by J. F. Kirwan
‘What was your Number Two like?’
Sergei grew serious. ‘The best.’
She leant forward, played her hunch. ‘So, why did you kill him?’
Sergei’s features locked down. His body seemed to close in on itself. She recognised it; his muscles were all engaged. He was primed to attack. But he was still cuffed to a table. Simon had verified it beforehand. And the table was welded to the floor. He relaxed, his muscles standing down. But she’d seen something in that moment. Something she now knew for certain.
Sergei was a killer.
He said nothing, just glared.
‘Okay, another tack. Why did you bring Nadia in, not one of your own?’
‘Her size. I’ve been over this before. The previous seven times.’
‘So, no one small enough in the entire Russian Navy?’ She studied him. This was the point at which they were in no man’s land. They both knew he was implicated, but he was still playing the part. Ironically this was the best chance to get actual intel. Once he knew they had hard evidence, it would come down to torture, and he seemed the type who could hold out another twenty hours. She needed to proceed carefully. Prod, retreat, prod, retreat. Find a button. She reckoned she already had it. His loyalty to his crew. The crew he’d betrayed.
‘What about Ivan Tekla? He was perfect for the job. Slim, expert diver, knew the sub, already won a commendation for bravery in Chechnya.’
Sergei glanced ever so briefly at her naked left wrist. He wanted to know what time it was. But Lorne had taken her watch off before entering.
Sergei shrugged. ‘He’d gone AWOL. We couldn’t find him. Not for the first time.’
‘Would it surprise you to know that he still hasn’t turned up?’
He did appear to register surprise, at least facially. She tried to watch his pupils, to see if they dilated, but he glanced upward to the strip light, and they constricted. Clever.
‘Yes,’ he said, lowering his face back towards hers. ‘Salamander must have taken him, then. He must have wanted Nadia there. To get revenge after the Rose affair.’
He hadn’t said the last part like a question. More like an affirmation. There was something else there as well. Anger? How much did Sergei know about the Rose? That Cheng Yi had been Salamander’s son? How much had Nadia told him? That was the trouble when agents slept with each other – everything got blurred, including the rules of the game. Nadia was still relatively inexperienced at this. Sergei wasn’t. Had he slept with her for that reason?
Jake was right. Sergei was lying. She continued with her hunch.
‘Nadia didn’t know what your crew looked like.’
He glanced at her wrist again. Why? What was he waiting for?
‘She didn’t need to,’ he said.
‘I beg to differ. If some of the original crew had still been alive, she could have shot them, mistaken them for terrorists.’ This had been Jake’s point. The big what-if? As in, what if Nadia’s version of everything that had happened back on the sub had been the wrong way round?
‘Didn’t go down that way,’ Sergei said, waving his hand dismissively, rattling the chain. But his voice had lost its spring, as if he was tired of playing.
She paused, thought about saying the killer line, the one that would end the charade, but decided to try one last angle.
‘When the sub was filling, Nadia said you dived to retrieve something, said you were gone some time, maybe two minutes.’
‘I needed to find the arming control. The case. I suddenly guessed where it was. I couldn’t leave it there.’ His voice definitely had an edge. The lie detector sensors should be spiking all over the place. Why wasn’t anyone outside the room reacting?
He was looking at her oddly. She couldn’t put her finger on it. It was as if…as if he hated her. She felt her own muscles engage. Her hands left the table, and she folded her arms, her fingers curling into loose fists.
She focused on what he’d just said, even though her instincts told her to get out of there. On the face of it, his statement was plausible. But she didn’t do plausible. He could have done something else during those two minutes. Erased the internal video storage, for example, because someone had. So they’d never know what had actually happened. Time to close this.
‘A deep-water submersible sent a robot drone into the sub yesterday. Something key was missing. The ship’s logs. The memory chips had been pulled.’
He said nothing. Just that stare. Nadia should see him now. The real Sergei.
She leaned forward. ‘What did your Number Two look like?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Was he in fact bald-headed with a prominent scar down his right cheek? You see, that’s who Nadia saw you interrogating.’
Sergei sat there, a coiled spring. A trapped animal. Handcuffed. No suicide pill.
‘Let me tell you what I think happened,’ Lorne said. ‘You set up the sub, probably a rendezvous with a mini-sub that was under your direct orders, eyes-only for your Number Two. It should have resulted in a clean take-over of the sub. That’s what Salamander wanted. A nuclear sub he could simply point at London, and maybe a few other capitals for all I know. But your crew were well trained. You had trained them too well, and they fought back, gained the upper hand, just.’
She stood up, looked down on him. ‘You didn’t go there to rescue the sub, you went there to finish the job. You got Nadia to do your dirty work for you, killing one of your crew in the torpedo room. The bodies piled up there were terrorists, not crew. And you took out Boris and Dmitri, then tortured your own Number Two for the case to enable the warhead, which he’d hidden. And you didn’t count on the last man there, either, at the stern of the sub, your rudder man.’
Her phone beeped. She opened a message. The crew manifest. She scrolled through until she found the image of a bearded man, wild blue eyes. ‘Your rudder man, Joksimovich, the man Nadia described.’ She put the phone on the table and pivoted it around so Sergei got a good look. ‘As soon as he saw you, he started up the engines and tried to take you and Nadia, whom he presumed to be on your side, to crush depth with him. That’s why the sub was on that ledge. It wasn’t by accident. They were waiting for you, Sergei.’
Sergei looked at her, his lips twisting as if he’d eaten something sour. He gave a very slow clap with his hands, rattling the chains. ‘Bravo,’ he said. ‘You’d make your father proud.’
Inwardly she flinched. Her father? He’d been dead for twenty years. She turned the spotlight back to him.
‘When did Salamander recruit you? What did he promise you?’ They’d been through Sergei’s records. There was a hazy period of two years when he’d been stationed in Afghanistan.
‘Does it matter, Virginia? Honestly?’
She flinched again, not bothering to mask it this time. Why did he know her real first name? She had always used her second name, Sara, with anyone who was remotely close, even Jake – everyone else knew her as Lorne.
Something was very wrong here.
He leaned forward, as close as he could, and whispered, ‘You’re missing something.’ He sat back. That smile again. It shouldn’t be there. His ass was fried. He must know they’d torture him now, until the bitter end.
She tried to stay calm. At least on the outside. It had always served her well. ‘What am I missing?’ she said. She thought about ending it now. But…she was curious.
‘There’s a single, central question you haven’t asked me. Now you know what I am.’
She ran it through her head. She knew what he was. A terrorist working for Salamander. She’d just asked why he worked for him, but there was one question she hadn’t asked. MI6 thought they’d caught him. But of course he’d walked right through the front door.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
He slammed his fists down on the table. Her eyes widened as the chain snapped apart, and he stood up. She glanced at the chain. One of the links had been saw
n almost to breaking point. She touched the emergency button under the table and then backed away fast, her chair scraping behind her. The door should open now, armed guards should rush in and either shoot or Taser him. They didn’t. The door was locked from the outside.
Standard procedure.
Sergei stretched his arms wide. ‘Why am I here? To be captured by MI6. To be interviewed by none other than Virginia Sara Lorne, daughter of Gideon Lorne.’
Her breathing sped up. She crouched slightly. The mole. He’d locked her in. The only person who… Simon. Shit! She needed to warn Jake. No matter. She could take Sergei. He was pure muscle, but he wasn’t armed. And then a knife slid out from his sleeve. One knife. Okay… She could still… A second knife slid from his other sleeve.
Fuck. She was dead.
Sergei walked slowly around the table. ‘Gideon Lorne, the young man who promised sanctuary to two spies, two unsung heroes who prevented a nuclear war. And then he betrayed them.’
She hadn’t known. Those files had been destroyed. Would it make a difference if she told him she didn’t know? No.
‘I’m here to kill you, Lorne.’ He stopped, spread his arms wide again. ‘Take your best shot, because in three seconds you’re out of the game.’
For the first time ever, her hands trembled. All her training told her there was no way to win this. But she had to try. She took a deep breath, kicked off her shoes, and attacked.
***
Five years earlier
Nadia was back in Kadinsky’s training camp in Siberia. It was near graduation day, which was good and bad. Good because she and the others wanted to get the hell out of there. Bad because if you failed you didn’t leave. Ever.
She’d passed everything so far. There was one more test for her and another one of Kadinsky’s recruits, Tomas, a tall, wiry ginger-haired guy, all sinews, brilliant and a crack shot, but edgy as hell, as if he’d downed too many espressos. The Chef stood in front of them. He didn’t look like a chef. Compact, a bland face you wouldn’t remember, unless he looked you in the eye. If you watched him, you realised he had economy of movement down to an art form, but when he did move it was either like a dancer, or explosive. The perfect assassin. A contortionist to boot. No one knew his story. Nobody dared ask.
When he spoke, she sat up and listened. There were no guards in the camp, only the Chef and a dozen trainees. In theory, they could have ganged up and killed him.
In theory.
‘You’re a bodyguard,’ he said to Nadia. ‘An assassin wants to kill the client you are there to protect. Let’s do this. Nadia, here, Tomas, there.’ He pointed. Tomas was the client, Nadia the bodyguard, the Chef the assassin.
‘I have a weapon, but not in my hands. First I take down the bodyguard, who is armed.’ He handed her a shoulder harness with pistol. She put it on. ‘I don’t need to kill the bodyguard, just take him or her out of play. Like this.’ He struck Nadia on the chin. Not hard, but hard enough. She went down. And tried to come back up, drawing her weapon. But the barrel of his gun was already on her forehead, its cool metal on her skin. He squeezed the trigger. Click. He swung his weapon towards Tomas, aimed at his head and squeezed the trigger a second time. Click.
‘You failed, Nadia. You and your client are dead. Get up. Tomas, approach.’
Tomas and Nadia stood side by side.
‘You both know the mechanics of knocking someone out. You’ve passed that test. A carefully aimed punch to the face, a rap of a gun hilt near the base of the neck. And if you move just a fraction?’
‘It doesn’t work,’ Tomas said.
‘Show me.’ The Chef drew back his fist, slowly, then cannoned it forward at Tomas.
Tomas twitched his face clockwise, just a fraction, a few degrees. He went down, but then got up. He didn’t rub his chin, though Nadia knew it must sting like hell.
‘That is the easy part,’ the Chef said. ‘Nadia, fall down as if knocked out or shot in the heart.’
She fell to the floor.
‘No. An unconscious or dead person doesn’t fall like that. Watch.’ He moved back to the desk and opened up his large laptop. She and Tomas came over. He showed videos of people falling, after either being struck or shot. Nadia realised these weren’t actors or stuntmen. These were real. Snuff movies. She felt nauseous but suppressed it. Learn or die. That’s what the Chef had said to them every day since their arrival. Four of the original fifteen hadn’t learned enough.
She studied how they fell.
‘The key difference is that there is no attempt at protecting the body, particularly the head.’ He closed the laptop. ‘Nadia, fall.’
She did. But even as she did so, she felt her shoulders hunch slightly.
‘Again.’
She tried several times. So did Tomas. She did it until her head whacked against the floor. After an hour he let them rest. Then he added the punches, the pistol-whips, and the body shots with live ammo where they wore bulletproof vests. At the end, he said, ‘Tomorrow is the final test.’
With that, he left.
Nadia and Tomas stayed up late. They talked, stilted at first, then more fluidly as the hours ticked by, about what they’d do after, laughing about another trainee who’d shot himself in the foot, joking about how they should all get together, kill the Chef, and set up their own cartel of assassins. They never once mentioned the rumour that on graduation day only one trainee ever passed. Finally they shook hands, said goodnight and tried to catch some sleep.
The next morning the Chef took them out to the lake. It was minus twenty, and after five minutes they were shivering. The Chef attached a length of steel chain to Nadia’s ankle, then a similar one to Tomas’s. The other end of both heavy chains were loosely attached to two hooks screwed into the ice.
The Chef carried a Kalashnikov. He unshouldered it, and blasted away at the ice, creating two more or less oval holes, one behind Nadia, one behind Tomas. The water was blue, almost the colour of a fancy cocktail, but much colder. He put down the weapon.
‘The final test. I knock you down. You must fall, as if unconscious, into the water, wait ten seconds, then surface. If you do not do it well…’ He nudged the chains with his boot. ‘Nadia, you first.’
He didn’t give her time to prepare or even take a breath. His fist lashed out at her left cheek, and she twitched her chin a fraction in the right direction, towards the oncoming punch, then collapsed into the freezing tomb, forcing herself not to flinch, whether through fear of freezing and drowning, or simple fear at failing and then being executed. The ice water enveloped her, went into her nostrils and mouth, almost making her gag and choke. Still she remained listless, and began counting. More than thirty seconds and the surface would freeze over anyway, and she’d be trapped. She drifted, down, until the length of chain halted her descent.
Nine… Ten. She swam upwards, clawed her way through the sticky surface and heaved herself back up onto the ice. The Chef didn’t help her, and it wasn’t easy, but she got out, and she realised she was laughing, and almost crying, too. She’d passed. She was going back to Moscow; she’d see Katya again. She got to her knees, ignoring the cold biting into her flesh. The Chef nodded to her.
‘Well done, Nadia. I am pleased.’
She grinned, the cat who’d got the cream, and then she looked around, to congratulate Tomas. But his chain was gone, the hole to his watery grave already icing over.
The Chef crouched down to unlock the chain from her ankle. As it fell from her leg she sprang up, kneed him in the face, dived over him towards the Kalashnikov, rolled, and came back up, the rifle pointed at his head. She pulled the trigger.
Click.
The Chef stood up. ‘Now you are ready.’
***
Today
Jake nodded to her and she stepped forward from behind the cupboard. Simon’s fist shot towards her jaw. Without even thinking about it, her face twitched a fraction, just a few degrees, towards the
inbound punch. She let her mouth go slack and her jaw swivel as Simon’s knuckles connected with her cheekbone, her arms fluttering for a second before she fell vertically, her legs twisting in an ungainly way beneath her as gravity arched her back and she hit the cupboard with her head, which then bounced forwards.
When her head finally hit the floor, her own left hand slammed into her face, just below the right eye. She settled in a position that would have made a yoga adept wince. The tranquiliser pistol was still in her right hand.
Her eyes weren’t fully closed – as they wouldn’t be – and she watched Simon as if in slow motion. He had pulled out a weapon with a silencer barrel.
‘I need to know,’ Simon asked Jake. ‘Did you really see Blue Fan?’
Jake must have shaken his head. Nadia had only one shot, but needed to aim carefully. ‘Simon?’ she said, half-groggy, so that he turned her way, the gun still pointing at Jake. She swung her arm upwards and she fired the dart straight into his neck. He pulled the trigger, but Jake had already moved. The bullet ricocheted off masonry behind Jake’s bed.
Now it was Simon’s turn to fall. He did it pretty well, except his eyes stayed open and he tried to move his jaw. With difficulty she untangled herself and caught the back of his head before it hit the deck, and rammed her fingers into his mouth to find the suicide pill. She plucked it out, and rolled it between her fingers. Intact. He’d had time to dislodge it, but not to crack it open.
Jake stood over them. ‘We have to find Lorne, right now.’
Two armed guards arrived, weapons drawn. They pointed them at Nadia.
‘No. He was the mole,’ Jake said. ‘Cuff him and take him to the Ops room.’
As they manhandled Simon, Jake placed his forefinger vertically across his lips, and held out his hand to Nadia. She gave him the pill. He put it in his pocket, and they followed the guards.
***
The door to the interrogation room was still locked, three guys dead on the floor outside, but Nadia and Jake could see perfectly through the bulletproof one-way mirror. Sergei on his back, a knife sticking out of his throat. Lorne…