Vladimir waded past the two floating bodies and stood behind the leader, now hanging upside down, trapped by his seat belt. Vladimir leaned forward, retrieved the knife from the dashboard, and slit the man’s throat. Searching inside his jacket pocket, he found the keys to the cuffs. The van pitched upwards, so that he had to hang on to the front seats. He worked methodically to get the cuffs off, then took a deep breath as the van gave one last gulp and slipped beneath the surface.
He blinked hard in the stinging, ice-cold water. That was when he noticed the face of the unconscious driver. A girl, not much older than his eldest, Katya. What the fuck were they thinking, bringing her on such a mission? He made his decision, and sealed his hand over her mouth and nose to stop her drowning. Luckily she’d not been wearing her seat belt.
It was going to be a real bitch towing her to shore.
***
A month later he watched his own funeral from a safe distance through a sniper scope. No coffin, just an urn of ashes that could have been anyone or anything. He was gone. The authorities presumed he’d drowned, because the girl had sworn silence in exchange for her life. Even if they suspected he’d survived, they wouldn’t expect him at his own funeral. He’d seen a couple of Spetsnaz haunting the village the past couple of days, snooping around, but they weren’t making a serious effort. Besides, he knew how not to be seen.
He focused on his three family members. The wife who’d grown to hate him – he didn’t blame her – weeping now. Relief or grief, he couldn’t say. Then the two girls. Katya, the eldest, the strongest. She’d be fine, a born survivor, with her mother’s good looks that would either see her happily through life or buy her trouble. He lingered on the younger one, Nadia. His favourite. She was like him, saw things and people as they truly were. More a curse than a gift.
Other family members, uncles and cousins, led the three women back towards the church. He put down the scope. He’d never see them again. He knew he should leave, but he stayed put. Family mattered more than anything. That’s all he’d lived for. Now, in order to protect them, he had to stay dead. But to never see them again? His wife could move on, though he suspected she wouldn’t. Katya would go to the big city, what she’d always dreamed of. She would be fine. But Nadia…
His own father, Nikolai, had been killed in a mining accident when Vladimir had been twenty-five. That’s when he’d decided to transfer into the military and work his way up into Special Ops, letting the GRU intelligence service train him as an assassin, to give him the tools of the trade he needed to avenge his father.
It took him a decade to piece it together, to find the four men guilty of pilfering away money from the mine, instead of installing even the most basic safeguards, and then botching any and all rescue attempts by trying to hide the collapse from the authorities until it was too late. Those small-time corrupt officials had, in those ten years, risen higher. One of them even made it to the Politburo.
He tracked them down and made his move while on detachment in Moscow. One by one he kidnapped them and buried them alive, so they could die just as his father and thirty other men had in the collapsed mine. The last one, the Politburo member, had only been a week ago. Afterwards, Vladimir had taken leave and spent the past days with his family.
Frankly, after that last hit he was surprised it had taken the GRU a week to join the dots. Perhaps he should have just cut and run. But then they’d have come after his family. This way was better. And now his father could finally rest.
His mind switched back to Nadia. His own turning point in life had been at twenty-five years of age. It would be a good time to revisit her. She’d be not too young, nor old enough to be set in her ways. He made his decision. He would find Nadia when she was twenty-five, walk back into her life, and if she wanted him to disappear again for ever, he would. Eleven years. If he lasted that long.
The mass of people had disappeared into the church. He hadn’t expected so many. He picked up the bag he’d retrieved two weeks earlier. Several passports, plenty of money including US dollars, some small arms. But not his Beretta. Nadia owned it now.
He headed off. His face would be posted at every border crossing, even though he was officially dead. He could easily slip into Afghanistan, but he had no desire to work with the Taliban any more, training them to fight against the Americans. He knew where he must go. The one place they would not look for him, because no one wanted to go there.
Chernobyl.
One of his Special Ops commanders, Borya – who’d saved Vladimir’s life more than once and taught him most of what he knew – had been summoned there back in April 1986. He’d flown those helicopters in and out, in the desperate effort to bury the glowing, split-wide-open reactor core in cement. Borya had been lucky, had lasted longer than most, but cancer got him in the end. His widow still lived there, in one of the surrounding ghost towns.
‘Go see her, Vlad,’ Borya had pleaded. ‘I played the hero, but she will pay the price longer than I.’
He’d not seen Borya again. His funeral had been seven years ago.
Vladimir began walking.
Time to make another man’s choice right.
The Barents Sea
Nadia heard the familiar rattles and clanks down the corridor. Steel bar gates unlocked, opened, locked again. Distant footsteps. Coming her way. She stopped her third round of push-ups and sat back on the wooden bench in the cell she’d barely left in almost two years. No visitors, no phone calls, no internet, no television, no papers. Books occasionally, classics. Minimal human contact.
They kept her in the dark, because they still weren’t convinced she’d given up all her secrets, and had classified her ‘need to know’ status as zero. They kept her hidden, afraid she’d talk about the Rose, and shame the British government over what it had created and almost let loose on its own kingdom. Afraid she’d let the public know they’d narrowly dodged a nuclear war with Russia. The government could invoke plausible deniability. Just another foiled conspiracy. But it wasn’t over. Cheng Yi was dead, but the unknown client was still out there. The threat was still real.
He would try again.
Maybe they’d keep her there for good. She’d killed two people. The world was better off without them, but British justice took a dim view of unlawful killing. British justice… She’d not seen a lawyer, nor been charged as far as she was aware. No visitors. She tried not to reopen that particular can of tarantulas; it never helped.
In the first six months, the thought of someone visiting her, Jake, maybe, or Katya, kept her going. But after a year the pain became unbearable. Nobody came. Nobody cared. And so she worked out, she read, and the rest were just bodily functions. She often sang the Cossack lullaby before lights out, just to practise using her voice, and to reach out to her older sister who used to sing it to her when they were young, soothing her while their parents screamed at each other downstairs. Nadia prayed Katya was all right, and comforted herself that above all, Katya was a survivor.
The sounds drew nearer, the telltale rattle of iron keys on a large ring. She knew the routine. She wiped sweat from her forehead with a mouldy towel, and stood to attention at the end of her cot, next to the washbasin. No mirror, no glass anywhere, a metal sink and lavatory in the corner. Light filtered through the misted glass and steel bars. She faced the solid metal door. Maybe she’d get coffee today. It would be cold, but that didn’t matter.
Footsteps grew closer. Two sets, not one. Another routine medical inspection? There