Wanted (4 page)

Both men had been badly beaten, Gregori the worst. Sickened, Valentin looked away from the younger man’s bloodstained eyes, eyes that Gregori would never again be able to shut.

Valentin lurched forward. The road this truck was travelling along had just grown steep. The men holding him tightened their grip. The woman returned, hunkering down on her boots before him.

She was as pale and smooth-featured as if she’d been carved out of ice. Her fur-collared combat jacket was dusted with snow. A single short blonde lock of hair curled down across her brow from beneath her hood.

Without any warning she punched Valentin hard in the face. He absorbed the pain. He went with it as he had so many times before. He would not give her the pleasure of seeing him wince. Instead he glared back. She punched him again, harder than before. He still did not react.

She laughed. It was the same laugh he’d heard before, when she’d been mocking Gregori’s inability to blink away the blood from his eyes. He’d make her pay for that. If he got the chance, he’d make her pay with her life.

No, he thought. Not if.
When
. . .

He knew he had to believe this or he might as well give up now.

The blonde woman leaned in as if to kiss him. She was beautiful. He could see that, in spite of the hatred he felt. She pressed her cold cheek to his, sniffing at him hungrily, like a dog would a bitch. And he could smell her too. He could smell her sweet perfume.

He shuddered as she trailed her lips lingeringly across his cheek. Something about the sensation horrified him. It was so clearly a promise that was about to be denied. His mouth felt as dry as autumn leaves.

When her lips reached his ear, she whispered, ‘Your friend, Colonel Zykov, pissed himself like a child before he died.’

Then she bit him. Her teeth snapped deep into the cartilage of his ear. Until they met. Pain lanced his skull. He bellowed through the tape. He tried to break free, but he still could not move.

With her teeth still clamped together, the blonde woman jerked her head sideways, like a wolf ripping at the flesh of a lamb. She tore Valentin Sabirzhan’s ear clean off.

White pain.

Red pain.

Pain that would not stop.

He gritted his teeth so hard together that he heard them beginning to crack.

Breathe! he ordered himself. Breathe through your nose or you’ll choke!

The side of his head felt wrong, as if someone had punched a hole clean through it. Gobbets of hot blood trickled down his throat. He’d bitten through his own cheek and lips.

Breathe.

Breathe, dammit, breathe.

A mesh of torch beams flickered across his face, across his body. In a moment of clarity, he glimpsed the tattoo of the fist and the star on his right arm.

Remember who you are.
Spetsnaz.
Remember your strength.

His nostrils flared. His breath came in growls. The woman remained squatted in front of him, her head cocked to one side, watching him curiously, as if searching for understanding, as if trying to learn and comprehend what might be going through his mind. Her mouth looked like a gunshot entry wound. Blood drops patterned her jaw like holly berries.

My blood, Valentin realized. Not hers.

She spat hard at him. Something wet hit his cheek and momentarily stuck, before dropping to the floor. He didn’t need to see it to know what it was.

Now her eyes were smiling. They were shimmering. No longer seeking to understand, already
knowing,
already satisfied. They were shining with something less like triumph and more like sex.

The first chance I get, I’ll wipe that smile off your face
whoever the hell you are,
Valentin promised her, with his eyes.

And perhaps somehow she read his words. Because something in her expression altered. Her ecstatic mask cracked.

‘When you die, old man,’ she said, ‘I will be the one who slits your throat.’

A click.

The red beam of a laser sight shot out from the pistol she was holding. It settled on his neck as she aimed.

The click of a trigger. Pain tore into his neck.

Darkness. Valentin tried to scream as he woke, but he could not.

Pain was spreading outwards from his head and enveloping his whole body now. He felt as if he were about to catch fire.

And if he felt this bad now – with whatever drug they’d given him still in his system – how much worse would he feel once it had worn off? Hopelessness gripped him. Was this it? Was this the place where he would die?

And
where
was he? He stretched out with all his senses. The air was cool. But he couldn’t feel motion, not like in the back of that truck. Only stillness. And silence, silent like the grave. He could smell nothing. But he could hear breathing. Was it just him? Was someone else here?

Hello? Hello!Hello, is anyone there?

His words came out as a growl. He couldn’t open his mouth. But the breathing – the other breathing – heightened. It became whimpers. It became gasps. And clinking. A
clinking
sound. It started up and did not stop.

I am not alone. I am not alone. But who? Who else is here? Believe,
he told himself.
Hope . . .

A thunder of footsteps. A terrible creaking sound. A burst of bright, flickering light. Valentin’s eyes screwed up involuntarily. He had to fight just to open them, to make himself look. A terrible glare. Bare bulbs on the ceiling. An open door. Dark shapes coming through it. Towards him. One reached down and jerked him to his feet.

No.

The bitch.

She shoved him into the arms of someone else. They gripped his neck from behind. As she moved aside, a man took her place, stood before him and observed him. Behind, a wall loomed into focus, damp brickwork, no decoration. What was this? A cellar? Where had these people brought him now?

The man watching Valentin was hooded, his face deep in shadow. But as one of the bare bulbs above his head flickered, pale yellow light flashed across his hooked nose and gaunt features, making him look like a gargoyle, like some devilish chimera, half remembered from a childhood fairy tale, half hawk and half human.

‘In case you were wondering,’ the man said in Russian, ‘we have already succeeded in securing the smallpox vial.’

His accent was Muscovite, educated, just like Valentin’s.
Do I know you?
Valentin searched his memory.
Have I worked with you? Are you military, just like me?

‘The man you left there to protect it, the pharmacist, he did his best to lie to us, but he was a family man and, well . . .’ the man sniffed dismissively as he waved his hand ‘. . . he simply was not up to the task.’

Valentin pictured the statistics, the ones about smallpox, the ones that had worried him each year more and more as he’d watched his own children grow up and have children of their own.

The effectiveness of the vials had increased exponentially over time because the otherwise globally eradicated smallpox virus was no longer vaccinated against. Conservative estimates, based on the recent computerized projections he had seen, suggested current national and international quarantine regulations and existing ring vaccination programmes would fail to prevent a global pandemic, were the virus to be purposefully released and propagated. Many millions would die.

‘I’m going to take the tape off your mouth now to enable us to talk,’ the hawk-faced man said, ‘but if you start shouting, I’ll set her on you again. She will, of course, take your other ear. But, trust me, that is probably the least she will do.’

Valentin believed him. He felt himself nod. And there – right then, in his moment of spiritual resignation – a sudden hope surged through him. Because his head had moved, even if it had done so only fractionally. He’d moved it himself.

The hawk-faced man pulled back the hood of his jacket, revealing ice-blue eyes and a shock of white-blond hair, which dispelled Valentin’s previous nightmare vision of some beast culled from a childhood story. This man’s eyes shone with intelligence, with a kind of enlightenment, even. There was something about his bearing that was studiously refined.

Without warning, he tore the duct tape from Valentin’s mouth and waited patiently as Valentin heaved air into his lungs.

‘You,’ Valentin said, ignoring the pain, his voice little more than a rasp, his tongue so swollen he could barely speak. ‘You killed Nikolai . . .’

The man gazed evenly back. ‘Zykov? Yes.’

‘You set him up, so that it would look like Russia was behind the assassination of that envoy.’

‘Quite so. Bravo.’

‘And Shanklin?’ Valentin said.

Danny Shanklin . . . Even now, even here, in so much agony, his training was kicking in, compelling him to gather whatever intelligence he could. In case he ever made it out alive. And Valentin had to know. Was his source right? Had Shanklin also been framed for the London massacre? Or had he been working with these monsters too?

‘Shanklin should have been dead by now,’ the hawk-faced man said.

Should have been . . . Valentin almost smiled. So this man who held him captive now
was
fallible, after all. Somehow Shanklin had disrupted his plan. Instead of lying there alongside Nikolai Zykov in a London morgue, set up and then disposed of like poor old Nikolai had been, Danny Shanklin had escaped.

‘Why—’ Valentin started to ask.

‘Are we doing this?’ The hawk-faced man’s eyes showed only disdain. ‘You are a man of so-called principle. You’d never understand.’

For profit, then, he guessed. For money. They’re going to sell the smallpox to whoever will pay them the most.

Again he pictured his family. His heart grew cold as steel.

‘As you’ve no doubt already guessed,’ the man said, peering into Valentin’s eyes, ‘Zykov told us everything we needed to know about locating the smallpox vials. You will now aid us similarly, telling us exactly what intelligence you think you have on us, and how you are planning to hunt us down.’

Strength. Valentin felt it then. His right hand made a fist. He felt his calf muscles flexing too. The drug they’d used to incapacitate him was finally wearing off.

‘Go fuck yourself, traitor,’ he said – not only because he knew Lyonya and Gregori were listening but because he was certain that, once he gave these people the information they wanted, he’d be useless to them. He’d be dead.

‘Traitor?’ The man gazing into his eyes smiled thinly. ‘To what? To Russia? Which Russia? Your Russia, old man? The one that no longer exists? Or today’s Russia? The oligarchs’ playground? What has
that
Russia ever done for me? Has it invited me onto a private yacht where prostitutes with legs longer than gazelles’ suck my
hui
until I’m dry? Has it even bought me a ticket to see dumb shitting Chelsea play Manchester United in the cup? No, it has given me fucking nothing at all.’

The hawk-faced man gripped Valentin’s jaw and twisted it sideways, examining his mouth in the same way he might do with a horse he was considering buying or having put down.

‘But you know what?’ he said, letting go. ‘You look like a tough old bastard, eh? And time is short. So I’m thinking that perhaps we should leave you for now and we’ll start with your colleagues instead.’

‘They will tell you nothing either,’ Valentin said. It was a warning, as much as a hope.

His interrogator ignored him. He slid a foot-long cylindrical metal contraption from inside his jacket. ‘In the temporary absence of SP-17,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to resort to more primitive methods to get the information we desire. And, luckily, back there in that slaughterhouse, there was something just as good.’

Fresh adrenalin coursed through Valentin’s veins, making them stand out on his neck like wires. SP-17 was a sodium pentothal-based truth serum, which had been developed especially for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. To have had access to that before, these bastards must have had contacts within the SVR, or had even been Russian intelligence agents themselves.

And poor Nikolai, Valentin thought. The effect of SP-17 was irresistible. If these bastards had used it on him, no wonder he had talked.

The blonde woman moved close to the hawk-faced man, her body pressing up tight to his. He did not move away, Valentin saw. Meaning they were lovers, he assumed. Not only did they kill together, they fucked.

The hawk-faced man handed her the metal contraption, and as he did so, Valentin saw something pass between them, the same ecstasy he’d seen in her eyes before, that same frisson of desire.

‘Do you know what this is?’ she said, holding up the cylinder for Valentin’s benefit.

He said nothing.

‘A stun-gun,’ she said. ‘It fires a recoil-action stainless-steel bolt and is used to kill or knock cattle out cold, depending on what velocity it’s set at, so that the beasts do not struggle or feel pain while they are being drained of their blood.’ She slowly licked the contraption’s metal tip, as if she were tasting ice cream. ‘I’m guessing it’ll make a big fucking mess of your friend.’

She moved out of sight.

The hawk-faced man’s eyes stayed locked with Valentin’s.

A whimper.

Valentin’s eyes flicked right. Gregori and Lyonya. He saw them then. Both had been stripped naked and were manacled to a wall.

The
clinking
noise . . .

Both men were gagged, their heads lolling, their wrists and ankles bloodied where the metal manacles dug in. Their muscles were inflamed and black with bruises. How long must they have been struggling to break free? And how long had he been there too? How long had they kept him drugged? What were they going to do next?

A terrible thought occurred to him. The fact that they were no longer in the truck meant that these people had escaped from the village where they’d stolen the vial. Wherever they were now, it was possible that no one else knew they were there.

As the woman drew nearer, Gregori’s body twisted hard against the wall, as if he were somehow attempting to force himself through. Fresh blood poured from his wrists and ankles.