David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

She stood up, face blank.

“Understandable,” she said, before she turned to the door, “I guess. I guess I’m not in the mood either, then.”

When she left, closing the door firmly, Alexei put a hand behind his head and regarded the asp, which she’d thoughtfully left him. Why did he still have it? The Romanians should have found it on him — they were professionals in every other respect, and a professional didn’t leave his enemy with a weapon in his pocket. Even an innocuous little weapon such as this.

He took hold of the ball at the asp’s tip, and pushed it back into the shaft, so it became like a pen again. He bounced it once in his palm, and tucked it under his pillow.

It scarcely mattered now, of course; there were other, more immediate things to worry about.

But he still couldn’t stop asking himself: What the hell was their angle? Crazy damn Romanians. They had to have an angle.

Alexei had been working with Mrs. Kontos-Wu for nearly three months when they boarded the Romanians’ cabin cruiser outside Boston, and nearly all of that time was spent in travel. Mrs. Kontos-Wu was an associate with Wolfe-Jordan, which had meant nothing to Alexei when he came to New York following an extended stay in Belarus. His work there hadn’t left much time for reading newspapers — particularly the financial sections where Wolfe-Jordan might have rated mention.

Because of that, her executive assistant Stephen Haber had been resolutely unimpressed with Alexei. He peered over his resume with undisguised disdain, the day they’d sat across from one another in a little hotel conference room in mid-town Manhattan.

“You worked with the KGB,” said Stephen, “until 1992. Am I wasting my time asking your duties?”

Alexei shrugged. “No,” he said. “I worked in Moscow in an office for two years in the early 1990s. It was not dramatic work. Before that — I was in foreign work. That is harder to talk about.”

“We’re all friends here,” said Stephen, in a tone that suggested that they weren’t friends at all.

“Okay,” said Alexei. “I spent time in Pakistan. East Germany. Czechoslovakia. Little bit in Poland.”

“What about Chechnya?”

“After my time.”

“Afghanistan?”

Alexei didn’t answer that one.

“Well.” Stephen was just a kid. He was probably twenty-five, but if Alexei ran into him on the street he wouldn’t have guessed him any older than twenty. Here, it was clear he’d managed to acquire the unpleasant confidence of many more years. Stephen tilted his head back and looked at Alexei hard — like he was trying to read his mind. “You won’t be doing much business in Afghanistan.”

“Okay.”

“But you may be working in a lot of other countries. Any problems with that?”

“I like to travel.”

“Good. You ever kill someone?”

Quiet for a moment. Alexei looked at the presentation board behind Stephen. There was a smear of blue ink across the bottom — Alexei thought he could make out the letters D and L in it.

“You ever kill someone?” asked Stephen again.

“Sure. Everyone in KGB killed someone.”

Stephen rolled his eyes and made a note on a yellow tablet.

“You were in Belarus most recently I hear.”

Alexei nodded. “Sure.”

Stephen eyed him. “You found good work with the Mafiya .”

“Sure,” said Alexei. “That’s all the work there is for KGB people in Belarus. Only killing people who piss off Mafiya .” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “That and washing the blood from our hands. Two hours a night.”

Stephen smiled thinly. “Funny,” he said.

Alexei smiled back. “Anyway,” he said, “there is no Russian mafia.”

Stephen looked at him. “You talk like someone who doesn’t want this job.”

“Oh,” said Alexei, “that’s not true.”

Stephen shook his head. “You poor bastard,” he said.

Alexei took it to mean that he’d blown the interview. Stephen Haber wouldn’t be calling again — not after a self-sabotaging interview like that. Thinking about it later, he had to wonder if maybe something inside him simply warned him away — was doing its best to keep him clear of this American workplace with its nursery school management.

But he’d been wrong. The next day, Alexei got a call and they met in the hotel bar — empty even of staff in the early afternoon. Alexei sipped a ginger ale. Stephen fiddled with an unlit cigarette and seemed nervous.

“You really don’t need to know this,” he’d explained, “but you’re working with one of the best. Mrs. Kontos-Wu is very hands-on. She doesn’t just pick companies out of the air. She doesn’t just sit in the office. She looks. That’s why we brought you in — Mrs. Kontos-Wu needs discreet protection; these companies are in pretty unstable places, some of them — politically unstable, you get what I mean.”

“That is what makes her so good, yes?” Alexei said, trying to at least belatedly pick up some of Stephen’s enthusiasm for his new boss.

“Not good,” said Stephen. “The best . Like you’re going to be.”

And so they had travelled: to tour diamond mines in South Africa; a computer chip factory in Taiwan; a biotech company in Calcutta and a half-built hotel complex in Borneo. On all of these, it was Alexei’s job to see that Mrs. Kontos-Wu came to no harm — that neither terrorists nor industrial spies nor, for that matter, common thieves even got near Mrs. Kontos-Wu and her entourage. Alexei carried a little arsenal of weapons — from the asp to the butterfly knife, to an electric stun-wand and a Glock semi-automatic handgun — and if pressed he knew he could kill with any one of them. But if he were ever so pressed, Alexei also knew it would have meant he’d already failed.

Seen in such terms, his first three months had been an unqualified success. Alexei swept their hotel rooms, hung back watchfully during Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s many meetings, scanned the crowds as they passed among them and generally enjoyed the sights and sounds of the new cities.

And Mrs. Kontos-Wu seemed to do well too. Everyone she met with seemed to be very agreeable — gave her all the information she needed — and even, sometimes, gave her more. Stephen Haber had been right: Mrs. Kontos-Wu evidently was the best.

Perhaps it was a combination of that — the sight of so many unfamiliar places, the chaos of so many smells and tastes, so many voices speaking in so many unintelligible languages, his boss’s uncanny ability to close a deal — that had made him careless in the banality of Boston Harbour.

Perhaps it was just stupidity.

“I have some people to talk to in Boston,” she told Stephen, the previous afternoon. “You can stay behind.”

Alexei was sitting on a wing-backed chair in the outer office, flipping through the back pages of the Post, counting time until his boss needed him. He folded the paper and looked out through the open doorway. Alexei could see Stephen, but Mrs. Kontos-Wu was hidden by a filing cabinet. As for Stephen — he didn’t look pleased at the news.

“You’ll still take your protection,” said Stephen — barely glancing at Alexei, who by this time had stood up and was leaning in the doorframe.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu glanced over the filing cabinet at Alexei. She was a small, slender woman, with long black hair and a faint Asian cast to her eyes. Now all he could see were those eyes. They were crinkled in a smile. “I don’t know that I’ll need him,” she said. “What do you think, Alexei?”

Alexei shrugged. “Never good to travel alone,” he said.

“But it’s up to me.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu leaned back in her chair, and disappeared behind the cabinet again. “That’s what I like about you, Alexei,” she said, a little sharply. “You leave it up to me .”