Anthony Horowitz - Russian Roulette

That was when I understood. Hunter had aimed through the spider and at the Commander. He had shot them both with the same bullet.

“Let’s move,” he whispered.

There was no time to discuss what had happened. The bodyguards were already panicking, shouting and pointing in our direction. One of them opened fire, sending bullets randomly into the rainforest. The guards in the towers were searching for us. More men were running out of the huts.

We snatched up our equipment and ran, allowing the mass of leaves and branches to swallow us up. We left behind us a dead drug lord with a single bullet and a hundred tiny fragments of black widow in his heart.

“You saved my life,” I said.

Hunter smiled. “Taking a life and saving a life… and with just one bullet. That’s not bad going,” he said.

We had put fifteen miles between ourselves and the compound, following the red pins until the fading light made it impossible to continue and we had to stop for fear of losing our way. We had reached The Log, the campsite where we had spent the night before, and this time I was careful not to sit on the hollow tree. Hunter spent ten minutes stretching out tripwires all around us. These were almost invisible, connected to little black boxes that he screwed into the trunks of the trees. Once again, we didn’t dare light a fire. After we had hooked up our hammocks, we ate our dinner straight out of the tin. It amused me that Hunter insisted on carrying the empty tins with us. He had just killed a man, but he wouldn’t litter the rainforest.

Neither of us was ready for sleep. We sat cross-legged on the ground, listening out for the sound of approaching feet. It was a bright night. The moon was shining and everything around us was a strange silvery green. To my surprise, Hunter had produced a quarter-bottle of malt whisky. It was the last thing I would have expected him to bring along. I watched him as he held it to his lips.

“It’s a little tradition of mine,” he explained, in a low voice. “A good malt whisky after a kill. This is a twenty-five-year-old Glenmorangie. Older than you!” He held it out to me. “Have some, Cossack. I expect your nerves need it after that little incident. That spider certainly chose its moment.”

“I can’t believe what you did,” I said. There was a bandage around my neck, already stained with sweat and blood. It hurt a lot and I knew that I would always have a scar where Hunter’s bullet had cut me, but in a strange way I was glad. I did not want to forget this night. I sipped the whisky. It burnt the back of my throat. “What now?” I asked.

“A slog back to Iquitos and then Paris. At least it’ll be a little cooler over there. And no damn mosquitoes!” He slapped one on the side of his neck.

We were both at peace. The Commander was dead, killed in extraordinary circumstances. We had the whisky. The moon was shining. And we were alone in the rainforest. That’s the only way that I can explain the conversation that followed. At least, that was how it seemed at the time.

“Hunter,” I said. “Why are you with Scorpia?” I would never normally have asked. It was wrong. It was insolent. But out here, it didn’t seem to matter.

I thought he might snap at me but he reached out for the bottle and answered quietly, “Why does anyone join Scorpia? Why did you?”

“You know why,” I said. “I didn’t really have any choice.”

“We all make choices, Cossack. Who we are in this world, what we do in it. Generous or selfish. Happy or sad. Good or evil. It’s all down to choice.”

“And you chose this?”

“I’m not sure it was the right choice but I’ve got nobody else to blame, if that’s what you mean.” He paused, holding the bottle in front of him. “I was in a pub,” he said. “It was in the middle of London… in Soho. Me and a couple of friends. We were just having a drink, minding our own business. But there was a man in there, a taxi driver as it turned out… a big fat guy in a sheepskin coat. He overheard us talking and realized we were all army, and he began to make obnoxious remarks. Stupid things. I should have just ignored him or walked out. That was what my friends wanted to do.

“But I’d been drinking myself and the two of us got into an argument. It was so bloody stupid. The next thing I knew, I’d knocked him to the ground. Even then, there were a dozen ways I could have hit him. But I’d let my training get the better of me. He didn’t get up and suddenly the police were there and I realized what I’d done.” He paused. “I’d killed him.”

He fell silent. All around us, the insects continued their chatter. There wasn’t a breath of wind.

“I was dismissed from the army and thrown into jail,” he went on. “As it happened, I wasn’t locked up for very long. My old regiment pulled a few strings and I had a good lawyer. He managed to put in a claim of self-defence and I was let out on appeal. But after that I was finished. No one was going to employ me and even if they did, d’you think I wanted to spend the rest of my life as a security guard or behind a desk? I didn’t know what to do. And then Scorpia came along and offered me this. And I said yes.”

“Are you married?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been married three years and there’s a kid on the way. At least I’m going to have enough money to be able to look after him.” He paused. “If it is a boy. You see what I mean? My choice.”

The whisky bottle passed between us one last time. It was almost empty.

“Maybe it’s not too late for you to change your mind,” he said.

I was startled. “What do you mean?”

“I’m thinking about New York. I’m thinking about the last few weeks… and today. You seem like a nice kid to me, Cossack. Not one of Scorpia’s usual recruits at all. I wonder if you’ve really got it in you to be like me. Marat and Sam… they don’t give a damn. They’ve got no imagination. But you…?”

“I can do this,” I said.

“But do you really want to? I’m not trying to dissuade you. That’s the last thing I want to do. I just want you to be aware that once you start, there’s no going back. After the first kill – that’s it.”

He hesitated. We both did. I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“If I backed out now, Scorpia would kill me.”

“I rather doubt it. They’d be annoyed, of course. But I think you’re exaggerating your own importance. They’d very quickly forget you. Anyway, you’ve learnt enough to keep away from them. You could change your identity, your appearance, start somewhere new. The world is a big place – and there are all sorts of different things you could be doing in it.”

“Is that what you’re advising me?” I asked.

“I’m not advising you anything. I’m just laying out the options.”

I’m not sure what I would have said if the conversation had continued but just then we heard something; the croaking of a frog at the edge of the clearing. At least, that was what it would have sounded like to anyone approaching, but it wasn’t a frog that was native to the Amazon rainforest. One of the wires that Hunter had set down had just been tripped and what we were hearing was a recording, a warning. Hunter was on his feet instantly, crouching down, signalling to me with an outstretched hand. I had a gun. It had been supplied to me when we were in Iquitos – a Browning 9mm semi-automatic, popular with the Peruvian Army and unusual in that it held thirteen rounds of ammunition. It was fully loaded.

I heard another sound. The single crack of a branch breaking, about twenty metres away. A beam of light flickered between the trees, thrown by a powerful torch. There was no time to gather up our things and no point in wondering who they were, how they had followed us here. We had already planned what to do if this happened. We got up and began to move.