Alice glances at her phone. She stands, her midnight-blue dress rippling with the same underwater gleam as the sharks. “Follow me.”
She leads Villanelle to a door, and a lift. The noise and the music die, there’s a dizzying ascent, and Villanelle follows Alice into a rooftop apartment as dimly lit as the club. There’s a folding gold-leaf screen, and shadowy contemporary paintings on the walls, but the room is dominated by a dramatic expanse of plate-glass window. Far below them is the city, its sprawling glitter made vague by a shroud of smog.
“The whore of Asia. That’s what they used to call Shanghai. And it’s still true. This apartment, the club, this building… All paid for by sex. Tea?” She indicates a spotlit side table. “It’s Silver Needle from Fuding Province. I think you’ll like it.”
Villanelle sips the pale infusion. It tastes of fragrant, rainswept hillsides.
“I could make you very rich,” says Alice. “I have clients who would pay a great deal of money for a night with you.”
Villanelle looks out into the night. She can smell the other woman’s scent, and her hair. “And you, Alice. What would you pay for me? Right here and now?”
Alice looks at her, her smile unwavering. “Fifty thousand kuai.”
“A hundred thousand,” says Villanelle.
Alice tilts her head thoughtfully, then steps round to face Villanelle. Green eyes meet grey. “For a hundred thousand kuai,” she says, undoing the silk-covered button at Villanelle’s collar, “I would expect a lot.”
Villanelle nods, and stands there, unmoving, as Alice’s fingers move down her qipao dress. She closes her eyes, feels the silk lifted from her shoulders, and her underwear removed. Naked, she feels the floor tilt beneath her feet. She tries to speak Alice’s name but it comes out as Anna, and when she tries to whisper “fuck me,” what she actually says is “kill me.”
Four days later Eve Polastri and Simon Mortimer step from the air-conditioned cool of the Pudong airport arrivals building into the 30-degree heat of the taxi rank. It’s midnight. Exhaust-tainted humidity rolls over them like a wave. Eve feels her scalp moisten and her H&M cotton twinset wilt on her shoulders.
Freckled and scrappy-haired, her features free of make-up, Eve knows that she’s not the sort of woman who gets noticed. Since landing an hour earlier the only person who’s given her a second glance is the Chinese customs officer who checked her passport, perhaps struck by the quiet intensity of her gaze. Both she and Simon look older than their years. Their fellow British Airways travellers, if they’ve given the matter any thought at all, have assumed that they are a married couple.
Simon glances at her affectionately. She reminds him of a starling or a thrush, one of those birds that patrol the lawn with sharp eyes and stabbing beaks. The hunter-killers of the intelligence world, like those of the animal kingdom, often have drab plumage.
Eve finds her own appearance mystifying. “Do you think I could be pretty?” she asked her mother, shortly before going up to Cambridge to read Criminology and Forensic Psychology.
“I think you’re very clever,” her mother replied.
It took her husband, Niko, a Polish-born maths teacher, to tell Eve that she was beautiful. “Your eyes are like the Baltic Sea,” he said, drawing a finger down her transparently pale cheek. “The colour of petrol.”
“You’re such a bullshitter.”
“Only when I want sex.”
“A bullshitter and a pervert.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t marry you for your cooking.”
She misses him already.
Flagging down a taxi, a green Volkswagen Santana, Simon gives the driver the address of their hotel.
“I didn’t know you spoke Mandarin,” Eve says.
Simon runs a hand over his stubble-roughened jaw. “I did a year of it at university. If this guy starts a real conversation, I’m stuffed.”
“So does he know where the Sea Bird Hotel is?”
“I think so. His expression suggested he didn’t think much of it.”
“Let’s see. Discreet was how Richard Edwards described it.”
Eve and Simon’s visit is strictly non-official, so there’s no one from the Shanghai MI6 station to meet them. Indeed, everything about their status is irregular. Since her recruitment by Edwards to investigate the Kedrin killing, an operation run strictly off-the-books, Eve has not contacted a single one of her former colleagues. Instead, day after day, week after week, she has made her way to the cramped and dingy office over Goodge Street tube station. There, with the long-suffering Simon, she has scrolled through file after classified file, staring at her computer screen until her head pounds and her eyes ache with tiredness, in the search for anything—a whisper, an afterthought, the ghost of a suggestion—that might lead her closer to the woman who murdered Viktor Kedrin.
And she’s got nowhere. She’s identified several high-profile political and criminal killings in which a woman is rumoured to have been involved, and a handful which she’s almost certain were carried out by a female shooter. She has watched, more times than she can remember, the CCTV recording from Kedrin’s London hotel in which his killer can be seen coming and going. But the images are smeared and indistinct, even when fully enhanced, and the figure’s face is never visible.
When not scouring cyberspace, Eve has followed the real-world lines of inquiry presented by the Kedrin case. But every lead, no matter how initially promising, has brought her up against a smoothly impermeable barrier. There’s no witness, no forensic evidence, no useful ballistics, no money or paper trail. At a certain point, everything just cuts out.
Despite this lack of progress, Eve has a sense of the woman she’s hunting. The woman she sometimes calls Chernaya Roza—Black Rose—after the 9mm Russian hollowpoint ammunition used to kill Kedrin and his bodyguards. Eve thinks that her Black Rose is in her mid-twenties, highly intelligent, and a loner. She is audacious, cool under pressure, and supremely skilled at compartmentalising her emotions. In all probability she is a sociopath, wholly lacking in affect and conscience. She will have few or no friends, and such relationships as she forms will be overwhelmingly manipulative and sexual in nature. Killing, in all probability, will have become necessary to her, with each successful murder further proof of her untouchability.
It’s less than twenty-four hours since Richard Edwards walked unannounced into the office over the tube station.
“Does anyone ever clean this place?” he enquired, with vague distaste.
“Yes, Simon does. And very occasionally me. Sorry if it’s not up to Vauxhall Cross standards. We’ve ordered some more vacuum cleaner bags.”
“Well, that’s something to look forward to. And in the meantime…” He opened the briefcase at his feet, and took out two well-used passports and a sheaf of flight tickets and schedules. “You’re going to China. Tonight. Someone’s taken out the leader of their cyber-warfare team in Shanghai, and it’s thought that the hit was carried out by a woman.”
It took him less than five minutes to bring her up to speed on the demise of Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei. “Your brief,” he told her, “is to make discreet contact with the MSS, the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and convey my assurances that the murder of Zhang was not sponsored, enabled or executed by us. Furthermore, you are to offer them any assistance they might need in investigating the murder, including sharing our suspicions about a female contract killer.”
“Do I have a contact at the MSS?”
“Yes. His name is Jin Qiang. I knew him in Moscow, when he was their head of station there, and he’s a good man. Since then he and I have kept certain back-door channels open. He knows you’re coming.”
“Isn’t he going to wonder why he’s dealing with me, rather than one of the local station officers? Who are presumably already on the case.”
“He’ll guess there are sensitivities. Reasons why you can’t go in under official cover.”
“So do we make contact with the MI6 station at all
?”
Edwards stood, walked to the window, and peered through the grime at the traffic. “For safety’s sake, we have to assume that the conspiracy to cover this woman’s tracks has global reach. If she’s killing people in Shanghai, they’ll have people there. Possibly our people. So you’ve got to keep clear of them. We can’t afford to trust anyone.”
“How much can I tell the MSS guy?”
“Jin Qiang? As far as our hitwoman goes, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving him everything you’ve got.” He drained his coffee, and dropped the paper cup into the bin. “We need to catch her, he needs to catch her.”
The door swung open. “You know, I’m convinced Goodge Street station’s a portal to hell,” said Simon, shrugging his computer bag from his shoulders onto his desk. “I’ve just had such a Buffy moment…” He froze. “Oh, hello, Richard.”
“Hello, Simon. Good morning.”
“We’re going to Shanghai,” said Eve, and wondered what on earth she was going to tell Niko.
“Look at this,” Simon says, lowering the window of the taxi and flooding it with the warm night. “It’s extraordinary.”
And it is. They’re approaching the Nanpu Bridge, with vast office blocks to right and left of them, their numberless windows pinpricks of gold against the bruised purple of the sky. And suddenly Eve’s tiredness evaporates, and she’s light-headed with the novelty of it all. Everything’s about money and profit. You can see it in the soaring high-rises, smell it in the diesel fumes, taste it on the night air. The hunger. The high stakes and the huge returns. The unbridled sense that more is more.
It’s an impression that’s confirmed as they cross the bridge. Below them, boats festooned with tiny lights ply the dark expanse of the river. To their right, in floodlit splendour, waits the Bund.
“How d’you feel?” Eve asks him.
He leans forward, his buff linen jacket folded on his lap. “I’m not sure. Things have got very strange recently.”
“She’s out there,” Eve murmurs. “Our Black Rose.”
“We don’t know for certain that it was her who killed the hacker.”
“Oh, it was her all right.”
“Assuming it was. Why would she stick around?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No. To be honest with you, I can’t.”
“For me, Simon. She’s waiting for me.”
“Now you’re actually starting to sound mad. I’m putting it down to jet lag.”
“You wait.”
He closes his eyes. Five minutes later they’re at the hotel.
It’s only when she’s in her room, a functional space whose off-white walls are decorated with a single out-of-date calendar, that she allows herself to think about Niko. The phone call after Edwards left the office was horrible. It would have been easy enough to think up a cover story, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie, and told Niko simply that she had to go away for a few days. He listened, said “I see,” and hung up. He has no idea where she is, or when she will be coming home. Eve stares out of the window. There’s a road, and beyond it the dark gleam of water. A cluster of houseboats, showing dim lights.
She loves Niko, and she’s hurting him deeply, and this is especially agonising because, for all his wisdom and experience, she can’t help thinking of herself as his protector. She’s guarding him from the truth about herself. From the side of her that he knows exists, but that he chooses not to acknowledge. The side of her that is utterly absorbed by the woman she is hunting, and the dark, refracted world in which she exists.
“They’re staying at the Sea Bird Hotel on Suzhou Creek,” says Konstantin. “They got in last night.”
Villanelle nods. The two of them are sitting in the tenth-floor apartment in the French Concession. On the table between them is a bottle of Tibet Glacier mineral water, two glasses, and a packet of Kosmos cigarettes.
“Which means that they’re not here officially,” Konstantin continues. “The Sea Bird is dirt cheap, by Shanghai standards.”
Villanelle stares out at the pale glare of the sky. “So why do you think they’ve come?”
“We both know why they’ve come. The Polastri woman was asking questions in London after Kedrin’s death, as I told you at the time. If she’s here, it’s because she’s made the right connections.”
“Which means that she’s smart. Or lucky. And that I need to get a close look at her.”
“No. That would be reckless. I’m pretty sure Polastri’s got no real clue what’s going on, but that doesn’t mean she’s not dangerous. Leave her to me, and go back to Paris. We need to wind this operation up. The hacker’s dead, and you need to disappear.”
“I can’t do that.”
His expression hardens. “This is not how I want things to be between us, Villanelle. I don’t want to have to negotiate every decision.”
“I know you don’t. You want me to be your killer doll. Wind me up, point me at the target, bang bang and back in my box.” She looks him in the eye. “Sorry, but that’s not how I function these days.”
“I see. So how do you function, exactly?”
“Like a thinking, feeling human being.”
He looks away. “Please, Villanelle, don’t talk to me about feelings. You’re better than that. We’re better than that.”
“Are we?”
“Yes. We see the world for what it is. A place where there’s only one law: survival. You survive very comfortably, do you not?”
“Maybe.”
“And why’s that? Because give or take a couple of reckless incidents, you’ve obeyed the rules. What did I tell you in London?”
She looks away irritably. “That I’m never completely safe. And that I should never fully trust anyone.”
“Exactly. Remember that, and you’re fine. Forget it and you’re fucked.” He reaches for the cigarettes. “Forget it and we’re all fucked.”
Frowning, Villanelle walks to the plate-glass door to the balcony and pulls it open. Humid air fills the room.
“Worried about your health?” Konstantin asks, lighting a Kosmos. “I’d have thought a bullet in the back of the head was a more pressing concern.”
She looks at him. The acrid tobacco smell reminds her of their earliest days together. In Russia, he must have smoked at least a packet a day. “So who’s going to shoot me? Eve Polastri? I don’t think so.”
“Trust me, Villanelle, her people will kill you without a second thought. One word from Polastri to Edwards, and MI6 will send in an E Squadron action team. Which is why you have to get out, now. Shanghai’s a big place if you’re Han Chinese, but it’s a very small town if you’re not. You could run into her anywhere.”
“I won’t, don’t worry. But I do have a way of getting to her. And perhaps of finding out what she knows.”
“Really?” He exhales cigarette smoke, which drifts away on the warm breeze. “And would you kindly tell me how?”
She does so, and for a long time he’s silent. “It’s too dangerous,” he says eventually. “Too many variables. We could end up attracting exactly the wrong kind of attention.”
“You once told me that kind of operation was a speciality of yours.” She looks at him speculatively. “Fear, sex and money, you said. The three great persuaders.”
“It’s too dangerous,” he repeats.
She looks away. “We might never get this chance again. We can’t afford not to take it.”
He stands up. Walks out onto the balcony. Finishes his cigarette, taking his time, and flicks the end out into space. “If we do it,” he says. “You stay out of sight. I make the play. Agreed?”
She grins, her expression fierce.
“Shit,” says Eve, staring at her phone. “That’s a bad start.”
“Tell me,” says Simon.
She sits down on her unmade hotel bed. The room is small, with worn bamboo furniture and a distant view of the creek. Underwear is visible in Eve’s open suitcase, and she wishes they’d agreed to mee
t downstairs.
“It’s Hurst.” She hands him the phone. “The Fanin credit card trail’s gone dead.”
DCI Gary Hurst is the senior investigating officer on the Viktor Kedrin case. He has been following up a loose end which, just conceivably, could indicate an error on the part of those who set up Kedrin’s murder. It seems that the theft of the card used by Lucy Drake to check into the hotel was reported to the police by Julia Fanin, but not to her bank. As a consequence, the hotel registration went through unchecked.
This discrepancy puzzled Hurst, especially when Fanin insisted that she had rung her bank’s Lost and Stolen Card number, a claim validated by her mobile phone records. It turns out that the bank’s credit-card support services are outsourced to a call-centre company based near Swindon, in the south-west of England, and Hurst’s investigation has concluded that one of the company’s employees unfroze the card after it was reported missing, so that it remained usable. Thousands of pounds worth of clothes, flights and hotel bills were then charged to the account over a two-week period, at the end of which the expenditure stopped dead. Which is where the investigation has stalled. Hurst’s text reads:
Right now working thru 90+ employees who might have taken JF’s call. But relevant records deleted so not confident of a result.
“And even if by some miracle he gets a result, it’s a dead cert we’d just hit another cut-out,” says Simon, returning Eve’s phone.
She slips it into her bag. “Let’s go and see Jin Qiang. The taxi should be waiting downstairs.”
Opened in 2009, the first new building on the Bund for seventy years, the Peninsula Hotel is dauntingly grand. The lobby is pillared art deco, a tone-poem in ivory and old gold. The carpets are vast, the conversation muted. White-uniformed bellboys hurry discreetly between the vast reception desk and the near-silent lifts.
Codename Villanelle Page 12
