Anthony Horowitz - Russian Roulette

I stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple enough!” he said. “Point the gun at the back of your mouth and shoot.”

“But why…?”

“Because you said to me five seconds ago that you would do anything I wanted and now I am asking you to prove it. I need to know that I can rely on you. Either you will pull the trigger or you will not. But let us consider the options, Yassen Gregorovich. If you will not do what I ask, then you have lied to me and I cannot use you after all. In that case, I can assure you that your death is certain. If you do as I have asked, then there are two possibilities that lie ahead of you. It is quite possible that you will kill yourself, that in a few minutes’ time, my cleaners will be wiping your brains off my carpet. That will be annoying. But there is also a very good chance that you will live and from that moment on you will serve me. It is your decision and you must make it now. I don’t have all day.”

He was torturing me after all. He was asking me to play this horrific game to prove beyond any doubt that he had complete power over me. I would never argue with him. I would never refuse an order. If I did this, I would be accepting that my own life no longer belonged to me. That in every respect I was his.

What could I do? What choice did I have?

I picked up the gun. It was much heavier than I had expected but at the same time, I had no strength at all. Nothing below my shoulder seemed to be working properly – not my wrist, not my hand, not my fingers. I could feel my pulse racing and I had to struggle even to breathe. What this man was demanding was horrific… beyond imagination. Six chambers. One containing a bullet. A one in six chance. When I pulled the trigger, nothing might happen. Or I might send a piece of metal travelling at two hundred miles per hour into my own head. If I didn’t do it, he would kill me. That was what it came down to. I felt hot tears brimming over my cheeks. It seemed impossible that my life could have come to this.

“Don’t cry like a baby,” Sharkovsky said. “Get on with it.”

My arm and wrist were aching. I could feel the blood pumping through my veins. Almost involuntarily, my finger had curled around the trigger. The grip was pressed against the palm of my hand. For a crazy moment, I thought of firing at Sharkovsky, of emptying the chamber in his direction. But what good would that do me? He probably had a second gun concealed somewhere and if I didn’t find the bullet at the first attempt he would have plenty of time to shoot me where I sat.

“Please, sir…” I whispered.

“I am not interested in your tears or your pleading,” he snapped. “I am interested only in your obedience.”

“But…”

“Do it now!”

I touched the muzzle of the gun against the side of my head.

“In your mouth!”

I will never forget his insistence, that one obscene detail. I pushed the barrel of the gun between my teeth, feeling the muzzle grazing the roof of my mouth. I could taste the metal, cold and bitter. I was aware of the black hole, the muzzle, pointing at my throat with, perhaps, a bullet resting behind it, waiting to begin its short journey. Sharkovsky was gloating. I don’t think he cared one way or the other what the outcome would be. I couldn’t breathe. The contents of my stomach were rising up. I pressed with my finger but I couldn’t make it work. In my mind I already heard the explosion. I felt the scorching heat and saw the darkness falling like a blade as my life was snatched away.

“Do it!” he snarled.

One chance in six.

I squeezed the trigger.

The hammer drew back. How far would it travel before it fell? I was certain that these were the last seconds of my life. And yet everything was happening horribly slowly. They seemed to stretch on for ever.

I felt the mechanism release itself in my hand. The hammer fell with a heavy, thunderous click.

Nothing.

There had been no explosion. The chamber was empty.

Relief rushed through me but it did not feel good. It was as if I was being emptied, as if my entire life and all the good things I had ever experienced were being taken from me. From this moment on, I belonged to Sharkovksy. That was what he had demonstrated. I dropped the gun. It fell heavily against the surface of the desk and lay there between us. The muzzle was wet with my saliva.

“You can leave now,” he said.

He must have pressed the communication button under his desk because although I hadn’t heard them, the men who had brought me here had returned. Perhaps the twins had been present and had seen what had just happened. I didn’t know.

I stood up. My whole body felt foreign to me. I might not have killed myself but even so, something inside me had died.

“Yassen Gregorovich is working for me now,” Sharvovsky continued. “Take him downstairs and show him.”

The two men led me out of the study and back into the corridor we had come through together. But this time we took a staircase down into a basement area. There was an oversized fridge door that led into a cold storage room and I watched as one twin opened it and the other went inside. He wheeled out a trolley. There was a dead body on it, covered by a sheet. He lifted it up and I saw a naked man. He couldn’t have been more than ten years older than me when he died. It had happened very recently. His face was distorted with pain. His hands seemed to be scrabbling at his throat.

I understood without being told. The old food taster.

A position has arisen here . That was what Vladimir Sharkovsky had said to me. Now I knew why.

I made my first escape attempt that same day.

I knew I couldn’t stay there. I wasn’t going to play any more of Sharkovsky’s sadistic games and I certainly wasn’t going to swallow his food… not when there was a real chance of my ending up on a metal slab. I had been left alone for the rest of the day. Perhaps they thought I needed time to recover from my ordeal and they were certainly right. The moment I got back to my room, I was sick. After that, I slept for about three hours. One of the twins visited me during the afternoon. He brought more clothes with him: overalls, boots, an apron, a suit. Each piece of clothing related to a different task I would be expected to perform. I left them on the floor. I wasn’t going to be part of this. I was out.

As soon as night had come, I left my room and set out to explore the grounds, now empty of gardeners although there were still guards patrolling close to the wall. It was clear to me that the wall completely surrounded the complex and there was no possibility of my climbing it. It was too high, and anyway, the razor wire would cut me to shreds. The simple truth was that the archway was the only way in and out – but at least that meant I could focus my attention on that one avenue. And looking at it, I wasn’t sure that it was as secure as it seemed. Three uniformed guards sat inside the wooden cabin with a glass window that allowed them to look out over the driveway. They had television monitors too. There was a red and white pole, which they had to raise, and they searched every vehicle that came in, one of them looking underneath with a flat mirror on wheels while another checked the driver’s ID. But when there were no cars, they did nothing. One of them read a newspaper. The others simply sat back looking bored. I could just slip out. It wouldn’t be difficult at all.

That was my plan. It was about seven o’clock and I assumed everyone was eating. I’d had no food all day but I was in no mood to eat. Still wearing the black tracksuit – the colour would help to conceal me in the darkness – I slipped outside. When I was sure there was nobody around, I sprinted to the edge of the cabin and then crept round, crouching underneath the window and keeping close to the wall. The road back to Moscow lay in front of me. I couldn’t believe it was this easy.