Fatal Ally

by Tim Sebastian

  That had really made them shit their pants. One by one they had lined up to offer their abject apologies – their ‘didn’t knows’, ‘hadn’t thoughts’, ‘would never have done its’, ‘please forgive us’. Like little boys with fear dripping from their noses, scared stiff that the bullies from the Lubyanka would go after them and rearrange their testicles.

  She had almost laughed at the thought of one bunch of Soviet thugs, humbled by another – until she remembered how much she hated them all.

  Tonight, there was no point going to bed. She fetched a blanket and wrapped it around her. Outside, the temperatures had sunk again and the heating was struggling. She switched off all the lights except for the one in the hall and left the door to the kitchen ajar. That way she would see them, before they saw her. It was the last advantage she would enjoy.

  Finally, she took the largest of the kitchen knives from its drawer, tested the blade with her thumb and hid it in the folds of the blanket.

  She had a pretty good idea what to do – as long as her courage held.

  From the British embassy, they took the metro to Taganskaya, then walked a mile to a set of small garages where two unmarked Zhiguli cars, blessed with Russian plates, were kept for occasional use.

  On payment of a sizable bribe, the registrations had been falsified at the State Auto Inspectorate and if the vehicles were stopped, they would survive all but the most detailed checks.

  Evans chose the dirtiest of the cars and drove fast and in silence through the Moscow night. Snow had been forecast earlier in the day, but the winds had blown it inexorably eastwards and it looked as though the city would be spared fresh falls. Ahead of them, to the south-east, he glimpsed a strong moon in a clear sky.

  He stopped three blocks from her apartment building and Margo pulled a plastic bag from the back seat. Inside it were some old potatoes and apples. She gripped it and took his arm with her other hand. Another Moscow couple, heading home after a late night and some shopping.

  After a few minutes they dropped down an underpass and crossed under a four-lane highway. In the distance, a local train, the elektrichka clattered out into the suburbs. A vast street hoarding shouted about a lottery and the millions of rubles that could be won. Beside it an elderly woman tried in vain to lift a drunk, lying inert in the snow, and then gave up.

  Margo hesitated for a second but Evans steered her on.

  ‘Almost there,’ he whispered. ‘Sorry about the nightlife.’

  They passed more red-brick blocks, grimy shop windows. The darkness and the cold unremitting.

  And then she knew they’d arrived. Fifty yards away two black BMWs had parked at crazy angles half on, half off the pavements, blocking the entrance to a six-storey building. One of the cars had its front wheels yanked at right angles to the chassis, as if to break a skid. Someone had arrived in a hurry.

  ‘Keep going,’ she told him. ‘Don’t stop now.’

  They were too late. Margo could see that. Her professional instinct, her good sense told her to get out immediately, as far away as they could. But the voice inside wouldn’t let her. They turned again into a dim-lit courtyard. A few lights burned in the other blocks but almost all the flats were in darkness.

  Most cities just sleep at night, she thought. This one dies.

  She pulled up her collar and the two of them stepped further into the shadows. There was a chance the security men would simply frighten the old woman and leave. After all, she couldn’t get away on her own. They could arrest her anytime they wanted.

  But she knew it wouldn’t go that way. Violence was the default setting in Russia. The instrument of first resort. The FSB would be charged with handling a monumental screw-up. Not an occasion for gentleness or mercy.

  She realized she was still holding Evans’s arm but she didn’t let it go. They would wait until the cars drove away and pick up whatever pieces were left. She doubted it would take very long.

  Yelena was calm and at peace.

  Twenty minutes earlier, she had knelt down on the floor and stroked the dog’s head. He was still refusing to eat. Perhaps he was sick. In any case there was nothing more she could do for him.

  In the darkness they looked at each other and drew comfort from each other’s presence.

  She had caught a single footstep on the landing outside the apartment, so it wasn’t a shock when the door smashed open. Three huge bodies, armed with pistols and flak jackets forcing their way in – somehow everywhere at once. Within a second, a powerful flashlight shone into her eyes – and then the kitchen light was on and the three of them stood in front of her. Creatures of the night, she thought. Killers who worked silently and in darkness. Untamed. Unstoppable.

  ‘Federal Security.’ The lead man was thin and wiry, close-cropped hair, moustache. He put his gun in his pocket. ‘You know why we’re here?’

  She smiled. ‘Someone hasn’t paid their phone bill, I suppose.’

  He crossed the room in two strides and slapped her hard across the face.

  ‘I don’t like jokes.’ He hit her again and stood over her. She winced a little, but he couldn’t wipe away the smile.

  ‘You are Mazurina, Yelena Fydorovna?’

  She nodded and spat a tooth onto the floor. ‘You people don’t change, do you? Every new breed, just as violent as the last.’

  ‘Then you know what to expect. Get your coat, you’re coming with us.’

  ‘I can’t leave my dog …’

  The man next to the moustache lifted his gun, calmly attached a silencer and smiled at Yelena. ‘You don’t have to worry …’ Carefully and with evident enjoyment, he shot Vasya twice in the head. ‘You see, now you don’t have to worry at all. Not a care in the world. The dog has been well looked after.’

  She turned away and threw up over the floor. She had expected everything except that. Even after all these years, they could still surprise her with the most staggering displays of cruelty. There were no limits to it. Perhaps there never had been.

  In any case, it was enough. Arkady and Vasya were both gone. It was time to end it.

  She got up shakily and turned towards the sink, as if to throw up again. One last bit of strength. That’s all it would take. Inside the blanket, she turned the knife towards her and with all her force, sank it into her chest, just below the ribcage.

  She couldn’t stop the cry of agony from her lips, but as they seized her and spun her round, she managed to laugh out loud. She didn’t hear their shouts and obscenities, didn’t feel them trying to drag the knife from her hand, the cries of disgust as her blood spurted over them.

  Yelena sank to the floor and tried to speak. She tried to say she wouldn’t be going with them, after all – and they could fuck themselves to hell and back again, for all she cared – but she didn’t know if she’d said it out loud or just thought it.

  In that moment the room seemed so cold and dark and yet the light was still burning. And the men … With her left hand she tried to wrap the blanket tighter around her, staunching the flow of blood, a survival instinct that even at the end was impossible to fight. Within seconds, though, she was unconscious.

  They heard the two BMWs leave. Not in a hurry, but quietly, slowly, their tyres scratching at the packed ice by the roadside.

  Evans led the way quickly to the main entrance. Like most Moscow apartment buildings you needed a code to gain entry – but he kicked the door hard and it opened easily, as if it was used to it.

  The hallway, in old, Soviet, light blue, was daubed with graffiti and stank of cigarette smoke. They took the stairs.

  At the apartment door, Margo signalled Evans to wait and listened for a moment. The door had been left ajar, lights still burned inside. She took off her shoes and tiptoed into the kitchen but she couldn’t prevent the involuntary gasp at what she saw.

  Yelena was on the floor, leaning at an angle against the cupboard beneath the sink, a blanket drenched with blood lay around her, a knife handle protruding from its folds. Beside
her, Margo registered the body of a dog with two clear bullet holes between the eyes.

  She crouched down and felt for a pulse on the woman’s temple. It was barely there. She was dying in front of her eyes.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ She spoke quietly into her ear. ‘I’m from the British embassy. Can you understand what I’m saying?’

  The eyes didn’t open, but she saw a finger move and reached down to hold her hand.

  Yelena seemed to mouth the word ‘Arkady’.

  ‘I’m afraid he didn’t make it.’ Margo gripped her hand more tightly. ‘I’m so sorry. There was nothing any of us could do.’

  She realized then that Yelena had gone. There was no need to search again for a pulse. She placed the woman’s hand back on the blood-stained blanket and stood up in the tiny kitchen.

  Everywhere she looked there was blood. On the walls, in the sink, spattered across the body of the dog.

  Even worse that it was in the kitchen – the room where life was always lived in Russia, where vodka was drunk, songs sung, guests seated, jokes told and retold.

  Not a room for dying. Not this way.

  Back in the car, she sat still for a few moments, inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. In more than twenty years in the Service, she had never experienced a day of such irretrievable darkness.

  There was no way to finesse the carnage. You stand in a cockroach-infested kitchen and an elderly woman sits on the floor with a knife in her chest, accompanied only by a dog with two bullet holes between the eyes – and fine words don’t help you.

  Perhaps they never can.

  Right up close, she had seen two elderly people die in fear and extreme pain. So close that she had touched them both in their final seconds of life. And been of no help to either.

  Her job had been to babysit Arkady out of Moscow and all the way to a new life in Britain. But the old one wouldn’t let him go. The moment the security police had arrived at his flat, he was finished.

  Evans started the car and drove out slowly onto the highway. She couldn’t look at the city, couldn’t look at people who lived and died in cruelty and violence and thought it was normal. Accepted it, made it normal; told lies to themselves, pretended everything was fine and taught their children, generation after generation, to close their eyes and do the same.

  Kneeling in that kitchen, Margo had told Yelena the truth about her ex-husband, that he hadn’t made it, that his life was over. And she was glad she’d done it. You don’t send people to their grave under false pretences.

  The car stopped at a traffic light and she watched a crowd assembling beside a bus stop, the morning light pale and uncertain. The shadows of winter never far away.

  She was tired of lying. Tired of the damage it left behind.

  Every lie, she thought, destroys something, however small, for someone.

  When you lie and go on lying, nothing is real.

  WASHINGTON DC

  It was long past midnight. Yanayev stood still in the hall of the residence. He didn’t remove his coat or hat. Didn’t answer his wife’s greeting from the bedroom.

  Lydia hurried down the stairs. ‘What is it, Vitaly? What happened?’

  He shrugged as if to indicate he didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘Is it all fine – did they get the man in Moscow?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Everything happened as it was supposed to. No doubt I’m a hero of the State and I’m told the Foreign Minister himself will call me. He hasn’t, of course. Probably can’t find the number …’ He tried to smile.

  She put a hand on his. ‘You didn’t like this, did you? Didn’t like the way it was done …’

  He nodded. His head suddenly seemed heavy, like pig-iron, bolted to the body. She took his coat and hat and led him into the living room. No lights, just the two of them, the grey, snowy garden, at peace and silent beyond the windows.

  ‘A man died today because of what I did …’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Wait, hear me out, Lydia. This man who I had never met, never even heard of. He made a run for it at the airport, was chased of course by our goons, and got run over by a truck.’ He sighed. ‘So they won’t need to bother with a trial and won’t need to rig it either – which of course they would have done, just to be on the safe side. You can’t be too careful …’

  ‘Vitaly …’ It came as a warning this time.

  ‘I know, I know – microphones everywhere, but I’m with you – here – now – and I’m damned if I won’t say what I feel.’

  She moved closer and put her arms round him.

  ‘All these years … first the lunacy of Communism, then the drunkenness and corruption of Yeltsin, and now this lot, with their prisons full to bursting and the law torn into shreds. Even Gorbachev says so. Whatever happens, we can’t seem to live in a normal country … I, I’m a diplomat, I should have stuck to that, left all the secret nonsense to Dmitrov and his clowns on the second floor. But Harry Jones came to me – I was flattered, I admit it, and I wanted to do something. Something for once that wouldn’t end in blood and death.’

  ‘The man who died was a traitor, Vitaly.’

  ‘Maybe he was. In other countries that would have been decided by a court with judges who think for themselves, instead of lapdogs waiting for a call from the Kremlin before they can open their snouts.’

  ‘That’s Russia, my dear …’

  ‘That’s what we always say.’ His voice lowered to a whisper. ‘And that’s why it never changes.’

  WESTERN SYRIA

  Just before you die, you will make a discovery. She forgot who had told her that – but she now knew it was true.

  They had forced Mai to stand, bound her hands behind her back with cord, kicked her down the broken, wooden staircase.

  A gust of air caught her face. She saw a wall half-standing, blackened plaster, a lightbulb swinging gently in the breeze. More steps into the basement. Three, maybe four of the men were there – or were there more? Light dropped down intermittently through holes in the ceiling. There was no talking, no hysteria. She couldn’t see their faces, but she could hear the breathing.

  What do you think about, when your time is up? She had often wondered.

  Her mind groped for the faces she had loved, the hands, the warm smiles, but it was moving too quickly …

  And then the bag over the head. And that’s where your life hits the wall at the end of the road. But there was no terror. That was the discovery. Terror is not about what will happen to you. It’s about what might.

  Certainty of any kind is comfort. Even now, she thought, as the final seconds of life rolled away.

  So she draws herself up to full height, legs slightly apart, and she can feel that her pulse is normal.

  I can play your game and beat you at it …

  A gun is cocked beside her head, just an inch away, and then just as the words of a childhood prayer start to form in her mind, the trigger is pulled.

  And there is only the dull metallic click of metal on metal.

  She loses her footing, stumbles, but doesn’t fall – her hand collides with cold, rough concrete. The building half-destroyed or half finished – that was the choice in the Arab world, nothing ever completed. Not even a farce like this.

  She now knows today was sport not business.

  Today was to remind her that it isn’t God who’ll decide when she’s to die. It’s a stinking little rat from a Syrian village she’s never heard of, who can’t even read a book or multiply two numbers. But he has a gun and an unbelievably inflated sense of his own importance and he will finish the job when he feels like it. Tomorrow or the day after, or in a week’s time, when the excitement and lust for blood will be too much for him to contain.

  Someone whipped the bag off her head. And she can see them against the bare brick walls. Kids, no more than twenty. All grinning stupidly as if they were playing tricks at school.

  And she can’t stop the rush of blood to her head, the ragged breathin
g, her legs threatening to buckle. But it’s only a few moments. Nobody moved.

  She held up her head, looked at them and spat on the floor in contempt.

  Only then did they hit her.

  She slipped in and out of consciousness. Time shaken, then stopped, then shaken again.

  Each time her eyes opened she would grasp for the image, try to hold it in both hands. And each time someone dragged it from her, forcing her back into darkness.

  Once, she remembered being a little girl. She sat on a swing and shrieked with laughter – but she didn’t know why. A crowd of people looked on and laughed with her. Even her dog was laughing. She reached out to touch his head, but he turned away.

  And then there were tears that fell through the laughter. Cold tears, like winter rain. She wondered where they came from, wondered if she still had a home, wondered if anyone would ever come to take her back to it.

  It was after five in the evening when Mai awoke. She shivered from the draft along the bare floorboards, and felt the stabbing, seething pain return.

  She remembered the two young Arabs standing over her in the half-light between day and darkness, the close-cropped hair, their studied, immovable expressions; remembered them backing away from her, washing their bloody hands in a bowl of water, drying them on clean, stripy towels they had brought with them, as if they had simply finished their shift and were going home after a good day’s work.

  Remembered the avalanche of pain.

  To a torturer, she recalled, the interval is just as important as the violence. It gives the victim sufficient time to replay the deep and abiding pain that has been inflicted and to build maximum fear before it all begins again. Time was on their side, not hers.

  She could hear traffic in the distance but it was the smells that reminded her where she was: cordite and cigarette smoke, the sweat of unwashed bodies, unwashed for days – and old blood, spattered on the streets and in the skewed, punched-in houses, like this one.