Christopher Nuttall: The Fall of Night

“I think that it is a little small for the pair of us,” Shelia said finally. Hazel nodded in grim understanding; it wasn’t as if Stuart and her were short of money, but she knew better than to assume anything. The Government might just decide that her husband was no longer needed in the army. “We will keep it in mind, but…”

“I quite understand,” Hazel said, keeping her face blank through determined effort. “You do know that if someone else comes with an offer, I am going to have to accept it…?”

“Yes, thank you,” Shelia said. “We do understand.”

Hazel showed them both out, sighed, and headed back upstairs to the living room. “You can count them out,” she informed Ustinov, who shrugged. The Russian was a man of few words; he’d only unbent far enough to tell her that he had committed a political indiscretion that had resulted in him being chased out of the country. Her husband had once commented that Ustinov was as fit as a soldier, something he had explained as being due to the Russian program of conscription. “You won’t get them as flatmates unless they change their minds.”

“That’s bad, I guess,” Ustinov said. He glanced back down the corridor. “We’d pay more if we could.”

“It’s not the money,” Hazel assured him. “It’s the fact that this place is meant to be full of life and it… isn’t. If Stuart and I ever have children, then perhaps there will be little feet running around, but…”

Ustinov grinned. “Perhaps,” he agreed, as the sound of a door opening echoed down the corridor. “Ah, here he is.”

Hazel smiled at Sergey Ossetia as he entered the living room. She had never gotten a gay vibe from him, not in the sense that some gaysexuals dressed in a feminine fashion, often comically exaggerated for effect, but she presumed that that was because Russia had a dim attitude to homosexuals. She had been looked at by enough men to know the difference between lust and dispassion… and Ossetia had shown no interest in her body whatsoever.

“Sorry about the delay,” Ossetia said. He spoke perfect English; neither of them had much in the way of an accent. “I was just emailing home and lost track of time.”

Ustinov glowered at him. “We’re late,” he said. “Come on; we’ll see you later, Mrs Robinson.”

“I assume that you don’t want your rooms cleared?” Hazel asked, teasing them. “I can do it for a small charge…”

“No, thank you,” Ustinov said, with great dignity. “You have a break while we go to work to earn the money to keep you in house and home.”

Hazel laughed and waved at them as they headed down the stairs and out onto the streets, and then got back to work. The house didn’t clean itself, after all.

Ustinov, who was a Captain in the FSB Commando detachments, checked around them out of habit as the two men strolled onwards through the Meadows, heading towards the other side of the city. The Meadows made a good place for them to have a private chat; it was somewhere where the British security services would have real problems spying on them, even though there was no sign that the British had even noticed them as more than the simple labourers they appeared to be.

Ossetia, who was a Lieutenant and technically Ustinov’s subordinate, frowned as he carefully hunted for signs of pursuit. “Are you sure that the items are safe?”

Ustinov nodded. “She hasn’t gone into our rooms since we took them,” he said. He had taken the precaution of scattering a handful of portable sensors around since the first week they had spent in the building; Hazel hadn’t even poked her head in, let alone anything else. “In any case, we have them all secure, don’t we?”

“More or less,” Ossetia agreed. They had moved beyond the ordinary relationship between a Captain and a Lieutenant; there was little point in maintaining the formalities when it was just the two of them. They knew that there was at least one other officer in Edinburgh, their superior, but they knew nothing about him… or about the others they assumed would exist within the city. Neither of them had been assigned to specific targets; both of them knew enough to know that some targets in the city would not have been left alone. “The boxes should remain secure, short of someone actually managing to burn through the casing, triggering the self-destruct system.”

“One hopes that that won’t happen,” Ustinov said shortly. They were almost at the university. “The blast would vaporise the entire house and hopefully be blamed on Islamic terrorists.”

They kept their mouths closed as they passed the university library, noticing the protesters protesting against the American deployment to Korea without showing their disdain, and headed towards the Mosque. It was a building that was a little piece of Arabia in Edinburgh, built by money supplied by Saudi Arabia before it collapsed into chaos; the two Russians kept their faces blank as they passed it. Once they had completed their first mission, perhaps the Mosque would make a good second target for chaos. The streets were packed with cars, despite the limited supplies of oil from the Middle East; it was easy to get into the crowds, lose themselves within the swarm of humanity, and finally reach a nondescript building near Arthur’s Seat. Every base had been covered; if anyone had asked, they had been called to the building and paid minimum wage to perform some basic repairs.

Control was waiting for them in a shabby room.

Neither of them knew his real name, nor did they know anything useful about him that the security services could use to track him down. They assumed that he was a deep-cover agent, working somewhere within Edinburgh, perhaps within the entire United Kingdom, to touch base with all of the Russian operatives within the country. They had been given some specific instructions concerning him; they were to tell him nothing about their positions, or where they stayed or…

The planners had tried to plan for everything.

“Boris and Boris, pleased to meet you,” Control said. The name Boris was a private joke; anything else would have kicked off alarms in their heads. If Control had called them Ivan, he had been captured and turned and they would have to run for their lives. “Take a seat; events are moving faster than we had anticipated.”

Ustinov nodded. They had privately expected to be called back to Moscow; they had run plenty of dry-runs before and nothing had ever come of it. When they had been inserted into Britain this time, they had expected nothing else; they would be just a pawn in Moscow’s endless power games with Europe. The acts they had planned and prepared, ever since they had come out of Chechnya with a burning hatred of all things European, Islamic or both, had seemed meaningless on their own. In the context of some much larger operation, however…

They seated themselves on the floor. “This building has been checked carefully,” Control said. “You have some work to do afterwards, but for the moment, the agency has ensured that we had some time together. I assume that you have a secure base and have placed your weapons somewhere where you can lay claim to them?”

Ustinov nodded again. “Yes, sir,” he said. That was as far as he was prepared to go when it came to sharing details. If something happened and they lost Control, there were contingency plans for himself and Ossetia to either launch attacks on their own, or flee the country. “Everything is as safe as it could reasonably be.”

Control smiled. “Good,” he said. “The start day of the operation has been set; the 1 stof June, local morning. You have been assigned to target set A; I assume that you have scouted out possible locations?”