J.F. Kirwan - 88° North

Jin Fe ushered Nadia into the empty lift, and rattled off something in Cantonese. The cop’s smile foundered, and he let go of the doors to go catch up his colleagues. The lift doors closed.

Nadia grabbed the waist-high bar for support as they descended. ‘What did you say to him?’

‘I told him you here for HIV treatment.’ Jin Fe said, matter of fact.

The lift doors opened into the garage. ‘This way,’ Jin Fe said.

Nadia suddenly wondered why she was trusting this girl she’d met less than twenty-four hours earlier. But a limousine pulled up, and as the driver’s window hummed down, she saw the Chef, and hobbled over to the car and got in the back seat. Jin Fe followed.

In the front passenger seat was a Japanese man, fifty-something, an unruly mound of salt and pepper hair. He seemed agitated, with fingers that drummed incessantly on the dashboard, and a deep frown that looked like he slept in it.

‘I guess we’re not going back to the hotel?’ Nadia asked.

The Chef didn’t answer. One of his rules. Never reward stupid questions. She tried a different tack.

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Later,’ the Chef said, his accent less Russian than she remembered. He pulled out of the garage. They hit the exit ramp and she was blinded by the sun. Almost immediately they were in a fast-moving river of cars, and she saw white-and-red taxis everywhere. The traffic weaved around tower blocks via concrete overpasses that made her imagine snakes and dragons writhing around the city. Must be the morphine. She needed an espresso to clear her head. Maybe a double.

As they climbed a slope – Fortress Hill according to the road signs – she glimpsed a bay full of expensive-looking yachts, then the Chef swung left into another underground garage, beneath a bland rose-and-cream apartment block.

The four of them got out and crammed into a tiny aluminium lift with crude fans instead of proper aircon. She began sweating as soon as the door closed. Upstairs the Chef dug out a set of keys and opened an iron grill before unlocking the main door. It was homely inside: net curtains, a painting on the wall of an elegant Chinese man, a plastic-coated table with a jug of water and mugs, and a stash of toys next to an ironing board propped up by the kitchen entrance. Someone’s home for sure, rather than a safe house, but it was deserted. Nadia knew better than to ask. She headed to a threadbare sofa and parked herself carefully while Jin Fe sat at the table and poured four glasses of water. Nadia recalled the bar where they’d rescued Jin Fe, and the young girl who had poured them champagne. She wondered how early Jin Fe had started in the business.

The Chef remained standing. She’d rarely seen him sit in a chair. He said chairs killed more people than assassins and cars put together, only more slowly. She hadn’t seen him in five years, yet he hadn’t aged. She guessed he was close to fifty now – chief assassin wasn’t an old man’s job. He had the same chiselled, square Russian jaw she remembered, jet black hair with just a sprinkling of grey near his ears, and a solid-looking brow good for head-butting. The only jarring features were his green eyes, almost reptilian. At least that’s what you thought when he looked directly at you. His body was the same fluid dancer’s frame it had always been. As if to prove it, his legs coiled down effortlessly into a cross-legged position on the floor, his back straight, eyes alert.

One of her fellow trainees used to call him Cobra back at the training camp in Siberia, partly because his movements were so fluid, but mainly because he seemed poised to strike at any moment. The Chef had also perfected an assassin’s technique called snake eyes, which he showed each of his students only once, along with a short lecture:

‘ Your enemy must see their imminent death in your eyes. Then they will falter, they will hesitate, and they will blink, clinging to life. This is the moment you strike. It is physiological, predator and prey, and is the way of things, hardwired into all of us. You must always be predator, never prey. You must perfect this look. ’

Nadia hadn’t, had never wanted to. She shivered. Only one other person she’d ever met had mastered that look, and he was currently holding Jake captive.

The Japanese man dragged a chair from the table and parked himself there. His handsome face was deadpan. Or just dead. There was more light in the eyes of the man in the portrait on the wall. His thick accent required him to speak slowly, to navigate his tongue around consonant-heavy English sentences.

‘My name is Sakuro,’ he said, turning to look directly at her. ‘I am an oncologist.’ His face darkened, as if a thundercloud had passed behind his eyes. ‘I was an oncologist. I was summoned to Fukushima. I treated radiation victims.’ His gaze lingered on her, studying her in a way that was totally opposite to the cop in the lift, then he gazed towards the window, or to nowhere, or maybe back to Fukushima. His hooded eyes were haunted. He’d seen terrible things.

Or done them.

Nadia felt her anger rise. Why had the Chef brought an oncologist? She didn’t need this.

‘This wasn’t part of the deal,’ she said, speaking to the Chef.

‘My deal is not with you, Nadia.’

True. The Colonel, her handler back in Moscow – the Chef’s deal was with him. The Colonel must have offered him something to work with her. She had no idea what, and didn’t want to know.

‘If we are to work together,’ he said, ‘I need to be sure you won’t collapse on me or start puking at a crucial moment.’

‘That will never happen.’ Because she’d eat a bullet before she got that far.

Sakuro spoke. ‘I wish to speak to Miss Laksheva alone.’

The Chef ushered Jin Fe out of the room, though not before she cast a worried glance back at Nadia.

Sakuro pulled out a silver cigarette case and opened it, revealing a row of white filterless cigarettes. He extracted one, produced an old-style silver lighter, and lit it up. Some kind of ritual, perhaps to calm his nerves. He inhaled long and deep, then stood and approached the window. He seized the brass lever and let some air into the stuffy room. The gap was narrow, the window held in place by a steel rod so that it couldn’t be opened fully, so that children couldn’t fall and parents couldn’t jump. Despite the narrow gap, the room was immediately inundated with the relentless hubbub of cars, taxi horns and shouting below, mixed in with hammering and drilling from the skinny tower-block-in-progress opposite. The heat and humidity of the city seeped in and easily conquered the air conditioning. Sakuro didn’t seem to notice. He leant his head against the glass and gazed downwards. He spoke quietly, so that she had to strain to hear his words. But then, she had the feeling he wasn’t really talking to her.

‘I knew the Prime Minister of Japan, and several ministers. I treated a few of their wives. I saved them. We live for the ones we save, because so many succumb, if not the first time, then later. So, I was trusted. When the tsunami hit, crippling the nuclear power plant, the country was thrown into chaos. The Prime Minister and his aides needed someone there they could trust. The scientists were contradicting each other, and as for the plant owners … So, I went, with my medical team.’ He inhaled again, then dropped the cigarette out the window, and watched it fall. He tugged the window shut, and turned to face her.

‘I did not believe in hell until that mission. There are few who were not there who could even begin to understand. But you were in Chernobyl, Nadia. You saw Fukushima-Daichi’s future, what it will become in twenty years.’

Nadia’s breathing slowed. Sakuro probably hadn’t intended it, perhaps didn’t even know what had really happened there, but images from her brief sojourn in Chernobyl – her sister lying dead in a pool of blood, her father putting a bullet into his skull after Salamander had chained him to a mound of radioactive slag – slapped into her. Hell didn’t cover it. She didn’t want to go back there. But who was she trying to kid? She’d never left. Because Salamander was still alive and breathing.