Fire Hawk (50 page)

Oksana sniffed in his smell and tried to imprint it in her memory before it went away. She didn't know why she felt so strongly that Sam's life had only a few more hours to run. Such certainties were never easy to explain. But the same dread feeling had come to her the night when Sergeyi died. The doctors had told her it would be months before the cancer killed him, but she'd known as she lay down beside him in the bed that when she awoke in the morning he would be gone.

She pulled back from him. His eyes were half closed as if locked on some far horizon.

‘Why you do this?'

‘Because I want to.' He kissed her again but she pushed him back.

‘Let me look, you very beautiful man.' He was like a sleep walker, she thought. Heading for a precipice.

She took one of his hands and put it on her breast. As he felt its shape a shiver rose up from her womb.

‘I very afraid for you, Sam,' she whispered.

From the kitchen came the sound of water boiling. And suddenly the lights came on. They blinked at the unaccustomed brightness.

‘I'll switch it off again,' he suggested.

‘I think is better.'

As he crossed over to the wall switch she slipped into the kitchen to turn off the gas.

The television came on. News headlines on some English language satellite channel. He watched the screen, fearful suddenly that the anthrax attack might already have happened.

Oksana came up behind him and slipped her arms round his waist.

They watched the screen. A car bomb in Jerusalem – tension over Jewish settlements on the West Bank. A
truck drivers' strike in France. Political sniping from the election trail in the USA.

He turned it off again.

Oksana held onto him.

‘You very dear man to me,' she murmured. Her hands were on his chest. ‘I feel your heart beating.'

She kept her hands there, feeling his life force, determined to have of it what she could.

‘Please love me,' she breathed. ‘Love me now.'

He turned round. Her eyes had a melting softness. She pressed her hips against his groin and lifted up her mouth. He teased at her lips while feeling for the buttons of her embroidered blouse. He undid them slowly, then reached behind her back for the clip to her bra.

Suddenly she turned away from him and looked towards the bed. As one, they decided without the need to voice it that to lie where Taras had lain night after night, week after week, masturbating over his porn tapes was not an option.

‘Sofa,' she whispered. ‘Come. I show.'

She took their bags off it and put them onto the floor, then began heaving at the seat cushions. With a creaking of unoiled springs a bed unfolded, its mattress covered with a linen protector that looked passably clean.

He held her again, their breath faster now after the exertion with the sofa. A smile crossed her face like the beat of a butterfly, her eyes full of longing, but a little afraid. He slipped the blouse and bra from her shoulders. Her breasts were round like a young girl's, their nipples as hard as orange pips.

‘Sam . . .' she breathed, her mouth caressing his ear as he bent his head to kiss them. ‘I want you to tell me something.'

He stood up straight and put a finger against her lips.

‘There's nothing you need to know.'

‘Yes,' she insisted. ‘This is important to me.'

‘Nothing's important,' he croaked. ‘Nothing except this.' He felt for the zip of her skirt.

‘Yes,' she insisted again, pulling back from him and holding him by the waist at arm's length. ‘Tell me.'

‘What then?'

‘I want to know if you love someone, Sam.'

Love? He didn't know what it meant any more.

‘No,' he breathed eventually.

She didn't know whether to believe him or not. But it freed her, what he'd said. She placed her palms on the hard muscles of his behind and pressed him to her, fearing the lump in his trousers that she'd felt against her belly might have been softened by her prevaricating. It wasn't. She began unbuttoning his shirt.

They undressed quickly and stood naked in the flickering candle light, her eyes clouding at the sight of the burn marks on his chest. Before she could ask, he kissed her hard on the mouth and then her neck. Her heat enveloped him as their bodies touched. She tasted of salt. Her fingers clasped the back of his head and he felt her opening up to him like a crocus in sunlight.

Then she did something he wasn't expecting. She detached herself from his embrace, knelt in front of him on the bed and hooked her hands behind her back as if they were shackled to her ankles.

‘I very happy you not like man in video,' she smiled. Then she took his penis in her mouth.

Sam gasped. He held her head, gently stroking behind her ears as she sucked. But he quickly realised she'd not done this before. Her movements were frenetic and uncertain. A desire to please but without knowing how.

‘Hey,' he breathed, pulling back and crouching in front of her. ‘You don't have to do that.' He kissed her lips, tasting his own salt on them, and cupped her breasts with his hands.

‘I want to . . .' she moaned, throatily.

‘No you don't.'

He lay her back on the bed and kissed her down the length of her body. The touch of his hands and tongue felt like fire to her.

‘I love you, love you, Sam,' she mouthed, stretching wide her legs so she could take all of him into her, every last piece of him and hold him there, hold him so tight and so firm that he would never be able to leave her. And so that the volcano that had been dormant inside her for years could finally erupt.

HE AWOKE WITH
a start, his heart kicking into life like a motorbike engine as he remembered what he now had to do.

The candle had burned down, but light from the bare bulb in the kitchen was bright enough for him to read his watch by. After eleven. He'd slept for far longer than he'd intended. Oksana lay by his side breathing heavily and evenly. After making love they'd lain with just a scratchy blanket for cover and fallen asleep like babies.

Moving slowly so as not to wake her, he swung his feet to the floor and stood up. He thanked God that Taras hadn't returned.

He gathered his scattered clothes, dressed, then carried his suitcase to the kitchen. He dug into it until his fingers found the package Figgis had given him in Kiev. He unwrapped the pistol, and checked it over. Figgis had called it a PSM, a Russian version of the Walther Polizei Pistol he'd once had instruction on. He checked the location of the safety, finding it at the rear of the slide instead of the side. The gun was slimmer and easier to conceal than a Walther. He unclipped the magazine to check it was full, then, after replacing it, tucked the barrel of the weapon into the sock on his left foot and bound the grip to the inside of his calf with a necktie. He straightened the trouser leg over the weapon and took a few paces to ensure he could walk with it.

His passport and cash he stuffed into a money belt and
secured it round his waist next to his skin. Then he pulled a thick sweater over his shirt. It was cold in this house and it would be colder outside. Pocketing his torch and the street map that he'd bought from a kiosk at the station on their return to Odessa, he checked he'd left nothing in the suitcase that he needed, then said goodbye to it, because he didn't expect to be seeing it again.

He tiptoed back into the bedroom. Oksana's breathing was steady and full. She lay on her back, her legs apart like a sated creature and with one hand on the pillow. He decided he must leave her a note. There was some scrap paper and a ball pen by the video. He scribbled a message saying that she should catch the first train to Kiev in the morning and he would contact her there soon. He left it on the pillow then stepped over to Taras's bed, picking up one of the empty vodka bottles lying on the floor beside it and stuffing it under his sweater. Finally, with a last look at Oksana, he slipped out into the night.

He walked quickly though the broad, ochre streets of Moldovanka, concerned that the lateness of the hour meant he'd missed his chance. The feeble street lighting of the neighbourhood concealed the terrible disrepair of its graceful buildings. He avoided doorways and patches of shadow where there were shapes that moved. A short-skirted whore, stoned out of her head, who was exposing her bony crotch to any car that passed, made a lurch towards him, then spat abuse when he ignored her. From time to time cars sped by at lunatic speeds as if escaping the scene of some crime. From inside a house he heard a woman scream, though whether from ecstasy, from a beating, or from the effects of
vink
he couldn't tell.

He shivered, partly from cold and partly through fear. He'd never felt more alone or more full of doubt. He knew that the prospect of persuading Rybkin to tell him about the anthrax plot had the flight potential of a brick,
but that wasn't the only issue he needed the man to resolve.

The night sky was clear and pricked with stars. He'd been walking for more than twenty minutes by the time he reached the street he was aiming for, a street very different from the slums he'd left behind. White fairy lights twinkled in the lower branches of the lush trees lining its broad, cobbled carriageway. Beneath the canopy of leaves, plastic tables and chairs clustered under parasols marked Marlboro and Pall Mall. This was vulitsya Deribasovska, the centre of Odessa's night-life.

Despite the chilly air, hundreds of twenty and thirty-somethings thronged the pedestrianised zone in jeans and bomber jackets, or smart suits, dresses and long coats. They were socialising with the vivacity of Romans. Sam slipped among them, slackening his pace to match that of the ambling crowd. As his eyes adjusted, he caught the occasional flash of white or navy. The NATO sailors were still in town. On a corner opposite, shiny helmets glinted above the watchful eyes of a US Military Police patrol.

The street was dotted with cafés and bars. Doing good business for a nation on its knees, thought Sam wryly. New Russians, new money. And somewhere here was the restaurant the renegade Major had identified as the nocturnal haunt of Dima Filipovich Grimov and his friends.

He'd memorised the tourist map of the centre. He was in the grid of the old town, little altered since it was laid out by architects from France and Italy in the nineteenth century. Roads intersected every hundred metres. The restaurant used by Grimov's gang should have been to his left at the fourth junction down, but when he looked into that particular side street it was in darkness. None of the garish neon that adorned every night-spot he'd seen so far.

He was about to check out the next street when he saw something. He slipped into the turning, losing himself in shadow while his eyes attuned to the dark. After a few seconds he could make out a large car parked about thirty paces down whose bodywork had the square bulk of a Mercedes.

Too dark to see if there were men inside or standing by it, but fearing his presence had been noted, he pulled the empty vodka bottle from under his sweater, raised it shakily and as visibly as possible to his lips, then lurched down the street like a drunk. Once he'd drawn level with the car on the opposite side of the road, he halted, swaying like a willow in a gale, and opened his fly to urinate.

He could see now that there
were
two men on the far pavement and they were watching him. Suddenly they turned back towards the building behind them as if responding to a noise. A shaft of light beamed up from a basement, accompanied by coarse laughter. One of the men shouted at Sam who took the words to mean
fuck off out of it.
The thug began moving towards him so he quickly zipped his fly and shuffled away. He heard the click of a gun being cocked and lurched away faster, terrified these hoods might be in the habit of using drunks for target practice.

After twenty paces he risked a look back. Next to the Mercedes several men were now gathered, talking in low voices. Some ducked into the car. Doors closed and the engine roared. As the machine pulled from the kerb, its headlamps ablaze, Sam leaned drunkenly against a tree.

The Merc's tyres slapped thickly at the cobbles as it passed him. The glow of the tail lights revealed a man on the opposite pavement. Sam cowered, fearful it was a gunman coming looking for him. But the man walked briskly on, his head bowed.

A burly man. A man with the same build as Viktor Rybkin.

Sam abandoned his empty vodka bottle and kept pace with the dark-coated figure, praying he'd got lucky. As they headed towards Prymorsky Boulevard, he heard beat music and remembered the concert platform they'd seen earlier being set up in front of the town hall.

Was
this Rybkin? The dull street lighting showed the man had thick hair, but he needed to see the face. He quickened his pace to get closer.

Suddenly a massive explosion shook the town. High above the rooftops fireballs burst into huge floral circles. The man stopped to look up. There was less than ten metres between them now. In the light from the flares the shape of the jaw and the scar on the cheek were unmistakable.

Sam smiled. The gods were being good to him. Then he flung himself behind a tree, as Rybkin looked round. The pistol nagged against his ankle.

Rybkin cut left across the cobbles. Sam waited for him to turn the corner into the boulevard, then sprinted forward.

The square at the head of the Potemkin steps was a mass of craning necks as the fireworks detonated above. He looked left, right, straight ahead.

‘Damn!' he breathed.

He'd lost him. He elbowed through the throng, searching for the thick head of hair that was his moving target. At the far side of the square the crowd thinned to nothing. He swung right. Then left. Then he saw him. Turning into an alley, looking back, checking. But checking for what? For an assassin from a rival mob? Or to make sure Sam was following . . .

Had they recognised him outside the restaurant? Was Rybkin leading him by the nose to that coffin he'd been so keen to nail the lid to? The coward in him wanted to
turn back, but he couldn't. He had to know now. Had to bloody know what Rybkin knew.