Severance Kill

by Tim Stevens

  ‘He’s got them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Max and Jakub. Blazek’s got them.’

  SEVENTEEN

  The pain was like nothing Tamarkin had ever experienced before, as though a malevolent being within his leg was trying to eat its way out. For a bizarre moment his leg was raised above him, its red wetness spraying in the morning light, before his back crashed down and his leg followed with a jar. He was blinded, pierced through by agony.

  Through the shimmering waves of screaming nausea he watched the woman, handling the gun as elegantly as a toddler with a monkey wrench, wave it shakily in his direction. Beyond, a man collapsed under Calvary’s shots. The young Blazek, Janos, was half-masking Calvary, a human shield.

  Consciousness was ebbing. Tamarkin’s mind, detached from his body’s pain, did the calculations.

  Either the woman or Calvary would kill him if he shot the other. And Calvary needed to remain alive for the time being.

  Even if Tamarkin survived this encounter, Calvary was going to get away this time, and with Janos.

  Janos might or might not know where Gaines was being held. If he did, and if he hadn’t yet told Calvary, Calvary would make him reveal what he knew.

  Therefore, Janos had to die.

  Krupina, dear old Darya Yaroslavovna, would have been moderately proud of him. He squeezed off one bad shot and two excellent ones, body shots because he didn’t have the focus and the acuity of vision right now to aim for the head. From the way Janos sagged and Calvary stepped aside, Tamarkin knew he’d done the job.

  Calvary raised his gun. Tamarkin saw the muzzle flash.

  The tide of blackness reared, a last wave, and engulfed him.

  *

  Bartos roared.

  He punched at the dashboard of the car, cracking the walnut veneer, splintering the plastic of the stereo display. He hammered the side of his fist against the window, causing something to snap within the door of the car.

  ‘Let me out.’

  ‘Brother — ’

  ‘Unlock the door.’

  ‘Bartos, listen — ’

  ‘Open this fucking door now.’

  ‘Listen.’ Bartos wondered if Miklos was aware how close he was sailing, how narrow the margin between Bartos as he was noor now and Bartos with a gun in his hand, shooting down his own brother for daring to defy him. ‘Deniability. It’s your mantra. The first commandment. You can’t go anywhere near there. The men have to pull back. They can’t be seen around the parkhouse. Least of all can they be caught in there by the police.’

  Bartos’s eyes blazed hate at his brother.

  ‘My son.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My firstborn.’

  ‘I know, brother.’

  ‘The little shit. He thought he could take the bastard on.’

  ‘He had your courage.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Bartos spat, not caring that he was in Miklos’s car. ‘He was a coward. He took this guy on because he was scared of me.’

  ‘Perhaps so, Bartos — ’

  Bartos pulled his phone out and dialled the Worm.

  Four rings, and it cut to voicemail. No message, just a tone.

  He was about to speak, then thought better of it. Who knew where the Russian was? Somebody else might have his phone in their hands.

  ‘I need to ditch this,’ said Bartos, holding his own phone up.

  Deniability. It was why he personally couldn’t go anywhere near the parkhouse. Why his men had to circle the building like scavengers rather than charge in and finish the job, kill the Brit bastard, now that the police were closing in.

  Janos, the presence of his body there, was a problem. Already Bartos was forming a plan in his mind to distance himself from his son, rehearsing the words he’d deliver sorrowfully to the police: he was wayward, he crossed the line, I’m not saying he deserved this fate but.

  Bartos’s phone went. He looked at the display, saw it was one of his men at the parkhouse.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Boss, we’ve caught two guys.’ The man sounded out of breath. ‘One we took inside the car park. The other was hanging around outside, trying to get in, when we grabbed him. Neither of them’s the Brit, but still.’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Bartos looked across at Miklos, his sudden grin splitting his face in half.

  *

  They loped through narrow streets dark with shadow, like vampires avoiding the sunlight. Where they were going didn’t matter for now. What mattered was that they put distance between themselves and the chaos behind them. Calvary had ditched the battered Peugeot after teug they werehree blocks, parking it down an alley.

  After ten minutes Calvary said, ‘Stop,’ and pushed Nikola into another alleyway. She had stamina; her breathing rate was barely raised. His hands moved expertly under her collar, down her flanks, her legs, under her arms.

  ‘You do the rest,’ he said.

  While he ran his hands over himself she said, ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Any kind of device. Probably tiny.’

  Nothing.

  He said, ‘Give me your phone.’

  She handed it over. He took the handset and his own and prised out the SIM cards and threw them into the alley.

  ‘There may be GPS tracking. We’ll get replacements.’

  When she frowned he said, ‘How did that Russian, the one who came up behind you, know we were there? They’ve used tracking devices before. Either we’re bugged, or something was planted on the Fiat.’ He tipped his head. ‘Let’s keep going.’

  They took off at a brisk walking pace. She said, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Nowhere familiar. Not your flat — we have to assume that’s compromised. Somewhere we can hole up and think. Plan.’

  ‘A hotel?’

  ‘Yes. First, we need a new car.’

  They stumbled upon a car rental office, one of the well-known international firms, and Calvary chose a VW saloon. Dull grey, anonymous, reliable. He paid cash, had to show his driving licence but didn’t care. He doubted Blazek or the Russians would be monitoring every car rental place in the city.

  Nikola knew the area they were moving through and guided him along streets that were a little shabby, where the tourist tat was marginally tackier than in the centre of town. At a street kiosk they stopped and bought smartphones, cheap knockoffs judging by the price.

  They found themselves outside a squat hotel. Calvary pulled into the miniature car park at the back.

  He paid cash again, up front for one day and night. The receptionist looked Nikola up and down, gave Calvary a knowing smirk. They took a ground floor room near the fire exit. Calvary moved about, pulling the curtains closed, locking the door.

  While Nikola disappeared into the tiny bathroom, Calvary took out his phone.

  Llewellyn’s phone rang four times before switching to voicemail. Calvary left a message, his voice terse. ‘Letting you know my new number. Ring me when you get this. I need information.’

  He heard Nikola emerging from the bathroom. He turned, saw her white, drawn face, her raw-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  She sagged as though her strings had been cut, dropping into a chair by the bed and covering anpan›

  her face with her hands.

  Calvary stepped round, stood over her, awkward. When she didn’t move he sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Max and Jakub,’ he said.

  She raised her face.

  ‘Not just them — yes, of course them, but… everything.’ She waved a vague hand.

  He knew what she meant. Less than two days earlier the fourth member of the group — Kaspar, she’d called him — had disappeared. Then Calvary had dropped into their lives, destroying their vehicle, forcing Nikola and Jakub to become killers, tainting their workbase and their homes with his toxic presence. Now Nikola was the only one left, the others missing, possibly dead, almost certainly being made to
suffer.

  And they were activists. Not trained operatives, not soldiers, but a quixotic, idealistic quartet of normal people with a notion of justice as touching as it was hopelessly naive and unrealistic.

  Calvary found it difficult to cope with certain emotions in other people. Fear, even abject terror, he knew how to allay or stoke, as the situation required. Anger he was skilled at defusing or provoking. But misery — simple, human unhappiness — he couldn’t handle. It might have been the epitaph on the tombstones of the half-dozen or so relationships he’d failed to sustain in his life, until five years ago when he’d sealed his heart in a vault, never again to be exposed to the light: he was helpless in the face of unhappiness.

  He said, ‘Max and Jakub are probably still alive.’

  She watched him. For signs I’m leading her on, he thought.

  ‘Blazek wants me. Not them. He’ll use them to trade.’

  ‘He will hurt them.’

  ‘Yes.’ He couldn’t lie. ‘He will. But not too badly. They can’t give him anything. They don’t know where I am. Sooner or later Blazek will realise that.’

  ‘But he won’t be able to find you.’

  ‘No. But I can find him. We’ve got Max’s phone number, and Jakub’s. Blazek will have those phones. He’ll be waiting for them to ring.’

  Nikola sat in silence for a few seconds. Then: ‘So you plan to call and offer yourself up? As a sacrifice?’

  He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Something like that. But it’s not that simple. I need some sort of leverage. If I offer a straight swap, he’ll take me and kill Max and Jakub into the bargain. I need to figure out a way to get us all free.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Her hand was on his knee. He looked at her.

  ‘Just for now. No plans. No thinking.’

  In her eyes Calvary saw the desperation born of having come cloavi. No se to death, the animal need to affirm life. He recognised it because he’d experienced it himself, many times. Had yielded to it.

  He rose, pulled her up to him, hands and mouth reaching for her. She pushed at him and he dropped back on the bed. She straddled him, pulling her sweater off over her head as he grappled with his shirt, his belt. His fingers moved up under her shirt, found the clasp of the brassiere, slid off both garments in one move.

  Her mouth pressed against his, her tongue probing. With her feet she drove his trousers down and off his legs. He grabbed at the waistband of her trousers and pushed it down over her hips, the panties coming with it. Arching, he pressed into her. He felt her breath against his mouth in a long gasp.

  For half an hour everything else disappeared, the city outside, Blazek and Gaines and Llewellyn. There was only the fierce heat of the moment, two living beings, virtual strangers, communicating without words.

  *

  The tapping on the door was becoming more insistent. She heaved herself up on to her knees, stared at the toilet bowl. Blood. Dark, clotted, not the bright hue of a fresh tear in the gullet.

  ‘Ma’am.’ Yevgenia had never been able to bring herself to call her Darya Yaroslavovna, unlike Gleb. ‘Please. Are you all right? Open the door. Let me help you.’

  ‘I’m fine, Yevgenia. Thanks. Go back to your desk.’

  Krupina hauled herself to face the mirror over the sink, pulling the toilet’s chain. No, she wasn’t in fact fine. Was about as far from fine as one could get.

  Her skin hung off her face like musty drapes, her hair lank like ropes of cobweb. Even her eyes seemed to be sagging, not just the sacs beneath them but the eyeballs themselves, bleeding southwards like tilted yolks.

  She was forty-nine years old, and looked like a woman three decades older. One who’d let herself go.

  The blood clots in the vomit were bad news. For the past nine months or so the retching had been a semi-regular feature of her day, but she’d been able to work around it, eating when she felt least nauseous, spewing when her stomach was at its emptiest. The cigarettes had helped, stilling the pangs from her belly, giving her a hacking cough which had distracted from the gastrointestinal grumblings.

  Dr Ostrovsky, the specialist flown in from Petersburg, had steepled his fingers on his desk, at their second meeting. The one following the assault course of investigations, scans and needles and proddings, he’d ordered after their first.

  ‘Perhaps one year. Two? Nobody can say. You have a not uncommon condition, Darya Yaroslavovna. It obeys the normal rules. Which is to say, its course is unpredictable.’

  She’d had chemotherapy. That had been a little under two years ago. She was still alive. Alive, andve.

  But that was now in doubt.

  Tamarkin had been out of contact for ninety minutes now. He normally kept his phone switched on and at hand round the clock. Ninety minutes was too long for him to be taking a shower and moving his bowels.

  Krupina wiped her mouth, splashed water on her face. She unlocked the door and walked past Yevgenia’s tight, impossibly young face.

  ‘Get me some cigarettes. That’s how you can help.’

  The girl was waving a piece of paper at her. She grabbed it. It was a printed-out email. Krupina thought Yevgenia might have been about to slip it under the door of the lavatory.

  Reinforcements authorised. Six men arriving in two lots, noon and six pm. Boy do you owe me.

  It was something, at least.

  *

  Scant light came in through the crack in the curtains. It could have been almost any time of the day or the evening, but Calvary’s watch said it was nearly nine a.m.

  Beside him Nikola breathed steadily, eyes closed, though he knew she was awake. Her hair spilled across her face and his arm.

  ‘I didn’t say thanks,’ he murmured.

  She lifted her head.

  ‘For saving my life up on the roof.’

  ‘No. You did not.’ Her lips smiled against his shoulder. ‘Well, maybe you just did.’

  She pressed closer to him. He felt her breast against his side.

  ‘So. No wife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘Not right now.’

  She raised herself onto her elbow, traced a finger along a scar on his chest. ‘A soldier.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did I become a soldier?’ He tilted his head. ‘On a whim. I was at college, studying mechanics. A friend had joined the army and persuaded me to do the same.’

  ‘And now you are — some sort of agent?’

  ‘No. Not quite.’ He let out a long breath. ‘In any case, that’s also past. Once I’ve found Gaines, I’m through with all this.’ He felt the shutters coming down, the withdrawal into the shadows that was automatic every time anybody touched on what he did for a living. ‘What about you? What’s your story?’

  ‘I studied journalism here at Charles University. I was going to go into television, I had some contacts and a possible job at a junior level. I met Jakub at a party. His father had got into debt, had become involved with Blazek’s loan sharks. He turned to drink, abandoned the family, was found dead under a bridge one winter morning.’ She shrugged. ‘His story moved me.’

  ‘You and Jakub…’

  She smiled. ‘No. We were only ever friends. He was married. She left him because she could not compete with his commitment to the cause, to the bringing down of Blazek. Now Jakub is alone. With us, but alone.’ She ran her palm up his chest once more. ‘Like you.’

  When she fell silent he glanced down, saw she was weeping again. He moved his arm to embrace her.

  ‘I am sorry. I was just thinking of Jakub, of Max… just a boy. Tied down somewhere, being hurt.’

  Hurt…

  Tightness creased the spot between his brows. He sat up, reached across to the bedside table for the remote, turned on the television. Nikola blinked in surprise.

  Calvary flicked past a blur of commercials and cartoons until he reached a news channel. Jerking cameras roved about the streets sur
rounding the multi-storey car park. Police uniforms were everywhere, sometimes barging the cameras aside.

  A reporter was shouting to make herself heard, pointing back at the parkhouse. Calvary looked at Nikola.

  She shook her head. ‘She says very little. There has been shooting in the parking lot, ambulances have been removing bodies.’ She sat up, pulling the covers over her. ‘For what are you looking?’

  He said nothing for a few seconds, staring at the screen. Then he pointed: ‘There.’

  The time signature in the corner indicated that earlier footage, an hour and a half old, was being shown. One of the cameras was aiming up at the roof, where a helicopter was taking off. The helicopter bore a red cross, the unmistakeable mark of hospital transport, not of a police vehicle.

  ‘Someone’s being airlifted out. It means they’re alive.’ He looked at her. ‘Not one of Janos’s men. They were stone cold dead. The Russian.’

  She watched him, unsure.

  Calvary swung his legs out of bed, started pulling on his clothes. ‘I have an idea.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Llewellyn’s cheery voice made him want to hurl the phone at the window.

  ‘Sorry I missed you earlier. No network coverage.’

  Calvary had tried twice more, eventually getting a reply fifteen minutes after he’d risen from the bed. He didn’t say hello, just: ‘Any information on those Russians from last night?’

  ‘Yes, as it happens.’ Llewellyn rustled some paper.bed. He ‘The woman sounds like Darya Krupina. An old KGB member, too young to have seen much action before the Soviet Union collapsed. She’s had postings in Bratislava and Vienna. Interestingly she’s not on the list of staff at the Russian Embassy there in Prague, which means she’s there in an unofficial role. Assuming it’s her, of course. The picture you sent wasn’t the best.’

  ‘What about the others? The younger men?’

  ‘The fair-haired one is Gleb Tamarkin. Up-and-coming SVR chappie, likely being groomed for great things. He’s been on the radar for the past three years, mostly in the Central European field, though he cropped up in Paris once. Again, no record of him at the Embassy. We don’t recognise the others.’

  ‘And you were going to let me know this information when, exactly?’ Calvary tweaked the curtains, saw nothing but desultory traffic on the road.