form of a pretty, heroin-addicted seventeen-year-old from Tblisi. Unaccountably, he had fallen in love with her, and taken to flying her on expensive shopping sprees in European capital cities. London was the couple’s favourite weekend destination, and when Villanelle bumped into him in a Bayswater side-street late one evening Horvat smiled indulgently. He didn’t immediately feel the stab wound to the inner thigh that severed his femoral artery, and as he bled to death on the pavement, his Georgian girlfriend watched him with spaced-out eyes, absently twisting the gold bracelet that he’d bought her that afternoon in Knightsbridge.
In between kills Villanelle lived in the Paris apartment. She explored the city, sampled the pleasures it had to offer, and enjoyed a succession of lovers. These affairs always took the same course: the heady pursuit, the devouring days and nights, the abrupt termination of all contact. She simply vanished from their lives, as swiftly and as mystifyingly as she had entered them.
She ran in the Bois de Boulogne every morning, attended a ju-jitsu dojo in Montparnasse, and practised her marksmanship at an elite shooting club in St-Cloud. Meanwhile, unseen hands paid her rent and managed her trading activities, whose proceeds were paid into a current account at the Société Générale. ‘Spend what you like,’ Konstantin told her. ‘But stay under the radar. Live comfortably but not excessively. Don’t leave a trail.’
And she didn’t. She made no surface ripple. Became part of that monochrome army of professionals who hurried from place to place, their solitude stamped into their gazes. What authority imposed the sentences of death that she executed, she didn’t know. She didn’t ask Konstantin, because she was certain that he wouldn’t tell her. What mattered to Villanelle was that she had been chosen. Chosen as the instrument of an all-powerful organisation which had known, just as she herself had always known, that she was different. They had recognised her talent, sought her out, and taken her from the lowest place in the world to the highest, where she belonged. A predator, an instrument of evolution, one of that elite to whom no moral law applied. Inside her, this knowledge bloomed like a great dark rose, filling every cavity of her being.
*
Slowly, the auditorium begins to fill. Sitting back in her seat, Villanelle studies the programme, her face shadowed by the partition. The performance time arrives and the house lights dim, the audience hubbub fading to silence. As the conductor takes his bow, to warm applause, Villanelle hears a figure quietly take his place in the adjoining box . She doesn’t turn, and as the curtain rises on the first act, leans forward to gaze with rapt attention at the stage.
Minute succeeds minute; time is slowed to a crawl. Puccini’s music engulfs Villanelle, but does not touch her. Her consciousness is focused, in its entirety, on the unseen person to her left. She forces herself not to look, but senses his presence like a pulse, malign and infinitely dangerous. At moments, she feels a coldness at the nape of her neck, and knows that he is watching her. Finally the first act ends, the strains of the Te Deum die away, and the crimson and gold curtain falls.
As the house lights come up for the interval, and conversation swells in the auditorium, Villanelle sits as if hypnotised by the opera. Then, without a sideways glance, she stands and leaves the box, noting with her peripheral vision the presence of
two bodyguards who are lounging, bored but watchful, at the end of the corridor.
Moving unhurriedly into the vestibule, she makes her way to the bar and orders a glass of mineral water, which she holds but doesn’t drink. At the far end of the room, she sees Leoluca Messina moving towards her. Pretending she hasn’t seen him, she turns and is absorbed by the crowd, re-emerging near the entrance to the foyer. Outside, on the opera house steps, the heat of the day has not abated. The sky is rose-pink over the sea, a livid purple overhead. Half-a-dozen young men, passing Villanelle, whistle and make appreciative comments in the local dialect.
She returns and takes her place in her box moments before the curtain rises on Act 2. Once again she makes a point of not glancing to her left at Greco; instead, she gazes fixedly at the stage as the opera unfolds. The story is a dramatic one. Tosca, a singer, is in love with the painter Cavaradossi, who has been falsely accused of aiding the escape of a political prisoner. Arrested by Scarpia, the Chief of Police, Cavaradossi is condemned to die. Scarpia, however, proposes a deal: if Tosca gives herself to him, Cavaradossi will be released. Tosca agrees, but when Scarpia approaches her, she seizes a knife and kills him.
The curtain falls. And this time, when Villanelle has finished applauding, she turns to Greco and smiles, as if seeing him for the first time. It is not long before there is a knock at the door of the box. It is one of the bodyguards, a heavy-set man who enquires, not discourteously, if she would care to join Don Salvatore for a glass of wine. Villanelle hesitates for a moment and then politely nods her acceptance. As she steps into the corridor the second bodyguard looks her up and down. She has left her bag in the box, her hands are empty, and the Valentino dress clings to her lean, athletic form. The two men glance knowingly at each other. It is clear that they have delivered many women to their boss. The heavy-set man gestures to the door of Greco’s box. ‘Per favore Signorina…’
Codename Villanelle (Kindle Singles) Page 3