Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

‘You do the rest,’ he said.

While he ran his hands over himself she said, ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Any kind of device. Probably tiny.’

Nothing.

He said, ‘Give me your phone.’

She handed it over. He took the handset and his own and prised out the SIM cards and threw them into the alley.

‘There may be GPS tracking. We’ll get replacements.’

When she frowned he said, ‘How did that Russian, the one who came up behind you, know we were there? They’ve used tracking devices before. Either we’re bugged, or something was planted on the Fiat.’ He tipped his head. ‘Let’s keep going.’

They took off at a brisk walking pace. She said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Nowhere familiar. Not your flat — we have to assume that’s compromised. Somewhere we can hole up and think. Plan.’

‘A hotel?’

‘Yes. First, we need a new car.’

They stumbled upon a car rental office, one of the well-known international firms, and Calvary chose a VW saloon. Dull grey, anonymous, reliable. He paid cash, had to show his driving licence but didn’t care. He doubted Blazek or the Russians would be monitoring every car rental place in the city.

Nikola knew the area they were moving through and guided him along streets that were a little shabby, where the tourist tat was marginally tackier than in the centre of town. At a street kiosk they stopped and bought smartphones, cheap knockoffs judging by the price.

They found themselves outside a squat hotel. Calvary pulled into the miniature car park at the back.

He paid cash again, up front for one day and night. The receptionist looked Nikola up and down, gave Calvary a knowing smirk. They took a ground floor room near the fire exit. Calvary moved about, pulling the curtains closed, locking the door.

While Nikola disappeared into the tiny bathroom, Calvary took out his phone.

Llewellyn’s phone rang four times before switching to voicemail. Calvary left a message, his voice terse. ‘Letting you know my new number. Ring me when you get this. I need information.’

He heard Nikola emerging from the bathroom. He turned, saw her white, drawn face, her raw-rimmed eyes.

‘Hey,’ he said.

She sagged as though her strings had been cut, dropping into a chair by the bed and covering anpan›

her face with her hands.

Calvary stepped round, stood over her, awkward. When she didn’t move he sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Max and Jakub,’ he said.

She raised her face.

‘Not just them — yes, of course them, but… everything.’ She waved a vague hand.

He knew what she meant. Less than two days earlier the fourth member of the group — Kaspar, she’d called him — had disappeared. Then Calvary had dropped into their lives, destroying their vehicle, forcing Nikola and Jakub to become killers, tainting their workbase and their homes with his toxic presence. Now Nikola was the only one left, the others missing, possibly dead, almost certainly being made to suffer.

And they were activists. Not trained operatives, not soldiers, but a quixotic, idealistic quartet of normal people with a notion of justice as touching as it was hopelessly naive and unrealistic.

Calvary found it difficult to cope with certain emotions in other people. Fear, even abject terror, he knew how to allay or stoke, as the situation required. Anger he was skilled at defusing or provoking. But misery — simple, human unhappiness — he couldn’t handle. It might have been the epitaph on the tombstones of the half-dozen or so relationships he’d failed to sustain in his life, until five years ago when he’d sealed his heart in a vault, never again to be exposed to the light: he was helpless in the face of unhappiness .

He said, ‘Max and Jakub are probably still alive.’

She watched him. For signs I’m leading her on, he thought.

‘Blazek wants me. Not them. He’ll use them to trade.’

‘He will hurt them.’

‘Yes.’ He couldn’t lie. ‘He will. But not too badly. They can’t give him anything. They don’t know where I am. Sooner or later Blazek will realise that.’

‘But he won’t be able to find you.’

‘No. But I can find him. We’ve got Max’s phone number, and Jakub’s. Blazek will have those phones. He’ll be waiting for them to ring.’

Nikola sat in silence for a few seconds. Then: ‘So you plan to call and offer yourself up? As a sacrifice?’

He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Something like that. But it’s not that simple. I need some sort of leverage. If I offer a straight swap, he’ll take me and kill Max and Jakub into the bargain. I need to figure out a way to get us all free.’

‘Not yet.’

Her hand was on his knee. He looked at her.

‘Just for now. No plans. No thinking.’

In her eyes Calvary saw the desperation born of having come cloavi. No se to death, the animal need to affirm life. He recognised it because he’d experienced it himself, many times. Had yielded to it.

He rose, pulled her up to him, hands and mouth reaching for her. She pushed at him and he dropped back on the bed. She straddled him, pulling her sweater off over her head as he grappled with his shirt, his belt. His fingers moved up under her shirt, found the clasp of the brassiere, slid off both garments in one move.

Her mouth pressed against his, her tongue probing. With her feet she drove his trousers down and off his legs. He grabbed at the waistband of her trousers and pushed it down over her hips, the panties coming with it. Arching, he pressed into her. He felt her breath against his mouth in a long gasp.

For half an hour everything else disappeared, the city outside, Blazek and Gaines and Llewellyn. There was only the fierce heat of the moment, two living beings, virtual strangers, communicating without words.

*

The tapping on the door was becoming more insistent. She heaved herself up on to her knees, stared at the toilet bowl. Blood. Dark, clotted, not the bright hue of a fresh tear in the gullet.

‘Ma’am.’ Yevgenia had never been able to bring herself to call her Darya Yaroslavovna, unlike Gleb. ‘Please. Are you all right? Open the door. Let me help you.’

‘I’m fine, Yevgenia. Thanks. Go back to your desk.’

Krupina hauled herself to face the mirror over the sink, pulling the toilet’s chain. No, she wasn’t in fact fine . Was about as far from fine as one could get.

Her skin hung off her face like musty drapes, her hair lank like ropes of cobweb. Even her eyes seemed to be sagging, not just the sacs beneath them but the eyeballs themselves, bleeding southwards like tilted yolks.

She was forty-nine years old, and looked like a woman three decades older. One who’d let herself go.

The blood clots in the vomit were bad news. For the past nine months or so the retching had been a semi-regular feature of her day, but she’d been able to work around it, eating when she felt least nauseous, spewing when her stomach was at its emptiest. The cigarettes had helped, stilling the pangs from her belly, giving her a hacking cough which had distracted from the gastrointestinal grumblings.

Dr Ostrovsky, the specialist flown in from Petersburg, had steepled his fingers on his desk, at their second meeting. The one following the assault course of investigations, scans and needles and proddings, he’d ordered after their first.

‘Perhaps one year. Two? Nobody can say. You have a not uncommon condition, Darya Yaroslavovna. It obeys the normal rules. Which is to say, its course is unpredictable.’

She’d had chemotherapy. That had been a little under two years ago. She was still alive. Alive, andve.

But that was now in doubt.

Tamarkin had been out of contact for ninety minutes now. He normally kept his phone switched on and at hand round the clock. Ninety minutes was too long for him to be taking a shower and moving his bowels.