Luke Jennings - Codename Villanelle

“Agreed.”

“Then there’s the Russian, Kedrin. I’m not so sure about him.”

“What aren’t you sure about?”

“How seriously we should take him. I mean, we can’t ask the Met to babysit every crackpot political theorist who shows up at Heathrow.”

Eve nods. With her make-up-free complexion and nondescript brown hair gathered in a scrappy up-do, she looks like someone for whom there are more important things than being thought pretty. She might be an academic, or an assistant in the better sort of bookshop. But there’s something about her—a stillness, a fixity of gaze—that tells another story. Her colleagues know Eve Polastri as a hunter, a woman who will not readily let go.

“So who requested protection for Kedrin?” she asks.

“Eurasia UK, the group which organised his visit. I’ve run checks, and they’re—”

“I know who they are.”

“Then you’ll know what I mean. They look more cranky than dangerous. All this stuff about the mystical bonds between Europe and Russia, and how they should unite against the corrupt, expansionist USA.”

“I know. It’s pretty wild. But they’ve got no shortage of supporters. Including in the Kremlin.”

“And Viktor Kedrin’s their poster boy.”

“He’s the ideologist. The face of the movement. Charismatic figure, apparently.”

“But not at immediate risk in London, surely?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“I mean, who would he be at risk from? The Americans aren’t crazy about him, obviously, but they’re not going to call in a drone strike on High Holborn.”

“Is that where he’s going to be staying?”

“Yes, at somewhere called The Vernon.”

Eve nods. “I suppose you’re right. We don’t need to trouble Protection Command with Mr. Kedrin. But I think I might go to his talk—I assume he’s addressing the Eurasia UK faithful at some point?”

“The Conway Hall. Friday week.”

“Good. Keep me posted.”

Simon inclines his head in assent. Although only in his twenties, he has the arch solemnity of a metropolitan vicar.

Keying in her identification code, Eve calls up the HST, or High Security Threat list. Circulating among friendly intelligence services, including on–off allies like the Russian FSB and the Pakistani CID, this is a database of known international contract killers. Not local enforcers or fly-in-fly-out shooters, but top-echelon assassins with political clients and price tags affordable only by the seriously wealthy. Some of the entries are lengthy and detailed, others are no more than a code name harvested in the course of surveillance or interrogation.

For over two years now Eve has been building up her own file of unattributed killings of prominent figures. A case she constantly returns to is that of Dragan Horvat, a Balkan politician. Horvat was an exceptionally nasty piece of work, implicated in human trafficking and much else besides, but that didn’t save Bill Tregaron when Horvat was murdered in Central London on his watch. Relieved of his post, Bill was seconded to GCHQ, the government listening centre at Cheltenham, and Eve, previously his deputy, became head of section at P3.

Horvat was killed on a trip to London with his girlfriend, a seventeen-year-old heroin addict from Tblisi named Irema Beridze. Officially, he was in London as a member of a high-ranking trade delegation; in truth, he and Irema spent most of their time shopping. They had just left a Japanese restaurant in a poorly lit side street in Bayswater when a hurrying figure bumped hard into Horvat, almost knocking him down.

In a cheerful mood, well lubricated by sake, Horvat was initially unaware that he had been stabbed. Indeed, he apologised to the disappearing figure before becoming aware of the warm blood pumping from his groin. Open-mouthed with shock, he sunk to the pavement, one hand clamped uselessly to his severed femoral artery. It took him less than two minutes to die.

Irema was still standing there, shivering and uncomprehending, when a party of Japanese businessmen left the restaurant a quarter of an hour later. Their English was imperfect, hers non-existent, and it was a further ten minutes before anyone called the emergency services. Irema was profoundly traumatised, and initially insisted that she could remember nothing about the attack. But patient questioning by an officer from the Metropolitan Police’s SO15 Branch, assisted by a Georgian interpreter, eventually elicited a single key fact. Dragan Horvat’s killer was a woman.

Professional female assassins are very rare indeed, and since joining the Service Eve has been aware of just two. For some years, according to the HST file, the FSB used a woman named Maria Golovkina to execute overseas hits. A member of Russia’s small-bore pistol squad at the Athens Olympics, Golovkina is thought to have been trained in covert assassination at the Spetsnaz base in Krasnodar. There’s also an entry in the file for a Serbian hitwoman, attached to the notorious Zemun clan, named Jelena Markovic.

Neither could have killed Horvat, for the simple reason that by the time the politician met his end in London both were dead. Golovkina had been found hanged in a hotel wardrobe in Brighton Beach more than a year earlier, and Markovic had predeceased her by four months, blown to shreds by a car bomb in Belgrade. So if Irema Beridze was right, it meant that there was a new female assassin abroad. And this interests Eve very much indeed.

Why, she isn’t completely sure. Perhaps because she can’t imagine taking a human life herself, she is fascinated by the notion of a woman for whom killing is unexceptional. Someone who could get up in the morning, make coffee, choose what to wear, and then go out and cold-bloodedly put a total stranger to death. Did you have to be some kind of anomalous, psychopathic freak to do that? Did you have to be born that way? Or could any woman, correctly programmed, be turned into a professional executioner?

Since taking over P3 from Bill, Eve has conducted a discreet but exhaustive search of the live case files for any further suggestion of female involvement in an assassination, and has flagged two references. The first involves the shooting in Germany of Aleksandr Simonov, a Russian business oligarch suspected of funding Chechen and Dagestani militants as part of a deal relating to oil and gas concessions. The assassin, who fired a burst of six rounds from an FN P90 sub-machine gun into Simonov’s chest outside the Frankfurt headquarters of the AltInvest Bank, was wearing despatch-riders’ waterproofs and a full-face motorcycle helmet, and raced away on a machine later identified as a BMW G650Xmoto. Of the dozen or so onlookers questioned afterwards, two stated that they “had the impression” that the shooter was a woman.

The other case, the close-up slaying in Sicily of a Mafia boss named Salvatore Greco, is apparently non-political. Local innuendo attributes the slaying, directly or indirectly, to the dead man’s nephew, Leoluca Messina, who has since assumed the leadership of the Greco clan. But there has also been speculation in the press about an accomplice, the so-called “woman in the red dress.” According to the investigators of the DIA, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, Greco was found dead in a private box at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, following an opera performance. He had been shot in the heart at close range with two low-velocity .22 rounds. His two bodyguards were also found dead on the floor of the box, despatched with single shots to the base of the skull.

Leoluca Messina is known to have been at the theatre that night, and a witness has described seeing him in the bar shortly before curtain-up, talking to a striking dark-haired woman in a red dress. It appears that they were not sitting together, but CCTV footage shows Messina leaving the theatre via the stage door shortly after the final curtain. A couple of paces behind him is a blurred figure: a woman in a red dress, dark hair swinging around her shoulders. Her face is invisible, masked by the opera programme that she’s holding up as if to fan herself.