She’d found out easily enough who killed him. Everyone knew; that was the point. Boris had tried, clumsily, to defraud the Brothers, and they’d shot him and left his body in the street. The following evening Oxana walked into the Pony Club on Ulitsa Pushkina. The three men she was looking for were standing near the bar, drinking and laughing, and when she sauntered up to them, smiling suggestively, they fell silent. In her army-surplus jacket and supermarket jeans she didn’t look much like a shlyukha, a whore, but she was certainly acting like one.
Oxana stood there for a moment in front of them, looking from face to face with taunting, amused eyes. Then she dropped into a crouch, her arms reaching back between her shoulder blades for the machete in its webbing holster, and drove upwards through her knees as her father had taught her. Half a kilo of titanium-finished steel blurred the air, the chisel-edge passing unchecked through the first man’s throat before burying itself deep below the second man’s ear. The third man’s hand dived to his waistband, but too late: Oxana had already let go of the machete and drawn the Makarov. Around her, she was vaguely aware of panicked breathing, suppressed screams, people backing away.
She shot him through the open mouth. The report was deafening in the enclosed space, and for a moment he just stood there staring at her, blood and brain-matter spilling from a gaping white flap of bone at the back of his head. Then his legs went, and he hit the floor beside the first man, who was somehow still on his knees, a desperate, dregs-of-the-milkshake rasp issuing from the bubbling gash beneath his chin. The third man wasn’t finished yet, either. Instead, he was lying in a foetal position in the spreading red lake, his feet working feebly and his fingers plucking at the machete embedded in the angle of his jaw.
Oxana watched them, annoyed at their failure to die. It was the kneeling man who really infuriated her, making that sick, Strawberry McFlurry noise. So she knelt beside him, drenching her Kosmo jeans in blood. His gaze was failing, but the eyes still held a question. “I’m his daughter, you cunt,” she whispered and, pressing the Makarov’s barrel to the nape of his neck, squeezed the trigger. Again, the detonation was appallingly loud, and the man’s brains went everywhere, but the sucking noise stopped.
“Chérie!”
She blinks. The restaurant swims back into focus. “Sorry, I was miles away… What did you say?”
“Coffee?”
Villanelle smiles at the waiter hovering patiently at her side. “Small espresso, thank you.”
“Honestly, sweetie, sometimes I wonder where you go in these daydreams of yours. Are you seeing someone you haven’t told me about?”
“No. Don’t worry, you’d be the first to know.”
“I’d better be. You can be so mysterious at times. You should come out with me more often, and I don’t mean shopping or fashion shows. I mean…” She draws a fingertip down the frosted stem of her champagne flute. “More fun stuff. We could go to Le Zéro Zéro or L’Inconnu. Meet some new people.”
In her bag, Villanelle’s phone buzzes. A single word text-message: CONNECT.
“I have to go. Work.”
“Oh, please, Vivi, you’re impossible. You haven’t even had your coffee.”
“I’ll do without.”
“You’re so boring.”
“I know. Sorry.”
Two hours later Villanelle is sitting in the study of her rooftop apartment in the Porte de Passy. Beyond the plate-glass window the sky is cold steel.
The email contains a few lines of text about skiing conditions in Val-d’Isère, and half-a-dozen JPEG images of the resort are attached. Villanelle extracts the password and accesses the payload of compressed data embedded in the images. It is a face, shot from different angles. A face she memorises like the text. The face of her new target.
Thames House, the headquarters of the British security service MI5, is on Millbank, in Westminster. In the northernmost office on the third floor, Eve Polastri is looking down at Lambeth Bridge and the wind-blurred surface of the river. It’s 4 p.m. and she has just learnt, with mixed feelings, that she is not pregnant.
At the next terminal, her deputy Simon Mortimer replaces his teacup in its saucer. “Next week’s list,” he says. “Shall we run through it?”
Eve takes off her reading glasses and rubs her eyes. Wise eyes, her husband Niko calls them, although she’s only twenty-nine, and he’s almost ten years older. She and Simon have been working together for a little over two months. Their department, known as P3, is a subsection of the Joint Services Analysis Group, and its function is to assess the threat to “high-risk” individuals visiting the UK, and if necessary to liaise with the Metropolitan Police with a view to providing specialist protection.
It’s in many ways a thankless task, as the Met’s resources are not infinite, and specialist protection is expensive. But the consequences of a poor judgement call are catastrophic. As her former head of section Bill Tregaron once said to her, before his career went into freefall: “If you think a live extremist preacher’s a headache, wait until you have to deal with a dead one.”
“Tell me,” Eve says to Simon.
“The Pakistani writer, Nasreen Jilani. She’s speaking at the Oxford Union on Thursday week. She’s had death threats.”
“Plausible?”
“Plausible enough. SO1 have agreed to put a team on her.”
“Go on.”
“Reza Mokri, the Iranian nuclear physicist. Again, full protection.”
“Agreed.”
“Then there’s the Russian, Kedrin. I’m not so sure about him.”
“What aren’t you sure about?”
“How seriously we should take him. I mean, we can’t ask the Met to babysit every crackpot political theorist who shows up at Heathrow.”
Eve nods. With her make-up-free complexion and nondescript brown hair gathered in a scrappy up-do, she looks like someone for whom there are more important things than being thought pretty. She might be an academic, or an assistant in the better sort of bookshop. But there’s something about her—a stillness, a fixity of gaze—that tells another story. Her colleagues know Eve Polastri as a hunter, a woman who will not readily let go.
“So who requested protection for Kedrin?” she asks.
“Eurasia UK, the group which organised his visit. I’ve run checks, and they’re—”
“I know who they are.”
“Then you’ll know what I mean. They look more cranky than dangerous. All this stuff about the mystical bonds between Europe and Russia, and how they should unite against the corrupt, expansionist USA.”
“I know. It’s pretty wild. But they’ve got no shortage of supporters. Including in the Kremlin.”
“And Viktor Kedrin’s their poster boy.”
“He’s the ideologist. The face of the movement. Charismatic figure, apparently.”
“But not at immediate risk in London, surely?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“I mean, who would he be at risk from? The Americans aren’t crazy about him, obviously, but they’re not going to call in a drone strike on High Holborn.”
“Is that where he’s going to be staying?”
“Yes, at somewhere called The Vernon.”
Eve nods. “I suppose you’re right. We don’t need to trouble Protection Command with Mr. Kedrin. But I think I might go to his talk—I assume he’s addressing the Eurasia UK faithful at some point?”
“The Conway Hall. Friday week.”
“Good. Keep me posted.”
Simon inclines his head in assent. Although only in his twenties, he has the arch solemnity of a metropolitan vicar.
Keying in her identification code, Eve calls up the HST, or High Security Threat list. Circulating among friendly intelligence services, including on–off allies like the Russian FSB and the Pakistani CID, this is a database of known international contract killers. Not local enforcers or fly-in-fly-out shooters, but top-echelon assassins with political clients and price tags affordable only by th
e seriously wealthy. Some of the entries are lengthy and detailed, others are no more than a code name harvested in the course of surveillance or interrogation.
For over two years now Eve has been building up her own file of unattributed killings of prominent figures. A case she constantly returns to is that of Dragan Horvat, a Balkan politician. Horvat was an exceptionally nasty piece of work, implicated in human trafficking and much else besides, but that didn’t save Bill Tregaron when Horvat was murdered in Central London on his watch. Relieved of his post, Bill was seconded to GCHQ, the government listening centre at Cheltenham, and Eve, previously his deputy, became head of section at P3.
Horvat was killed on a trip to London with his girlfriend, a seventeen-year-old heroin addict from Tblisi named Irema Beridze. Officially, he was in London as a member of a high-ranking trade delegation; in truth, he and Irema spent most of their time shopping. They had just left a Japanese restaurant in a poorly lit side street in Bayswater when a hurrying figure bumped hard into Horvat, almost knocking him down.
In a cheerful mood, well lubricated by sake, Horvat was initially unaware that he had been stabbed. Indeed, he apologised to the disappearing figure before becoming aware of the warm blood pumping from his groin. Open-mouthed with shock, he sunk to the pavement, one hand clamped uselessly to his severed femoral artery. It took him less than two minutes to die.
Irema was still standing there, shivering and uncomprehending, when a party of Japanese businessmen left the restaurant a quarter of an hour later. Their English was imperfect, hers non-existent, and it was a further ten minutes before anyone called the emergency services. Irema was profoundly traumatised, and initially insisted that she could remember nothing about the attack. But patient questioning by an officer from the Metropolitan Police’s SO15 Branch, assisted by a Georgian interpreter, eventually elicited a single key fact. Dragan Horvat’s killer was a woman.
Professional female assassins are very rare indeed, and since joining the Service Eve has been aware of just two. For some years, according to the HST file, the FSB used a woman named Maria Golovkina to execute overseas hits. A member of Russia’s small-bore pistol squad at the Athens Olympics, Golovkina is thought to have been trained in covert assassination at the Spetsnaz base in Krasnodar. There’s also an entry in the file for a Serbian hitwoman, attached to the notorious Zemun clan, named Jelena Markovic.
Neither could have killed Horvat, for the simple reason that by the time the politician met his end in London both were dead. Golovkina had been found hanged in a hotel wardrobe in Brighton Beach more than a year earlier, and Markovic had predeceased her by four months, blown to shreds by a car bomb in Belgrade. So if Irema Beridze was right, it meant that there was a new female assassin abroad. And this interests Eve very much indeed.
Why, she isn’t completely sure. Perhaps because she can’t imagine taking a human life herself, she is fascinated by the notion of a woman for whom killing is unexceptional. Someone who could get up in the morning, make coffee, choose what to wear, and then go out and cold-bloodedly put a total stranger to death. Did you have to be some kind of anomalous, psychopathic freak to do that? Did you have to be born that way? Or could any woman, correctly programmed, be turned into a professional executioner?
Since taking over P3 from Bill, Eve has conducted a discreet but exhaustive search of the live case files for any further suggestion of female involvement in an assassination, and has flagged two references. The first involves the shooting in Germany of Aleksandr Simonov, a Russian business oligarch suspected of funding Chechen and Dagestani militants as part of a deal relating to oil and gas concessions. The assassin, who fired a burst of six rounds from an FN P90 sub-machine gun into Simonov’s chest outside the Frankfurt headquarters of the AltInvest Bank, was wearing despatch-riders’ waterproofs and a full-face motorcycle helmet, and raced away on a machine later identified as a BMW G650Xmoto. Of the dozen or so onlookers questioned afterwards, two stated that they “had the impression” that the shooter was a woman.
The other case, the close-up slaying in Sicily of a Mafia boss named Salvatore Greco, is apparently non-political. Local innuendo attributes the slaying, directly or indirectly, to the dead man’s nephew, Leoluca Messina, who has since assumed the leadership of the Greco clan. But there has also been speculation in the press about an accomplice, the so-called “woman in the red dress.” According to the investigators of the DIA, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, Greco was found dead in a private box at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, following an opera performance. He had been shot in the heart at close range with two low-velocity .22 rounds. His two bodyguards were also found dead on the floor of the box, despatched with single shots to the base of the skull.
Leoluca Messina is known to have been at the theatre that night, and a witness has described seeing him in the bar shortly before curtain-up, talking to a striking dark-haired woman in a red dress. It appears that they were not sitting together, but CCTV footage shows Messina leaving the theatre via the stage door shortly after the final curtain. A couple of paces behind him is a blurred figure: a woman in a red dress, dark hair swinging around her shoulders. Her face is invisible, masked by the opera programme that she’s holding up as if to fan herself.
Which, Eve reflects, is certainly no accident. The woman is well aware that the CCTV camera is there. But the really strange detail is one that the DIA have not made public. Before Greco was killed, he was immobilised with a lethal tranquilliser apparently delivered via a custom-made device that was found buried in his left eye. A photograph of this device is in the online case-file, along with details of its inner workings. It’s a sinister-looking thing: a curved and hollowed steel spike containing an inner reservoir and armed with a tiny plunger.
Why was it necessary to incapacitate Greco in this way before shooting him? It’s a question that’s nagged Eve for some time, and she’s no nearer to finding an answer than she was on the day that she first read the file. Given that the assassination took place in an essentially public location, wouldn’t it have made sense to get it over with quickly? Why, with discovery possible at any moment, would the killer want to drag things out?
Eve is still pondering this question when she arrives back at the flat in Finchley a few minutes before eight o’clock. Her husband, Niko, is not there; he’s gone ahead to the bridge club where he instructs three evenings a week. He’s left a pierogi—a Polish dumpling dish—in the oven, which Eve retrieves gratefully. She’s not much of a cook and hates having to prepare meals from scratch when she arrives back after a long day at Thames House.
As she eats, she watches the eight o’clock news summary on the BBC. There’s a warning of a cold front coming in from the east (“Make sure your boilers are serviced!”), an overwhelmingly bleak piece about the economy, and an imported clip of a rally in Moscow, where an impassioned, bearded figure is addressing an attentive crowd in a snow-whitened square. A blurry caption identifies him as Виктор Кедрин.
Eve leans forward in her seat, a forkful of pierogi suspended in her hand. Despite the poor image-quality, Viktor Kedrin’s magnetism is palpable. She strains to hear his words behind the commentator’s voice-over, but the clip cuts to a story of an orphaned kitten adopted by a chihuahua.
When she’s finished eating, Eve exchanges her work clothes for jeans, a sweater and a zip-up windproof jacket. The result is unsatisfactory, but she can’t be bothered to give it more thought. She looks around the flat, from the waist-high stacks of books in the narrow front hall to the clothes hanging from the drying-rack in the kitchen. If and when I get pregnant, she tells herself, we’re going to need somewhere bigger. For a moment, she allows her thoughts to linger on the airy red-brick mansions in Netherhall Gardens, just five minutes’ walk away. A first-floor apartment in one of those would be perfect. And about as likely to come into her and Niko’s possession as Buckingham Palace. The combined salaries of a Security Services officer and a teacher just didn’t stretch to that s
ort of place. If they wanted somewhere larger, they’d have to move further out. Barnet, perhaps. Or Totteridge. She rubs her eyes. Even the thought of moving is exhausting.
She zips up her windproof. The club is ten minutes away, and as she walks, she thinks of that cold front coming in from the east. It seems to promise not just ice and snow, but menace.
It’s a tournament night at the West Hampstead Bridge Club, and the place is filling fast. The game room is laid out with folding baize-topped tables and stackable plastic chairs. It’s warm after the chill of the streets, and there’s an animated buzz of conversation round the bar.
Eve spots Niko Polastri, her husband, straight away. He’s playing a practice hand with three beginners, his gaze attentive, his movements economical. Even at a distance Eve can see from their body language how anxious the novices are to impress him. A woman with teased blonde hair leads a card, and Niko regards it for a moment before picking it up and returning it to her with a grave smile. She looks confused for a moment, then her hand flies to her mouth and everyone at the table laughs.
Niko has the gift of imparting knowledge with grace and humour. In the North London school where he teaches maths he’s popular with the pupils, who are generally acknowledged to be a tough bunch. At the club, where he is one of four senior instructors, the members compete openly for his approval, with even the flintiest veterans melting at a word of praise for a stylishly executed finesse, or a contract made against the odds.
Eve met Niko four years ago, when she first joined the club. At the time she was less interested in improving her bridge-playing than in finding a social life disconnected from the intense, inward-looking hive of Thames House. A social life that would hopefully feature an attractive, intelligent man. In her mind’s eye she saw a suave figure, his features not quite discernible, leading her up a broad flight of steps to a smart West End restaurant.
Codename Villanelle Page 5
