Die for Me Read online

  “Is she the one who killed Kristina?” Dasha asks, her voice so low I can hardly hear her.

  “Are they the one,” Lara corrects her. “My pronouns are ‘they’ and ‘them’ now. But yeah, that was me. Sorry.”

  Dasha frowns. I know that she wants to scream, to hurl herself at Lara and inflict agonizing violence on her. But she is a Pakhan, and does none of these things. “Just know this,” she says to Lara. “I will kill you. That’s a promise.”

  “You’ve already killed three of our soldiers,” Richard says. “For a local bratva, that’s impressive.”

  Dasha turns to Oxana, her green eyes steady. “These are your people?”

  “Not anymore.” I feel her pull the final stitch tight.

  “You’ve heard of Dvenadsat?” says Richard. “The Twelve?”

  “I’ve heard of them,” says Dasha. “So?”

  “So you’ve been extending your hospitality to two people with whom we have issues, Miss Kvariani. Mrs. Polastri here, my none-too-bright former employee. And her somewhat unstable girlfriend.” He inclines his head in our direction.

  “And for this you murder an innocent young woman, storm my building with assault weapons, seriously injure two of the men who are trying to defend me, and kill a third? Fuck you and fuck your Twelve.”

  “Our condolences for the loss of the girl. That was unintentional.” He looks at Lara. “She mistook her for Eve.”

  “They mistook her,” says Lara.

  “Your condolences?” My voice shakes. “You have a daughter her age, Richard. How would you feel if someone shot Chloe, and then turned to you and said it was ‘unintentional’? You fucking monster.”

  Richard ignores me and continues to address Dasha. “All that we want from you is Villanelle.”

  “Who’s Villanelle?” Dasha asks.

  “I used to be,” says Oxana. “Long story.”

  “She’s ours,” says Richard. “Bought and paid for.”

  “Wrong, asshole,” Oxana says. “Those days are over.”

  Richard flicks her a brief smile and switches his gaze to me. He’s wearing a velvet-collared overcoat and beneath it an old school tie, black with a pale-blue stripe.

  “So, did Kim Philby go to Eton too?” I ask him.

  “No. Westminster. Bit of an oik, our Kim. And a traitor of course, which I’m not.”

  “And how are you not a traitor, Richard, may I ask?”

  “If I could show you the big picture, Eve, you’d understand. But right now none of us has the time for that.” He moves away from me and cursorily examines the three dead men on the floor. “You’ll be glad to know that your attempt to fake your own death delayed us for a whole twenty-four hours. A convincing piece of work. We allowed your husband a glimpse of the photograph, and he was quite upset. This time, though, it’s going to be for real. Anton, would you kindly do the honors?”

  Anton takes Oxana’s Sig from his pocket, and weighs it in his hands. “No. I’ve got a better idea.” Popping out the Sig’s magazine, he removes all the rounds except one, and then hands the gun to Oxana.

  “Villanelle, shoot Eve in the head. Quickly please.”

  My mind empties. At least it’ll be her.

  “Get on with it,” Anton says.

  Oxana doesn’t move. She’s calm, her breathing steady. She stares at the Sig, frowning.

  “Am I going to have to do it myself?” Anton says. “Because I’d be very happy to. I just thought it might be more intimate this way.” He regards us with fastidious distaste. “I know how… fond you two are of each other.”

  “If anyone harms Eve, I’ll shoot myself,” Oxana answers, raising the Sig and pressing the barrel to her temple. “I’m serious. I’ll blow my brains across the room.”

  Richard gives her the thinnest of smiles. “Villanelle, we have a job for you. The one that all the others have been leading up to.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “You won’t say no. This will be the greatest challenge of your career. And afterward, you’ll be free to go, with more money than you’ll ever be able to spend.”

  “Of course. You’d really let me go.”

  “We really would. The world would be a different place.”

  “And Eve?”

  “Right now, her knowledge threatens us all. Kill her and move on.”

  “No. Eve comes with me.”

  Richard regards her patiently. “Villanelle, there are other women. This one’s really very ordinary. She’ll hold you back.”

  Her eyes a frozen gray, Oxana returns the barrel of the Sig to her temple. “Eve lives. Agree, or I fire.”

  Anton regards her expressionlessly for a moment. “If Eve lives, you accept the contract.”

  “Who’s the target?”

  “You’ll learn in due course. But I guarantee that you’ll be impressed.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  “If you decline the contract, then you and your… girlfriend”—he says the word as if it nauseates him—“will be loose ends that we have to tie up. And we will. No faked deaths, no last-minute escapes. Just two anonymous bodies in a landfill.” Swinging the barrel of his weapon toward me, as if to warn Oxana not to try anything, he takes back the Sig. “But don’t let’s spoil the moment. You won’t decline this one. And the really heartwarming news is that you’ll be working with Lara again. She can’t wait.”

  “They can’t wait,” says Lara.

  7

  We spend the rest of the day in the black Mercedes, traveling to Moscow. Anton drives, Richard is in the passenger seat, and Lara, Oxana and I are in the back. It’s a perverse situation. My back hurts like hell, the slightest bump or vibration tearing at the stitches. Oxana gazes wordlessly out of the side window, Lara looks bored, and I sit between them, watching the flat, snow-blown landscape race past. Meanwhile, Oxana’s Sig and my Glock are in Anton’s pockets.

  “… shoot Eve in the head.”

  At intervals I find myself weeping, or shaking uncontrollably. When this happens Oxana looks at me with frowning concern. She doesn’t know what to say or do. At random moments she takes my hand, wipes my eyes with a tissue, or puts an arm around me and presses my head awkwardly to her shoulder. Lara pointedly ignores all of this.

  “Kill her and move on.”

  I don’t respond to Oxana. I can’t. I’m locked in to the events of the morning. Kris’s sudden weightlessness as she is borne backward by the high-velocity sniper round, and the softness with which she falls to the marble floor. The sound of bullets smacking into clothing and flesh. The tiny blur of orange announcing the shot that furrows through my back, and the way that the sound seems to follow the pain. The sight of Dasha’s men as we leave. One sprawled across the stairs, glued in place by his own congealed blood. Two others sitting on the half-landing, wounded but alive, and one of them, the one that Oxana struck on the head with her Sig Sauer, raising a rueful hand in farewell as we pass.

  “… shoot Eve in the head.”

  We pass exits for Gatchina, Tosno, Kirishi.

  “Quickly please.”

  Velikiy Novgorod, Borovichi.

  “Kill her and move on.”

  Oxana takes my head in her hands, and gently turns it until we are face to face. “Listen to me,” she says, very quietly, so that only I can hear. “I’m going to tell you a story. A story about my mother. Her name was Nadezhda, and she grew up on a farm, a few miles from the town of Novozybkov, although her family was originally from Chuvashia. She was very pretty, in the Chuvash way, with a high forehead and long dark hair. Something about her eyes, perhaps the arch of her brows, gave her a surprised expression. When she was fifteen there was the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, a hundred and fifty kilometers away. The wind carried the radiation northeast to the Novozybkov district, and everyone from my mother’s village was evacuated. Soon afterward the area became a Closed Zone.

  “I’m not sure how my mother ended up in Perm. Perhaps she was sent to relatives. She married
my father when she was twenty-two, and I was born a year later. I was a very clever child, and I’m not sure how, but I always knew that Mama was sick, and would die before long. I hated her for that, for forcing this sadness on me, and sometimes at night I dreamed that the waiting was over and she was already dead. She looked so helpless, so vulnerable, and that made me angry too, because I knew that was not how things were supposed to be. She was supposed to look after me. She was supposed to teach me all the things I needed to know.

  “There would often be whole days when she stayed in bed, and my father had to stay at home and make my meals. He was a military instructor, and he had no idea what to do with a little girl, so he taught me the things that he taught his men: how to fight and survive. My best memory with him is of going into the woods in the winter and trapping a rabbit. I must have been about six. He made me kill and skin the rabbit myself, and we cooked it on a fire in the snow. I was very proud of that.

  “It wasn’t long afterward that my mother said she was feeling better, and took me on a day trip to the Kungur ice caves. It was a special treat, partly because of the outing itself, but mostly because I was getting my mother to myself for a whole day. I even got a new coat to wear. It was pink quilted nylon, with a hood, and a zip down the front.

  “We caught a bus from the Central station in Perm. The journey took about two hours, and we had lunch at a café in Kungur. Hamburger and chips, with Coca-Cola to drink, a big treat. I didn’t know what to expect from the caves. I didn’t know what a cave was, and ice didn’t sound very interesting because we lived with it for half the year. So I wasn’t prepared when we actually went down inside the earth. There was a paved stone track, and it was like going into some secret fairy-tale kingdom. There were ice crystals hanging from the ceiling like spears, shining ice pillars and waterfalls, and rock pools as clear as glass. Everything was lit up with colored lights. ‘Is it magic?’ I asked my mother, and she told me that it was. Later, when we were on the bus going home, I asked if the magic would make her better, and she said that maybe, just maybe, it would.

  “She died a few weeks later, and for years I wasn’t quite sure if I’d imagined or dreamed the whole thing. It was all so unlike anything else in my life. All I knew was that magic might work for some people—film stars, models, people like that—but it didn’t work for ordinary people like my family. I didn’t cry when my mother died. I couldn’t.”

  Oxana falls silent for a heartbeat or two. “I never told anyone else that story.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Yes. At least I think it is. It was all so long ago. Now lean your head on my shoulder and sleep. It’s still three hours until Moscow.”

  “Yesterday,” I whisper. “You were ready to die for me?”

  “Go to sleep, pupsik.”

  When I wake it’s dark and we are crawling through an industrial suburb in heavy traffic. The motorway is awash with churned-up slush. Anton follows an exit sign reading Ramenki.

  “Feeling better?” Oxana asks me.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  “Good. We need to eat.” She kicks the back of the driver’s seat. “Hey assholes, we’re hungry. What are the plans for dinner?”

  Richard and Anton look at each other.

  “Anton, you toad-faced dildo, I’m talking to you. Which restaurant are you taking us to, because it fucking well better be good.”

  “Is she always like this?” Richard asks Anton.

  “She’s always been a degenerate, yes. There was a time she used to behave more respectfully.”

  “Suck my dick, bitch. Those days are over. Tell me where we’re going.”

  “Somewhere we can have a civilized, face-to-face conversation,” Richard says. “We’re going to have to work together here. We can’t have the project compromised by personality issues. It’s too important.”

  We sit in silence as we wind through the suburbs. It’s snowing again, and I listen to the soft thump of the windscreen wipers and the hiss of the slush beneath our wheels. The city’s traffic is as chaotic as ever, and as we pass Moscow State University and cross the river, we’re forced to slow to a crawl. The last few hundred meters take almost half an hour, but finally we pull up in front of a massive Stalinist block. Its gray frontage, pierced with archways, extends the length of the entire street.

  We climb out and stretch cramped limbs. The building’s vast impersonality fills me with dread. Its towers are so tall that they vanish into the night sky. I’m standing next to Oxana, my back throbbing painfully, when there’s a whooshing crunch in front of me, and glittering slivers spatter my face. Grabbing my arm, Oxana drags me beneath one of the archways.

  “What—”

  “Falling icicle,” she says, and when I’ve wiped my glasses I see the shattered lumps in the snow, some the size of a baby’s head.

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Yes. You have to watch out for those.”

  Lara saunters over from the Mercedes, grinning. “Another near miss?”

  I don’t answer. I can’t. The idea of a spear of ice plummeting from the sky seems, at this moment, wholly unsurprising.

  Anton jumps out of the driver’s seat, regards Oxana and me irritably, and locks the Mercedes.

  “Take your things and follow Lara,” he orders us. “And no bullshit. Because I know for a fact that she’d love an excuse to shoot you.”

  “They’d love an excuse.”

  We follow Lara into a huge, dimly lit atrium from which passageways lead in multiple directions. There are marble pillars and classical details of the sort that you might find in an international railway station, but the overall effect is cheerless. A few people come and go, muffled against the winter weather, and no one seems perturbed by the fact that Lara is carrying a sniper’s rifle and an automatic pistol. There’s a shining trail of boot prints to the nearest lift, but Lara avoids this and leads us to a small alcove, and inputs a code into a wall panel. A door slides back, revealing a glass and steel lift, which whisks us with sickening speed to the twelfth floor.

  We emerge into a softly illuminated space, neither hot nor cold, dominated by armored-glass windows and a huge Salvador Dalí painting of a tiger. There are doors to left and right, and a faintly ominous humming that might be the building’s climate control system or distant machinery. Beyond the windows, far below, the dark form of the Moscow river winds between snowy parks and windblown embankments.

  Lara touches a button beside the right-hand door and we are admitted by a young man in paramilitary uniform, who leads us along a corridor hung with abstract paintings in hues of ivory, scarlet and vermilion, their slashing brushstrokes so exactly like knife wounds that the stitches in my back start to ache. Several other men and women in business suits pass us in the corridor, before Lara lets Oxana into one of the rooms and pointedly leads me to another. It’s painted dove gray, and undecorated except for a bronze statuette of a panther, which stands on a walnut side table.

  “I’m afraid there’s no complimentary dressing gown or slippers,” Lara tells me sourly. “We weren’t expecting you to still be alive. I will collect you for dinner in one hour.”

  I ease myself into a sitting position on the bed. My back is screaming now. “Can you get me a doctor?” I ask them.

  “You have pain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me.”

  In answer I ease my sweater over my head, pull up my T-shirt and turn my back to them.

  “OK, looks sore.” They pause. “Why does she like you so much?”

  “Oxana? I really don’t know.”

  “All the time, even in bed, she was like Eve, Eve, Eve. So annoying. I’ve tried to kill you twice now.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Die Another Day. You saw that film?”

  “No.”

  “Rosamund Pike, super-cute. Pierce Brosnan, not so cute. You think I could be in a Bond film?”

  “Definitely. There’s always some crazy Russian with a butch
haircut and a big-ass gun.”

  Lara looks at me uncertainly. “OK. I’ll find someone.”

  The doctor arrives just ten minutes later. A businesslike young woman in the uniform of a Russian navy medic, with a case full of gear. She prods the stitches, feels my lymph nodes, and gives me a box of antibiotic tablets and another of painkillers. She doesn’t ask me how I came by an obvious gunshot wound, but she’s interested in the stitches. “Haven’t seen that before. Blanket-stitch suturing. Nice neat work, though.”

  “My girlfriend,” I explain. “She hasn’t done much sewing since school.”

  “And these marks on your neck. They look like bites.”

  “They are.”

  “Also your girlfriend?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. Be careful, OK.”

  I knock on Oxana’s door. When she answers she’s damp from the shower and wrapped in a white bathrobe. With her spiky haircut and moist pink skin she looks almost childlike.

  “Do you know anything about this place?” I ask her. “Did Konstantin or anyone else ever mention it?”

  “Never.”

  The bedside telephone rings. Oxana answers it, listens for twenty seconds, and hangs up. “That was Richard. He says we’ve all had a stressful day, ha fucking ha, and he’d like to invite us to meet for a quiet, informal dinner. He thinks we should all get to know each other better, so that we can draw a line under this morning’s unfortunate events and move on.”

  “Move on,” I say. “Seriously? He’s completely fucking insane.”

  “Well I’m starving, so it’s fine by me. Lara’s coming to collect us in fifteen minutes. Wear the bee sweater. I like you in that.”

  The twelfth floor is luxurious, in an impersonal, chain-hotel sort of way, but we are unquestionably prisoners. The triple-glazed windows can’t be opened, and the exit door to the lift is code-controlled. Watchful young men and women, some of them carrying weapons, patrol the corridors and move between cryptically numbered offices. By the time we leave Oxana’s room the place is as busy as ever. Their work, whatever it is, continues day and night.