“I suppose you’re right. But really, ‘female intuition’? What I said in my memo was that I was concerned that I’d underestimated the potential threat to Kedrin.”
“What exactly made you change your mind?”
On her screen, Eve calls up an article from Izvestiya. “OK, this is from a speech he gave last month in Ekaterinburg. I’m translating. ‘Our sworn enemy, which we will fight to the death, and to which we will never surrender, is American hegemony in all its forms. Atlanticism, liberalism, the deceitful’—he actually says snake-like—‘ideology of human rights, and the dictatorship of the financial elite.’”
“Pretty standard stuff, surely?”
“Agreed. But there’s a huge tranche of the Russian and former Sov-bloc population who see him as a kind of messiah. And messiahs don’t have a long shelf life. They’re too dangerous.”
“Well, let’s hope he says his piece at the Conway Hall and pushes off fast.”
“Let’s hope.” She rubs her eyes. “I suppose I ought to go. Don’t much feel like it, but…” She exits the Izvestiya page. “Simon, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think I should do something about, you know, the way I dress? That female intuition comment makes me worried I’m sending the wrong message?”
He frowns. “Well, I know you’re not even slightly like that. And as we’re so often reminded, discretion is the keynote of the Thames House style. But I don’t think there’d be any harm in your, perhaps, venturing a teensy bit further afield than the Marks and Spencer’s Classic and Indigo ranges.” He looks at her a little nervously. “What does your husband think?”
“Oh, Niko lives in a fashion universe all of his own. He teaches maths.”
“Ah.”
“I just don’t want to see this department’s authority undermined, Simon. We make serious decisions, and we need to be taken seriously.”
He nods. “Are you busy tomorrow afternoon?”
“Not specially. Why?”
“Well, I don’t want to perpetuate any stereotypes here, but perhaps you and I could go shopping?”
The Vernon Hotel is a six-storey edifice faced with grey stone on the north side of High Holborn. Its clientele is, for the most part, as anonymous as its frontage, so reception manager Gerald Watts is happy to give his attention to the strikingly attractive young woman standing before him. She’s wearing a fur-trimmed parka, and the eyes that meet his from behind the grey-tinted glasses are bright and direct. Her accent, with its hint of France and suggestion of Eastern Europe (after five years at the Vernon’s front desk Gerald considers himself something of an expert in these matters), is charmingly fractured.
Her name, he discovers when he takes her credit card details, is Julia Fanin. She’s not wearing a wedding ring; absurdly, this pleases him. Proffering her key-card to Room 416 he allows their fingers to touch. Is it his imagination, or does he detect a flicker of complicity? Indicating with a raised hand that one of his assistants take her valise and show her to her room, he watches the easy sway of her hips as she walks towards the elevator.
By the time that Eve arrives at Red Lion Square, it’s 7.45. Inside the Conway Hall the crowd is about two hundred strong. The majority of those who have come to hear Viktor Kedrin speak are already seated in the Main Hall; a few stand chatting against the wood-panelled walls, while others have found their way up to the gallery. Most are men, but there are a few couples here and there, and several younger women in T-shirts printed with Kedrin’s portrait. And there are other more enigmatic figures, male and female, whose predominantly black clothing is imprinted with slogans which might be musical, mystical, political or all three.
Looking around her, Eve feels a little out of place, but not threatened. The hall is filling fast, and the various tribes seem content to coexist. If the individuals present have anything in common, it is perhaps that they are outsiders. Kedrin’s audience is a coalition of the disenfranchised. Climbing the stairs to the gallery, she finds a seat at the front on the right-hand side, overlooking the stage and the lectern, and with a rush of guilt, realises that she hasn’t called Niko to tell him that she can’t make it to the bridge tournament. She searches her bag for her phone.
She doesn’t tell him where she is, just that she can’t come, and as always he’s understanding. He never questions her about her work, her absences or her late nights. But she can tell that he’s disappointed; it’s not the first time he’s had to apologise for her at the club. I must make it up to him, she tells herself. His patience isn’t infinite, nor should it have to be. Perhaps we could go to Paris for a weekend. Take the Eurostar, stay in a little hotel somewhere and walk around the city hand in hand. It must be so romantic in the snow.
In the hall, the lights flicker and dim. On the stage a ponytailed man walks to the lectern and adjusts the microphone.
“Friends, I greet you. And I apologise if my English is not so good. But it gives me pleasure to be here tonight, and to introduce my friend and colleague from St. Petersburg State University. Ladies and gentlemen… Viktor Kedrin.”
Kedrin is an imposing figure, broad and bearded, in a battered corduroy jacket and flannel trousers. There’s applause as he walks out, and a few cheers. Taking her phone from her bag, Eve grabs a shot of him at the lectern.
“It’s cold outside,” Kedrin begins. “But I promise you, it’s colder in Russia.” He smiles, his eyes dead-leaf brown. “So I want to talk to you about the spring. The Russian spring.”
Rapt silence.
“In the nineteenth century there was a painter named Alexei Savrasov. A great admirer, as it happens, of your John Constable. Naturally, like all the best Russian artists, Savrasov succumbed to alcohol and despair and died penniless. But first, he created a very fine series of landscape paintings, the best known of which is called The Rooks Have Come Back. It’s a very simple painting. A frozen pond. A distant monastery. Snow on the ground. But in the birch trees, the rooks are building their nests. Winter is dying, spring is coming.
“And this, my friends, is my message to you. Spring is coming. In the Russian heartland, there is a yearning for change. And I feel the same thing in Europe. A longing to throw off the dictatorship of capitalism, of degenerate liberalism, of America. A longing to reclaim an older world of Tradition and the Spirit. So I say to you, join us. Leave the U.S. to their pornography, their blood-sucking corporations and their empty consumerism. Leave them to their Reign of Quantity. Together, Europe and Russia can build a new Imperium, true to our ancient cultures, true to the old beliefs.”
Eve scans the ranks of the audience. Sees the rapt gazes, the mute nods of agreement, the desperate yearning to believe in the golden age that Kedrin promises. In the centre of the front row is a young woman in a black sweater and plaid skirt. She is a few years younger than Eve, and beautiful, even at a distance. On impulse, Eve raises her phone, and surreptitiously zooming in on the woman’s face, photographs her. She catches her in profile, lips parted, gazing fervently up at Kedrin.
The speech gathers pace. Kedrin recalls another who dreamt of a new imperium—a thousand-year Reich, no less—but dismisses the Nazis for their crude racism and lack of higher consciousness. He makes an exception of the Waffen-SS, from whose rigorous idealism, he says, much can be learned. This is too much for one audience member, a middle-aged man who stands up and starts shouting incoherently at the stage.
Within seconds, two figures in quasi-military clothing appear from the shadows at the back of the hall, grab the man, and half-lead him, half-drag him towards the exit. A half-minute later, to desultory cheers, they return without him.
Kedrin smiles beatifically. “There’s always one, no?”
In all, he speaks for about an hour, setting out his mystical, authoritarian vision for the northern hemisphere. Eve is appalled but fascinated. Kedrin is charismatic, and satanically persuasive. That he will make true believers out of those assembled here tonight, she is in no d
oubt. He is not yet well known in Europe, but in Russia he commands a growing following, and has a small army of dedicated street fighters ready to do his will.
“And so my friends, I finish as I started, with that simple message. Spring is coming. Our day is dawning. The rooks have come back. Thank you.”
As one, the audience rises to its feet. As they cheer, stamp their feet, and applaud, Kedrin stands at the lectern, unmoving. Then, with a small bow, he leaves the stage.
Slowly, as Eve watches from the gallery, the hall empties. The spectators have a dazed look, as if waking from a dream. After a couple of minutes, accompanied by the ponytailed master of ceremonies and flanked by the two foot soldiers who ejected the protester, Kedrin appears in the auditorium. He is quickly surrounded by admirers, who take it in turn to address a few words to him and shake his hand. The woman from the front row waits on the outskirts of the group, a faint smile touching her sharp, cat-like features. If I dressed like that I’d look like a librarian, Eve muses. So how come this little fascist princess gets to look like Audrey Hepburn?
Kedrin’s certainly registered her, and gives her a glance as if to say: wait, just let me finish with these people and you’ll have my full attention. Soon, watched with barely suppressed amusement by the shaven-headed foot soldiers, the two of them are deep in conversation. Her body language—the head fetchingly tilted, the neat little breasts out-thrust—makes her availability unambiguously clear. But eventually she settles for shaking his hand, pulls on her parka, and vanishes into the night.
Eve is one of the last to depart the hall. She waits outside at a nearby bus stop, and when Kedrin and his party leave the building, she follows them at a discreet distance. After a couple of minutes the four men turn into an Argentinian steak restaurant in Red Lion Street, where they are clearly expected.
Deciding to call it a night, Eve makes for Holborn tube station. It’s gone 9.30, and she’s too late for the bridge tournament. But she’ll get to the club in time to grab herself a large vodka and cranberry juice and watch Niko play a few hands. She needs to wind down. One way and another, it’s been a weird day.
At a little after 9.45, when she’s satisfied that the Russians are settled in, Villanelle moves away from the doorway from where she’s been watching the steak house, and takes a back route to the hotel. As she moves through the lobby towards the lifts, her face shadowed by her fur-trimmed hood, she directs a smile and a brief flutter of her leather-gloved fingers at the reception desk, where Gerald Watts is still on duty.
Letting herself into Room 416, Villanelle opens the valise, takes out a packet of surgical gloves, and exchanges a pair for the leather ones she’s wearing. Then, from a sealed polythene bag, she takes a micro-transmitter the size of a fingernail, and a pinch of Blu-Tack. Placing this in the pocket of her parka, she leaves the room and takes the stairs up to the fifth floor, where she seems to straighten a picture on the wall outside Room 521. This done, she continues upwards to the sixth floor, where the stairs terminate in an exit to the roof. It’s unlocked, and stepping outside she conducts a quick reconnaissance of the area, noting the placement of chimney stacks and fire-escape ladders. Then, without hurry, she returns to the fourth floor.
Back in her room she switches on an iPod-sized UHF receiver, and inserts one of the in-ear headphones. Nothing, as she expected, just a faint, ambient hiss. Pocketing the receiver, leaving one ear-bud trailing, she takes a waterproof case from the valise. Inside, each component lying in its bed of customised foam, is the weapon she ordered from Konstantin: a polymer-bodied CZ 75 9mm handgun and an Isis-2 suppressor. Villanelle prefers a lightweight action on a combat weapon, and the CZ’s trigger-pull weight has been adjusted to two kilos for double-action firing, and one kilo for single action.
Hotel-room assassination, she knows, is a complex science. Taking down the target is easy; it’s doing so swiftly, silently and without collateral damage that’s difficult. There must be no recognisable gunshot report, no scream of alarm or pain, no bullets smacking through plasterboard partition walls, or worse, through the guests on the other side of them.
So after attaching the suppressor, Villanelle loads the Czech handgun with Russian-made Chernaya Roza—Black Rose—hollowpoint rounds. These are constructed with an oxidised copper jacket whose six sections, on impact, peel back like petals. This slows penetration, initiates a massive and incapacitating shockwave, and causes enhanced disruption of tissue along the wound path. For a 9mm round, the Black Rose’s stopping power is unequalled.
Villanelle waits, her breathing steady. Visualises and re-visualises the coming course of events. Replays every conceivable scenario. Through the headphones, she hears hotel guests bid each other goodnight, snatches of laughter, doors closing. It’s more than an hour and a half before she hears what she’s been waiting for: voices speaking Russian.
“Come in for five minutes. I’ve got a bottle of Staraya Moskva. We need to run over arrangements for tomorrow.”
Villanelle considers. The drunker they all are, the better. But she can’t leave it too late. She hears murmurs of assent, and the sound of the door closing.
Again, Villanelle waits. It’s past 1 a.m. when the security team finally, and noisily, leaves the room. But how drunk is Kedrin? Will he remember the wide-eyed young woman he met at the Conway Hall? She picks up the hotel phone and dials Room 521. A slurred voice answers. “Da?”
She answers in English. “Mr. Kedrin? Viktor? It’s Julia. We spoke at the lecture. You said to call you later. Well… it’s later.”
Silence. “Where are you?”
“Here. At the hotel.”
“OK. I gave you my room number, yes?”
“Yes. I’ll come up.”
She puts on the parka. The valise is now empty except for a clear plastic evidence bag. Opening this, Villanelle shakes its contents into the valise, which she then stows in the wardrobe. The evidence bag goes into the inside pocket of her parka. Then, after a last look around the room, she leaves, holding the CZ 75 by the suppressor so that the body of the handgun is up her sleeve.
Outside Room 521, she taps lightly on the door. There’s a pause, and it opens a few inches. Kedrin is flushed, his hair awry, his shirt open halfway to the waist. His eyes narrow as he examines her.
“Can I come in?” she asks, tilting her head and looking up at him.
He bows, semi-ironically. Ushers her in with a vague, sweeping gesture. The room is similar to Villanelle’s own, but larger. An ugly gilt chandelier hangs from the ceiling. “Take off your coat,” he says, sitting down heavily on the bed. “And get us a drink.”
She slips off her parka and drops it into an armchair, the CZ 75 concealed in the sleeve. A side table holds an empty bottle of Staraya Moskva vodka and four used glasses. Villanelle checks the fridge. In the freezer there’s a plastic half-bottle of duty-free Stolichnaya. Uncapping the bottle, she pours a liberal amount into two of the glasses, and meeting his gaze, hands him one.
“A toast,” he says blearily, his eyes dropping to her breasts. “We must have a toast. To love. To beauty!”
Villanelle smiles. “I drink to our ruined home…” she begins, speaking Russian. “And to life’s evils, too…”
He stares at her for a moment, his expression at once surprised and melancholy, and continues the Akhmatova poem. “I drink to the loneliness we share.” He throws back the vodka. “And I drink…”
There’s a sound like a snapping stick, and Kedrin is dead. Blood jets briefly from the entry wound beside his left nostril.
“… I drink to you,” murmurs Villanelle, completing the couplet as she pulls the bedclothes over him. Quickly, she pulls on the parka and makes for the door. As she’s leaving the room, she finds herself face to face with one of Kedrin’s pet thugs. He’s broad-shouldered, scowling, and smells of cheap cologne.
“Ssshh,” hisses Villanelle. “Viktor’s sleeping.”
The eyes narrow in the skull-like head. Some instinct tells him that somethi
ng is wrong. That he’s fucked up. He tries to look past her, and realises far too late that the Glock 19 that he collected from the driver this morning is in his shoulder holster, not in his hand. Villanelle puts two rounds through the base of his nose, and as his knees go, catches the front of his flight jacket and swings him back through the door of the room. He falls backwards, hitting the monogrammed hotel carpet like a ton of condemned beef.
She briefly considers dragging the body out of view, but it will take more time than it will save. Then the phone in the room starts ringing, and she knows she has to get out. Making for the stairs she passes Skull-Head’s colleague and Ponytail, hears them running to Kedrin’s room. One look inside the door and they’re after her, pounding along the corridor.
Villanelle races up the stairs to the sixth floor, continues upwards, and bursts out into the night. The roof is virgin white, and a blizzard of snow swirls around her as she bolts the stairwell door. Visibility is no more than a few feet. She has perhaps fifteen seconds start.
The door splinters and the lock flies outwards. The two men come out fast, breaking left and right respectively, leaving the door swinging in the icy wind. The roof is deserted. Footsteps lead from the stairwell to a balustrade, beyond which is whirling darkness.
Suspecting a trap, the two men duck behind a chimney stack. Then, very slowly, the younger man leopard-crawls across the snowy roof to the balustrade, peers over, and beckons cautiously to Ponytail. There, just visible, is Villanelle, with her back to them, the parka whipping around her body in the wind. She appears to be watching the chimney stack.
Both men discharge their weapons, and seven suppressed headshots tear through the parka hood. When the slight figure doesn’t fall they freeze; there’s an instant of terrible comprehension, and then their heads twitch in near unison as Villanelle squeezes off two shots from the fire escape behind them.
Like lovers, the two men fold into each other. And stepping up from the fire-escape ladder, unknotting the sleeves of her parka from the flue-pipe, Villanelle watches them die. As always, it’s fascinating. There can’t be much brain-function left after a Black Rose round has bloomed inside your cerebellum, clawing its way through your memory, instincts and emotions, but somehow, some spark lingers on. And then, inevitably, dims.
Codename Villanelle Page 8
