by Zoe Sharp
“No, it isn’t,” I agreed. “Or you’d be dead already.”
He laughed. “Don’t you think you’re being a little too . . . emotional? Typical female trait. The shock of the gunfight, no doubt.”
Parris looked about him, but if he was hoping for agreement or approval from the others, they gave him no response.
“I thought I saw movement at the top of the stairs and merely repositioned for optimum visibility,” he said, sounding every inch the commanding officer. “Gregor Venko is my employer. Why would I wish any harm to come to him?”
“And yet there he is—shot by his own son. On your watch.”
“Have you considered the possibility that perhaps you were Ivan’s target, and by throwing yourself at his father, you were the reason he was injured?”
Ivan had been fumbling to secure the tourniquet around his upper thigh, holding it tight enough to stem the bleeding. At Parris’s words he stopped, head jerking up.
“Yes!” he shouted, with the fervor of a drowning man tossed a life belt. “I wanted that lying bitch dead!”
“But you’re a shit shot, is that what you’re saying?” I demanded. “You were what—less than six meters from a static target—and you missed?”
He scowled, unwilling to admit to something that went so against his ego however much it might have saved his skin. “Shooting down like that, at an angle . . . is not easy,” he muttered eventually.
“There we are then. Mystery solved,” Parris said briskly. “Now—”
“Stay where you are,” Gregor said. His voice was weaker than it once had been, but it carried no less authority for all that. It was enough to make Parris hesitate. “Did you think I would allow you to wipe security tape without first making copy?” Gregor asked him. “After all, I am ‘master strategist, always three step ahead.’ Was that not how you describe me?”
Parris sagged visibly. It came over me, in a hot prickle of awareness, that Gregor had seen and heard the conversation I’d had with Parris when he’d taken me back up to the guest suite after Hackett and Sean had arrived with the depleted convoy. But how . . . ?
My eyes flicked sharply to Ushakov. His face was expressionless as always, but I knew, even so, that he was the one who’d taken the discs to Gregor. Or a copy of them, at any rate.
Gregor, I reasoned, had not trusted Parris for some time. And right now the colonel must have realized he was completely and utterly fucked.
Even so, the man was not prepared to give up without a last-ditch effort to retrieve the situation.
“I know it looks bad, sir,” he said to Gregor, “but you must understand I was merely playing along with Ivan in order to learn his intentions, while doing everything I could to—”
“You LIAR!” Ivan roared. It was rapidly becoming his catchphrase. “You were the one who was stealing—you and him.” He stabbed a bloodied finger at Hackett, who instinctively took a couple of steps back. “And I—” A finger to his own chest now. “—I discovered this, by forcing it out of Clay.”
“You tortured him to death,” Gregor said, almost sadly.
Ivan scuttled closer on arse and knuckles, dragging his injured leg. His efforts with the tourniquet had not been entirely successful, and it was still leaching blood through his combat pants. If someone didn’t deal with that, and soon, he was going to be in serious trouble.
His eyes were wild with pain and shock and desperation. There was a kind of madness in them. I guessed it had always been there, but usually he kept it better hidden.
“He was a bad man, Papa. A terrible man. He was stealing from you, and his comrade, they kidnap and rape women. They—”
“No,” Gregor said, with a gentle finality that was no less effective for not being a shouted command. He reached out his good hand, and Ivan grasped it with both his, kissing the old man’s fingers in supplication. “You tortured him, and then you took what he stole for yourself.”
Gregor raised his head and looked straight into my eyes with tears gathering in his own.
“You once gave me back my son,” he said in a voice like rusted metal graunching over rock. “But now you have taken him away from me again.”
“If he gets treatment—”
“No.” Gregor cut me off with a shake of his head. “By exposing his . . . treachery.”
There was nothing I could say to that, so I said nothing. Silence was becoming my catchphrase.
Gregor looked down at where Ivan still clutched at his hand, head bowed, and met my eyes again. The tears loosed and ran now.
“Please . . .” was all he said.
I knew what he was asking for—an execution.
I couldn’t do it.
I don’t know how long I stood there, frozen. It could have been a couple of seconds or even a minute.
Then Parris gave a gusty sigh. “That’s the trouble with sending a girl to do a man’s job,” he said. “They simply haven’t got the balls for it.”
As he spoke, he raised his weapon to shoulder height. From where I was standing, I couldn’t tell if he was aiming for Gregor or Ivan, but I wasn’t about to take a chance either way.
Neither, it seemed, were Sean or Ushakov.
The three of us fired almost simultaneously, so that it was impossible to say which of the rounds struck Parris first. His body danced from the impact, limbs splaying as he went backward and down. The Shipka dropped from his nerveless fingers and bounced off the carpet in an end-over-end cartwheel that made me hold my breath. Anything that operated on an open-bolt blowback system was far more likely to discharge under such abuse.
For once we were lucky. The weapon spun under a chair and stilled before Parris himself finished falling.
He lay on his back, one leg twitching. As my hearing cleared, I just had a chance to hear him rasp in his last breath as his lungs flooded and his heart gave out.
Hackett, who’d jumped for cover, rose with a shaky breath. “Fuck.”
Ushakov crossed to the body with care, the AS Val at the ready, but Parris had already gone. Ushakov kicked him, just to be sure, then spat on the corpse.
“Ublyudok,” he said.
I didn’t know what that meant, but I could make a pretty good guess.
I stepped closer to Ivan, who had not raised his head or reacted to the gunfire. Carefully, I reached down and loosened the tourniquet on Ivan’s leg, slipped it off, and placed it on the couch next to Gregor.
He nodded, just once, eyes closing briefly.
“Go,” he said.
I listened, and despite the sound insulation inside the room, I could still hear occasional bouts of distant gunfire.
“That may be easier said than done.”
Gregor raised tired eyes to Ushakov. “Show them.”
Ushakov jerked his head, and we followed him toward another steel door at the far end of the room, where he punched in a code to an electronic lock.
As the door closed behind us, the last glimpse I had of Gregor Venko was of him cradling his dying son.
SEVENTY-THREE
BEYOND THE DOOR USHAKOV OPENED WAS A CORRIDOR LEADING TO a stone stairwell. Instead of flickering torches, the way down was illuminated by floor lighting—the type that shows you the way to the emergency exits on a passenger flight. A cold breeze whistled up the curved steps like a chimney stack.
“Where does this go?” Sean asked.
“Outside. Further down the mountain,” Ushakov said. “The tsars used it to smuggle in local girls.”
I began to wish I’d kept hold of my stolen coat. As it was, I’d already begun to shiver.
“I hope you’ve got a phone on you,” I said to Sean, “or we’ll have frozen to death before we get down to Borovets.”
Ushakov reached into his pocket and pulled out a smartphone, tossed it to me. I only just caught it, one-handed, glanced down, and realized it was the one Parris took from me when I arrived.
“You didn’t chuck it away,” I said, surprised.
“Was goin
g to sell instead,” he admitted morosely. “Would have fetched good price on eBay.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And take good care of Gregor.”
He nodded and gave Sean a vague salute, then turned away without any further good-byes. Hackett, I noticed, he ignored altogether.
I couldn’t blame him for that.
I switched the phone on as we began to descend. It seemed to take a long time to go through its start-up routine, but it showed no signal at the end of it.
“I think we need to wait until we’re above ground, at least,” I said.
“We should have asked him how far it was,” Hackett complained. “I’m bloody freezing.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll be outside soon enough, and then it really will be cold,” Sean told him. “Christ, I never thought I’d miss the heat of Iraq.”
“Sean . . .” I began, but wasn’t sure how to continue.
He paused on the stairs, looked back at me. With the light at floor level, it was hard to judge his expression—or his mood. “What?”
“What happened—when you found Clay? What did he tell you, exactly?”
He shrugged, began to descend again. When he spoke it was over his shoulder, and I think we were both aware of Hackett, dogging our steps, listening in.
“He was almost gone by the time I got there. Ivan had made a hell of a mess of him. Some of what he said didn’t make much sense—about stolen treasures and Parris making him do it, and how sorry he was about the girl.” He paused. “I thought he meant you.”
“He might have—partly. But I wasn’t the last for Clay. He’d acquired a taste for it.” And I told him, briefly, about Najida. About what had been done to her, both by Clay and by her family. At the end of it Sean swore under his breath. Hackett said nothing.
“He kept coming back to Parris, and I couldn’t work out if he meant Parris was behind the theft, or the rape. I didn’t find out until later that he meant both.”
“So why did you go to Karbala?”
“Moe,” Sean said. “The kid I hired as my local fixer-cum-guide. I asked him what he knew about stolen antiquities, and he said nothing, but he had an uncle—”
“—in Zubayr,” I finished for him. “Yes, he took me there, too.”
“You met Moe?” There was animation in his voice. “Great kid, isn’t he?”
Yes, he was . . .
The stairs eventually leveled out into a passageway with an arched stone roof like an old wine cellar. The lighting continued in pinpoint LEDs along either wall.
The temperature was dropping constantly. By the time we reached the limit of the tunnel—maybe three hundred meters of gentle downward slope—it was bitter.
At the end of the tunnel was a wooden door with a huge iron key still in the lock. Sean turned it, not without effort, and we stepped out into a one-room hut on the other side. I moved to the window, which was partially covered with snow on the outside.
“Any idea where we are?” Sean asked.
“None, but there’s a ski-lift or cable-car pylon just visible, so if they follow those, they should be able to find us.”
I tried my phone again, and this time it was showing a single bar of signal. I did that thing where you hold the phone up above your head at arm’s length, as if that was going to make a difference. It didn’t.
“I’ll try outside.”
As soon as I stepped out, I felt naked. I sank into the soft powder snow up to my knees and struggled to go more than half a dozen meters from the doorway. It was enough to produce another bar of signal.
I dialed Madeleine’s number with fingers that now throbbed from the cold. When she answered, my face was numb enough that my voice sounded a little slurred.
“Charlie! Where are you?”
I explained. She promised to have someone up to us as soon as she could, and that they would bring warm clothing with them.
“Is Sean . . . all right?”
“He’s fine,” I said without further explanation. “Who organized the assault team?”
“Hamilton.”
“I didn’t think she had the manpower.”
“She had enough for a diversion.”
“Well, tell her to pull her men back. I think Gregor’s had enough bloodshed. If she goes in and talks to him, she might get further than she expects.”
I rang off and turned back toward the cabin. Before I could move closer, the door burst open and Hackett leaped through. He jumped into the snow, staggered as if he’d landed in deep water, and began to run.
Automatically, purely on a reflex, I raised the Shipka to my shoulder and took a bead on him.
A second later, Sean appeared in the doorway. The muzzle of his weapon was already up, already tracking. I saw the intense concentration in every line of his body. Hunter on prey.
“Sean—!”
He fired at the exact moment as my shout. Even after all the gunfire in Gregor’s stronghold, out here the shot seemed louder and more crisply defined. Hackett’s head snapped to the side, spraying a pale mist of blood and debris into the freezing air. He pirouetted with an odd grace and then flopped into the snow in a tangle of lifeless limbs like a dancing puppet with all strings sliced through.
The memory of watching Sean go down the same way, to the same injury, sent my heart rate screaming. I threw myself down alongside Hackett, rolled him partially onto his back. That was as much as I needed to do to know he was beyond anything I could do for him—even if I’d wanted to.
Part of his skull had sheared away like a broken egg, leaving jagged shards of bone and a glutinous mush that spilled out obscenely into the snow. All around him were stark pinpricks of color where his fluids had melted through the crust.
A flashback to the day of Sean’s shooting came brutally into my mind. The injury that had just killed Hackett, and the one that had come so close to killing Sean, overlaid each other, similar enough to send me reeling.
A shadow fell across the body. I jerked my eyes upward, found Sean standing over the pair of us, staring down. The gun was still up and ready
I slumped onto my backside in the snow, murmured, “I thought . . . you promised to keep him alive.”
Sean straightened very slowly, moving like an old man. “Only until we got out. Then all bets were off.”
“But . . . why?”
His eyes moved to mine. I searched for something behind them, but found nothing.
“Because now we can part even.”
EPILOGUE
THIS TIME, WHEN I ARRIVED AT MADELEINE’S AGENCY HEADQUARTERS in Kings Langley, I was shown into the conference room rather than her office, although by the same Mr. Smooth assistant.
I’d spent six days in Bulgaria, going through endless rounds of red tape with the authorities. The final body count was four dead, and another three injured. The dead included Parris, Hackett, Ivan, and one of the men defending the hunting lodge from the assault. The injured included Gregor and two of Woźniak’s guys. One was walking wounded, the other more seriously hurt.
All in all, it could have been much worse.
I think once Gregor had been professionally patched up by the doctors, he’d spread enough largesse to make most of what had occurred up the mountain simply go away. He hadn’t picked this as his home ground for nothing. What was going to happen to the three truckloads of Iraqi antiquities was anybody’s guess, but I daresay Gregor and Hamilton would come to some . . . arrangement.
As for Sean’s killing of Hackett, I looked the investigating officers square in the eye and swore it was self-defense.
I’m not sure if that provoked Sean’s gratitude or made him despise me. I might have asked him about that, but before I knew it he was on a plane back to New York. I only found that out through Parker.
He congratulated me on clearing Sean, told me to take some time before I came back. Feeling aimless, I flew to the UK and spent a couple of days in the uncomfortable company of my parents in Cheshire, where I retrieved the Honda Fireblade
. The one Gregor once gave me as a thank-you for saving Ivan’s life that time in Germany. It was still under a sheet in the back of my parents’ garage. I dusted it off and then escaped up north to visit friends.
It felt good to be back on a bike again.
I was having breakfast in a café in the Lake District when I got Madeleine’s call, but within four and a half hours I was pulling up outside her office—and that included two stops for fuel on the way. One of the joys of riding a motorcycle is you don’t get hung up in traffic.
Now, aware of being in my fly-spattered leathers, and with a very bad case of helmet-hair, I sat drinking coffee at the conference table. I’d asked Mr. Smooth if Luisa Dawson was around, but he would only say that she was “on assignment,” so I was left to my own devices.
I was halfway down my third cup when the door finally opened and Madeleine walked in, immaculately dressed as always. Two steps behind her was a guy in a dark suit, with prematurely gray hair and watchful eyes.
“Parker!” I said, rising. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Just got in on the red-eye this morning,” he said, looking as rested and relaxed as only a man who always flies first class can do. He took in my unbusinesslike attire and smiled. “You’re looking good, Charlie.”
I grimaced. “Well, this was not quite how I had in mind spending my day when I got dressed this morning. Speaking of which, would one of you like to tell me what is going on?”
Madeleine, who’d been watching the two of us, smiled also. She was carrying an armful of manila folders, which she put down on the table, together with a slim laptop, flipping open the lid.
“Aubrey Hamilton has been mounting a little side operation in Iraq,” she said as she tapped on the keyboard. “Luisa is out there with her right now. Things came to a head this morning, and we thought you’d want to be there, so to speak, to watch the footage.”
I glanced at Parker, but from the fact he wasn’t asking any questions, I assumed I was the only one still in the dark.
“What kind of side operation?”
“Probably best she reads you in on that herself,” Parker said. He took the seat next to mine and reached for the coffeepot. There must have been a proximity sensor on the damn thing, because almost as soon as he’d done so, Mr. Smooth appeared with a recharged pot and extra cups and saucers.
