Daniel Silva: The Unlikely Spy

Seconds later she heard the sound of a leather boot on gravel.

She heard the sound again, closer.

She turned her head and saw the driver standing there. She looked to the face and saw only a black woolen mask. Two pools of pale blue stared coldly behind the eyeholes. Feminine-looking lips, parted slightly, glistened behind the slit for the mouth.

Beatrice opened her mouth to scream. She managed only a brief gasp before the driver rammed a gloved hand into her mouth. The fingers dug into the soft flesh of her throat. The glove tasted horribly of dust, petrol, and dirty motor oil. Beatrice gagged, then vomited the remains of her picnic lunch-roast chicken, Stilton cheese, red wine.

Then she felt the other hand probing around her left breast. For an instant Beatrice thought her mother's fears about rape had finally been proved correct. But the hand touching her breast was not the hand of a molester or a rapist. The hand was skilled, like a doctor's, and curiously gentle. It moved from her breast to her ribs, pressing hard. Beatrice jerked, gasped, and bit down harder. The driver seemed not to feel it through the thick glove.

The hand reached the bottom of her ribs and probed the soft flesh at the top of her abdomen. It went no farther. One finger remained pressed against the spot. Beatrice heard a sharp click.

An instant of excruciating pain, a burst of brilliant white light.

Then, a benevolent darkness.

The killer had trained endlessly for this night, but it was the first time. The killer removed the gloved hand from the victim's mouth, turned, and was violently sick. There was no time for sentiment. The killer was a soldier-a major in the secret service-and Beatrice Pymm soon would be the enemy. Her death, while unfortunate, was necessary.

The killer wiped away the vomit from the lips of the mask and set to work, taking hold of the stiletto and pulling. The wound sucked hard but the killer pulled harder, and the stiletto slipped out.

An excellent kill, clean, very little blood.

Vogel would be proud.

The killer wiped the blood from the stiletto, snapped the blade back into place, and put it in the pocket of the overall. Then the killer grasped the body beneath the arms, dragged it to the rear of the van, and dumped it on the crumbling edge of the tarmac.

The killer opened the rear doors. The body convulsed.

It was a struggle to lift the body into the back of the van, but after a moment it was done. The engine hesitated, then fired. Then the van was on the move again, flashing through the darkened village and turning onto the deserted roadway.

The killer, composed despite the presence of the body, quietly sang a song from childhood to help pass the time. It was a long drive, four hours at least. During the preparation the killer had driven the route by motorcycle, the same bike that now lay beside Beatrice Pymm. The drive would take much longer in the van. The engine had little power, the brakes were bad, and it pulled hard to the right.

The killer vowed to steal a better one next time.

Stab wounds to the heart, as a rule, do not kill instantly. Even if the weapon penetrates a chamber, the heart usually continues to beat for some time until the victim bleeds to death.

As the van clattered along the roadway, Beatrice Pymm's chest cavity rapidly filled with blood. Her mind approached something close to a coma. She had some sense she was about to die.

She remembered her mother's warnings about being alone late at night. She felt the wet stickiness of her own blood seeping out of her body into her shirt. She wondered if her painting had been damaged.

She heard singing. Beautiful singing. It took some time, but she finally discerned that the driver was not singing in English. The song was German, the voice a woman's.

Then Beatrice Pymm died.

First stop, ten minutes later, the bank of the River Orwell, the same spot where Beatrice Pymm had been painting that day. The killer left the van's engine running and climbed out. She walked to the passenger side of the van, opened the door, and removed the easel, the canvas, and the rucksack.

The easel was erected very near the slow-moving water, the canvas placed on it. The killer opened the rucksack, removed the paints and palette, and laid them on the damp ground. She glanced at the unfinished painting and thought it was rather good. A shame she couldn't have killed someone with less talent.

Next, she removed the half-empty bottle of claret, poured the remainder of the wine into the river, and dropped the bottle at the legs of the easel. Poor Beatrice. Too much wine, a careless step, a plunge into frigid water, a slow journey to the open sea.

Cause of death: presumed drowned, presumed accidental.

Case closed.

Six hours later, the van passed through the West Midlands village of Whitchurch and turned onto a rough track skirting the edge of a barley field. The grave had been dug the previous night-deep enough to conceal a corpse but not so deep that it might never be found.

She dragged Beatrice Pymm's body from the back of the van and stripped away the bloody clothing. She took hold of the naked corpse by the feet and dragged it closer to the grave. Then the killer walked back to the van and removed three items: an iron mallet, a red brick, and a small spade.

This was the part she dreaded most, for some reason worse than the murder itself. She dropped the three items next to the body and steadied herself. Fighting off another wave of nausea she took the mallet in her gloved hand, raised it, and crushed Beatrice Pymm's nose.

When it was over she could barely look at what was left of Beatrice Pymm's face. Using first the mallet, then the brick, she had pounded it into a mass of blood, tissue, smashed bone, and shattered teeth.

She had achieved the intended effect-the features had been erased, the face rendered unrecognizable.

She had done everything they had ordered her to do. She was to be different. She had trained at a special camp for many months, much longer than the other agents. She would be planted deeper. That was why she had to kill Beatrice Pymm. She wouldn't waste her time doing what other, less gifted agents could do: counting troops, monitoring railways, assessing bomb damage. That was easy. She would be saved for bigger and better things. She would be a time bomb, ticking inside England, waiting to be activated, waiting to go off.

She put a boot against the ribs and pushed. The corpse tumbled into the grave. She covered the body with earth. She collected the bloodstained clothing and tossed it into the back of the van. From the front seat she took a small handbag containing a Dutch passport and a wallet. The wallet held identification papers, an Amsterdam driver's permit, and photographs of a fat, smiling Dutch family.

All of it had been forged by the Abwehr in Berlin.

She threw the bag into the trees at the edge of the barley field, a few yards from the grave. If everything went according to plan, the badly decomposed and mutilated body would be found in a few months, along with the handbag. The police would believe the dead woman to be Christa Kunst, a Dutch tourist who entered the country in October 1938 and whose holiday came to an unfortunate and violent end.

Before leaving, she took a last look at the grave. She felt a pang of sadness for Beatrice Pymm. In death she had been robbed of her face and her name.

Something else: the killer had just lost her own identity. For six months she had lived in Holland, for Dutch was one of her languages. She had carefully constructed a past, voted in a local Amsterdam election, even permitted herself a young lover, a boy of nineteen with a huge appetite and a willingness to learn new things. Now Christa Kunst lay in a shallow grave on the edge of an English barley field.