Betrayal (27 page)

He scooped up his phone, irritated at the distraction. ‘Yes?’

‘You’re in danger.’

The voice that spoke to him was deep, pleasant sounding, clearly belonging to an educated man. Glazov knew exactly who it was. It was the man who had just given him a second chance at life.

Only now he seemed poised to take it away again.

‘W-what did you say?’

‘You’re in danger,’ the man repeated. ‘The FSB are on to you. They found Umarov and unless he was very careful, they’re likely to make the connection to you.’

Glazov’s breath caught in his throat. Umarov, his old friend from the days when the two of them had worked for Norilsk Nickel together, had smuggled out the explosives he’d needed to build the bombs. He’d assured Glazov that he would take care of any red tape, and that the matter was unlikely to receive any police follow-up.

‘But … how?’ Glazov asked. It should have been an angry demand, but instead it came out as a pathetic whimper.

‘Perhaps I should ask you the same question. You assured me the bomb wouldn’t compromise us.’

‘And I meant it,’ Glazov stammered, feeling utterly helpless. He was afraid, and there was no hiding it. His hands were starting to tremble, and he was beginning to wish he hadn’t left his glass of vodka in the kitchen. ‘I don’t understand how this happened, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t let you down. You have to believe that.’

‘But you
are
a liability. If the FSB capture you, they could make you talk.’

Glazov was practically shaking with fear. He knew well enough the ruthless measures the FSB took with suspected terrorists. Man or woman, old or young, sick or healthy, it made no difference to them.

He wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing. Even during his army days he’d been an engineer, not a soldier. He’d never killed a man in his life, and had certainly never been hunted and shot at.

‘What do I do?’ he asked, pleading for help, for understanding. How could he make this man understand that he wasn’t the enemy, that he hadn’t betrayed him? ‘Tell me what I can do.’

Agonising silence greeted him for the next few seconds. He was a condemned man waiting for the judge to pass sentence.

‘I can get you out, but we must move quickly,’ his employer decided. ‘Pack some warm clothes and be ready to leave. I’m sending someone to pick you up. They’ll identify themselves with the password
Alexander
. Do you understand?’

Glazov swallowed, trying to force down the bile that seemed to be rising in his throat. ‘Y-you promise you’ll help me?’

‘You’re a man with skills, Anatoly,’ the voice admitted. ‘Skills that could be valuable to us in future. If you agree to work for us, we can protect you. Now get moving. Good luck.’

With that, the line went dead.

Laying down the phone, Glazov turned and slowly surveyed the room: the threadbare furniture, the old-fashioned TV and the peeling wallpaper. His home, his life, his prison.

It took all of three seconds for him to make his decision.

‘Fuck this,’ he said, hurrying into his bedroom. If he had to throw in his hand with a bunch of nationalistic zealots, so be it. At least he’d be alive.

The rest he would figure out later.

Drake braced himself as the 4x4 ploughed through another deep hole in what was laughably called a road, the impact practically jolting him out of his seat. The dipped headlights illuminated a grey world of leafless woods, muddy overgrown fields and the occasional crumbling ruins of long-abandoned homesteads.

He hadn’t seen a single electric light in the past ten minutes, and it didn’t take much imagination to guess why. Most residents here would have cleared out during the First Chechen War, with few willing to return to a country scarred by conflict and suffering.

And yet here, in the midst of this remote war-torn landscape, Anatoly Glazov had chosen to make his home. Drake couldn’t wait to pay him a visit.

Gearing up for a house assault was a ritual he’d gone through more times than he could count, and always it involved the same round of last-minute equipment and weapon checks, the same worries over trivial details, the same recitals of whatever plan they were expected to carry out.

In this case there wasn’t much of a plan to follow. Their objective was simply to get to the isolated farm where Glazov had set up shop, find him and secure him for questioning. With little knowledge of what to expect once they were on site, it was impossible to formulate a more sophisticated strategy.

Still, the FSB were clearly erring on the side of caution. He, Mason and Miranova were accompanied by a pair of tactical agents in full body armour and woodland BDUs (Battle Dress Uniform).

They were certainly ready for a fight. Drake had spotted tear-gas canisters, breaching shotguns and stun grenades amongst their gear, but their weapon of choice seemed to be AKS-74s: compact and modern variants of the legendary AK-47 assault rifle. Such weapons were accurate and reliable even in severe weather, and powerful enough to punch through most body armour without difficulty.

It rather smacked of overkill to apprehend one frightened old man, but as the saying went, it was better to have a weapon and not need it than the other way around.

Drake glanced down to inspect the weapon he’d been issued with – an MP-443 Grach. A big, chunky automatic pistol, the Grach was a relatively new weapon that had only been adopted by the Russians a few years back. It felt solid and durable, but Drake had a feeling the balance was wrong for him and would hurt his accuracy. This one had been fitted with an integrated flashlight and laser sight for night operations, which further added to the weight. Still, he was confident he could hit most man-sized targets at up to 30 yards.

Holstering the weapon, he glanced at Mason, who was busy lacing up his boots. He seemed to be making a real meal of it, as if his fingers weren’t listening to the commands from his brain. He could see the tension in the older man’s face, as well as the faint sheen of sweat on his brow.

‘You all right?’ Drake asked, perplexed by his behaviour. Even if he’d been out of the game for a while, he was an experienced operative who had done this sort of thing dozens of times. Why was he acting like a rookie on his first mission?

‘I’m hot as hell in this thing,’ Mason replied, shifting uncomfortably inside his winter BDUs. The layered, thermally insulated uniform had bulked out his already large frame.

Drake frowned, sensing there was more to it than mere discomfort. ‘Need a hand with that?’ he asked, gesturing to his bootlaces.

Mason flashed him an angry look. ‘The day I can’t lace up my own fucking boots is the day they put me out to pasture.’

With a final hard yank he finished tying the lace, then reached up and wiped the sweat from his brow. He looked as though he’d just finished a strenuous workout.

Before Drake could question his friend further, Miranova twisted around in her seat.

‘We are less than five minutes out,’ she reported, having consulted the GPS unit mounted on the dash. Using a printed map to navigate in these parts would have been an exercise in futility; he doubted if most of the roads here had even been surveyed. ‘When we get there, Agents Pushkin and Vasilev will handle the breach. We will go in once the building is secure. Understand?’

Drake nodded. Being the most heavily armed and armoured, it made sense for the two tactical agents to spearhead the assault. There weren’t many problems that their combined firepower couldn’t overcome.

‘As long as we find Glazov, I don’t care how it’s done.’

This wasn’t why he had come to Chechnya. He was here for Anya, not to get involved in the FSB’s war. But there was still a chance that this Glazov, whoever he was, might lead Drake to her. He could only hope the man had something worthwhile to share with them.

He flexed his gloved hands, eager to get moving. The action itself he could handle; it was the waiting that did his head in. So much of his military career had been spent waiting – waiting to attack, waiting for support, waiting for an ambush, waiting for a release from the endless tension and paranoia of being in a hostile country.

But beneath it all, he sensed another reason for his unease. He had no cause to suspect the assault wouldn’t go exactly to plan, yet something in the back of his mind wouldn’t let it go.

Their adversaries had been one step ahead of them the whole time. Had they really managed to gain the upper hand now?

Glazov was gasping in shallow, ragged breaths as he shuffled down the corridor, clutching a single suitcase that represented everything of value to him in this world. He had to pause every so often as another coughing fit overtook him, but somehow he found the strength to pick it up and keep moving.

Strangely, he felt little remorse at the things he was leaving behind. There was nothing here that meant much to him. He’d moved back here to his family home years ago for no other reason than because he couldn’t afford to buy a place of his own. He’d even tried to sell the farm and its surrounding land to anyone who would buy it, but such a desperate scheme had been doomed to failure from the start. All of the adjoining farms had long since been abandoned, and no property developer worth his salt would buy land here.

No, he wouldn’t miss this place one bit.

He paused for a moment at the entrance to his old workshop, still strewn with the tools he’d used to construct the bombs. Such a task had been easy for a man of his experience. He’d dealt with explosives throughout most of his life, both in the army and as a civilian engineer, and knew how best to employ their effects.

He hadn’t asked too many questions about their intended targets, partly to guarantee the security of the buyers but mainly because he just didn’t want to know. It was easier to justify if he knew nothing. In fact, it had almost been possible to forget he’d done it.

Almost.

Pushing those thoughts away, he hurried past, heading for the living room.

He was just laying down the suitcase when the front door resounded with a hard, almost violent blow. His already labouring heart went into overtime at the realisation that someone was right outside.

Was it the FSB come to arrest him, or his buyer come to rescue him?

Either way he was taking no chances. Reaching into his coat, he pulled out a Makarov pistol; a relic from his days in the Red Army. He hadn’t maintained it very well over the years, but the weapon was so simple that there were few things to go wrong with it. He was confident it would still fire if he pulled the trigger, though he prayed it wouldn’t come to that.

With the pistol gripped tight in sweating hands, he advanced slowly towards the front door. It was heavy and solid, built in the days when strength was the best deterrent against theft, and secured with a deadbolt on his side. Nothing short of a battering ram would break it down.

The door rattled in its frame as it took another hard blow. Whoever was out there clearly wasn’t one for waiting around.

‘Who’s there?’ he called out, trying to sound braver and more dominant than he felt. The Makarov in his hand offered less reassurance than he’d hoped. There could be a dozen armed men out there for all he knew, and one rusted pistol certainly wouldn’t stop them.

Then, to his surprise, a woman’s voice called out in answer: ‘Alexander.’

Relief surged through him. He hadn’t expected his saviour to come in the form of a woman, but he certainly wasn’t about to question it at that moment. If anything, her prompt arrival here was a telling indication of how powerful and organised his new benefactor was. Shoving the Makarov in his pocket, he hurried forwards, unbarred the door and swung it open.

The woman who stood before him was tall and strikingly attractive, her short blonde hair damp from the rain, her icy blue eyes locked with his. She was dressed in woodland camouflage gear, and judging by the mud splattered on her boots and trousers, she had already hiked some distance to get here.

Without saying a word she stepped in over the threshold, and instinctively Glazov backed off a pace or two. There was something about her, some hidden aura of menace, that made him shiver from more than just the cold.

‘W-who are you?’ he stammered, wishing he’d kept the Makarov in his hand.

For a moment he caught a glimmer of something in her eyes; something that put him in mind of a field mouse about to be pounced on by a hawk. She hadn’t come all this way to help him, he realised at last. Why would they go to all that trouble for a sick, crippled old man?

She had come to silence him before the FSB got here.

In a moment of blind panic, his hand went for the gun in his pocket.

He was far too late. He saw her draw a weapon from a holster behind her back, saw the long tapering barrel of a silencer as she swung it up towards his head in a single fluid motion.

His last sight was of her cold, remorseless blue eyes staring into his as she squeezed the trigger. There was a flash, a moment of sickening blackness, and then he saw no more.

Lowering the silenced M1911 automatic, Anya looked down at Glazov. He was lying in a heap in the hallway, his blood slowly soaking into the floorboards beneath. His face still bore an expression of blank, uncomprehending shock, his eyes wide and glassy. A single .45-calibre round to the forehead had ended his life before he’d even hit the ground.

She didn’t allow herself to feel bad for him. He might have been a sick man of advancing years just trying to make some money, but to do it he’d knowingly constructed bombs designed to kill innocent people. Men like him deserved no pity.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the faint rumble of a car engine in the distance. Returning to the door, she peered out into the darkened woods that surrounded the isolated farm.

Sure enough, she could just make out twin points of light bouncing and jolting between the tree trunks. A single vehicle trying to negotiate the muddy, neglected road that wound its way up here.

It could only be the FSB, coming here to arrest Glazov. Little did they know that they were already too late.