It’s five weeks later, and at midday the grey sky over the Dever Research Station promises rain. Set in sixty acres outside the village of Bullington in Hampshire, the former Logistics Corps barracks appears from the outside to comprise little more than a cluster of dilapidated red-brick blocks and prefabricated huts. Chain-link fencing topped with razor wire and signs prohibiting photography lend the place a grimly uninviting aspect.
Despite its neglected air Dever is an active station, classified as a top-secret government asset. Among other functions, it acts as a base for E Squadron, a Special Forces unit whose role is to conduct deniable operations in support of the Secret Intelligence Service.
Identifying himself at the gatehouse, Richard Edwards parks his thirty-year-old S-class Mercedes on an area of cracked tarmac. With the exception of a couple of security personnel who are making an unhurried circuit of the perimeter, the place appears deserted. Making his way past the main administration block, Richard enters a low, windowless building. Descending to the underground firing range, he finds Eve field-stripping a Glock 19 pistol under the watchful eye of Calum Dennis, the station armourer.
“So how are we doing?” he enquires, when the slide, spring, barrel, frame and magazine have been neatly lined up on the gun-mat.
“Getting there,” says Calum.
Eve stares fixedly down the range. “Can I try that last drill again?”
“Sure,” says Calum, handing Richard a pair of ear-defenders.
“Ready when you are,” says Eve, putting on her own ear-defenders.
Calum types a series of instructions into a laptop, and as he hits Enter, the range is plunged into darkness. Fifteen seconds pass, during which the only sound is the sigh of the ventilators and a metallic clicking as Eve assembles the Glock. Then a target, a human torso, is briefly illuminated at the far end of the range and she snaps off two shots, the muzzle flash bright in the darkness. Four more static targets appear, and Eve fires paired shots at each. The final target moves from side to side, and she discharges the last five rounds in her magazine in fast succession.
“Well…” Calum says and smiles faintly, lowering a pair of binoculars. “His afternoon’s fucked.”
Outside, an hour later, Eve’s walking Richard back to his car. Rain’s falling in a thin mist, darkening her hair.
“You don’t have to do any of this,” he tells her. “By rights, I should take you off this investigation. Sort you out with an official position in the Service.”
“It’s too late, Richard. That woman killed Simon, and I want her for it.”
“You don’t know that. The police report said it was almost certainly a Triad hit, and we know that Janie Chou person he hooked up with had links to organised crime.”
“Richard, please, don’t treat me like an idiot, the Triads don’t chop up tourists. That bitch killed Simon just as surely as she killed Kedrin and the others. I saw his body, she almost beheaded him.”
He unlocks the Mercedes. Stands there for a moment, head bowed. “Promise me one thing, Eve. That if you find her, you won’t go anywhere near her. And I mean anywhere.”
She looks away, expressionless.
“That weapon you insist on carrying. Don’t go thinking that a couple of decent groupings on the range gives you any kind of licence to take chances. It doesn’t.”
“Richard, the reason that I’ve spent the last ten days here at Dever is that she knows who I am. Killing Simon was a message, addressed to me. She was saying: I can take you, and the people you care about, any fucking time I want…” Eve pats the Glock, now holstered at her side. “I’ve seen what she can do, and I need to be ready, it’s that simple.”
He shakes his head. “I should never have got you involved. It was a grave mistake.”
“Well, I am involved. And the only way that this thing is ever going to end is if we find her and kill her. So please let me get on with that.”
As she walks back towards the range, Richard watches her go. Then he climbs into the Mercedes, switches on the ignition and the windscreen wipers, and begins the drive back to London.
4
Villanelle wakes in a warm tangle of limbs. On the far side of the bed Anne-Laure is lying face down, her hair a honey-coloured swirl, one suntanned arm trailing across Kim’s chest. Where Anne-Laure is all dreamy curves, Kim displays a lynx-like elegance, even in sleep. His features are lean and refined, reflecting his Franco-Vietnamese ancestry, and his limbs are the colour of ivory, their musculature precisely defined in the morning light.
Detaching herself, Villanelle walks to the bathroom, and takes a shower. Still naked, she pads to the tiny galley kitchen, fills the Bialetti coffee maker with Hédiard’s “Sur la Côte d’Azur” blend, and switches on the ceramic hob. At the end of the kitchen a sliding glass door leads to a small terrace, and Villanelle steps outside for a moment. It’s September, and Paris is radiant with the dying summer. The horizon is a pale haze, pigeons are cooing on a neighbouring rooftop, and the faint murmur of traffic rises from the rue de Vaugirard, six storeys below.
Anne-Laure inherited the single-bedroom apartment five months ago, and tells her husband, Gilles, a senior functionary at the Treasury, that she goes there “to write” and “to think.” If Gilles thinks this out of character, and suspects that the place is put to more active use, he doesn’t say so, because he himself has recently taken a mistress. His secretary, to be precise, a plain and unstylish woman with whom he cannot be seen socially, but who, unlike Anne-Laure, never questions or criticises him.
Villanelle stands there, gazing out over the city, until she hears the rasp of the percolating coffee. In the bedroom, Anne-Laure is stirring, her fingers sleepily re-acquainting themselves with the hard contours of Kim’s body. He is twenty-three, and a dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet. Anne-Laure and Villanelle met him twelve hours earlier at a drinks party given by a fashion designer. It took them just three minutes to persuade him to leave with them.
Anne-Laure is astride Kim now, her hands braced against his muscular thighs, her eyes half-closed. Setting the coffee tray down on a bedside table, Villanelle clears the chaise longue of discarded clothes and arranges herself, cat-like, on the soft brocade. She likes watching her friend having sex, but this morning there’s an artificial quality to Anne-Laure’s gasping and sighing and hair-tossing. It’s a performance, and from his blank expression and the dutiful bucking of his hips, Villanelle can tell that Kim isn’t buying it.
Catching his eye, Villanelle hitches her knees up, spreads her thighs, and begins, very slowly and deliberately, to finger herself. Anne-Laure is oblivious to this performance, but Kim stares intently between her legs. Villanelle returns his gaze, notes his anguished look as he tries to hold himself back, and watches as he shudders to a climax. Seconds later, with a plaintive cry, Anne-Laure subsides on top of him.
On the chaise longue Villanelle stretches and licks her finger. Sex, for her, offers only fleeting physical satisfaction. What she finds much more exciting is to look into another person’s eyes and to know, like a cobra swaying in front of its hypnotised prey, that she is in absolute control. But that game gets boring, too. People capitulate so easily.
“Coffee, anyone?” she enquires.
Half an hour later Kim has left for ballet class at the Opera and Villanelle and Anne-Laure are sitting outside on the terrace. Anne-Laure’s wearing a silk kimono, while Villanelle’s in cigarette jeans and a Miu Miu sweater, her hair twisted into a scrappy chignon. Both are barefoot.
“So, does Gilles still fuck you?” Villanelle asks.
“From time to time,” says Anne-Laure. She takes a cigarette from the packet beside her and flicks her gold Dunhill lighter. “He probably thinks that if he stops altogether I’ll suspect something.”
They fall silent. Before them is the roofscape of the Sixième Arrondissement, tranquil in the morning light. It’s a luxury to be able to sit like this, chasing the morning away with inconsequential chatter, and both women know i
t. Six storeys below, people are racing to work, fighting for taxis, and jamming themselves into buses and Metro carriages. Anne-Laure and Villanelle’s financial needs are well taken care of, so they’re free to abstain from this daily grind. Free to pick through vintage clothes stores in the Marais, lunch at yam’Tcha or Le Cristal, and have their hair done by Tom at Carita.
Over London, a leaden sky promises rain. In her office above Goodge Street Underground station, Eve Polastri wrenches a wad of printing paper from the photocopier and repositions it, but the paper-jam light continues to blink.
“And sod you, too,” she mutters, punching the off button.
Eve’s using the fifteen-year-old copier because the scanner’s given up the ghost and is now lying unplugged on the floor, where sooner or later she’s going to trip over it. She’s put in a request for new office equipment, or at least a budget for repairs, and there have been vague promises from Vauxhall Cross, but given the byzantine arrangement by which the operation is funded, she’s not hopeful.
Today, Eve is to be joined by two new colleagues, both male. Richard Edwards has described them as “an enterprising couple of blokes,” which could mean anything. At a guess, a pair of low-flyers with discipline issues who have failed to adjust to the ordered, hierarchical world of the Secret Intelligence Service. Whatever their history, they’re unlikely to regard Goodge Street as a promotion.
Eve glances at the battered metal desk formerly occupied by her deputy. A scattering of effects—a Thermos flask, a Kylie Minogue mug filled with pens, a Disney “Frozen” snow-globe—stands as he left them, untouched. Seeing this dusty array, Eve feels a vast weariness. There was a time when her mission was straightforward, and its purposes clearly defined. Now, three months after Simon’s murder, a paralysing uncertainty bears down on her. The outlines of her task, once so hard-edged, have dissolved into a blur, as indistinct as the view through the grime-streaked office window.
She wonders, vaguely, if she should have taken more care with her appearance. She’s wearing a zip-up tracksuit top, a pair of baggy-arsed supermarket jeans, and trainers. Simon was always on at her to make a bit more of herself, but all that vanity stuff—shopping, make-up, hairdressing—doesn’t come naturally to her. When she was working with the Joint Services Analysis Group at Thames House, a well-meaning colleague took her for an afternoon at an expensive spa. Eve tried to enjoy herself, but she was bored witless. It all seemed so unimportant.
One of the things she’s always loved about Niko is that none of these things matter to him, either. Yet he makes her feel beautiful, and sometimes, at the most ordinary of moments—when she’s getting dressed, perhaps, or climbing out of the bath—she catches him gazing at her with a tenderness that pierces her to the heart.
For how much longer, she wonders, will he look at her like that. How unreasonably will she have to behave for him to wake up one morning and decide that he just can’t continue? They must be almost at that point already. She’s taken to pacing mutely around the flat in the evenings, vodka-tonic in hand, like an alcoholic ghost. Later, as often as not, she passes out in front of her laptop. Murdered men stalk her dreams, and she wakes at random hours of the night, her heart pounding with dread.
Lance Pope and Billy Primrose arrive at 10 a.m., and exchange unreadable glances as Eve introduces herself. Lance is fortyish, with the lean, suspicious features of a stoat. Billy, audibly wheezing after the climb up the stairs, looks barely out of his teens, with black-dyed hair, skin like suet, and a deathly back-bedroom pallor.
“So this is it,” Lance murmurs.
Eve nods. “A long way from the comforts of Vauxhall Cross, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve spent most of my career in the field. I’m not choosy about furniture.”
“Just as well.”
“I’ve ordered some hardware,” says Billy, still wheezing faintly. “External processors, logic and protocol analysers. Basic stuff.”
“Good luck with that. I filed a requisition order six weeks ago.”
“It’ll be here this afternoon. I’ll need a bit of space.”
“Well, help yourself.” She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. “How much do you both know about why you’re here?”
“Bugger all,” says Lance. “We were told you’d brief us.”
She replaces her glasses, and the two men swim back into focus. Billy in gothic black, Lance in a seedy version of sports casual. She finds them both deeply unprepossessing, confirming the impression she gained from their files.
At seventeen, using the online handle “$qeeky,” a reference to the asthma from which he’d suffered since childhood, Billy was a member of a hacker collective responsible for a series of well-publicised attacks on corporate and government websites. The FBI and Interpol eventually took the group down, and its leaders received prison sentences, but the underage Billy was released on bail on the condition that he live at home, under curfew, with no access to the Internet. Within weeks he had been recruited by MI6’s Security Exploitation team.
Lance is a career MI6 officer, and a veteran of numerous overseas postings. Although an experienced agent runner, commended by the heads of station he has served under, he has not been promoted in several years. The problem is his chronic insolvency, caused by a predilection for online gambling. He’s divorced, and lives alone in a one-room rented flat in Croydon.
“We’re here to hunt down a professional assassin,” Eve tells them. “We have no name, no country of origin, no information concerning political affiliation. We know that she is a woman, probably in her mid- to late-twenties, and that she acts on behalf of an extremely well-resourced organisation with a global reach. We know that she’s got at least six high-profile kills to her name.”
Rain begins to beat at the office window, and she zips her tracksuit top up to her chin. “There are two main reasons we need to catch this woman, apart from the fact that she’s a serial murderer who needs to be stopped.”
“Which isn’t the concern of the Service,” says Lance, almost to himself.
“Which wouldn’t normally be our concern, but in this case, very much is. I’m assuming you both know who I mean by Viktor Kedrin?”
Billy nods. “Fascist nut-job, Russian, taken out in London last year.” He scratches his groin absent-mindedly. “Weren’t Moscow behind that?”
“The SVR? No, that’s what everyone assumed. In fact Kedrin and his bodyguards were shot dead by our target. It was a brutally efficient job, and she carried it out alone.”
“You’re sure about that?” asks Lance.
“Absolutely. And for what it’s worth, we have a CCTV image of her.” Eve hands each man a printout of a blurry figure in a parka, with the hood up. The image has been captured from behind. She could be anyone.
“Best we’ve got?” asks Lance.
Eve nods, and hands them each another printout. “But she may resemble this woman. Lucy Drake.”
Billy gives a low whistle. “Pretty fit, then.”
“Lucy Drake’s a model. Our killer used her as a double, to check into Kedrin’s hotel and to approach him in a lecture hall. But the likeness may only be superficial.”
“So could she have been freelancing for Moscow?” asks Billy. “The shooter, I mean, not the model.”
“Unlikely, given that the SVR have an entire directorate trained in assassination. And why would they have him killed in London when they could do it any time they wanted to at home?”
“Make a splash?” Billy shrugs. “Show that no one’s beyond their reach?”
“Possible, but our information is that the Kremlin were quite happy to tolerate Viktor and his far-right associates; they made the official regime look almost moderate. And they didn’t hesitate to use his death against us. They’ve demanded a full investigation and made it clear, at diplomatic level, that they expect the killer caught. That demand has filtered down via Richard Edwards to me. To us.”
Lance purses his lips. “So who was responsible for
Kedrin’s protection when he was in London?”
Eve meets his gaze. “Officially, me. I was the liaison officer between MI5 and the Metropolitan Police.”
Lance lets her answer hang in the air. Above the patter of the rain, Eve can hear the faint wheeze of Billy’s breathing.
“You said there’s a second reason we want this woman.”
“She killed Simon Mortimer, the officer you’re replacing. And yes, I know what the official Service report says, because I helped draft it. What actually happened is that she cut his throat, to send a message to me.”
“Shit,” murmurs Billy. Reaching into the pocket of his combat pants, he finds an inhaler, and takes two deep puffs.
“She cut his throat,” says Lance flatly. “To send you a message.”
“Yes. You heard me right. So you might want to think quite carefully before agreeing to join this team.”
Lance looks at her for a moment. “Where exactly do you see us going with all this?”
“We have a lead. The name of an individual who might be on the payroll of the organisation that runs our target. It’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got. So we follow the money, and we follow the man, and maybe, just maybe, we get to our killer.”
“Any chance of borrowing some A4 surveillance people from Thames House?”
“None whatsoever. This is a closed-circle operation, and no whisper of it leaves this room. Nor will you make any further contact, social or otherwise, with any Security Services personnel, on either side of the river. If anyone checks your files, you’re both on official secondment to Customs and Excise. And I repeat, this could be dangerous. All the indications are that our target is not only highly trained and well-resourced, but a narcissistic sociopath who kills for pleasure.”
“I’m assuming the money’s shit,” Lance says.
“You both stay at present pay-grades, yes.”
Codename Villanelle Page 15
