Luke Jennings: Codename Villanelle

“So how come you’re not shorting the Nikkei Share Index or whatever it is that day-traders do?” Anne-Laure asks, when they are finally installed at a table.

Villanelle smiles. “Even super-capitalists need a day off. Besides, I wanted to hear about this new guy of yours.” She looks around her at the shining silver and glassware, the flowers, the paintings, the golden wash of the lights. Outside, beyond the tall windows, the sky has faded to a snow-laden grey, and the Carousel Gardens are almost deserted.

As they eat, and Anne-Laure talks about her new amour , Villanelle makes attentive noises. But her mind is elsewhere. Fine-living and designer clothes are all very well, but it’s months now since the Palermo operation, and she badly needs to feel her heart race with the prospect of action. More than that, she wants confirmation that she’s valued, that the organisation regards her as a prime asset.

She can still see, half a world away, the grim sprawl of the Dobryanka remand centre. Was it worth it? Konstantin had asked her. Throwing her life away to avenge her father, himself a man who’d gone to the bad. Put like that, of course, it wasn’t worth it. But given her time again, she knew that she’d act exactly as she’d acted that night.

Her father had been a close-quarter battle instructor before he’d started freelancing for the Brothers’ Circle. And although Boris Vorontsov hadn’t been the ideal parent, given to whoring and heavy drinking, and dumping Oxana in the orphanage whenever he went away on active service, he was her flesh and blood, and all she had after her mother’s death.

There hadn’t been many birthday or New Year presents, but her father had taught her to defend herself, and more. There had been memorable days in the forest, wrestling in the snow, shooting at tin cans with his old Makarov service pistol, and lopping through birch-trunks with his Spetsnaz-issue machete. She’d hated the machete at first, finding it heavy and unwieldy, but he’d taught her how it was all in the timing. That if you got it right, the weight of the blade and the arc of the swing did the job for you.

She’d found out easily enough who killed him. Everyone knew; that was the point. Boris had tried, clumsily, to defraud the Brothers, and they’d shot him and left his body in the street. The following evening Oxana walked into the Pony Club on Ulitsa Pushkina. The three men she was looking for were standing near the bar, drinking and laughing, and when she sauntered up to them, smiling suggestively, they fell silent. In her army-surplus jacket and supermarket jeans she didn’t look much like a shlyukha , a whore, but she was certainly acting like one.

Oxana stood there for a moment in front of them, looking from face to face with taunting, amused eyes. Then she dropped into a crouch, her arms reaching back between her shoulder blades for the machete in its webbing holster, and drove upwards through her knees as her father had taught her. Half a kilo of titanium-finished steel blurred the air, the chisel-edge passing unchecked through the first man’s throat before burying itself deep below the second man’s ear. The third man’s hand dived to his waistband, but too late: Oxana had already let go of the machete and drawn the Makarov. Around her, she was vaguely aware of panicked breathing, suppressed screams, people backing away.

She shot him through the open mouth. The report was deafening in the enclosed space, and for a moment he just stood there staring at her, blood and brain-matter spilling from a gaping white flap of bone at the back of his head. Then his legs went, and he hit the floor beside the first man, who was somehow still on his knees, a desperate, dregs-of-the-milkshake rasp issuing from the bubbling gash beneath his chin. The third man wasn’t finished yet, either. Instead, he was lying in a foetal position in the spreading red lake, his feet working feebly and his fingers plucking at the machete embedded in the angle of his jaw.

Oxana watched them, annoyed at their failure to die. It was the kneeling man who really infuriated her, making that sick, Strawberry McFlurry noise. So she knelt beside him, drenching her Kosmo jeans in blood. His gaze was failing, but the eyes still held a question. “I’m his daughter, you cunt,” she whispered and, pressing the Makarov’s barrel to the nape of his neck, squeezed the trigger. Again, the detonation was appallingly loud, and the man’s brains went everywhere, but the sucking noise stopped.

“ Chérie !”

She blinks. The restaurant swims back into focus. “Sorry, I was miles away… What did you say?”

“Coffee?”

Villanelle smiles at the waiter hovering patiently at her side. “Small espresso, thank you.”

“Honestly, sweetie, sometimes I wonder where you go in these daydreams of yours. Are you seeing someone you haven’t told me about?”

“No. Don’t worry, you’d be the first to know.”

“I’d better be. You can be so mysterious at times. You should come out with me more often, and I don’t mean shopping or fashion shows. I mean…” She draws a fingertip down the frosted stem of her champagne flute. “More fun stuff. We could go to Le Zéro Zéro or L’Inconnu. Meet some new people.”

In her bag, Villanelle’s phone buzzes. A single word text-message: CONNECT.

“I have to go. Work.”

“Oh, please, Vivi, you’re impossible. You haven’t even had your coffee.”

“I’ll do without.”

“You’re so boring .”

“I know. Sorry.”

Two hours later Villanelle is sitting in the study of her rooftop apartment in the Porte de Passy. Beyond the plate-glass window the sky is cold steel.

The email contains a few lines of text about skiing conditions in Val-d’Isère, and half-a-dozen JPEG images of the resort are attached. Villanelle extracts the password and accesses the payload of compressed data embedded in the images. It is a face, shot from different angles. A face she memorises like the text. The face of her new target.

Thames House, the headquarters of the British security service MI5, is on Millbank, in Westminster. In the northernmost office on the third floor, Eve Polastri is looking down at Lambeth Bridge and the wind-blurred surface of the river. It’s 4 p.m. and she has just learnt, with mixed feelings, that she is not pregnant.

At the next terminal, her deputy Simon Mortimer replaces his teacup in its saucer. “Next week’s list,” he says. “Shall we run through it?”

Eve takes off her reading glasses and rubs her eyes. Wise eyes, her husband Niko calls them, although she’s only twenty-nine, and he’s almost ten years older. She and Simon have been working together for a little over two months. Their department, known as P3, is a subsection of the Joint Services Analysis Group, and its function is to assess the threat to “high-risk” individuals visiting the UK, and if necessary to liaise with the Metropolitan Police with a view to providing specialist protection.

It’s in many ways a thankless task, as the Met’s resources are not infinite, and specialist protection is expensive. But the consequences of a poor judgement call are catastrophic. As her former head of section Bill Tregaron once said to her, before his career went into freefall: “If you think a live extremist preacher’s a headache, wait until you have to deal with a dead one.”

“Tell me,” Eve says to Simon.

“The Pakistani writer, Nasreen Jilani. She’s speaking at the Oxford Union on Thursday week. She’s had death threats.”

“Plausible?”

“Plausible enough. SO1 have agreed to put a team on her.”

“Go on.”

“Reza Mokri, the Iranian nuclear physicist. Again, full protection.”