SEVERANCE KILL (13 page)

Jakub’s lizard eyes revealed nothing.

Calvary gazed out the window, watching the midnight city seem to grab at the car as it went by.

*

Nikola’s flat was in the Vinohrady district to the southeast. She parked on the street and they followed her up. It was a small two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. Cosy, cluttered, with signs of only one occupant.

Calvary felt awkward in the confined space, with his boots and his gun. He’d made sure Max brought the Glock in with them as well. They seated themselves around a battered kitchen table and Nikola made tea and sandwiches. Calvary felt the fatigue starting to drag him under.

He tossed the wallet onto the table. Pulled out the business card. Marek Zito, and the phone number.

Max said, ‘Yeah, we know Zito. Close to Janos, as you’ve discovered for yourself. History of jail time for assault, burglary.’ He shrugged. ‘But we’re no further in than we were before.’

‘We have a number,’ Calvary said. ‘And I have an idea.’

*

He told them. Max watched him with growing incredulity. Nikola glanced from time to time at Jakub, who’d dropped his gaze to the tabletop.

Afterwards Max flipped the card in the air, caught it deftly. ‘Never work.’

‘Agreed,’ Jakub grunted.

Calvary said, ‘Look. You said yourselves, the brother, Miklos, is the golden boy. The anointed heir. This Janos is just a kid. At that age you’re full of piss and vinegar. Hypersensitive. He wants respect from his dad, the boss, Bartos. Instead he’s screwed up. Three times. First, on the tram. That was him in charge. Sure, he got Gaines, which earned him some brownie points. But he accidentally shot a Russian – what’s more, a Russian intelligence agent, it seems – and he lost one of his men in a surprise counterattack by a total stranger. Me. Then, he fails to take me down outside the hospital, gets himself slammed in a car door, and indirectly gets his brother’s car wrecked. Finally he lets me escape from what should have been an airtight trap, a trap I walked straight into, in the restaurant. Bartos has got to be furious with him. And Janos is feeling utterly humiliated.

‘His one shot at redemption is taking me in. Without help from his father or his brother. He’ll suspect something’s up when I contact him – I don’t think he’s stupid enough not to. But I doubt he’ll go straight to Bartos or Miklos or any of the rest of the crew with the information.’

Nikola ran her hand through her hair. ‘It is a gamble.’

‘Worth it. Possibly our only shot.’ He finished his tea. ‘Two things. I need to make a phone call first, in private. I’ll go for a walk. Second, I need a few hours’ rest. We all do.’

*

Outside, the street was dark with trees. He walked several blocks away, the Browning in his waistband. He hit the speed dial.

‘Martin. Where are you?’

He closed his eyes at the sound of the voice.

‘You have to give me more time, Llewellyn.’

‘I’m listening.’

He brought Llewellyn up to date, leaving out nothing, not even what he planned to do.

‘I need you to run a check on the Russians.’ He described them. The squat one who’d been shot on the tram. The young, dark-haired one who’d been following Gaines and also at the alley where he’d dropped the bug. The slightly older, fair-haired man. And the woman: middle-aged but looking older, sick or injured in some way.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Llewellyn. ‘There should be something at least on one of the older ones.’

Calvary drew the night air into his lungs. He glanced about, the shadows seeming to crowd in on him.

‘I need you to run some other checks.’

He gave descriptions of Nikola, Max and Jakub along with their names, and that of their newsletter,
Reflektor
.

Calvary said, ‘I can get Gaines. But at the moment, Blažek and his crew really don’t seem to know why they’ve kidnapped him. I don’t know either. That suggests he’s somewhere nearby, and hasn’t been disposed of yet.’

‘Yet.’

‘For God’s sake, Llewellyn.’ He fought to keep his voice low. ‘You want him dead, don’t you? Who cares if it’s some mobster who bumps him off?’

‘You know very well that it has to be you, Martin. And very visibly you.’

‘If I read the morning’s papers and find you’ve shopped me, Llewellyn, then all bets are off.’

A chuckle. ‘No, don’t worry. You’ve earned a grace period. Shall we say, twelve hours? The evening editions?’

Calvary took four long, slow breaths. Then he said, ‘Gaines isn’t going to be my last kill, Llewellyn. There’ll be one more.’

He rang off.

FOURTEEN

‘You understand what you are asking for, Darya Yaroslavovna.’

She did, yes.

‘Half a dozen extra people. To carry out a potentially explosive operation – literally and politically – on EU soil.’

Yes, she appreciated the implications.

‘Without Embassy protection. Without the cover, the logistical support the Embassy could provide.’

She was aware of the drawbacks, but it was the only way this could be done. It had to be deniable, if it went wrong.

For a long minute – it seemed as long as that, anyway – she heard only his breathing. Then: ‘I’ll do what I can.’

Krupina closed her eyes. It meant
consider it done
.

‘My balls are on the line, Darya Yaroslavovna.’

‘I’m very grateful,
tovarischch
. Profoundly so.’

‘We’ll find out just how grateful the next time I need a favour from you.’

It was a secure connection, as secure as they came, yet she listened after her superior had rung off, her ear probing for the tell-tale click of a tapped line. Old habits.

She opened the door. Gleb was outside, hovering at a respectful distance.

‘It’s a go.’

He breathed out. ‘Thank God. What sort of numbers?’

‘I asked for half a dozen. I think I’ll get them.’

‘When?’

She raised a shoulder. ‘Ten, twelve hours. Out of our hands.’

*

In the alley Tamarkin had lost his temper, hurling the bug against the wall. Not like him.

‘He can’t be far. Yet he might as well be on the other side of the world.’

Krupina leaned against the Audi, lit up. Blew ragged tusks of smoke from her nostrils.

She said: ‘We change our focus. Calvary, yes, he’s still important. But I think we can be sure that this Blažek has a hand in Gaines’s abduction. That the invaders on the tram were Blažek’s men. Which means, we go after him.’

Her boys, Gleb and Arkady and Lev, said nothing. They weren’t defeatists, she knew.

‘I’m aware of our numbers. Our limited resources. We need backup. Bodies on the ground, mainly.’

Tamarkin said, ‘We ask the Embassy?’

‘No. I go crawling to Moscow tugging my forelock. Appeal directly for assistance.’

Arkady let out a slow whistle between his teeth. ‘This Gaines must be someone special if you think you’ve any chance with that approach. With respect, boss.’

‘And I know you’re fishing with that remark, Arkasha, but it’s still “need to know”.’

*

Calvary lay in the darkness, listening to the shuffling and settling of the other three in their respective rooms, to the muffled sounds of the late-night city beyond the windows.

Three people. Two men and a woman. Journalists, not fighters. However much they liked to style themselves as guerrillas. Two handguns between them.

Against them, the biggest organised crime operation in Prague. And Russian intelligence, probably SVR.

All that he had to do was find Gaines and kill him, making sure the Russians knew it was him who’d done the deed.

That was all he had to do. Except he didn’t have a clue where they were keeping Gaines.

Calvary had been given the spare bedroom, a box-like space with a single bed. Max and Jakub took the floor and the sofa in the living room. They turned in at half past one, with plans for a five a.m. start. Calvary hadn’t made the call yet, wasn’t planning to until the last moment. He wanted Janos to be working against a deadline, with little time to think through his decision or call up an army of reinforcements.

As often happened, Calvary was so tired that he found sleep difficult. He lay entirely still, fully clothed save for his boots, allowing his weight to sink into the bed. Eyes closed, he modulated his breathing. Pictured his heartbeat slowing to the bare minimum needed to keep his circulation going.

Eventually he slipped into a state between wakefulness and deep sleep. As usual, the images came. Not dreams, but memories, from more than four years earlier.

*

The sweat stung his eyes and his lips and he shouldered it away. Late May, and the temperature had soared in the last week to the mid-twenties Celsius. Far from the life-sapping hell August would bring, but stifling nonetheless.

The late morning sun washed the walls of the scorched buildings in gold. The scorch marks were from a different kind of heat: the kind generated by human beings in order to damage one another. The street Calvary was walking down had been the scene of an ambush six days earlier, involving an IED attack on a Snatch Land Rover. He thought he could see fragments embedded in the stone walls. Fragments not from the explosive but from the vehicle itself.

A month earlier the Americans had come. A battalion of U.S. Marines, despatched to support Calvary’s own rifle battalion and the rest of the British and Afghan troops in the southwest of the country. Not the surge of eleven thousand men that would flood in a year later, but a formidable force all the same. They’d stormed the town, Garmsir, to find that the Taliban had already withdrawn. Soon it became apparent that they hadn’t gone far.

Garmsir.
It meant
hot place
in Pashto. The name was apt for more than one reason. For the last four weeks the place had been a battleground. The Americans and Calvary’s people had been trying to take on a more civil role, that of supporting and protecting the thousands of Afghan civilians returning to the town for the first time since the retreat of the Taliban. Work was in progress to set up local government once more, to build and train a police force, to ensure that the Afghan army that would be left behind was equal to the task of defending the town.

And the attacks came, in tidal waves and in lone breakers lapping at the shore. Yesterday there was a car bomb attack on a recruitment queue. Today, a pitched battle in the streets, involving high-quality Russian artillery. Tomorrow there might be a grenade thrown through the window of a perceived collaborator’s home at dinnertime, killing his family along with him.

Calvary stepped back from the road as a convoy of lorries lumbered past. Locals, mostly, with Marines riding shotgun in front and behind in Jeeps. He half waved, half saluted, got a forest of raised thumbs in response.

Walking towards him, on the other side of the street, Calvary saw Willis, his sergeant, hazy through the dust. As Lieutenant, Calvary was in command of B Company for that day’s patrol. Willis nodded. Calvary was well liked by his men. He suspected he was held in similar esteem by Major Farnborough, the head of the Company. Not that Farnborough would ever show it if he was happy with anyone’s performance.

Calvary hefted his rifle, partly to ease the stickiness under his arms. He carried the L86 Light Support Weapon, a gun he preferred over the usual L85A2 for its accuracy.

He called to Willis as they drew near: ‘One more circuit, then get Barnesy to relieve you. Grab yourself some lunch – ‘

On the last word, and past Willis’s grin, he saw the car fishtail round the corner, pluming dust behind it. An old Ford Cortina, so filthy its colour couldn’t be discerned. Two men protruding from the windows, one aiming a Kalashnikov assault rifle down the road, the other hoisting something bulkier. A rocket launcher. To Calvary it looked like one of the new RPG-28s. An anti-tank gun.

Behind the car, half hidden by the corner, stood another man, eyes wide, forefinger pointing down the street.

He yelled and dropped to his knee and was squeezing the trigger as the man with the Kalashnikov opened fire. The unmistakeable clatter bounced off the walls of the low canyon that was the street. Bullets stitched in a horizontal arc, ripping through Willis’s back and flinging him rolling and sprawling in the dirt.

Calvary’s first, second and third shots smashed into the gunman’s head and chest, smacking him back against the side of the car. His wet torso flopped doll-like out of the open window as the Cortina juddered over Willis’s body. As the car shot past him Calvary saw the driver, crouched low behind the dashboard. He drew a bead and fired, watching the driver’s head shear off inside the car.

Just as the man with the RPG fired.

The sucking noise followed the report of the firing mechanism so closely that it was hard to distinguish the two sounds. Then the Jeep at the end of the convoy upended itself, the blast flipping the rear of the vehicle vertically upwards and driving the entire car into the lorry in front of it.

Calvary put two bullets into the man with the RPG, one messy one through the top of his head, the other between his shoulder blades as he twisted away. Then he rolled and dived and continued rolling, towards the end of the street, almost making it before the fuel tank of the lorry went up a second after the driverless Cortina ploughed into both Jeep and lorry.

The sound wave was colossal, a thump of bass like a physical punch, counterpointed by the screech of shattering glass and rending metal. The fireball raked across Calvary’s back and out into the square at the end of the street. He kept low, feeling shrapnel spinning over him like hot hail.

He didn’t waste time looking back. Instead he ran out into the square at a crouch, seeing civilians scattering and screaming, some standing around, shocked and bewildered. A group of Afghan squaddies was sprinting towards him, shouting.

Down one of the grimy streets off the square, a man was running. A boy, really, the one he’d seen at the top of the street behind the Cortina. Guiding it, egging it on.

Calvary flung himself prone on the steaming gravel, levelled the rifle. Put one eye to the SUSAT telescopic site.

The boy was sprinting like an ungainly fawn, skinny legs bare below ragged cutoff trousers, feet huge in outsized trainers. He craned back over his shoulder. His beard was wispy, a pantomime disguise, though it was probably real enough.

His eyes were wide, yellow not with triumph but with terror.

The Afghan squaddies skidded in the gravel beside him, jabbering at him in Pashto. He recognised one of the few phrases he’d learned.

‘Wélem.’

Shoot
.

The ring of the sight felt hot against the bone of his eye socket. Once more the boy turned to stare back. Once again, pure terror.

He was unarmed. Wore too little to be carrying a weapon.

‘
Wélem.’

Calvary lifted his face away form the sight, got to his feet. Down the street the boy turned and disappeared. The soldiers snarled, took off after him.

*

Three U.S. Marines, one British soldier – Sergeant Willis – and seven civilians were killed in the attack. Lieutenant Calvary was praised by both his commanding officer and his counterpart in the marines for his prompt action. Calvary didn’t think he’d made any difference. If the three men in the Cortina had survived, they could hardly have done any more damage.

Nobody mentioned the young man who’d run away. Nobody knew about him, apart from a handful of Afghan soldiers.

Four weeks later Calvary was attending a briefing with the other two rifle Companies. Major Farnborough conducted it, together with an American and an Afghan counterpart. A new series of photographs had been obtained, a new set of identities were to be learned and memorised.

Calvary watched the slide show with the others. He saw the deliberately graphic images of flayed and twisted bodies. Of limbless collaborators, strung up from trees by their necks. Of smoking rubble where villages had been. All fresh, all recorded in the last fortnight.

Then came the parade of faces. Some blurred, captured at a distance with secret lenses. Others close up, sullen or smiling.

Pelabo Ghilzai. Aged twenty seven. Known as ‘Little Boy’ for his thinness, his gamine physical awkwardness, the smoothness of his skin. The yellow eyes were shy, the mouth nervous. But smiling.

So precocious that despite his age he was already a senior strategist in the local Taliban chapter. The one devoted to reclaiming Garmsir town, and district, from both the foreign invaders and their milksop collaborator cronies.

In another two weeks Calvary was gone. Stepping off a plane at Gatwick and into a room with Llewellyn.

*

He didn’t jerk awake at the memory of the explosion, or of the boy’s face on the projected slide. That had all stopped a long time ago. Sometimes Calvary would have memories of the hits he’d done, and in some of those the boy’s face would be superimposed on those of his victims. He wondered why his unconscious had to be so obvious about its workings.

Instead he switched to wakefulness gently but promptly, like the turning on of a light. He checked the time on his phone. Four thirty. Three hours’ sleep; it would have to be enough.

His face was gummed to the pillow and he realised he’d forgotten to attend to the nicks on his cheeks from the glass of the restaurant’s window. Picking his way through the dark, he found the bathroom and did what he could with cotton pads and a bottle of antiseptic in the cabinet. He attempted a shave.