Anthony Horowitz - Russian Roulette

I was shaking by the time I returned to the hall. It was as if all the pain and misery I had suffered in the last three years had been bundled together and then slammed into me, delivering one final, knock-out blow. It wasn’t enough that Vladimir Sharkovsky had been endlessly cruel to me. It wasn’t enough that he had reduced me to the role of his mindless slave. He was also directly implicated in the deaths of my mother and father, of Leo and of everyone else in the village.

Was it really such a surprise? When I had first heard his name, it had been at the university in Moscow. He had been talking to Misha Dementyev on the telephone and Dementyev had been implicated in what had happened. Nigel Brown had warned me too. He had told me that Sharkovsky invested in chemicals. I should have made the connection. And yet how could I have? It was almost beyond belief.

That night, as I stood at the table watching him tear apart the salmon that I had just tasted in front of all the other guests, I swore that I would kill him. It was surely the reason why fate had brought me here and it no longer mattered if I lived or died.

I would kill him. I swore it to myself.

I would kill him.

I would kill.

I barely slept that night. Every time I closed my eyes, my thoughts turned to guns, to kitchen knives, to the forks and spades that were used in the garden, to hammers and fire axes. The truth was that I was surrounded by weapons. Sharkovsky was used to having me around. I could reach him and have my revenge for Estrov before anyone knew what had happened.

But what good would it do? Josef and Karl – of course I knew which was which by now – were always nearby and even assuming I could get to Sharkovsky before they stopped me, they would deal with me immediately afterwards. Lying in my simple wooden bed, in my empty room, looking at the cold light of day, I saw that any action on my part would only lead to my own death. There had to be another way.

I felt sick and unhappy. I remembered Fagin with his leather notebook, reading out the different names and addresses in Moscow. Why had I made this choice?

Once again, and for the first time in a very long while, I thought about escape. I knew what the stakes were. If I tried and failed, I would die. But one way or another, this had to end.

I had just one advantage. By now I knew everything about the dacha and that included all the security arrangements. I took out one of the exercise books that Nigel Brown had given me – it was full of English vocabulary – and turned to an empty page at the back. Then, using a pencil, I drew a sketch of the compound and, resting it on my knees, I began to consider the best way out.

There wasn’t one.

CCTV cameras covered every inch of the gardens. Climbing the wall was impossible. Quite apart from the razor wire, there were sensors buried under the lawn and they would register my footfall before I got close. Could I approach one of the guards? No. They were all far too afraid of Sharkovsky. What about his wife, Maya? Could I somehow persuade her to take me on one of her shopping trips to Moscow? It was a ridiculous idea. She had no reason to help me.

Even if I did miraculously make it to the other side, what was I to do next? I was surrounded by countryside – the Silver Forest – with no idea of how near I was to the nearest bus stop or station. If I made it to Moscow, I could go back to Tverskaya Street. I had no doubt that Dima would hide me… assuming he was still there. But Sharkovsky would use all his police and underworld contacts to hunt me down. It wouldn’t bother him that he had been keeping me a prisoner for three years and he had treated me in a way that was certainly illegal. It was just that we had made a deal and he would make sure I kept it. I worked for him or I was dead.

For the next few weeks, everything went on as before. I cleaned, I washed, I bowed, I scraped. But for me, nothing was the same. I could hardly bear to be in the same room as Sharkovsky. Tasting his food made me physically sick. This was the man responsible for what had happened to Estrov, the unnamed investor my parents had been complaining about the night before they died. If I couldn’t escape from him, I would go mad. I would kill him or I would kill myself. I simply couldn’t stay here any more.

I had hidden the exercise book under my mattress and every night I took it out and jotted down my thoughts. Slowly, I realized that I had been right from the very start. There was only one way out of this place – and that was the Bell JetRanger helicopter. I turned to a new page and wrote down the name of the pilot, Arkady Zelin, then underlined it twice. What did I know about him? How could I persuade him to take me out of here? Did he have any weaknesses, anything I could exploit?

We had known each other for three years but I wouldn’t say we were friends. Zelin was a very solitary person, often preferring to eat alone. Even so, it was impossible to live in such close confinement without giving things away and the fact was that we did talk to each other, particularly when we were playing cards. Zelin liked the fact that I was interested in helicopters. He’d even let me examine the workings of the engine once or twice, when he was stripping it down for general maintenance, although he had drawn the line at allowing me to sit in the cockpit. The security guards wouldn’t have been happy about that. And then there was Nigel Brown. He knew a bit about Zelin too and when he’d had a few drinks he would share it with me.

Arkady Zelin

Soviet Air Force. Gambling?

Saratov.

Wife? Son.

Skiing… France/Switzerland. Retire?

This was about the total knowledge that I had of the man who might fly me out of the dacha . I wrote it down in my exercise book and stared at the useless words, sitting there on the empty page.

What did they add up to?

Zelin had been in the Soviet Air Force but he’d been caught stealing money from a friend. There had been a court martial and he had been forced to leave. He was still bitter about the whole thing and claimed that he was innocent, that he had been set up, but the truth was he was always broke. It was possible that he was addicted to gambling. I often saw him looking at the racing pages in the newspapers and once or twice I heard him making bets over the phone.

Zelin owned a crummy flat in the city of Saratov, on the Volga River, but he hardly ever went there. He had three weeks’ holiday a year – he often complained it wasn’t enough – and he liked to travel abroad, to Switzerland or France in the winter. He loved skiing. He once told me that he would like to work in a ski resort and had talked briefly about heli-skiing – flying rich people to the top of glaciers and watching them ski down. He had been married and he carried a photograph in his wallet… a boy who was about eleven or twelve years old, presumably his son. I remembered the day when I had come into the recreation room with a huge bruise on my face. I’d made a bad job of polishing the silver and Josef had lost control and almost knocked me out. Zelin had seen me and although he had said nothing, I could tell he was shocked. Perhaps I could appeal to him as a father? On the other hand, he never spoke about his son… or his wife, for that matter. He never saw either of them; perhaps they had cut him out of their life. He was quite lonely. He was the sort of person who looks after number one simply because there is nobody else.

I could have scribbled until I had filled the entire exercise book but it wasn’t going to help very much. Sharkovsky had a number of trips abroad that summer and each time he left in the helicopter, I would stop whatever I was doing and watch the machine rise from the launch pad and hover over the trees before disappearing into the sky. I had nothing I could offer – no money, no bribe. I knew that there was no way Zelin was going to fall out with his employer. In the end I forgot about him and began to think of other plans.