Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

Calvary waited.

‘Oh, Martin, come on. Killing people isn’t a long-term career option. Not for a normal person. You had your reasons for taking on this work, and I know what they were, but you’ve reached the point — as I say, the point everyone reaches eventually — where you can’t go on. It isn’t a wobble, it isn’tng., it is something you can grit your teeth and get over. You said something like that back there on the street. No. You want out, for good.’ He hunched forward suddenly. Calvary saw something gristly stuck between his incisors. ‘He pleaded, did he? On behalf of his wife? His children?’

Hating Llewellyn as he’d never believed he could hate anybody, Calvary said: ‘I don’t have to say anything to you about my reasons.’

‘No, you certainly don’t.’ The gentleness was back, slipping in like silk. ‘Look, it’s a rotten situation you’re in. I do appreciate that. You’re a superb operative, one we can’t let go without getting our money’s worth. But you’re almost out. One more job, and you will be. And it’s the most significant job of all, the most useful to your country. Not that I expect you to care about that, but it’s the truth.’

‘If I don’t — ’

‘If you don’t’ — the steel cut through the silk — ‘if you refuse, or agree and then go renegade, Scotland Yard will be sent the photos the Chapel has of you leaving Abubakar Al-Haroun’s flat. They’ll find him there in all his stiffening glory, and your spoor will be all around for their lab rats to snuffle up. And you’ll be subject to one of the biggest manhunts of the decade. If, when , they catch you, you won’t be able to take refuge in the defence that you were just following the Chapel’s orders, because we don’t exist. I don’t exist. You and I never met. You’ll be locked up in maximum security for the rest of your life, for your own protection because you’ll be the target of a fatwa , having assassinated one of the most valuable recruiters Islamist terrorism had in Western Europe.’

From the way he raised a warning but friendly finger, Calvary knew a waiter had been approaching and had been put off. Llewellyn steepled his fingers and rested his long chin on the tips.

He said, sadly: ‘And I’m afraid the same applies if you fail.’

*

A northeasterly storm had slowed the flight and it took close to two and a half hours. By the halfway point, Calvary was managing to think more about the job itself than about Llewellyn. Fuelled by coffee, he absorbed the details of the street map in the Prague guidebook he’d bought at Gatwick, specifically the area surrounding the flat where Gaines lived. He didn’t get the same feel for the district as he would actually walking the streets, but you could never be too prepared. At the same time he went over what Llewellyn had told him about Gaines’s daily routine. Clearly the man had been under surveillance for some time.

And clearly he was a man of habit. The eight-thirty a.m. walk to the local supermarket for the newspaper was followed by a trip to the bakery a few blocks away. Gaines would disappear back into his flat until late afternoon or early evening, when he’d emerge again and catch a series of trams to various places of interest, chiefly museums and libraries. If he was near the river he’d sometimes take supper overlooking the water, followed by a lengthyd hby a le walk criss-crossing the bridges. Most of his evenings were spent alone. The rest were taken up with formal dinners when he was sometimes invited to speak. He’d lived on his own since the death of his wife three years earlier and had no children.

By the time he disembarked and strode through the customs channel at Prague’s Ruzyne Airport, Calvary had worked out how he was going to do it.

‘Two years at most, Darya Yaroslavovna. Then you’ll have to start hauling your arse outside.’

Krupina flipped a hand, sending eddies through the fug. ‘The way you go on, these will have killed me by then anyway.’ She favoured Belomorkanal cigarettes, Stalin-era stalwarts. Couldn’t get on with the local Czech brands or even the American imports she saw everywhere.

Tamarkin had been referring to the proposed ban on indoor workplace smoking in the Czech Republic, scheduled to come into force in a couple of years’ time. She peered at him where he was lounging in the doorway, tie loosened and top button undone. She sometimes wondered if permitting such familiarity in her staff was wise.

The offices were on the third floor of a run-down suite a few streets away from Wenceslas Square, the shabbiness offset by the favourable location. There was no company title above the buzzer in the street, nor any logo on the glass door on the third floor apart from the ghost of a stencil that once announced the name of a State law firm. Beyond the glass door were a tiny lobby with an empty reception desk, a shared open plan area where Tamarkin and his four colleagues worked, and the inner sanctum, Krupina’s own office.

Her desk and shelves were crammed with so much paper the room looked like a throwback to the pre-digital age. A four-year-old desktop computer was the only concession to modernity. Balanced atop a mound of yellowing documents and newspaper clippings was a tarnished ashtray riddled with butts like a chunk of maggoty steak, the whole arrangement screaming fire hazard even to Krupina herself.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘Mail.’ He held up a sealed manila packet.

She sat up behind her desk. The office never received mail except in a diplomatic bag through the Embassy. When it came it was always significant, because it meant the message was too important to have been sent even by encrypted email.

He stood with the packet raised, enjoying the moment. She held up the back of her hand, waggled her fingers. Arrogant little ublyudok .

‘Give.’

She took it and reached for a paper knife. When he didn’t move from the doorway she said, without looking up, ‘Double liver sausage with tomato and onions on rye. Sauerkraut on the side, and for God’s sake leave off the dumplings.’

He muttered something a› crone .

Krupina slit open the duct tape and wrestled with the packaging, her stubby fingers annoying her. The fat bubble-wrapped envelope contained a single sheet of A5 paper.

The letterhead was that of the President’s office.

Her habit was to scan a document rapidly, her vision blurring down the page, feeling for anything that might jump out. Subsequent careful reading would provide the topsoil, but the essence was in the first impression.

Her skim gave her one word, occurring twice and in capitals.

TALPA.

The Linnaean term for the genus mole .

Krupina reached over and slammed the window sash closed. She pulled her jacket lapels across her chest. Suddenly, it felt colder.

*

Darya Yaroslavovna Krupina had, in her opinion, been born at precisely the wrong time in history.

It was an opinion she kept to herself, because she feared boring people more than almost anything else. She’d been born too late to be able to make a significant contribution to her motherland’s place in history, but too early not to give a damn.

She’d been a late arrival, her conception taking place when her mother was forty-three, just after her parents had given up all hope. As was often the case. Her Leningrad childhood had been unremarkable, her university years by contrast sensational. She had graduated joint first in her class and her honours degree in political science had been celebrated, embarrassingly, by her father, a legless survivor of the Stalingrad campaign, with a cripplingly expensive bash for forty people at the Pribaltiyskaya, Leningrad’s most splendid hotel.