Severance Kill

by Stevens, Tim

  ‘It’s guerrilla activism,’ Max piped up. ‘We print an edition, distribute it ourselves to stations, street corners. Quick and dirty. Then we go to ground again. Every scrap of a link between Blažek and some new or old crime gets reported.’

  ‘Has it made any difference?’

  ‘No,’ said Nikola, quickly, staring at him. Daring him to laugh. ‘Not yet. We do not even know if Blažek is aware of our existence.’

  ‘He is now.’

  She nodded.

  ‘You said you had weapons.’

  She glanced at Max. ‘We have a gun.’

  ‘A gun. Singular.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He raised his eyebrows. Max went over to a drawer, unlocked it.

  By the way he carried the piece Calvary could see he wasn’t used to handling it. He took it. A Browning Hi-Power. Chambered for nine millimetre parabellum rounds. He jacked the magazine. It was full.

  A good piece. But there was no smell of oil, and the mechanism didn’t feel slick.

  He began stripping it. ‘Needs a clean.’

  Nikola and Max hovered, unsure. Calvary said, ‘Have either of you ever fired this?’

  Glances. If they’d been standing they would have shuffled their feet. ‘No. But Jakub has had some practice.’

  ‘Shooting tin cans?’ He reassembled it, sighted down it, straight armed. It would have to do.

  ‘So. Mr Calvary.’ Max tried to lighten the mood. ‘Can I call you Cal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right. So, like… What’re you doing here?’

  He’d been waiting for the question, had had time to work out the best response. He said, ‘Turn on the TV. To the news.’

  Nikola shrugged, did so. Found one of the American 24-hour channels. They waited a couple of minutes until the economic news was over. Then the background switched to a jarringly familiar scene. The site of the tram hijacking just outside the Old Town.

  A breathless local reporter summarised the known facts. Three, perhaps four masked and armed men had boarded the tram shortly after noon and had shot dead a Russian national, seemingly randomly. They had taken captive an unidentified man but had come under attack from another passenger armed with what appeared to be an umbrella. The other passenger had disappeared. Police were appealing for the mysterious hero to come forward and give his version of events, as he might be able to shed light on the attackers’ identities. Police had also released an identikit picture of the kidnapped man, based on eyewitness testimony, and were appealing for help from anybody who could identify him.

  The identikit resembled Gaines in the same way a second-rate political caricature resembles its target. They’d made him heavier, given him jowls, which had the effect of taking twenty years off his age. He looked almost jolly, not furtive and crepuscular as he really was.

  The story moved on and Calvary picked up the remote and killed the picture. ‘The man with the umbrella was me. I’m here in Prague looking for the man in the identikit picture. I was following him on the tram when those men took him. I killed one of them.’

  ‘And these guys were Blažek’s crew?’

  ‘I’m supposing so. Blažek had my target, the man on the tram, kidnapped. They were keeping the hospitals under surveillance, I’m guessing, which is how they found me. They want me too.’

  ‘Dead?’ said Nikola.

  ‘No. If they wanted that, they could have shot me on the street. They had at least a couple of chances. They want to get me alive. I don’t know the reason. To find out who I am. Maybe they worked out I was following my target and want to know why.’

  ‘And who is this target of yours?’ Her gaze was almost defiant. We have a right to know. We saved you.

  He’d thought about his answer to this one, too. The truth would put them off. But if he gave them too little information, or misled them entirely, he risked reducing his chances of the three of them working out why Blažek had taken Gaines. ‘His name’s Sir Ivor Gaines. British expatriate. I’ve been sent to fetch him back.’

  Max said, ‘So you’re, what, like a spy? MI6?’

  Calvary winced inwardly. Nobody in SIS called it MI6. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So why does Blažek want this guy?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Calvary stood, stretched, the stiffness creeping in already. He paced.

  ‘Tell me about Blažek. This empire of his.’

  Nikola followed him with her eyes. ‘He has the city under his control. Hard drugs, prostitution – and I mean people trafficking. Extortion, loan sharking, fraud. As well as old-fashioned robbery. He took over in the late 1990s, using cunning and brute force. United the rival gangs that had grown up during the communist years with the new ones that appeared after liberation. Now it is a dynasty. His brother and son, Miklos and Janos respectively, are set to take over from him, in that order. Janos is this guy.’ She pointed at a picture of the man Calvary had injured with the car door. ‘He’s young and stupid, he’ll never get there.’

  At that moment the door to the basement office swung open.

  Calvary was across the desk on his belly, the Browning in his extended arm. He flicked the safety off.

  ELEVEN

  They converged on the War Council chamber from all over the city, in their Mercs and their Beamers and in some cases Cadillacs. The chamber was a converted barn in reclaimed forest land to the north west, fully equipped with central heating and air conditioning, a staffed kitchen and overnight facilities. The last two wouldn’t be necessary. This wouldn’t take long.

  Bartos arrived a little before nine. Miklos was there already. No concern in his eyes, despite his older brother’s scuffed and bruised appearance. Bartos disapproved of sentimentality.

  ‘Janos here?’ said Bartos.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘That prick.’

  Inside the chamber was a heavy conference table in the shape of a horseshoe. Bartos sat at the midpoint of the curve, drank mineral water and watched the cars arriving. They filed in, his lieutenants, sombre in dark suits. Ten in total. Janos wasn’t quite the last to get there, but close to it. Bartos thought his limp was exaggerated. The little shit had been bumped by a car door. He, Bartos, had survived a full-on crash.

  When the room was full, Bartos got straight to the point.

  ‘This bastard’s made a fool out of me. Out of all of you, too.’

  He ticked off points on his fingers, gazing at each man in turn. ‘One guy dead. Skewered through the throat like a pig, with a fucking umbrella. Pavel, a fellow his size, floored. While two of my men stood by with their heads up their asses and watched.’ He held up a warning finger as Janos made to speak. ‘Chaos outside the hospital. Wrecked cars, bookshop staff whose silence we’re having to enforce. So much for a low profile, people.’ He swallowed, hard. Ten, nine, eight… ‘And my BMW six series. Written off.’

  He drew a deep breath, the only sound in the room. ‘One guy. One guy. Then some dipshit van, this tin can on wheels, comes along and spirits him away. And can we trace it? Can my people, the finest, handpicked modern businessmen in the city, find one pissant little Toytown van? Can you fuck.’

  The silence hovered like a terrified waiter.

  Bartos exploded: ‘Well? Come on. Someone help me out. I want to hear how you’re going to put it right.’

  Janos tried to speak, cleared his throat, tried again. ‘I’ll –’

  ‘You’ll scurry off with your drugs and your whores and keep out of the way. You’ve done enough screwing up.’

  None of the men dared look at Janos. Bartos had never spoken to his son like that before, not in front of the others. He didn’t care.

  Miklos said, ‘Put me in charge. I’ll find this man, and the people who rescued him.’

  ‘See?’ Bartos raised his palms to the heavens, looking round at them. ‘That’s initiative. That’s the can-do spirit.’ He nodded at Miklos. ‘Okay. Done. Before we get down to details, I want the security doubled on the
Englishman, Gaines. A dog pisses against a hydrant within a mile of him, I want the pooch’s balls served up with a pasta sauce.’

  Across from him, he saw Janos’s face burning.

  *

  Krupina cleared the stairs two at a time, ignoring the complaints from her unaccustomed knees. She’d barked her instructions to Yevgenia on the way and when she entered the office she saw Tamarkin bent over Yevgenia’s workstation, both their faces flushed with excitement.

  ‘Something?’

  ‘Have a look at this, boss.’ Tamarkin’s grin wasn’t sardonic as usual.

  On the screen a soft turquoise blip pulsed gently, a beacon in the centre of a street map. From the street names she knew the area was in the south of the city.

  ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘Positive,’ said Yevgenia.

  Then Oleg had proved himself, right to the end. He hadn’t got close enough to the target, Gaines, to drop the tag on him. But he’d become aware of Calvary on board the tram with him. The fact that he hadn’t mentioned Calvary meant the English agent had been so close to him he might have been eavesdropping on Oleg’s muttered conversation into his microphone. And so he’d contrived to drop the tag, the spider, on Calvary, in the hope that this might give Krupina and Tamarkin and the others a lead.

  Which it had.

  ‘How far, exactly?’ murmured Krupina.

  ‘Five point six kilometres,’ Yevgenia said immediately.

  Beside her Tamarkin was pulling on his jacket. Krupina breathed out, long.

  ‘I’m coming along. Arkady, Lev too.’

  *

  ‘Something else I haven’t mentioned,’ Calvary said. ‘There are Russians involved.’

  The man in the door had frozen, eyes wide at the sight of the gun. It was odd that Calvary first saw him like this, because afterwards he noticed the man’s eye’s were usually hooded, half closed.

  ‘Jakub,’ Nikola said, fear catching at her throat.

  Calvary raised the Browning, thumbed the safety back on. Slid his torso off the desk.

  Jakub was older than the others. Perhaps thirty five. His hair was long, wavy and streaked with grey. He wore a leather coat that reached down to his ankles. A ‘duster’ from a spaghetti western.

  He stepped in, eyes fixed on Calvary’s. Nikola said, ‘Jakub, this is Mr Calvary. A friend.’

  ‘Friend.’ With the one word, Calvary could tell Jakub’s English was limited. He came close, didn’t offer his hand. The hostility ebbed off him in waves.

  *

  Nikola brought him up to date, which was when Calvary mentioned the Russians.

  ‘They were surveilling Gaines from the start. He’s a traitor, possibly working for them. They’d have him under observation, it stands to reason. The Russian who got shot on the tram was one of them.’

  Jakub watched him, rubbing the stubble on his cheeks.

  Calvary said, ‘Can you think of any connection Blažek might have with the Russians?’

  ‘He hates them,’ said Nikola. ‘He’s completely bigoted about them. It’s well known. He won’t have them in his crew.’

  ‘So, snatching Gaines could be Blažek cocking a snook at the Russians? That assumes he knew they had some link with Gaines.’

  Calvary sat against a desk, steepled his hands, blew slow air between them. An impasse.

  All right.

  He said to Nikola, ‘Do you have any information on properties Blažek owns?’

  She stood beside Jakub, who was still regarding Calvary with hooded distrust. Contempt, even. Nikola said: ‘He owns enormous quantities of property. If you are wondering whether we might narrow down the range of places this Gaines has been taken to... no. There are scores of possibilities.’

  ‘Then there’s one course of action.’ Calvary pushed himself upright. ‘I have to advertise myself. Get in Blažek’s way.’

  *

  They took two cars. Krupina and Lev in his Audi, Tamarkin and Arkady in the Toyota that Gleb favoured. Two cars meant two directions of approach, and twice the chance of their having a set of wheels on the road in case of a violent attempt at escape by their target, Calvary.

  Lev didn’t object when Krupina cranked the window down and lit up. She wouldn’t have cared if he had. Something was alive in her blood, something she hadn’t felt for years. Before even the posting previous to her current one.

  Back at the office Yevgenia had both cars on her monitor and was tracking their approach to the target, represented by the blue beacon. They were linked up telephonically so Yevgenia would be able to advise them as soon as the target moved. He hadn’t, so far.

  There was, Krupina admitted to herself, the possibility that he had found the tag, the spider, and had ditched it. Or, simply, that it had fallen off, or that he’d discarded whichever item of clothing Oleg had planted it on. Krupina thought of herself as a realistic pessimist. A pessimist because she was Russian. Realistic because she recognised when pessimism was of limited usefulness. And this was such a case: their was absolutely nothing to be gained from assuming the worst.

  They were armed this time. Not Krupina; it wasn’t her style. But the men, Gleb Tamarkin and Lev and Arkady, carried Makarovs. The Pistolet Makarova, in service since the time of Stalin and supremely reliable. The carrying of concealed handguns wasn’t illegal in the Czech Republic, unlike in most EU countries and indeed in Russia itself. But none of them had licences, and if randomly stopped and searched, each of the three men – and Krupina by association – faced questions at the very least. Under routine circumstances she baulked at authorising the packing of heat, as the Americans said.

  These weren’t routine circumstances.

  Lev swung the Audi through bleak nighttime streets, ones not to be found in the city’s tourist brochures. Here the appearance was not far removed from the rundown greyness of outer Moscow. In a way Krupina pitied these old Warsaw Pact capitals. Prague, Budapest, Warsaw itself: all had been touched by socialism, had tasted its benefits for a diminishingly brief period in their histories, but had reaped none of its benefits. The mighty architecture of Soviet Moscow remained still, its heroic Metro system. All that these European cities had left to show for forty years of enlightenment was a dying fringe of industrial wasteland, around a chocolate-box commemoration of feudal and capitalist exploitation.

  Through Krupina’s earpiece, and the earpieces of the three men, Yevgenia said, ‘Target’s on the move.’

  Damn. ‘How close are we?’

  ‘You’re half a kilometre away.’

  ‘Any idea what direction?’

  ‘Northeast. He’s moving at a fair speed. It suggests he’s in a vehicle of some sort.’

  Krupina said, ‘Gleb, you keep on the periphery. When Lev and I get on top of the target, Yevgenia, you let us know.’

  ‘Boss, I think Arkady and I should go in first.’

  ‘Your opinion is noted, Gleb, but this is my baby. Plus, we have to assume Calvary saw Arkady before, and that he might recognise him.’ She worked on the cigarette – a Marlboro – knowing there might not be time for another.

  Krupina peered at the satnav display. ‘Yevgenia, we’re turning into Berounska Street now.’

  ‘He’s heading towards you.’

  Lev pulled in at the kerb when she waved. Up ahead, on the left, was the building. The one Yevgenia had identified as the location of the signal.

  A car, an old Fiat by the look of it, was approaching from that direction.

  *

  Calvary said: ‘You told me you followed the big man, this Pavel Kral.’

  ‘Yes.’ Nikola replied quickly. She didn’t glance at Jakub but she didn’t have to. Calvary could tell that she was anxious to ease the tension in the room, to act as a buffer between him and Jakub’s dislike. The hooded eyes watched him, throughout.

  ‘So how did you pick up his trail? How did you know where to find him in order to follow him?’

  ‘He has breakfast most weekday mornings at a particular ca
fe. We got lucky today.’

  ‘You know where he lives? Or any of Blažek’s crowd?’

  ‘No.’ It was Max who answered, swivelling round in his chair. ‘It’s the holy grail, man. To find out one of the lieutenants’ addresses. Blažek’s himself would be like winning the Euro lottery.’

  Calvary considered. ‘Are there any favourite haunts? Bars, restaurants these people like to frequent? Somewhere I might find a crowd of them?’

  Jakub muttered something. Again Nikola shook her head.

  ‘Jakub, you must use English. Please. Mr Calvary speaks no Czech.’

  The eyes unhooded a fraction. Jakub said, ‘Nebe. It is restaurant near Old Town. Regular place for Blažek.’

  ‘Okay. Good.’ Calvary paced. ‘Is it likely to be open now?’

  Nikola: ‘No reason why not. But I do not know if Blažek or his people will be there tonight. They will be out on the streets, looking for you. For us.’

  ‘You have a point.’ Calvary pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. ‘But it’s worth a try.’

  ‘Why you want to get us killed?’

  It was the first time Jakub had addressed him directly. The man stood with his hands clasped low, head lowered. His gaze openly belligerent.

  ‘You wish to walk into Blažek’s company – and then? You meet him, and he catches you. Catches us. Kills us. Why? What is achieved?’

  ‘That’s not how I see it playing out,’ said Calvary. ‘What I need to do is separate one of the crew from the others. Preferably a higher-echelon member. Get him on his own. Interrogate him. But I need a way in. And,’ he went on, as Jakub opened his mouth once more, ‘I’m not looking to put any of you in danger. I’ll go in alone.’

  Glances were shooting around the room like projectiles. Calvary sighed.

  ‘Look. I haven’t said it yet, but thanks for saving me. You didn’t have to, but you still did. That took decency, not to mention guts. I don’t expect anything more from you. I don’t want to drag you in any deeper, into a problem that’s mine. Let me give you a couple of minutes. Talk it over. Decide what you want to do. If you decide to call it quits, that’s absolutely fine, I’ll walk out of here and you won’t see me again. No hard feelings.’