The bridge club, whose members had an average age somewhere north of fifty, did not deliver such a man. Had she wished to meet retired accountants and widowed dentists, it would have been just the place, but attractive single men under forty were thin on the ground. Niko wasn’t there when she first presented herself; she and a couple of other prospective members were attended to by Mrs. Shapiro, the blue-haired club secretary.
Dispirited by the experience, she was in two minds about going back the next week. But she went, and this time Niko was there. A tall man with patient brown eyes and the moustache of a nineteenth-century cavalry officer, he took charge of Eve from the moment she arrived, squiring her to a table, summoning two more players, and partnering her without comment for half-a-dozen hands. Then, dismissing the others, he faced her over the green baize table.
“So, Eve. Good news, or not-so-good news?”
“Not-so-good news first, I think.”
“OK. Well, you understand the basics of the game. You learnt as a child?”
“My parents both played, yes.”
“And you like, very much, to win.”
Eve meets his gaze. “Is it that obvious?”
“To others, maybe not. You like to play the myszka, the mouse. But I see the fox.”
“Is that good?”
“It could be. But you have faults.”
“A faulty fox?”
“Exactly. If you’re going to play a strategic game, you need to know very early on where all the cards are. To do this, you need to concentrate harder on your opponents’ play. You need to remember the bidding, and count every suit.”
“Right.” She digested this for a moment. “So what’s the good news?”
“The good news is that there’s a very nice pub just five minutes away.”
She laughed. They were married later that year.
Eve’s bridge partner tonight is a young guy, perhaps nineteen, one of a trio of students from Imperial College who joined the club in the autumn. He’s got a slightly mad-scientist look about him, but he’s a ferociously good player, and at the West Hampstead that’s what counts.
After her initial uncertainty, Eve has come to look forward to her evenings here. Some of the members are her parents’ age and even, in one or two cases, her grandparents’. But the standard of play is fierce, and after a rigorous day at Thames House she appreciates the idea of intellectual challenge for its own sake.
At the end of the evening she thanks her partner. They’ve finished fourth overall, a good result, and he grins a little awkwardly and shuffles off. At the entrance Niko helps her into her zip-up waterproof jacket as if it was a Chanel coat, a tiny act of chivalry that does not go unnoticed by other female members, who glance at Eve enviously.
“So how was your day?” she asks him, linking her arm tightly through his as they make their way back towards the flat. It’s just started to snow, and she blinks as the flakes touch her face.
“The Year 11 boys would have a better understanding of differential calculus if they didn’t all stay up until two in the morning playing Final Attrition 2. Or maybe not. How about you?”
She hesitates. “I’ve got a problem for you. I’ve been trying to figure it out all day.”
Niko knows what she does, and while he never presses her for information Eve often thinks how useful a mind like his would be to her employers. At the same time the thought of him walking the featureless corridors of Thames House fills her with horror. It’s her world, but she wouldn’t want it to be his.
After leaving Cracow University with a Master’s degree in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Niko took off round Europe in a battered van with a friend named Maciek. Living and sleeping in the van, the pair travelled from tournament to tournament—bridge, chess, poker, anything offering a cash prize—and after eighteen months on the road, retired with over a million zloty between them. Maciek spent his share in less than a year, mostly on the girls at the Pasha Lounge on Warsaw’s Ulitsa Mazowiecka. Niko headed for London.
“Tell me,” he says.
“OK. Three dead men on the floor of a theatre box, after a performance. Two bodyguards and a Mafia don. All shot. But the don has been tranquillised first. Paralysed by an immobilising agent injected into one eye. What’s the story? Why was he not just shot like the bodyguards?”
Niko is silent for a minute. “Who was killed first?”
“I’m assuming the bodyguards. The shooter, thought to be the don’s nephew, used a silencer. Low-calibre weapon at point-blank range.”
“Body shots?”
“The don, yes. The bodyguards, back of the neck. No mess. Very professional.”
“And the syringe, or whatever. The immobilising agent. What do we know about that?”
“I’ll show you.”
She takes a photocopy of a photograph from her bag. They stop for a moment in a whirl of snowflakes beneath a street light.
“Nasty-looking thing.” He blows snow from his moustache. “But clever. And perhaps it wasn’t the nephew. Is there a woman involved?”
She stares at him. “What makes you say that?”
“The killer’s first problem is how to get past the bodyguards with a weapon. These are going to be tough, experienced guys.”
“OK.”
“But this, on the other hand…” He holds up the photocopy. “They’re not going to give this a second look.”
“How come?”
He reaches into his coat pocket, and takes out a pen. “Look, if I draw a retaining wire which attaches here, and snaps into place there, what do we have?”
Eve stares at the limp photocopy. “Oh for fuck’s sake. How can I have missed that?” Her voice is a whisper now. “It’s a hairclip. A woman’s fucking hairclip.”
Niko looks at her. “So, is there a woman involved?”
In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport, Villanelle checks her messages. A coded text confirms that Konstantin will meet her at the La Spezia cafe in Gray’s Inn Road in London at 2 p.m. as arranged. Returning her phone to her bag she sips her coffee. The lounge is warm, with smoothly moulded seating in restful shades of white and taupe; the walls are flecked with illuminated leaf-shapes. Beyond the plate-glass exterior wall the tarmac, slush and sky are a barely distinguishable grey.
Villanelle is travelling on a false passport as Manon Lefebvre, the co-author of a French investment newsletter. Her cover story is that she is in London to talk to an online publisher interested in setting up a partnership. She looks professionally anonymous in a mid-length trenchcoat, narrow jeans and ankle boots. She’s wearing no make-up, and despite the season, grey-lensed acetate sunglasses; airports attract photographers and, increasingly, law-enforcement professionals armed with facial recognition software.
An Air France steward appears in the lounge and directs the business-class passengers to their flight. Villanelle has reserved the front aisle seat in the waiting Airbus, and although she makes a point of not meeting his eye, she can tell that the man in the window seat, currently flicking through an inflight magazine, is determined to engage her in conversation. She ignores him, and taking out a 4G tablet and earphones, is soon immersed in a video clip.
The clip shows, in slow motion, the contrasting terminal performances of two handgun rounds when fired into a block of clear ballistics gelatin, a testing medium designed to simulate human tissue. One round is Russian, one American. Both are jacketed hollow point, designed to deliver massive kinetic shock and remain within a target’s body rather than passing through. Knowing that she’s likely to be operating in a busy urban environment, this information is of interest to Villanelle. She’s going to want a one-shot, lights-out kill. She can’t risk the possibility of collateral damage.
She frowns, torn between the two hollowpoint rounds. The Russian round expands on entry, its jacket peeling back like the petals of a flower as it blasts through flesh and bone. The U.S. round, by contrast, doesn’t deform but tumbles nose over point, teari
ng a devastating wound cavity as it goes. Both have their very considerable merits.
“Could I ask you to switch off your device, Mademoiselle?”
It’s the stewardess, chic in her dark-blue tailored suit.
“Of course.” Villanelle smiles coolly, blanks the screen and takes out the earphones.
“Good movie?” asks her companion, seizing his chance.
She noticed him earlier, in the business-class lounge. Late thirties and implausibly good-looking, like a designer-dressed matador.
“Actually, I was shopping.”
“For yourself?”
“No, for someone else.”
“Someone special?”
“Yes. It’s going to be a surprise.”
“Lucky him.” He levels a dark-brown gaze at her. “You’re Lucy Drake, aren’t you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Lucy Drake? The model?”
“Sorry, no.”
“But…” He reaches for the inflight magazine, and pages through it until he reaches a fragrance advertisement. “That’s not you?”
Villanelle looks at the page. It’s true, the model does look uncannily like her. But Lucy Drake’s eyes are a piercing green. The fragrance is called Printemps. Spring. Villanelle takes off her sunglasses. Her own eyes are the frozen grey of the Russian midwinter.
“Forgive me,” he says. “I was mistaken.”
“It’s a compliment. She’s lovely.”
“She is.” He holds out his hand. “Luis Martín.”
“Manon Lefebvre.” She looks down at the magazine, now on the armrest between them. “How did you know that model’s name, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I’m in the business. My wife and I own an agency, Tempest. We’ve got divisions in Paris, London, Milan and Moscow.”
“And this Lucy Drake is on your books?”
“No, I think she’s with Premier. She’s not working so much any more.”
“Really?”
“She wants to act, apparently. And she thinks the more editorial and advertising she does, the less chance she has of being taken seriously.”
“So does she have talent?”
“She has talent as a model, which is very much rarer than you might think. As an actress…” He shrugs. “But then people so often undervalue their real talents, wouldn’t you say? They dream of being something they can never be.”
“You’re Spanish?” asks Villanelle, deflecting the personal questions that she senses coming.
“Yes, but I spend very little time in Spain. Our main residences are in London and Paris. Do you know London?”
She considers. Did six weeks’ brutal unarmed combat training in the Essex marshes count? A fortnight spent hurtling round hairpin bends on the evasive driving course at Northwood? A week learning to pick locks with a retired burglar on the Isle of Dogs?
“A little,” she says.
The stewardess is back with champagne. Martín accepts, Villanelle asks for mineral water.
“You should think of modelling,” he says. “You have the cheekbones, and the fuck-you stare.”
“Thank you very much.”
“It’s a compliment, believe me. What do you do?”
“Financial stuff. Much less glamorous, I’m afraid. So… was your wife a model?”
“Elvira? Yes, originally she was. A very successful one. But these days I deal with the clients, and she runs the back office.”
The conversation takes its predictable course. Villanelle is guarded on the subject of her alter-ego Manon Lefebvre, and presses Martín for details about Tempest. With two glasses of Veuve Clicquot drunk and a third half-empty, he’s only too happy to talk about himself, while simultaneously plying Villanelle with a stream of increasingly flirtatious compliments.
For a moment she wonders if he’s a plant from MI5, or France’s external intelligence service, the DGSE. But she didn’t book the London flight; instead she took a taxi hailed at random outside the Galeries Lafayette on the Boulevard Haussmann, and paid cash for her ticket when she got to the airport. Basic counter-surveillance measures, including a last-second pull-off into a service station on the A1 autoroute, told her that she wasn’t followed from Paris. And Martín was in the business-class lounge before her, already checked in. Most importantly, her instincts—highly tuned when it’s a question of her own survival—tell her that this man is not playing a role. That he really is the over-groomed seducer that he appears to be. The joke about narcissistic types like Martín is that they always think they’re in control—at work, in conversation, during sex.
Her thoughts drift to that night in Palermo. Say what you like about Leoluca Messina, he didn’t have control issues. In fact he was perfectly happy to let her fuck him while she was holding a cocked and loaded Ruger. In its way, the whole episode was quite romantic.
Konstantin is sitting in front of the cafe counter, facing the door and Gray’s Inn Road. The Evening Standard is open in front of him at the sports page, and he’s sipping a cappuccino. When Villanelle walks in, stamping snow from her boots, he looks up, his gaze vague, and nods her to a seat opposite him. The downbeat welcome robs the moment of its potential drama; no one looks up at the young woman in the thrift-shop coat and knitted beanie. She orders a cup of tea, and the pair begin an inaudible conversation. Were anyone to attempt audio surveillance they would find their efforts frustrated by the low-fi snarl of the sound system and the steamy hiss and cough of the Gaggia coffee machine.
For thirty minutes, as customers come and go, they discuss logistics and weaponry in fast, idiomatic Russian. Konstantin tests Villanelle’s plan to destruction, throwing up objection after objection, but finally concedes its workability. He orders a second cappuccino, and stirs his cup meditatively.
“Palermo worried me,” he tells her. “What you did, driving through the city at midnight on the back of Messina’s motorcycle, that was reckless. Things could have gone badly wrong.”
“I improvised. I was in control throughout.”
“Listen to me, and listen well. You are never completely safe. And you can never fully trust anyone.”
“Not even you?”
“Yes, Villanelle, you can trust me. But part of you should always be mistrustful, questioning and attuned to danger. Part of you shouldn’t fully trust me. I want you to survive, OK? Not just because you’re so good at what you do, but…”
He stops, annoyed that his concern for her has momentarily become personal. From the first, in that hut by the Chusovaya river, he has sensed the cross-currents of sex and death swirling beneath her icy surface. Known that the implacable hunger that drives her could also destroy her. For a moment, she looks almost vulnerable.
“Go on.”
His eyes rake the busy cafe. “Look, right now, no one knows for sure that you even exist. But what happens this week could change everything. The British are a vengeful people. If you give them half a chance, their security services will come after you with everything they’ve got, and they will not back off.”
“So it’s important, this action?”
“It’s vital. Our employers don’t take these decisions lightly, but this man must be eliminated.”
With a finger, she traces a V in spilt tea on the melamine surface of the table. “I sometimes wonder who they are, these employers of ours.”
“They’re the people who decide how history is to be written. We are their soldiers, Oxana. Our job is to shape the future.”
“Oxana is dead,” she murmurs.
“And Villanelle must survive.”
She nods, and even in the winter dimness of the cafe he can see that her eyes are shining.
Later, high above South Audley Street in Mayfair, she looks westwards. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling window the sky is umber in the twilight, and the trees are grey. Snowflakes drive silently against the plate glass.
The top-floor apartment is registered in the name of a corporate finance group. There’s a TV suite and a stat
e-of-the-art sound system, which Villanelle will not use, and a fully provisioned kitchen, which she will leave only slightly depleted. For the next forty-eight hours she will spend much of her time here in the bedroom, sitting as now in a white leather Charles Eames chair, waiting. There are moments when she would welcome the sting of loneliness. Instead, she feels a level blankness, neither happy nor unhappy. She senses a rising of the tide, an echo of the action to come. Konstantin will do his part, but in the end there will just be her, and Kedrin, and the moment.
She touches a finger to her mouth, to the faint ridge of the scar. She was six when her father brought Kalif home. A hunting dog rejected by its previous owner, the animal attached itself devotedly to Oxana’s mother, who was already gravely ill. Oxana wanted Kalif to love her, too, and one day she climbed onto the steel-framed bed in which her mother passed her increasingly pain-wracked days and nights, and pressed her face close to the dog, which was curled up on the thin blanket. Baring sharp teeth in a vicious snarl, Kalif struck out at her.
There was a lot of blood, and Oxana’s torn lip, stitched without anaesthetic by a medical student from a neighbouring apartment, was slow to heal. Other children stared at her, and by the time the wound ceased to be noticeable Oxana’s mother was dead, her father was in Chechnya and Oxana herself had been consigned to the tender mercies of the Sakharov Orphanage.
Villanelle could easily have her upper lip remodelled by a plastic surgeon, so that it curves into the perfect bow that nature intended, but she hasn’t done so. The scar is the last vestige of her former self, and she can’t quite bring herself to erase it.
From nowhere she feels a morbid crawl of desire. Rolling onto her side on the white leather, she presses her thighs together and clasps her arms across her small breasts. For several minutes she lies like this, her eyes closed. She recognises it, this hunger. Knows that it will tighten its grip unless satisfied.
Codename Villanelle Page 6
