Disposable Asset Page 18

  An ordinary pickpocket.

  He stepped back, releasing her.

  Looking at him bright-eyed, snarling, she vanished.

  Women in Petersburg, thought Vlasov, were sexier than women in Moscow.

  Both were beautiful, of course. But the women in Moscow, with their flawless make-up, gym-toned bodies, and sleek tight black clothing, all seemed cut from the same cloth. Nothing was left to chance. A machine might have mass-produced them. Here in Pieter was more variety and seemingly less effort. Tall, short, wide, narrow, full-bodied, slender, blonde, brunette, redhead: he saw every flavor of which a man might dream. Many emitted an artsy vibe completely unlike the mercenary air one sensed in Moscow. Girls like this, he thought, would be open to experimentation.

  But some were too artsy. A young woman, for example, who flickered through the corner of his gaze as she walked down Liteynyy Avenue, who might have been pretty had she not tried so strenuously to make herself ugly. She was emaciated, for one thing, with face and eyes as hollow as a skull’s. Her nose was slightly misshapen, as if she had gone a few rounds with Nicolai Valuev. She wore an ill-fitting old Red Army jacket and had shaved her head down to gleaming white skin, piercing her nose and ears with safety pins.

  Their eyes grazed; she turned away, heading north.

  Absently, Vlasov smoked. He came to a stop, looking after the limousine slowly approaching Ulitsa Pestelya. The first of the undercover vehicles had already made the westward turn.

  He looked back after the girl with the shaved head.

  Too intense-looking; too thin.

  But …

  No.

  But …

  Maybe.

  She had already lost herself in the crowd.

  ‘Possible suspect,’ he murmured into his collar. ‘Height one-point-six meters. Slight build, shaved head, piercings, green army jacket. Heading north on Liteynyy.’

  Sometimes you’ll just get a feeling about something, Quinn had said. You’re picking up on body language, unspoken signals. When in doubt, trust your instincts.

  She walked quickly, not looking back.

  The man, she thought, had recognized her.

  People send a wide array of unintentional messages. There are easy things to see, the so-called negation and aversion behaviors: touching the face or hair, leaning away, crossing the arms. Then there are more subtle things, like pupil dilation, pore size, skin flush, breathing, muscle tone changes. The study of non-verbal behavior is called kinesics. You probably won’t even realize consciously what signals you’re picking up. But when you’re out there – with a descriptive gesture indicating the world beyond the red-brick colonial, the Williams-Sonoma decor, the warmly crackling fireplace – follow your gut.

  He had recognized her. And now – she saw by turning her head a few degrees – he was following her.

  And he was talking into his collar.

  Self-recrimination rose in a bitter flood. The oldest, most obvious of all tricks – a baited trap – and she had fallen for it. She had delivered herself into an ambush. It had been naive to think that a few childish precautions – a shaved head and some piercings and Masha’s dead husband’s old Army jacket – would protect her.

  She found a reserve of the chilly gray mist, gathered it around herself, using it to cool the rising emotion, to remain in control.

  She refrained from looking around again. If it was indeed a trap, the route followed by the motorcade would be studded with agents, snipers, cameras. But put enough distance between herself and the path linking the US consulate to Sledkom HQ, and she would have a chance.

  She walked. Impassive facades rose on every side; no cross street to duck into, no alley, no escape until the next block. She moved faster, shoving her way ahead. Pigeons took wing, fluttering up on to power lines. A fat man snapped a reprimand. She ignored him, hurrying ever faster.

  The man had recognized her. More: she had recognized him. But how? In the back of her mind blinked a newspaper photograph: a gaunt, well-dressed man with a pretty little mustache, addressing a crowd of reporters. With the help of our faithful and watchful citizenry, the cowardly criminals responsible for this heinous act will soon be flushed from the sewers like the rats that they are …

  ‘Motherfucker,’ she whispered beneath her breath and hastened even faster.

  ‘Got her,’ said the sniper. ‘Heading north, toward the embankment. Moving fast. Should I …?’

  ‘Negative.’ Bordachenko used two fingers to hold the collar microphone closer to his lips, as if that would amplify not just his voice but his authority. The last thing he needed was an overeager kid opening fire on a crowd because of a mistaken identity. ‘Negative until we’ve got positive ID.’

  ‘I’m still with her.’ Vlasov’s voice was pitched higher than usual, slightly breathless. ‘I’ve got her.’

  ‘I want backup.’ Bordachenko summoned a composure he did not feel. ‘Who sees them? Someone on foot.’

  Radio silence.

  ‘For the love of – who sees them?’

  ‘I’ve got her,’ said Vlasov again, panting. ‘She won’t lose me.’

  Bordachenko swore, reached with his free hand for his phone. Time for the whizz kids in Sledkom to deliver on their promises.

  Shunting aside pedestrians, Vlasov reached beneath his coat and loosened his gun in its holster.

  Now she was falling into a flat-out run. He stepped into the street, avoiding the crowds but placing himself in the path of a motorbike. The driver blasted his horn. Dodging the bike, Vlasov started sprinting. But he had smoked too many thin dark cigarettes; his snug-fitting tailored white suit, ideal for making an entrance to an underground casino with a pretty lady on his arm, was not so good for chasing a fast young girl through the streets of Saint Petersburg.

  As he ran he drew his Makarov automatic, racked the slide to chamber a round. Someone saw the gun, and excitement hissed through the crowd. As one they gasped, shrinking back. A good thing; for as they withdrew, they exposed the running girl. He might shoot now and take her down. But that would require stopping, taking aim. And she was almost at the corner. She was turning the corner. He was right behind her—

  Smooth-soled Italian calfskin shoes lost purchase, sliding across sooty cobbles. She melted out from somewhere to his left, liquidly, graceful as a ballerina, and something bit through his coat and into his side, a very strange and terrible sensation, of violation and hard cold steel piercing soft supple flesh.

  His legs turned suddenly to air. As he folded, she charged off again. The blade she had used clattered into a gutter. He struggled in vain to raise the Makarov, even as a few bystanders managed to get their phones up and start shooting video, the fuckers.

  She ducked behind a parked car and was gone.

  The bystanders filmed Vlasov.

  He coughed, spat, put his head down. Blood was pulsing out his side, pooling beneath him in a dark sticky puddle. The swine were still filming him. Not a one moved to help, nor to stop the girl.

  He looked up, into the blank goggling lenses of half a dozen smartphones. ‘Yob tvoyu mat,’ he said amiably to the assembly – Fuck your mother.

  ‘Got her,’ said the tech manning the drone. ‘Heading north on Mokhovaya.’

  He sounded no older than Bordachenko’s youngest son. His piping voice should have been begging for kissel, not offering the best information they had at a crucial junction of a vital manhunt. Bordachenko said hopefully: ‘Inspektor. Still with us?’

  No answer.

  ‘Inspektor.’ The hiss of an open channel. ‘Inspektor.’ Bordachenko grappled for the name of the drone’s pilot. ‘Efrussi. Where’s Vlasov?’

  A painfully long pause. ‘No sign,’ said the young voice at last. ‘Should—’

  ‘Negative. Stay with the suspect.’ Closing his eyes, Bordachenko consulted a mental map. ‘Durasova and Negretov – to Chaykovskogo. Post-haste. Sitko, call your friend in the River Police. We need a cordon blocking the embankment. Miste
r Ravensdale, move up to Gangutskaya – and stay ready. She’s heading your way.’

  Andrew Fletcher listened to his earpiece.

  She was finished, he thought.

  She had gone as far as she could go. A noble effort it had been – much more successful than anyone had anticipated – but she was finished at last.

  But she had surprised him before. And if she escaped again, it would be his own goddamned fault. He had trained her too well. Blakely had made her necessary, Bent had fumbled the disposal, Ravensdale had failed to deliver on his promises … but Fletcher himself was the one who had chosen her, motivated her, molded her into what she was.

  A man, he thought, should finish what he started.

  After a second’s hesitation, he threw open the reinforced door of the ZIL-4112R. Before the driver could react he was out on the street, clawing for his breast holster.

  She ran.

  Past a string of parked cars, a hotel courtyard, an inoperative fountain surrounded by granite figures from Russian fairy-tales: The Armless Maiden, Ivan the Fool, Ruslan and Lyudmila, Koschei the Deathless.

  She pounded around another corner, nearly colliding with an OMON agent brandishing a weapon – facing away. She slipped her left arm around his throat, moving on autopilot; inserted the other arm behind his head, locking her fingertips just behind his left ear. Her right knee drove into his spine between the fourth and fifth vertebrae. Extending the fingers of both hands, she shifted her weight sharply back, neatly dislocating the skull from the spinal column. One more. God willing, the last one.

  She dropped the body. As the crowd gawked, she worked the weapon from stiff hands: a 5.45 mm PSM pistol.

  She ran again, stumbling, pulse thundering in the hollow of her wrist, the PSM in one hand. Lungs burning, legs wobbling. Deathless, she thought. Deathless. Her heart tried to climb up her gullet, out her throat. Run!

  Ahead on her right: the frozen river. Across the water: a dazzling minaret. From everywhere at once, or so it seemed: rising and falling sirens. Beyond them, distantly but growing closer: the laconic thud of helicopter rotors.

  A pair of dry gunshots sounded behind her. She turned down a narrow brick alleyway, heart doing cartwheels and somersaults. An iron ladder led up. Options multiply as they are seized.

  She climbed recklessly, briefly flashing back on to another fire escape, a year before and miles away, outside the hang-out pad in the East Village. Police! Don’t fucking move!

  On the rooftop she laid flat, chest down, six stories above the city. Coup d’oeil was the French term: literally meaning stroke of the eye; in military terms meaning the ability to discern, in one glance, the tactical advantages of terrain.

  A crosswind buffeted her, snapping the collar of the jacket against her cheeks. She ignored it, focused. From her new vantage point she could see the river to the north and roads clogged with traffic, with tiny model cars, to the south, east, and west. Blaring sirens drew the eye, pressing her way, but snarled by traffic. The majority of ant-sized pedestrians ran instinctively away from the gunshots. Those running toward her stood out: policemen, undercover agents, elbowing through the crowds. She found snipers, small with distance, posted on rooftops. The helicopter hovering above the body of the OMON agent, a block behind her current position. Floating almost directly overhead, less than thirty yards away: a quadricopter drone.

  She rocked back on to her haunches, took aim. The drone danced mockingly through the sky. She fired; missed.

  She was about to move again – to leap to the next rooftop and scale quickly back to street level – when something made her look southward.

  One of the men coming toward her, running all-out, had clicked some switch in her mind. He wore no uniform. He moved clumsily – wearing armor beneath his clothes, she thought – but the gait was nonetheless recognizable.

  She had spent a full year training beneath Julian Quinn in the red-brick colonial. She knew intimately his carriage, his bearing, the shape of his stride.

  Julian Quinn was racing in her direction, holding a gun.

  She raised the 5.45 mm PSM pistol. It would be almost too easy.

  Don’t get cocky.

  Clear day, no wind, just about fifty paces … a moving target. She led off. He kept coming. A lamb to the slaughter.

  The drone ceased to exist. The policemen, the howling sirens, the pounding helicopter ceased to exit. There was only the gun. The man in her sights.

  He had lied to her. Betrayed her. Ordered her death.

  Focus on the target. Then refocus on the front sight, so it comes into sharp focus, keeping your forearms and the gun level …

  In the last second, he seemed to understand what was coming. He slowed, eyes searching the rooftops.

  She licked her lips.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said aloud.

  Her finger hesitated against the trigger.

  COBBLER’S COVE: ONE YEAR EARLIER

  She sat before the fireplace, poring over photographs.

  The first pictured her father wearing military camouflage, standing beside Julian Quinn on what looked like a target range. The next pictured her father at a cocktail party, standing beside a former President of the United States. The two men seemed to be sharing a joke – heads bent together, shoulders almost touching, eyes twinkling. A US Great Seal hung in the background, above a white brick hearth.

  Fake, she had insisted.

  Real, he had answered with conviction.

  Here was her father, shot through a telephoto lens, standing in a large public square beside a man with a receding hairline and muscles going to fat … in Moscow, according to Quinn. Then her father on a hillside, squinting up at the camera from a gun he seemed to be cleaning, looking almost unrecognizable in a thin mustache and flak jacket. Her father shaking hands with someone who seemed vaguely familiar, a face she knew from movies – or maybe a politician, a congressman she’d seen in the newspaper or on an interview show. Then her father wearing a turban, not in some kitschy carnival sideshow where he’d placed his face into a cardboard cut-out of a cartoon Arab, but against a backdrop of craggy dark mountains. Holding an automatic weapon. More turbaned figures, also holding automatic weapons, milled behind him. Beyond them, a dark saw-blade of rock bisected a pale sky.

  Tell me, Quinn had said. How did your father die?

  Car accident, she’d answered.

  ‘Mechanical failure’, right? The brakes bombed on his Subaru, and he went into a lamp post at sixty miles per hour? He had shaken his head. The bad guys killed your father, Cassie. That man in the public square is a mafiya kingpin. He buys or steals raw fissile ma-terials – uranium, plutonium, deuterium, heavy water – and then sells them to the highest bidder. Your dad was building a case against him. Your dad was going to shut the whole operation down.

  He worked, she had protested, in consulting.

  Business restructuring? With a specialty in Russia and Eastern Europe? Another shake of the head, gentle but firm. A cover. He worked for us. He did vital things for this country.

  She flipped back to the photograph of the man in the public square. Tilted her head, studying the face. This, according to Quinn, was the man who had caused her so much pain. Receding hair, layered fat. The banality of evil.

  Believe me, Quinn had said. Once you learn the whole story, you’ll be glad I found you.

  And he had been right. Because otherwise she would never have learned the truth. She would never have learned that this was not a world in which God made you an orphan just because He felt like it, just for the hell of it. Instead it was a world in which Daddy had been a patriot, a hero. Killed In The Line of Duty. And now Cassie would take his place. Avenge him. And Make Things Right.

  SAINT PETERSBURG

  On the other side of the sight, Quinn searched the rooftops, trying to find her.

  Her finger curled tighter. She would do it. Not only for herself, but for all the others he had doubtless used, would doubtless use again.

  An
d there’s no need to ask him anything first. Because he’ll just lie again – and you know the truth already. Daddy was no spy. Daddy was a book-lover and a consultant and a lousy cook and a great father and a man of peace and now Daddy is dead and Quinn made you into a monster and you might as well accept it, already. Daddy would be so disappointed if he could see what you’ve become, but he can’t, he won’t, he won’t ever, because Daddy is dead Daddy is dead Daddy is dead, and Quinn lied, he lied, he lied, finding your weakest spot and playing on it, pretending the world makes sense but really it doesn’t, nothing makes sense, nothing means anything, nothing matters, and Quinn lies, lies, lies—

  She fired.

  Half of Quinn’s head vanished in a red mist.

  ‘Found Vlasov,’ said a gasping voice in Bordachenko’s ear. ‘He’s down.’

  ‘Quinn’s also down,’ said the drone’s pilot. ‘Suspect on the move again.’

  Bordachenko covered his eyes, already closed, with one hand.

  Keeping in a low crouch, she climbed swiftly down the fire escape, aware of the drone buzzing in her wake.

  The park pacing the River Neva was peppered with old-fashioned lamp posts. Beside a strip of frost-covered greenery ran a thin road, less congested than the wider boulevards in the center of town. A sky-blue Lada Kalina idled at a stop sign, waiting to turn on to the river. Cassie made for it, ducking reflexively at the sound of more flat, curiously unemphatic gunshots.

  Her feet slapped against cobblestones, thud thud thud. Gnats whizzed past, zip zip zip. As she reached the Kalina, a bullet shattered the driver’s side window. She saw the driver’s head whip forward and sideways. Bright rosettes of blood pattered across the windshield’s interior. The woman rolled bonelessly back, eyes showing only white.

  Cassie tore open the door, shoved the driver across the parking brake, slid behind the wheel, gnashed gears, and jerked out on to the riverside boulevard. Glancing into the passenger seat she saw a slack, pretty, lifeless face, and weakening freshets of blood.

  Her eyes skimmed to the rear-view. A stranger looked back: bloodshot eyes, safety-pin piercings, shaved head.