Wanted (2 page)

Scissors . . .

He had shown the boy no mercy. If he would not play by the rules, then neither would God. He’d used shears. He’d watched Shanklin screaming as the child had twitched and bled out.

After that Shanklin had begged to be killed. But God had refused. Because God had known that Shanklin had hidden his daughter outside among the trees. And God had needed Shanklin to witness him killing her too, to witness him taking her and doing with her as he wished.

He’d needed Shanklin to see. Because it was only then, when he saw the complete submission in Shanklin’s eyes, that God himself could truly believe he was now all-powerful, and that the
BITCH GODDESS,
who had once ruled him, was now truly dead.

But Shanklin had tricked him. When God had gone out into the trees to find Shanklin’s daughter and drag her kicking and screaming back in, Danny Shanklin had somehow got free.

God still remembered the snapping of that twig out there in the woods, like the fracturing of one of his own bones. He’d turned to see Shanklin – bloodied from where God had plunged the shears deep into his thigh – lurching towards him through the brambles, trailing his blood through the snow.

Like a demon, God had thought. As if Shanklin himself had been a creature resurrected, sent up by that
BITCH GODDESS
to—

God had raised his Browning pistol to kill Shanklin. But – impossibly – Shanklin had been quicker. His knife had lanced deep into God’s shoulder. There, among those spiny winter branches, Shanklin had severed God’s nerves, so that even now the fingers of his right hand were numb.

Too late – here, in this kitchen, in this house he had come to visit – God now saw his hand shaking and realized his shoulder was throbbing. And, too late, he felt
HOT RAW FEAR
ballooning like a black hole inside him. And the
SICKNESS
and
EMPTINESS,
the life he had once lived, were widening and stretching and opening up to swallow him.

Screaming, God screwed up his eyes. But even in the heart of his darkness he saw that she – the
BITCH GODDESS
– had already sensed his weakness and had come to claim him once more.

He felt himself falling and writhing, powerless before her. He begged her to stop but she showed him no mercy. He recoiled – so weak! – as her blackened, broken teeth began to grind and her mouth to snarl and roar of
PAPER
and
SCISSORS
and
STONE.

‘NNNNUUUUGH—’

Screeching, he prised open his eyes. Gasping for air, he saw light. He scrambled across the plastic sheeting, retching and reaching for the table, as though he were clawing his way up from a pit of wet clay.

He hauled himself upright. Snatching a fresh scalpel from his medical bag, he tore off his clothes. First he slit the shoulder scar Shanklin had given him. Then he sliced open the other scars – the older scars, the ones he’d been given by
HER
– the mesh of pulped flesh and white hieroglyphics engraved and battered into his ribcage, chest and what remained of his genitals.

He opened each wound, like an oyster, like an eye. He nicked with his scalpel again and again, and watched each cut weep red tears, until each scar filled, becoming a blur of red. Until a flare of hope – so strong! – leaped inside him that he might soon truly heal.

The
BITCH GODDESS’s
snarling faded. It became the whispering of dead leaves blown away by a breeze. And then – with such triumph, such joy! – he sensed her retreating into the darkness, dispersing, like blood drops in a stream, choke by choke, cut by cut, bruise by bruise.

Until she was gone.

Only now did he once more truly believe that she, the
BITCH GODDESS,
was dead and that he alone was all-powerful.

He remembered the others then, those he had come to claim, the family whose house this was. He turned to face them, tied to a row of chairs that he’d nail-gunned to the floor. A father and a mother. Three children. Five iron links he would soon prove to be water. He focused on the short, shallow gasps of their breath. A tingling in his groin. A tightening of skin, of pleasure
and
pain.

Each would give him what was his. Each would soon also believe.

As the forest trees thinned at the edge of the village and Valentin moved stealthily through the shadows cast down by the tall trees and outcrops of rock, the crackle of mud and ice gave way to the reassuring crunch of grit and gravel beneath his boots.

Valentin released the safety catch of his AS Val and crouched. Two decades had passed since he and his closest friend, Nikolai Zykov, had illegally raided the top-secret Biopreparat repository. It had housed the hybrid smallpox formulations developed for the Soviet biological-warfare programme during the Cold War.

Correctly fearing the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, and dreading the subsequent neutering of Russia’s security and power, Valentin and his fellow loyalists had stolen those weapons with the intention of preserving them for the future exclusive use of the Russian state.

They’d got away with it too. None of them had ever been linked with the raid, or even questioned. The six separate smallpox variations they’d taken had never been found, or even publicly reported as missing. Each had been carefully hidden in remote places such as this village. Valentin had selected it and delivered the vial.

The smallpox formulations they’d taken had never been needed or used, either as weapons or bargaining chips, because Mother Russia had prevailed without them in carving out a powerful new place for herself in the post-
Perestroika
world. Mother Russia had prevailed without them in carving out a powerful new place for herself in the post- Perestroika world. She had gone from strength to strength, as witnessed by the recent triumph of both the Olympics and her rampant intervention in Ukraine.

Even so, they had decided to keep the six vials in reserve for the day when they might be needed. And while he had never forgotten their existence, each year he had thought of them less.

Until now. Because now Nikolai Zykov was dead.

The British Intelligence post-mortem file, of which Valentin had seen a stolen copy, claimed that Colonel Zykov had died of natural causes. A heart attack. Two days ago. In London’s Ritz Hotel.

Valentin would have been more inclined to believe it of his hard-drinking old friend, if the world’s outraged media hadn’t claimed that Nikolai had suffered his fatal heart attack after first attempting to start a war.

The media claimed that Colonel Nikolai Zykov had assassinated a Georgian peace envoy, who’d been in London to protest to the United Nations Security Council about Russia’s continued occupation of the disputed border territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Valentin believed that his friend had been set up. By whoever had been in that hotel room with him. By whoever had carried out the assassination. By whoever had wanted a Russian like Nikolai to be found dead and to take the blame for the massacre and the hit.

The world’s media claimed that an American mercenary, named Danny Shanklin, had helped Nikolai. But Valentin had further intelligence, which suggested that Shanklin, too, had been framed.

Furthermore, not only was Nikolai dead, but so was his daughter. Katarina had been tortured and murdered by a psychopathic rapist in Moscow, only a few hours before her father had died.

It was this, above all else, that had brought Valentin to the village tonight. First, Katarina had been his goddaughter, and second, he didn’t believe she’d been randomly killed by a rapist. He suspected that she’d been tortured in an attempt to get Nikolai to surrender the secret whereabouts of the six stolen smallpox vials.

Five had been successfully recovered during the last few hours by Valentin’s comrades from other locations in Russia. The one in this village was the last.

Valentin hoped that Nikolai had done his duty and had taken the secret of the vials’ locations with him to his grave, regardless of how his daughter had suffered. He hoped, too, that whoever had broken into Nikolai’s office in the Russian Embassy on the night of the London massacre had left with nothing of use.

But he had come here to make sure.

A feathering of fresh snow was beginning to fall. Valentin moved wraithlike through the outskirts of the village, adrenalin overriding fatigue, powering him on through the shadows and past the small school, until he reached a tree-shaded playground at the rear of the shops.

No one must know he was there. As well-funded and influential as his clandestine, hardline organization was, he had no official business there. He needed to retrieve the vial, which did not officially exist, and fade back into the mountains.

Ahead he could see the silhouettes of the dairy and slaughterhouse rising up into the twinkling night sky. A dog howled in the distance. Closer, a diesel engine grumbled out a muffled, monotonous tune.
The dairy lorry,
Valentin supposed.

His face glistened with sweat as he wove between the swings and slides, momentarily picturing his grandson laughing last summer, as he’d stabbed his tiny finger towards a jet plane bisecting a clear blue Moscow sky.

Valentin slipped through the playground’s gate and ghosted past the back yards of the shops, until he reached the last. The tump-tump of the diesel engine was louder now. He could even see the back of the lorry, red tail-lights glowing, a suction pipe running from its roof to the taps set into the dairy wall.

Valentin scoped the shadows with his rifle’s night-sight. Nothing. He peered through a gap in the fence of the building he’d positioned himself behind. A thin line of yellow light beneath a ground-floor curtain indicated that someone inside was awake.

The pharmacist. Valentin’s last contact with him had been less than twenty-five minutes ago, just before the helicopter had dusted down. By now he should have taken the vial from its refrigerated storage unit in the concealed safe room and readied it for transportation. In less than two minutes, Valentin hoped, Lyonya and Gregori would be in, out and gone.

‘Report status, Alpha Two,’ Valentin said softly.

‘At rendezvous now.’ Lyonya’s voice came crackling back through his microbead earpiece. ‘All quiet except one civilian in the cab of the lorry. Looks like he’s pouring himself a coffee from a Thermos.’

The driver, Valentin thought. He’d be keeping himself warm while the truck’s tank filled. Valentin hunkered down, peering again at the building, cursing the pain in his lower back and leg.

He checked the back door. No signs of forced entry. None of the windows had been tampered with. The only footprints were child-sized and iced over.

‘Proceed to target,’ Valentin said.

The snow was falling thicker now, spiralling dizzily to the ground. Valentin waited, eyes trained on the back of the building.

He pictured Lyonya and Gregori entering its front. There’d be no greeting, no words. The pharmacist would hand over what they’d come for. Then Lyonya and Gregori would leave.

But there . . . Valentin felt it again: the swelling of apprehension, the prickling sensation at the back of his neck. His sixth sense for danger. ‘Look at you, twitching like a cat . . .’ Wasn’t that what Nikolai had always said to him in the old days whenever they’d gone into combat together?

A half-smile softened Valentin’s face, as he remembered his old comrade. But then his smile died.

Had Nikolai betrayed the vials’ locations before he’d died? Within minutes he would know.

He checked the luminous dials of his watch. Enough time had passed, surely, for Lyonya and Gregori to be reporting back.

‘Status, Alpha Two,’ Valentin said.

Nothing.

‘Status,’ he repeated.

Still no reply.

He felt a fresh surge of adrenalin, of nerves. But it might just be the weather, he reminded himself. Or the terrain. Either was more than capable of interfering with their comms . . .

He checked his Bluetooth microbead’s placement, but it was fine. He peered up at the trees through the thickening snow. It was turning into a whiteout. Not even the satellite his comrades in Moscow had covertly accessed would be able to see him now.

Meaning that he was truly alone.

‘Status,’ he tried one final time, knowing that if there was no reply, he would have to go in.

A shadow moved across the slit of yellow light in the ground-floor window. Valentin waited for the curtain to be raised. For Lyonya or Gregori to look out. Nothing.

He had no choice. He slipped through the delivery gate and moved swiftly, silently, to the back door. He listened, hoping to recognize one of his men’s voices. He heard nothing.

Crouching, poised, weapon at the ready, he reached up for the door handle and gently turned it. A click. It wasn’t locked. Still no noise inside. No voices. His sixth sense was a siren wail inside his head.

He edged the door open, listening, perplexed, as the drumming of the diesel engine grew louder not softer, watching as a widening slice of the pharmacy’s storeroom was revealed.

A second door was already open inside, leading out into the alleyway where the dairy lorry had been parked. He realized that what he had thought was a shadow on the floor was a growing pool of blood.

The red dot of a laser sight rose swiftly up his chest towards his head.

He had been right to be afraid. And his comrades had been right to send him here. Because whoever had set up Colonel Nikolai Zykov for that assassination in London had also succeeded in extracting the codes for the locations of the smallpox vials from him before he had died.

Cleaning his wounds, God bandaged them tightly, careful not to step past the perimeter of the plastic sheeting, beyond which no one’s – neither his own nor his victims’ – blood must flow.

He sealed his bloodied clothing and the scalpel into a Ziplock bag, pulled on a new plastic jacket and surgical mask, then a fresh pair of gloves.

He set about tearing the photographs of Shanklin from each of the newspapers. He folded each image lengthways, then lengthways again, and ripped them into squares. He screwed each square into a tiny ball, then gathered them into the box he’d placed beside the rolled-up magazine, the surgical scissors and the jagged shard of rock.