She said she was born near Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, growing up in a pleasant suburb near the Sea of Azov. Her parents worked in the university: her father, a lapsed Jew, was a lecturer at the law school. Her mother, his second wife, was an administrative assistant. Her step-brother Ivan died during the soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan aged eighteen, when she was a baby.
“He’d been conscripted six months before” she said matter-of-factly, “his armoured vehicle was blown up by a bomb planted by the mujahedeen.”
“Some things never change” I said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
“We should never have been in Afghanistan,” she replied.
“Like I said, some things never change.”
“Quite. The Communists killed him as far as I’m concerned. My father had contacts in the intelligence agencies through his work in the university, when I was approached to join SVR he was very supportive. He knew that I would be with a group of people who wanted a better Russia, people who were against gangsterism and the FSB.”
“You don’t strike me as the revolutionary type, Alisa.”
“Good” she said, “it’s not something I wish to advertise.”
“And the SVR is crawling with anti-government types too?”
She reddened slightly “of course not. We have many pro-government officers. But there is a cadre within SVR that feels the way I do – we support each other and use our influence when we can. It includes very senior people, we can achieve much.”
“So tell me” I smiled, changing the subject, “where did you learn to pick pockets? I’ve never had a gun taken like that from me before.”
“Or had a cookie planted on you?” she laughed. “My father loved tricks and magic. He taught me. Then, when I went to the academy the instructors thought it might come in useful, as tradecraft.”
“The SVR trained you to pickpocket?”
“Sure” she said, sipping her drink “but I prefer the term sleight-of-hand. They brought out this old guy, a thief. He’d spent ten years in a Gulag in the old days. He taught me misdirection, pick-pocketing and lock-picking.”
I looked at her long, slender fingers. Her nails were cut short and she wore no rings or bracelets. “There’s nothing up your sleeve then?”
“I imagine that the only rabbit in this place is in the kitchen,” she laughed.
I sat closer to her, so our conversation wouldn’t be overheard. “What happens if the FSB get Belov then?”
“Crushing opposition can embolden it” she said quietly, her voice almost a whisper over the jazz music playing in the background. “In Russia there is a growing protest movement. But if the FSB can show that the most heavily-protected exiles can still be slaughtered with impunity? In the UK? Men like Belov are still important in Russia. Their fortunes help fund the opposition.”
I speared a piece of artisan Brie de Melun with a knife. “Even though Belov’s a thief? He told me as much.”
“So? Everyone was a thief back then” she shrugged, “the victor writes the history book, no? The only the ones labelled thieves were the oligarchs who fell out of favour with the government. It makes no difference to me. My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
We sipped cognac and coffee, the couple watching us taking their time over their meal.
“We are being watched. They aren’t bad” whispered Alisa, “especially the woman. But he is too obvious.”
“Maybe he’s just checking you out. You look great.”
She ignored the compliment, “did you know?”
“Sure” I shrugged, “I spotted one of them in the pub opposite here an hour before our date.”
“This isn’t a date.”
“Yes it is, a platonic date.”
“That might work,” she replied.
The waiter refilled my coffee cup and I nodded my thanks. “It’s Belov’s people, he thinks I don’t know.”
Alisa’s face clouded over. “He doesn’t trust you.”
“I’d be worried if he did. He’s a Russian Oligarch. I’m a British mercenary. The FSB is trying to kill him. What do you think?”
“I think that sometimes having your enemy’s enemy as your friend is a pain in the ass,” she looked at the cheese and pulled a face, ordering another cognac instead. “You told me your family are dead, how is that?”
I put my drink down, “my Old Man? He died of a heart attack. Fifty-a-day smoker and drank like a fish. My mother died of cancer just after I left the army. She went home to Parma and passed away in her sleep with her sisters. I was there with her. I never had any brothers or sisters. Mum had me late in life, I think they call it a ‘happy accident.’ That’s it, nothing overly dramatic or tragic. I loved them, they were good parents.”
“Happy Accident, I like that” she smiled, “so there’s nobody else?”
I don’t know why, but I told her about Sam and the kids, and Clarkie. I didn’t give up any names, just that there was a family I had to look after.
Alisa Turov nodded approvingly “it is good, that you send money to a dead comrade’s family. It is the proper thing to do.”
I shrugged, “I’ve got to do something right. It balances out all the things I’ve done wrong.”
“This is true, although wouldn’t you say that most of your targets deserve their fate?”
I scratched my head at that one. “I think it’s probably a seventy-thirty per cent split, thirty per cent are just poor bastards who chose the wrong side.”
“That is like war, no? Maybe you should look after their families too” she said playfully.
“If I earned enough I probably would.”
We finished our meal. I left the waiter a tip big enough not to embarrass Sergei Belov. The surveillance couple smooched ostentatiously as we walked past them and collected our coats.
“I’ll walk you to the taxi rank,” I said gallantly.
“Thank you Cal, I’m sure I’d never make it by myself” she laughed. She wasn’t drunk, after all she was a Russian intelligence officer, but she was flushed from the booze.
“Anyway” I whispered in her ear, “let’s lose these watchers. It should be easy after a bottle and a half of good wine and two cognacs!”
She laughed and touched my arm. It had stopped snowing, the pavements gritted and slushy as we walked through Mount Street Gardens, looking up and cooing at the grand apartment blocks. It was after eleven, and quiet apart from the distant buzz of traffic. We walked towards Park Lane. I satisfied myself that the surveillance operatives had either been called off or had lost us.
We neared the exit from the park, when Alisa groaned and fell. I turned, head fuzzy from drink, and saw two men in dark clothing on top of her. I felt a sharp pain in my ribs as another man jumped me. My flank burnt as he stabbed me. I fell to one knee and grabbed him, fingers clawing at his throat. Behind me I heard grunts and groans. Alisa was swearing in Russian as she fought.
My attacker was a scruffy, lanky kid in his late teens, wearing a dark hoodie. Facial piercings glimmered in the street lights. The whites of his eyes were large and round, the zombie-stare of the crack-head on his pale pinched face. He looked at the sharpened screwdriver in his hands, amazed that it hadn’t killed me.
I hit him in the face with a heel-palm strike, breaking his nose and pushing him backwards. He was trying to get up when I planted my size eleven into his crotch like I was taking a football penalty. I turned around to see one of Alisa’s attackers on the floor unconscious, the other guy wrestling with her. A machete lay on the floor. She broke his grip expertly and pivoted on one leg, delivering a round-house kick to his throat. Gurgling, the man fell to the ground, clutching at his neck. She grabbed the back of his head by his ears and drove his face into her knee. Catching his head in the crook of her elbow, she twisted her body and wrenched the man’s head through one-hundred eighty degrees. There was a snapping noise and he fell silently to the ground.
“Cal!” she called. I turned around to see the kid I’d kicked
in the nuts stagger towards me, the screwdriver in his hand. I slipped on the snow-slick grass as he tried to stab me again. The puncture wound in my side was starting to throb, my shirt slick with blood. He hesitated as he thought about how he was going to stab someone who was lying down.
Alisa stalked around the kid, sizing him up. Realising something terrible was going to happen, he went to run, but the Russian caught him with a kick to his shin. He stumbled to the ground. She pulled him up by an arm then delivered a series of strikes to his face and head. It was high-level mixed martial arts, the kid collapsing in a bloodied heap on the wet grass. Blood bubbled, like cappuccino froth, from his nose and mouth as she stamped on his throat. “Let’s go!” she hissed, grabbing my arm, “before the police arrive.” Behind us our three attackers lay still, one moaning gently. Alisa’s coat and shoes were streaked with mud, her stockings torn.
“Sure,” I said, hauling myself up, “thanks for that.”
“You’ve been stabbed,” she said, pushing her hand against my ribs. I felt her finger probe the wound. I howled in pain.
“Shut up cry-baby! It’s a shallow wound. You’ll be fine.”
We made it to South Audley Street, where she hailed a black taxi. “Battersea,” she barked at the driver, giving her address.
The cabbie nodded, “what happened to you?”
“My husband has drunk too much,” she laughed, “he fell over in the park!” Her accent was now cut-glass English. It was like she’d just walked out of Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
“As long as he ain’t sick in the back,” grumbled the cabbie.
She flashed him a brilliant smile. “He won’t be, if he does he’ll be in even more trouble!”
At her apartment she gave the cabbie a handful of cash, and he drove off happy “hope the hangover ain’t too bad!” he chirruped.
Her flat was spartanly-furnished, the large white-painted sitting room almost empty apart from a TV, desktop PC and two angular cream sofas. Blood dripped onto the cushions as I collapsed onto them.
“Wait there, I’ll the get first aid kit” she said, sounding Russian again. She took off her muddy high-heeled boots and looked at them sadly.
“I’d rather have a drink” I grunted, examining my stab injury. It was a ragged puncture two inches above my belt, just below my ribcage. I’d suffered worse. I’d been stabbed twice before, working for a PMC in Iraq, although one of those was during a bar-fight at the Marhaban hotel in the Baghdad Green Zone. I’d been shot once in the calf with a .22 pistol, on a job in Trieste two years earlier. And in the army I’d been injured by shrapnel in Basra and Bosnia. Sierra Leone was all about gonorrhoea. The screw-driver wound sustained in Mayfair joined my CV of interesting injuries.
Alisa came back in with a green plastic first aid box. She cleaned the wound and fussed about dressing it, a frown on her face. “How did they know where we were? I thought that was Belov’s surveillance on us.”
I winced. “It was. He’s got a leak: he knew where I was having dinner this evening.”
She put my hand on the dressing and cut a length of surgical tape. “So it was Volk’s followers? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I” I grimaced, “Sergei and I are going to have a chat.”
She finished, nodded and put a bottle of vodka, one of my favourite pain-killers, in front of me with two shot glasses. Mahler wafted from hidden speakers. “Have a drink, I won’t be a minute.”
When she came back she was wearing sweatpants and a vest. She put a Beretta PX4 compact handgun on the table in front of me. “That one is spare: just in case.”
“Thanks,” I said, checking the weapon and putting it down next to the bottle of Stolichnaya. “Where did you learn to fight like that?”
“Ballet school” she smirked, pouring a slug of vodka. “Tomorrow I am scheduled to speak with my controller in Moscow on a secure line, I will see if we can get some support. I think you are right: Volk must have somebody close to Belov, but not close enough to kill him.”
Alisa gave me a glass of water and a duvet. “Stay here tonight,” she pointed at the dressing on my gut, “and let me know if that starts bleeding again.”
I nodded and tossed my vodka down my throat, then kicked my shoes off.
Alisa walked over to the window, a Glock-19 pistol held loosely in her hand. She screwed a suppressor onto the barrel and closed the curtains. She picked up one of the shot glasses and drank, then poured another. She could drink like a Soviet tank driver, I gave her that. “I’m going to get some sleep,” she said “you get some too.”
I yawned and took off my jacket. “Agreed, but there was one more thing I wanted to ask you though?”
“Of course” she said “what is it?”
“Fyodor Volk. What’s the big deal with Dante? And why quotes from The Inferno?”
She looked at the shot glass and smiled. “I don’t know. All I know is that his file mentions his interest in Dante. But you know Cal? Before I kill him I’ll make sure I ask.” She turned on her heel and went to bed.
CHAPTER TEN
“Why did you want to meet here?” asked Belov, grunting his thanks as he took the offered cigar.
I’d called the meeting as soon as I woke up at Alisa’s apartment. Before I left she gave me a memory stick with Misha Baburin’s prison photographs on it. Then she told me she’d be in touch after she’d spoken to her boss in Moscow. I’d gone home and showered and dressed. I had my Walther strapped to my shin and the SIG in a shoulder holster, my Fortis covert body armour rubbing against the field dressing on my side.
We sat on a bench in a frost-white Richmond Park. Out of earshot bodyguards stood drinking tea from the cafe, occasionally talking into their hidden microphones. I’d given Belov a selective update about the operation.
“You’ve got a leak in your organisation” I said matter-of-factly, “three men tried to kill me and my Russian contact last night. Same as before – they looked like homeless men.”
“Impossible” said Sergei, “I spy on all of my employees. I would know if there was a traitor.”
“Well I’m out of ideas then” I said, watching the joggers trudge by, “but I was stabbed last night by some eighteen-year old junkie.”
“You didn’t tell me that you were having dinner with the SVR officer,” he said, changing the subject. He pulled a pewter hipflask from inside his big black coat and took a swig. He offered it to me and I happily gulped down the cognac.
“What do you expect? You gave me her name, Sergei,” I shrugged “she’s been very helpful.”
“This man you tell me about, the FSB asset Baburin? Maybe this is his work.”
“Perhaps,” I agreed, not mentioning Fyodor Volk, “but that still doesn’t explain how they knew about my dinner date last night. In fact the only people about were your surveillance team.”
“Ah” he chuckled, holding his hands up in mock surrender, “mea culpa. I will have words with them. They should have followed you home, so you would have had protection.”
“Don’t worry about it” I said, “Alisa Turov doesn’t need protection. She saved my life last night.”
“I will review my security and have my office re-swept for bugs,” grumbled Sergei.
“Thanks” I replied, getting to my feet. “We’re back out looking at Baburin tonight, I’ll keep you updated. In the meanwhile don’t discuss this with anyone.”
The Russian offered his gloved hand, his breath making a cigar-and-booze smelling cloud in the cold air, “OK, but next time don’t drag me to a park in the suburbs!” As unobtrusive as ever, Sergei stalked off to his armoured Maybach limo with his bodyguards. A Range Rover with four more goons in it cleared the way.
Once they’d gone I looked at my phone and the three missed calls from Harry. I’d never actually met the Handler. I didn’t know what Harry looked like or where he lived. The guy I’d replaced on The Firm had given me his telephone number and told me to wait for instructions. My pay was always on
time, any kit I needed was always where he said it would be and operations ran smoothly. So I wasn’t complaining. Pulling a face, I decided there was no point putting it off. I rang him and sat back down on the bench.
“On operations in high-risk low-infrastructure environments” said the Handler calmly, “I don’t expect you to call me every five minutes. But in London …”
“Sorry Harry.”
“Oz told me you’ve met with SIS. Why?”
“It was an ambush” I said apologetically, “the Russian contact we made pulled me onto a meeting and they were there. There wasn’t a lot I could do.” I told him about my conversation with ‘Marcus’ and ‘Chris.’
Harry’s voice was quiet and measured. “Cal, if you meet intelligence officers I have to brief upwards and explain. It arcs established relationships for me and jeopardizes operational security for you, The Firm and the intelligence officers. What’s one of the cardinal rules of The Firm?”
“There’s need-to-know and then there’s nice-to-know. We don’t need-to-know,” I recited like a bored school kid doing five times table.
“Exactly, and if you keep on accidentally having these sorts of meetings then it’s entirely fucking possible that somebody will plant a fifty-fucking-calibre round in your thick fucking head. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good” sighed Harry, “now give me an update.”
I filled him in, including the attempt on our lives. “I’ve just met Belov and told him he’s got a mole in his office.”
I could hear Harry slurping his coffee, “I wish we could fold this job, but now SIS is involved. Stabbings in the middle of town, slotting murderous tramps, next thing you know the Old Bill is involved …”
“I know” I said, “which is why we need to crack on and sort out this Baburin character and the FSB team. That’s fifty per cent of this operation resolved right there.”
“Get on with it then” he ordered, “stop fucking about in flash restaurants.”
The Ninth Circle Page 9
