Cristelle Comby - Red Lies

Side-stepping the unconscious man on the tiled white floor, she retrieved her shoes and wig before returning to the bedroom. Predictably, Serov had won his fight, too. The Soviet agent was seated on the side of the bed, busy rearranging his tie. Behind him, the second guard was sprawled over the coverlet, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle.

“Did you kill him?” Sofiya asked. She hadn’t meant for her voice to tremble, but it did, and she clenched her teeth.

Serov barely glanced at her when he stood up. “Why? Didn’t you kill yours?”

Sofiya knew better than to reply. Instead, she closed the front door that had remained half-open and then moved to the mirror on the wall next to it. She put the wig back in place and tried to fix her smudged mascara with her fingers. She was lucky the guard hadn’t managed to land a blow to her face, for that would have been hard to explain to the wedding guests.

“Found it!” Serov said.

When she glanced his way, Sofiya saw that he was crouched in front of the safe again. So, the mark had gone for the obvious hideout after all. “Good,” she said. “We better go before backup arrives.”

Serov nodded, and they were out in no time. She didn’t know where their mark had gone, but she was in favour of not waiting around to find out. He’d probably moved to another room or had been ordered to wait for backup in a predesignated location. Either way, it was a safe bet that the two gorillas had radioed for help the moment they realised one of their keys was missing.

Sofiya looked like her regular self when she entered the flat on Marieberg. Gone were the wig, the tight-fitting dress, and the over-the-top makeup. She was Sofiya again, a young girl from Moscow who’d made one too many wrong choices in her life. When her eyes settled on the suitcases that waited in the corner of the living room, she wondered if she hadn’t just made another one. Same time tomorrow, she would be in Russia, getting ready to marry a man she hardly knew. Her eyes welled up on their own accord, and she had a hard time stopping them from overflowing.

“Sofiya?”

The sound of her name drew her out of her thoughts, and she turned to face Petrov. He’d just come out of the kitchen, and he was looking at her with a curious expression and a touch of concern. She must have looked worse than she thought, she realised.

“I’m fine,” she said with a shrug. “Long day.”

“I’d ask what you’ve been up to, but I doubt I’d get a straight answer,” he said, leaning against the corridor wall.

“Honesty isn’t really part of the job description, is it?”

That got a smirk out of the man. “No, it isn’t. Everything is set for this weekend. We can go over the plan one more time if you’d like.”

Sofiya shook her head as she walked past him. Right now, all she wanted was a hot shower and some sleep. Her fingers were dirty again, and it wasn’t the kind of red stain that could be washed up, even though she knew she’d try anyway.

Why did Serov have to kill that man? she wondered. Murder would no doubt put their covert operation under an official spotlight. There’d be a police investigation, complete with a forensic swipe of the room. Both Soviet operatives had been careful to wipe all their prints, but in their haste to get out, they might have missed something. And all of that for what? Sofiya thought, bitterly. She didn’t even know what it was they’d stolen, or from whom. Goes to show how much value her own government placed in her. She was nothing but a pawn in their schemes; only good enough to be pushed around to suit their needs—a puppet on Directorate K’s strings. It had to stop, or she would go mad.

“Sofiya?” Petrov called out after her retreating form.

“Don’t worry,” she said, hand on the door handle to her bedroom. “I know what is expected of me; I won’t disappoint.”

Later that night, as she lay in her bed for what she knew was going to be her last night in Stockholm, she wasn’t sure what to feel. She’d enjoyed her time in the Swedish capital and had come to like the meandering town, with all its islands and bridges. She’d come to miss it, she knew. And she could only hope wherever she ended up staying next would be half as nice.

There were so many uncertainties on the horizon that it felt as though her future could be decided with the toss of a coin. And which way it would land was anyone’s guess. The only silver lining in her dire situation was the safe bet that she wouldn’t go down alone.

Sofiya hadn’t chosen a redhead wig for no reason, and she hadn’t booked the room in Alexeïeva’s name just for fun. For the entirety of the mission, she had made sure none of the cameras ever captured her face. That way, she had ensured that the police would have nothing more to go on than the pixelated image of a bosomy redhead and witness’s accounts that she was Russian.

While Sofiya wasn’t sure how careful Serov had been in cleaning the bedroom, she knew she’d been thorough with cleaning the bathroom of her prints and strands of synthetic red hair that had been stripped off the wig during the fight. Actually, she was dead certain she left that bathroom spotless—save for the passed-out bodyguard near the sink and the two red hairs she’d dropped behind her on her way out. Two very real human hairs that she’d plucked from Alexeïeva’s desk chair when she visited her office.

Yes, it may take the police a day or two to follow that lead to the finish line, but Sofiya was sure they would get to her nemesis eventually. And diplomatic immunity or not, if they decided to dig deeper into that dragon of a woman’s life and look at her bank records with a fine-tooth comb, well, it was anyone’s guess what they would find.

The Dormition Cathedral was the most sacred of the Russian Orthodox churches and stood on the Cathedral Square in the Kremlin of Moscow. Built between 1475 and 1479 by the Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti di Rodolfo, the building combined Russia’s Byzantine heritage with the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance. With its five tall golden domes covered in gilded copper sheets and its carved limestone exterior, the Cathedral could be seen from miles away.

The interior was as decorated as the richly painted arches of the exteriors, with frescoes as far as the eye could see, on the walls, on the ceilings—the largest one was an image of Christ Pantocrator on the interior of the main dome. Above the altar, the apse was devoted to an image of Mary, Mother of God, standing in a pose that seemed to bless the worshippers.

Sofiya felt small as she walked down the central aisle with a lit candle in her hand. She wore an ivory dress with an embroidered corset and a large gown that touched the ground around her. A thin veil, pinned to the corset around her neck, draped her bare shoulders and fell behind her like a cape. As she locked gazes with the portrait of Mary, Sofiya forced herself not to think of what was really happening within this Cathedral. So much of this venchanie was a farce; it was hard not to laugh.

The svideteli —the witnesses—were people she had never even met before today. The man, Gregor, was a distant cousin of Petrov, and the woman, Mila, was apparently a friend of his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in years. As far as Sofiya could tell, each of them thought this was for real and couldn’t believe their luck to be the best man and maid of honour of someone from the Nomenklatura —furthermore, at a wedding that took place in the Kremlin.