Anthony Horowitz - Russian Roulette

He wheeled himself forward, heading for his side of the desk. I moved away, making room for him. It was right that it should be this way… as it had been all those years before.

“What happened to Arkady Zelin?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“They were in it together, weren’t they? He and the mechanic.” I didn’t say anything so he went on. “I will find them eventually. I have people looking for them all over the world. They’ve been looking for you, too.” He was rasping and his voice was thick with hatred. He didn’t need to tell me what they would have done with me if they’d found me. “Did you help them?” he asked. “Were you part of the plot?”

“No.”

“But you left with them.”

“I persuaded them to take me.”

“So why have you come back?”

“We have unfinished business. We have to talk about Estrov.”

“Estrov?” The name took him by surprise.

“I used to live there.”

“But you said…” He thought back and somehow he remembered. “You said you came from Kirsk.”

“My parents, all my friends died. You were responsible.”

He smiled. It was a horrible, death’s-head smile with more malevolence in it than I would have thought possible. “Well, well, well,” he croaked. “I have to say, I’m surprised. And you came here for revenge? That’s not very civil of you, Yassen. I looked after you. I took you into my house. I fed you and gave you a job. Where’s your gratitude?”

He had been fiddling around as he spoke, reaching for something underneath the desk. But I had already found what he was looking for.

“I’ve disconnected the alarm button,” I told him. “If you’re calling for help, it won’t come.”

For the first time, he looked uncertain. “What do you want?” he hissed.

“Not revenge,” I said. “Completion. We have to finish the business that started here.”

I placed the gun on the desk in front of him and spilt out the bullets.

“When you brought me here, you made me play a game,” I said. “It was a horrible, vicious thing to do. I was fourteen years old! I cannot think of any other human being who would do that to a child. Well, now we are going to play it again – but this time according to my rules.”

Sharkovsky could only watch, fascinated, as I picked up the gun, flicked open the cylinder and placed a bullet inside. I paused, then followed it with a second bullet, a third, a fourth and a fifth. Only then did I shut it. I spun the cylinder.

Five bullets. One empty chamber.

The exact reverse of the odds that Sharkovsky had offered me.

He had worked it out for himself. “Russian roulette? You think I’m going to play?” he snarled. “I’m not going to commit suicide in front of you, Yassen Gregorovich. You can kill me if you want to, but otherwise you can go to hell.”

“That’s exactly where you kept me,” I said. I was holding the gun, remembering the feel of it. I could even remember its taste. “I blame you for everything that has happened to me, Vladimir Sharkovsky. If it wasn’t for you, I would still be in my village with my family and friends. But from the moment you came into my life, I was sent on a journey. I was given a destiny which I was unable to avoid.

“I do not want to be a killer. And this is my last chance… my last chance to avoid exactly that.” I felt something hot, trickling down the side of my face. A tear. I did not want to show weakness in front of him. I did not wipe it away. “Do you understand what I am saying to you? What you want, what Scorpia wants, what everyone wants… it is not what I want.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sharkovsky said. “I’m tired and I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to bed.”

“I didn’t come here to kill you,” I said. “I came here to die.”

I raised the gun. Five bullets. One empty chamber.

I pressed it against my head.

Sharkovsky stared at me.

I pulled the trigger.

The click was as loud as an explosion would have been. Against all the odds, I was still alive. And yet, I had expected it. I had been chosen. My future lay ahead of me and there was to be no escape.

“You’re mad!” Sharkovsky whispered.

“I am what you made me,” I said.

I swung the gun round and shot him between the eyes. The wheelchair was propelled backwards, crashing into the wall. Blood splattered onto the desk. His hands jerked uselessly, then went limp.

I heard footsteps in the hallway outside and a moment later the door crashed open. I had expected to see the new bodyguards but it was Ivan Sharkovsky who stood there, wearing a dinner jacket with a black tie hanging loose around his neck. He saw his father. Then he saw me.

“Yassen!” he exclaimed in the voice I knew so well.

I shot him three times. Once in the head, twice in the heart.

Then I left.

King’s Cross, London. Three o’clock in the morning.

The station was closed and silent. The streets were almost empty. A few shops were still open – a kebab restaurant and a minicab office, their plastic signs garishly bright. But there were no customers.

Inside his hotel room, Yassen Gregorovich took out the memory stick and turned off the computer. He had read enough. He was still sitting at the desk. The tray with the dirty dishes from his supper was on the carpet beside him. He looked at the blank screen, then yawned. He needed to sleep. He stripped off his clothes and left them, folded, on a chair. Then he showered, dried himself and went to bed. He was asleep almost immediately. He did not dream. Since that final night in the Silver Forest, he never dreamed.

He woke again at exactly seven o’clock. It was a Saturday and the street was quieter than it had been the day before. The sun was shining but he could see from the flag on the building opposite that there was a certain amount of wind. He quickly scanned the pavements looking for anything out of place, anyone who shouldn’t be there. Everything seemed normal. He showered again, then shaved and got dressed. The computer was where he had left it on the table and he powered it up so that he could check for any new messages. He knew that the order he had received the day before would still be active. Scorpia were not in the habit of changing their minds. The screen told him that he had received a single email and he opened it. As usual, it had been encrypted and sent to an account that could not be traced to him. He read it, considering its contents. He planned the day ahead.

He went downstairs and had breakfast – tea, yoghurt, fresh fruit. There was a gym at the hotel but it was too small and ill-equipped to be worth using, and anyway, he wouldn’t have felt safe in the confined space, down in the basement. It was almost as bad as the lift. After breakfast, he returned to his room, checking the door handle one last time, packed the few items he had brought with him and left.

“Goodbye, Mr Reddy. I hope you enjoyed your stay.”

“Thank you.”

The girl at the checkout desk was Romanian, quite attractive. Yassen had no girlfriend, of course. Any such relationship was out of the question but for a brief moment he felt a twinge of regret. He thought of Colette, the girl who had died in Argentina. At once, he was annoyed with himself. He shouldn’t have spent so much time reading the diary.

He paid the bill using a credit card connected to the same gymnasium where he supposedly worked. He took the receipt but later on he would burn it. A receipt was the beginning of a paper trail. It was the last thing he needed.

As he left the hotel, he noticed a man reading a newspaper. The headlines screamed out at him:

SHOOTING AT SCIENCE MUSEUM