Anthony Horowitz - Russian Roulette

I must have looked alarmed because she raised a hand, stopping me.

“Let me finish. You were brought up by your parents who, I am sure, were good people. So were mine! You are thinking that you could never murder someone for money. You could never be like Mr Grant. But you’re wrong. We will train you. We have a facility not very far from here, an island called Malagosto. We run a school there… a very special school. If you go there, you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life – even harder than in that dacha where you were kept.

“You will be given training in weapons and martial arts. You will learn the techniques of poisoning, shooting, explosives and hand-to-hand combat. We will show you how to pick locks, how to disguise yourself, how to talk your way in and out of any given situation. We will teach you not only how to act like a killer but how to think like one. Every week there will be psychological and physical evaluations. There will also be formal schooling. You need to have maths and science. Your English is excellent but you still speak with a Russian accent. You must lose it. You should also learn Arabic, as we have many operations in the Middle East.

“I can promise you that you will be more exhausted than you would have thought possible but, if you last the course, you will be perfect. The perfect killer. And you will work for us.

“The alternative? You can leave here now. Believe it or not, I really mean it. I won’t stop you. I’ll even give you the money for the train fare if you like. You have nothing. You have nowhere to go. If you tell the police about me, they won’t believe you. My guess is that you will end up back in Russia. Sharkovsky will be looking for you. Without our help, he will find you.

“So there you have it, Yassen. That’s what it comes down to.”

She smiled and finished her drink.

“What do you say?”

They taught me how to kill.

In fact, during the time that I spent on the island of Malagosto, they taught me a great deal more than that. There was no school in the world that was anything like the Training and Assessment Centre that Scorpia had created. How do I begin to describe all the differences? It was, of course, highly secret. Nobody chose to go there… they chose you. It was surely the only school in the world where there were more teachers than students. There were no holidays, no sports days, no uniforms, no punishments, no visitors, no prizes and no exams. And yet it was, in its own way, a school. You could call it the Eton of murder.

What was strange about Malagosto was how close it was to mainland Venice. Here was this city full of rich tourists drifting between jazz bars and restaurants, five-star hotels and gorgeous palazzos – and less than half a mile away, across a strip of dark water, there were activities going on that would have made their hair stand on end. The island had been a plague centre once. There was an old Venetian saying: “Sneeze in Venice and wipe your nose in Malagosto” – the last thing you could afford in a tightly packed medieval city, with its sweating crowds and stinking canals, was an outbreak of the plague. The rich merchants had built a monastery, a hospital, living quarters and a cemetery for the infected. They would house them, look after them, pray for them and bury them. But they would never have them back.

The island was small. I could walk around it in forty minutes. Even in the summer, the sand was a dirty yellow, covered with shingle, and the water was an unappealing grey. All the woodland was tangled together as if it had been hit by a violent storm. There was a clearing in the middle with a few gravestones, the names worn away by time, leaning together as if whispering the secrets of the past. The monastery had a bell tower made out of dark red bricks and it slanted at a strange angle… it looked sure to collapse at any moment. The whole building looked dilapidated, half the windows broken, the courtyards pitted with cracks, weeds everywhere.

But the actual truth was quite surprising. Scorpia hadn’t just watched the place fall into disrepair, they had helped it on its way. They had removed anything that looked too attractive: fountains, statues, frescoes, stained-glass windows, ornamental doors. They had even gone so far as to insert a hydraulic arm into the tower, deliberately tilting it. The whole point was that Malagosto was not meant to be beautiful. It was off-limits anyway, but they didn’t want a single tourist or archaeologist to feel it was worth hiring a boat and risking the crossing. The last time anyone had tried had been six years before, when a group of nuns had taken a ferry from Murano, following in the footsteps of some minor saint. They had still been singing when the ferry had inexplicably blown up. The cause was never found.

Inside, the buildings were much more modern and comfortable than anyone might have guessed. We had two classrooms, warm and soundproof with brand new furniture and banks of audio visual equipment that would have had my old teachers in Rosna staring in envy. All they’d had was chalk and blackboards. There were both indoor and outdoor shooting ranges, a superbly equipped gymnasium with an area devoted exclusively to fighting – judo, karate, kick-boxing and, above all, ninjutsu – and a swimming pool, although most of the time we used the sea. If the temperature was close to freezing, that only made the training more worthwhile. My own rooms, on the second floor of the accommodation block, were very comfortable. I had a bedroom, a living room and even my own bathroom with a huge marble bath that took only seconds to fill, the steaming hot water jetting out of a monster brass tap shaped like a lion’s head. I had my own desk, my own TV, a private fridge that was always kept stocked up with bottled water and soft drinks. All this came at a price. Once I left the facility, I would be tied by a five-year contract working exclusively for Scorpia and the cost of my training would be taken from my salary. This was made clear to me from the start.

After I had met Mrs Rothman and accepted her offer, I was taken straight to the island in the back of a water ambulance. It seemed an odd choice of vessel but of course it would have been completely inconspicuous in the middle of all the other traffic and I did not travel alone. Mr Grant came with me, laid out on a stretcher. I have to say that I felt sorry for him. In his own way he had been kind to me. I turned my thoughts to Vladimir Sharkovsky, probably lying in a Moscow hospital, surrounded by fresh bodyguards watching over him just as the machines would be watching over his heart rate, his blood pressure – all his vital signs. Who would be tasting his food for him now?

It was midday when I arrived.

The water ambulance pulled up to a jetty that was much less dilapidated than it looked and I saw a young woman waiting for me. In fact, from a distance, I had mistaken her for a man. Her dark hair was cut short and she was wearing a loose white shirt, a waistcoat and jeans. But as we drew closer I saw that she was quite attractive, about two or three years older than me, and serious-looking. She wore no make-up. She reached out and gave me a hand off the boat and suddenly we were standing together, weighing each other up.

“I’m Colette,” she said.

“I’m Yassen.”

“Welcome to Malagosto. Do you have any luggage?”

I shook my head. I had brought nothing with me. Apart from what I was wearing, I had no possessions in the world.

“I’ve been asked to show you around. Mr Nye will want to see you later on.”

“Mr Nye?”

“You could say he’s the principal. He runs this place.”

“Are you a teacher?”

She smiled. “No. I’m a student. The same as you. Come on – I’ll start by showing you your rooms.”