Tom Cain - The accident man

"It was my wife, Olga, who discovered her, you know, at a Komsomol gathering. She was just a slip of a girl from the provinces-Kirov, if I recall…"

"Not Kirov," said Carver. "It was…" He frowned. He knew where Alix had lived as a child. The name was on the tip of his tongue. But for the life of him he couldn't recall it.

Zhukovski shrugged indifferently. "I do not really care where it was. What was obvious from the moment Olga brought her to my attention was that this was a girl of astonishing capacities. Her eyes were crazy, of course…"

"She told me," said Carver. That much he did remember.

"Her teeth too. Did she tell you that? We had to fix those. But the rest was all Alexandra."

He put his vodka on a side table to the right of his chair, taking the time to compose his thoughts.

"It was her hunger that struck me most," Zhukovski continued. "She was hungry for a better life, hungry for experience, and, yes, hungry for sex. Every atom of that girl was female, yet she had a masculine desire for sexual conquest. There was no form of pleasure she would not explore. And then, as the duckling turned into a swan and for the first time in her life she became aware of her powers of attraction, she acquired a hunger for power. Perhaps she wished for revenge on all the boys who had spurned and mocked her, who can say? But she used her power over men like an empress. Some girls had to be persuaded, even forced, to put their bodies at the service of the motherland. Not Alexandra. She gloried in it."

"What did she do afterward, when the wall came down?" Carver asked. He was starting to gather his senses now, the pain of his electrocution was fading, his body was back under control. He could sit still in his chair without twitching like an impatient schoolboy.

"You see," Zhukovski said with a smile, nodding in satisfaction that he had been proved right, "you could not resist. You still want to know everything about her. Well, I will tell you. I left the committee for State security-what you would call the KGB-preferring to pursue my interests in private enterprise. Alexandra came with me."

"You were her pimp?"

"Is that what she told you? I will have words with her about that. No, I kept her for my own use. As I have already told you, she is my mistress."

"So why would you send your little pet on a suicide mission to Paris?"

"Because it was not a suicide mission. My orders to Wake were clear. His chosen assassin had to die. That was you, of course. I could not trust a man I did not know. But I had no intention of losing two of my most valued people. It was the English who decided to kill them as well."

Carver grimaced. "But Alix… why send her?"

Zhukovski shrugged. "Because she was bored. She had started complaining that she had nothing to do all day except shop, eat lunch, and go to beauty salons. I told her that every other woman in Russia would kill to have her life. But she was not convinced. She said she wanted to work in my organization…"

"And you believed her?"

"I believed that she was bored. And I knew that a woman who feels like that will soon cause trouble. She gets drunk in public, or she screws her tennis coach. So I thought, okay, this is a simple job. All she has to do is sit on a motorcycle and flash a camera. If it works, then maybe I can think of further assignments."

Carver could imagine Alix being driven crazy by a life that required nothing of her except a futile fight against time. She was approaching thirty. Zhukovski might start looking elsewhere. She would see other, younger girls examining her, waiting for the first wrinkle, the slightest thickening of her waist or drooping of her breasts, the first sign that her power was waning. She was smart enough to plan another life. But would that life have to be within Zhukovski's organization, or had she been telling the truth when she talked of wanting to escape?

Stupid question. She'd made her feelings perfectly clear on that score. A boot in the face wasn't exactly a subtle hint. Forget her, she didn't want to be rescued. If she wanted to be part of Zhukovski's crew, she could go to hell with the rest of them. He could still turn things around.

He measured the distance between him and Zhukovski. He could cover the gap in a single leap, he was sure. Zhukovski would be hampered, being in a soft armchair. He'd find it tougher to get to his feet.

Carver let his head sag on his shoulders, then mumbled, "It's over, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Zhukovski. "For you it is."

The Russian relaxed, confident that Carver was a broken man. He reached his right arm out toward the vodka sitting on the table beside the chair, turning his head toward the glass as he did so. And in that moment of vulnerability, Carver leaped.

He had tensed his feet against the ground, pressing his toes into the carpet, bunching the muscles on his upper thighs and sucking in his stomach. Then he'd pushed up and away from the chair with every remaining ounce of his strength, aiming to smash headfirst into Zhukovski's face.

He stopped dead in midair as fifty thousand volts jack-knifed his body for the fourth time, crashing him down to the carpet, leaving him groveling in agony once again.

"Did you really think I would be that careless?" asked Zhukovski, getting up from his chair. He stood over Carver. "Well, did you?" he repeated. Then he kicked Carver in the guts, driving the breath from his body.

"Don't you understand who I am?" Zhukovski did not raise his voice so much as refrigerate it, delivering every word with a frozen, deliberate matter-of-factness. "I was a colonel in the KGB. I made dissidents watch as their entire families were burned alive: wives, children, mothers, fathers, everyone. I made prisoners place their hands in boiling water, then peeled their skin off like a tomato. Do you want me to do that to you?"

"No," groaned Carver. "Please. I beg you. I'll help you. I can do that. I know the password to the consortium's computer. I have the key to decrypt all the files. I'll tell you. Just, please… just stop hurting me."

"Well now…" Zhukovski was almost whispering to himself. He was walking around Carver, circling his body. "Why would I want to do that?"

He kicked Carver again, this time at the base of his spine, making him arch backward as the wounded muscles went into spasm. As Zhukovski kept moving around him, Carver shrank into a fetal curl. He was dry retching, unable to speak.

Zhukovski stamped on his ankles.

"I'm not impressed," he said. "I had expected a former member of the special boat service to have a greater resistance to physical pain. Perhaps you have gone soft. Or perhaps you are merely pretending to give in. What do you say?"

Carver's face was lying to one side on the floor. He was resting the weight of his head on the undamaged side of his jaw. Zhukovski could clearly see the angry red swelling that marked the area where Titov's punch had connected, so he ground his heel into the center of the bruising, gradually increasing the pressure on Carver's face, pinning his battered head while his body writhed helplessly. Carver let out a muffled howl of pain.

"No, that was not pretense," said Zhukovski. "But still, you might have set a trap for me. For a man of your skills, it would be no problem to booby trap a computer. Replace the battery with explosives and one strike of a single key would set it off. I have used that method of assassination myself. Perhaps we will finally discover what secrets are hidden in this ridiculous machine. But if it really is a trap, you will be the one who dies."

When Alix had said that the sight of Carver was making her physically sick, she was telling the truth. As he lay naked and defeated at her feet, slobbering over her boots, it was all she could do not to retch. She had to kick him away before she vomited right over him.