Russian Roulette (Alex Rider)

by Horowitz, Anthony

  We got there just before midnight but all the street lamps were lit and I was able to make out a very attractive building, made of cream-coloured stone, with arched doorways and windows and lots of decoration over the walls. It was smaller and neater than our apartment block, just four storeys high, with a slanting orange-tiled roof.

  “That’s the window – up there.”

  Dima pointed. The flat was on the top floor, just as Fagin had said, and sure enough I could make out the fortochka, which was actually slightly ajar. The woman who lived there might have thought she was safe, being so high up, but I saw at once that it would be possible to climb in, using the building’s adornments as footholds. There were ledges, windowsills, carved pillars and even a drainpipe that would act as one side of a ladder. It wouldn’t be easy for me but once I was inside I would go back down and open the front door. I’d let the others in and the whole place would be ours.

  There were no lights on inside the building. The other residents must have been asleep. Nor was there anyone in the street. We crossed as quickly as we could and grouped ourselves in the shadows, right up against the wall.

  “What do you think, Yasha?” Dima asked.

  I looked up and nodded. “I can do it.” But still I hesitated. “Are you sure she’s away?”

  “Everyone says Fagin is reliable.”

  “OK.”

  “We’ll be waiting for you at the door. Make sure you don’t make any noise coming down the stairs.”

  “Right. Good luck.”

  Dima cupped his hands to help me climb up to the first level and as I raised my foot, our eyes met and he smiled at me. But at that moment I suddenly felt troubled. This might be my destiny but what would my parents have said if they could have seen me now? They were honest people. That was the way I’d been brought up. I was amazed at how quickly I’d become a burglar, a thief. And if I stayed in Moscow much longer? I wondered what I might become next.

  I began the climb. The three boys scattered. We’d agreed that if a policeman happened to come along on patrol, Grigory would warn me by hooting like an owl. But right now we were alone and at first it was easy. I had the drainpipe on one side and there were plenty of bricks and swirling plasterwork to give me a foothold. The architect or the artist who had built this place might have had plenty of ideas about style and elegance but he had been less brilliant when it came to security.

  Even so, the higher I went, the more dangerous it became. The pipe was quite loose. If I put too much weight onto it, I risked tearing it out of the wall. Some of the decorations were damp and had begun to rot. I rested my foot briefly on a diamond-shaped brick, part of a running pattern, and to my horror it crumbled away. First, there was the sound of loose plaster hitting the pavement. Then I found myself scrabbling against the face of the building, desperately trying to stop myself plunging down. If I’d fallen from the first floor, I’d have broken an ankle. From this height it was more likely to be my neck. Somehow I managed to steady myself. I looked down and saw Dima standing underneath one of the street lamps. He had seen what had happened and waved a hand – either spurring me on or warning me to be more careful.

  I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, then continued up – past the third floor and up to the fourth. At one stage I was right next to a window and, peeping in, I saw the vague shape of two people lying in bed under a fur cover. I was lucky they were heavy sleepers. I pulled myself up as quickly as possible and finally reached the ledge that ran along the whole building just below the top floor. It was no more than fifteen centimetres wide and I had to squeeze flat against the wall, shuffling along with my toes touching the brickwork and my heels hanging in the air. If I had leaned back even slightly I would have lost my balance and fallen. But I had come this far without killing myself. I was determined to see it through.

  I got to the window with the smaller window set inside it and now I saw that I had two more problems. It was going to be an even tighter fit than I had imagined. And it was going to be awkward too. Somehow I had to lever myself up and in, but that would mean putting all my weight on the main sheet of glass. The windows were only separated by a narrow frame and unless I was careful there was a real chance they would shatter beneath me and I would end up being cut in half. Once again I looked for Dima but this time there was no sign of him.

  I reached out and held onto the edge with one hand. The fortochka was definitely unlocked. The room on the other side was dark but seemed to be a lounge with a dining area and a kitchen attached. I grabbed the glass with my other hand. I saw now that I was going to have to go in head first. It just wasn’t possible to lever up my leg. Using my forehead, I pushed the little window open. I leant forward, pushing my head inside. Now the glass was resting against the back of my neck, making me think of a prisoner in the old days, about to be decapitated by guillotine. Trying to keep as much of my weight off the glass as I could, I arched forward and in. The fit was very tight. The opening was barely more than forty centimetres square … a cat flap indeed. My shoulders only just passed through and I felt the loose end of the glass scraping against my back. I pushed harder and found myself wedged with the lower rim of the fortochka pressing into my back just above my buttocks. Suddenly I was trapped! I couldn’t move in either direction and I had a nightmare vision of being stuck there all night, waiting for someone to discover me and call the police in the morning. The glass was creaking underneath me. I was sure it was going to break. I pushed again. It was like giving birth to myself. The edge cut into me but then, somehow, gravity took over. I plunged forward into the darkness and hit the floor. I was in!

  If it hadn’t been for the carpet, I would have definitely broken my nose and ended up looking like Dima. If there was anyone in the flat, they would certainly have heard me and I lay there for a moment, waiting for the door to open and the lights to go on. It didn’t happen. I remembered the people I had seen beneath their fur cover in the flat below. Surely they would have heard the thump and wondered what it was. But there was no sound from below either. I waited another minute. My arm was sticking out at a strange angle and I was worried that I had dislocated my shoulder, but when I shifted my weight and got back into a sensible position, it seemed all right. Dima and the others would have seen me go in. They would be waiting for me to come down and open the front door. It was time to move.

  First I examined my surroundings. As my eyes got used to the half-light, I saw that I was in the main living area and that the owner must have been as wealthy as Fagin had said. I had never been anywhere like this. The furniture was modern and looked brand new. Living in a wooden house in a village, I had never seen – I had never even imagined – glass and silver tables, leather sofas, and beautiful cabinets with rings hanging off the drawers. Everything I had ever sat on or slept in had been old and shabby. There was a gorgeous rug in front of a fireplace and even to steal that would make this adventure worthwhile. How much more comfortable I would be lying on a luxurious rug than on the lumpy mattress back at the Tverskaya Street apartment!

  Paintings in gold frames hung on the walls. I didn’t really understand them. They seemed to be splashes of paint with no subject matter at all. There had been a few framed photographs in my house, a tapestry hanging in my parents’ bedroom, pictures cut out of magazines, but nothing like this. Next to the sitting area there was a dining-room table – an oval of wood, partly covered by a lace cloth, with four chairs – and beyond it a kitchen that was so clean it had surely never been used. I ran my eye over the electric oven, the sink with its gleaming taps. No need to run down to any wells if you lived here. There was a fridge in one corner. I opened the door and found myself bathed in electric light, staring at shelves stacked with ham, cheese, fruit, salad, pickled mushrooms and the little pancakes that we called blinis. I’m afraid I couldn’t help myself. I reached in and stuffed as much food into my mouth as I could, not caring if it was salty or sweet.

  And that was how I was, standing in the kitchen with f
ood in my hands and in my mouth, when there was the rattle of a key in the lock and the main door of the flat opened and the lights came on.

  Fagin had got it wrong after all.

  A man stood staring at me. I saw his eyes turn instantly from surprise to understanding and then to dark, seething fury. He was wearing a black fur coat, black gloves and the sort of hat you might see on an American gangster. A white silk scarf hung around his shoulders. He was not a huge man but he was solid and well built and he had a presence about him, a sense of power. I could see it in his extraordinarily intense eyes, heavy-lidded with thick, black eyebrows. His flesh had the colour and the vitality of a man lying dead in his coffin and standing there, framed in the doorway, he had that same, heavy stillness. His face was unlined, his mouth a narrow gash. I could make out the edges of a tattoo on the side of his neck: red flames. It suggested that the whole of his body, underneath his shirt, was on fire. Without knowing anything about him, I knew I was in terrible trouble. If I had met the devil I could not have been more afraid.

  “Who is it, Vlad?” There was a woman standing behind him. I glimpsed a mink collar and blonde hair.

  “There is someone in the flat,” he said. “A boy.”

  His eyes briefly left me, darting across the room to the window. He didn’t need to ask any questions. He knew how I had got in. He knew that I was alone.

  “Do you want me to call the police?”

  “No. There’s no need for that.”

  His words were measured, uttered with a sort of dull certainty. And they told me the worst thing possible. If he wasn’t calling the police it was because he had decided to deal with me himself, and he wasn’t going to shake my hand and thank me for coming. He was going to kill me. Perhaps there was a gun in his coat pocket. Perhaps he would tear me apart with his bare hands. I had no doubt at all that he could do it.

  I didn’t know how to react. My one desire was to get out of the flat, back into the street. I wondered if Dima, Roman and Grigory had seen what had happened but I knew that even if they had, there was nothing they could do. The front door would be locked. If they were sensible, they would probably be halfway back to Tverskaya Street. I tried to collect my thoughts. All I had to do was to get past this man and out into the corridor. The woman wouldn’t try to stop me. I looked around me and did perhaps the most stupid thing I could have done. There was a bread knife on the counter. I picked it up.

  The man didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He glanced at the blade with outrage. How could I dare to pick up his property and threaten him in his home? That was what he said without actually saying anything. Holding the knife didn’t make me feel any stronger. In fact all the strength drained out of me the moment I had it in my hand and the silver, jagged blade filled me with horror.

  “I don’t want any trouble,” I said and my voice didn’t sound like my own. “Just let me go and nobody will be hurt.”

  He had no intention of doing that. He moved towards me and I jabbed out with the knife without thinking, not meaning to stab him, not really knowing what I was doing. He stopped. I saw the face of the girl behind him, frozen in shock. The man looked down. I followed his eyes and saw that the point of the blade had gone through his coat, into his chest. I was even more horrified. I stepped back, dropping the knife. It clattered to the floor.

  The man didn’t seem to have felt any pain. He brought up a hand and examined the gash in his coat as if it mattered more to him than the flesh underneath. When he brought his hand away, there was blood on the tips of his glove.

  He gazed at me. I was unarmed now, trapped by those terrible eyes.

  “What have you done?” he demanded.

  “I…” I didn’t know what to say.

  He took one step forward and punched me in the face. I had never been struck so hard. I didn’t even know it was possible for one human to hurt another human so much. It was like being hit by a rod of steel and I felt something break. I heard the girl cry out. I was already falling but as I went down he hit me again with the other fist so that my head snapped back and my body collapsed in two directions at once. I remember a bolt of white light that seemed to be my own death. I was unconscious before I reached the floor.

  РУССКАЯ PУЛЕТКА

  RUSSIAN ROULETTE

  I woke up in total darkness, lying in a cramped space with my legs hunched up, a gag in my mouth and my hands tied. My first thought was that I was locked inside a box, that I had been buried alive – and for the next sixty seconds I was screaming without making any sound, my heart racing, my muscles straining against the ropes around my wrists, barely able to catch breath. Somehow I got myself under control. It wasn’t a box. I was in the boot of a car. We had been standing stationary a moment ago but now I heard the throb of the engine and felt us move off. That still wasn’t good. I was being allowed to live – but for how long?

  I was in a bad way. My head was pounding – and by that I mean all of it, inside and out. The whole side of my face was swollen. It hurt me to move my mouth and I couldn’t close one of my eyes. The man’s fist had broken my cheekbone. I had no idea what I looked like but what did that matter? I did not expect to live.

  I presumed the man was Vladimir Sharkovsky. Fagin had warned me that he was dangerous but that was only half the story. I had seen enough of him in the flat to know that he was a psychopath. No ordinary person had eyes like that. He had been utterly cold when I had attacked him but when his temper flared up it had been like a demon leaping out of the craters of hell. He hadn’t called the police. That was the worst of it. He was taking me somewhere and when he got there he could do whatever he wanted to me. I dreaded to think what that might be. Was he planning to torture me as a punishment for what I had done? I had heard that many hundreds of children went missing from the streets of Moscow every year. It might well be my fate to become one of them.

  I cannot say how long the journey took. I couldn’t see my watch with my hands tied behind me and after a while, I dozed off. I didn’t sleep exactly. I simply drifted out of consciousness. It would have been nice to have dreamt of my parents and of my life in Estrov, to have spent my last hours on this planet reliving happier times, but I was in too much pain. Every few minutes, my eyes would blink open and I would once again find myself struggling for breath in that almost airtight compartment, desperately wanting to straighten up, to go to the toilet, to be anywhere but there. The car just rumbled on.

  Eventually, we arrived. I felt us slowing down. Then we stopped and I heard a man’s voice, a command being given, followed by what sounded like the click of a metal gate. When we set off again, there was a different surface – gravel – beneath the tyres. The car stopped and the engine was turned off. The driver’s door opened and shut and I heard footsteps on the gravel. I tensed myself, waiting for the car boot to be released, but it didn’t happen. The footsteps disappeared into the distance and when, a long time later, they hadn’t come back, I began to think that I was going to be left here all night, like a piece of baggage nobody needed.

  And so it was. I was left in the dark, in silence, with no idea how long it was going to last or what would happen when I was released. It was being done on purpose, of course, to break my spirit, to make me suffer. I was the victim of my own worst imaginings. I had nothing to do except to count every single painful minute. Unable to move, to stretch myself, my whole body was in torment. My only option was to try to sleep, fighting back all the dread that came from being tied up and left in this small space. It was a long, hideous night. By the time the boot was opened, I was no longer afraid of death. I think I would have welcomed it. A short tunnel of horrors followed by release. It would be worth the journey.

  There was a man leaning over me; not the one from the Moscow flat. He was quite simply massive – with oversized shoulders and a thick neck – and dressed in a cheap grey suit, a white shirt and a black tie. His hair was blond and thickly oiled so that it stood up in spikes. He was wearing dark glasses and there
was a radio transmitter behind his ear that had a wire curling down to a throat mike. His skin was utterly white and it occurred to me that he might have been in a prison or some other institution all his life. He didn’t look as if he had ever spent any time in the sun.

  He reached down and with a single movement dragged me out of the boot, then stood me up so that I was balanced against the back of the car. I would have fallen otherwise. There was no strength in my legs. He looked at me with hardly any expression apart from disgust and I couldn’t blame him for that. I stank. My clothes were crumpled. My face was caked with blood. He reached into his jacket pocket and I winced as he produced a knife. I was quite ready for him to plunge it into my chest but he just leant over me and cut the cords of my wrists. My hands fell free. They looked horrible. The flesh of my wrists was blue, covered in welts. I couldn’t move my fingers but I felt the pins and needles as the blood supply was restored.

  “You are to come with us,” he said. He had a deep, gravelly voice. He spoke without emotion, as if he didn’t actually enjoy speaking.

  Us? I glanced round and saw a second man standing at the side of the car. For a moment, I thought my brain was playing tricks on me after my long captivity. This second man was identical to the first – the same height, the same looks, the same clothes. They were twins … just like the two girls I had once known in Estrov. But it was almost as if these two had trained themselves to be indistinguishable. They had the same haircut, the same sunglasses. They even moved at exactly the same time, like mirror images.

  The first twin hadn’t bothered to find out my name. He didn’t want to know anything about me.

  “Where are we?” I asked. The words came out clumsily because of the damage to my face.

  “No questions. Do as you are told.”

  He gestured. I began to walk and for the first time I was able to take in my surroundings. I was in what looked like a large and very beautiful park with pathways, neatly cut grass and trees. The park was surrounded by a brick wall, several metres high with razor wire around the top, and I could make out the tips of more trees on the other side. The car that I had been in was a black Lexus. It had been parked quite close to an arched gateway with a barrier that rose and fell, the only way out, I suspected. A guardhouse stood next to it. This was a wooden construction with a large glass window and I could see a man in uniform, watching us as we walked together. My first thought was that I had been brought to some sort of prison. There were arc lamps and CCTV cameras set at intervals along the wall.