Andy McNab - Zero hour

'She's gone to Copenhagen. A place called Christiania. Have you heard of it?'

'No.'

'It's a commune inside the city. Slobo said she needed to get away for a while. She was pissed off with her father.'

'Does that mean he knew who Tarasov is?'

Anna kept one hand on the wheel while she fished in her pockets for cigarettes. 'I don't think so. He just said "her father". But he cut off her Facebook, and he moved her along with a new ID. She may think she's taking a break in Hippie Land, but I think Slobo had other ideas.'

I powered down my window a quarter of the way as she lit up. Spots of rain peppered my face. 'Do we have an address?' 'He didn't know it. Or if he did, he wasn't telling me.' I sparked up my BlackBerry. 'What's her new name?'

'Nemova.'

'How did she travel?'

She took a drag of her cigarette. 'He didn't say, but I didn't ask. It wasn't exactly coffee and chat.'

My screen lit up and showed four bars. I hit the time and date app. It took a second or two to load. I tapped in Julian's number. There was a long tone and a short break as he began to receive the call. The green padlock icon would signal secure mode. It rang three times.

'Nick?'

'She's been trafficked. She's in Denmark. Some kind of commune, maybe. She's got a new name. Lilian Nemova. I'll spell: November – Echo – Mike – Oscar – Victor – Alpha. Worth checking the visa applications again?'

Julian didn't answer immediately. He was probably still writing it all down. 'I'll get somebody on it. Then I need to inform Mr Tresillian.'

A deep growl cut in. 'Already here, Julian. Now listen to me, Mr Stone. Excellent work. Go to Denmark. Find her. A contact and a safe-house will be arranged once you've discovered where she is.' There was a pause. 'A commune? A fucking commune? I didn't even know they still existed. Do these people think the world owes them a fucking living?'

Jules and I weren't sure who was meant to answer.

Tresillian filled in the gap. 'Anyone got anything useful to say?'

'I wouldn't mind dropping out myself one day.'

The jokes still weren't welcome. 'Not on my watch, Mr Stone. Next time we hear from you I trust it will be good news.'

The phone went dead. Obviously Julian didn't have anything to say. Or if he did, tough shit.

Before closing the BlackBerry down I shifted the cursor to the camera icon and clicked on 'View Pictures'. I spent a few moments willing the minute Cyrillic script to magically translate itself into plain English and leap out at me. 'I took these of the shipment stacked inside Tarasov's factory. You see the stencilling on the nearest case? Can you read what it says?'

She zoomed in on each photograph in turn. 'Just a series of numbers and letters – the product serial ID, maybe.' She looked up. 'Why not run them by Julian? He'll be able to blow them up on a big screen.'

She wasn't wrong. I thought of the one on the wall behind Tresillian's head. And I thought of the look on Tresillian's face when I'd asked about Lilian's dad. 'My orders were to steer well clear of Tarasov. And if the boss of bosses is listening in to Jules's incoming calls…'

She squinted harder at the BlackBerry's tiny display. 'I can't – no, hang on… here, in the corner…'

'What?'

'Some kind of shipping label.'

'Russia?'

She zoomed in further. 'Yes and no. It's shipping to Moscow but it's marked "for onward transit". There's an end-user company mentioned. I don't recognize the name – but I know somebody who might.' She pulled out her iPhone. 'Is there anything else about Tarasov I should know?'

I couldn't tell her. I didn't know myself.

She pressed the speed dial. It didn't sound like there were any pleasantries. The exchange was short. 'He'll call back when he's done some digging.'

'Anna?'

'About an hour and a half, I think.'

'No, not that. I was thinking about you, back in the flat. Those tears, the way you brought them on like that. What was that all about?'

'It's what I do, Nick. I get people to talk. I told him I was her sister. I told him I didn't care what he was doing, why he was doing it, who he was doing it with. I just wanted her back.' She flicked the stub of her latest cigarette out of the window. 'Not that it got me far this time.'

The city was way behind us now. The arc of the BMW's fullbeams cut into the darkness ahead.

'How do you manage cry-on-demand? Do baby journalists have to go to acting school or something?'

'Sort of. I learnt the trick from an American reporter in Bosnia. It came in handy sometimes at road-blocks. She used to think of something really sad. Her mother's death, maybe.'

'And you?'

'I'm sure you can guess.'

A grim silence filled the car. The pulse in my neck quickened. I pictured a twenty-one-year-old kid on a mortuary slab with the back of his head removed by a tumbling missile fragment. I was just going on what she'd told me, but the image was astonishingly vivid – maybe because I was no stranger to scenes like that.

It was 1987. They were young. They were in love. They'd started dating when she was just sixteen – a schoolgirl. He was almost nineteen and in the Soviet Army. And then he'd gone to Afghanistan. She waved goodbye to him at the station, and the next time she saw him he was in a coffin. Even now, she still went to the station sometimes when she wanted to remember him.

'Grisha was an idealist.' I remembered the sadness in her voice as we'd walked along a windy Moscow prospekt and she'd told me the story. 'He loved poetry. That's how we met. His family lived in the same apartment block as mine. One evening when I came back from school I found him sitting on the front steps. He was reading Pushkin. I love Pushkin…'

They'd got talking. He wanted to go to university to study literature, but his family didn't have the money or the influence to send him – in those days you couldn't do it any other way. He would have been conscripted anyway, to fight in Afghanistan, so why not get a university education from the army as well? It meant signing up for five years, but then he'd be free of it. He wanted to become a teacher.

Anna's father didn't approve of the relationship. But, then, he didn't approve of anything much. He was an alcoholic. The Soviet system had killed his love of life. He worked in a factory that made machine tools. He hated it. Anna's mother was scared of him.

Anna was his only child. He wanted her to make something of her life, and study, study, study, he said, was the only way to achieve it. She had to see Grisha in secret. He had a motorbike, so they could escape every so often for a few hours on their own.

When he'd joined the army, Grisha had gone away for almost a year. In that time Anna saw him only once. He didn't talk about his training, but she could see that it had affected him deeply. It was only after the Chechen war, years later, when she'd helped families who'd tried to discover what had happened to their dead or missing sons, that she'd found out what they did to recruits. There was systematic abuse. Punishments had nothing to do with performance. If the officers and the NCOs in charge were having a bad day, they beat you. If they were bored, they beat you. When Grisha had come home that summer he was a changed man. He didn't want to talk about the army, just kept telling her that it wouldn't be long – another four years – and then he'd be free of it.

It was Grisha's father who had bought the motorbike, a beaten-up old thing from the Great Patriotic War, and restored it for him. The only times she had seen Grisha happy that summer were when he and his father had worked on the bike and when he had taken Anna out on it.

It was her eighteenth birthday while he was still on leave so they had decided to hand in their application to get married. Russians didn't have engagements and rings. They applied to ZAGS, the department of registration. But the wedding had never happened. He was sent to Afghanistan before ZAGS had given them a date.