Die for Me Page 11

  By the time Richard arrives we’ve all finished. Ignoring the food, he pours himself a cup of coffee, and takes his place at the table.

  “We have ten days,” he announces. “Ten days to prepare for an operation that will require supreme daring and technical skill. If we succeed—when we succeed—we change the course of history.” He spreads his hands and looks at each of us in turn. “I want you all to remember the words of Field Marshal Suvorov, which I believe were much admired at your former regiment, Anton?”

  “They were indeed,” Anton says. “‘Train hard, fight easy.’ Painted on the CO’s door.”

  “We’ll be leaving midday tomorrow,” Richard continues. “Destination to be announced in due course. Today is for supply and paperwork. We’ll be measuring you up for clothes and equipment, and taking photographs for passports, et cetera. It’s a tight turnaround, but our people are used to working against the clock. Your documents, clothes and hand luggage are being delivered in twenty-four hours. Your weaponry is waiting for you at the training destination.”

  I listen with increasing disbelief. I agreed to be involved in whatever Richard and the Twelve are planning because of Oxana, and because I had no choice. I couldn’t imagine Richard and Anton, knowing what they know about me, being so suicidally unwise as to award me any but the most minor, walk-on role. A couple of days on the range at Bullington doesn’t add up to any kind of real training. I can fire, dismantle and clean a Service-issue Glock, but that’s as far as it goes. I’ve spent my professional life behind a desk. I wear glasses. What part could I possibly play in an operation requiring “supreme daring and technical skill”? I’d be a liability, and it would be crazy to think otherwise. Yet Richard is clearly including me in this briefing.

  The day passes slowly and miserably. Oxana is unreachable, she won’t even look at me. Instead she flirts listlessly with Charlie, making sure that I can see, and stares out the windows. With its stale, climate-controlled atmosphere, the apartment is oppressive. Everyone is on edge. The snow continues to fall all day, and although it’s freezing on the streets I’d give anything to be out there, breathing the clean, cold air. Impossible, of course. We can’t even open a window.

  Dinner is once again superlative but I have no appetite, and the smell of rare meat and blood-thickened gravy turns my stomach. Instead, that evening, I drink the best part of a bottle of Château Pétrus, a wine so expensive that I never thought I’d taste it. Seeing me pouring my fifth glass, Richard looks at me indulgently. “Pétrus is the unofficial house wine of the Twelve,” he says. “You’re going to fit in perfectly.”

  “I’m definitely looking forward to drinking a shitload of this stuff,” I say, hearing my voice slur. “Assuming I make it back alive, that is.”

  “Oh you will,” he replies. “You’re very hard to kill. It’s one of the things I like most about you.”

  “You don’t like anything about me,” I say, swaying aggressively toward him and spilling a crimson splash of wine on the damask tablecloth. “You just need me because you need my girlfriend. Cheers.”

  He smiles. “But is she? Your girlfriend, I mean. She seems to be getting on very well with Lara, or whatever she’s calling herself these days.”

  I see what he means. On the other side of the table, Oxana is playing with Charlie’s hand, holding their gaze and nipping their fingertips between her teeth.

  “If that was her trigger finger I’d be worried,” Richard says, but I’m already out of my chair and moving unsteadily round the table.

  “I need a word,” I say to Oxana.

  “Maybe she’s busy.”

  “Fuck off, Charlie. Oxana, you heard me.”

  She follows me. More out of curiosity, I’m guessing, than anything else.

  Slamming the bedroom door behind me I slap Oxana’s face so hard that, for a moment, she’s shocked into wide-eyed immobility. “Enough, OK? Enough of your stupid sulking, enough of this shit with Charlie, enough of you being such a complete and utter bitch.”

  My hand stings and it feels like the stitches in my back have torn open. Oxana recovers herself and flicks me a sly half-smile. “You knew what you were getting into with me. You knew better than anyone.”

  “Fuck you, Oxana. That’s not good enough. You can’t go through your life saying I am what I am and that’s the end of it. You’re worth more than that. We’re worth more than that.”

  “Really? Well perhaps I like how I am. Perhaps I don’t want to be what you want me to be, has that thought ever crossed your mind?”

  “Yes, every day. Every single day since—”

  “Since you gave up everything to be with me? Are you going to drag that one out again? Because I tell you, Polastri, it’s not very fucking sexy, OK?”

  “Whatever. I really don’t care anymore.”

  “Oh boohoo, you pussy.”

  Walking over to the window, I look down at the figures on the pavement below, braced against the driving snow. “Listen to me,” I tell her. “The only reason I’m here, the only reason I’m even alive, is that Richard and Anton think that you care what happens to me. They need you, so they keep me around. But you know what? I think I’d rather tell them that they’re wrong, that you don’t actually give a shit about me. Then they can just put a bullet through the back of my head and get it over with. I’ve had enough.”

  “Eve, I never said I didn’t care about you. Last night—”

  “What about last night?”

  “You heard what I said.”

  “You said you loved me.”

  “I meant it.”

  “And then you panicked. You thought you’d given me something, some kind of power, that I’d use against you. You didn’t trust me to love you back, so you turned on me, like you always do.”

  “You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you? Got all the theories. But you know something? That doesn’t make you someone who cares. It just makes you the latest in a long line of assholes who’ve been poking at my mind ever since I was a child.”

  “I’m just trying to understand you.”

  “Don’t. You understood me better before you met me, when I was just the worst fucking person you could imagine. A monster you had to hunt down. Think of me like that and you won’t go far wrong.”

  I turn round to face her. “Oxana.”

  “What?”

  “We have one more night here. Two at the most. Then God knows what.” I walk toward her, and place my hands on her arms. Her muscles twitch through her thin sweater, and her depthless gray eyes hold mine. I touch a finger to the ridge of scar tissue on her lip and hear the faint shiver of her breath. “Like you said, now’s all there is. And you’re all that I have and all that I want.”

  She frowns, as if trying to recall a distant memory. “I don’t feel all the things that other people do. I have to fake some of them. But I do have my own kind of love. It’s probably not the same as…” She shrugs faintly. “But it’s real.”

  “I know it is.”

  She looks away and I catch the flash of tears. I taste them when I kiss her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m a mess. Just fuck me, OK?”

  8

  The clothes arrive the next morning. Boxes of weatherproof jackets and parkas, winter hats, trousers, thermal underwear and boots. None of it ostentatious, but all designer-branded and clearly expensive. Then a cabin suitcase for each of us, and folders containing used Russian international passports, driving licenses, credit cards and other identifying papers in the same names.

  “Where do you think we’re going?” Charlie asks me.

  “Hawaii?”

  We leave at midday, and as we step out of the lift in our designer outfits and follow Richard through the building’s endless succession of lobbies, no one gives us a second glance. We could be an upscale tour group, or prosperous Russians setting off on holiday. Outside, it’s wonderfully cold, and I turn into the wind for a moment so that the snowflakes fly into my face. Then, all to
o soon, we’re climbing into a Porsche SUV with dark-tinted windows. Anton drives, Richard takes the front seat, and I sit between Oxana and Charlie.

  We drive northwest, following the signs to Sheremetyevo airport. Visibility is limited, and the road surface treacherous. The outlines of broken-down vehicles are visible on the hard shoulder, hazard lights winking. I’m nervous, but glad that Oxana is at my side. I’m even glad, in a perverse sort of way, that Charlie’s there.

  We’re crossing the outer ring road when a police vehicle swings in front of us, blue lights flashing. “Fuck’s sake,” Anton mutters, bringing the Porsche to a halt in the slush. “What now?”

  There’s a sharp tap on the passenger-side window and Richard lowers it. The features of the uniformed figure outside are obscured by his helmet and face mask, but his shoulder patch identifies him as an officer of the FSB, Russia’s internal security service. Ahead of us, other vehicles similar to ours have been stopped. Several drivers and passengers have been ordered out of their cars and directed, documents in hand, to an armored truck with iron-grille windows and FSB insignia, parked on the side of the highway.

  “What’s going on, Lieutenant?” Richard asks the officer, as wind and snow blast into the Porsche’s interior.

  “Security check. Passports please?”

  We hand them over, he checks them carefully, and peers at us one by one through the passenger window. Then he returns all the passports except mine. “Out please,” he tells me, pointing to the truck with a gloved hand.

  It’s freezing outside, and I pull the hood of my parka over my head as I join the line outside the truck. “Must be looking for someone important,” I say to the woman in front of me, a grandmotherly figure in a pink woolen headscarf.

  She shrugs, indifferent, and stamps her booted feet in the snow. “They’re always looking for someone. They just stop cars at random.”

  Eventually, it’s my turn. I climb the steps into the truck, and when I get inside stand for a few seconds, eyes narrowed. It’s dark in there after the snow-brightness. Two officers are sitting on metal benches opposite me, and one is in the shadows to my left. At a signal from the man in the shadows the others leave.

  “Mrs. Polastri. Eve. I’m so glad that the reports of your death were exaggerated.”

  I recognize the voice, and when he moves into one of the shafts of light admitted by the iron-grille windows, I recognize the man. Broad shoulders made broader by a military greatcoat, buzz-cut silver hair, a wry smile.

  “Mr. Tikhomirov. This is a surprise. And yes, it’s good to be alive.”

  “I saw the photograph. It was good, and would have fooled most people but… what do they say? Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. In our world, as you know, nothing is what it looks like, even life and death. Everything’s a simulacrum.”

  Vadim Tikhomirov is a senior officer of the FSB. A general, in fact, although he’s not the kind of man to advertise his rank. We first met in complicated circumstances after Charlie—or Lara as they were then—tried and failed to shoot me in the VDNKh Metro station in Moscow. On that occasion Tikhomirov not only got me out of Russia, he discreetly alerted me to the fact that my boss, Richard Edwards, was an asset of the Twelve.

  Tikhomirov is the refined face of an often brutally uncompromising organization, and where his own loyalties lie I’m not sure. Is he, as he appears to be, a dedicated servant of the Russian state, and if so, what does that actually entail? Unquestioning obedience to the diktats of the Kremlin, or the playing of longer, more ambiguous games?

  He leans toward me on the bench. “Eve, we have very little time. If we don’t keep this short your friends outside are going to be suspicious. First, you’ve done brilliantly to insert yourself into a Twelve operation.”

  I stare at him. Does he really think that’s why I’m here? That I’m still working for MI6?

  “How do I know this? Let’s just say that we have a friend in common in St. Petersburg. But it’s imperative that we discover what the Twelve are planning, because if what I suspect is true the consequences will be catastrophic, and not just for Russia. So you absolutely have to find out, Eve. And you have to tell me.”

  It’s as cold as a butcher’s fridge in the truck, and I zip my jacket up to the chin.

  “You know who’s in that Porsche SUV, don’t you? Our mutual friend Richard Edwards. Why don’t you just arrest him?”

  “Nothing I’d rather do, believe me. But I can’t. I have to let him run. See who he leads us to.”

  “Isn’t that a bit risky? I mean—”

  “This is the Twelve we’re dealing with, Eve. We need to take down the whole organization, and if we’re going to do that we need to aim a lot higher than Edwards. He’s useful to them but he’s replaceable, and probably doesn’t know that much anyway.”

  “I see.” This is not sounding good.

  “So, we need to keep our nerve, let them think it’s safe to go ahead, and wait for the key players to reveal themselves. Then, and only then, can we make our move. First we have to know what they’ve been planning.”

  “And that’s where I come in?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So tell me.”

  “I’m going to give you a phone number, which you’re going to memorize, and the rest is up to you. You’re a highly resourceful individual, and I’m confident that one way or another you’ll succeed.” He lets his words hang in the air. “So are you with me? I’m afraid that you have to decide right here, right now.”

  “One condition.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Oxana Vorontsova.”

  “Ah. The famous Villanelle. I thought we might get to her.”

  “Don’t kill her. Please, I…” I stare at him helplessly.

  He meets my gaze, his eyes thoughtful, and then turns to the door. Slowly, barely perceptibly, he nods his head. “I can guarantee nothing. I have to consider the optics. But if you do this thing for me I will try to do this for you. Here is the number…”

  He says it three times. Makes me repeat it three times.

  “They’ve taken our guns, phones, pens, everything,” I tell him. “They’ll be watching us all the time. I don’t know how I’m going to—”

  “You’ll find a way, Eve. I know you will.” He stands up, bowing his head beneath the low roof of the truck. “And now you have to go.”

  As I stand in my turn, a handsome young man in a winter camouflage uniform climbs into the truck, and I recognize Dima, Tikhomirov’s assistant. A long look passes between them.

  “Please,” I whisper. “Remember.”

  Tikhomirov looks at me, his expression sad, and raises his hand.

  As I trudge back to the SUV, I repeat the number he gave me.

  “So what did they want?” Richard asks, when we’re back on the motorway.

  “They checked my appearance against a set of photographs of women that they had on a laptop. I didn’t look anything like any of the photographs—all the women were wearing black Islamic headscarves—and the officers didn’t ask my name. I asked them what it was all about but they wouldn’t tell me.”

  “So who was there?”

  “An FSB officer, in his forties probably, and two junior guys. A fourth guy came in from having a cigarette just as I left. I didn’t get the impression they were very interested in what they were doing.”

  “They didn’t photograph you? Take your fingerprints? Take a copy of your passport?”

  “Nothing like that, no.”

  Anton looks back at me and grins. “Just checking out women to pass the time?”

  “Probably.”

  Richard leaves us on the tarmac at Sheremetyevo airport, beneath a bruise-dark sky. He shakes our hands through the driver’s window of the Porsche, and gives us each a taut, crinkle-eyed smile that doesn’t quite mask his relief that he’s not coming with us. How did I work for him for so long without spotting that phony manner?

  The Learjet lifts off shortly afterward, heading westward
s. Our immediate destination, Anton tells us, is Ostend, in Belgium. No one inquires further.

  Oxana sits next to me, her head on my shoulder, and we talk about the things we’ll do, and the places we’ll visit, when all of this is over. We both know it’s a fantasy, that we’ll probably never walk hand in hand by the River Neva in St. Petersburg, watching the ice floes drift past, or sit in the sun on a spring morning in the courtyard of Oxana’s favorite café in Paris, but we promise ourselves these things and more. I say nothing about my conversation with Tikhomirov. I try not to think about it at all, and to ignore the ghastly sensation that we are sleepwalking toward a cliff edge. Instead, I lose myself in the moment, feeling the soft weight of Oxana’s head on my shoulder.

  After three and a half hours we land at Ostend–Bruges airport. The light has almost gone, and as we leave the warmly upholstered interior of the Learjet we’re met with a bitter wind and driving sleet. A minibus is waiting for us on the tarmac, and we’re driven a few hundred meters to a waiting Super Puma helicopter, where the pilot hands us noise-canceling headsets. The helicopter’s rotors are already swinging as we board, and the lights of the airport vanish behind us as we gain height over desolate beaches and the wind-blurred expanse of the North Sea.

  Oxana tucks in next to me again, but with the engine noise and the headsets conversation is impossible. Where we’re going, I have no idea, although Oxana’s pensive expression suggests that she may have figured it out. We hold a roughly northwestern course toward England, but why would we be traveling there by helicopter? If our destination is London, we could have flown there directly from Moscow. Are we going to be landing on a ship?

  After forty-five minutes we start our descent. The helicopter’s spotlights illuminate dark, wrinkling waves. “We’re there,” Oxana mouths at me. “Look.” She jabs a finger downwards.

  At first I see only the surface of the sea. Then a gray rectangle swings into view, and the Super Puma’s spotlights lock on to it. A marine platform, its size hard to estimate, supported by two trunk-like columns. As we approach the platform I see that there’s a helipad at one end, which two tiny human figures are illuminating with torches. Never in my life have I seen anything so unforgivingly harsh. “Fucking hell,” I mouth at Oxana, and she nods.