Andy McNab - Exit wound

Semyon pulled a pair of cheap reading glasses from an alloy tube and focused on the back screen.

‘The little fat one, tell him.’

He zoomed in until Spag’s face filled the screen.

The accompanying shrug and shake of his head said it all. As he handed the Nikon back his eyes fixed on mine. He seemed to be apologizing.

‘If he doesn’t know where they are, I need to get into the proving ground. Can he help?’

His eyes bounced between the two of us and he gobbed off some more.

‘OK. We will go to his apartment later tonight and he may have more information.’

I realized I had their relationship all wrong. It wasn’t their apartment. But they’d said a lot more to each other than she was translating. ‘I don’t want to go to his place. I want to meet outside.’

‘No.’ Anna protected him. ‘He may be able to get maps, papers, find out where everyone is in the city. If he is stopped in possession…’ She searched my face. ‘No matter where they are, you will take me.’

Semyon asked something.

Anna turned to me. ‘We do not know your name.’

‘Manley. James Manley.’ I’d always wanted to say that. ‘But you can call me Jim.’

‘Jim, we need to help each other. We get what we want, the pictures that prove the story, then you can do whatever you have been sent to do.’

Semyon stepped forward, his hand extended, but his eyes burnt into mine. There were several messages there, none of them good.

Izmailovsky Park, Moscow

1930 hrs

We followed the crowd out of the ornate, almost Victorian-looking metro station. The thirty-minute non-stop express ride from Sheremetyevo had given me time to check out the others in the carriage.

Once up at street level, Anna fumbled about in her day-sack for a pack of cigarettes. It gave me time to study the twenty or so who’d come up with us.

We headed down a tree-lined avenue littered with empty bottles and rusty cans. Anna’s wheelie-case squeaked over the paving-stones. At the end, set in a large park of patchy grass, was a mock-Russian fortress with bell towers and onion domes. We could have been in Disneyland, if it hadn’t been for the slogans and graffiti daubed on the walls and the methers sparked out beneath them.

We manoeuvred round a group that had gathered to watch and applaud a fire-breather and passed through a pillared gateway topped off with balloons. The Izmailovsky flea-market was huge. You could lose yourself in it – and anyone you needed to.

Anna had chosen well. I wanted somewhere we could disappear for a few hours, that had constant movement and faces that changed quickly. She knew the score. She’d been doing it herself for years. Campaigning journalists weren’t exactly in the Good Lads Club in this country.

Her flat was routinely watched. A hotel was out of the question – they’d want to see our passports. So, it was hang-about time until we went to Semyon’s. After that, the plan was for her to go and collect her car. If Semyon didn’t know where the targets were in Moscow, or if he discovered that they’d already left the city, we’d need to get to the proving ground as fast as we could. The area was the size of Wales, the brochure had said. Finding it was one thing; finding out where exactly the test firing was going to happen was quite another.

Straight ahead there was a long run of stalls. The flea-market was a tourist attraction and kept long hours. A group of Japanese camcorded each other buying tat. Cold War chess sets, brass busts of Lenin, and Russian dolls with Putin and Obama painted on them were flying off the stall. So was the cheap padded coat I asked her to buy me, the sort any respectable granddad would wear. Del was very happy with the US dollars she handed him.

I steered her down an alley that opened up on our right. As we moved behind a rail of hanging T-shirts, I turned and had a quick browse. Nobody was following or taking the slightest interest. I decided I didn’t want a Putin T-shirt after all and we moved on. If someone’s behind you innocently, they might follow you the first time you take a turn. At a push, they might take the second. But nobody follows you round the third side of a square without a fucking good reason.

Anna caught on fast and didn’t need to ask. She pointed to things, smiled and laughed. Sometimes she took my arm. Worst case, I was a foreigner with a girl I had out on appro from the Russian-brides catalogue.

The third right had brought us into the flea-market’s very own B amp;Q district: rows of stalls covered with all your needs if you were building a house or knocking one down, from second-hand screwdriver sets to petrol-powered Kango hammers. I looked at my watch. It was nearly eight and coming to last light. The first stars were out. The temperature had dipped. We still had three or four hours to kill.

We crossed into a place filled with counterfeit DVDs and CDs and Russian rock memorabilia. Techno thumped from a speaker. A guy with a head-load of stubble-length bleached hair tried to get Anna to buy a Prodigy mug. Instead he got back the short, sharp Stalin daughter’s stare and bollocking. We moved on a bit, but not far. The deafening music was good – it made it impossible for anyone to hear our conversation.

She drew my head down and moved her mouth against my ear. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I could feel her breath. I wasn’t going to complain about that.

I pointed to a cafe at the end of the alleyway instead. Embers glowed in an open fire. A guy was cutting neat slices off something roasting over it. I started to head towards it.

‘No, not there.’ She pulled me in the opposite direction.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Somewhere else. Anywhere but there.’

We sat in a bar filled with people, smoke and music. It doubled as a kebab shop, and that was what she bought me to eat. I filled my face and lifted the Pepsi Max can to my mouth. She gunned down Baltika beer from the bottle. I was sure I’d never seen Agnetha do that.

‘Remember, we got a busy time ahead.’

She put down the bottle and picked up her cigarette. She blew the smoke towards the ceiling, as if that was going to stop the nicotine getting anywhere near me. ‘Do not patronize me. If I want a drink I’ll have one. You are not my father.’

‘Is Semyon?’

The cigarette went down and the beer came up. ‘No, he is not. But he is special – perhaps more so, even, than my own father.’

I looked at the ring on her right hand. ‘What about your husband?’

The beer bottle smacked down on the tabletop. ‘Do I ask anything from you? I don’t even know if James Manley is your real name. IranEx is full of people with unreal names. Are you a spy, Jim? I imagine you are.’

I couldn’t help laughing. She didn’t know how much I wished I was. I’d been brought up on old Bond films. ‘No.’

‘I don’t believe you. But that’s OK.’ She nodded at the two remaining kebabs. ‘They will get cold.’

As I kept eating she drank and smoked, deep in her own world. She ordered more drinks and tapped another stick from the pack.

‘What about you? Are you a spy?’ I wiped grease from my mouth. ‘Your Arabic’s good. And your English is better than mine.’

‘I am what I say I am. I like languages, that’s all. Besides, Arabic pretty much came with the territory.’

‘Chechnya?’

‘Yes, and Bosnia, and Afghanistan…’

‘I thought your thing was anti-corruption.’

‘It is. Where do you think M3C sells its weaponry?’

‘Does your source work for them?’

‘Semyon… Semyon is a very trusted friend.’ She spoke the words slowly to emphasize just how much she meant them.