by Tim Stevens
‘I rather assumed you’d be in touch when you needed to be.’ Llewellyn sounded playfully hurt. ‘Didn’t want to ring you at an inconvenient time.’
Not looking at Nikola, Calvary said, ‘What about the other information I asked you for?’
‘Those journalist friends of yours? Nothing. No connection with Blazek or the Russians. They seem to be who they say they are. Unusual in our line of work.’ A soft chuckle. ‘The young lady’s rather attractive, isn’t she? I’ve seen her picture.’
‘Shut up and listen.’ Calvary told him about the events at the parkhouse.
When he had finished Llewellyn said, ‘Well. That’s a turn up, if this young hoodlum Janos was telling the truth. A turncoat SVR officer, working for organised crime.’
‘It’s possible the Russian knows where Gaines is being kept. The trouble is I shot him, and I don’t know if he’s in any condition to talk, or if he’s still alive, even. I’ve got to try the hospitals.’ Another quick peek through the curtains. Force of habit. ‘I need you to tell me about this Tamarkin. Any aliases he might go under.’
‘I can enquire.’
‘Quickly, Llewellyn. And be as exhaustive as you can. I’m only going to get one shot at this.’
Nikola was perched on the edge of the bed, watching him. Calvary said to her, ‘I’ll tell you what I have in mind as soon as I get a reply.’
Llewellyn rang back in five minutes.
*
It took Nikola a fraction of that time to search the internet on her phone for the hospital served by the air ambulance. She gave Calvary the number.
The switchboard operator put him through to the trauma unit. He waited, on hold, before a harassed-sounding staff member of unspecified rank diverted him to the operating theatre. From there he was transferred to the post-op surgical ward.
Each time he repeated the litanateere y, in glottic Russian. My name is Valery Petrov and I’m calling from the Embassy of the Russian Federation. I am urgently trying to determine the whereabouts of a Russian citizen who I understand was shot this morning and may have undergone emergency surgery. His given name is Gleb Tamarkin but he may be using another.
At last a young female voice called off into the background and he heard the receiver being laid down. Footsteps, then a middle-aged male growl. ‘Da?’
Calvary got to the part about the whereabouts of the Russian citizen when the voice cut in: ‘Name again?’
‘My name? Valery Petrov, senior public liaison officer. My staff ID number is 83774. My immediate superior is Mr Konstantin Churyenko, contact telephone number — ’
‘All right, yes.’ The voice was gruff. Calvary had pulled all of it out of the air — title, number, names. Sound confident enough and you can get away with a great deal, he’d learned.
‘I’m Dr Grossman. An hour ago I operated on a man who gave a Russian name.’
Calvary felt a clutch of elation. He realised the surgeon was waiting for him to speak.
‘Doctor, the man I’m looking for is called Gleb Tamarkin. However, he may be using an alias.’ He lowered his tone, making it grave, though not conspiratorial; he didn’t want to overdo it. ‘This man occupies rather a sensitive position at our embassy.’
If the surgeon was impressed he didn’t let it show in his voice. ‘What alias?’
‘Possibly one of the following.’ He ran through the list Llewellyn had provided. ‘Adam Livschitz. Mikhail Dubrovsky. Gennady — ’
‘Dubrovsky. That’s your man.’ Calvary heard the rasp of a stubbled cheek against the receiver. ‘Got himself shot in the belly and the leg with a handgun. My job was the easy part. The abdominal shot missed all the vitals, passed through the muscles in his flank. The orthopaedics team are working on his leg now. It’s messy.’
‘He’s still in theatre?’
‘That’s what I said.’ The surgeon sounded testy now.
‘Thank you. We’ll be sending a representative down as soon as possible.’
‘No questions for him, for a while. A few hours, at least. I’ve put the police off as well.’
Calvary said, ‘Dr Grossman, you’ve been extremely helpful. My country is grateful.’
‘Sure.’ The surgeon put the phone down even before finishing the syllable.
Calvary crammed the phone in his pocket, picked up the Browning. Checked the magazine. Five bullets fired, eight left.
To Nikola he said, ‘How far to the hospital?’
*
The man’s head rocked back, the guy with the hooded eyes. He blew snot and blood and fragments of teeth on to the floor.
Bartos stepped away, breathing heavily, shaking his dripping fists. The guy’s face was a mess, one eye swollen closed, but still he glared at Bartos with that lizard look.
No respect.
Beside Bartos, Pavel cracked his knuckles. He was limping a little. Bartos knew the sign: he’d been kicked in the balls, though he wasn’t admitting it.
Bartos’s throat was sore. For an hour he’d screamed himself hoarse. The bellowing storm of rage that normally battered its terrified targets into obedience hadn’t worked.
In a moment he’d go next door, see how Miklos was getting on with the other one, the skinny kid with the stupid hair.
He let Pavel have a go, watched him wade in with fists and boots. The man toppled time and again in his chair and was pulled upright. He never looked at Pavel; always his stare came back to Bartos.
Pavel was moving in again when Bartos said, ‘Wait.’ He strode forward, bent his head so that his ear was near the man’s moving lips.
The sound was barely a whisper. Bartos turned his head to try to decipher the words the lips were forming.
‘Pig,’ hissed the man, and he spat in Bartos’s face. Laughed.
Bartos straightened. His self control was, he thought, remarkable. He turned, walked slowly back towards the wall. Three paces, four.
He drew the pistol from his belt, a CZ-TT nine millimetre. Good Czech workmanship. Bartos was nothing if not patriotic.
*
‘No answer at his flat.’
Arkady stood in the doorway. Krupina waved him in. The nausea had passed; she’d managed to keep down some tea. Felt better.
‘You didn’t force your way in, by any chance?’
‘Of course.’ A faint smile. ‘Unobtrusively. No sign of him, no evidence of any struggle.’
‘And you last spoke to him when?’
‘The same time as you, boss. Just before we all left for the night.’
A missing operative. Krupina should go to the Embassy to report it. Endure their scorn, their laughter. Their jokes about milk cartons.
Failing that, she should contact her superior at SVR headquarters in Moscow. Face his quiet, slow-burning anger. She’d already had to call him twice, once to make arrangements for Oleg’s body to be repatriated, the second time to ask for more men.
She thought of her father, the scarred stumps of his legs that he’d brandished like trophies. His proof of having lived in the service of his country. Where was hers?
She got up, left her office. Arkady followed. At her desk Yevgenia looked up expectantly.
‘Can you get a GPS trace on Gleb’s phone?’
‘Yes, of course.’ The young woman set to work.
Krupina prowled about the larger office, reluctant to return to the stuffy confines of her own room. Also, she acknowledged to herself, she wanted to demonstrate to the others, Yevgenia and Arkady and Lev, that she was fit and well. Or at least ambulant.
In less than ten minutes Yevgenia said, ‘I have it.’
Krupina peered at the screen. The girl homed in. Identified the cross streets, entered the details into a search engine.
‘It’s a hospital.’
*
The man was leaning against the wall of the alley beside two enormous wheeled dumpster-like containers almost overflowing with linen. He wore overalls with the hospital’s name stencilled across the chest, and was smoking a cig
arette. He glanced at Calvary as he approached, then looked away again.
In Russian Calvary said: ‘You work here?’
‘Have a guess.’ The man concentrated on his cigarette.
‘I’m a doctor. I left my pager in my scrubs and they’ve been thrown in the waste. Mind if I take a look?’
The man laughed, glanced at the linen containers. ‘Needles and haystacks. But knock yourself out.’
Calvary found a crate and climbed up on it, peering down into the container. They’d circled the hospital in the rented VW to get a feel for the layout, and had spotted the bay round the back where loading and offloading was done. The hospital wasn’t the one Calvary had approached earlier, where he’d been ambushed by Janos and his men. This one looked bigger, sleeker, more modern.
The container was a riot of cloth, bloodied or stained or merely grubby. He rummaged, careful not to tip too far forward and fall in. Sheets, towels, hospital gowns. He found a gown with only a smear of blood on it.
He rolled the garment up as tightly as he could and stuffed it under his jacket, which he zipped up. He found the upper half of a pair of scrubs but not the lower. Eventually he tugged out a white coat, unstained. It looked about the right size. This too he crammed under his jacket.
He stepped down, said over his shoulder to the smoking man, ‘There’s no chance I’ll find it in there. Don’t know what I was thinking.’
Another laugh. ‘Told you so. Hope it doesn’t get you into too much trouble, pal.’
Round the corner, on the other side of a grassy verge, Nikola sat in the car. He climbed in and unzipped his jacket.
She pulled on the white coat — it was a size too big, but that added authenticity if anything — while Calvary slipped out of his jacket and wrapped the gown across his torso, arching to tie the knot at the back. He kept the rest of his clothes on under the gown, and his boots. Rolled his sleeves up.
Calvary glanced in the wing mirror, saw a police car turning up the road running along the side of the hospital and heading towards them.
He grabbed Nikola and clamped his mouth over hers. She stiffened, startled; then he saw her eye, close up, swivel to the back window and she understood. She responded, winding her arms round his neck. Over her head Calvary saw the police car cruise past, the man in the passenger seat gazing at them, grinning and saying something.
‘They’re past now,’ Calvary managed to say, but Nikola continued a while longer. Eventually she broke away.
They cruised the perimeter of the hospital again until Calvary spotted what he was looking for and pointed. Outside another service door a carelessly scattered fleet of stretchers had been left unattended, like trolleys in a supermarket car park. One or two had blankets piled haphazardly on them.
Nikola pulled into one of the public car parking areas and while Calvary waited in the passenger seat, she trotted over to the trolleys and purloined one, together with some blankets. Back at the car they peered around. Cars were arriving and departing but everybody appeared too preoccupied with their own problems to notice a white-coated woman helping an apparently bleeding man out of a car and onto a gurney.
It was better they played it this way round, Calvary had decided. That Nikola be the doctor and he the patient. Anyone such as a security guard or policeman who might have grounds to be looking out for an intruder would notice Nikola first and unconsciously discount her as a threat; her patient would probably not warrant a second glance, as long as he didn’t ham up his performance too much.
They left both guns in the car, the Browning under the seat and the Glock in the glove compartment. He’d thought about bringing one of them in but decided the risk of discovery was too great.
Nikola pushed him at a brisk pace around to the main entrance. The automatic doors slid open with futuristic speed and they were inside. From his supine position Calvary saw the emergency room waiting area was much like the ones in hospitals of similar size in London: a few people dotted about on the seats, sleeping or muttering while supporting bleeding hands, the floor stinking of sour drink and scrubbed-away vomit, the bins overflowing with wrappers and soft-drink cans. Behind a desk a desultory pair of clerks ate and drank and listened to a radio.
Calvary muttered something hoarsely and she bent to hear. He whispered: ‘Take us into the emergency room itself. I need to get a couple of accessories.’
They proceeded into the emergency room proper, the inner sanctum which those fortunate souls who were ill or damaged or persistent enough to get past the triage nurse were privileged to penetrate. Elderly quavering wails rose from curtained cubicles, and the sound of drunksouanctum wen puking was interspersed with clotted expletives. At the central hub, dog-tired young women and men spoke into phones or scribbled notes.
Nikola parked the trolley beside a wall of drawers and pretended to study a notice board. Calvary snaked an arm out from under the blanket and rummaged in one of the drawers, coming away with a roll of tape and a few alcohol swabs in individual packets. He groaned, struggling to a sitting position, and Nikola put her hands on his shoulders and began to talk to him in Czech in a half-consoling, half-chiding tone. His new position allowed him to peer into the other drawers and he lifted out a cannula, a plastic bag of saline and an infusion set. These he buried beneath the blanket before slumping back.
She wheeled him out of the emergency room into a corridor that led off into the depths of the hospital, pausing near the door to allow him to lift a cheap-looking stethoscope from where it was coiled on a small steel table. Nikola draped it around her neck, and instantly her appearance was transformed: she became a doctor.
A short passage off the corridor appeared to lead to the locked door of a disused ward. Calvary said, ‘Down there.’ They had to be quick; anybody glancing down the passage would wonder what they were doing there. Motioning Nikola to keep her back to the corridor and thereby provide a degree of cover, he lifted back the blanket and began to peel open the plastic packaging of the cannula.
He attached the infusion set to the saline, ran a little of the fluid through, hung the bag on the hooked rod that protruded vertically up from one corner of the trolley. ‘Squeeze my arm,’ he said. Nikola gripped his upper arm, making the veins in the forearm bulge. He inserted the cannula, used tape to secure it. It wasn’t much, an added detail, but it would help.
Back in the corridor she stopped at a signboard indicating the directions of various wards and departments.
‘The theatres and pre- and post-operative wards are on the first floor,’ she said.
Now came the tricky part.
NINETEEN
The pain had hold of his entire body. It wasn’t the sharp burn of earlier, but a duller, less localised sensation that was aggravated whenever he moved.
Tamarkin opened his eyes to harsh lighting glaring into his face. For an instant he was back in Moscow on a training exercise, in the subterranean cells of the Lubyanka, being put through his paces while an interrogator alternately shouted and wheedled.
Then his situation snapped into focus as if a camera lens had been adjusted. He’d been shot, abdomen and leg. He was in hospital. He was alive.
He tried to lift his head. Apart from the pain the move set off, he felt the groggy, spinning nausea caused by the anaesthetic. Before his head sagged back he took in a small, low-ceilinged room. He was the only occupant, apart from a lone nurse who moved about amidst the beep and flicker of monitoring equipment. She caught his eye, smiled distractedly.
Tamarkin had a few memories of what had happened after he’d seen the muzzle flashfon from Calvary’s gun and felt the hammer blow to his stomach. He recalled finding himself at some point alone on the rooftop, and sliding the agonising distance towards where his gun had landed. He’d managed to kick the Makarov a good ten feet and was delighted through his pain to see the stock land near the gunman Calvary had shot. The immediate assumption would be that the pistol belonged to the dead man.
Further vague memories include
d shuffling backwards on his bottom until he reached the stairwell, then flopping back down it, before blackness claimed him again. Then, thirty seconds or two hours later, he couldn’t tell which, the intolerable racket of a helicopter’s rotors almost on top of him. Later, faces crowding over him as he was lifted on to some sort of bed — the operating table, he supposed.
He closed his eyes to take further stock. He remembered groping for his phone, finding it smashed by the impact of his fall; so the hospital staff would have been unable to run through his contact list to call anybody he knew. They’d have found his Mikhail Dubrovsky ID, so that was the persona he’d have to remember to use. They might already have contacted the Embassy, in which case Krupina would have been notified and would be on her way, if not already waiting outside.
He would have to come clean with Krupina. Not entirely, not about his association with Blazek; but he’d have to tell her that he’d attached a tracker to Calvary’s Fiat without her knowledge. Had done it to try and catch the man on his own initiative. She’d bawl him out, would probably arrange for his demotion. But he thought part of her might understand.
Calvary. Had he learned of Gaines’s whereabouts from Janos? If he had, then Tamarkin thought he might succeed in springing Gaines. A few hours ago he would have thought this impossible. But time and again Calvary had evaded Blazek, had got the better of him, and Tamarkin had to assume this might happen once more.
Krupina had requested reinforcements from Moscow. Might even have received them by now. A dozen highly trained operatives versus what Tamarkin was coming increasingly to regard as an inept mobster rabble.
It was time to play a different hand. Time to throw in his lot with Krupina once more. To tell her where Gaines was being held.
*
A small group of people outside the lift stepped aside and Nikola smiled her thanks, easing the stretcher through them. Calvary kept his expression set, his eyelids fluttering.
By twisting his head Calvary managed to scan the corridor. Double doors ahead were marked with the legend OPERACNI SALY. Operating theatres. Another pair of doors on either side of the corridor halfway down appeared to open into wards.
