The brink of war? If Lily Xirau was murdered in Caspian there would be no war.
“War” implies a conflict that each side has a chance of winning. The Triumvirate would burn the republic to ashes in a matter of hours.
But as long as Papalazarou had a slim chance of regaining his hold on StaSec, what did that matter? It was the Morrison Crisis all over again, except now, instead of sacrificing his own agents, he would risk the entire nation for his own ambition.
I hated him. This half-dead, machine-voiced abomination. Why couldn’t he simply die? So many had died and yet he still clung to the surface of the earth like a vile parasite.
“Do you … see the box … in front of you?” the metallic voice intoned.
“Yes,” I said.
“Open it.…”
I reached out and opened the box with one hand.
Inside was a thin dagger.
It was, in some ways, a beautiful thing. The handle was slim and silver, a woodland motif engraved around the pommel.
But the blade was a horror. It reminded me of a shark’s mouth, row after row of serrated edges, but all pointing the wrong way. This knife would not slide easily into a human body. It would have to be driven through, chewing and shredding as it went.
“Sorry, South,” said Wernham. “I’d have given you a gun, but I wasn’t sure of your … aim.”
He gave a pestilent smile.
In my ear, the machine voice ground on like a wheel over broken glass.
“You will … take the knife.… You will … return to Room 15.… You will … kill … Lily Xirau.…”
My blood felt ice cold. I was trying to wake up. But I couldn’t. This was happening.
“Wernham … will be watching.… If you fail … you will die.… Good day … Agent … South.…”
The line went dead. I lowered the phone from my ear.
Wernham held out his hand and I tossed it back to him.
“Right,” said Wernham. “Shall we get to it?”
I realized that what terrified me most was not what I was being asked to do, or the thought of dying. It was the knowledge that, if I had been forced to do this yesterday, I almost certainly would have. Would any man or woman in the Caspian Republic have sacrificed their life for code?
And that was what Papalazarou and Wernham were counting on. To their minds they were asking me to crush a beetle, or stamp on a snake. They could not imagine that I would consider Lily worth gambling my life on.
But Lily was real to me now. Everything had changed.
I gripped the handle of the dagger tightly and wondered if I could fling it at Wernham.…
No. Too risky. I doubted I had the strength to land a killing blow, and I doubted my aim even more. He was smart, keeping me at a distance. He would probably escort me down to the third floor, shadowing me from behind. If I tried to run for it, or talk to anyone, he would shoot. But he wouldn’t be able to follow me inside Room 15. He wasn’t cleared. That was why he needed me in the first place. He needed someone who could get past Coe’s DSD men.
Therefore, the best approach would simply be to reenter Room 15 … and do nothing. Not particularly heroic, but undoubtedly the safest option. Wait him out. Wernham couldn’t lay siege forever. If I could get a message to Lubnick, and tell him what was happening, so much the better.
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”
He gave another execrable grin. And then he shot me.
Or at least, I was certain he had.
I heard the shot, and I could have sworn I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. But it was simply my innards contracting in shock at the noise.
Wernham’s head cracked and dribbled like an egg.
In the doorway stood Sally Coe, already holstering her gun. She casually strolled over to Wernham’s body and stared at his brain matter, which lay scattered across the roof like a drunkard’s vomit.
“My, my,” she said, as if to herself, and she prodded the brain with the toe of her boot. “It does exist. I feel like I’ve seen a unicorn.”
She looked up and stared at me.
“You okay, South?” she said. “You look a little queasy.”
I nodded and the world shook with the movement.
I dropped the knife and leaned on the table for support. I felt like I was going to pass out.
Sally, meanwhile, was looking out over the canal side of the roof and studying the distance between the ledge and the water.
“Right,” she said at last. “Give me a hand, will you?”
She went to lift Wernham’s body and I realized that she wanted to throw him over the side.
I couldn’t follow her logic. Surely we must hide him? Somehow get him down to the ground and into a car and leave him in some wasteland where no one would find him.…
I felt a sudden blast of nausea at how easily I was slipping into the mind-set needed to dispose of a body.
Sally laid it out for me with calm precision.
“Wernham on the roof is a problem,” she explained. “Wernham floating down the canal with his brains blown out is a message.”
Of course. It is only the little people who have to trifle with actually hiding their kills. Wernham was known, to a certain substrata within ParSec and StaSec alike, as a dud note. A slut. Only the people on this roof would ever know who actually killed Nard Wernham, but everyone would suspect. And that was exactly to Sally’s purpose. Wernham would serve as a cautionary tale to any StaSec agent who felt tempted to sell themselves, and to any ParSec hood with designs on their virtue.
Fumbling, like a man in a dream, I followed Sally’s instructions and took Wernham’s body by the elbow and knee while Sally lifted his other half.
“Right,” she said. “On three…”
We cantered to the roof’s edge and clumsily lobbed Wernham’s body over the side. He rolled through the air and the remains of his head collided with the hard bank of the canal, leaving a smear of brain and blood on the concrete.
Sally swore, but then the rest of the body rolled over and lazily tumbled into the water and began its long, slow journey to the Caspian Sea.
Sally lit a cigarette and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Ah well,” she said. “Good enough for government work.”
28
“Coe. The brothers and sisters on the street feared StaSec. StaSec feared ParSec.
ParSec feared the Devil.
And the Devil feared Sally Coe.”
—Nadia Evershan, The Old Baku Girl: My Journey from State Security Agent to Rebel
She turned and sat down on the roof, leaning her back against the stone wall. I sat down beside her.
“So,” she said. “What exactly was all that about?”
I told Sally everything. When I got to the part about the smartphone, she stopped me.
“Where is it now?” she asked.
In Wernham’s pocket, I told her. In Wernham’s jacket. Slowly drifting toward the Caspian Sea as we spoke.
“Shit,” said Coe. “Shit. That would have been useful to have.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot.”
“Oh, not your fault,” she said cheerily. “Not your fault. You’ve been having a rough one, haven’t you?”
“Did you know about this?” I asked. “That Papalazarou is still conscious?”
She gazed at me with those implacable gray eyes, and drew on her cigarette.
“What do you think, Nicky?”
“So you’re keeping him prisoner?”
“Hardly,” she snorted. “He can’t even move. He pisses in a bag.”
“But he is awake?”
“Well … if he was,” said Sally, “that would mean he should be back running StaSec, and not Gussie. Would you like that, Nicky?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes. That would be rather ghastly, wouldn’t it? So let’s say he’s not.”
We said nothing for a few moments.
“Thank you,” I said at las
t.
“Don’t mention it,” she said. “And I mean that quite literally. I think if we never speak of this again it’ll be better for both of us.”
“Of course,” I said.
She winked at me.
“No worries, classmate.”
Classmate. Of course. That’s what she was doing here. That’s how she had found me.
“I need to ask you something,” I said.
“Hmm,” she murmured.
“That night. September 9, 2184. The PCPP.”
“Oh yes,” she said, as if I were asking her about a neighbor we had both grown up with.
“We killed them. Didn’t we? All of them.”
She turned to look at me, as expressive as a gravestone.
“Yes,” she said.
And that was that.
I had known, of course. I had known almost from the beginning. But now it was more than knowledge. It was fact. I had taken part in a massacre.
A purge. Had even ParSec ever murdered an entire political party in the dead of night? I owed Chernov an apology. Who was I to look down on him?
“There were no survivors?” I asked.
“None.”
“You shot them all?”
“No.”
“But you said…”
“I said we killed them all, Nicky.”
I looked at her, confused.
“That was Little Papa’s … test? Joke? Game? Fetish? Christ, I don’t know,” she said. “He’s a nasty man, Nicky. I don’t mind men, actually. Most of you I’m actually rather fond of. It’s always nice to meet someone with whom one shares a hobby. But him? I would piss on him if he was on fire, but only the parts that weren’t burning. He didn’t think we had it in us. The female agents. He didn’t think we were hard enough. So he told us that we were going to carry out the executions. You boys would bring them in, we would … show them out. He left us with the guns. And our orders. And then he drove off. So we got to work. We’d take them in, line them up against the wall…”
Half-heartedly, she mimed shooting a gun with her hand.
“We took it in turns. Bringing them in. Carrying the bodies off. The shooting. Gussie took the lead. She insisted that it be done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. No dithering about. Just bring them in. Shoot them. Carry them off. Quicker that way. Easier for everyone, including the Progs. Don’t even let them realize what’s happening. That quick. You have to realize that about her, Nicky, she’s not cruel. She does what she has to do, but she doesn’t want anyone to suffer more than they have to. We’d gotten through around a hundred before we discovered Little Papa’s game.”
She fell silent.
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He’d given us the Progs,” said Coe, softly. “And he’d given us the guns. But he hadn’t given us enough rounds. So there we were. There we were.”
She took a deep drag from her cigarette.
“And then someone noticed the steel tubes in the corner. Scaffolding, you know? When someone suggested it, I thought they were joking. But you can’t purge half a party, can you? It was all or nothing. And we had our orders. And we certainly weren’t going to give the bastard the satisfaction. We were going to show him. We weren’t weak. We weren’t soft. We were gullivers. Every last one of us. So that’s how we did it.”
I remembered the figure, arms handcuffed behind their back. Running. Screaming. Scalp flapping as they ran. The hole where the nose had been.
The humanity beaten out of them.
“We clubbed thirty-five people to death with steel bars,” she reflected. “In one night. Almost certainly a record. For StaSec, at least.”
“I didn’t know,” I whispered.
“Well of course you didn’t,” she said. “It’s a big fucking state secret and if you tell anyone you’ll be going on a swimming trip with Wernham. Sorry, South, but I do have to make that clear. I’m telling you this because you were there and I owe you for … for your help. But let’s not forget ourselves, am I clear?”
“I understand, Senior Special Agent,” I said. “But there’s something else I need to ask you.”
She gestured for me to go on.
“Do you remember a woman among the prisoners? Short. Mid-twenties. Arabian. Quite dark. Long black…”
“Oh fuck…,” Sally breathed. “You mean her. Manukov’s daughter. That’s who you mean.”
I said nothing. I simply exhaled, as if for the last time.
The truth of the moment felt lethal. Poisonous.
“I’m sorry, South,” she said. “I truly am.”
“What happened?” I rasped, like a threat. “How?”
Sally actually sounded like she was about to cry.
“It was … such a stupid…”
She took another drag from her cigarette and released it in a great cloud.
“They found her in bed with one of the Progs. A local party head named … Lucian … Casternan. I think that was his name. Lucian C-something. They tell him he’s under arrest. And then they ask her who she is. She doesn’t want to get her father in trouble, so she gives a fake name. She tells them she’s Casternan’s wife.”
“I see,” I said.
“Casternan’s wife. An organizer for the Progs. Who’s out of the city.”
“But who is also on their list,” I whispered.
Sally nodded.
“She thinks it’s just a night in the cells, probably. She doesn’t think it’s worth dragging Manukov into. He’d taken a lot of heat for her already.”
“But Manukov was there!” I wailed. “He was there! Why didn’t he…”
“He had gone home,” said Sally. “After the shooting started. I saw him leave, he looked like a ghost. Eyes staring out of his head. Haunted. He left. She arrived, maybe an hour later.”
An hour. If she had arrived an hour earlier, or if Vassily had had a stronger stomach …
“She was brought in. They asked her name. Again, she said she was Mrs. Casternan. She was brought in and lined up against the wall. She just had enough time to realize what was happening. She shouted out her name. It was too late.”
I got to my feet, grabbed the table Wernham had set up and smashed it against the concrete stairwell. Coe watched me silently.
When I was done I turned to look at her.
“Meghri,” I growled.
“What?”
“She was killed in Kobustan. How did she end up in a forest in FUCKING MEGHRI!” I bellowed, and Coe actually reached for her gun.
I didn’t move. And slowly, she withdrew her hand from the inside of her jacket, empty.
“Papalazarou came back before daybreak. He recognized…”
“Zahara,” I hissed. “Her name was Zahara.”
“He recognized her. He was panicked. Terrified. He seemed to completely shut down. He had this idea that Manukov could get his friends in the army to have him killed.”
“And then?”
“And then Gussie stepped forward. And she told him that she would get rid of the body. She was the one who drove her out to the forest.”
“Niemann?” I said. Wake up.
Coe nodded sadly.
“Yes. She saved him, that night. Just in case you ever wondered how a woman became deputy director working for the worst misogynist in Eurasia.”
“Did Manukov ever find out?” I asked at last.
“You were his son-in-law, South,” said Coe. “You’d know better than I would.”
Yes. Yes of course, he knew. If Niemann hadn’t been unlucky and Zahara’s body hadn’t been discovered so soon after, he probably would never have put the two together. But Vassily was no fool. He had seen the executions firsthand. He would have figured it out. But he didn’t blame Papalazarou. He blamed himself. Because he hadn’t been there. Because he could have saved her.
I tried to save her, Nicky.
But you didn’t, Vassily. You didn’t.
And then you gave me your ispoved, your confes
sion, for Olesya.
And when you died, she read it. She read how StaSec had killed her beloved sister.
StaSec? Or …
I felt a sudden, horrific sense of weightlessness. I was back in the harsh white light in the dusty purgatory of Kobustan. A figure running toward me. A human being, whittled to the bloody core, beaten past recognition.
Oh God. Spare me this. I will bear anything. But spare me this.
“Sally…,” I said, so low she wasn’t sure she had heard me. “Tell me it wasn’t her. The one I killed. Tell me that was not Zahara.”
She stood up.
She looked me square in the eye.
“No,” she said. “She wasn’t beaten. She was shot. And she was already dead by the time you got there.”
Had I expected relief? None came.
Sally Coe lied for a living, and was the greatest in her field.
“Would you lie to me, to spare me?” I asked her, like a man in a trance.
“No,” she said.
“Would you lie to me, to spare me?” I asked again.
“No,” said Sally Coe.
So there was my truth. Or as close as I would ever get to it.
Because I would never really know. I would never know if Sally Coe was lying to me out of pity. I would never know what Vassily had told Olesya in his ispoved. I would never know how much Olesya blamed me and hated me for the death of her beloved sister. And yet, all the pieces I had showed me the outline of the ones that were missing.
Of course she hated me. Of course she blamed me. Even if she knew I had not killed her sister with my own hands.
It’s you. As long as you carry a gun for them, you’re part of it. It’s all you.
And then, at last, I felt a weight being lifted. I finally understood.
I laughed.
I saw the concern in Coe’s eyes.
“Are you all right, South?” she asked softly.
“Did you ever meet my wife, Sally?” I asked her. “Olesya Vassilyevna? Old Manukov’s daughter?”
She didn’t answer but I carried on: “Do you know what she did? She ran away from home. Never wrote. Never called. Just up and gone in the night. Ignored me for months. And then she came back. Pretended that she was ready to make it work. Made me fall in love with her all over again. Made me need her. Made me unable to live without her. Buried herself in me so deep I could never get her out. And then she divorced me. Just to hurt me. And she died. And I’m starting to think that she did that just to hurt me, too. She burned me alive. She skinned me and bled me. She poisoned me. She murdered me. She fed me to the dogs. She hollowed me out. And do you know why, Sally? Do you know why she did that?”
When the Sparrow Falls Page 21