Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

‘I’ll do it,’ said Llewellyn. ‘There should be something at least on one of the older ones.’

Calvary drew the night air into his lungs. He glanced about, the shadows seeming to crowd in on him.

‘I need you to run some other checks.’

He gave descriptions of Nikola, Max and Jakub along with their names, and that of their newsletter, Reflektor .

Calvary said, ‘I can get Gaines. But at the moment, Blazek and his crew really don’t seem to know why they’ve kidnapped him. I don’t know either. That suggests he’s somewhere nearby, and hasn’t been disposed of yet.’

‘Yet.’

‘For God’s sake, Llewellyn.’ He fought to keep his voice low. ‘You want him dead, don’t you? Who cares if it’s some mobster who bumps him off?’

‘You know very well that it has to be you, Martin. And very visibly you.’

‘If I read the morning’s papers and find you’ve shopped me, Llewellyn, then all bets are off.’

A chuckle. ‘No, don’t worry. You’ve earned a grace period. Shall we say, twelve hours? The evening editions?’

Calvary took four long, slow breaths. Then he said, ‘Gaines isn’t going to be my last kill, Llewellyn. There’ll be one more.’

He rang off.

‘You understand what you are asking for, Darya Yaroslavovna.’

She did, yes.

‘Half a dozen extra people. To carry out a potentially explosive operation — literally and politically — on EU soil.’

Yes, she appreciated the implications.

‘Without Embassy protection. Without the cover, the logistical support the Embassy could provide.’

She was aware of the drawbacks, but it was the only way this could be done. It had to be deniable, if it went wrong.

For a long minute — it seemed as long as that, anyway — she heard only his breathing. Then: ‘I’ll do what I can.’

way — ssize="+0"›Krupina closed her eyes. It meant consider it done .

‘My balls are on the line, Darya Yaroslavovna.’

‘I’m very grateful, tovarischch . Profoundly so.’

‘We’ll find out just how grateful the next time I need a favour from you.’

It was a secure connection, as secure as they came, yet she listened after her superior had rung off, her ear probing for the tell-tale click of a tapped line. Old habits.

She opened the door. Gleb was outside, hovering at a respectful distance.

‘It’s a go.’

He breathed out. ‘Thank God. What sort of numbers?’

‘I asked for half a dozen. I think I’ll get them.’

‘When?’

She raised a shoulder. ‘Ten, twelve hours. Out of our hands.’

*

In the alley Tamarkin had lost his temper, hurling the bug against the wall. Not like him.

‘He can’t be far. Yet he might as well be on the other side of the world.’

Krupina leaned against the Audi, lit up. Blew ragged tusks of smoke from her nostrils.

She said: ‘We change our focus. Calvary, yes, he’s still important. But I think we can be sure that this Blazek has a hand in Gaines’s abduction. That the invaders on the tram were Blazek’s men. Which means, we go after him.’

Her boys, Gleb and Arkady and Lev, said nothing. They weren’t defeatists, she knew.

‘I’m aware of our numbers. Our limited resources. We need backup. Bodies on the ground, mainly.’

Tamarkin said, ‘We ask the Embassy?’

‘No. I go crawling to Moscow tugging my forelock. Appeal directly for assistance.’

Arkady let out a slow whistle between his teeth. ‘This Gaines must be someone special if you think you’ve any chance with that approach. With respect, boss.’

‘And I know you’re fishing with that remark, Arkasha, but it’s still “need to know”.’

*

Calvary lay in the darkness, listening to the shuffling and settling of the other three in their respective rooms, to the muffled sounds of the late-night city beyond the windows.

Three people. Two men and a woman. Journalists, not fighters. However much they liked to style themselves as guerrillas. Two handguns between them.

Against them, the biggest organised crime operation in Prague. And Russian intelligence, probably SVR.

All that he had to do was find Gaines and kill him, making sure the Russians knew it was him who’d done the deed.

That was all he had to do. Except he didn’t have a clue where they were keeping Gaines.

Calvary had been given the spare bedroom, a box-like space with a single bed. Max and Jakub took the floor and the sofa in the living room. They turned in at half past one, with plans for a five a.m. start. Calvary hadn’t made the call yet, wasn’t planning to until the last moment. He wanted Janos to be working against a deadline, with little time to think through his decision or call up an army of reinforcements.

As often happened, Calvary was so tired that he found sleep difficult. He lay entirely still, fully clothed save for his boots, allowing his weight to sink into the bed. Eyes closed, he modulated his breathing. Pictured his heartbeat slowing to the bare minimum needed to keep his circulation going.

Eventually he slipped into a state between wakefulness and deep sleep. As usual, the images came. Not dreams, but memories, from more than four years earlier.

*

The sweat stung his eyes and his lips and he shouldered it away. Late May, and the temperature had soared in the last week to the mid-twenties Celsius. Far from the life-sapping hell August would bring, but stifling nonetheless.

The late morning sun washed the walls of the scorched buildings in gold. The scorch marks were from a different kind of heat: the kind generated by human beings in order to damage one another. The street Calvary was walking down had been the scene of an ambush six days earlier, involving an IED attack on a Snatch Land Rover. He thought he could see fragments embedded in the stone walls. Fragments not from the explosive but from the vehicle itself.

A month earlier the Americans had come. A battalion of U.S. Marines, despatched to support Calvary’s own rifle battalion and the rest of the British and Afghan troops in the southwest of the country. Not the surge of eleven thousand men that would flood in a year later, but a formidable force all the same. They’d stormed the town, Garmsir, to find that the Taliban had already withdrawn. Soon it became apparent that they hadn’t gone far.

Garmsir. It meant hot place in Pashto. The name was apt for more than one reason. For the last four weeks the place had been a battleground. The Americans and Calvary’s people had been trying to take on a more civil role, that of supporting and protecting the thousands of Afghan civilians returning to the town for the first time since the retreat of the Taliban. Work was in progress to set up local government once more, to build and train a police force, to ensure that the Afghan army that would be left behind was equ sehiting and pal to the task of defending the town.

And the attacks came, in tidal waves and in lone breakers lapping at the shore. Yesterday there was a car bomb attack on a recruitment queue. Today, a pitched battle in the streets, involving high-quality Russian artillery. Tomorrow there might be a grenade thrown through the window of a perceived collaborator’s home at dinnertime, killing his family along with him.

Calvary stepped back from the road as a convoy of lorries lumbered past. Locals, mostly, with Marines riding shotgun in front and behind in Jeeps. He half waved, half saluted, got a forest of raised thumbs in response.

Walking towards him, on the other side of the street, Calvary saw Willis, his sergeant, hazy through the dust. As Lieutenant, Calvary was in command of B Company for that day’s patrol. Willis nodded. Calvary was well liked by his men. He suspected he was held in similar esteem by Major Farnborough, the head of the Company. Not that Farnborough would ever show it if he was happy with anyone’s performance.