Adrian Magson: Execution

Sergeant Leonid Serkhov blinked in surprise. It wasn’t often that he was called on to speak, although every member of the Special Purpose Centre was aware that he or she was expected to have an opinion if asked. But this was unusual. For a start, it was Colonel Gorelkin doing the asking; and he hadn’t got them here just to congratulate them on a job well done. There had to be another reason.

‘Yes, sir,’ he replied, flicking a nervous glance at Votrukhin. Stocky and heavy across the shoulders, with receding hair and high cheekbones, Serkhov looked as if he might be in danger of breaking something if he moved too quickly, and kept stretching his chin to ease the stiff collar of his shirt.

‘Interesting. So neither of you had any concerns about the woman?’

‘Woman?’ Lieutenant Votrukhin lifted an eyebrow, and looked suddenly rather uneasy.

‘Yes. There was a woman patient in the room next to the subject.’ He waited a few heartbeats before adding, ‘Or have I been misinformed?’

‘No. No, that’s correct.’ Votrukhin cleared his throat and threw a warning glance at Serkhov. But the sergeant was staring resolutely straight ahead, the message patently clear: you’re on your own with this one.

‘She was unconscious or in heavy sleep,’ the lieutenant continued. He didn’t bother wondering how Gorelkin knew about the woman. The colonel was former old-style KGB, and those people had eyes everywhere and double-checked everything and everyone. He probably checked up on his own wife if he had one. ‘We didn’t think she presented a threat, so we left her alone. In any case, we had little time to do anything other than what we were there for. The security guard was incompetent, but he stayed on the move.’ He rolled a fragment of mint across his mouth but didn’t bite into it.

‘You took a close look at her, of course?’ Gorelkin studied the juice bottle as he spoke. It was a trick he’d perfected over the years, feigning an interest in some inanimate object while asking questions, to make others think he was merely going through the motions. It was rarely the case.

‘Yes. She was out of it. She’d been gut-shot, according to her notes. I checked the face. There wasn’t a flicker, so we got on with the job.’

‘Serkhov?’

The sergeant shrugged, and instantly wished he hadn’t. Shrugs in the SPC were not well received. It was seen as demonstrating a lack of commitment. He said quickly, ‘I, uh, was by the door, watching the corridor. But from where I was, she didn’t move a muscle. Like the lieutenant says, she was out of it.’

The bottle went down on the polished table with a firm tap, and Gorelkin looked at them each in turn. ‘If she was out of it, gentlemen,’ he said softly, ‘perhaps you could explain why, just five minutes after you exited the target building, a woman was seen walking down the stairs from that floor and leaving the building through a rear door used only by staff? Why, the following morning, the room where you had seen the supposedly unconscious or sleeping woman, was empty, and her clothes gone?’

Neither man spoke. They had messed up. Gorelkin wouldn’t have been this specific if he didn’t have the facts. And now they had to wait to hear what he was going to say. From long experience with others who’d failed in the centre, they knew it wouldn’t be pleasant. Gorelkin was every bit the old-style apparatchik , but in modern clothing. Scratch the surface of his kind, and there was cold, hard steel underneath. If the current administration ever turned itself back beneath the true cloak of communism, as many wanted, Gorelkin would roll with it as easily as changing his underwear, and emerge victorious.

But the expected firestorm didn’t come.

‘You can count yourselves lucky,’ the colonel muttered coldly, ‘that right now I don’t have the luxury of replacing you and sending you back to whatever shit-hole regiments you came from. If I did, you’d be on the next plane out!’ He emphasised the final word by slapping a hand down on the table top. The bottle jumped, then toppled and rolled towards the edge.

Votrukhin reached out instinctively and grabbed it. Placed it carefully back where it had come from.

‘What should we do?’ he asked. As the senior man, it was down to him to take the lead. Even if it meant sticking his neck out for Gorelkin to take off his head.

‘What do you think you’ll do — you find her!’ Gorelkin snapped. ‘She’s a threat we can’t ignore. She can’t have vanished completely.’

‘She was probably just military,’ Serkhov put in with unusual bravado. ‘A female grunt wounded in Afghanistan like the others in that unit. Why would she be a threat?’

‘Think about it, Serkhov.’ Gorelkin’s voice could have sliced marble. ‘A woman recovering from being shot in the stomach. That’s a nasty wound for anyone. But in the middle of the night, the same night you two turn up, she gets up from her bed and walks out of the hospital, taking whatever clothes she had with her. Now that’s not normal “grunt” behaviour. Something scared her enough to get out of there — and she had the balls and toughness to get up and walk. What do you think made her do that, huh?’

‘She heard us,’ Serkhov replied, his tone subdued. He threw an accusing look at Lieutenant Votrukhin, a reminder that he’d urged the lieutenant that she should be taken care of, and he’d been ignored.

‘Of course she heard you. I presume you spoke in Russian?’

Their silence confirmed it. He nodded. ‘As I thought. Which means she probably understood every word you said. And if this wounded trooper understood you , what does that lead you to conclude?’

‘She would have heard and understood what the target said, too,’ said Votrukhin softly. Both men had received a thorough briefing on arriving in the UK. It had begun with details of the target’s shooting by another member of the centre flown over to deal with Tobinskiy in the coastal town of Brighton in southern England. That operative had since left the country. The decision, they had been informed, had been made at the highest level to activate a second team to finish the job, and Votrukhin and Serkhov had been assigned that task. The reason given for the urgency was that the target had been transferred to a specialist hospital in London, and had been heard raving aloud under the regime of drugs he was under. The conclusion was that the risk of anybody working on the unit comprehending what he was saying was moderate to high.

And clearly somebody had.

‘It’s a big city,’ Serkhov put in. ‘It would help if we knew something about her. . where she comes from, that kind of stuff. I didn’t even see what she looked like.’

‘I’m dealing with that. You’ll have the information as soon as I can get it.’

‘From the embassy?’

‘No. Not from the embassy.’ Gorelkin paused, then said, ‘This mission is running under chyornyiy rules; you know what that means, but I’ll repeat them in case you’ve forgotten. You are to have no contact with the embassy or any of our residents or other assets. You understand?’ Both men nodded. ‘You pass all requests and operational decisions through me. You need something, I will get it for you, including information, money, papers or equipment. You get caught and we do not know you. I will make all efforts to extricate you, but you know that might not be possible for some time. Understood?’

The two men exchanged a brief look, then nodded. They had heard of chyornyiy or black rules operations before, but had never worked under them.

‘Don’t they have next-of-kin details on the hospital database?’ asked Votrukhin. He wanted to get this business over and done with.