Stevens Tim

Severance Kill

SEVERANCE KILL

Tim Stevens

Kindle Edition

Copyright 2012 Tim Stevens

***~~~***

Kindle Edition, Licence Notes

ONE

Calvary went backwards through the window in a sunburst of glass, the fragments fanning and spinning on either side of his field of vision. The force of the kick had been great enough to propel him slightly upwards as well as backwards so that he felt for an instant as though he was hanging motionless, four floors above the courtyard.

Better this way, he thought.

He twisted slightly in midair, because without visual data his chances of survival would drop from minuscule to nonexistent, and craned his neck. Four storeys down, the concrete floor of the courtyard lay like a morgue slab, lit by a sheaf of late-afternoon sun. Clinging to the wall of the building was the wrought-iron creeper of the fire stairs.

Better that he puts up a fight.

Already he was plummeting, the cold beginning to bite, and the pain from the kick. By contracting his stomach muscles he was able to jackknife so that his backwards momentum was offset. He lunged closer to the wall, shot out an arm, felt his fist bounce off hard metal. It meant he was within reach of the fire stairs. His grip clamped round a step. Suddenly, jarringly, he stopped falling.

His legs flailed at the air. His shoulder burned from the shock of the impact. Above him his fingers inched towards the edge of the step, slipping on a slick of sweat. He forced his legs to be still.

Between Calvary’s feet, two storeys down now, the concrete beckoned.

He didn’t try to peer up at the window beyond the fire stairs. There was no point. Either the Songwriter would be coming down the steps already, or he’d have left the flat by the normal exit. In that case he’d be fleeing or, more likely, coming round to the back to wait for Calvary in the courtyard. In either instance Calvary’s only effective response would be movement. Fast movement, with no lingering to analyse the situation.

By focusing all his attention on the arm gripping the step, so that for an instant he became his arm and nothing else, Calvary launched himself upwards, both hands reaching this time so that he got a solid grip on one of the steps higher up. He swung his legs sideways, for a second letting go his grasp, managing to achieve purchase on the banister above. His palm slid down its smoothness but he caught hold with his other hand.

The Songwriter’s heel slammed down hard on his fingers, grinding them against the steel.

Calvary’s hand spread in agony and dropped away. The movement swung his centre of gravity outwards across the drop once more. His other hand was going to be next and that would be the end, so he braced himself on the arm that was still clinging to the banister and sprung his body upwards as though he was pogoing on an invisible cushion of air. The move didn’t give him quite the momentum he was hoping for but he managed to regain a two-handed grip on the banister. This time he dragged himself over it and up on to the stairs.

The Songwriter’s kick came hard at his face. Calvary jerked his head aside at the last moment. The blow caught him on the taut triangle of muscle between neck and shoulder and he rocked back across the banister and arched, arms wheeling, before regaining his balance.

The Songwriter hadn’t followed up on his attack, but had retreated back up the fire stairs. Calvary watched his legs disappear back through the wrecked frame of the window.

It meant one of two things. Either he’d been quick to understand, from the way Calvary had survived his assaults, that he was likely to come off second best in a hand-to-hand fight, and was making good his escape. Or, he was going for a weapon.

Calvary drove himself up the stairs three at a time, the separate pains in his hands and his shoulder and his chest from the kicks and wrenches ignored for the time being. A knife: that would be nasty, close up, but if he could get on level ground with the Songwriter with enough room to spare between them – perhaps ten, twelve feet – he’d be able to gauge the man’s proficiency with a blade and work out an approach that might succeed. A gun, on the other hand... A distance of ten feet would render him utterly helpless.

Through the ragged window frame he went, vaulting through the tooth-like shards in a ducking motion and hitting the floor at a roll and springing upright in the afternoon gloom. The Songwriter was crammed against the far wall, a weapon in his right hand, his mouth moving.

The weapon was a phone.

Calvary moved in, his weight on blessed solid ground now. His left fist pinned the man’s phone hand against the wall by the wrist, the blow cracking the slender bones and triggering the inevitable reflex that sent the fingers splaying and the handset spinning and skittering across the parquet floor. In almost the same movement he pivoted on his left foot so that his right knee drove into the Songwriter’s flank, hard bone biting into tender kidney.

The pain of such a blow was so intense that it incapacitated the victim by inducing astonishment almost more than anything else. Calvary knew this, having been on the receiving end more than once. The Songwriter bent on one knee over his damaged forearm, looking crazily like a third-rate lounge singer reaching the high point of his act. Using all the force he could generate from his hip, Calvary pistoned his heel against the bent knee. The man howled and bounced splay-legged off the wall, cracking his head.

Calvary took a step back and stood, arms hanging loose, allowing himself to breathe.

The Songwriter sat against the wall, half sighing, half moaning, lids jerking over flicking eyes. He was tall and slightly built in a modest pale blue suit, a dark Rorschach blot staining the fabric between the stretched thighs. His shoes, the ones that had driven Calvary through the window and stamped on his fingers on the fire escape, were soft leather loafers, not the hobnailed boots they’d felt like at the time.

The Songwriter could hardly have chosen his footwear that morning expecting someone to attack him.

Priorities. Calvary glanced at the phone on the floor a few feet away. The screen was blank, dead. No connection. Either he hadn’t got through to whomever he’d been calling or they’d been cut off. Calvary watched the man, the dropped marionette, slumped against the wall. He watched for signs that the man was bluffing: tension in the upper limbs in preparation for a grab for a hidden gun, perhaps a .22 pistol in the sock, or a honed shiv in a holster up the sleeve.

Nothing. Just a fluttering at the eyes, a creature on the cusp of consciousness. While the ammonia stink of his humiliation rose from his crotch.

*

Calvary picked his way across the detritus of the flat. There was damage, a lot of it. Unnecessary wreckage. He should have heard the man coming. He’d been expecting him and, God knew, he’d had more than enough time to prepare. But the photo had pinned him like a butterfly on a collector’s board, and even if he had registered the footfalls on the stairs he probably wouldn’t have been able to move any more quickly.

He found the photo face down under a smashed coffee table, its glass face splintered. He’d been staring at it when the Songwriter had come through the door with amazing speed and hurled a vase at him, insignificant as a weapon but enough to make Calvary recoil and lose a precious second. The battering of the man’s fists and feet had driven him in surprise towards the window. The spinning kick to the chest had sent him through it.

Stepping back over to the Songwriter he gazed at the photo. The boy and the girl were perhaps ten and seven. Both had their father’s deep black, almost purple hair, his thin face, and probably his tawny skin, though right now his face was the colour of putty.

The Songwriter – whose real name was Abubakar Al-Haroun, and whose real profession was not writing lyrics but recruiting young men and women to build and detonate bombs – tilted his head back so that Calvary saw the bloodshot crescents of his eyes.

Calvary gripped the frame of the photo, melding the image of the children on to his retinas.

No illusions. No running away.

He dropped the picture, crouched, and laid a hand on either side of the man’s face. At the last, before the crack, the faintly smiling lips were moving, he supposed in prayer.

*

The north London street stretched ahead, suburban and dull, its terraced houses supporting one another wearily up a sluggish slope. Wads of early spring blossoms like discarded rags broke up the evenness of the pavement and clumped in the gutters.

Llewellyn fell into step beside him. Calvary picked up his pace so that the other man was left trailing for a moment.

‘He got one past you, then.’

Llewellyn was only an inch shorter than Calvary but his narrow shoulders and air of turning inward upon himself made him seem far smaller. Above his rumpled, cheerful Celtic face his hair was thick and startlingly bouffant.

Calvary kept walking. He knew Llewellyn meant the swelling lip. The rest of the bruises he’d been able to conceal with gloves and scarf.

He said: ‘Your intelligence was below par. He was a fighter. Unit 777 or something.’ The special operations outfit of the Egyptian Army.

‘It’s possible.’ Llewellyn was actually beaming. ‘Beside the point, now, though.’ He’d found his stride and was matching Calvary.

After a beat he said: ‘Bit of a mess back there, it would appear.’

‘Nothing you won’t be able to handle.’

Calvary had phoned Llewellyn once he’d put several blocks between him and the Songwriter’s flat, which was in a quiet residential district on the far north-western fringes of the city. The rendezvous was set up for a few miles away. Calvary had taken the Tube, knowing that by the time he arrived at the meeting point Llewellyn’s crew would already be swarming over the flat, removing every trace of Calvary’s DNA.

Do the fire escape, too, he’d said on the phone. Llewellyn had reproached him with silence.

Wanting to be alone, Calvary turned down a side road, trying to shake Llewellyn off. It didn’t work, of course. In a moment Llewellyn murmured: ‘There’s another job.’

‘No.’

‘I know it’s a bit soon. Sooner than it’s ever been before. But it’s really –’

‘No. I mean, no. I’m not doing it.’ At last Calvary stopped, half turned to the smaller man. ‘Not now, not later. I’m finished.’

In the Songwriter’s flat, after the heaves had died away and there was no more sourness to be ejected from his belly and his throat, he’d stood gripping the rim of the sink and stared at himself in the spattered glass. Fair hair darkened by sweat and matted to his forehead, eyes muddy, stubble like buckshot. Thirty was a milestone he’d left behind him. Forty was, if not quite on the horizon, then no longer the imaginary, fantastical notion it had been ten years earlier.

Enough, he’d thought. Not just thought; decided.

Llewellyn was watching his eyes. After a moment he clapped Calvary on the shoulder and shook his head, grinning. ‘My manners. Look. Drinks and dinner, on me. Or if you’d prefer to get some rest first –’

Calvary stood where he was, resisting Llewellyn’s attempt to tug him along. ‘You’re not listening, Llewellyn. I’m out. I’ve had enough. I’ve done enough. This isn’t some knee-jerk response, something I’ll get over once I’ve had a few pints. No more.’ He turned, began walking back down the hill.

Behind him Llewellyn didn’t call out, didn’t run after him – he never ran – and Calvary assumed he was standing there watching him walk away, trying to think of the right words before he disappeared out of earshot.

Calvary’s phone buzzed and he fished it out of his pocket. A text message, from Llewellyn.

Except there was no message, just a photograph.

In it, Calvary, his face clearly distinguishable in profile despite the relatively low resolution, was emerging through the front door of the block of flats he’d vacated an hour earlier. The name of the block, Victory Gardens, was clearly displayed over the entrance.

He’d disabled the CCTV cameras outside the block, so the picture hadn’t been taken by them.

He hadn’t been aware that he’d stopped walking until he heard Llewellyn’s voice at his side.

‘So you see, Martin,’ he said gently, ‘it isn’t quite as simple as that.’

TWO

The branches flailed at him, competing with the squalls of rain that managed to slip between the trees. Calvary ignored them. His breath sawed and his thighs burned. The pounding his feet were taking from the knotty, stony floor of the woods would raise blisters. A year earlier, six months, there would have been none of this after only eight miles. He’d been letting himself slide.

The forest lay on a ridge to the northeast of the city, a swathe of ancient woodland within walking distance of the flat where Calvary lived, alone. The soil under his feet was said to be riddled with bodies, victims of the East End gangs. Calvary couldn’t say he felt at home in the forest, quite; but he didn’t feel like an interloper there either.

His watch, a sports model, said it was five in the afternoon. The flight was at six tomorrow morning. Plenty of time to force himself through another few circuits, scald himself in the shower, exhaust himself before dropping into a sodden slumber. Do anything but think.

He drove himself deep into the gloom.

*

Llewellyn had turned the tablet computer round to show Calvary.

‘Sir Ivor Gaines.’

They were at a corner table in a tiny restaurant a few miles into the Berkshire countryside, west of the city. Calvary had never been there before but he assumed it was one used regularly by the Chapel for meetings such as this one. He assumed it had discreet, well-compensated staff and bug-free walls.

One other table was occupied, by a young couple who were so engrossed in each other they barely spoke. Llewellyn himself had said little while he’d driven. Calvary had kept completely silent, staring out the window.

‘Age seventy-three. Former FCO, retired seven years ago. Career diplomat. Served in Hong Kong and Indonesia, and closer to home in Vienna, Prague and Berlin.’

Llewellyn had ordered his usual Scotch and soda. He took a hearty swig. Despite himself, Calvary glanced down at the image on the screen. The picture was a sharp one, taken with a decent camera.  Its subject seemed unaware he was being snapped. He looked younger than his years, small and molish and with sparse hair combed over his pate in the manner of a middle-aged rather than an elderly man. To Calvary he resembled an older Philip Larkin.

Calvary drew a breath, grappled his feelings – towards Llewellyn, towards the situation he was in – until they were secured, then stowed them. Forced himself to concentrate.

He said, ‘Spook?’

‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? Diplomat of his generation, posted to those particular fields. But no, surprisingly SIS never managed to recruit him. They tried, of course. Several times. He was never interested.’ Llewellyn sipped some more whisky. ‘Bit of a lefty, apparently.’

‘That’s odd, in a diplomat.’

‘It’s more common than you might realise. People spend time in the host culture, interacting with the other side, sometimes they go native.’ He raised his eyebrows as the food arrived. ‘You really ought to eat something.’

Calvary ignored him. ‘How left wing was he?’

Llewellyn jabbed his fork at Calvary in delight. ‘Exactly. You’ve got it.’ For a moment he seemed to be congratulating himself silently. ‘So left wing that, during his time in Berlin in the late seventies, Gaines was suspected of liaising with the KGB. Nothing too drastic, a few low-level documents that got leaked. And nothing that could be pinned on him. They tried the usual traps – feeding him false information to see if it made it across to the other side – but he was too good to fall for those. And he was a bloody good diplomat, so they were disinclined to sack him. They decided to keep him in place and watch what happened.’

Llewellyn gave his lamb shank some attention, then went on. ‘He was in Prague nearly a decade later, just before the fall of the Wall. Ten more years of unblemished service as far as we know. Then, one of SIS’s most highly placed agents within the StB, the Czechoslovakian secret police, fell under a train. Murdered, of course. Again, there was no proof, but he’d been an old friend and colleague of Gaines’s.’

Llewellyn was becoming more animated now, starting to talk before finishing a mouthful. Calvary moved his chair back, pointedly, but Llewellyn didn’t seem to notice. Not for the first time the man’s curved face, the prominent chin and the peak of hair, made Calvary think of Punch.

‘Here’s the clincher. An old StB officer admitted last year that Gaines was the one who’d tipped them off about our agent. The StB chappie refused to go on the record, mentioned it out of the blue in a conversation with an SIS man in Prague who used him as an occasional source of information. But it caused quite a fuss, as you might imagine. Two days later the old StB fellow was dead. Heart attack.’ He lifted his shoulders, meaning: draw your own conclusions.

‘Gaines is living in Prague now. Loved it so much he retired there.’

‘Not Moscow.’

‘Good God, no.’ Llewellyn chortled. ‘Very few of those secret flagwavers for Mother Russia could actually stand living in the bloody place. Kim Philby did, but that was hardly by choice. Also, Gaines married a Czech woman, so he had ties there. She died.’ He signalled for another Scotch.

Calvary said: ‘You want me to hit him.’

Llewellyn’s eyes twinkled.

Calvary breathed deeply though his nose. ‘Why go after him now? More than twenty years later? Even in the light of the new information this StB man provided?’

‘Justice? The notion that it applies to everybody, regardless of age or of how long has passed in between?’ Llewellyn was watching him in amusement, toying with him.

Calvary didn’t bother answering. The Chapel had never been interested in justice or any such higher concept. Killing Gaines would have to address some issue to do with realpolitik, or they wouldn’t be involved, and Calvary and Llewellyn wouldn’t be sitting here.

Llewellyn let it go. ‘Fair enough. Our Sir Ivor hasn’t stuck to tending roses in his retirement. He’s become something of an advocate for the current Russian regime. All under the guise of cementing friendship between Moscow and the West. We need to stand together against the global terrorist threat. Blah blah. But the after-dinner talks he gives, the articles he writes for local newspapers, are all fawningly pro-Kremlin.’

‘Even so. He’s hardly a huge threat to British interests, surely. Or even any threat.’

‘True.’ Llewellyn tapped the screen of the computer. ‘But I’ll show you why it matters.’ He turned the tablet towards Calvary again.

This time he recognised the face. Not just the face, but the actual picture. There had been a few days, the year before last, when it had been inescapable. Every broadsheet, every tabloid, every TV screen had given it prominence. The narrow, wolfish face, the hair receded to a widow’s peak, the eyes those of both hunter and hunted.

Peter, or Pyotr, Grechko. Defector from the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, the KGB, in the dying months of the Cold War. Invited back into the Kremlin fold in 2000, an invitation which he very publicly turned down. Stabbed to death with a stiletto on the Albert Bridge two years ago.

‘The final straw.’ Llewellyn’s voice had gone quiet. ‘It’s time we sent the Kremlin a message.’

*

Calvary had been among the first to check in and board, and managed to secure himself a window seat. His sole piece of luggage, a holdall, stowed under the seat in front of him, he stared out at the runway while the plane began its reluctant turn, the rain blurring the orange light.

He’d wanted to go the previous evening, straight after the meeting with Llewellyn, but he’d needed a night’s sleep. Even when the jobs didn’t involve intense physical exertion as this one had, he felt utterly drained afterwards, unable to function for a day or two. He felt clean, clearheaded, after the run the previous afternoon.

Less than twelve hours, and he’d be free. Assuming Llewellyn was telling the truth.

*

He’d first met Dafydd Llewellyn on a summer’s day nearly five years earlier. Six weeks after… it had happened.

Calvary had stepped off the plane, a civilian jet from Turkey that had taken him on the second leg of his journey home, and in the customs channel he’d been intercepted smoothly by two men whom, absurdly, he’d for instant taken to be plainclothes military police. They sat him in a box of a room which smelled of the disinfectant that had been used to clear away the stink of fear-induced sweat.

After a couple of minutes the small man came in, his grin bisecting his long face. He offered Calvary coffee. His voice was beautifully modulated, the tongue lingering on the Ls and prolonging the consonants at the ends of the words.

Llewellyn came straight to the point. ‘Mr Calvary, I would like to offer you a job.’

A talent spotter in the Army – Calvary didn’t know if it was somebody in his own regiment, and Llewellyn wasn’t saying – had apparently noticed Calvary and forwarded his name to Llewellyn. Llewellyn was fully aware of what had happened six weeks earlier, and why Calvary was leaving the Army. Calvary found the fact that he still wanted to hire him, and for this particular type of work, supremely ironic.

So Calvary had come to work for the Chapel. He had never met anybody else from the Chapel but Llewellyn. He had no idea if it had offices anywhere, whether it was a subdivision of SIS or an entirely separate agency.

He knew precisely three things about the Chapel. Its existence was unknown to all but a handful of senior people in government, perhaps less than a handful. It paid on a commission basis, and very generously.

And its sole remit was the permanent elimination of enemies of the State.

*

‘We know who did it. Know, beyond the shade of a doubt, who killed Grechko. But there’s nothing we can do about it. The Kremlin refuses to let us extradite the bugger, and that’s that.’

Llewellyn had finished his lamb and was starting on a crème brulee.

‘But enough’s enough. It was murder, and it was done so blatantly that it could only have been meant to cock a snook at us. Grechko was British, and he was murdered on British soil. We need to let them know we won’t let this one go.’

‘Gaines isn’t Russian, though. And he’s in Prague.’

Llewellyn flipped a hand. ‘The match doesn’t have to be exact. There are no high-profile Brits in Moscow who’ve recently taken Russian citizenship and are agitating against the brutalities of the British state. That’s because we don’t arrest our captains of industry or murder our journalists.’

Calvary let that pass without comment.

Llewellyn went on. ‘So: A known Cold War traitor, now a vocal fanboy for the Kremlin regime, gets hit. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. But it mustn’t look like an accident either. They need to know that we know they understand exactly what it is. An assassination.’

Calvary had agreed to a glass of tap water. He drained it, steadily, watching Llewellyn over the rim.

Llewellyn laid down his spoon with a sigh and leant back.

‘Now. Let’s talk about you, Martin.’

‘There’s nothing to say.’

‘Oh, but there is. Plenty.’ He dabbed his lips. ‘Six jobs, you’ve done. You’re baulking earlier than most.’

‘What?’

‘Baulking. Everybody does, sooner or later. Unless they’re complete psychopaths, but we try not to hire those. Try to screen them out at the beginning.’

Calvary waited.

‘Oh, Martin, come on. Killing people isn’t a long-term career option. Not for a normal person. You had your reasons for taking on this work, and I know what they were, but you’ve reached the point – as I say, the point everyone reaches eventually – where you can’t go on. It isn’t a wobble, it isn’t something you can grit your teeth and get over. You said something like that back there on the street. No. You want out, for good.’ He hunched forward suddenly. Calvary saw something gristly stuck between his incisors. ‘He pleaded, did he? On behalf of his wife? His children?’

Hating Llewellyn as he’d never believed he could hate anybody, Calvary said: ‘I don’t have to say anything to you about my reasons.’

‘No, you certainly don’t.’ The gentleness was back, slipping in like silk. ‘Look, it’s a rotten situation you’re in. I do appreciate that. You’re a superb operative, one we can’t let go without getting our money’s worth. But you’re almost out. One more job, and you will be. And it’s the most significant job of all, the most useful to your country. Not that I expect you to care about that, but it’s the truth.’

‘If I don’t –’

‘If you don’t’ – the steel cut through the silk – ‘if you refuse, or agree and then go renegade, Scotland Yard will be sent the photos the Chapel has of you leaving Abubakar Al-Haroun’s flat. They’ll find him there in all his stiffening glory, and your spoor will be all around for their lab rats to snuffle up. And you’ll be subject to one of the biggest manhunts of the decade. If, when, they catch you, you won’t be able to take refuge in the defence that you were just following the Chapel’s orders, because we don’t exist. I don’t exist. You and I never met. You’ll be locked up in maximum security for the rest of your life, for your own protection because you’ll be the target of a fatwa, having assassinated one of the most valuable recruiters Islamist terrorism had in Western Europe.’

From the way he raised a warning but friendly finger, Calvary knew a waiter had been approaching and had been put off. Llewellyn steepled his fingers and rested his long chin on the tips.

He said, sadly: ‘And I’m afraid the same applies if you fail.’

*

A northeasterly storm had slowed the flight and it took close to two and a half hours. By the halfway point, Calvary was managing to think more about the job itself than about Llewellyn. Fuelled by coffee, he absorbed the details of the street map in the Prague guidebook he’d bought at Gatwick, specifically the area surrounding the flat where Gaines lived. He didn’t get the same feel for the district as he would actually walking the streets, but you could never be too prepared. At the same time he went over what Llewellyn had told him about Gaines’s daily routine. Clearly the man had been under surveillance for some time.

And clearly he was a man of habit. The eight-thirty a.m. walk to the local supermarket for the newspaper was followed by a trip to the bakery a few blocks away. Gaines would disappear back into his flat until late afternoon or early evening, when he’d emerge again and catch a series of trams to various places of interest, chiefly museums and libraries. If he was near the river he’d sometimes take supper overlooking the water, followed by a lengthy walk criss-crossing the bridges. Most of his evenings were spent alone. The rest were taken up with formal dinners when he was sometimes invited to speak. He’d lived on his own since the death of his wife three years earlier and had no children.

By the time he disembarked and strode through the customs channel at Prague’s Ruzyne Airport, Calvary had worked out how he was going to do it.

THREE

‘Two years at most, Darya Yaroslavovna. Then you’ll have to start hauling your arse outside.’

Krupina flipped a hand, sending eddies through the fug. ‘The way you go on, these will have killed me by then anyway.’ She favoured Belomorkanal cigarettes, Stalin-era stalwarts. Couldn’t get on with the local Czech brands or even the American imports she saw everywhere.

Tamarkin had been referring to the proposed ban on indoor workplace smoking in the Czech Republic, scheduled to come into force in a couple of years’ time. She peered at him where he was lounging in the doorway, tie loosened and top button undone. She sometimes wondered if permitting such familiarity in her staff was wise.

The offices were on the third floor of a run-down suite a few streets away from Wenceslas Square, the shabbiness offset by the favourable location. There was no company title above the buzzer in the street, nor any logo on the glass door on the third floor apart from the ghost of a stencil that once announced the name of a State law firm. Beyond the glass door were a tiny lobby with an empty reception desk, a shared open plan area where Tamarkin and his four colleagues worked, and the inner sanctum, Krupina’s own office.

Her desk and shelves were crammed with so much paper the room looked like a throwback to the pre-digital age. A four-year-old desktop computer was the only concession to modernity. Balanced  atop a mound of yellowing documents and newspaper clippings was a tarnished ashtray riddled with butts like a chunk of maggoty steak, the whole arrangement screaming fire hazard even to Krupina herself.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘Mail.’ He held up a sealed manila packet.

She sat up behind her desk. The office never received mail except in a diplomatic bag through the Embassy. When it came it was always significant, because it meant the message was too important to have been sent even by encrypted email.

He stood with the packet raised, enjoying the moment. She held up the back of her hand, waggled her fingers. Arrogant little ublyudok.

‘Give.’

She took it and reached for a paper knife. When he didn’t move from the doorway she said, without looking up, ‘Double liver sausage with tomato and onions on rye. Sauerkraut on the side, and for God’s sake leave off the dumplings.’

He muttered something as the door banged shut. It sounded like crone.

Krupina slit open the duct tape and wrestled with the packaging, her stubby fingers annoying her. The fat bubble-wrapped envelope contained a single sheet of A5 paper.

The letterhead was that of the President’s office.

Her habit was to scan a document rapidly, her vision blurring down the page, feeling for anything that might jump out. Subsequent careful reading would provide the topsoil, but the essence was in the first impression.

Her skim gave her one word, occurring twice and in capitals.

TALPA.

The Linnaean term for the genus mole.

Krupina reached over and slammed the window sash closed. She pulled her jacket lapels across her chest. Suddenly, it felt colder.

*

Darya Yaroslavovna Krupina had, in her opinion, been born at precisely the wrong time in history.

It was an opinion she kept to herself, because she feared boring people more than almost anything else. She’d been born too late to be able to make a significant contribution to her motherland’s place in history, but too early not to give a damn.

She’d been a late arrival, her conception taking place when her mother was forty-three, just after her parents had given up all hope. As was often the case. Her Leningrad childhood had been unremarkable, her university years by contrast sensational. She had graduated joint first in her class and her honours degree in political science had been celebrated, embarrassingly, by her father, a legless survivor of the Stalingrad campaign, with a cripplingly expensive bash for forty people at the Pribaltiyskaya, Leningrad’s most splendid hotel.

They had been heady times. Comrade Gorbachev had recently become Party secretary, his approach to leadership bringing a new self respect and confidence to the body politic. Darya was a Party member and her entry into the junior ranks of the KGB had been straightforward. By the autumn of 1989 she was twenty-six years old, a rising star in the field of human intelligence and with a degree of expertise in signals intelligence as well. The world was loosening up, the West was encouraging more dialogue with the socialist nations. Socialism had a foot in the door.

The next six months sent her reeling. Left her wandering in a void. One by one, Moscow’s allies capitulated, dropping all pretence of idealism and morality and damned guts. By the spring of 1990 the only holdouts were basket-case countries like Albania.

She stayed on. She was kept on, which was a sort of validation, she supposed. The KGB became the FSK, then split into the FSB, concerned with domestic security, and the SVR, the foreign operations agency. Boris Yeltsin’s star waxed and waned. Darya Krupina did her job faithfully, switching her attention to the nouveau riche gangster scum of Moscow and St Petersburg (the name sounded so wrong to her, compared with Leningrad) and gathering enough evidence on some of them to have the bloodsucking ghouls put away for life.

At the end of the decade Yeltsin stood down. The new president changed everything. It wasn’t quite like the Gorbachev days. The sense of purpose was less well defined. And she was thirty-seven, not twenty-two. Ageing leached zest from one’s life, there was no avoiding it.

Still, there was much to be celebrated about the new direction. Mother Russia was no longer ruled by a buffoon. She had oil, and gas. Lots of gas. The West, Europe especially, was nervous. Not scared pantsless, but on edge.

Krupina’s father had died at the age of eighty seven, six years earlier. On the mattress under the summer heat in the Petersburg apartment, he’d pulled his only daughter’s lank greying head close and whispered, ‘Look, Dascha.’ And he’d yanked up his pyjama legs and pointed at the fishbelly-pallid scars of his leg stumps and hissed: ‘The scars of a life lived well. If you can do this for your country, you can die having lived.’

He’d punctuated the melodrama with a cackle which, over the years, Darya Krupina had analysed for traces of bitterness. She’d concluded that there were none, that Yaroslav Petrovich Krupin had been genuinely proud to concede his legs for the glory of Russia.

And what had she done, Darya Yaroslavovna Krupina? Apart from graduating like a supernova in 1985, more than a quarter century ago, in another world? After eight years’ service in the FSB, she’d been transferred to the overseas arena, under the SVR. She’d carried out one major job in Western Europe. For her own protection, she was told, she’d subsequently been farmed out to the SVR’s clandestine – unofficial, illegal, non-embassy – desk, in Prague, the capital of a country that had once been one of Soviet Russia’s most robust allies but was now a member of the enemy alliance. She was, oh joy of joys, the head of that desk. There was no Embassy support. The Embassy FSB and SVR staff despised her, tried to pretend she and her people didn’t exist. She was left with the crappy jobs, the nasty ones, the operations that the Kremlin could deny if they went wrong.

But she had her little crew. She had her boys, Gleb and Arkady, and young Yevgenia, and Lev and Oleg, the two older stalwarts whom she couldn’t exactly call boys but for whom she felt great affection nonetheless. She had an office of her own, and cigarettes. If purpose was missing from her life, had she any right to complain?

But purpose had just landed on her lap.

*

She fingered the letter, probing the expensive paper as though it were supple leather whose texture was to be savoured. She reread the words.

TALPA. The Mole. The British mole, the one they’d never been able to find. Deep in the heart of the Kremlin. In its soul. So deep that its influence had directed the course of history in the last twenty years.

The Kremlin’s priority target.

And somebody here in Prague knew who it was.

Krupina looked across at the ikon nailed to the wall. She was an unbeliever but her mother had been devout, discreetly so until her death in 1978 when she’d pressed the tacky crucifix into the teenage Darya’s palm and rasped: ‘Rebirth.’

Krupina lit a fresh cigarette and bounced a stream of smoke off the grey, grimy window. Forty nine years old, and deathbed life lessons from her parents all of a sudden meant something.

She picked up her mobile phone, took a moment to work out the buttons.

He answered on the second ring. ‘Tamarkin.’

‘Get in here.’

‘I’m out buying your sandwich –’

‘Just get back in here, for Christ’s sake.’

*

Bartos Blažek’s nieces called him Uncle K without knowing why. Certain family members, and people of his inner circle who weren’t blood, called him the Kodiak. It was his size, of course, but also his beariness. He liked the idea. Hugeness, strength, cuddliness and power, combined. And, yes, he was hairy. Not so much on his head, any more. But his arms, his chest and back and legs, were pelted. He was proud.

Magda had, as usual, organised matters with the skill of the born hostess. The twins squealed and squirmed between the legs of tables and adult guests, dirtying their party clothes within minutes. The handful of school friends giggled, their initial shyness loosening. Their parents either remained frozen to the walls in awe or mingled, chattering too blatantly. Nobody approached Bartos apart from Magda, who squeezed close to him after the drinks had started flowing, rubbing her hip against his. He smiled down at her – she was tall, at five ten, but half a foot shorter than him – and planted a kiss on the side of her mouth.

‘Excellent.’

He doubled over as Karel, the elder of the twins by ten minutes, barrelled headfirst into his gut. Helena dashed to join in, and held her hands up to her father’s face, trying to get the fingers right.

‘No, that’s nine. Yes – eight’s right. Eight years old.’

Bartos knuckled his son’s head and ruffled his daughter’s. He squatted and squeezed each of the twins’ faces against one of his stubbled cheeks. They shrieked and recoiled.

Over their black heads he gazed at his firstborn son, Janos, leaning against the wall across the room. Dressed in one of his trademark skinny Italian suits, he was laughing from the side of his mouth at some inanity his current girlfriend was spewing into his right ear. In his left hand he clasped a balloon of brandy. Bartos thought he could see white grains on the boy’s left nostril.

His eyes were angled across the room, raised halfway.

Bartos turned his head, following Janos’s sightline.

Janos was staring at Magda’s breasts.

Bartos looked back at Janos and at the same instant Janos shifted his gaze to Bartos crouching at his children. For a second Janos’s eyes flickered with primitive embarrassment. With guilt. Then, a flicker of fear kindled into a blaze.

He raised his glass in Bartos’s direction and bared his teeth in what Bartos had heard the Americans call a shit-eating grin.

Bartos watched him. Didn’t smile.

Someone was tapping at his shoulder and he brushed at it. Magda’s voice roused him and he turned his head. She handed him the phone.

He listened.

‘On my way,’ he said.

Bartos clasped his twins close, stood and murmured in his wife’s ear, felt her nod as he pulled her to him and kissed her hair. Then he left, not looking back. He felt Janos’s terror cast after him like a fishing net.

*

The young man – boy, really – was trussed to a flimsy wooden chair at the back of the warehouse, between the standing shapes of two of Bartos’s men. The falling evening light through the window picked out his juddering silhouette. Bartos could smell the boy’s shit from the door.

As Bartos stepped forward a high jabbering started up. One of his men put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, not roughly. Close up, Bartos could see he’d been slapped around a little: lip scabbed, one eye swollen closed.

Bartos dropped to his haunches, one knee cracking, in front of the boy. The jabbering had segued into a low keening.

‘What’s your name, son?’

The boy began to blubber and one of the men backhanded him across the temple, the other grabbing the chair before it could tip over. Bartos frowned and shook his head at the man.

‘What’s your name?’

‘K-k-k-k –’

‘A little louder?’

‘K-Kaspar. Sir.’

‘I’m Bartos, Kaspar. You seem a nice enough guy. Sorry to meet you in these circumstances.’

Bartos frowned at the ground for a moment, then looked up at the boy. ‘You know why you’re here, of course.’

The nods came rapidly, guilt eager to confess itself.

‘You tried to take something that didn’t belong to you.’

‘Yes.’

‘A pickpocket. Do you do this for a living?’

The boy, Kaspar, tried to find saliva, his throat clicking.

‘I assume you don’t, because you were quite poor at it. Unlucky for you that you chose one of my people.’

Pavel had phoned him just after breakfast. Somebody had tried to lift his wallet and he’d noticed. The would-be thief had raced off. Pavel had sent two men in pursuit.

‘Call me when,’ Bartos had said before ringing off. An attempted crime against one of his middle-echelon men was something he needed to respond to himself. It implied an attack on him personally.

Bartos duckwalked forwards until his nose was under the boy’s.

‘So, if you’re not a professional pickpocket... why did you do it? Who hired you?’

He flinched from the bubble that swelled at one nostril. The boy was panting.

‘Nobody. I’m out of work, needed money. I tried my hand. I was no good.’

‘Nobody put you up to it.’

‘No.’

The boy was in confessional mode, would shop anybody. Bartos was sure of it. Was sure he was telling the truth.

He sat back on his heels. ‘In that case, I’m left with a problem. What do I do with you?’

Kaspar began to rock in the chair, chattering again. Bartos held up a hand. To his credit, the boy shut up at once.

Bartos stood.

‘I’m hated by many people. But even my worst enemies will concede that I’m nothing if not fair.’

He fished in the hip pocket of his trousers and came up with a koruna piece which he balanced on his thumb tip, letting the light play off the edge.

‘Fairness requires an even chance. So. I spin this coin. You call it. If you win, you walk. No conditions, no harm done, other than a pair of shitty pants. If you lose, I do what I have to.’

The nodding was hectic now, almost mechanical. Bartos wondered whether he himself would view fifty-fifty odds with such enthusiasm.

He flipped the coin high and clapped his hand over his wrist.

The boy stopped shaking. Beside him both men were stone.

‘Call, it, Kaspar.’

‘Tails,’ he blurted.

With a conjuror’s flourish Bartos removed his covering hand, angling his wrist so his two men could peer at the coin. Kaspar let out a whimper. His feet began to jitter and bounce.

‘Well, well.’ Bartos slipped the coin back in his pocket. ‘You’re in luck.’

Behind him the boy’s sobs were indistinguishable from his laughter. Bartos headed for the door, listening to the mutters of his men as they began to unleash their prisoner.

Bartos stopped.

The image of Janos, his firstborn son, flashed back. Staring. Staring at his stepmother, Magda. The drool virtually spooling from his slack lower lip.

Bartos squeezed his eyes tight.

In four steps he was back at the boy, hands hanging open at his side, looking down. The face was weeping and grinning up at him in fawning thanks. After a moment, the first flicker of doubt passed across the eyes. Lodged there.

‘Sorry, Kaspar.’ Bartos moved in, stepping to the side of the boy as his man moved back, shoving one bear paw under the boy’s chin and reaching with the other one across the face from the top so that his fingertips thrust into the boy’s mouth, gripping the upper and lower lips. He kept his nails long, and he felt them bite through the flesh as the boy’s scream echoed through the rafters.

‘It’s been one of those days.’

Bracing himself, feet and shoulders, he pulled his hands apart and peeled the boy’s lips away from his jaws, not stopping when the natural anatomical resistance was met. The upper lip tore off, the lower extending itself down the chin.

The screams went on until Bartos altered his grip to hook his fingers behind the teeth, and prised the lower jaw off the boy’s face.

FOUR

Calvary had chosen a hotel two blocks away from Gaines’s flat. He checked just after eleven in the morning, having taken a tram from the airport and then a Metro train to the northeastern suburbs. The Prague Metro system was a relatively straightforward one and he navigated it with ease. Prague was chilly, the April wind rawer than it had been in London. Calvary was wearing a pullover and jacket which threatened not to be enough.

The hotel was a three-star affair, part of a chain and somewhere he was less likely to be remembered than a family-run bed and breakfast. Calvary slung the holdall in a cupboard, splashed water on his face, and went for a walk.

In other circumstances he would have cased Gaines’s street, looking for potential approach and escape routes, access points. But he wasn’t intending to break in and carry out the hit in the man’s flat. He knew somebody, either SIS or Llewellyn’s minions, had had Gaines under surveillance, and more than likely still did so. Calvary didn’t intend to get caught on camera again, leaving the scene of the killing. Instead he turned and strode in the direction of the city centre, armed with his map.

Calvary wandered for an hour, absorbing the atmosphere of the city, the rhythm of its streets. He didn’t consider himself to be much of a romantic but the city had a distinct, heady aroma that made him think of dense forests. He bought two sausages – jiternice, a local specialty – and a bottle of water from a street kiosk, and ate them on the way back to the hotel.

*

Back at the room he kicked off his boots and lay supine on the bed, hands behind his head. He’d rested well the night before, was killing time more than anything else.

Llewellyn. The man’s face was imprinted in the floral pattern of the dark ceiling, in the skin at the back of Calvary’s eyelids when he closed them. He’d never been a mentor to Calvary, quite. Calvary had been too old for that sort of thing by the time he’d met him. But Llewellyn had offered him salvation of a sort, a chance to earn back his self-respect. No, not quite that. To achieve redemption. Absolution.

Except it hadn’t worked out like that.

The first hit he’d carried out ruthlessly, using a handgun, a SIG-Sauer P226. The target was a high-ranking officer in a dissident Irish Republican outfit who’d been amnestied under some accord or other. The amnesty was a smokescreen, strictly for public consumption. The Chapel had other plans. Calvary had seen photographs of the man’s handiwork. Six innocent people gunned down, three of them children under twelve.

He hadn’t flinched, had emptied half the clip into the astonished face, obliterating it. He was accelerating away almost before the body caromed off the wall of the terraced house. In the drive to Belfast’s airport, on the flight back across the Irish Sea, Calvary had felt nothing. No disgust, no fear, but no exhilaration either. No sense of sins assuaged.

Never mind, he’d told himself. It would take time. He’d accepted a second job, and a third. Llewellyn always took pains to remind him that he could turn down any job, on any grounds – moral, practical – he liked, and no hard feelings would be nurtured. But he’d never felt the need to refuse.

His first twinge of misgiving came with number four.

It was the first hit he’d carried out on continental Europe. Florim Zagreda was a truly vile human being, a trafficker in hard drugs and women – Zagreda’s definition of women included girls as young as eight – who had eluded conviction once too often, thanks to a combination of sharp legal representation and systematic intimidation of witnesses. He was an international problem, but his involvement in the Albanian organised crime networks of East London sealed his fate as far as the Chapel was concerned.

Calvary’s problem hadn’t been with removing Zagreda from the human pool. It had been with the way the hit had played out. Zagreda was at an arms fair in Hamburg, brazenly flaunting his recent acquittal on some charge or another. He normally moved about with a retinue of heavily-armed cronies, and was known always to wear a Kevlar vest in public. Neither of these measures protected him when he was lounging in his hotel bath at four a.m. after a night’s debauch, and Calvary appeared in his bathroom out of the closet he’d been hiding in since purloining the cleaning lady’s key card earlier that day. Before the bodyguards could run through from the bedroom Calvary tossed the most low-tech of improvised weapons, an old-fashioned battery-operated transistor radio, into the bath.

The crackle and scream were eardrum rending, the churning mix of water and blood and effluent like a shark attack. Zagreda didn’t die at once. Calvary was through the bathroom window, every inch of his escape route having been mapped out in advance, but although he couldn’t afford to waste time he stared back in fascination as the head thrashed, lips rolled back to reveal an impossibly huge rictus, and a claw hand grabbed at the air – at the very air – in desperation.

It had nothing to do with sorrow for a life lost. Zagreda deserved to die if anyone did. Nor did Calvary care particularly that the man had suffered. Again, on récolte ce qu’on a semé. No, what unsettled Calvary, left him with a gnawing in his gut all the way back to London and beyond, and through his sleeping as well as waking hours, was the last images of an organism clinging to life. Clawing at it, as though it had never had a right to anything else. Outraged at its being torn away.

Perhaps Zagreda deserved to lose his life. But did Calvary have the authority to take it?

*

Back at the restaurant, Llewellyn had said: In answer to your unasked question – how can you be sure I’m telling the truth when I say you’ll be left alone after this job – all I can say is, I give you my word. And whatever you think of me, you have to admit... I’ve never lied to you.

Llewellyn was right. He’d never lied to Calvary. And he was right about the other thing, too.

Killing Gaines would kill Calvary’s past. Finally.

Calvary felt grimy after his flight. In the shower a few minutes later he almost laughed out loud. He realised he hadn’t raised the matter of remuneration. Had no idea how much he was being paid for the Gaines hit, or even if he was being paid at all.

*

‘Rise and shine, boss.’

Krupina jerked her forehead off her wrist, squeezed her eyes tight against the dazzle. Through strands of lank fringe she saw a Tamarkin-shaped figure shoving a cup of tea across the desk at her.

His face came into slow focus. He looked cheery, eager even, with no trace of the practised cynicism that usually marred his good looks.

Yes, she had to admit that bit.

He’s twenty years younger than you, you old bat. Get a grip.

‘I wasn’t asleep.’ She was furious: at him for having caught her out, at herself for having been caught napping, literally.

‘Right. Whatever.’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘Lev and Arkady are in position. Oleg’s trying to find suitable vantage points round the back. They can’t agree. You know what they’re like.’ He bounced on the balls of his feet, simmering with energy. ‘Your call.’

God. She knuckled exhaustion from the corners of her eyes. She’d slept wretchedly the night before, the pain and the coughing shaking her awake every few minutes. At nearly fifty, she needed more than three hours’ staccato sleep a night. Deserved it.

No. She didn’t deserve anything of the sort. Not yet.

Krupina spun the mobile phone towards Tamarkin. ‘Get me Oleg. He’s good at this kind of thing.’

The digital display of the clock radio said it was 12.30 p.m. She didn’t believe it, till she glanced at the window and saw the early afternoon shadows lurking beyond the grime.

*

Tamarkin had been in favour of an immediate swoop, as soon as she’d told him. The impetuosity of youth. She’d considered it, an early morning assault, quick and hard. But this wasn’t Moscow. The neighbours wouldn’t meekly retreat behind their own doors, not wanting to get involved. They’d call the police at the very least. Also, Krupina considered the possibility that Gaines had some sort of bodyguard or watch detail. Sometimes British intelligence provided it for retired people of importance, as the FSB did for her country’s own grandees. An open confrontation with agents of the British state wouldn’t go down well, whatever the immediate outcome.

She’d favoured a few days’ initial surveillance, but tugging at her had been a sense that she was doing what she’d done all her career, all her life. Being overly cautious. And it would mean opportunity would escape her grasp yet again. This time, though, there’d be no recovering.

The message in the diplomatic bag had been unambiguous: Sir Ivor Gaines, British citizen and retired Foreign Office bigwig, knew the identity of the enemy mole, the British mole, within the Kremlin. The existence of TALPA had first been suspected in the mid-eighties, but after 1989 it had been largely forgotten about as more pressing concerns – the wrenching apart of the Empire – had come to the fore. After the Yeltsin victory in 1991 there’d been a feeling amongst some of the higher echelons that TALPA, if he or she existed, didn’t really matter. Britain was our ally, and bygones were bygones. TALPA would either throw in his (or her) lot with the Moscow body politic, or retire quietly back to London.

All that had changed on New Year’s Eve, 1999, when President Yeltsin stood down, the joking was over, and the motherland began the long climb back to self respect.

Her options were three. (Do nothing wasn’t one of them.) She could arrange an immediate abduction of Gaines, assuming he was at home. She could put tags on him and observe him for a few days, a week, on the principle that there was no rush, and a complete picture of his movements would help avoid any complications such as the snatch being observed by any British intelligence agents he might be in contact with. Or, and this was the compromise she settled on, a synthesis of her position and Tamarkin’s: she could grab Gaines later that day, after he emerged from his flat and once preliminary surveillance had made certain the field was clear.

She’d impressed upon Tamarkin and the others the importance of Gaines, and of taking him. But she hadn’t told them why. Need to know was a tried and tested policy.

As head of the ‘unofficial’ SVR team in Prague, Krupina had none of the luxuries of her counterparts based in the Embassy in Pod Kastany. None of the creature comforts, and none of the diplomatic protection either. If she or her team were found by the authorities to be operating illegally on Czech soil, specifically attempting to kidnap a British citizen, it would mean a catastrophic diplomatic embarrassment for her country, and no less dire consequences for her personally. Never mind her career; she would be thrown to the wolves, the legal wolves, and would rot either in a Prague jail or, more likely, one in Moscow after extradition. She would be regarded as something worse than a traitor: a traitor who had failed.

In such circumstances, death couldn’t come soon enough.

*

Oleg Ruzhovsky was her third-in-command, one down the pecking order from Gleb Tamarkin. He was too old to be a serious contender for career advancement, which was a pity, Krupina thought. A pity, and a relief. Oleg was perhaps the best espion she had ever met, a bluff Volgograd expatriate with a feel for surveillance that was partly in his nature, partly the product of years of meticulous honing.

Oleg’s rough voice had to compete against the traffic in the background, which seemed to be building up even at this hour.

‘There’s access up the fire escape at the back. No telling which room’s his bedroom, though. But there’s a light on somewhere, so he might be awake.’

‘I want you round the front. That’s where he’s likely to emerge, the front door. Put Lev or Arkady round the back.’

‘Understood, tovarischch.’ He used the word – comrade – without irony. Ruzhovsky was fifty-four and old school.

‘No publicity. None at all.’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Yes.’

She thought for a moment, then said, ‘And no guns.’

After a pause: ‘Agreed.’

The pause was because an SVR officer felt naked without a firearm, even if he didn’t use it.

Darya Krupina rung off, sat back in her chair and lit a Belomorkanal. She prepared to do what every covert agent in the world is expected to do, and which she had never got used to.

To wait.

*

The hunting knife had a six-inch blade and would never have been on open display in an airport shop in Britain. Calvary had spotted it in a window when he was making his way towards the exit. A lucky find.

It wasn’t the weapon he’d chosen, however. A close-quarters stabbing in a public place was always going to be difficult to get right, and a fatal thrust would be even harder to achieve with a blade of that length. Plus, there’d be blood, lots of it, and it would taint him as he tried to make his escape through the crowds.

He sat on the edge of the bed and unfurled his next purchase. A good quality men’s umbrella, ivory-handled, with a shaft some three feet long. Not cheap. Using the tip of the knife, he pared the nylon of the umbrella’s hood away from the steel spike at the top of the shaft, then carefully snapped the spokes off one by one at their roots on the sliding cylinder that opened the umbrella.

He used the knife to whittle the stumps into tiny barbs. Then he set to work on the spike itself, stropping the blade of the knife against the steel, honing the point to razor keenness. When he was satisfied, testing the tip against his thumb and drawing a bead of blood, he performed a few practice thrusts.

Up beneath the breastbone, through the abdominal wall and the diaphragm, the sheet of muscle separating chest from abdominal cavities. With luck he’d get the heart, but even if he didn’t, a slight jerk downwards would rip the ringlet of barbs through tissues and organs like a steel claw. If the target didn’t die immediately, if by some miracle the crowds stayed calm enough to summon medical help, and if by yet another stroke of luck he made it to hospital alive, there’d be nothing for the surgeons to work on. Lungs shredded and haemorrhaging, bowel and spleen leaking like a colander.

Calvary’s last acquisition at the airport had been a pack of gauze and tape. He padded the tip tightly and slipped the shaft carefully into the sleeve that had come with the umbrella. When the time came, a thrust would push the tip through the end of the sleeve to expose it. There’d be no need to draw the shaft like a sword from a scabbard.

One o’clock. Time to get into position. Carrying the sleeved umbrella with the tip pointing downwards, he left the room.

*

Bartos decided to put Janos in charge. It might seem an odd thing to do, while he was trying to decide what to do about his son and about the flagrant disrespect the boy had shown him. But Bartos believed in giving people he was angry with a chance.

He issued Janos his instructions, telling him to handpick his men. He saw the gratitude in his son’s eyes, the appreciation that he was being given autonomy. And the promise: I’ve pissed you off, and I won’t let you down.

When Janos had left, Bartos walked over to the bay window of his office and stared out across the wakening city to the south. As always, his eyes were immediately drawn to the grand silhouette of the Prazsky Hrad, the city’s main castle, soaring over the rooftops on the right.

Excitement always made him want to smoke, but he’d given up in order to get Magda and his physician off his back. Instead he bit into an apple. A poor substitute.

Bartos hated Russians. He hated them for what they had done to his country, ruling it like a colony for their own ends, trampling over its glorious culture in the name of their absurd ideology, coming in with tanks and guns to pacify the natives in 1968, the year of Bartos’s birth. He had hated Russians since the twenty-third of March, 1988. That was the date he’d received official confirmation that his application to join Státní bezpecnost, the secret police, had been rejected. No reasons were given, but he knew what they were. The Soviets, the Rusáks, the ones who vetted all applications, saw him as uncouth, a thug. By the time he’d made a success of himself, had forced his way to his current position, the Soviets were long gone. Gone as a significant force. But here and there they lingered, in person and in influence, like the stench of a latrine.

Today, in a few hours, he would have his revenge. He would snatch the Rusáks’ prize out from under their noses, send them squalling and blubbering in panic. About the target, the Englishman, he cared little. He’d had little to do with these people, saw them as neither a threat to be confronted nor potential allies to be cultivated. They came to his city in droves each year, drank at his bars, used his women, scored his drugs. They were customers like any other.

First, he would take the Englishman. Then he’d find out how much he was worth to the Rusáks, how badly they wanted him.

What they were willing to give in return.

FIVE

Calvary’s map told him there was a coffee shop on the corner of Gaines’s street. He slipped in through the side entrance, avoiding the street itself. It wasn’t crowded and there were booths available, but he chose a stool at a table facing the window. From this point he had a direct view, at an angle, of Gaines’s apartment block.

One thirty p.m. Calvary sipped coffee. He wore pullover and jacket, cargo trousers, running shoes. Dull colours, but he’d avoided the all-black look. It was too obvious. The umbrella shaft in its sleeve stood propped against the wall at his feet.

After half an hour a waitress – young, plain, tired-eyed – came over. He gave her his most winning smile, tried Russian: he was sorry, but he had no Czech. She warmed immediately, responded in kind. Went off to fill up his cup.

Calvary was fluent in Russian, a tongue he’d learned from his mother who had come to England from Moscow in the late seventies. She hadn’t defected, quite; the application her own parents had made for permission to emigrate had suddenly been granted to her after more than a decade of consistent refusal. It was probably something to do with a brief period of détente at the time in the run up to the SALT talks. His mother had met and married his father and gained permanent residence in Britain, and had brought Martin up with just enough respect for her own culture that he didn’t feel like a misfit among his peers. By the time he joined the forces at eighteen, the Russian side of his lineage wasn’t a drawback any longer.

The waitress came back with his refilled coffee cup and he took it gratefully. He was going to be there a while.

*

By two o’clock he’d identified one of them.

The middle-aged silver Audi up on the pavement hadn’t moved, even though there was a man in the driver’s seat. A head that turned every now and again towards the block where Gaines lived. There was nobody else in the car, as far as Calvary could see.

The car was on Calvary’s side of the road, parked facing the coffee shop and far enough back that the driver didn’t have to crane round to watch the entrance. The plates were those of the Czech Republic. SIS might use a car like this.

A street cleaner with elaborate equipment blasted the pavement with water, making two slow passes. Calvary though he looked genuine.

At three fifty he stiffened. A mousy man swaddled in a heavy coat emerged from the entrance. But a woman followed close behind and linked arms with him, and as they sauntered by Calvary saw the man was at least twenty-five years younger than Gaines. He forced his breathing under control. The lashings of caffeine were making him hypersensitive.

Four fifteen. He risked a trip to the lavatory, stretched, bounced on his toes, rolled his head on his neck. When he got back to his stool, where he’d riskily left the modified umbrella, he saw the watcher in the Audi was still there. Which meant Gaines probably hadn’t left either.

At five forty-two, as the shadows in the street stretched to breaking point, four people emerged from the doors, smiling and gesturing as though acknowledging that they’d reached the entrance together and now deferring to one another’s right to leave first. The second one was in his seventies, small and slightly stooped. Face round and closed in on itself beneath the brim of an old-fashioned trilby.

Gaines.

*

‘Visual,’ Arkady’s voice erupted in her ear through a blurt of static, and Krupina recoiled. She’d been hunched over the desk, head close to the teleconference device, but there had been silence for so long that the intrusion took her by surprise.

‘Subject turning right down Ostrovni Street. On foot and unaccompanied.’

Oleg’s voice came through: ‘I have him too.’ He was on foot, in the window of a department store several blocks up the road.

‘Hold off.’ This was Tamarkin, cruising off to the west in his Toyota, his role that of a floater, ready to move in as and when the net began to close and they needed assistance.

‘Thank you for that, Gleb,’ she muttered. ‘Keep your distance, all of you, at least one visual contact at all times. Oleg, you’re the principal at the moment. Arkady, follow in the car. Ditch it if you have to.’

After a moment Lev confirmed visual contact, having eased in from the back. She leaned back in the swivel chair.

‘All right. Oleg’s in charge now. Do us proud, people.’

She fired up a fresh smoke.

*

Llewellyn’s briefing had mentioned that although Gaines used the city’s extensive public transport network with ease and to great advantage, he was a walker who sometimes favoured his legs even when he had a long distance to travel. After fifteen minutes, when Gaines had passed several bus and tram stops, Calvary concluded the man had chosen today for a constitutional.

The late afternoon was chilly and crisp, the dimming sky smudged with cloud but clear for the most part. Modern architecture began to give way to the more venerable lines of the medieval Old Town. Calvary kept a distance of close to a block, closing in when the crowds grew thicker, dropping back when they slimmed down. Gaines had an odd gait, rapid with a slight lope. Calvary wondered if he’d been injured, or if he was nervous. From time to time the head turned and he caught the face in profile, the glasses thick and flashing. The mouth was small and pinched shut.

Gaines passed two Metro station entrances. Calvary was hoping he wouldn’t use the Metro. It could become difficult to track him, and he didn’t want to carry out the hit on one of the trains. The opportunities to make a quick exit would be limited.

The crowds were becoming more consistently dense as they moved into the heart of the Old Town. Calvary watched the man lope across a large, breathtakingly picturesque square, which he took to be the Old Town Square from what he remembered of his perusal of his guidebook. One edge was dominated by a pair of Gothic towers, the Týn Church. Across from this stood the Old Town Hall and its astronomical clock. Calvary decided the place deserved some exploring. Pity about the circumstances.

He made his way across the square, dodging piles of manure from the horses that drew the tourist-trap carriages, before he could lose Gaines.

That was when he spotted the two tags.

*

‘There’s someone else in the field.’

Krupina sat up again. It was a cliché, but her scalp crawled.

‘Tell me.’

A second’s silence, then Oleg’s voice came again. ‘One man. European, exact nationality difficult to be sure of. Thirties. Medium height, compact. Moves like a soldier.’

‘How do you know he’s in the field?’

‘He’s been behind the target for at least the last kilometre. That’s when I first noticed him, anyway. Could be longer. Using tradecraft, keeping back.’

European, exact nationality difficult to be sure of. That meant he was possibly British. It was as she’d feared.

‘He’s definitely tagging Gaines, not one of you?’

‘Almost certainly.’

Her fingers reached for the almost empty pack of coffin nails. ‘All right. Maximum discretion. One of you drop back if need be. You’re using a box?’ A box formation: two shadows behind the target and two in front, all moving in the same direction as the target.

‘Yes.’

‘Drop a spider on the target when you have a chance.’ The spider was the microtransmitter they favoured, a speck with leglike hooks that would cling to clothing. It transmitted location data via satellite up to a range of ten kilometres.

A slight pause. ‘Yes, tovarischch.’

Damn. Being a control freak. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to tread on your toes.’

‘No harm done.’

Krupina clasped her hands as if in prayer, absurd though that would be.

Don’t lose him. For the love of God.

*

The square heaved with gawking tourists in pairs and small groups, rushing waiters, hustlers pushing rip-off tours or taxi services. For a moment Calvary felt a flare of panic, thinking Gaines had slipped away. But there he was, disappearing down a narrow cobbled souvenir alley.

The first of the followers was on Calvary’s left, approximately parallel to him and twenty or so feet away. Short, hair in a brutal buzz cut, expression hewn from a mountain wall. Fifty, fifty-five years old. The second was a little further back on the right. Calvary had noticed him while sweeping his gaze behind him – it was a natural thing to do, with all there was to be marvelled at in a setting like this – and had confirmed his presence with a second, more subtle glance. This one was taller, slimmer. Late twenties, perhaps. Dressed in a hooded parka.

Calvary was well aware of the hazards of racial profiling. Not the political hazards, but the genuine mistakes that could be made when you pigeonholed someone on first sight into an ethnic or racial category. It could lead to complacency, which might have disastrous consequences. Nonetheless – of course there was a but – he identified the two men immediately, on instinct, as Russians.

In any case it didn’t matter. Whoever they were, they represented a hazard. They were tagging the man he intended to kill. If their ethnic background was surprising, if they didn’t appear to be the SIS or Chapel agents he’d been expecting, it was a detail, no more. At least for the time being.

It added a complication, because he was going to have to shake them off before he made his move. And that meant getting them out the way without losing track of his target, Gaines.

A lost-looking backpacker stepped into his path, map proffered like a sacrificial offering. He sidestepped smartly. The alley exiting the square was too narrow for more than three people to walk abreast in either direction, and Calvary allowed the squat pursuer – Squat – to enter first. Past the bobbing heads, Gaines’s trilby wove into and out of sight.

Gaines turned into a broader thoroughfare. The younger of the two pursuers, Parka, crossed the street and Calvary saw him moving parallel to them on the opposite side. It was as though he was trying to corral Gaines without Gaines’s even realising it.

Was it Calvary’s imagination or had Gaines picked up the pace a little? He was perhaps fifty yards ahead of Calvary, Squat between them, and there seemed to be an added urgency to his movement. Calvary saw him duck his head as though he was consulting his watch. Then he turned his head to the left, peering at the road as he walked, and Calvary understood. He was looking for a tram.

Squat appeared to notice it, too, and began to narrow the gap between him and Gaines. Gaines looked back, slowed, and stepped towards the kerb. A designated tram stopping point. Behind Calvary, he heard a bell sing through the jabber of people and traffic.

The tram, modern looking in sleek red and white, slid into position at the kerb with a hydraulic wheeze. Gaines joined the short queue stepping up between the sliding doors in the side.

Calvary strode straight past, almost barging Squat. For an instant he felt the man’s gaze at his back.

*

Krupina was doing what pacing she could in the confines of the office when Oleg’s voice came through.

‘I’m on board a tram with the target. The other party didn’t get on. Walked past.’

She thought about this. ‘Did he make you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Where’s he now?’

‘Can’t see him.’

She breathed slowly, through pursed lips. She didn’t like this.

‘How close are you to the target?’

‘Visual contact. Not close enough to drop a spider on him, if that’s what you mean.’

Krupina thought for a moment.

‘Arkady, where are you?’

‘On foot, on the other side of the road. Tram’s disappearing.’

Oleg was on his own with the target, then.

She heard him muttering in the background, in Czech. Then: ‘Tram’s heading for Nádraží Braník.’

‘Okay. He might not be going all the way. Gleb?’

‘Yes.’ Tamarkin. He was still in the car, the floater on standby.

‘Head for the terminus. It’s this side of the river. Be prepared to drive back along the route, in case he gets off earlier.’

‘Got you.’

Time for another Belomorkanal. The last one. Krupina tossed the empty pack in the trash bin.

The foreigner, the maybe-Englishman. Disappeared.

She didn’t like it at all.

*

By waiting until the tram had set off, then stepping on to the road behind it and running at a moderate clip, Calvary was able to keep near enough to close the distance when it slowed for the next stop. He hoped Squat would be looking for him on the pavement, rather than on the road behind, and that he’d be hidden from Parka’s view by the intervening traffic. One or two people laughed as he trotted by: poor guy missed his tram.

He almost didn’t make it, drawing alongside the tram as it was about to pull away once more. Not good: he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Luckily a couple of backpackers were stuck halfway through the doors, and the driver stopped to let them board. Calvary was able to slip in behind them.

All the seats were taken, and there was little standing room left. Calvary grasped the rail above his head. He saw that he was directly behind Squat, who was also standing, facing forward. Only if the man turned round would he spot Calvary. Gaines had found a seat near the front, but was in the process of rising to allow an elderly woman to sit down.

For an instant, quite by chance, Gaines glanced in Calvary’s direction. Their eyes met. Calvary fought the urge to look away immediately, instead breaking eye contact at what seemed a natural interval. Had he seen something in the small man’s expression? Unease?

Squat turned his head a fraction to the right to look out the window. Calvary saw the earpiece, like a tiny grey bead of flattened wax. The lips murmured. Calvary turned his own right ear towards the sound, leant in as close as he dared.

No words were distinguishable. But the intonation, the sense that the speech was being formed thickly at the back of the mouth, told him that the language was Russian. As he’d suspected.

He looked at the legend on the wall of the tram, trying to make sense of the route. It was more complicated than that of the Metro trains. Near the front, Gaines was checking his watch. Biting his lip. Calvary thought he had an appointment to keep, had dawdled in the beginning, walking instead of taking public transport, and was now running late.

An appointment meant other people. He had to make his move before then.

The problem was Squat. He’d successfully ‘lost’ him, but couldn’t approach the target without immediately making himself known once more to the Russian. On the other hand, the Russian was alone on the tram. Calvary was fairly certain of that. The younger man, Parka, was far behind them in the street, and even if Squat had other colleagues, there was no way they could be keeping up closely enough to be able to come to his assistance quickly. If the hit on Gaines meant a confrontation with the Russian, then so be it.

Five seconds, it would take, barging past Squat, shoving through the standing passengers, then the umbrella up, the point out and driven up into Gaines’s belly – he’d have to be turned a little first, one hand on the shoulder – and the driver would brake when he heard the screams. Calvary would force the doors open with the shaft of the umbrella and step out. The tram was moving at ten miles an hour, tops, and the brakes would have slowed it, so there’d be little risk in exiting. Then away, trailing chaos and screaming in his wake.

The driver yelled something and the tram slammed to a halt. The passengers lurched as one organism. Calvary was sent sprawling into Squat, who staggered in turn against the woman in front of him. Squat turned and stared Calvary full in the face.

Calvary looked past him because beyond the startled yells of the scattered passengers there was something happening at the front of the tram. The doors adjacent to the driver hissed open and men, their heads obscured by stocking masks, began to pour aboard.

SIX

‘What the hell’s going on...’

The explosion of static and noise made Krupina flinch and knock a pile of papers off the desk with her flailing arm. Down the line there was shouting, female screams.

Oleg yelled one word, that didn’t make sense – hijacking – and then he was drowned out.

Krupina snarled, ‘Everyone. Find that tram. Go, go.’

*

There were three of them. Tracksuits, black stockings like cauls across their faces. Handguns drawn.

The driver cowered, arms raised across his face. The screaming spread through the tram like flames. The crowd was beginning to turn, to press towards the back. Away from the guns.

Gaines was blinking, dazed. One of the invaders grabbed him by the shoulder, jammed the gun against the side of his head.

The surge of the crowd was going to reach critical mass in a moment, creating a wave Calvary wouldn’t be able to breach.

With his right hand he jerked the nylon of the umbrella downwards so that the honed tip of the shaft burst through the gauze and flashed beneath the internal lighting of the tram. With his left he seized the horizontal handrail overhead. He contracted his abdominal muscles and jackknifed his legs and launched himself forwards, treading on the hunched backs of the passengers in front as they crawled towards the rear of the tram, using them as stepping stones. He brought the umbrella shaft down in a stabbing motion as the nearest of the invaders began bringing his gun hand up.

The point caught the man in the shoulder, pinning him off-centre like a butterfly mounted by a clumsy novice collector. He shrieked and stumbled backwards, the gun whipping out of his splayed hand and against the windscreen. The shaft hadn’t gone in far enough to include the barbs, and Calvary pulled it back as his feet landed on the floor of the tram. His kick sent the wounded man slamming back against the windscreen, which cracked and starred under the impact.

The nearer of the other two men brought his gun so close Calvary could stare into the black of the barrel, smell the oil. He ducked and at the same time chopped the side of his hand against the wrist, knocking it aside. He thrust the umbrella shaft at the exposed torso but the man was quick and danced aside.

Behind him, the third man was backing down the steps through the open doors, one arm across Gaines’s throat, the pistol still pressed against his head. Gaines’s heels dragged, his arms flailing.

The second man hadn’t dropped his gun and was taking a bead again in the confined space, even as the first man sat against the dashboard, clutching his bloody shoulder and roaring.

Calvary rammed the umbrella shaft upwards, at an angle, pivoting from the hip. The point pierced the gunman’s throat at the angle of the cartilage and the soft underside of the jaw. Calvary’s fist felt the resistance as the tip jarred against bone.

At the same moment the man fired.

*

She grabbed her sparse hair in both fists, pressing the heels of her hands against her temples.

The gunshot had been loud. The scream was louder. As though from some beast living in Krupina’s ear.

‘Oleg.’

Something horrible was coming across the line now. A noise, made by something that didn’t sound human. A staccato sucking, like a hog’s snort.

Then a wheeze.

‘Shot.’

‘Oleg. Talk to me.’

‘Tovarischch.’

Even the background screaming was muffled, after that.

*

Something flicked against Calvary’s face, something hot and wet. Out of the corner of his right eye he saw it was blood. He glanced at his shoulder, but there was nothing there. No wound. And he felt no pain.

Disregard it.

The second man had fallen back through the door and his upended legs jerked on the steps. Gouts from his throat had sprayed the walls and the seats in arterial crimson.

Beyond the throat-stabbed man, through the doors, the third one was dragging Gaines along the pavement.

Calvary glanced once behind him. Saw, as well as the moaning man with the shoulder wound, a body on the floor of the tram. The passengers, their yelling having subsided into shocked whimpering, were drawing back from the body like a tide from a beached boat. The face was tilted towards him. It was Squat, the Russian. Eyes glazed.

He’d taken the gunman’s bullet, in the chest, by the look of it.

Calvary leaped over the dead man supine on the steps and his feet hit the pavement, where passersby had left a huge bare crescent. He saw immediately the reason for the driver’s having braked. A large car, a Mercedes station wagon, had pulled across the road into the tram’s path. Behind the wheel was another masked figure. The third invader was at the rear door, bundling Gaines in, planting a hand on his head and shoving down like a cop in an American film.

By Calvary’s foot was Gaines’s trilby, looking forlorn on the pavement.

The driver gunned the engine. Gaines was already in, his door still open. The man who’d pushed him in leaped aside and the car rocked up on to the kerb. Calvary rolled on the pavement, to the right, rolling and rolling to take himself out of the path of the vehicle. It veered past him and continued along the pavement, sending pedestrians spinning and tumbling in terror. For a second Calvary caught sight of Gaines through the flapping rear door, his bewildered white face turned towards Calvary. Then the car was fishtailing round the back of the tram and U-turning back on to the road in a flood of horns.

The car arced round and appeared at the front of the tram again. Calvary was already sprinting towards it as it slowed by the kerb to let the other man climb in. He took a flying leap at an acute angle from behind and got his torso across the windscreen just after the man slammed the passenger door shut.

The Mercedes took off into the traffic, causing cars to slew aside, jarring against the side panel of one vehicle that didn’t escape in time. The impact nearly shook Calvary off but he clung on, hauling himself across the bonnet so that he covered the entire windscreen. Through the glass he could see frantic movement as the driver tried to peer round him.

There’d be guns – yes, there was the man in the passenger seat, not aiming through the windscreen but instead cracking his door open and hooking his gun arm out and around. A mistake. Calvary lashed out with his boot, his heel connecting with the wrist and sending the gun spinning into the slipstream. The car lurched, the driver trying to keep to a straight path as he craned to see round. Buffeting Calvary were torrents of sensation and noise: cold, blasting air, the roar of traffic.

The front passenger wheel rocked over something solid, possibly a kerb, and Calvary’s right hand was shaken free. For an instant he almost cartwheeled away from the bonnet but he managed to brace the toes of one boot against the edge where the windscreen met its metal frame. He pivoted up so that he was kneeling on the bonnet facing through the windscreen, left hand sliding up to grip the end of one side of the car’s roof rack, right hand punching the windscreen in front of the driver’s face to try and star it.

The driver slammed on the brakes.

Calvary was flung up and across the roof, tumbling in a semi-somersault. His free hand scrabbled for purchase but there was none. He bounced off the raised back of the station wagon and smashed into the road surface, the impact winding him. He rolled twice on the tarmac, wondering vaguely why he was on fire, realising the stinking plumes of rubbery smoke were from the car’s tyres.

He’d been trained to roll and to recover quickly from an unexpected tumble, and he found his feet, stumbling a little. The Mercedes was hurtling away already. He caught his breath and braced his legs to run after it – there might be a chance, even now…

The tram hit him from behind.

*

‘Tram’s still sitting there,’ Arkady was saying. His voice was measured but he couldn’t keep the urgency entirely under control. ‘Hell of a scene. Panicking crowd. And you heard the shot. Some kind of disturbance after that, a car driving away.’

Krupina was shrugging on her coat. ‘The rest of you. How far away?’

Lev answered: ‘Few blocks. A couple of minutes.’

‘Gleb?’

‘There in five. Do we have any idea –’

‘No.’ She sat in her coat and hat, not wanting to lose contact with them just yet. ‘We have to assume the target is no longer in the locale. Priority is to find out what happened to Oleg, get him out of there if possible.’

Sirens were beginning to warble in the background, both down the line and through the open window of her office. She pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes.

*

‘Stop it,’ she shrieked, delighted and alarmed.

Bartos lowered her to her feet, kept one arm round her waist.  Put the phone back to his ear.

‘Janos, you’re on my okay list. Right up there at the top.’ He grinned down at Magda, released her. She recognised the sign. He needed privacy.

Smiling, she disappeared into the kitchen.

Bartos listened as Janos confirmed the delivery of the package to the appointed venue. They spoke in code. It was unlikely the police had either of their numbers – pay-as-you-go disposable mobiles were the only phones Bartos permitted in his outfit – but there was no point taking unnecessary risks.

He gazed out the living room window, the view different from the one from his office. This one faced west, took in the broad sweep of the Vltava River.

He wondered why Janos had stopped speaking.

‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘There were… complications.’

Bartos felt the red rising up his shoulders, his neck.

‘Tell me.’

‘One down.’

‘How bad?’

‘As bad as it gets.’

Bartos ground the handset in his paw. Fucking Russians.

‘Just the one?’

‘A few bumps and scrapes for the rest of us.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Bartos began to prowl around the living room, fiddling with the godawful tacky bric a brac Magda insisted on littering every free surface with. ‘Just how many of the bastards were there?’

A pause. Bartos thought he could hear the click of a dry throat swallowing. ‘One.’

‘One.’

‘A pro. A killer, I’d say.’

‘One Russian. And he kicked the shit out of you.’

‘He didn’t –’ Janos caught himself before he went too far. ‘He wasn’t Russian. I don’t think so.’

Bartos clamped his teeth until the roots hurt. Then he hurled the phone to the marble floor, smashing his heel down on it again and again as shards of metal and plastic spun and scattered. He stretched his arms wide, fists clenched, flung his head back and roared, the bay window vibrating with the shock.

*

Calvary loped through the streets, automatically lapsing into the two lefts, one right pattern he normally used when departing a scene. Around him, over him, dark turreted buildings crowded, medieval and leering. Exotic aromas of pickled foods, spiced bakery and beer beckoned him like sirens. He had a sense of the river, cold and vast, looming nearby.

You let him get away, and you’ll never find him again.

As he strode, he plucked a forgotten dishcloth from a café table and wiped the blood off his face and neck. The Russian, Squat’s, blood. He turned the collar of his jacket up to hide the stain.

Didn’t even get close to him. Not even within striking distance.

Pathetic.

The tram had been braking and had hit him at perhaps eight miles an hour. It presented no sharp edge, and he’d started moving in the same direction so the impact hadn’t been as damaging as it might have been. Still, it had sent him sprawling, the breath knocked from him for the second time. By the time he’d rolled clear and got over the shock, he couldn’t see the Mercedes anywhere.

Round a corner the bridge stretched before him, steep and majestic. The Charles Bridge, one of the city’s landmarks. In either direction beneath it the black river’s massive bulk shifted restlessly. Across the river, high above, the towers of the castle stared down at him. A beautiful city. It stirred nothing in him.

He made his way across the bridge, which was as crowded as the streets. Dawdling tourists interwove with accordion-wielding buskers and puppeteers manipulating sinister-looking marionettes. All ignored him.

It took an age to cross. On the other side he turned away from the main thoroughfare and walked along the cobbles by the riverside. He stopped after fifty yards, leaned on the rail, looked back across the river. A choir of sirens rose from the Old Town, overlapping and distorted.

He pulled out his phone. It was undamaged.

‘Llewellyn.’ A jaunty rise on the last syllable.

‘I’ve lost him.’

A tut of the tongue. ‘Find him again, then.’

‘No. Lost him for good.’

He gave a brief account. Llewellyn listened without interrupting.

‘Russians in the field, Llewellyn. What the hell was that about?’

He could almost see the pursed lips. ‘Hardly surprising, really. If anything, confirmation of our suspicions about him. He’s been on their payroll in the past. It makes sense that they’d keep an eye on their investment.’

‘Your intelligence made no mention that he was under surveillance.’

‘We’re not perfect. The Russians may have been too subtle for us.’

‘They stuck out like a sore thumb.’

‘Anyway.’ A beat. ‘Any idea what you’re going to do now?’

A gull wheeled up from the water, shrieking, inches from his face, and Calvary recoiled. He breathed deeply, tried to slow his heart.

‘As I told you, Llewellyn. He’s gone. Whoever it was that snatched him – and it wasn’t the Russians – they’re long gone. I can’t –’

‘Hold on. You say it wasn’t the Russians?’

‘No. It was a Russian that got shot dead. This was another group.’

For a moment he though they’d been cut off. He glanced at the phone’s screen.

Llewellyn said, quietly, ‘This makes things… complicated.’

You’re telling me.

Calvary said, ‘A hijacking and kidnapping, by an unknown group. I’ve no idea who they were, and you clearly haven’t a clue either. My role here’s finished, Llewellyn. I’ll do another hit, if I have to. But not this one. It’s over.’

His phone buzzed and he glanced at it. A text message had come through.

Llewellyn said, ‘Open it. It’s from me.’

There were no words, just a picture. The front page of one of the red-top tabloid papers.

Two words, in capitals: BLOODY MURDER. Below the headline was the photo Calvary had seen before, the one of him exiting the block of flats where Al-Haroun, the Songwriter, had lived. A smaller, inset picture showed Al-Haroun’s body, lifeless eyes staring at the camera, neck grotesquely twisted.

Not wanting to, Calvary tapped the screen to enlarge the picture. The text was blurred at this resolution but the first lines were legible. This is the unknown man caught on camera leaving the flats where.

Llewellyn’s voice came at him through the picture. ‘There still?’

Calvary raised the phone to his mouth. ‘You utter bastard.’

‘It’s a mockup, of course. But it’ll be tomorrow morning’s first edition. We won’t give a name, yet. That’s the next step.’

‘You prick.’

‘So, you see, Martin, it really is rather important that you find Sir Ivor. And despatch him.’

‘I closed his eyes. The Songwriter’s. I closed them, and you opened them, for the photo.’

‘Anything I can help you with, don’t hesitate to ask.’

Calvary said nothing.

‘Good luck, Martin.’

The connection broke.

SEVEN

Outside, the streets were taking on a hostile appearance as the darkness settled over the city. Krupina rubbed away a patch of condensation on her window.

‘Do I need to do any liaising with the Embassy?’ Beside her, Tamarkin’s calmness masked similar feelings to hers, she knew.

‘Not as long as his legend holds up.’ Like all of them Oleg had a cover story, an address and a history in Prague. He had an up-to-date visa.

Tamarkin had reached the area in his car fifteen minutes before Krupina arrived by cab. They hadn’t got close to the tram. The police were already cordoning the scene off. But they’d watched, and soon two bodies were being carted into an ambulance on stretchers. In each case the blanket was over the face, which meant only one thing.

‘How much are you going to tell HQ?’ SVR headquarters was in Yasenevo, southwest of Moscow. It suddenly felt a long distance away to Krupina.

‘Nothing, at the moment. I want to be able to offer them some good news first.’

He laughed without mirth. ‘Ever the optimist.’

The others, Arkady and Lev, were scouring the area, trying to pick up from snatches of conversation what exactly had happened. Eyewitnesses put the numbers of assailants at between two and ten. One said they were definitely Muslim, another that they were armed with machine guns. Her men relayed this information to Krupina as Tamarkin drove the two of them back to the office off Wenceslas Square.

Tiny, shy Yevgenia, the closest thing to a desk jockey in Krupina’s team, was already working on the identikit composites on her PC, based on the information provided by Arkady, who apart from Oleg was the only one of them to have seen the foreigner who’d been tailing Gaines. Quite what his relation was to the men who’d stormed the tram was anyone’s guess. But he was their only lead, and as far as Krupina was concerned was responsible for Oleg’s death until proven otherwise.

Yevgenia was generating possible identikit images of the man using standard software. Arkady was viewing them on his smartphone and giving her feedback. She saw Krupina approach, put her phone on loudspeaker. Krupina stopped to watch and listen.

‘Hair a bit shorter. Also, the chin’s too round. Sharpen it a little.’

Despite herself, Krupina was fascinated. The image on the screen morphed almost imperceptibly as Yevgenia’s fingers flew over the keys. The face was monochrome. Arkady hadn’t seen the eyes close enough to identify the shade and it would be a mistake to speculate, so better to leave colour out of it. The head rotated in 3D – Arkady had seen it mainly in profile – and the jaw and occiput changed shape according to his instructions.

Krupina gazed at the face. Though it wasn’t familiar, the man was British, she was sure of it.

‘Gleb.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Get me the biographies and pictures of the known British SIS operatives in Prague. Might as well throw in French and German as well.’

‘Long shot.’

‘I know.’

‘Think he could be a Yank?’

She glanced back at the screen.

‘No. He looks too grim.’

*

Bartos, the Kodiak, stood in the basement with the three men in a semicircle before him. One, whose name Bartos couldn’t remember, if he’d ever known it, had his right shoulder wrapped in thick layers of bandage through which blood was seeping pinkly.

‘So what the fuck?’

Janos spoke up immediately. ‘The source was good. We learned the target was on the tram, and we boarded without initial incident.’

‘“Without initial incident”. It sounds like a traffic report.’

‘Sorry, boss.’ It was always boss in front of the other men. Never dad. Bartos insisted on it. ‘I took charge of the target myself, when a passenger attacked us with some sort of spear. A home-made affair. Looked like an umbrella shaft.’

‘You were attacked by a single man… armed with an umbrella.’

Janos jerked his head at the injured man. ‘He got Milos in the shoulder. And he killed Istvan.’ He jabbed a finger at his throat.

‘Istvan’s who, exactly?’

‘A good guy. Couple of bank jobs.’

There’d be nothing to tie the dead man to Bartos. It was one of Bartos’s tenets that everyone was deniable. Still, at that time the man had been working for him, had been one of his employees, and had been killed. Bartos took that personally.

‘And Istvan fired his gun when he went down. Hit a civilian.’

Bartos wasn’t interested. ‘This umbrella guy. You say not a Russian.’

‘Didn’t look it.’

‘You remember his face?’ He swept his gaze across each man. They almost fell over themselves nodding, the injured man wincing in the process.

‘Good. Find him, and bring him to me.’

Janos said: ‘We shook him off the car, and he got hit by a tram. Probably hurt.’

‘Excellent. Shouldn’t have any difficulty finding him, then.’

He turned away, began to lumber out. Then he stopped.

‘Janos.’

He didn’t turn, but heard the man approach. Could smell the terror.

He put a hand on Janos’s back and walked him to the far side of the basement. He murmured: ‘You fucked up. But you also did good, getting me the Englishman. I ought to rip your balls off and give you a medal.’ He clapped his palm between his son’s shoulderblades, hard enough to make Janos gasp. ‘Even-Steven. Get me this umbrella guy and you’ll be well into the black.’

*

Back outside on the street, he took a call on his phone, recognising the number on the screen.

‘Yeah.’

‘Got the product? The Brit?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good.’ A pause. Then: ‘You realise one of your guys shot a Russian dead on the tram.’

Bartos stopped in his tracks.

‘Not only that, but he was SVR. Oleg Ruzhovsky.’

‘Ah, for Christ’s –’ Bartos stared about him, the rage building. Don’t smash the phone. Don’t.

Into the silence he snarled: ‘My men said some stranger attacked them.’

‘Yes. That’s a bit of a mystery to me, too. But he wasn’t anything to do with Ruzhovsky. Somehow Ruzhovsky stopped a bullet from one of your boys’ guns.’

A civilian, Janos had said. He hadn’t known it was a KGB who’d been shot.

‘Look after the merchandise.’

Bartos headed for his car. He said: ‘Any idea yet why this Brit, Gaines, is so important?’

‘No. But I’m looking into it.’ In a moment: ‘What do your guys say about the attacker on the tram?’

‘Nationality not clear. Not Czech or Russian, probably. Tough, a professional.’

‘What did he have? Gun-wise?’

Bartos bit his lip.

‘You there?’

Bartos said: ‘They think it was a sharpened umbrella.’

‘An...’ In the background Bartos heard coughing, or something like it. ‘Did you say an umbrella?’

‘It was sharpened. Weaponised.’

‘Right.’

The voice sounded like it was choking. Bartos shouted, ‘What?’

He thought he caught something about Mary Poppins before he cut the call. He stood, T-shirted in the cold, the Kodiak, and wished he had something nearby to assault.

Nobody laughed at him. Nobody.

When this is over, you’ll pay. God, how you will.

*

Calvary had crossed back over the river and was somewhere south of the Old Town, in a modern shopping district. He kept moving, not with any particular destination in mind but not aimlessly either. Physical motion kept his thoughts flowing; at the same time he wanted to stay close to the scene of the attack without getting too close and possibly being recognised.

He stepped through the glass doors of a department store and felt the warmth and familiarity draw him in. Escalators soared past layers of shops, many of them with recognisable names.

His holdall was back at the hotel. It contained nothing of value, and nothing incriminating. He’d registered there using a credit card which bore an alias. The receptionist hadn’t asked for his passport, which was in his own name and which he kept in his pocket. He felt fairly confident that nobody would trace him to the hotel or pin a name on him.

Besides, the police would be more interested in finding the hijackers and kidnappers, not the have-a-go hero who’d confronted them.

Calvary wandered into an electrical appliance shop. Deep at the back were the televisions. He browsed among the plasma screens, some the size of cars. Several were tuned to a local news channel. A lone reporter stood at the scene of the hijacking, the tram almost concealed behind her in a cocoon of police officers and emergency vehicles. He watched, not understanding the words. No photographs came up on the screen, no identikit pictures.

Calvary smiled and waved away a hovering shop assistant, then stepped into a quiet corner where there were radios on display. Nobody bought radios any more. He drew out his phone, connected to the internet, and looked up hospitals in Prague.

He didn’t know if any of the masked men he’d encountered had been injured seriously enough to warrant hospital attention, or if they’d even seek it in the circumstances. But it was possible – just – that the man he’d skewered through the throat had made it to an emergency department. A long shot, and it might mean doing the rounds of several of the city’s hospitals.

It wasn’t as though he had a lot of options.

His search came up with five hospitals within a few miles of the attack, three of which had emergency departments.

*

Krupina stood, hunched, behind Yevgenia, gazing at the monitor. Faces flicked across the display so quickly she wanted to ask the girl to slow the program down. She didn’t, because she knew the software was analysing each face in a fraction of a second, comparing it to the identikit picture, and would stop as soon as there was even a vague match.

Tamarkin nudged her elbow with something and Krupina looked down, hoping for cigarettes. Instead he proffered a paper plate with a prepackaged sandwich.

‘Never got you your order earlier.’

She ate standing up, watching the monitor, while Tamarkin ran the office, moving from desk to desk, co-ordinating the search for Oleg’s body, listening for any Embassy mutterings. A little after three p.m., twenty minutes into the search, Yevgenia said, ‘Something, boss.’

Krupia’s attention had been wandering. She leaned on the back of the girl’s chair, peered at the monitor.

The identikit image was on the left. On the right was the latest in a series of photos of known British, French and German intelligence agents. Known to SVR and FSB.

Almost by definition the pictures the Russian services obtained of their enemies were less than optimal. They were seldom mug shots, unless the agent had been arrested. More often they were grainy, poorly lit snapshots taken on street corners, in airport queues, at the scenes of crimes. This one was no different. The man in the database photo was of indeterminate age, no younger than thirty. It was a three-quarter view from an angle above the horizontal. The face was looking up and away from the camera. Fair hair, undistinguished features. He was on a street somewhere, on the move.

Yevgenia tapped keys and another picture replaced the first. This one was clearer. It was a profile view, seemingly close up but probably taken with a zoom lens, of a man leaning on the rail of a boat in bright sunshine. He appeared lost in thought. Hair brown and short, mouth set, eyes hard.

Yevgenia began to summarise the legend out loud. ‘Martin Calvary. British. First picture taken in September 2009 in Copenhagen, near scene of murder of Gerhardt Kreutzmann. The old Stasi colonel. Second picture a chance sighting on a ferry from Malta to Sicily in March last year. Calvary strongly suspected to have links with British SIS and possibly to be an active agent.’

‘Show it to Arkady,’ Krupina murmured. Yevgenia moved the mouse, clicked.

She touched her phone, connecting her with Arkady. ‘Got it?’

Krupina waited. The phone had its speaker function switched on so she would hear the reply.

Arkady said, ‘Yeah. That’s him.’

EIGHT

Bartos shovelled carbonara into his face, an early supper on a heated outdoor restaurant terrace where his status guaranteed him a degree of privacy. Across the table was his brother, Miklos. Thinner than him, with more hair. But not the boss.

‘Want me to take over?’ Miklos fingered the stem of his wineglass, the fidgeting betraying his craving for a cigarette. Bartos didn’t allow smoking within ten feet of him and certainly not at the table.

Bartos sucked up a tube of penne. ‘Not yet. Let’s give the kid a chance to prove himself.’

‘So what’s he doing?’

‘Checking the hospitals with his guys, to see if this umbrella asshole’s turned up in any of them. He got hit by a tram according to them.’

‘Long shot.’

Miklos was next in line for the top job in the family, unless Bartos hung on in there long enough for his own firstborn, Janos, to become a contender. Then there’d be a battle, and it would be something to behold. Bartos liked Miklos, knew the family and the business would be in safe hands with him in charge. But not yet. Still, he spoke more freely with his brother – about business as well as personal matters – than with anybody else, even Magda.

‘So when are you going to approach the Russians?’ Miklos signalled to an invisible waiter behind Bartos: it’s on me.

Bartos finished chewing and swallowing before he answered. ‘Haven’t decided yet. I’d like to find out what’s so important about this Gaines guy, this Brit. Why they want him so badly.’

‘The Worm has no idea?’

‘Says he’s working on it. Meantime, I want to do my own investigating. I’ve got a feeling this umbrella guy has something to do with it, is involved somehow. If you believe Janos and his boys, this wasn’t just some wannabe hero who jumped a bunch of hijackers. He was a pro, armed with a shiv, who put down one of Janos’s men, injured another and almost stopped them getting away.’

‘The Russians will be looking for us, too.’

‘Fuck the Rusáks.’ He glowered at his empty plate. It was true, though. He didn’t care much that a civilian had been shot in the crossfire on the tram. Shit happened. But the Worm said the man had been SVR. Russian intelligence. They didn’t drop it, when you’d killed one of theirs. Now his bargaining power would be limited. He’d demand a high price for Gaines. But he’d also have to insist on the Russians staying off his back in future.

His phone went off. Bartos listened.

‘On my way.’

He put the handset away, was already rising. ‘Son of a bitch. They’ve spotted the umbrella guy.’

*

The man Bartos Blažek called the Worm was at that moment sitting with his eyes closed, picturing Calvary.

A British agent, sent to capture or kill an expatriate Brit who was wanted by Moscow. Was wanted so badly that the unofficial SVR was in charge of taking him.

The Worm didn’t enjoy his dealings with Blažek. He found the man’s coarseness revolting, his arrogance a character flaw of such magnitude that it would surely bring him down one day. But he paid well. Paid magnificently, in fact. And however much Blažek might despise the Worm in turn – and it was obvious that he did – it was clear that he valued their association.

The Worm’s information had led to Blažek’s interception of the product – the Brit, Gaines – but the problem was that neither the Worm nor Blažek knew why Gaines was so important to Moscow. The Worm had the better chance of finding out, but even he would struggle. Until Gaines’s precise value was established, Blažek couldn’t enter into a transaction with the SVR.

Couldn’t, or wouldn’t. The Worm found the man’s stubbornness infuriating. Gaines was of critical importance to the Russian state, of that there was no doubt. Blažek would be able to command an astronomical price even without knowing the full details. But Blažek was a businessman, as he never failed to remind the Worm. And a good businessman never did business without being fully aware of the stakes. Blažek had made clear, furthermore, that until he’d sold Gaines to the SVR, the Worm wouldn’t see a penny of his payment.

So the Worm had his work cut out.

*

The hospital was a modern structure of glass and steel, the emergency department obvious even to someone like Calvary who didn’t read the language: a large forecourt crowded with ambulances arriving and departing, a steady flow of pedestrian traffic through the main sliding doors. It was southwest of the Old Town, fifteen minutes’ walk.

Llewellyn would want a progress report later that evening. Calvary didn’t know when the first editions of the newspapers went to press in Britain, but suspected it couldn’t be much later than midnight. If he hadn’t found Gaines by then, at least he might have enough of a lead to persuade Llewellyn to hold off. A skim through the online news sites, British and international, had told him that either the Songwriter’s body hadn’t been discovered yet, or at the very least the press hadn’t got hold of the story. Calvary thought the Chapel had probably secured the man’s flat, had kept the police away.

Had opened the dead man’s eyes to increase the impact of the photograph. God. Llewellyn was sick.

For a moment another pair of eyes stared into Calvary’s. Also dark brown. But not dead. Crucially, not dead.

The image, the memory, disappeared as the car cut up onto the kerb in front of him and the passenger door rocked open, the gun emerging first.

*

‘We’re going to lose him. I’m moving in.’

Bartos crashed through the restaurant, his bulk sending a canteen of cutlery flying, the phone jammed to his ear. ‘Who the hell else is nearby?’

Adam’s voice came through. The first one had been the driver’s.

‘Pavel’s on his way. I’d told him to meet me here before I saw the guy coming out the entrance.’

Bartos shoved down the steps past an elderly couple. A walking stick clattered to the ground. His BMW sat on a double yellow line outside, the driver already running the engine. ‘You keep after the guy. I’ll light a fire under Pavel’s ass.’

He rang off, speed-dialled Pavel’s number, and while it rang he yelled the name of the hospital at his driver. The car surged away, slamming Bartos back into his seat.

*

Use the environment to your advantage. Sometimes the best tools are to be found there.

The lesson was woven into Calvary’s fibres, his neurones. The man had made a stupid mistake, emerging over an open car door at close range, perhaps relying on the tendency of an opponent to step back from a gun aimed at his face. Instead of stepping back, Calvary leaped forward, both feet leaving the ground. He smashed the door into the man, catching his arm and his chest and making him cry out and drop back into the car. Calvary found his feet and kicked at the door again, pistoning his leg out, driving it against the man’s legs.

The driver was already reversing, the door swinging open, the man in the passenger seat drawing back inside. Traffic on the road squealed and veered around the reversing car, a Lexus.

Without the benefit of being at close range, Calvary was at a disadvantage. He glanced about, saw a sidestreet and ran round the corner, pressing himself against the wall of the building. The Lexus hurled itself across the pavement at the corner, the gear too low, and overshot. Calvary slipped back onto the main road and began running back the way he’d come.

People were milling on the pavement in confusion. He wove among them. As he ran he scanned the road. No other cars approaching. Perhaps the Lexus was alone.

He heard more horns, a scream of overworked tyres at his back, and he knew the Lexus was back on the main road.

He needed to get away, or at least out of range of the gun. But he didn’t want to get too far away, because one or more live captives would be worth a great deal to him.

The Lexus didn’t appear on the periphery of his vision as he was expecting. He chanced a look over his shoulder. The car was idling on the road behind him, keeping pace. The passenger with the gun was on the far side from him. The driver was watching him through the open window.

Evidently they didn’t want to open fire, risk a public battle. They’d expected to snatch him quickly, with a minimum of fuss, so that there’d be no clear eyewitness accounts. There was little chance of that now.

Calvary stopped running. He turned, stood facing the car across the road. Held his palms out.

Your move.

*

‘He’s stopped running. Standing there, waiting for us.’

Bartos stuck a finger in his other ear. ‘What? Can’t hear you.’

Janos repeated himself. Bartos said, ‘You hurt? What the hell just happened?’

‘I’m okay. He’s made us, though. He’s fast. Won’t get him on our own, now.’

‘Jesus.’ Bartos closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, counted slowly back from ten. Magda had recently given him an anger-management CD. He got to five and lost patience.

‘Keep him there. Don’t do anything unless he runs.’

‘Then go after him?’

‘No, dickhead. Sit there crooning Sinatra songs.’

He punched in Pavel’s number again. Pavel wasn’t all that smart, but he was big and ferocious. And he was nearby.

‘You there yet?’

‘Hospital’s ahead.’

‘He’s on the street. Janos and his driver are stopped or parked or whatever the fuck, across from him.’

In a beat: ‘Boss, I see them.’

*

The Lexus had pulled up onto the kerb to let the traffic flow past. Through the windscreen Calvary could just make out the man in the passenger seat, phone raised to his ear. Calling for backup.

Time to make a move.

He scanned the windows on his side of the street. A bookshop caught his eye. He raised a hand to the Lexus and turned and pushed through the door.

The rule was usually, in a situation like this: keep away from civilians. The risk of some innocent being caught in the crossfire was normally unacceptably high. But Calvary’s impression was as before, that these men wanted to keep as low a profile as possible. There weren’t likely to be any hostage situations. And that would give him an advantage that would offset any numerical imbalance.

The bookshop was dark, cosy, populated by a handful of browsers and silent staff. Calvary moved across to the far end, near the cash registers, picked a book off a shelf and began paging. He watched the door.

Something changed in the atmosphere, a subtle shifting like the first hint of a storm. Keeping his gaze on the doors, Calvary groped for it with his other senses, trying to pin it down.

Damn it. A side entrance.

Over to his right, a man stood inside the door. Head shaven, torso wrapped in black leather like a hide. Without looking directly at him Calvary nonetheless sensed there was something wrong with his face. The man wasn’t moving, was just standing there, his stare boring into Calvary.

A minute later the doors at the front swung open and two men slipped in. One was hobbling a little. The passenger from the Lexus. The other was the driver.

They too made no pretence at subtlety, their eyes fixed on Calvary.

All right, if that’s the way it’s going to be.

He lifted his head, looked straight at each of the three men in turn. His eyes met theirs almost audibly, like swords joining battle.

NINE

The big one first. It was an axiom. Putting down the bruiser, the tough guy, gave your own morale a boost as well as denting that of whichever opponents were left.

Calvary walked between the rows of shelves towards the shaven-headed man, who didn’t move from his place at the door. Up close, he could see he’d been right about the man’s face. Scars crossed the mouth like stitching performed by a drunken surgeon. His left cheek was bone white, a continent of scar tissue. The eyes were black, small.

Another thing Calvary noticed up close was the man’s size. He was six feet four or five. Shoulders almost too wide to have fit through the door.

Calvary stopped three feet from the man. In a low murmur, in Russian, he said, ‘Over there’. He tipped his head to the right, where taller aisles curved away, floor to ceiling. It would afford more privacy.

The man glanced in that direction, nodded once. He looked past Calvary, over his head, and nodded again to the other two.

Calvary turned his back, brazenly, and walked over to the tall aisles. A scan of the shop suggested that nobody had noticed anything untoward, neither shoppers nor staff.

There was nobody browsing in the first aisle Calvary came to. It curved towards the wall and ended there, a cul de sac. There was room for perhaps two medium-sized people standing abreast.

The move relied entirely on position-sense, the instinct a fighter develops after years in the field for an opponent’s location in space. There was no time to confirm visually. Even a fraction of a second’s hesitation would blow it, would lose him the advantage of shock and surprise.

Calvary pivoted on the ball of his foot and kicked up into the place his position-sense told him the bald man’s crotch would be.

It was a kick with a leg that was almost straight, with the full power of his right hip behind it, with the blade of his shin bone rather than the ankle as the offensive edge. And his judgement, his sense of the man’s location, was pitch perfect. His leg slammed against soft tissue and bone, the impact jarring him almost off his left foot.

The man’s arms had been outstretched, ready to move in with a stranglehold, and they flapped against the twin towers of the shelves like broken wings. His breath came in a drawn-out huff, his eyes straining from their sockets. He staggered, doubling, and Calvary brought a half fist up at his throat.

The man turned his head at the last second and Calvary’s blow rocked off his jaw, snapping his head round further. Incredibly the man kept his feet, bracing his hands against the shelves on either side. Calvary took a step back, deeper into the aisle, and kicked again, a roundhouse, this time catching the man in the chest, not in the face where he wanted it. It sent the man barging against one of the shelves.

Behind him the other two were loitering, unable to pile in because of the lack of space and because a commotion would be inevitable. They seemed resigned to keeping watch.

The giant’s face was waxen, the rest of his skin now matching the tone of his scars, a damp sheen across his forehead like a caul. His breath hissed wetly between his clenched teeth. His tiny eyes glittered with pain and hate. With a grunt he pushed himself away from the shelf and bore down on Calvary.

Calvary grabbed a hardcover book without looking, some kind of academic tome that weighed a couple of kilogrammes at least. He lashed out at the man’s kneecap with his boot and as the man sidestepped it, shoved the book into his face like a shotputter. He felt the crack as well as heard it, saw the gout of red spray sideways and spatter the spines on the shelves.

Still the man kept coming on, driving Calvary back until he felt the wall press against him. He put up his hands to protect his face, used his feet on shins and knees, tried another kick at the groin. Then the man’s forearm slammed past his hands and across his throat.

The blow knocked the breath from him, but this was followed by panic because he couldn’t regain the breath, couldn’t get air through his compressed trachea. He brought both hands up to curl his fingers around the forearm, trying to pull it free. It was a mistake. The man punched a meaty fist into his exposed torso.

Calvary tensed his abdominal muscles in time but even so, the pain was colossal, like an extension of the man himself. Blurred waves eddied before his eyes, the man’s face rippling grotesquely. And all the time, the pressure built against his throat, threatening to cut off air and blood flow.

One chance. He raised his hands on either side, open-palmed, and slapped them together with all the force he could muster, against the man’s ears.

The move wasn’t so much painful as disorientating, the sudden overwhelming clap of noise directly against the eardrums producing a similar effect to a tiger’s roar, the pitch of which stuns its prey momentarily. The man recoiled, forearm easing back from Calvary’s throat. He brought a knee up this time, into the groin, and there was no way any man could cope with two strikes there in succession. Calvary turned his head aside barely in time to avoid the full force of the man’s vomitus. Some of it caught him on the shoulder; most painted the books and the shelves. The giant sagged against Calvary, who gripped him under the arms and lowered him to his knees.

Past him, beyond the entrance to the aisle, he could see the other two men half remonstrating, half apologising. Evidently a staff member had been alerted by the commotion, and the men were pretending they’d knocked a stack of books over.

Using the collapsed man as a step, Calvary vaulted upwards, clambering up the wall of shelves and dropping down the other side, scattering volumes in a series of thunks and crashes. The sales assistant shrieked but he didn’t pay any attention, didn’t even look at her or either of the two men as he sprinted towards the side entrance where the big man had come in. He heard a yell behind him but didn’t pause, letting the door swing shut behind him.

Once more the cold blasted him after the warmth of the shop. The side street tapered to an end to his right, a wall with a locked-looking steel door blocking the way. He headed left, back towards the main street, put his head round, then took off to the right, back in the direction he’d originally been heading, towards the Old Town.

The car roared at him immediately from across the road, cutting diagonally across two lanes and causing other vehicles to brake and slew. Once again they were trying to block his passage along the pavement. At his back he could hear the shouts of the two men as they emerged from the front entrance of the bookshop.

Calvary stumbled, the blow to his gut and the precious seconds of compression of his windpipe taking their relentless toll. For a moment the pavement reeled towards him but he kept his footing, bit down hard on his lower lip, the pain like a slap across the face. The car, a high-end BMW, had mounted the kerb and he was perhaps ten yards from it. He couldn’t dodge it, nor could he turn back because the two men were close behind; he could feel them.

Calvary darted sideways, to his left, launching himself into the traffic almost without casting a glance at it. The cacophony was shocking, a disharmony of yells and horns and tyres on rubber. A saloon grew in his left visual field and instinctively he knew it wasn’t going to brake in time so he jumped, not forwards but straight up. As if detached, he observed his feet clear the bumper and felt his legs crash down on the bonnet. Felt the cold smooth slope of the windscreen against his shoulder, the side of his face. Saw another face, chalky, mouth distorted into a terrified O, through the glass. Then the roll carried him off the windscreen to the side and he was back on the road and lurching on, the far pavement within sight.

All he’d done was clear the way, slow the traffic so that the two pursuers could follow him; and the new car, the BMW would be turning, heading back across the road. He tripped at the kerb, absorbed the fall through his hands, stumbled upright. He felt the nearness of the car as it pulled up directly behind him, almost catching his heel. Hands grabbed at him, at his arms and his trouser cuffs, and he shook them off, the movement dropping him to one knee again.

Then, cutting through the noise and the surging in his ears, a woman’s voice, low and urgent. First in Czech.

Then: ‘Get in. We’re on your side.’

He turned, then, instead of running as he should have, because it was so unexpected. Not just the fact that it was a woman, nor even the oddness of the comment. What was most jarring of all was that she’d spoken in English.

It wasn’t a BMW or Lexus or Mercedes, but a beaten-up camper van. Two faces peered at him through the driver’s window. The sliding door in the side of the van was drawn open. Calvary made a snap decision, dived in.

The door slammed shut under its own weight as a man’s voice from the front said, ‘Go,’ and the van took off.

*

‘Jesus, damn it.’

Bartos drove his fist into the dashboard, once, twice, popping the glove compartment open, not caring if he triggered the airbag. He reeled forward in his seat as the driver hit reverse. This time the front bumper clipped another car, glass from a shattered headlight arcing across the bonnet. Sirens were sounding somewhere not far away. Bartos didn’t think they belonged to ambulances.

The idiots, Janos and his crony, were trying to cross the road after the umbrella guy but were too scared of getting run over to do it properly. Bartos’s driver showed some guts, barrelling into the traffic, the rear of the BMW caroming off a sports car’s panelwork.

There was the guy, half kneeling by the kerb, pedestrians describing a wide arc around him as though he was radioactive.

Bartos had the gun out from under the dash, a stubby Ruger P95. Good American hardware, punchy and reliable. He held it low in a gloved hand in the footwell between his knees. Would ditch it out the window the moment the cops got near. His driver was braking already, drawing up to the guy on the pavement.

The van cut in so suddenly that for a second it looked inevitable that they’d tailend it. Bartos’s driver braked and banked hard to the right and the BMW’s front passenger wheel hit the kerb, jarring the car to a stop. The impact flung the gun from Bartos’s hand into the footwell. He ducked to retrieve it and when he lifted his head the van was leaping away, its door rolling shut. The guy was gone from the pavement.

The BMW’s engine had stalled. His driver’s mouth was set in a curve of fury as he fired it up again. He spun the wheel and the first few metres were half on the pavement, sending people scattering. The BMW cleared the three cars that had pulled into line behind the van and was once more behind it.

Bartos said, ‘Ram it if you have to.’

The van’s rear window was blacked out. The bodywork was covered with rust. Piece of shit hippymobile. Looked as old as the 1970s, too.

The driver muttered, ‘Brace yourself, boss,’ and put his foot down.

*

The rear seat was torn and bursting like a collapsed loaf. Calvary rocked and bounced off it as the van swerved.

He craned back. Through the rear window the BMW curved in off the pavement and was behind them once more. Two men, the driver and another. The passenger was big, wearing sunglasses.

Calvary said, ‘Got weapons?’

‘What?’ The woman. She was driving.

‘Guns.’

‘Not here. Back at base.’

Not much bloody use then, are they? he wanted to snarl. He cast about among the junk at his feet. Newspapers, soft drink cans, stinking polystyrene fast food containers.

The man up front – young, his English American accented – peered round. ‘What’re you doing?’

‘Looking for something to stop them. You’ll never outrun them, not in this wreck.’

‘They’ll leave us alone when they see the cops.’

‘You willing to wait for that?’ Calvary snapped his fingers. ‘Come on. Something heavy. Anything.’

The impact threw him forward against the back of the driver’s seat, and the woman let out a cry. The collision shunted the van forwards and slightly sideways. Calvary crawled back on to the seat and looked back. The BMW had dropped away, its front bumper at an angle, its bonnet creased. But it was coming on.

‘They’re going to do it again,’ he said.

The woman had kept the engine running and she swung them back onto the lane. All around cars were veering away or simply stopping, allowing the madness to pass by. The young man was scrabbling in the glovebox, spilling detritus: road maps, tickets of various kinds.

‘Got this,’ he said, handing it back.

It was a torch, a chunky one. Metal with a rubber grip. Calvary hefted it.

The BMW rammed them again, then, and this time there was a bang and the van sagged and listed to the right. Its end fishtailed and the woman pulled at the wheel frantically. The stink of burning rubber added to the assortment of smells inside.

‘I can’t hold it,’ she yelled.

‘You’ll have to.’ In the swinging view through the rear window Calvary saw the BMW drop back again and then resume its pursuit. It too had taken some damage, the bumper skittering away across the road as he watched, one of the headlights completely stove in.

Calvary turned so that one leg was above the back of the seat, braced his hands.

He waited until the BMW had closed the distance to perhaps five yards. Then he pistoned his leg out and felt his boot strike the glass of the window. It cracked and splintered as glass used to in car windows, back when he was a very small boy. Two more kicks and the shards sprayed out into the wind, the air rushing in.

He knelt on the back seat, hefted the torch once more.

Below, the big man in the passenger seat stuck an extended arm out his window. Aimed a handgun at the remaining rear tyre.

Calvary hurled the torch at the middle of the BMW’s windscreen.

The gun went off at the precise moment the torch struck. The noise from the blast was ripped away in the wind. The shot sang clear. A nebula of cracks burst across the windscreen. Beautifully symmetrical.

The arm with the gun was withdrawn and Calvary could hear the shouting. The BMW swerved and shook. They were on a single-lane road now and the BMW was perilously close to the kerb. The crazed windscreen looked opaque. Visibility through it must be zero.

Two things happened then. The van’s rear tyre, the one that had burst in the second ramming, peeled free and flapped away like a crippled scavenging bird, the bare rim of the wheel screeching against the tarmac. And the BMW’s mangled front slammed into the base of a lamppost, the rear wheels lifting off the ground before the car dropped, dead.

Sirens were everywhere, dopplering from all directions, coalescing.

TEN

Wenceslas Square was misnamed, Krupina always thought. It was a boulevard, really. She wasn’t much of a walker but she liked to stroll up its length towards the grand, brightly lit National Museum at the end. Used the time to think. The evening cold penetrated her coat to her bones, and at one point she was seized with a coughing fit that made the crowd part into two streams around her.

Yevgenia had given her what there was on the database about Martin Calvary, and Krupina had followed this up with a couple of calls to old contacts in Moscow. Nobody knew him or had ever met him, but there was information one directorate might hold that another one didn’t, even within the same organisation. So it proved in Calvary’s case.

A classic proletariy, in the old terminology, Calvary was the son of an English decorator father and a receptionist mother. The mother, intriguingly, was a Russian immigrant. Calvary was from Leicester in the Midlands, and had attended but not graduated from a technical college in Birmingham. He’d then enlisted with the British Army.

What little was available from SVR’s contacts within the British Ministry of Defence indicated that Calvary had served from 1998 until five years ago, and had risen to the rank of first lieutenant. He had distinguished himself as a rifleman in the Royal Green Jackets in Kosovo in 1999 and later in Afghanistan, first in 2005 and then in 2007 when, as an officer in the newly formed Rifles regiment, he’d been part of Operation Achilles, the renewed push against the Taliban in Helmand Province.

Then, in the summer of 2008, he’d left. Honorably discharged. No breath of a scandal. No details available at all.

And reappeared, no longer a serving soldier, near the scene of the Kreutzmann hit in Copenhagen. Kreutzmann, the old Stasi officer, had employed his own security, some of whom had links to SVR or FSB. They had sifted through their collections of surveillance footage from the days before and the period immediately after the murder, and he’d come up more often than most.

Krupina couldn’t hold out any longer. She walked to a kiosk and bought a pack of Marlboros. Belomorkanals were hard to come by, and her next shipment wasn’t due till tomorrow. She lit up. The smoke barely tickled her throat, let alone her nerve endings.

So: Calvary’s potential as a hit man had been spotted during his time in the army, and he’d been headhunted. By SIS, probably, though there were lots of people who might want an old Stasi dead – many of them Germans – and so it was conceivable that Calvary was working for some other agency, or even freelancing.

He was here, then, to take out Gaines, who knew the identity of the British mole in the Kremlin. This suggested strongly that SIS were handling him. Probably they’d bought Gaines’s silence through bribes or threats before, but weren’t satisfied. Wanted him out of the picture entirely.

It didn’t explain what had happened on the tram. Who the armed men were who hijacked it, why there’d been gunfire. Were they accomplices of Calvary’s, joining him on board and helping him kidnap Gaines? It didn’t fit.

She’d pulled strings at the airports, Prague’s and the others, to get Calvary’s name and face on the danger lists. But the Czech Republic was a landlocked country with porous borders and an almost infinite number of escape routes. She’d never stop him leaving.

And yet… something in her, something nagging, told her he hadn’t left. Hadn’t completed his business here in the city. Might not, in fact, have got his man at all.

She could muster little excitement at the prospect of the chase. Hanging over everything was the fact of Oleg’s death. No goodbyes, just a life terminated in a semi-random act of violence.

One of the best espions she’d ever known. The phrase came back to her.

And... something else.

That was what had been nagging at her.

She turned and began the nearly kilometre-long journey back to the office at close to a trot, fumbling out her phone as she did so.

*

‘You’re doing what?’

‘Burning it.’

Calvary put his lips around the end of the hose and drew deep, feeling the heavy warmth spread down the rubber. He pulled his face away in time to avoid a mouthful, angled the hose end into the cut-off plastic milk bottle. The petrol began to course out.

The young man and the woman – a few years older, but still young, perhaps in her late twenties – had been peering round the lip of the alley, watching for police. The sirens sped by in both directions but there’d been no interest shown in this dark passageway between tall blocks.

She’d ridden on the rim of the wheel until the front tyre had begun to howl in sympathy. Calvary said, ‘Down there,’ jabbing his finger at the alley’s mouth. She spun the wheel and the van rocked into the blackness, one side scraping sparks off the wall.

While they were looking out – not that it would do them any good – Calvary rummaged in the bins at the end of the alley for what he wanted. A container, in this case a two-litre plastic bottle, and a length of hose. He used the jagged edge of a tin can lid to trim the hose and saw off the neck of the bottle.

‘It’s my van.’ The kid ran a hand through his sprawling mop of black curls. He was spare, hip-looking in skinny jeans and T-shirt.

‘No it’s not.’ Calvary wielded the bottle like a chainsaw, shaking petrol over the van, inside and out. Using what he had sparingly. ‘It’s now the property of the city of Prague, specifically its police department. Along with all the DNA inside. Yours, hers and mine.’

He held out his hand without looking at the boy. ‘Give me a light.’

‘What? I don’t –’

‘The van stank of weed. Come on.’

‘Jeez...’ But the kid handed over a lighter, decorated with a bas-relief of cannabis leaves.

‘Back,’ said Calvary, and flicked the roller. He dropped the lighter and herded them towards the street. The heat licked at their backs, and Calvary heard the crackle of blistering paint an instant after they turned into the low afternoon sunlight.

He let them take the lead, matching their pace.

‘How far are we going?’

‘Twenty minute walk,’ said the woman.

Calvary said to the man, ‘You said it was your van?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How come she was driving?’

The woman cut in: ‘Because she is the better driver.’ Her English was good but with a Czech accent. She was tall, nearly Calvary’s height. Dark hair hanging loose, dressed in a suede jacket, jeans and boots. There was a slight resemblance between her and the boy, Calvary thought; something in the nose, the mouth.

To the boy Calvary said, ‘The number plate will have been caught by every security camera we passed. The police will be looking for you already.’

He grinned back. ‘Uh-uh, dude. Unregistered car, fake plates. Untraceable.’

Well, that’s something. ‘Why?’ said Calvary. ‘Are you criminals?’

Another laugh. ‘No. We just don’t trust the State, man.’

They ignored red lights, wove their way precariously across traffic. Overhead a helicopter chattered through the early evening sky. It looked like police.

‘He means,’ the woman said, ‘our enemies, the ones chasing you, have connections everywhere. Maybe in the vehicle licensing department.’

Calvary was disorientated, thought they were somewhere south of the hospital where it had all kicked off. It was a slightly grubby commercial district, fleets of lorries rolling down the roads in boiling clouds of dust.

‘Who are you?’

She said, ‘I’m Nikola. This is Max.’

‘No, I mean who are you?’

‘Your enemy’s enemies,’ said the boy. ‘So, your friends.’

Calvary thought, Spare me. He didn’t push it, concentrated on an inventory of his injuries. Nothing disabling, but there’d be aches later that might restrict mobility. He’d have to watch for that, keep his joints in motion.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Calvary.’

‘Like where Jesus got crucified.’ The boy was grinning again.

The woman, Nikola, had been murmuring into a phone. She put it away.

‘We are activists,’ she said. ‘We publish an independent newsletter. Reflektor. You are from England?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you will not have heard of us. Even most Prague residents haven’t.’

Max said, ‘We’re kind of a single-issue group.’ When Calvary didn’t ask, he went on: ‘Committed to bringing down Bartos Blažek and his empire.’

Calvary was silent. Max stared at him. ‘You – don’t know?’

‘Who that is? No.’

‘Shit, you really are from out of town, dude.’ He glanced at Nikola. ‘He’s the head of the biggest organised crime syndicate in the city. The country, even.’

Nikola finished: ‘And that was him. In the car behind us.’

*

A bulb blew with an audible pop as she flicked on the lights. The office was low-ceilinged, crowded but neat. Four workstations were positioned to make maximum use of the space available. The IT equipment looked up to date or close to it. A couple of older televisions hung on brackets. Even with the illumination from the fluorescent lights the room had the feel of a basement, which it was.

The walls were corkboarded almost from floor to ceiling, and virtually every inch of board was in turn covered with a cutting or photograph of some sort: newspaper and magazine articles, posed portraits, paparazzi shots. The faces were unfamiliar apart from two that kept cropping up: the scarred potato features of the huge man he’d fought in the bookshop, and the feral-looking smaller man whom he’d slammed in the car door and who had followed him into the shop with his crony.

And, most frequently of all, he noticed another large man, mid-forties, running to fat, dressed sometimes in shiny suits, sometimes polo shirts. He hadn’t had a clear look at the passenger in the BMW but he knew this was him.

‘Blažek. The Kodiak,’ said Max. He shoved a swivel chair across. Put your feet up, man. You look beat.’

‘No time.’ Calvary began to prowl about the office, taking in the pictures. The articles were all, or nearly all, in Czech so they meant little to him. ‘How did you happen to be there just at the right time?’

‘Back there?’ Max looked at Nikola, who’d hung up her jacket and was over at a tiny kitchenette, putting the kettle on. ‘Do you think we should –’

‘We have been following this man.’ She tapped a shot of the scarred giant. ‘Pavel Kral. One of Blažek’s thugs. He is medium level, not among the lieutenants but more than just a footsoldier. We’ve been tailing him all morning. This afternoon he took a phone call and set off for the hospital. We saw him enter the bookshop. Then you came out with the other two following, and Blažek himself appeared and tried to grab you. Whoever you were, we could not let them take you.’

‘What she means,’ said the kid, ‘is that it gave us great satisfaction to stick it up Blažek’s ass.’

Nikola: ‘What happened to this man? Pavel?’

‘I put him down,’ said Calvary.

Both of them were looking at him with new expressions.

‘For good?’ said Max.

‘No.’ He accepted the hot mug Nikola passed him. Black coffee, and sugared. He grimaced but sipped anyway. ‘Why were you following him?’

Nikola leant back against the kitchenette counter, bounced lightly on her heels. ‘We are four, in this office. Jakub you will meet shortly. The other man, Kaspar, has disappeared. He was investigating Pavel Kral’s involvement in an armed robbery. An involvement that is suspected but unproven.’

‘Dumb asshole thought he was some kind of master pickpocket.’ Max shook his head. ‘He was going to steal Kral’s bank cards, hack his accounts, link him to the purchase of a getaway car. Crazy stuff. We told him it’d never work.’

‘He disappeared this morning. Left the office and did not return. Does not answer his phone,’ she said. ‘We believe Kral has taken him.’

*

‘How long have you been doing this work?’

Calvary had accepted the offer of a chair in the end.

‘The newsletter has been running for three years, now,’ she said. ‘Jakub and I started it, then Max and Kaspar came on board. We publish irregularly. Sometimes monthly, sometimes every three months. It depends on the activity of Blažek’s organisation.’

‘It’s guerrilla activism,’ Max piped up. ‘We print an edition, distribute it ourselves to stations, street corners. Quick and dirty. Then we go to ground again. Every scrap of a link between Blažek and some new or old crime gets reported.’

‘Has it made any difference?’

‘No,’ said Nikola, quickly, staring at him. Daring him to laugh. ‘Not yet. We do not even know if Blažek is aware of our existence.’

‘He is now.’

She nodded.

‘You said you had weapons.’

She glanced at Max. ‘We have a gun.’

‘A gun. Singular.’

‘Yes.’

He raised his eyebrows. Max went over to a drawer, unlocked it.

By the way he carried the piece Calvary could see he wasn’t used to handling it. He took it. A Browning Hi-Power. Chambered for nine millimetre parabellum rounds. He jacked the magazine. It was full.

A good piece. But there was no smell of oil, and the mechanism didn’t feel slick.

He began stripping it. ‘Needs a clean.’

Nikola and Max hovered, unsure. Calvary said, ‘Have either of you ever fired this?’

Glances. If they’d been standing they would have shuffled their feet. ‘No. But Jakub has had some practice.’

‘Shooting tin cans?’ He reassembled it, sighted down it, straight armed. It would have to do.

‘So. Mr Calvary.’ Max tried to lighten the mood. ‘Can I call you Cal?’

‘No.’

‘Right. So, like… What’re you doing here?’

He’d been waiting for the question, had had time to work out the best response. He said, ‘Turn on the TV. To the news.’

Nikola shrugged, did so. Found one of the American 24-hour channels. They waited a couple of minutes until the economic news was over. Then the background switched to a jarringly familiar scene. The site of the tram hijacking just outside the Old Town.

A breathless local reporter summarised the known facts. Three, perhaps four masked and armed men had boarded the tram shortly after noon and had shot dead a Russian national, seemingly randomly. They had taken captive an unidentified man but had come under attack from another passenger armed with what appeared to be an umbrella. The other passenger had disappeared. Police were appealing for the mysterious hero to come forward and give his version of events, as he might be able to shed light on the attackers’ identities. Police had also released an identikit picture of the kidnapped man, based on eyewitness testimony, and were appealing for help from anybody who could identify him.

The identikit resembled Gaines in the same way a second-rate political caricature resembles its target. They’d made him heavier, given him jowls, which had the effect of taking twenty years off his age. He looked almost jolly, not furtive and crepuscular as he really was.

The story moved on and Calvary picked up the remote and killed the picture. ‘The man with the umbrella was me. I’m here in Prague looking for the man in the identikit picture. I was following him on the tram when those men took him. I killed one of them.’

‘And these guys were Blažek’s crew?’

‘I’m supposing so. Blažek had my target, the man on the tram, kidnapped. They were keeping the hospitals under surveillance, I’m guessing, which is how they found me. They want me too.’

‘Dead?’ said Nikola.

‘No. If they wanted that, they could have shot me on the street. They had at least a couple of chances. They want to get me alive. I don’t know the reason. To find out who I am. Maybe they worked out I was following my target and want to know why.’

‘And who is this target of yours?’ Her gaze was almost defiant. We have a right to know. We saved you.

He’d thought about his answer to this one, too. The truth would put them off. But if he gave them too little information, or misled them entirely, he risked reducing his chances of the three of them working out why Blažek had taken Gaines. ‘His name’s Sir Ivor Gaines. British expatriate. I’ve been sent to fetch him back.’

Max said, ‘So you’re, what, like a spy? MI6?’

Calvary winced inwardly. Nobody in SIS called it MI6. ‘Something like that.’

‘So why does Blažek want this guy?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Calvary stood, stretched, the stiffness creeping in already. He paced.

‘Tell me about Blažek. This empire of his.’

Nikola followed him with her eyes. ‘He has the city under his control. Hard drugs, prostitution – and I mean people trafficking. Extortion, loan sharking, fraud. As well as old-fashioned robbery. He took over in the late 1990s, using cunning and brute force. United the rival gangs that had grown up during the communist years with the new ones that appeared after liberation. Now it is a dynasty. His brother and son, Miklos and Janos respectively, are set to take over from him, in that order. Janos is this guy.’ She pointed at a picture of the man Calvary had injured with the car door. ‘He’s young and stupid, he’ll never get there.’

At that moment the door to the basement office swung open.

Calvary was across the desk on his belly, the Browning in his extended arm. He flicked the safety off.

ELEVEN

They converged on the War Council chamber from all over the city, in their Mercs and their Beamers and in some cases Cadillacs. The chamber was a converted barn in reclaimed forest land to the north west, fully equipped with central heating and air conditioning, a staffed kitchen and overnight facilities. The last two wouldn’t be necessary. This wouldn’t take long.

Bartos arrived a little before nine. Miklos was there already. No concern in his eyes, despite his older brother’s scuffed and bruised appearance. Bartos disapproved of sentimentality.

‘Janos here?’ said Bartos.

‘Not yet.’

‘That prick.’

Inside the chamber was a heavy conference table in the shape of a horseshoe. Bartos sat at the midpoint of the curve, drank mineral water and watched the cars arriving. They filed in, his lieutenants, sombre in dark suits. Ten in total. Janos wasn’t quite the last to get there, but close to it. Bartos thought his limp was exaggerated. The little shit had been bumped by a car door. He, Bartos, had survived a full-on crash.

When the room was full, Bartos got straight to the point.

‘This bastard’s made a fool out of me. Out of all of you, too.’

He ticked off points on his fingers, gazing at each man in turn. ‘One guy dead. Skewered through the throat like a pig, with a fucking umbrella. Pavel, a fellow his size, floored. While two of my men stood by with their heads up their asses and watched.’ He held up a warning finger as Janos made to speak. ‘Chaos outside the hospital. Wrecked cars, bookshop staff whose silence we’re having to enforce. So much for a low profile, people.’ He swallowed, hard. Ten, nine, eight… ‘And my BMW six series. Written off.’

He drew a deep breath, the only sound in the room. ‘One guy. One guy. Then some dipshit van, this tin can on wheels, comes along and spirits him away. And can we trace it? Can my people, the finest, handpicked modern businessmen in the city, find one pissant little Toytown van? Can you fuck.’

The silence hovered like a terrified waiter.

Bartos exploded: ‘Well? Come on. Someone help me out. I want to hear how you’re going to put it right.’

Janos tried to speak, cleared his throat, tried again. ‘I’ll –’

‘You’ll scurry off with your drugs and your whores and keep out of the way. You’ve done enough screwing up.’

None of the men dared look at Janos. Bartos had never spoken to his son like that before, not in front of the others. He didn’t care.

Miklos said, ‘Put me in charge. I’ll find this man, and the people who rescued him.’

‘See?’ Bartos raised his palms to the heavens, looking round at them. ‘That’s initiative. That’s the can-do spirit.’ He nodded at Miklos. ‘Okay. Done. Before we get down to details, I want the security doubled on the Englishman, Gaines. A dog pisses against a hydrant within a mile of him, I want the pooch’s balls served up with a pasta sauce.’

Across from him, he saw Janos’s face burning.

*

Krupina cleared the stairs two at a time, ignoring the complaints from her unaccustomed knees. She’d barked her instructions to Yevgenia on the way and when she entered the office she saw Tamarkin bent over Yevgenia’s workstation, both their faces flushed with excitement.

‘Something?’

‘Have a look at this, boss.’ Tamarkin’s grin wasn’t sardonic as usual.

On the screen a soft turquoise blip pulsed gently, a beacon in the centre of a street map. From the street names she knew the area was in the south of the city.

‘You’re certain?’

‘Positive,’ said Yevgenia.

Then Oleg had proved himself, right to the end. He hadn’t got close enough to the target, Gaines, to drop the tag on him. But he’d become aware of Calvary on board the tram with him. The fact that he hadn’t mentioned Calvary meant the English agent had been so close to him he might have been eavesdropping on Oleg’s muttered conversation into his microphone. And so he’d contrived to drop the tag, the spider, on Calvary, in the hope that this might give Krupina and Tamarkin and the others a lead.

Which it had.

‘How far, exactly?’ murmured Krupina.

‘Five point six kilometres,’ Yevgenia said immediately.

Beside her Tamarkin was pulling on his jacket. Krupina breathed out, long.

‘I’m coming along. Arkady, Lev too.’

*

‘Something else I haven’t mentioned,’ Calvary said. ‘There are Russians involved.’

The man in the door had frozen, eyes wide at the sight of the gun. It was odd that Calvary first saw him like this, because afterwards he noticed the man’s eye’s were usually hooded, half closed.

‘Jakub,’ Nikola said, fear catching at her throat.

Calvary raised the Browning, thumbed the safety back on. Slid his torso off the desk.

Jakub was older than the others. Perhaps thirty five. His hair was long, wavy and streaked with grey. He wore a leather coat that reached down to his ankles. A ‘duster’ from a spaghetti western.

He stepped in, eyes fixed on Calvary’s. Nikola said, ‘Jakub, this is Mr Calvary. A friend.’

‘Friend.’ With the one word, Calvary could tell Jakub’s English was limited. He came close, didn’t offer his hand. The hostility ebbed off him in waves.

*

Nikola brought him up to date, which was when Calvary mentioned the Russians.

‘They were surveilling Gaines from the start. He’s a traitor, possibly working for them. They’d have him under observation, it stands to reason. The Russian who got shot on the tram was one of them.’

Jakub watched him, rubbing the stubble on his cheeks.

Calvary said, ‘Can you think of any connection Blažek might have with the Russians?’

‘He hates them,’ said Nikola. ‘He’s completely bigoted about them. It’s well known. He won’t have them in his crew.’

‘So, snatching Gaines could be Blažek cocking a snook at the Russians? That assumes he knew they had some link with Gaines.’

Calvary sat against a desk, steepled his hands, blew slow air between them. An impasse.

All right.

He said to Nikola, ‘Do you have any information on properties Blažek owns?’

She stood beside Jakub, who was still regarding Calvary with hooded distrust. Contempt, even. Nikola said: ‘He owns enormous quantities of property. If you are wondering whether we might narrow down the range of places this Gaines has been taken to... no. There are scores of possibilities.’

‘Then there’s one course of action.’ Calvary pushed himself upright. ‘I have to advertise myself. Get in Blažek’s way.’

*

They took two cars. Krupina and Lev in his Audi, Tamarkin and Arkady in the Toyota that Gleb favoured. Two cars meant two directions of approach, and twice the chance of their having a set of wheels on the road in case of a violent attempt at escape by their target, Calvary.

Lev didn’t object when Krupina cranked the window down and lit up. She wouldn’t have cared if he had. Something was alive in her blood, something she hadn’t felt for years. Before even the posting previous to her current one.

Back at the office Yevgenia had both cars on her monitor and was tracking their approach to the target, represented by the blue beacon. They were linked up telephonically so Yevgenia would be able to advise them as soon as the target moved. He hadn’t, so far.

There was, Krupina admitted to herself, the possibility that he had found the tag, the spider, and had ditched it. Or, simply, that it had fallen off, or that he’d discarded whichever item of clothing Oleg had planted it on. Krupina thought of herself as a realistic pessimist. A pessimist because she was Russian. Realistic because she recognised when pessimism was of limited usefulness. And this was such a case: their was absolutely nothing to be gained from assuming the worst.

They were armed this time. Not Krupina; it wasn’t her style. But the men, Gleb Tamarkin and Lev and Arkady, carried Makarovs. The Pistolet Makarova, in service since the time of Stalin and supremely reliable. The carrying of concealed handguns wasn’t illegal in the Czech Republic, unlike in most EU countries and indeed in Russia itself. But none of them had licences, and if randomly stopped and searched, each of the three men – and Krupina by association – faced questions at the very least. Under routine circumstances she baulked at authorising the packing of heat, as the Americans said.

These weren’t routine circumstances.

Lev swung the Audi through bleak nighttime streets, ones not to be found in the city’s tourist brochures. Here the appearance was not far removed from the rundown greyness of outer Moscow. In a way Krupina pitied these old Warsaw Pact capitals. Prague, Budapest, Warsaw itself: all had been touched by socialism, had tasted its benefits for a diminishingly brief period in their histories, but had reaped none of its benefits. The mighty architecture of Soviet Moscow remained still, its heroic Metro system. All that these European cities had left to show for forty years of enlightenment was a dying fringe of industrial wasteland, around a chocolate-box commemoration of feudal and capitalist exploitation.

Through Krupina’s earpiece, and the earpieces of the three men, Yevgenia said, ‘Target’s on the move.’

Damn. ‘How close are we?’

‘You’re half a kilometre away.’

‘Any idea what direction?’

‘Northeast. He’s moving at a fair speed. It suggests he’s in a vehicle of some sort.’

Krupina said, ‘Gleb, you keep on the periphery. When Lev and I get on top of the target, Yevgenia, you let us know.’

‘Boss, I think Arkady and I should go in first.’

‘Your opinion is noted, Gleb, but this is my baby. Plus, we have to assume Calvary saw Arkady before, and that he might recognise him.’ She worked on the cigarette – a Marlboro – knowing there might not be time for another.

Krupina peered at the satnav display. ‘Yevgenia, we’re turning into Berounska Street now.’

‘He’s heading towards you.’

Lev pulled in at the kerb when she waved. Up ahead, on the left, was the building. The one Yevgenia had identified as the location of the signal.

A car, an old Fiat by the look of it, was approaching from that direction.

*

Calvary said: ‘You told me you followed the big man, this Pavel Kral.’

‘Yes.’ Nikola replied quickly. She didn’t glance at Jakub but she didn’t have to. Calvary could tell that she was anxious to ease the tension in the room, to act as a buffer between him and Jakub’s dislike. The hooded eyes watched him, throughout.

‘So how did you pick up his trail? How did you know where to find him in order to follow him?’

‘He has breakfast most weekday mornings at a particular cafe. We got lucky today.’

‘You know where he lives? Or any of Blažek’s crowd?’

‘No.’ It was Max who answered, swivelling round in his chair. ‘It’s the holy grail, man. To find out one of the lieutenants’ addresses. Blažek’s himself would be like winning the Euro lottery.’

Calvary considered. ‘Are there any favourite haunts? Bars, restaurants these people like to frequent? Somewhere I might find a crowd of them?’

Jakub muttered something. Again Nikola shook her head.

‘Jakub, you must use English. Please. Mr Calvary speaks no Czech.’

The eyes unhooded a fraction. Jakub said, ‘Nebe. It is restaurant near Old Town. Regular place for Blažek.’

‘Okay. Good.’ Calvary paced. ‘Is it likely to be open now?’

Nikola: ‘No reason why not. But I do not know if Blažek or his people will be there tonight. They will be out on the streets, looking for you. For us.’

‘You have a point.’ Calvary pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. ‘But it’s worth a try.’

‘Why you want to get us killed?’

It was the first time Jakub had addressed him directly. The man stood with his hands clasped low, head lowered. His gaze openly belligerent.

‘You wish to walk into Blažek’s company – and then? You meet him, and he catches you. Catches us. Kills us. Why? What is achieved?’

‘That’s not how I see it playing out,’ said Calvary. ‘What I need to do is separate one of the crew from the others. Preferably a higher-echelon member. Get him on his own. Interrogate him. But I need a way in. And,’ he went on, as Jakub opened his mouth once more, ‘I’m not looking to put any of you in danger. I’ll go in alone.’

Glances were shooting around the room like projectiles. Calvary sighed.

‘Look. I haven’t said it yet, but thanks for saving me. You didn’t have to, but you still did. That took decency, not to mention guts. I don’t expect anything more from you. I don’t want to drag you in any deeper, into a problem that’s mine. Let me give you a couple of minutes. Talk it over. Decide what you want to do. If you decide to call it quits, that’s absolutely fine, I’ll walk out of here and you won’t see me again. No hard feelings.’

He didn’t wait for a response from any of them, just walked over to the far end of the office and began studying the pictures and clippings on the wall. Behind him he heard them conferring, in Czech and in low voices. He thought he heard hissed anger in Jakub’s.

‘Mr Calvary.’ Nikola. He turned. It hadn’t taken long.

‘We are involved with you, and you with us, now. Whether we like it or not.’ She paused. ‘And we need to find out what happened to our colleague, Kaspar.’

‘Okay.’

‘We will take you to the restaurant, Nebe, and go in with you.’

‘No. I mean, you can take me there. I’d be grateful for the lift. But it’ll be too dangerous inside. You can wait for me in the street. I might need to make a quick getaway.’

‘Mr Calvary –’

‘And it’s Martin.’

*

They took Nikola’s car, a dark blue Fiat parked round the corner. Max sat up front beside her, hoisting a backpack. He saw Calvary looking.

‘Camera. In case there’s any action.’

Jakub stayed behind.

They took the Browning. It was in the glove compartment with a spare magazine. Calvary wasn’t even going to try bringing it into the club with him.

As Nikola pulled away, Max shook his head.

‘Still can’t believe you killed my van, man.’

There was little traffic on the street at this hour. As they turned at the end, Calvary glanced at an idling Audi. Saw a man and an elderly woman inside.

For an instant there was almost eye contact.

Then they were away and heading towards the lights.

TWELVE

They’d sat in the car for ten minutes, watching the entrance of the restaurant Nebe from across the street. A steady stream of people passed in and out, more leaving than arriving at this hour.

Nikola and Max both had prepaid phones. They took Calvary’s number, and he theirs.

To pass the time Calvary said, ‘Are the two of you related?’

Nikola gave a faint smile. ‘We are cousins.’

To Max he said, ‘But you grew up in Minnesota.’

Max turned to stare at him. ‘St Paul. How the hell’d you know?’

The rounded vowels, the singsong delivery. ‘Lucky guess.’

‘Yeah. Whatever.’ He gave Calvary a curious look. ‘My parents took me there when I was a baby. Three years old. The borders had just opened up and they got the hell out of Czechoslovakia. But I kept in touch with my big cousin here, always wanted to come back. Arrived here two years ago.’

‘To fight the good fight.’

‘Hey, you don’t need to make fun of us, man.’ The kid’s anger was genuine. ‘You’ve got your priorities, we’ve got ours. This asshole Blažek has screwed up more people’s lives than you could imagine. He needs to be taken down.’

‘I wasn’t making fun,’ said Calvary, quietly. He thought: nice one. You’re alienating the only people in this city who might be able to help you.

*

Calvary walked through the doors into the clatter of cutlery and crockery, the din of conversation. The place was dimly lit in red, the tables crowded.

Somebody touched his arm and he turned. A man sharply uniformed in a tuxedo had stepped up and was appraising Calvary, his expression chilly.

Calvary slipped a banknote out of his wallet and held it folded between two fingers. ‘Speak Russian?’

The man shrugged, looking as if he wanted to spit.

‘I’m looking for Bartos Blažek. Is he here?’

The man shook his head. Too quickly. Stepped back. Calvary brandished the note.

‘I’m not asking for an introduction. I just want to know if he’s here. A nod will do fine.’

A faint lifting of the eyes, past Calvary’s shoulder. Calvary looked round. Over the diners’ heads, through the hovering layer of smoke, he saw some sort of balcony. A mezzanine level.

He turned back to the maitre d’. ‘He up there himself?’

The man took the money, not quite snatching it. He leaned in again.

‘His son. Janos,’ he said in Russian.

Calvary fished out his phone, texted Nikola and Max. Janos Blažek is here.

He was making his way between the tables when a reply came from Max: Watch yourself. He’s dumb but mean.

Calvary thought about texting back I know, but didn’t.

A central flight of steps led up to the balcony that projected from the mezzanine. The bottom of the steps was crowded with people queueing to go up or come down. Waiters squirmed through, holding loaded trays precariously above their heads. Calvary headed for the steps.

An arm gripped his wrist.

As he began the instinctive manoeuvre to break free and counterattack, the other man pulled him close and pressed into the small of his back a hard steel object which he didn’t need to see to be able to identify. Another man appeared at his side, a third loomed ahead, at the foot of the steps leading up to the mezzanine. He jerked his head indicating up the stairs.

The maitre d’ must have tipped them off.

Calvary began to climb the steps, the gun pushed into his back. The two men took up positions on either side of him, the gunman bringing up the rear. They led him into the depths of the mezzanine. Ten or twelve booths lined the walls at the back on all three sides, the booths themselves insulated by partitions as high as a man’s shoulder. Access to them was through an opening about two people’s width across. All the booths were full and gold flashed from within some of them, rich laughter swirling like cigar smoke. The booth they were heading for was directly in the centre at the back.

They stopped at the entrance to the booth. Inside, still seated, were four men and three young women, pneumatic and feline, bleached blonde. Directly opposite Calvary was a lean man in his twenties in expensive but nasty clothes: light grey shiny three-piece suit, pink and white striped shirt with gold cufflinks, no tie. Calvary recognised the face from the encounter outside the hospital and in the bookshop. From the photos on the wall of the office. Janos Blažek.

Janos’s eyes were chips of blue, and slightly bloodshot as though he’d been drinking. They came into focus.

He stood up, staring at Calvary. Triumph chased fury across his face.

He said something in Czech, raising his voice to be heard over the din. Calvary shook his head. ‘Russian or English.’

‘Who are you?’ Janos spoke English. His accent was thick and guttural.

Calvary said, ‘I’m the guy who skewered your friend through the throat on the tram. And wrecked your daddy’s BMW.’

The barrel of the gun drilled deeper into the area over Calvary’s left kidney. He realised, suddenly, that Janos had been one of the masked men on the tram. Realised it from the way Janos’s teeth clenched when he mentioned the man he’d killed.

‘I’m looking for the man you kidnapped,’ Calvary said. ‘Give him to me and I’ll leave you alone.’

Janos didn’t like Calvary’s reply because his face darkened and his fist slammed the table top, dislodging a glass. ‘You do not speak until I tell you. This man. Why he is important to you?’

So they didn’t know. It was a bargaining chip. Calvary felt a flash of optimism.

‘Tell me where I can find him, if you still have him, and I’ll tell you why he’s important.’

His face showed he was struggling with his anger. Then he said, ‘We have him.’

Janos wasn’t going to reveal any more, and it wasn’t worth trying to get him to. Calvary knew he had to get away, as far away as he could, and quickly. The advantage he had was that four of them were inside the booth and only three outside, so the odds were better than they appeared, but they weren’t going to stay that way for long.

Calvary glanced at the man on his right, one of his escorts up the steps. Beyond him he saw that a waitress had negotiated the traffic on the steps adroitly and was speeding over, trays in both hands carried at waist height and laden with tiny shot glasses, each crowned with flame. She was heading for the booth immediately to the right of Janos’s.

Calvary made his move.

*

Darya flicked the spent butt end into the street and sat bolt upright.

Men were swarming from cars towards the entrance of the restaurant like bees funnelling into a hive at the command of their queen. The cars were high-end ones. The men looked like athletic thugs. The drivers moved the cars – four of them – into a tight barrier along the pavement outside the entrance.

‘You see that?’ she almost shouted.

In her ear Tamarkin’s voice was shockingly close. ‘Yeah.’

‘Who are they?’

‘I’m not sure, but they look like gangbangers. The Blažek crew.’

She knew of Blažek. Everybody who spent time in the city did.

‘They must have something to do with our man. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise.’

Tamarkin said, ‘I agree.’

They had followed the Fiat expertly after the first visual contact had been made, checking occasionally with Yevgenia that they were in fact following the signal she was monitoring. They’d taken up position at either end of the street, watching the Fiat until Calvary emerged, alone, and entered.

She couldn’t go in after him herself. She would stick out as though she were radioactive. And she wanted Tamarkin out here as well, in the other car, in case either the Fiat departed and needed following, or Calvary left the restaurant on the run. Not that she had any idea what he was doing there in the first place.

So she had sent Arkady in. He was young and trendy enough to be inconspicuous in a setting like this restaurant.

Arkady was trying to update them, but the overwhelming noise coming through his feed made his words unintelligible. In a moment a text message came through from him. Can’t see the target, but there’s some sort of scuffle going on upstairs.

She texted back, her fingers labouring over the tiny keys. Men pouring in. Keep out of the way. Safety first.

Part of her hoped he’d ignore her.

*

In the booth, Janos started to speak. Calvary cut across him loudly.

‘Hand over your prisoner and we’ll forget about –’

He didn’t finish the thought because it was always a surprise to the opponent when you attacked while you yourself were in mid-sentence, just as it was when you hung up a phone and cut your own voice off. Calvary shot out his arm and grabbed one of the trays from the waitress, hoping like hell it didn’t spill on to her. She was grasping it loosely and he managed to snatch it away, brought it whipping across and tilted it at the same time so that the glasses of burning sambucca sprayed into the booth like tiny splintering fireworks. He continued the movement of his arm and the edge of the tray cracked into the face of the man at his side with the gun. The burning spirits wouldn’t cause any real damage but they had shock value and would impart pain. It bought Calvary enough time to use his legs to piston himself off the outer wall of the booth and crash blindly backwards into the man behind him, who went down, shouting. Calvary twisted round and gripped the gun-arm by the wrist and gave it a quick rotational jerk. The man screamed. Calvary caught the gun with his other hand and hauled himself up, dragged the gunman across in front of him.

The momentum of his pistoning action had driven Calvary back towards the steps and the two men outside the booth had been slow to react, so they were only now coming forward. Calvary yelled at them to stay back as he got a forearm across the gunman’s throat and jammed the barrel of the pistol in his ear.

Pandemonium now as the patrons started to see the gun and began funnelling towards the steps. Calvary moved aside to let them pass. On the floor below, people were starting to notice and point up at them.

Calvary stood, his back to the stairs, hoping to Christ there weren’t any more of them down there, his arm exerting pressure on the gunman’s trachea so that he hissed and gasped. The shark’s fin of the pistol sight cut into the external canal of his ear. Five or six feet away ahead and to the right and left were Janos’s cronies, the women screaming and cowering behind them. All three of the cronies had drawn handguns, all attempts at discretion discarded. In the booth Janos had risen and was roaring, wiping at his neck and face with a handkerchief. Another man was leaning on the table in the booth, clutching his face and moaning.

On the floor below, the diners were on their feet, women screaming, a wedge of panicking bodies driving towards the doors.

Calvary moved quickly, shuffling back and dragging the gunman with him, slipping his fingers inside his suit jacket and coming out with a wallet and putting it in his own pocket before getting his arm around his neck once more. The gunman was trying to nurse his injured wrist with his other hand, a pathetic keening issuing from between his clenched teeth. Calvary assumed they would be more circumspect about shooting at him once he was down among the crowd. Not that he thought they’d give a damn about civilian casualties as such, but it would be bad public relations.

In two movements Calvary put his foot in the small of the gunman’s back and kicked him forward before using both legs to launch himself in a backward flip over the banister of the balcony. Deliberately falling backwards was a highly unnatural manoeuvre for a human being to carry out and he’d never been especially good at this type of acrobatics, but he didn’t exactly have a lot of options available.

Someone fired, and they were close because he felt the whine of the bullet past his face as he dropped into space. He got the move almost right and landed on his feet, but with the centre of gravity off so that he was leaning backwards, arms wheeling. He tumbled back, landed on his backside on one of the abandoned tables, found his balance once more and plunged low into the crowd struggling for the exit, keeping himself at the height of their waists. It might have been putting them at a terrible risk, but Calvary had calculated that the men up on the mezzanine wouldn’t start firing indiscriminately into the crowd as long as he was completely hidden in its midst. As he moved he thumbed the safety on the pistol and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket.

Someone in the throng had seen him land with the gun, and there was yet another renewed wave of screaming as the crowd started parting for him. It was making him more visible. Calvary saw them, then, at least four men, possibly six, forcing their way in against the outflow of the crowd. Clearly Janos’s crew, though God knew how they’d managed to arrive at the club so quickly.

Calvary got rough then, shoving his way through the crowd at a stumble, angling away from the direction of the exit and towards the row of low windows set in the wall facing the street. He could feel the presence of Janos’s men behind him on the floor as he broke free on the perimeter of the crowd and tucked his head down to turn himself into as much of a ball as he could.

He dived straight at the window.

The pane gave in a cascade of fragments that flashed brilliantly in the neon vista outside as Calvary burst onto the street and hit the pavement hard, rolling on his shoulder. He sprang to his feet, feeling the tiny insect-stings of shards in his cheeks and neck. In the heat of the moment it was difficult to tell if he had been cut badly.

Passers-by reeled away in astonishment and the part of the clientele that had barged its way through the exit shouted and pointed. He turned left down the street and ran without looking back. He was aware that he was more exposed out there than he had been in the restaurant.

Calvary pounded along the pavement, at one point cannoning off a stout man in evening wear and catching his angry shout in his slipstream. He suddenly veered off the pavement on to the road and although it wasn’t particularly busy he managed only by a few inches not to get his knee smashed by the bumper of a taxi cab. Then he was dodging cars in a maelstrom of horns and contorted faces until he made it to the other side and dived right down a narrow sidestreet. The narrowness of focus was almost exhilarating. Nothing mattered now, nothing, except that he get as far away from the restaurant as possible.

Finally Calvary ducked into an alley and leaned with his hands on his knees and sucked long, gulping breaths, his face stinging and his hammer-blow heart threatening to pound a hole in his chest. He took stock.

He was alive. He had a wallet belonging to one of the enemy. An extra gun.

And he knew he’d been set up.

THIRTEEN

‘Target has left the building.’

Yevgenia’s voice in her ear pulled Krupina back from the sight on the pavement. The doors of the restaurant had been broken off their hinges by the press of bodies. People were spilling and sprawling out.

Sirens cut the air, high above the hubbub.

She’d seen the target, Calvary, come through the window like an aquatic creature bursting through the smooth surface of a lake. Had seen him roll and gain his feet and take off. She had yelled in Lev’s ear and pointed and he’d swung the Audi round. Too late. The first of the escaping diners were surging across the road. Lev couldn’t dodge them, not even by veering on to the pavement. The surge turned into a flood. The Audi sat in the road, hemmed in by bodies.

‘He’s heading east.’

Krupina said, ‘Gleb?’

‘Here. I’m free. I’ll make a loop round the back, head him off.’

In the rear view mirror, past the frantic crowd, Krupina saw Gleb’s Toyota peel away at the end of the street.

A hand slapped her window. She saw Arkady and jerked her thumb at the door behind her. He pulled it open with difficulty, squeezed in.

‘What happened in there?’

He was out of breath. ‘Gunfire. Target got away. Looked unharmed.’

‘Got away from whom?’

‘I don’t know. But before I got out, a group of flash-looking types were being hustled down from the balcony and out the back. Young, rich. Gang types. They looked hurt.’

Gang types, again. Blažek’s men.

She didn’t know what the connection was. Couldn’t waste time thinking about it now.

The road ahead was clearing and Lev began to ease the Audi forward.

‘Yevgenia, talk to me.’

*

Nikola answered at once.

‘I’m on the corner of –’ Calvary did his best with the Czech pronunciation. ‘Four, five blocks from the restaurant.’

‘What happened –’

‘Just get here. And don’t call Jakub. Don’t answer any calls from him.’

He rang off before she could ask why. Because he may have set us up. Because the Blažek reinforcements got there too quickly. They must have been tipped off beforehand.

He huddled in the alley, watching the road. The shouting was distant now, but the sirens were getting louder. An ambulance flashed past.

He pulled out the wallet he’d taken off the gunman. Cheap, imitation crocodileskin. Four credit cards in shades of gold and platinum, a wad of high-denomination koruna notes.

A business card with a name – Marek Zito – and a mobile phone number.

He pocketed the items. Focused his thoughts on the big problem. The looming one.

Set up. He ran through the possibilities.

Nikola and Max had tipped off Blažek. Hardly feasible. They’d rescued Calvary earlier. Why not just feed him to the wolves back then?

Jakub, the unknown quantity. This was more likely. But why? Was he one of Blažek’s men, working undercover inside the guerrilla newspaper? Calvary couldn’t believe it. The paper was too minor and irritant for Blažek to bother with, surely. And even if he was threatened by it, there were more direct ways a man like him would deal with the matter.

A third possibility was surveillance. Calvary, Nikola and Max might have picked up followers on the way to the restaurant. But he doubted Blažek’s crew had the skills to track him such that he failed to spot them. They weren’t trained intelligence operatives, from what he could gather.  Also, how had they got on to the Fiat in the first place?

Surveillance. Trained operatives.

The realisation punched a cold fist into his gut.

Calvary shut his eyes. He’d been so stupid that he deserved to get caught.

*

He started with the collars of his shirt and coat, running his fingertips underneath them. Nothing. He pulled the coat off, felt along the arms, ran his palms over the back.

Delved into the pockets. And found it deep in the lint of one of them.

It was the size of a pinhead with an array of hooks radiating like curved limbs. Light from a street lamp winked off it. Calvary imagined that if he looked at it under proper illumination he’d see writing in Cyrillic.

The Russian on the tram, the squat one who’d been shot. Calvary had been standing behind him, thinking he was undetected. But the Russian had been aware of him, had dropped the bug in his pocket. Probably when the hijackers boarded and it became clear the Russian wasn’t going to get near Gaines.

Calvary threw the bug deep into the alley, beyond a heap of bins. He peered out into the street. A few cars, passing at speed, not looking for him. He emerged and loped across the street to another alley almost directly opposite.

Less than a minute later two cars appeared from opposite directions, pulling to a stop facing each other. An Audi and a Toyota. The Audi’s driver stayed put but his passenger stepped out. A woman, a finger in her ear, her lips moving. The man in the back climbed out, too, as did the driver of the Toyota.

The two men walked down the alley at a crouch. From the way they held their arms before them, Calvary knew they had handguns.

The woman stayed at the mouth of the alley. There was something familiar about her. As she turned to look down the street, Calvary stared at her profile and realised she was the old woman he’d seen in the car as they’d been leaving the office. She wasn’t all that old, he realised. But there was something… wrong about her.

The two men emerged from the alley. The woman jerked her head to one side, her mouth set in frustration.

They glanced about, the three of them, as though they might through an immense stroke of luck see their target loitering nearby. They conferred, briefly. Then they got back into the cars and pulled away.

Russians. He was certain of it.

*

The Fiat turned into the road and he was on the back seat almost before it came to a stop. Max gaped at him.

‘Jeez, dude, you’re bleeding.’

Calvary touched his face, felt the congealing stickiness. ‘It’s nothing. Drive. Anywhere, for now.’

He updated them in terse sentences. They’d been aware of nothing until Blažek’s reinforcements had started piling into the restaurant, shortly before the shooting started.

Max said, ‘I got some pictures. Unknown guys going in. We’ll run them through the database later.’

Calvary said, ‘You need to ring Jakub. Tell him to get out of there. The Russians tracked me to the office, they know about it.’

‘Damn.’ Max slapped the dashboard. ‘He’ll have to wipe the hard drives, bring the laptops with him.’

Max made the call. On the wheel, Nikola’s knuckles were ivory.

She said, ‘Russians, again.’

‘Yes. It doesn’t make sense, unless they’re working with Blažek in some way. But his men killed the Russian on the tram. So that theory doesn’t hold, either.’ He was beginning to come down off the adrenaline high, to feel fatigue hit him in a series of slow blows. ‘We have to assume there are two hostile parties looking for us. Blažek’s people, and the Russians.’

‘We’re going to pick Jakub up. He’s making his way to the Old Town,’ said Max. ‘Then where the hell do we go?’

*

Bartos used his palms, their meaty weight the equivalent of a smaller man’s fists. Janos’s head rocked left, right, left again. Blood from his split lip slashed the wall.

‘Again,’ roared Bartos. ‘Again. Not once, not twice, but three times.’

Janos raised an arm to fend off the blows at last but the move only stoked Bartos’s fury.

‘Don’t you put your hand up to me,’ he screamed. He put his boot in his son’s chest and shoved. Janos and the chair he was on were sent tipping back against the wall. Bartos kicked the chair’s back legs away and the younger man bounced off the floor. He curled into a ball and lay there, shuddering.

Bartos raised his boot to stamp down. Stopped himself.

He looked at the blood on the walls and the carpet of the summer house. The smashed furniture.

‘Clean this fuckin’ mess,’ he said, spittle flying. He barged out.

Miklos was waiting outside, his arms folded. The rest of the men were up at Bartos’s main house. They couldn’t be allowed to see family business being settled.

‘Little bastard’s finished,’ said Bartos.

Miklos had coordinated the evacuation of the restaurant, making sure Janos and his entourage got out before the police arrived. He’d taken statements, provided Bartos with a summary even before they’d arrived at the Kodiak’s home.

‘He’s jerked me off for the last time.’ Bartos stared off over the city’s lights. ‘This Brit guy.’

‘He has nothing,’ said Miklos behind him.

‘He humiliated me again.’

‘He took Zito’s gun. He has nothing else. Janos told him nothing. The other men confirm this.’

Bartos didn’t turn. After a few seconds he pulled out his phone.

The Worm’s phone was switched off. Bartos thought about leaving a message – never turn your phone off on me – but decided against it.

Thirty seconds later his phone buzzed. The Worm.

‘Couldn’t speak just then. What’s up?’

‘Who is this guy?’

‘Which guy are we –’

‘Don’t dick me around. The umbrella guy. The one who just got the better of six of my men, disarmed one of them. Shut down the Restaurant Nebe.’

‘I’m working on it.’

‘That’s not good enough.’ Bartos breathed deep. He knew if he started shouting, up at the house the twins would wake up. ‘If he’s some kind of undercover special forces agent I need to know about it. Need to know what kind of connections he’s got, what sort of backup.’

‘He doesn’t need any backup, by the look of it. Seems to me he’s doing a fine job of running rings round you on his own.’

Oh, you’ll pay. The phone creaked in Bartos’s fist.

The Worm went on: ‘Look, Blažek. You need to get a grip. I feed you information, it’s up to you what you do with it. It’s not my fault you’ve let it go to waste, let this man slip through your fingers. At least you’ve got Gaines. I’ll let you know once I’ve found out why he’s so important. Till then, get off my back.’

*

The Worm cut the boor off in mid-shout, then opened his palmtop computer. There it was. The beacon, a different one. Calvary was still on the radar.

He’d wondered how much to tell Blažek about Calvary. Whether to tell him his name, and that he was a suspected assassin for the British government. In the end he’d decided to reveal nothing. The Worm didn’t think Blažek was a coward, but he did wonder if the big man would baulk at going after somebody with Calvary’s pedigree, or his suspected links. There was a risk he and his men might pull their punches, awed even if unconsciously by who they were up against, and that would be fatal when dealing with a man like Calvary.

The Worm looked at his watch. Twelve forty-five a.m. He needed to get moving.

*

Nikola drove parallel to the river. The view across was spectacular, the castle high above, soaring and brooding simultaneously. She’d taken a roundabout route and by the way she watched her mirrors, made unexpected turns, Calvary knew she had some experience shaking off tags.

A grand, ornate building was coming up and Nikola took an abrupt right and pulled in. Jakub climbed in the back. He didn’t look at Calvary. His face was grim.

‘We go to my apartment,’ said Nikola. ‘Even if they search the office, they will not be able to trace us there.’

On the way, Calvary checked the pistol he’d taken off the man in the club. A Glock 17. Modern, chunky, effective. The magazine was full. He passed it forward to Max, who flinched a little. Not a good sign.

‘Swap it. Give me the Browning,’ said Calvary.

‘Why?’

‘I’d prefer it.’

He didn’t tell them the real reason, which was that the Browning needed to be cocked before every shot. The Glock chambered a new round automatically, making it easier for a novice to use.

Assuming they ever needed to use it.

*

They navigated a warren of streets. After ten minutes’ silence, Calvary turned to Jakub.

‘Look. You don’t like me. You don’t like that I’ve brought Blažek down on your heads, when you were working on ways to get at him without being noticed. I’m sorry for you. But I can’t undo any of it. I need your help, and you sure as hell need mine. So let’s work together.’

Jakub’s lizard eyes revealed nothing.

Calvary gazed out the window, watching the midnight city seem to grab at the car as it went by.

*

Nikola’s flat was in the Vinohrady district to the southeast. She parked on the street and they followed her up. It was a small two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. Cosy, cluttered, with signs of only one occupant.

Calvary felt awkward in the confined space, with his boots and his gun. He’d made sure Max brought the Glock in with them as well. They seated themselves around a battered kitchen table and Nikola made tea and sandwiches. Calvary felt the fatigue starting to drag him under.

He tossed the wallet onto the table. Pulled out the business card. Marek Zito, and the phone number.

Max said, ‘Yeah, we know Zito. Close to Janos, as you’ve discovered for yourself. History of jail time for assault, burglary.’ He shrugged. ‘But we’re no further in than we were before.’

‘We have a number,’ Calvary said. ‘And I have an idea.’

*

He told them. Max watched him with growing incredulity. Nikola glanced from time to time at Jakub, who’d dropped his gaze to the tabletop.

Afterwards Max flipped the card in the air, caught it deftly. ‘Never work.’

‘Agreed,’ Jakub grunted.

Calvary said, ‘Look. You said yourselves, the brother, Miklos, is the golden boy. The anointed heir. This Janos is just a kid. At that age you’re full of piss and vinegar. Hypersensitive. He wants respect from his dad, the boss, Bartos. Instead he’s screwed up. Three times. First, on the tram. That was him in charge. Sure, he got Gaines, which earned him some brownie points. But he accidentally shot a Russian – what’s more, a Russian intelligence agent, it seems – and he lost one of his men in a surprise counterattack by a total stranger. Me. Then, he fails to take me down outside the hospital, gets himself slammed in a car door, and indirectly gets his brother’s car wrecked. Finally he lets me escape from what should have been an airtight trap, a trap I walked straight into, in the restaurant. Bartos has got to be furious with him. And Janos is feeling utterly humiliated.

‘His one shot at redemption is taking me in. Without help from his father or his brother. He’ll suspect something’s up when I contact him – I don’t think he’s stupid enough not to. But I doubt he’ll go straight to Bartos or Miklos or any of the rest of the crew with the information.’

Nikola ran her hand through her hair. ‘It is a gamble.’

‘Worth it. Possibly our only shot.’ He finished his tea. ‘Two things. I need to make a phone call first, in private. I’ll go for a walk. Second, I need a few hours’ rest. We all do.’

*

Outside, the street was dark with trees. He walked several blocks away, the Browning in his waistband. He hit the speed dial.

‘Martin. Where are you?’

He closed his eyes at the sound of the voice.

‘You have to give me more time, Llewellyn.’

‘I’m listening.’

He brought Llewellyn up to date, leaving out nothing, not even what he planned to do.

‘I need you to run a check on the Russians.’ He described them. The squat one who’d been shot on the tram. The young, dark-haired one who’d been following Gaines and also at the alley where he’d dropped the bug. The slightly older, fair-haired man. And the woman: middle-aged but looking older, sick or injured in some way.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Llewellyn. ‘There should be something at least on one of the older ones.’

Calvary drew the night air into his lungs. He glanced about, the shadows seeming to crowd in on him.

‘I need you to run some other checks.’

He gave descriptions of Nikola, Max and Jakub along with their names, and that of their newsletter, Reflektor.

Calvary said, ‘I can get Gaines. But at the moment, Blažek and his crew really don’t seem to know why they’ve kidnapped him. I don’t know either. That suggests he’s somewhere nearby, and hasn’t been disposed of yet.’

‘Yet.’

‘For God’s sake, Llewellyn.’ He fought to keep his voice low. ‘You want him dead, don’t you? Who cares if it’s some mobster who bumps him off?’

‘You know very well that it has to be you, Martin. And very visibly you.’

‘If I read the morning’s papers and find you’ve shopped me, Llewellyn, then all bets are off.’

A chuckle. ‘No, don’t worry. You’ve earned a grace period. Shall we say, twelve hours? The evening editions?’

Calvary took four long, slow breaths. Then he said, ‘Gaines isn’t going to be my last kill, Llewellyn. There’ll be one more.’

He rang off.

FOURTEEN

‘You understand what you are asking for, Darya Yaroslavovna.’

She did, yes.

‘Half a dozen extra people. To carry out a potentially explosive operation – literally and politically – on EU soil.’

Yes, she appreciated the implications.

‘Without Embassy protection. Without the cover, the logistical support the Embassy could provide.’

She was aware of the drawbacks, but it was the only way this could be done. It had to be deniable, if it went wrong.

For a long minute – it seemed as long as that, anyway – she heard only his breathing. Then: ‘I’ll do what I can.’

Krupina closed her eyes. It meant consider it done.

‘My balls are on the line, Darya Yaroslavovna.’

‘I’m very grateful, tovarischch. Profoundly so.’

‘We’ll find out just how grateful the next time I need a favour from you.’

It was a secure connection, as secure as they came, yet she listened after her superior had rung off, her ear probing for the tell-tale click of a tapped line. Old habits.

She opened the door. Gleb was outside, hovering at a respectful distance.

‘It’s a go.’

He breathed out. ‘Thank God. What sort of numbers?’

‘I asked for half a dozen. I think I’ll get them.’

‘When?’

She raised a shoulder. ‘Ten, twelve hours. Out of our hands.’

*

In the alley Tamarkin had lost his temper, hurling the bug against the wall. Not like him.

‘He can’t be far. Yet he might as well be on the other side of the world.’

Krupina leaned against the Audi, lit up. Blew ragged tusks of smoke from her nostrils.

She said: ‘We change our focus. Calvary, yes, he’s still important. But I think we can be sure that this Blažek has a hand in Gaines’s abduction. That the invaders on the tram were Blažek’s men. Which means, we go after him.’

Her boys, Gleb and Arkady and Lev, said nothing. They weren’t defeatists, she knew.

‘I’m aware of our numbers. Our limited resources. We need backup. Bodies on the ground, mainly.’

Tamarkin said, ‘We ask the Embassy?’

‘No. I go crawling to Moscow tugging my forelock. Appeal directly for assistance.’

Arkady let out a slow whistle between his teeth. ‘This Gaines must be someone special if you think you’ve any chance with that approach. With respect, boss.’

‘And I know you’re fishing with that remark, Arkasha, but it’s still “need to know”.’

*

Calvary lay in the darkness, listening to the shuffling and settling of the other three in their respective rooms, to the muffled sounds of the late-night city beyond the windows.

Three people. Two men and a woman. Journalists, not fighters. However much they liked to style themselves as guerrillas. Two handguns between them.

Against them, the biggest organised crime operation in Prague. And Russian intelligence, probably SVR.

All that he had to do was find Gaines and kill him, making sure the Russians knew it was him who’d done the deed.

That was all he had to do. Except he didn’t have a clue where they were keeping Gaines.

Calvary had been given the spare bedroom, a box-like space with a single bed. Max and Jakub took the floor and the sofa in the living room. They turned in at half past one, with plans for a five a.m. start. Calvary hadn’t made the call yet, wasn’t planning to until the last moment. He wanted Janos to be working against a deadline, with little time to think through his decision or call up an army of reinforcements.

As often happened, Calvary was so tired that he found sleep difficult. He lay entirely still, fully clothed save for his boots, allowing his weight to sink into the bed. Eyes closed, he modulated his breathing. Pictured his heartbeat slowing to the bare minimum needed to keep his circulation going.

Eventually he slipped into a state between wakefulness and deep sleep. As usual, the images came. Not dreams, but memories, from more than four years earlier.

*

The sweat stung his eyes and his lips and he shouldered it away. Late May, and the temperature had soared in the last week to the mid-twenties Celsius. Far from the life-sapping hell August would bring, but stifling nonetheless.

The late morning sun washed the walls of the scorched buildings in gold. The scorch marks were from a different kind of heat: the kind generated by human beings in order to damage one another. The street Calvary was walking down had been the scene of an ambush six days earlier, involving an IED attack on a Snatch Land Rover. He thought he could see fragments embedded in the stone walls. Fragments not from the explosive but from the vehicle itself.

A month earlier the Americans had come. A battalion of U.S. Marines, despatched to support Calvary’s own rifle battalion and the rest of the British and Afghan troops in the southwest of the country. Not the surge of eleven thousand men that would flood in a year later, but a formidable force all the same. They’d stormed the town, Garmsir, to find that the Taliban had already withdrawn. Soon it became apparent that they hadn’t gone far.

Garmsir. It meant hot place in Pashto. The name was apt for more than one reason. For the last four weeks the place had been a battleground. The Americans and Calvary’s people had been trying to take on a more civil role, that of supporting and protecting the thousands of Afghan civilians returning to the town for the first time since the retreat of the Taliban. Work was in progress to set up local government once more, to build and train a police force, to ensure that the Afghan army that would be left behind was equal to the task of defending the town.

And the attacks came, in tidal waves and in lone breakers lapping at the shore. Yesterday there was a car bomb attack on a recruitment queue. Today, a pitched battle in the streets, involving high-quality Russian artillery. Tomorrow there might be a grenade thrown through the window of a perceived collaborator’s home at dinnertime, killing his family along with him.

Calvary stepped back from the road as a convoy of lorries lumbered past. Locals, mostly, with Marines riding shotgun in front and behind in Jeeps. He half waved, half saluted, got a forest of raised thumbs in response.

Walking towards him, on the other side of the street, Calvary saw Willis, his sergeant, hazy through the dust. As Lieutenant, Calvary was in command of B Company for that day’s patrol. Willis nodded. Calvary was well liked by his men. He suspected he was held in similar esteem by Major Farnborough, the head of the Company. Not that Farnborough would ever show it if he was happy with anyone’s performance.

Calvary hefted his rifle, partly to ease the stickiness under his arms. He carried the L86 Light Support Weapon, a gun he preferred over the usual L85A2 for its accuracy.

He called to Willis as they drew near: ‘One more circuit, then get Barnesy to relieve you. Grab yourself some lunch – ‘

On the last word, and past Willis’s grin, he saw the car fishtail round the corner, pluming dust behind it. An old Ford Cortina, so filthy its colour couldn’t be discerned. Two men protruding from the windows, one aiming a Kalashnikov assault rifle down the road, the other hoisting something bulkier. A rocket launcher. To Calvary it looked like one of the new RPG-28s. An anti-tank gun.

Behind the car, half hidden by the corner, stood another man, eyes wide, forefinger pointing down the street.

He yelled and dropped to his knee and was squeezing the trigger as the man with the Kalashnikov opened fire. The unmistakeable clatter bounced off the walls of the low canyon that was the street. Bullets stitched in a horizontal arc, ripping through Willis’s back and flinging him rolling and sprawling in the dirt.

Calvary’s first, second and third shots smashed into the gunman’s head and chest, smacking him back against the side of the car. His wet torso flopped doll-like out of the open window as the Cortina juddered over Willis’s body. As the car shot past him Calvary saw the driver, crouched low behind the dashboard. He drew a bead and fired, watching the driver’s head shear off inside the car.

Just as the man with the RPG fired.

The sucking noise followed the report of the firing mechanism so closely that it was hard to distinguish the two sounds. Then the Jeep at the end of the convoy upended itself, the blast flipping the rear of the vehicle vertically upwards and driving the entire car into the lorry in front of it.

Calvary put two bullets into the man with the RPG, one messy one through the top of his head, the other between his shoulder blades as he twisted away. Then he rolled and dived and continued rolling, towards the end of the street, almost making it before the fuel tank of the lorry went up a second after the driverless Cortina ploughed into both Jeep and lorry.

The sound wave was colossal, a thump of bass like a physical punch, counterpointed by the screech of shattering glass and rending metal. The fireball raked across Calvary’s back and out into the square at the end of the street. He kept low, feeling shrapnel spinning over him like hot hail.

He didn’t waste time looking back. Instead he ran out into the square at a crouch, seeing civilians scattering and screaming, some standing around, shocked and bewildered. A group of Afghan squaddies was sprinting towards him, shouting.

Down one of the grimy streets off the square, a man was running. A boy, really, the one he’d seen at the top of the street behind the Cortina. Guiding it, egging it on.

Calvary flung himself prone on the steaming gravel, levelled the rifle. Put one eye to the SUSAT telescopic site.

The boy was sprinting like an ungainly fawn, skinny legs bare below ragged cutoff trousers, feet huge in outsized trainers. He craned back over his shoulder. His beard was wispy, a pantomime disguise, though it was probably real enough.

His eyes were wide, yellow not with triumph but with terror.

The Afghan squaddies skidded in the gravel beside him, jabbering at him in Pashto. He recognised one of the few phrases he’d learned.

‘Wélem.’

Shoot.

The ring of the sight felt hot against the bone of his eye socket. Once more the boy turned to stare back. Once again, pure terror.

He was unarmed. Wore too little to be carrying a weapon.

‘Wélem.’

Calvary lifted his face away form the sight, got to his feet. Down the street the boy turned and disappeared. The soldiers snarled, took off after him.

*

Three U.S. Marines, one British soldier – Sergeant Willis – and seven civilians were killed in the attack. Lieutenant Calvary was praised by both his commanding officer and his counterpart in the marines for his prompt action. Calvary didn’t think he’d made any difference. If the three men in the Cortina had survived, they could hardly have done any more damage.

Nobody mentioned the young man who’d run away. Nobody knew about him, apart from a handful of Afghan soldiers.

Four weeks later Calvary was attending a briefing with the other two rifle Companies. Major Farnborough conducted it, together with an American and an Afghan counterpart. A new series of photographs had been obtained, a new set of identities were to be learned and memorised.

Calvary watched the slide show with the others. He saw the deliberately graphic images of flayed and twisted bodies. Of limbless collaborators, strung up from trees by their necks. Of smoking rubble where villages had been. All fresh, all recorded in the last fortnight.

Then came the parade of faces. Some blurred, captured at a distance with secret lenses. Others close up, sullen or smiling.

Pelabo Ghilzai. Aged twenty seven. Known as ‘Little Boy’ for his thinness, his gamine physical awkwardness, the smoothness of his skin. The yellow eyes were shy, the mouth nervous. But smiling.

So precocious that despite his age he was already a senior strategist in the local Taliban chapter. The one devoted to reclaiming Garmsir town, and district, from both the foreign invaders and their milksop collaborator cronies.

In another two weeks Calvary was gone. Stepping off a plane at Gatwick and into a room with Llewellyn.

*

He didn’t jerk awake at the memory of the explosion, or of the boy’s face on the projected slide. That had all stopped a long time ago. Sometimes Calvary would have memories of the hits he’d done, and in some of those the boy’s face would be superimposed on those of his victims. He wondered why his unconscious had to be so obvious about its workings.

Instead he switched to wakefulness gently but promptly, like the turning on of a light. He checked the time on his phone. Four thirty. Three hours’ sleep; it would have to be enough.

His face was gummed to the pillow and he realised he’d forgotten to attend to the nicks on his cheeks from the glass of the restaurant’s window. Picking his way through the dark, he found the bathroom and did what he could with cotton pads and a bottle of antiseptic in the cabinet. He attempted a shave.

When he emerged, the other three were up and dressed, in conference in the living room. Two laptops were open in front of them.

Max pushed across a mug of coffee and a plate of hot rolls. ‘We’ve been looking at suitable venues. Jakub’s found the best one.’

Jakub turned the laptop towards Calvary. ‘Premiéra parkhouse. Fifteen minutes from here.’

Calvary looked at the images. Yes, it was as good as anything. He’d asked them to look for somewhere that was likely to be uninhabited early in the morning, and which had good vantage points.

*

The streets were waking up but still shrouded in dark. They belonged to cleaners, cabbies, the occasional ambulance. Eventually Jakub pointed down a side street and Nikola pulled the Fiat in. The district was residential bordering on commercial.

Ahead was a six-storey building with the dull, concrete appearance of public parking lots everywhere. The information online had said the opening hours were eight a.m. until one a.m. Calvary climbed out of the Fiat, motioning the others to stay where they were, and walked over to the entrances where the lowered booms blocked access to the ramps beyond. Yes, the sign confirmed the opening hours. A few cars were scattered here and there in the gloom beyond, but otherwise the parkhouse appeared deserted.

Calvary went back to the car and told them what he wanted them to do.

FIFTEEN

The Toyota saloon sat with its rear-view mirror angled precisely, giving a clear view of the Fiat two hundred yards behind.

Tamarkin watched Calvary climb back in, and considered his options.

Krupina had dismissed them at two a.m., ordered them to get the sleep they needed before an early start in the morning. By early start she meant eight a.m. At the office. Two hours from now. Even if he didn’t make it on time, he’d say he had been doing some investigating on his own, visiting informants, seeking a paper trail, anything that might give them access to the mobster Blažek.

He had no idea what Calvary and his trio of oddball sidekicks were doing at the hotel. But he had to assume that Calvary would recognise him – perhaps he’d been watching when they had found the discarded bug the night before – and so he couldn’t approach more closely. Couldn’t follow Calvary if he went back into the hotel.

It had been a simple matter to plant the tracking device on the Fiat outside the club. Tamarkin had been on his own in the Toyota after Arkady had gone in. He kept the tracker under the seat for use at short notice. A low dash alongside the parked cars had brought him alongside the Fiat, unnoticed either by its occupants or by Krupina and Lev, parked in the Audi at the other end of the road. He fitted the tracker to the Fiat’s undercarriage where it remained held in place magnetically. Back in his Toyota he’d opened his palmtop computer, established that the signal was working.

It was insurance, his own way of keeping track of the car even if the bug on Calvary’s person was discovered. It had proved a good idea. After they’d found the discarded bug and returned to the office, Tamarkin had checked the progress of the Fiat. Once Krupina dismissed them, he followed the signal, found the Fiat parked in a quiet residential street. Empty, and with no indication where Calvary and the others had gone.

So he sat there, all night, allowing himself to slip into the controlled doze he’d mastered after years of stakeout work. At a little after five thirty they’d emerged.

Ten, twelve hours. That was Krupina’s estimate of how long it would take for reinforcements, SVR personnel rustled up at short notice, to arrive. Even if her best guess was right, there were still five hours left.

A dozen SVR operatives would take Calvary down, without difficulty. Tamarkin could contrive some story about how he managed to track Calvary to the hotel. It would be infinitely preferable to an assault by Blažek’s cack-handed, untrained thugs. But Blažek’s people could be here in half an hour. Perhaps sooner. Krupina’s troops weren’t even in Prague yet.

Tamarkin watched Calvary, the woman and the other two men leave the Fiat and head for the entrance to the car park.

It gave him a little time.

*

Calvary had asked for an unused pay-as-you-go phone. Nikola kept a stash of them in her flat. She handed one over.

He’d done a quick survey of every floor of the parking lot, the others in tow. Two side-by-side lifts at the far end gave access to each floor, as did fire stairs adjacent to them. On the roof the early morning air was chill. The turrets of the old town loomed in the distance across the rooftops.

He led them back down to the fifth floor, one below the top.

Calvary dialled the number on the card he’d found in Zito’s wallet.

In a moment, a sleep-furred voice: ‘No?’

‘Is this Marek Zito?’ As usual Calvary used Russian. Zito had looked in his thirties, was therefore old enough to have had the language forced upon him as a boy and be at least reasonably proficient.

‘Yeah?’

In the background, an annoyed woman’s mutter.

‘Listen carefully. I’m not going to repeat myself. I’m the man who took your gun and wallet off you in the club last night.’

The shout blasted his ear. He could imagine the man leaping out of bed, knocking things over.

‘I want you to call your boss. Janos, not his father. Tell him to ring me on this number immediately. I have an offer for him. For him alone. Not Bartos.’

He cut the call.

They watched the phone in his hand. It rang less than two minutes later.

‘Who are –’

He recognised the voice.

‘As I said to your friend, listen. Just so we get it clear from the start that I am who I say I am, I chucked a tray of burning drinks into your lap last night, disarmed your gunman, and generally made you look like a complete idiot in front of your cronies. Probably earned you a spanking from Daddy, too, I’d imagine. Ring any bells?’

Silence.

‘Good. Now I’ve learned I don’t have anything to fear from you, I want to propose an arrangement.  Is anyone listening in on this conversation? Are you on speakerphone?’

‘No.’

‘I’m at the Premiéra multi-storey car park on Chodov Street. The top floor, on the roof. I’ll be here for half an hour. It’s now six ten by my watch. Six forty, I’m gone.’

‘What’s this –’

‘Just listen. I can tell you why the man you have, Gaines, is so important. But I’ll tell only you. Not your father, not your uncle Miklos. Oh, and I want payment for it. Five hundred thousand koruna, cash.’

After a beat: ‘I can get this.’

Calvary knew he had him.

*

They stood saying nothing for a few seconds afterwards. It hit Calvary, the realisation of what he was planning. Of how risky it was.

Jakub walked to the chest-high wall that ran along the perimeter, peering down as if Janos could be out there already.

‘Can’t believe you said come alone.’ Max laughed, but there was a shake in it. ‘Bad line, man. Too many movies.’

‘Of course he won’t come alone. It’s what he’d expect me to say. He’ll assume I’m not alone, either.’ Calvary paced to get the blood flowing again, the muscles limber. ‘He started playing the game when he said he could get the money. Half a million koruna in half an hour? You’ve got to be joking.’

‘And you do not think he will tell his father?’ Nikola, this time. Face pale against the dark of her hair.

‘Highly unlikely. This is his moment. He won’t even tell many people. Just those closest to him. Anyone else might just go over his head and inform Bartos.’ He breathed deeply. ‘And that, I’m hoping, will keep the numbers down.’

Calvary swung to face them. ‘Jakub, I want you on the floor below us. You’re my backup if his men start coming up the ramps or the stairs.’

A nod.

‘All right. Nikola, you wait in the car. Watch the front entrance.’ He turned to Max. ‘You find a vantage point round the back, maybe across the street. Keep me up to date about anyone who might be approaching from that direction’

Jakub had the Glock. Calvary said, ‘You up to using that if need be?’

Jakub didn’t answer. Glared at him.

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

They could all feel it, the rising collective adrenaline tide.

Calvary said, ‘One more thing. Nikola and Max, if the shooting starts, you hide. Doesn’t matter where you are. Don’t run. At the moment they don’t know what you look like. But if you’re running, you’ll draw attention. And Janos will have backup down there. Make no mistake. He’s not going to risk letting me getting away this time.’

*

Six thirty-five. The sun had struggled above the horizon and was tipping the distant spires orange.

Calvary crouched against the perimeter wall near the stairwell, behind a car somebody had left in the parkhouse overnight. He had the Browning out with its safety still engaged.

Five minutes left. He’d given Janos a very short deadline. Perhaps too short. Perhaps he’d overestimated the kid’s ability to organise a squad in time.

Or, perhaps Janos was a lot sharper than he’d realised, and had taken up position out of sight around the parking lot with his men, waiting for Calvary to give up on him and emerge into the street where he’d be an easy target.

He’d kept the phone switched on, half expecting a call from Janos to plead for more time. There’d been nothing.

On his other phone, Max’s text message buzzed. Middle-aged couple just walked past. Otherwise, zip.

A moment later the phone rang: Nikola. ‘It is him. Janos. He is alone, walking towards the entrance.’

Calvary cut her off and speed-dialled Max’s number. ‘Max. Nikola’s seen Janos. Anyone else round the back?’

‘Hold on.’ Max said. ‘Yeah. Four guys. Look like hoods. They’re waiting by the wall at the rear.’

Calvary said, ‘What are they wearing?’

‘Huh? Long coats. Why’s it matter?’

‘They’re packing serious firepower. Concealing it.’

Nikola’s call came through. ‘He has gone in.’

From his position behind the car Calvary could hear the echo of footsteps. It sounded as though they were coming from the stairwell.

Janos had been instructed to come alone, so he had to ensure his backup men hung back. On the other hand, they had to be close by enough that they could respond if he was attacked. Calvary listened to the footsteps pause, then resume, then pause once more. As if somebody, presumably Janos, was climbing the stairs and stopping cautiously at each floor to glance into the open space. Calvary had told him to go up to the roof but Janos would naturally suspect that he might be ambushed on the way up.

The footsteps approached and stopped. From behind the car Calvary could hear slow breathing. He waited until he could no longer sense the human presence a few feet away from him and crept forward, peering round the end of the car.

Janos was starting to climb the steps leading up to the roof.

Calvary moved fast, running at a soft-footed crouch towards the doorway and reaching the first step before Janos half turned, his mouth opening in surprise.

The phone went, then, Calvary’s, and although it was a tiny buzz he allowed it to distract him for a split-second too long. Janos scrambled backwards, bringing up his own phone which he already had in his hand and yelling a single word into it.

Calvary dived for the man’s legs and caught them and sent him sprawling on the steps as the shouting began below, several floors down. He got to his feet first and hauled Janos up by the collar of his jacket, pressing the muzzle of the Browning against his forehead.

The first shots came, then, a volley of three or four followed by another three from a gun with a different sound, the hollow interior of the parkhouse amplifying the noise so that the concrete seemed to shake beneath Calvary’s feet. He heard a scream and another shot but there was no time to dwell on what it meant, because he needed to get Janos up on the roof.

He half-dragged, half-shoved the younger man towards the perimeter wall, also chest-high as it was on the lower floors. On the way he kept the Browning pressed into Janos’s back, letting go his collar for a moment to reach into his waistband and pull out the gun he found there and toss it spinning away across the concrete.

‘Get on the wall.’

‘What?’

‘You heard.’ Calvary motioned with the barrel of the Browning. ‘Up.’

Janos clambered on to the ledge. It was perhaps two feet across. He stood facing Calvary, terror stark in his face. He rocked in the wind.

Calvary stepped back and sideways, so that the stairwell they’d come up was on the periphery of his vision.

‘First off, you lied to me. You said there was no backup outside.’

‘There isn’t.’

‘What do you call that shooting downstairs, then? Unfortunately for you, it means I’m going to have to rush things.’ Calvary cocked the hammer. ‘The first shot goes into your foot. You should just about be able to keep your balance. But it’ll make it harder to stay standing.’

Janos shuffled his feet as though that would protect them. ‘You cannot –’

‘I can, and I will.’ Calvary gripped the pistol two handed. ‘Unless you tell me where you’re keeping Gaines.’

‘I do not know.’ The answer came quickly, almost shouted out.

‘Wrong answer.’

Calvary fired, the sound of the shot ringing off into the morning air. He’d aimed at the very tip of Janos’s expensive-looking loafer. Janos shrieked, his leg jerking up, and toppled back, arms pinwheeling. Calvary was prepared for it and his hand flashed out, gripping Janos by the forearm, hauling him back so that he dropped into a sitting position on the wall. He clutched his foot, staring down at the bloody leather, whimpering.

‘Up on your feet.’

This time Janos didn’t delay. He staggered, wincing, keeping the weight on his good foot.

‘I’ll ask once more. Where’s Gaines?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I am not lying.’ The words were gabbled, sobbed. ‘My father would not tell me.’

Calvary almost wanted to laugh.

‘So you’ve fouled up so badly your dad doesn’t trust you any more.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Well, in that case you’re of no use to me, are you?’

‘Wait.’ The leg Janos was balancing on had started to shake. In his eyes was a pathetic eagerness. ‘There is something. My father has a contact. A Russian intelligence agent.’

Calvary thought he saw movement at the door, but there was nothing there. He nodded at Janos.

‘Go on.’

‘This agent told him about Gaines. Said he was of great importance to the Russians. My father arranged to take Gaines down. He had a man phone him and invite him to a meeting, said it was to discuss something in his past.’ He swallowed stickily, having to raise his voice against the wind. ‘We were waiting for Gaines at the meeting point. Gaines was on his way to the meeting when this agent, my father’s contact, said he was on a tram and that there were other Russians, the agent’s colleagues, on his trial. We decided to hit the tram rather than wait, in case the Russians moved in first.’

Calvary showed nothing on his face, but he thought: yes, it makes sense.

He said, ‘What’s this Russian’s name?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him. My father calls him the Worm. Pays him. He probably knows where Gaines is being held.’

Calvary saw movement from the corner of his eye, at the stairwell. He got janos by the collar again and hauled him forwards off the ledge, swinging him across and bringing the gun up to the side of his head.

From the stairwell two men had emerged, both dressed in the long leather coats Max had mentioned. One levelled his shotgun at waist height. The other sighted down the length of a pistol.

They stepped forward.

SIXTEEN

Tamarkin made his decision after Calvary and his people had been inside the car park fifteen minutes.

He dialled. Blažek answered on the third ring, clearly groping up from the depths of sleep. Tamarkin had a brief image in his mind of the Kodiak, hairy paunch corseted in a string vest. It was only marginally less unpleasant than the idea of him in congress with that trophy wife of his, his crass bulk bellowing away on top of her.

‘I can give you the man you’re looking for. I’m sitting outside a multi-storey car park, and he’s in there.’

‘Hold on.’ Down the line came sounds of exertion, fumblings for bedside lamps and the like. ‘Yeah, go on.’

‘A little quid pro quo first, Bartos.’

‘What?’

‘Insurance for me. I want you to tell me where you’re keeping Gaines.’

‘What?’

A limited education, Tamarkin’s research had told him. Wasn’t that the truth.

‘You heard. It’s the least you can do for me, given what I’m about to hand you. Plus, if he gets the better of you and you’re all massacred, at least I know where to find Gaines. Oh, and don’t lie to me. I’ll check it out, and if you’ve lied to me that will be the end of our association. Permanently.’

‘You’re a real little asshole. Ending contact with you will be a pleasure.’ Tamarkin heard the man pulling on clothes.

‘Do you want to know what I’ve got for you or not?’

Blažek told him the address. Tamarkin got him to repeat it, spell it.

‘All right.’

He gave Blažek what he had, including Calvary’s name and the fact he was British. He also told him about the Fiat parked round the front and its registration number.

Afterwards he sat, watching the car park entrance, itching to go in and scout around but knowing it was out of the question. The woman had emerged and returned to the Fiat, where she sat watching. The young man had disappeared round the back. Of Calvary and the other man there was no sign.

At six forty Tamarkin saw a familiar figure appear round a corner and lope towards the car park entrance, hesitating at the barriers and peering upwards. It was Janos.

Now that was interesting.

Tamarkin had called Blažek only fifteen minutes earlier, and would have preferred to wait until the man arrived before making a move of his own. But Janos’s presence here intrigued him. Blažek couldn’t have sent him on his own, so the boy must be here for a different reason.

Tamarkin had the Makarov with him still, as well as a spare ammunition clip. In the footwell, his hands out of sight of the window, he stripped and reassembled the gun.

As he was about to climb out of the car, wondering how he might get to the parkhouse without the woman in the Fiat spotting him, he heard the explosion of gunfire from within.

The woman emerged from the Fiat, stood frozen in fear and uncertainty for a moment, and then began running towards the entrance.

*

Calvary wasn’t afraid of the shotgun. The man wouldn’t risk it, given how the shot would scatter and take Janos with it. The other man’s pistol was a different matter.

He was advancing in slow, relentless steps, the shotgun man lagging close at his shoulder. They cleared half the distance between the door to the roof and the wall where Calvary and Janos stood.

For emphasis, Calvary recocked the Browning.

‘Janos,’ he said. ‘Tell your men to back down. Or I will kill you. Have no doubt about that.’

It all depended on how confident the man was with his pistol. If he was any good, he could conceivably achieve a head shot before Calvary could pull the trigger. It was a gamble, but it might be one he was prepared to make.

Janos said nothing, had started to gibber quietly again. It would probably make no difference if he said anything.

Beyond the two men, at the top of the stairs, there was movement.

Calvary deliberately didn’t look, kept his gaze alternately on each man’s face.

Between their heads, out of focus, a woman appeared at the door.

Nikola.

He wanted to stare straight at her, yell at her to get back, but that was the last thing he could do.

To cover any noise Nikola might make, Calvary kicked at the back of Janos’s injured foot, making him yell. The men had slowed their advance. The one with the pistol said something in Czech. Janos hissed back.

‘What was that?’ Calvary murmured.

‘He ask me move my head out the way. I tell him forget it.’

‘Good advice.’

Beyond the men, Nikola was edging to one side, the Glock raised awkwardly in her hand. If she’d been a professional she would have taken the man with the shotgun down first: he was the more likely to do damage with a wild shot. But she wasn’t a professional, and if she put a foot wrong she was going to get herself – and Calvary, and Janos – killed.

What the hell was she doing up here on her own? Where was Jakub?

A noise, then, back at the door, someone else coming through, and the man with the shotgun jerked his head round.

Probably out of fright, Nikola pulled the trigger of the Glock. The gun bucked in her fist. The man with the shotgun was flung, his upper body twisting, to sprawl near Calvary’s feet. He’d been hit in the belly and he moaned, hand clamped across the wound.

The man with the pistol didn’t flinch, kept it trained on Calvary’s face. Didn’t even turn round. He could have had an army behind him and he wouldn’t have known or, apparently, cared. He had nerve, Calvary had to give him that.

Calvary knew the man was going to risk a shot.

In the middle distance Nikola had the Glock trained on the man’s head. A visible tremor had started up in her arm.

Behind her stood another man, the one who’d made the noise coming through the door. Young, fair haired, pleasant faced. One of the Russians Calvary had seen after he’d ditched the bug in the alley. In his clasped hands, pointed at the ground, he too had a pistol.

Slowly the Russian raised his gun, levelling it at Nikola’s back.

Calvary didn’t know if this qualified as a Mexican standoff, didn’t care. The man aiming the pistol at him expected him to fire, would be anticipating the tightening of his index finger inside the Browning’s trigger guard. So Calvary did the unexpected.

Using his chest he shoved Janos forward as hard as he could. The pistol man was six feet away and Janos stumbled on his injured foot and caromed into the man. At the same time Calvary dived sideways, over the shotgun man who lay jerking and mewling by the wall in a spreading pool. He landed hard on his side and had the Browning up and fitted the shot just past Nikola’s shape, catching the Russian in the lower leg and throwing him spinning into the air. Still on the ground, Calvary pivoted at his waist and fired at the pistol man who had stepped back from Janos’s staggering figure. Calvary’s shot went wide. The man hesitated because shots were coming from over at the stairs and Calvary realised the Russian was shooting, his aim thrown by the fall he’d taken and the agony of his leg wound.

Calvary took aim again and put two bullets into the pistol man’s chest, dropping him. He stood and dived for Janos, who’d found his feet and was limping about, bewildered. Calvary got the Browning up against his head again and yelled, ‘Out the way, out the way,’ to Nikola.

The Russian had hauled himself into a sitting position and was taking aim. Nikola turned and aimed the Glock at him, but the Russian ignored her. Too late, Calvary saw the Russian was aiming not at Nikola or him, but at Janos.

The Russian squeezed off three shots, one going wild, the others punching into Janos’s torso so hard that Calvary felt the man’s body rock. An exit wound sprayed blood across the arm of Calvary’s jacket. He drew a bead and fired, watched the Russian slam back, the gun spinning away across the concrete.

Calvary lowered Janos to the ground. One shot through the abdomen, the other in the chest. No exit wound. He was dead, there was no question about it.

He took stock. The pistol man, dead nearby. The Russian supine at the stairs. Against the wall, the shotgun man had crawled onto his belly with his legs drawn up beneath him, like a sleeping baby. He wasn’t moving, and his eyes were open.

In the centre of the rooftop stood Nikola, gun lowered, uncomprehending.

‘Give me a hand here,’ said Calvary. He snapped his fingers when she didn’t move. ‘Quickly. We’ve no time.’

Nikola hurried over. Calvary lifted Janos under his arms.

‘Grab his feet.’

She complied silently. Calvary backed towards the wall, looked over.

In the street below, men were emerging from drawn-up cars, guns held low. Three of them on this side. God knew how many on the others. A growing crowd of passersby was simultaneously coalescing and drawing back.

Where the hell had they come from? Were they more of Janos’s reinforcements? Had he told his father after all?

He grabbed Janos under the armpits and hoisted him on to the wall.

Nikola said: ‘What are you doing?’

‘Creating a diversion.’

He tipped Janos’s body over the edge, watched it tumble, saw it bounce hard off the lip of a balcony. The men below barely had time to shout before the body smashed into the roof of a parked car, the windscreen crazing. The alarm started up immediately, its piercing tone setting off others around it.

More yells, frantic now, and men began to pour round the corner into the street to stare at the sacrilege, the unbelievable crime they’d been witness to.

Calvary grabbed Nikola’s arm and started off at a run across the rooftop to the opposite side. Sirens were beginning to advance from all directions.

‘Why the bloody hell didn’t you stay put in the car like I told you?’ said Calvary. ‘And where’s Jakub?’

‘He was gone,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘When I came through the entrance below. One man was dead. Jakub’s gun was lying near him.’

Two here on the roof, one dead below, shot by Jakub. Max had seen four men. That meant one of them had taken Jakub alive.

They reached the stairwell, stepped over the body of the Russian. Calvary led the way. The floor below was empty.

He used the stock of the Browning to smash the window of the parked car he’d hidden behind earlier, a Peugeot saloon, ignoring the shrill whoop of the alarm. Shoving Nikola across into the passenger seat, he dropped behind the wheel and ripped off the panel beneath it and grappled with the wires. Ten seconds later the ignition caught.

Calvary took the spiralling ramp as fast as he dared, catching the walls with the front bumper a couple of times in a screech of angry metal. As he pulled round the last curve and gunned the engine towards the barriers he saw the cluster of men, Blažek’s, spilling aside, their shouting faces whipping past.

The boom smacked off the windscreen, breaking off but crazing the glass. Then they were free, hurtling down the street, pedestrians stumbling back in confusion. Calvary saw the Fiat as they passed it, nobody inside.

Beside him Nikola had her phone out. When she didn’t say anything he glanced at her.

‘Max’s phone is off,’ she said quietly.

Calvary’s instinct was to head away, putting as much distance as he could between them and the parkhouse; but he took a left turn almost at a hairpin angle and doubled round the back of the block. There was no sign of Max among the massing crowds.

‘Martin?’ she said, her voice choking on the second syllable.

‘He’s got them.’

‘What?’

‘Max and Jakub. Blažek’s got them.’

SEVENTEEN

The pain was like nothing Tamarkin had ever experienced before, as though a malevolent being within his leg was trying to eat its way out. For a bizarre moment his leg was raised above him, its red wetness spraying in the morning light, before his back crashed down and his leg followed with a jar. He was blinded, pierced through by agony.

Through the shimmering waves of screaming nausea he watched the woman, handling the gun as elegantly as a toddler with a monkey wrench, wave it shakily in his direction. Beyond, a man collapsed under Calvary’s shots. The young Blažek, Janos, was half-masking Calvary, a human shield.

Consciousness was ebbing. Tamarkin’s mind, detached from his body’s pain, did the calculations.

Either the woman or Calvary would kill him if he shot the other. And Calvary needed to remain alive for the time being.

Even if Tamarkin survived this encounter, Calvary was going to get away this time, and with Janos.

Janos might or might not know where Gaines was being held. If he did, and if he hadn’t yet told Calvary, Calvary would make him reveal what he knew.

Therefore, Janos had to die.

Krupina, dear old Darya Yaroslavovna, would have been moderately proud of him. He squeezed off one bad shot and two excellent ones, body shots because he didn’t have the focus and the acuity of vision right now to aim for the head. From the way Janos sagged and Calvary stepped aside, Tamarkin knew he’d done the job.

Calvary raised his gun. Tamarkin saw the muzzle flash.

The tide of blackness reared, a last wave, and engulfed him.

*

Bartos roared.

He punched at the dashboard of the car, cracking the walnut veneer, splintering the plastic of the stereo display. He hammered the side of his fist against the window, causing something to snap within the door of the car.

‘Let me out.’

‘Brother –’

‘Unlock the door.’

‘Bartos, listen –’

‘Open this fucking door now.’

‘Listen.’ Bartos wondered if Miklos was aware how close he was sailing, how narrow the margin between Bartos as he was now and Bartos with a gun in his hand, shooting down his own brother for daring to defy him. ‘Deniability. It’s your mantra. The first commandment. You can’t go anywhere near there. The men have to pull back. They can’t be seen around the parkhouse. Least of all can they be caught in there by the police.’

Bartos’s eyes blazed hate at his brother.

‘My son.’

‘Yes.’

‘My firstborn.’

‘I know, brother.’

‘The little shit. He thought he could take the bastard on.’

‘He had your courage.’

‘Bullshit.’ Bartos spat, not caring that he was in Miklos’s car. ‘He was a coward. He took this guy on because he was scared of me.’

‘Perhaps so, Bartos –’

Bartos pulled his phone out and dialled the Worm.

Four rings, and it cut to voicemail. No message, just a tone.

He was about to speak, then thought better of it. Who knew where the Russian was? Somebody else might have his phone in their hands.

‘I need to ditch this,’ said Bartos, holding his own phone up.

Deniability. It was why he personally couldn’t go anywhere near the parkhouse. Why his men had to circle the building like scavengers rather than charge in and finish the job, kill the Brit bastard, now that the police were closing in.

Janos, the presence of his body there, was a problem. Already Bartos was forming a plan in his mind to distance himself from his son, rehearsing the words he’d deliver sorrowfully to the police: he was wayward, he crossed the line, I’m not saying he deserved this fate but.

Bartos’s phone went. He looked at the display, saw it was one of his men at the parkhouse.

‘Yeah.’

‘Boss, we’ve caught two guys.’ The man sounded out of breath. ‘One we took inside the car park. The other was hanging around outside, trying to get in, when we grabbed him. Neither of them’s the Brit, but still.’

‘Alive?’

‘Yes.’

Bartos looked across at Miklos, his sudden grin splitting his face in half.

*

They loped through narrow streets dark with shadow, like vampires avoiding the sunlight. Where they were going didn’t matter for now. What mattered was that they put distance between themselves and the chaos behind them. Calvary had ditched the battered Peugeot after three blocks, parking it down an alley.

After ten minutes Calvary said, ‘Stop,’ and pushed Nikola into another alleyway. She had stamina; her breathing rate was barely raised. His hands moved expertly under her collar, down her flanks, her legs, under her arms.

‘You do the rest,’ he said.

While he ran his hands over himself she said, ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Any kind of device. Probably tiny.’

Nothing.

He said, ‘Give me your phone.’

She handed it over. He took the handset and his own and prised out the SIM cards and threw them into the alley.

‘There may be GPS tracking. We’ll get replacements.’

When she frowned he said, ‘How did that Russian, the one who came up behind you, know we were there? They’ve used tracking devices before. Either we’re bugged, or something was planted on the Fiat.’ He tipped his head. ‘Let’s keep going.’

They took off at a brisk walking pace. She said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Nowhere familiar. Not your flat – we have to assume that’s compromised. Somewhere we can hole up and think. Plan.’

‘A hotel?’

‘Yes. First, we need a new car.’

They stumbled upon a car rental office, one of the well-known international firms, and Calvary chose a VW saloon. Dull grey, anonymous, reliable. He paid cash, had to show his driving licence but didn’t care. He doubted Blažek or the Russians would be monitoring every car rental place in the city.

Nikola knew the area they were moving through and guided him along streets that were a little shabby, where the tourist tat was marginally tackier than in the centre of town. At a street kiosk they stopped and bought smartphones, cheap knockoffs judging by the price.

They found themselves outside a squat hotel. Calvary pulled into the miniature car park at the back.

He paid cash again, up front for one day and night. The receptionist looked Nikola up and down, gave Calvary a knowing smirk. They took a ground floor room near the fire exit. Calvary moved about, pulling the curtains closed, locking the door.

While Nikola disappeared into the tiny bathroom, Calvary took out his phone.

Llewellyn’s phone rang four times before switching to voicemail. Calvary left a message, his voice terse. ‘Letting you know my new number. Ring me when you get this. I need information.’

He heard Nikola emerging from the bathroom. He turned, saw her white, drawn face, her raw-rimmed eyes.

‘Hey,’ he said.

She sagged as though her strings had been cut, dropping into a chair by the bed and covering her face with her hands.

Calvary stepped round, stood over her, awkward. When she didn’t move he sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Max and Jakub,’ he said.

She raised her face.

‘Not just them – yes, of course them, but… everything.’ She waved a vague hand.

He knew what she meant. Less than two days earlier the fourth member of the group – Kaspar, she’d called him – had disappeared. Then Calvary had dropped into their lives, destroying their vehicle, forcing Nikola and Jakub to become killers, tainting their workbase and their homes with his toxic presence. Now Nikola was the only one left, the others missing, possibly dead, almost certainly being made to suffer.

And they were activists. Not trained operatives, not soldiers, but a quixotic, idealistic quartet of normal people with a notion of justice as touching as it was hopelessly naïve and unrealistic.

Calvary found it difficult to cope with certain emotions in other people. Fear, even abject terror, he knew how to allay or stoke, as the situation required. Anger he was skilled at defusing or provoking. But misery – simple, human unhappiness – he couldn’t handle. It might have been the epitaph on the tombstones of the half-dozen or so relationships he’d failed to sustain in his life, until five years ago when he’d sealed his heart in a vault, never again to be exposed to the light: he was helpless in the face of unhappiness.

He said, ‘Max and Jakub are probably still alive.’

She watched him. For signs I’m leading her on, he thought.

‘Blažek wants me. Not them. He’ll use them to trade.’

‘He will hurt them.’

‘Yes.’ He couldn’t lie. ‘He will. But not too badly. They can’t give him anything. They don’t know where I am. Sooner or later Blažek will realise that.’

‘But he won’t be able to find you.’

‘No. But I can find him. We’ve got Max’s phone number, and Jakub’s. Blažek will have those phones. He’ll be waiting for them to ring.’

Nikola sat in silence for a few seconds. Then: ‘So you plan to call and offer yourself up? As a sacrifice?’

He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Something like that. But it’s not that simple. I need some sort of leverage. If I offer a straight swap, he’ll take me and kill Max and Jakub into the bargain. I need to figure out a way to get us all free.’

‘Not yet.’

Her hand was on his knee. He looked at her.

‘Just for now. No plans. No thinking.’

In her eyes Calvary saw the desperation born of having come close to death, the animal need to affirm life. He recognised it because he’d experienced it himself, many times. Had yielded to it.

He rose, pulled her up to him, hands and mouth reaching for her. She pushed at him and he dropped back on the bed. She straddled him, pulling her sweater off over her head as he grappled with his shirt, his belt. His fingers moved up under her shirt, found the clasp of the brassiere, slid off both garments in one move.

Her mouth pressed against his, her tongue probing. With her feet she drove his trousers down and off his legs. He grabbed at the waistband of her trousers and pushed it down over her hips, the panties coming with it. Arching, he pressed into her. He felt her breath against his mouth in a long gasp.

For half an hour everything else disappeared, the city outside, Blažek and Gaines and Llewellyn. There was only the fierce heat of the moment, two living beings, virtual strangers, communicating without words.

*

The tapping on the door was becoming more insistent. She heaved herself up on to her knees, stared at the toilet bowl. Blood. Dark, clotted, not the bright hue of a fresh tear in the gullet.

‘Ma’am.’ Yevgenia had never been able to bring herself to call her Darya Yaroslavovna, unlike Gleb. ‘Please. Are you all right? Open the door. Let me help you.’

‘I’m fine, Yevgenia. Thanks. Go back to your desk.’

Krupina hauled herself to face the mirror over the sink, pulling the toilet’s chain. No, she wasn’t in fact fine. Was about as far from fine as one could get.

Her skin hung off her face like musty drapes, her hair lank like ropes of cobweb. Even her eyes seemed to be sagging, not just the sacs beneath them but the eyeballs themselves, bleeding southwards like tilted yolks.

She was forty-nine years old, and looked like a woman three decades older. One who’d let herself go.

The blood clots in the vomit were bad news. For the past nine months or so the retching had been a semi-regular feature of her day, but she’d been able to work around it, eating when she felt least nauseous, spewing when her stomach was at its emptiest. The cigarettes had helped, stilling the pangs from her belly, giving her a hacking cough which had distracted from the gastrointestinal grumblings.

Dr Ostrovsky, the specialist flown in from Petersburg, had steepled his fingers on his desk, at their second meeting. The one following the assault course of investigations, scans and needles and proddings, he’d ordered after their first.

‘Perhaps one year. Two? Nobody can say. You have a not uncommon condition, Darya Yaroslavovna. It obeys the normal rules. Which is to say, its course is unpredictable.’

She’d had chemotherapy. That had been a little under two years ago. She was still alive. Alive, and with a final achievement within her grasp.

But that was now in doubt.

Tamarkin had been out of contact for ninety minutes now. He normally kept his phone switched on and at hand round the clock. Ninety minutes was too long for him to be taking a shower and moving his bowels.

Krupina wiped her mouth, splashed water on her face. She unlocked the door and walked past Yevgenia’s tight, impossibly young face.

‘Get me some cigarettes. That’s how you can help.’

The girl was waving a piece of paper at her. She grabbed it. It was a printed-out email. Krupina thought Yevgenia might have been about to slip it under the door of the lavatory.

Reinforcements authorised. Six men arriving in two lots, noon and six pm. Boy do you owe me.

It was something, at least.

*

Scant light came in through the crack in the curtains. It could have been almost any time of the day or the evening, but Calvary’s watch said it was nearly nine a.m.

Beside him Nikola breathed steadily, eyes closed, though he knew she was awake. Her hair spilled across her face and his arm.

‘I didn’t say thanks,’ he murmured.

She lifted her head.

‘For saving my life up on the roof.’

‘No. You did not.’ Her lips smiled against his shoulder. ‘Well, maybe you just did.’

She pressed closer to him. He felt her breast against his side.

‘So. No wife?’

‘No.’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘Not right now.’

She raised herself onto her elbow, traced a finger along a scar on his chest. ‘A soldier.’

‘I was.’

‘Why?’

‘Why did I become a soldier?’ He tilted his head. ‘On a whim. I was at college, studying mechanics. A friend had joined the army and persuaded me to do the same.’

‘And now you are – some sort of agent?’

‘No. Not quite.’ He let out a long breath. ‘In any case, that’s also past. Once I’ve found Gaines, I’m through with all this.’ He felt the shutters coming down, the withdrawal into the shadows that was automatic every time anybody touched on what he did for a living. ‘What about you? What’s your story?’

‘I studied journalism here at Charles University. I was going to go into television, I had some contacts and a possible job at a junior level. I met Jakub at a party. His father had got into debt, had become involved with Blažek’s loan sharks. He turned to drink, abandoned the family, was found dead under a bridge one winter morning.’ She shrugged. ‘His story moved me.’

‘You and Jakub...’

She smiled. ‘No. We were only ever friends. He was married. She left him because she could not compete with his commitment to the cause, to the bringing down of Blažek. Now Jakub is alone. With us, but alone.’ She ran her palm up his chest once more. ‘Like you.’

When she fell silent he glanced down, saw she was weeping again. He moved his arm to embrace her.

‘I am sorry. I was just thinking of Jakub, of Max… just a boy. Tied down somewhere, being hurt.’

Hurt…

Tightness creased the spot between his brows. He sat up, reached across to the bedside table for the remote, turned on the television. Nikola blinked in surprise.

Calvary flicked past a blur of commercials and cartoons until he reached a news channel. Jerking cameras roved about the streets surrounding the multi-storey car park. Police uniforms were everywhere, sometimes barging the cameras aside.

A reporter was shouting to make herself heard, pointing back at the parkhouse. Calvary looked at Nikola.

She shook her head. ‘She says very little. There has been shooting in the parking lot, ambulances have been removing bodies.’ She sat up, pulling the covers over her. ‘For what are you looking?’

He said nothing for a few seconds, staring at the screen. Then he pointed: ‘There.’

The time signature in the corner indicated that earlier footage, an hour and a half old, was being shown. One of the cameras was aiming up at the roof, where a helicopter was taking off. The helicopter bore a red cross, the unmistakeable mark of hospital transport, not of a police vehicle.

‘Someone’s being airlifted out. It means they’re alive.’ He looked at her. ‘Not one of Janos’s men. They were stone cold dead. The Russian.’

She watched him, unsure.

Calvary swung his legs out of bed, started pulling on his clothes. ‘I have an idea.’

EIGHTEEN

Llewellyn’s cheery voice made him want to hurl the phone at the window.

‘Sorry I missed you earlier. No network coverage.’

Calvary had tried twice more, eventually getting a reply fifteen minutes after he’d risen from the bed. He didn’t say hello, just: ‘Any information on those Russians from last night?’

‘Yes, as it happens.’ Llewellyn rustled some paper. ‘The woman sounds like Darya Krupina. An old KGB member, too young to have seen much action before the Soviet Union collapsed. She’s had postings in Bratislava and Vienna. Interestingly she’s not on the list of staff at the Russian Embassy there in Prague, which means she’s there in an unofficial role. Assuming it’s her, of course. The picture you sent wasn’t the best.’

‘What about the others? The younger men?’

‘The fair-haired one is Gleb Tamarkin. Up-and-coming SVR chappie, likely being groomed for great things. He’s been on the radar for the past three years, mostly in the Central European field, though he cropped up in Paris once. Again, no record of him at the Embassy. We don’t recognise the others.’

‘And you were going to let me know this information when, exactly?’ Calvary tweaked the curtains, saw nothing but desultory traffic on the road.

‘I rather assumed you’d be in touch when you needed to be.’ Llewellyn sounded playfully hurt. ‘Didn’t want to ring you at an inconvenient time.’

Not looking at Nikola, Calvary said, ‘What about the other information I asked you for?’

‘Those journalist friends of yours? Nothing. No connection with Blažek or the Russians. They seem to be who they say they are. Unusual in our line of work.’ A soft chuckle. ‘The young lady’s rather attractive, isn’t she? I’ve seen her picture.’

‘Shut up and listen.’ Calvary told him about the events at the parkhouse.

When he had finished Llewellyn said, ‘Well. That’s a turn up, if this young hoodlum Janos was telling the truth. A turncoat SVR officer, working for organised crime.’

‘It’s possible the Russian knows where Gaines is being kept. The trouble is I shot him, and I don’t know if he’s in any condition to talk, or if he’s still alive, even. I’ve got to try the hospitals.’ Another quick peek through the curtains. Force of habit. ‘I need you to tell me about this Tamarkin. Any aliases he might go under.’

‘I can enquire.’

‘Quickly, Llewellyn. And be as exhaustive as you can. I’m only going to get one shot at this.’

Nikola was perched on the edge of the bed, watching him. Calvary said to her, ‘I’ll tell you what I have in mind as soon as I get a reply.’

Llewellyn rang back in five minutes.

*

It took Nikola a fraction of that time to search the internet on her phone for the hospital served by the air ambulance. She gave Calvary the number.

The switchboard operator put him through to the trauma unit. He waited, on hold, before a harassed-sounding staff member of unspecified rank diverted him to the operating theatre. From there he was transferred to the post-op surgical ward.

Each time he repeated the litany, in glottic Russian. My name is Valery Petrov and I’m calling from the Embassy of the Russian Federation. I am urgently trying to determine the whereabouts of a Russian citizen who I understand was shot this morning and may have undergone emergency surgery. His given name is Gleb Tamarkin but he may be using another.

At last a young female voice called off into the background and he heard the receiver being laid down. Footsteps, then a middle-aged male growl. ‘Da?’

Calvary got to the part about the whereabouts of the Russian citizen when the voice cut in: ‘Name again?’

‘My name? Valery Petrov, senior public liaison officer. My staff ID number is 83774. My immediate superior is Mr Konstantin Churyenko, contact telephone number –’

‘All right, yes.’ The voice was gruff. Calvary had pulled all of it out of the air – title, number, names. Sound confident enough and you can get away with a great deal, he’d learned.

‘I’m Dr Grossman. An hour ago I operated on a man who gave a Russian name.’

Calvary felt a clutch of elation. He realised the surgeon was waiting for him to speak.

‘Doctor, the man I’m looking for is called Gleb Tamarkin. However, he may be using an alias.’ He lowered his tone, making it grave, though not conspiratorial; he didn’t want to overdo it. ‘This man occupies rather a sensitive position at our embassy.’

If the surgeon was impressed he didn’t let it show in his voice. ‘What alias?’

‘Possibly one of the following.’ He ran through the list Llewellyn had provided. ‘Adam Livschitz. Mikhail Dubrovsky. Gennady –’

‘Dubrovsky. That’s your man.’ Calvary heard the rasp of a stubbled cheek against the receiver. ‘Got himself shot in the belly and the leg with a handgun. My job was the easy part. The abdominal shot missed all the vitals, passed through the muscles in his flank. The orthopaedics team are working on his leg now. It’s messy.’

‘He’s still in theatre?’

‘That’s what I said.’ The surgeon sounded testy now.

‘Thank you. We’ll be sending a representative down as soon as possible.’

‘No questions for him, for a while. A few hours, at least. I’ve put the police off as well.’

Calvary said, ‘Dr Grossman, you’ve been extremely helpful. My country is grateful.’

‘Sure.’ The surgeon put the phone down even before finishing the syllable.

Calvary crammed the phone in his pocket, picked up the Browning. Checked the magazine. Five bullets fired, eight left.

To Nikola he said, ‘How far to the hospital?’

*

The man’s head rocked back, the guy with the hooded eyes. He blew snot and blood and fragments of teeth on to the floor.

Bartos stepped away, breathing heavily, shaking his dripping fists. The guy’s face was a mess, one eye swollen closed, but still he glared at Bartos with that lizard look.

No respect.

Beside Bartos, Pavel cracked his knuckles. He was limping a little. Bartos knew the sign: he’d been kicked in the balls, though he wasn’t admitting it.

Bartos’s throat was sore. For an hour he’d screamed himself hoarse. The bellowing storm of rage that normally battered its terrified targets into obedience hadn’t worked.

In a moment he’d go next door, see how Miklos was getting on with the other one, the skinny kid with the stupid hair.

He let Pavel have a go, watched him wade in with fists and boots. The man toppled time and again in his chair and was pulled upright. He never looked at Pavel; always his stare came back to Bartos.

Pavel was moving in again when Bartos said, ‘Wait.’ He strode forward, bent his head so that his ear was near the man’s moving lips.

The sound was barely a whisper. Bartos turned his head to try to decipher the words the lips were forming.

‘Pig,’ hissed the man, and he spat in Bartos’s face. Laughed.

Bartos straightened. His self control was, he thought, remarkable. He turned, walked slowly back towards the wall. Three paces, four.

He drew the pistol from his belt, a CZ-TT nine millimetre. Good Czech workmanship. Bartos was nothing if not patriotic.

*

‘No answer at his flat.’

Arkady stood in the doorway. Krupina waved him in. The nausea had passed; she’d managed to keep down some tea. Felt better.

‘You didn’t force your way in, by any chance?’

‘Of course.’ A faint smile. ‘Unobtrusively. No sign of him, no evidence of any struggle.’

‘And you last spoke to him when?’

‘The same time as you, boss. Just before we all left for the night.’

A missing operative. Krupina should go to the Embassy to report it. Endure their scorn, their laughter. Their jokes about milk cartons.

Failing that, she should contact her superior at SVR headquarters in Moscow. Face his quiet, slow-burning anger. She’d already had to call him twice, once to make arrangements for Oleg’s body to be repatriated, the second time to ask for more men.

She thought of her father, the scarred stumps of his legs that he’d brandished like trophies. His proof of having lived in the service of his country. Where was hers?

She got up, left her office. Arkady followed. At her desk Yevgenia looked up expectantly.

‘Can you get a GPS trace on Gleb’s phone?’

‘Yes, of course.’ The young woman set to work.

Krupina prowled about the larger office, reluctant to return to the stuffy confines of her own room. Also, she acknowledged to herself, she wanted to demonstrate to the others, Yevgenia and Arkady and Lev, that she was fit and well. Or at least ambulant.

In less than ten minutes Yevgenia said, ‘I have it.’

Krupina peered at the screen. The girl homed in. Identified the cross streets, entered the details into a search engine.

‘It’s a hospital.’

*

The man was leaning against the wall of the alley beside two enormous wheeled dumpster-like containers almost overflowing with linen. He wore overalls with the hospital’s name stencilled across the chest, and was smoking a cigarette. He glanced at Calvary as he approached, then looked away again.

In Russian Calvary said: ‘You work here?’

‘Have a guess.’ The man concentrated on his cigarette.

‘I’m a doctor. I left my pager in my scrubs and they’ve been thrown in the waste. Mind if I take a look?’

The man laughed, glanced at the linen containers. ‘Needles and haystacks. But knock yourself out.’

Calvary found a crate and climbed up on it, peering down into the container. They’d circled the hospital in the rented VW to get a feel for the layout, and had spotted the bay round the back where loading and offloading was done. The hospital wasn’t the one Calvary had approached earlier, where he’d been ambushed by Janos and his men. This one looked bigger, sleeker, more modern.

The container was a riot of cloth, bloodied or stained or merely grubby. He rummaged, careful not to tip too far forward and fall in. Sheets, towels, hospital gowns. He found a gown with only a smear of blood on it.

He rolled the garment up as tightly as he could and stuffed it under his jacket, which he zipped up. He found the upper half of a pair of scrubs but not the lower. Eventually he tugged out a white coat, unstained. It looked about the right size. This too he crammed under his jacket.

He stepped down, said over his shoulder to the smoking man, ‘There’s no chance I’ll find it in there. Don’t know what I was thinking.’

Another laugh. ‘Told you so. Hope it doesn’t get you into too much trouble, pal.’

Round the corner, on the other side of a grassy verge, Nikola sat in the car. He climbed in and unzipped his jacket.

She pulled on the white coat – it was a size too big, but that added authenticity if anything – while Calvary slipped out of his jacket and wrapped the gown across his torso, arching to tie the knot at the back. He kept the rest of his clothes on under the gown, and his boots. Rolled his sleeves up.

Calvary glanced in the wing mirror, saw a police car turning up the road running along the side of the hospital and heading towards them.

He grabbed Nikola and clamped his mouth over hers. She stiffened, startled; then he saw her eye, close up, swivel to the back window and she understood. She responded, winding her arms round his neck. Over her head Calvary saw the police car cruise past, the man in the passenger seat gazing at them, grinning and saying something.

‘They’re past now,’ Calvary managed to say, but Nikola continued a while longer. Eventually she broke away.

They cruised the perimeter of the hospital again until Calvary spotted what he was looking for and pointed. Outside another service door a carelessly scattered fleet of stretchers had been left unattended, like trolleys in a supermarket car park. One or two had blankets piled haphazardly on them.

Nikola pulled into one of the public car parking areas and while Calvary waited in the passenger seat, she trotted over to the trolleys and purloined one, together with some blankets. Back at the car they peered around. Cars were arriving and departing but everybody appeared too preoccupied with their own problems to notice a white-coated woman helping an apparently bleeding man out of a car and onto a gurney.

It was better they played it this way round, Calvary had decided. That Nikola be the doctor and he the patient. Anyone such as a security guard or policeman who might have grounds to be looking out for an intruder would notice Nikola first and unconsciously discount her as a threat; her patient would probably not warrant a second glance, as long as he didn’t ham up his performance too much.

They left both guns in the car, the Browning under the seat and the Glock in the glove compartment. He’d thought about bringing one of them in but decided the risk of discovery was too great.

Nikola pushed him at a brisk pace around to the main entrance. The automatic doors slid open with futuristic speed and they were inside. From his supine position Calvary saw the emergency room waiting area was much like the ones in hospitals of similar size in London: a few people dotted about on the seats, sleeping or muttering while supporting bleeding hands, the floor stinking of sour drink and scrubbed-away vomit, the bins overflowing with wrappers and soft-drink cans. Behind a desk a desultory pair of clerks ate and drank and listened to a radio.

Calvary muttered something hoarsely and she bent to hear. He whispered: ‘Take us into the emergency room itself. I need to get a couple of accessories.’

They proceeded into the emergency room proper, the inner sanctum which those fortunate souls who were ill or damaged or persistent enough to get past the triage nurse were privileged to penetrate. Elderly quavering wails rose from curtained cubicles, and the sound of drunken puking was interspersed with clotted expletives. At the central hub, dog-tired young women and men spoke into phones or scribbled notes.

Nikola parked the trolley beside a wall of drawers and pretended to study a notice board. Calvary snaked an arm out from under the blanket and rummaged in one of the drawers, coming away with a roll of tape and a few alcohol swabs in individual packets. He groaned, struggling to a sitting position, and Nikola put her hands on his shoulders and began to talk to him in Czech in a half-consoling, half-chiding tone. His new position allowed him to peer into the other drawers and he lifted out a cannula, a plastic bag of saline and an infusion set. These he buried beneath the blanket before slumping back.

She wheeled him out of the emergency room into a corridor that led off into the depths of the hospital, pausing near the door to allow him to lift a cheap-looking stethoscope from where it was coiled on a small steel table. Nikola draped it around her neck, and instantly her appearance was transformed: she became a doctor.

A short passage off the corridor appeared to lead to the locked door of a disused ward. Calvary said, ‘Down there.’ They had to be quick; anybody glancing down the passage would wonder what they were doing there. Motioning Nikola to keep her back to the corridor and thereby provide a degree of cover, he lifted back the blanket and began to peel open the plastic packaging of the cannula.

He attached the infusion set to the saline, ran a little of the fluid through, hung the bag on the hooked rod that protruded vertically up from one corner of the trolley. ‘Squeeze my arm,’ he said. Nikola gripped his upper arm, making the veins in the forearm bulge. He inserted the cannula, used tape to secure it. It wasn’t much, an added detail, but it would help.

Back in the corridor she stopped at a signboard indicating the directions of various wards and departments.

‘The theatres and pre- and post-operative wards are on the first floor,’ she said.

Now came the tricky part.

NINETEEN

The pain had hold of his entire body. It wasn’t the sharp burn of earlier, but a duller, less localised sensation that was aggravated whenever he moved.

Tamarkin opened his eyes to harsh lighting glaring into his face. For an instant he was back in Moscow on a training exercise, in the subterranean cells of the Lubyanka, being put through his paces while an interrogator alternately shouted and wheedled.

Then his situation snapped into focus as if a camera lens had been adjusted. He’d been shot, abdomen and leg. He was in hospital. He was alive.

He tried to lift his head. Apart from the pain the move set off, he felt the groggy, spinning nausea caused by the anaesthetic. Before his head sagged back he took in a small, low-ceilinged room. He was the only occupant, apart from a lone nurse who moved about amidst the beep and flicker of monitoring equipment. She caught his eye, smiled distractedly.

Tamarkin had a few memories of what had happened after he’d seen the muzzle flash from Calvary’s gun and felt the hammer blow to his stomach. He recalled finding himself at some point alone on the rooftop, and sliding the agonising distance towards where his gun had landed. He’d managed to kick the Makarov a good ten feet and was delighted through his pain to see the stock land near the gunman Calvary had shot. The immediate assumption would be that the pistol belonged to the dead man.

Further vague memories included shuffling backwards on his bottom until he reached the stairwell, then flopping back down it, before blackness claimed him again. Then, thirty seconds or two hours later, he couldn’t tell which, the intolerable racket of a helicopter’s rotors almost on top of him. Later, faces crowding over him as he was lifted on to some sort of bed – the operating table, he supposed.

He closed his eyes to take further stock. He remembered groping for his phone, finding it smashed by the impact of his fall; so the hospital staff would have been unable to run through his contact list to call anybody he knew. They’d have found his Mikhail Dubrovsky ID, so that was the persona he’d have to remember to use. They might already have contacted the Embassy, in which case Krupina would have been notified and would be on her way, if not already waiting outside.

He would have to come clean with Krupina. Not entirely, not about his association with Blažek; but he’d have to tell her that he’d attached a tracker to Calvary’s Fiat without her knowledge. Had done it to try and catch the man on his own initiative. She’d bawl him out, would probably arrange for his demotion. But he thought part of her might understand.

Calvary. Had he learned of Gaines’s whereabouts from Janos? If he had, then Tamarkin thought he might succeed in springing Gaines. A few hours ago he would have thought this impossible. But time and again Calvary had evaded Blažek, had got the better of him, and Tamarkin had to assume this might happen once more.

Krupina had requested reinforcements from Moscow. Might even have received them by now. A dozen highly trained operatives versus what Tamarkin was coming increasingly to regard as an inept mobster rabble.

It was time to play a different hand. Time to throw in his lot with Krupina once more. To tell her where Gaines was being held.

*

A small group of people outside the lift stepped aside and Nikola smiled her thanks, easing the stretcher through them. Calvary kept his expression set, his eyelids fluttering.

By twisting his head Calvary managed to scan the corridor. Double doors ahead were marked with the legend OPERACNÍ SÁLY. Operating theatres. Another pair of doors on either side of the corridor halfway down appeared to open into wards.

They’d discussed what to do. Nonetheless, it was a tense moment. Nikola left the trolley and went forward alone, pushing through one of the sets of ward doors.

A porter came past with another patient on a trolley. He glanced incuriously at Calvary, on his own in the corridor.

She was back in under a minute.

‘Our man.’

‘Dubrovsky?’

‘Yes. His name is marked on the wall chart. He is in a side room.’

That would help. ‘Any guards?’

‘Two policemen. At the nurses’ station.

He considered.

It was a plan of such immense risk, to her as well as to him, that he almost rejected it out of hand. Almost.

‘Okay. This is what we do.’

*

Krupina was put through just as she was pulling the door of the Audi closed.

A bright young female voice said, ‘Yes, Mr Dubrovsky’s in recovery now. He’s doing well.’

Lev drove, swiftly but not at breakneck speed. Behind him Arkady watched Krupina’s eyes in the mirror, caught the relief, smiled.

‘Thank you. Please tell him that Krupina is on her way.’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘I’m a colleague.’

‘From the Russian Embassy?’

‘No.’ Had Gleb spun them a story? ‘Were you expecting an Embassy person?’

‘Well, the gentleman earlier said he was going to send someone down.’

‘Which gentleman?’

‘The one from the Embassy,’ the girl said patiently.

Krupina rubbed her face in confusion. ‘Did he give a name?’

‘I think so. It was Dr Grossman who took the call. I don’t know if he wrote the name down.’ There was the sound of rummaging through paper. ‘No, doesn’t seem to have.’

Krupina’s first call had established that Gleb had been operated on for a gunshot to the abdomen and another to the tibial bone in the right leg. She hadn’t been able to find out any further details.

While Lev drove she made another call, this time to an acquaintance at the Embassy. No, nobody at his end was aware of Tamarkin’s having been injured, nor had they been in contact with the hospital.

Arkady said, ‘What’s wrong, boss?’

For a moment she didn’t answer, trying to piece it together. She couldn’t.

‘Lev, step on it. Gleb’s in danger.’

*

The doors opened into a warm, brightly lit area saturated with the aroma of coffee and antiseptic. From his supine position Calvary glimpsed a flow of people in scrubs or white coats on either side. Standing at the nurses’ station were the two uniformed men, one of whom looked over his shoulder at them before turning back to his conversation. Calvary took in the pistols at their belts.

Nikola wheeled the trolley straight past the desk and further into the ward. From where he lay Calvary saw a whiteboard with names. Dubrovsky, M. Side room C, by the looks of it.

A nurse glanced across, called something out. Nikola replied, and Calvary caught the name they’d agreed on for him: Peter Farber.

The nurse came over, a stern matronly type. Nikola said, ‘Please, can we use Russian? The patient does not speak Czech.’

The nurse – her name badge identified her as Sister Anna Jelinek – stared at Calvary. ‘Why have you brought him here? We haven’t been notified.’ Her Russian was thickly accented.

Nikola ran a hand through her long hair, gave a harassed sigh. ‘He’s for surgery. They were supposed to let you know down in casualty.’

‘Where are his notes?’

Nikola made a pretence of looking on the rack under the trolley, then straightened, burying her face in her hands. ‘They’re not here. Oh God, they haven’t put the notes on.’ When she took her hands away Calvary saw she was actually weeping. ‘I’ll have to go and get them.’ She turned away.

Sister Jelinek said, ‘You can’t leave him here.’

Damn, thought Calvary.

Nikola swallowed. She put a thumb to her mouth, bit the nail. Her hand shook.

‘Sister,’ she said. Her voice had the edge in it Calvary had noticed before in fellow soldiers after several hours of waiting for the enemy to show its hand. ‘Let me tell you something. I came on duty at one p.m. yesterday. It’s now ten a.m. I haven’t slept. I’ve had a sandwich and a bottle of water. That’s all. I’ve been forced to bring this bloody patient up here myself because there aren’t enough porters around. And now you have the gall, the –’

‘Control yourself, doctor.’ Sister Jelinek’s voice was like a bullwhip.

Nikola cut across the last syllable: ‘The nerve to tell me to take the patient away with me, as though it’s a pet of mine, a toy.’ Her voice rose to a shriek. ‘You know what? I’ve had enough. Of your attitude and those like you. Of this hospital. Of this job.’

‘Doctor. Get a grip on yourself. Now.’

Nikola backed towards the door, still shouting. A small crowd gathered at the nurses’ station, staff and patients alike, staring in alarm. The policemen were moving towards her as well.

‘I won’t be responsible, sister,’ she yelled. ‘I won’t be. For what happens next.’

He saw her turn and run, barging past the policemen. Calvary saw one of them start after her.

God bless you, Nikola, he thought. Now run. Just run.

Sister Jelinek shook her head, disgust etched into her face.

As quietly as he could, Calvary swung his legs off the trolley, acutely conscious of his booted feet and how out of place they’d look beneath the hospital gown. To a young nurse who was staring at the door, mouth agape, he said, ‘Toilet?’ She pointed vaguely down the passage separating the dormitories from the individual rooms.

He lifted the saline bag off the hook and carried it, moving unhurriedly down the passage, closing his ears to the shouts that would come after him. There was room C, on the left. He pushed open the door and went in.

*

Tamarkin had asked the nurse who seemed to be in charge of attending him for a phone. She’d said she would see what she could do, but so far she hadn’t come back.

Krupina would find him eventually, but if possible he wanted to get in contact sooner rather than later. He’d asked the nurse for a clock as well and she’d put a small digital display on the bedside table. Ten oh-nine. A little over three hours since the rooftop battle. Calvary might be working his way into the safe house where Gaines was being kept; might even have him by now.

A morphine pump in his arm allowed him to self administer pain relief. He’d used it sparingly until now, wanting to keep a clear head. But the screeching message from his leg in particular was overwhelming. He clicked the button. Sweet relief poured into his veins, his mind, almost immediately. For the first time he felt some sympathy – no, empathy was the word – for the raddled junkies he saw crawling around the edges of Gorky Park back home in Moscow.

Something slipped through the balm of warmth induced by the morphia. A scratchiness. He attended to it in a detached manner. A sound, was it? Yes. Not pain; definitely an aural stimulus.

Shouting. A woman’s fishwife shriek. Not the wails of the post-surgery patients in the ward outside his room, the ones he’d learned to accept as wallpaper noise in the short time he’d been conscious. Other voices: one of the nurses’, one he recognised from afar; a man’s, authoritative.

In his left hand the morphine trigger whispered: love me. Use me.

For the moment he didn’t need comfort. Pain would be more useful.

Tamarkin dropped the trigger. With his right hand he groped at the plastic water jug on the table beside the digital clock. Using both hands he snapped the jug, pulled a splinter free, a jagged length with a fat end tapering to a point. He writhed so that he could wrap the thick end in the blanket. He buried the weapon beneath the covers, and waited.

*

Lev dropped them at the entrance. Krupina and Arkady navigated the front doors of the hospital and the reception area, found the directions on the wall. Took the lift to the first floor.

When they stepped out, a young woman raced past them and down the stairs beside the lift, a doctor by the look of her: white coat, stethoscope draped over the neck.

She was screaming, yelling.

A uniformed police officer followed her at a run. Darya realised the doctor was speaking German. She didn’t understand the words but could tell the woman was both distressed and saying things that were perturbing the policeman.

Krupina peered down the stairs after them and caught a glimpse of the woman’s face as she looked back. Very pretty, long dark hair. In hysterics.

It was a ruse. Her eyes connected with Arkady’s. He’d reached the same conclusion.

She had her phone out and was calling Lev, saying, ‘Watch out for a young woman escaping, slim, dark hair,’ as Arkady went through the doors of the ward, the Makarov still inside his jacket. By the time Krupina entered the ward he was peering into the dormitories off to the right even as a battleaxe of a nursing sister clutched at his arm and shouted at him. A second policeman stood at the nurses’ station looking nonplussed.

A Babel of confusion rose and dipped around her but she ignored it and stared at the whiteboard on the wall. Saw the room where Dubrovsky, M. was being cared for.

She headed down the passage after Arkady, ignoring the angry sister. Said, ‘This one,’ and indicated the door of the side room.

TWENTY

The first thing Tamarkin noticed was the saline drip bag, held aloft, and he relaxed a fraction. It was another patient who’d wandered into the wrong room.

Then the man dropped the bag, ripped the cannula from his arm and pulled a chair over to the door, tipping it so that the back was under the handle, jamming it.

In two strides he was beside the bed.

Tamarkin watched through the slits between his lids, keeping his breathing even. It was Calvary. Last seen a second before the muzzle flash.

He was doing something to the infusion set linking the drip bag to Tamarkin’s own cannula. Tamarkin made his move.

*

If he’d been stooped a couple of inches lower the plastic shard would have gone into his neck, the jugular or the carotid. As it was the point pierced Calvary’s pectoral muscle through the cloth of the gown and through his shirt. He raised his elbow, tearing the shard out of the man’s hand, and tugged the point free. It had penetrated half an inch.

Tamarkin slumped back on the pillow. There was no fight in him, Calvary could see. He’d played his only card, a surprise attack, and he had nothing left.

Calvary heard the handle of the door being jiggled. Then the banging began.

He worked swiftly, drawing back the plunger of the syringe he’d palmed on his way to the room, fitting the needle to the end. Holding Tamarkin’s arm down with one hand he slipped the tip of the needle into the rubber stopper that sealed the projection from the infusion set, the one that allowed injections to be given using the same cannula.

Tamarkin’s eyes took in Calvary’s movements. He tried to pull his arm free but Calvary had it in a vice grip.

‘What are you doing?’ It was a whisper. His throat would be sore from the tube the anaesthetist had put down it.

‘Air embolus,’ said Calvary. ‘Fifty CCs of air to the heart. It’ll be relatively quick, don’t worry.’

The banging at the door was becoming frantic. Calvary heard the first of the kicks.

‘I’ll tell you –’

‘I didn’t come here for information. I came here to dispatch you.’ Calvary began to depress the plunger with his thumb.

‘For God’s sake.’ The more Tamarkin tried to raise his voice the more quietly it emerged. ‘I can give it to you. All of it. I know where Gaines is.’

‘As I said, I’m not really that interested.’

The kicks were coming hard, now. Calvary heard something splinter.

Always start an interrogation hard. Never cajole, never build up slowly. Go in at the extreme. He’d found it useful advice in the past.

Tamarkin gave him Gaines’s location.

Calvary memorised it, hoping he’d grasped the pronunciation.

He had what he needed. He looked down at Tamarkin.

There was no justification for it. Except that if he didn’t do it, Tamarkin would alert Blažek as soon as he was able. And Blažek would immediately move Gaines to a new hiding place.

Calvary had no option.

He pressed down on the plunger.

The single opening window in the room swung on a horizontal hinge at the top. He pushed it. As expected it opened only a few inches, not enough to fit a human body.

Calvary jumped onto the bedside table, kicked the window out so that it snapped off its hinges. He peered down. A short drop on to a grass verge.

He was airborne as the chair wedged under the door handle finally gave way behind him and the door was flung open.

*

Krupina yelled, ‘Lev, he’s out the window, it’s Calvary, get round the back,’ into her phone as Arkady slipped out after him. The policeman stood in the middle of the room, staring at Gleb in the bed, at the second man disappearing through the window. The nursing sister and one or two other staff were trying to peer into the room. Nearby a patient had started to scream.

Krupina barged past into the room, shouldered even the policeman aside. Looked down at Gleb.

Then hurried to the window and gazed out.

*

The drop felt further than Calvary had been expecting, and the air was cold and sharp after the controlled temperature of the ward. He landed on his feet, his knees bent to absorb the impact, and he rolled on his shoulder and let the momentum carry him down the grass verge until it levelled out. With a fluid continuation of the movement he was on his feet and running.

He had a sense that if he followed the wall to the left he would arrive eventually at the area where the trolleys had been left, not far from where they’d parked the car. It was possible – unlikely, but possible nonetheless – that Nikola had already got out of the building. More plausible was that she’d either been caught, or was roaming somewhere inside, trying to evade capture.

Calvary felt the exhilaration in his belly like an accelerated pregnancy. Wherever she was, he’d find her. Make her safe. He had what he needed: Gaines’s whereabouts. All else was detail.

Something batted at his heel and he looked over his shoulder and suddenly he was tumbling, rolling over his shoulder again, this time on the hard concrete of the pavement. He’d been kicked, a low blow at his foot, expert, and it had sent him spinning. Through the blur of movement he saw the man, young, lean, coming in fast. Calvary extended a leg, rigid, and his boot caught the man in the stomach and jackknifed him, but he’d been ready and had tensed his abdominal muscles and so the blow wasn’t incapacitating. His extended knuckles raked at Calvary’s throat. Calvary parried with a sweep of his own fist, followed up with a jab at the man’s face. He fell short but the man jerked his head back and lost some of his impetus. Calvary heaved with his leg, threw the younger man off and was up again and running.

He came through the window after you. You should have been expecting that.

He rounded a corner into a blaze of sunlight, but that wasn’t why he recoiled. A car was heading towards him, breaking the rules, riding across pavement and chipping flint off bollards. He dodged left, finding himself hard up against the cold of the wall. The car slammed to a stop behind him and he ran on, aware of two presences at his back now, the lean man and whoever had come out of the car.

Nikola, he thought. Where are you? Did you get out?

He had the address where Gaines was being held. It was what he’d been seeking ever since the job had started to go wrong. He was close, he was so close. It couldn’t play out like this. He refused to let it.

Ahead he fancied saw the car park where they’d left the rental VW. It was unlocked with the keys tucked above the driver’s mirror. He just had to reach it, climb in, grab the keys and take off. Lose them, then circle back, find Nikola.

Then get Gaines.

The first blow crashed into the backs of his legs, dropping him into a kneeling position on the pavement. The second lashed across the back of his head, knocking the world into a grey, sickly haze. At some point he turned, felt his head crack the concrete. Saw two faces swimming over him. He punched out, hit something soft, saw one of the faces rock away. Then fists, battering his visual fields, crowding all else out.

It wasn’t supposed to play out like this.

The final blow landed and the daylight reversed itself into night.

*

Krupina reeled away from the window. She’d lost them, Calvary and Arkady, round the corner.

To the policeman’s confounded and terrified face, she said, for show: ‘My Embassy will expect a full explanation of how this was allowed to happen.’

She stormed out of the ward into the corridor. Gripped her phone, stared at the screen.

Calvary. Slipped away like quicksilver.

As though responding to some psychic communication of hers, the phone vibrated. Arkady.

‘We’ve got him.’

She closed her eyes.

*

The kid was scared, no question about it. But he hadn’t pissed himself yet.

Bartos brought his face close. This one wouldn’t spit.

‘You heard the shot.’

The kid tried to avoid his gaze, but couldn’t.

‘Your friend – Jakub, was it? Yes.’ Bartos edged closer. The boy’s fear smell pulsed off him. He wasn’t even tied. Was parked in the bare wooden chair without any restraints except the knowledge that he was helpless.

Bartos had barged through the door a few minutes earlier. He’d noted Miklos’s quick shake of the head and had known the young man – Max, he’d admitted to – hadn’t said anything.

‘Brainy guy, that Jakub. And how do I know this? Because his brains, lots of them, are painting the walls of the room next door.’

For a moment Bartos wished Janos was there. His deadbeat son hadn’t been good for much, but he shared his father’s sense of humour and knew when to appreciate a joke.

‘So I ask you once more, Max. How do we find your friend, Calvary? An address, a contact number. A car licence plate. Any of them will do.’

The sweat beaded on the boy’s forehead. His mouth quivered.

Bartos sat back on his heels. ‘Who are you, anyway? You and your late buddy Jakub? Do I know you? Has Bartos Blažek ever had anything to do with you before?’ He chewed the inside of his cheek, watching the wide eyes. ‘And how are you connected to this Calvary guy?’

The silence stretched between them until it was close to breaking point.

*

Blackness shaded to slate like dawn in a stormy sky. The aural veil began to lift as well: a miasmic slurry of sound gave way by degree to human speech, then distinct voices.

Calvary had been aware, intermittently, of travel. The ragged rumble of a vehicle’s chassis under his back. Hands beneath his armpits, lifting him. A supported propulsion forward and downward, his partially suspended feet tripping over steps that receded beneath him.

By the time his vision cleared entirely and he was able to be certain of what he was seeing around him, rather than experiencing it in some sort of dream, his overwhelming sense was of nausea.

He was in a windowless room of some kind, lit only by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cobwebbed flex directly above his head. By angling his eyes downwards he could make out flagstones. The sour, winey smell suggested he was in a cellar.

He was seated in a steel chair with one leg shorter than the others. His legs were secured to the chair with plastic ties around the ankles. Thin, tough cord lashed his waist and chest to the back of the seat. His arms, curiously, were free. He flexed his elbows, rolled the shoulder joints.

He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.

Somewhere off in the darkness, fluid dripped in an intermittent rhythm.

The uniformity of the shadow shrouding his immediate environment was torn open as a shape detached itself and stepped forward. A woman. The woman. Fiftyish, or past seventy. Of medium height, dumpy, ungainly. The flesh hanging off her like peeling wallpaper. Blue ribbons of smoke twined towards the lit bulb from the cigarette between her fingers.

‘Mr Calvary. You’re awake, I see.’ She spoke English, her accent heavy.

His eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. He could make out the horizon where the far wall and the ceiling joined. Over to the right, beyond the woman, sacks packed to splitting were piled man-high.

To the left, he made out a small wooden table. An orange lead curled from a wall socket up to the surface of the table.

The lead ended in a grey appliance, scarred and dull but instantly recognisable.

An electric hammer drill.

TWENTY-ONE

The young man, Arkady, peeled out of the shadows beside the woman. In his right hand he bounced something. He tossed it at Calvary.

Calvary caught it, left handed. He didn’t need to look at it to know what it was. A squash ball.

He dropped it.

So it was going to be the hand.

Arkady had thrown the ball to see which hand Calvary used to catch it, reflexively, and thereby establish which one was dominant. They would think he’d have more to fear from damage to the hand he used the most. Calvary had anticipated this and used his left, non-dominant hand. This way his right hand might be spared.

The woman raised the cigarette to her mouth. From behind Calvary’s right shoulder a second man emerged. Bigger, older. Possibly the driver of the car that had cut Calvary off outside the hospital wall. He grabbed Calvary’s right arm and forced it round behind his back. Then he seized the left hand. Secured them together with a plastic tie.

It wasn’t going to be the hand, then. That had been a bluff, to get Calvary to relax a little. To make him feel as though he was in control.

The man moved behind Calvary once more. Calvary turned his head. He could see the man pushing forward something heavy. A workbench of some kind, with an iron clamp protruding past the edge.

The man’s hands forced his head round so he was facing forwards again. He felt the wooden edge of the bench against the back of his neck, felt cold metal press against his temples, smelled machine oil. Felt the jaws of the clamp tightening, compressing his head.

He tried an experimental shake of his head, found he had no range of motion at all in any plane. All he could move were his eyes.

Still the woman watched, the only movement her hand rising to her mouth to draw on the cigarette.

The big man stepped into Calvary’s field of vision. He took up the drill. Hefted it. Thumbed the switch.

The whine was ragged, as though the motor had done battle with hard surfaces scores of times before. The confined walls and ceiling of what Calvary assumed was the cellar amplified the noise.

The man brought the spinning tip close to Calvary’s eyes. Stopped the motor for a moment. Protruding from the clamped jaws was a masonry bit, eight or nine gauge by the look of it. The tip was shaped like a blunt arrowhead, designed for boring holes through tiles.

The man fired the drill up again, held it horizontal. Gripped Calvary’s hair in his other hand. Brought the blurred tip of the bit towards the centre of Calvary’s forehead.

It was time to go.

*

In the last four years Calvary had carried out six hits for Llewellyn and the Chapel. The kills had required meticulous planning, incorporating sometimes months of research beforehand.

Nonetheless, Calvary knew that at a metaphysical cocktail party someone would eventually approach him, gin and tonic in hand and ask: In between jobs, what do assassins actually do?

Calvary would have an answer in such a situation. He had spent the time in between hits mastering his weapons, his tools of the trade. He had achieved a high standard of knowledge in geopolitics, in military history, in game theory.

And he’d burrowed deep into the psychology and physiology of interrogation science, and implemented what he’d learned. Usually he’d been on the dishing-out end, finding out what he needed to know about the location of a target. Start extreme, with a serious threat to physical integrity – this was the most useful tactic in the interrogator’s arsenal. He’d employed it with Janos on the roof and with Tamarkin in the hospital room. And it seemed his captors, Krupina and her minions, were doing the same with him. No questions initially, just the promise of mutilation.

Calvary had practised being on the receiving end of a hostile interrogation, though until now he’d never found himself in such a situation while on a job. The best advice he’d had was from an elderly Chilean man, a survivor of the Pinochet terror in the early seventies. From this man he’d learned the technique of dissociation.

Most people he’d read of who’d undergone dissociation in whatever form found it unpleasant in the extreme. The Chilean dissident had described as a waking dreaming state, waking death, a sensation of cosmic, existential wrongness. It was a biological survival mechanism, kept alive in the species by its value in preserving the integrity of the psyche at times of extreme physical or emotional stress. It could therefore be usefully employed deliberately for the same reason, or to some other end, such as uncoupling the perception of pain from the recognition of what needed to be done to end that pain. Put simply, it enabled one to tolerate torture without providing the information that the torture was intended to elicit.

Dissociation which is achieved voluntarily was, however, no less unpleasant than the other kind, said the Chilean. It required one to do something profoundly counter-instinctive, which was to focus inwards rather than outwards towards the threatening stimulus. It involved disciplining one’s self to ignore something that all the senses scream was not to be ignored at any cost.

The first thing Calvary did was turn the drill into a snake, a special type of snake that was deadly but could detect only moving prey. If he remained absolutely still, slowing his breathing so that not even his ribcage moved, it would be unaware of his whereabouts. Calvary concentrated on stillness.

The next thing he did was find a tunnel within himself. Calvary’s knowledge of human anatomy told him there were plenty of tunnels leading from the head to the rest of the body: the oesophagus, the trachea, the foramen magnum in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passed. He needed a narrow passage, one down which the snake would have difficulty following him. The foramen magnum was the narrowest and least flexible, so Calvary opted for it. He became a small huddled homunculus, perched on the bony lip of the orifice, aware of the approaching snake and aware that the only escape, terrifying though it seemed, was downwards. He made the homunculus that was himself lean back over the edge until he was past the point of no return, and drop into the void.

Black walls with strange starry silver streaks in them rushed past as he built up speed. Calvary felt as though he were hurtling through time as well as space, plummeting away from the present with its immediate concerns – the drill/snake, Prague, Nikola and the others, Gaines – and towards a place in the distant, primeval past, where his sole concern was to perpetuate his life, existence becoming an end in itself. Calvary saw, or imagined he saw, primitive life forms as he descended: bizarre deep-sea beings festooned with machine-like attachments, blurred jelly shapes skittering past shrieking through enormous fanged maws.

Then Calvary stopped falling.

There was no trauma involved, no jarring. He simply ceased to drop, and hung in utter stillness. Around him, and above and below, the darkness was absolute. Calvary created a soft cocoon of gauzy light around him, a fire substitute evoked by his species memory to keep predators at a distance. Within the sheath of light he concentrated on making himself smaller, curling himself up into a ball, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped tight around his legs. He remained like that for a long time.

After a while Calvary looked up. Far, far above there was a pinpoint in the blackness. He made his eyes able to see with telescopic vision. This allowed him to identify the pinpoint as a square window. Through the window he saw a tiny man, himself, tied to a chair. A woman and one other men stood off near a wall, watching him. Another man stood over the man in the chair and did something to him. As though through miles of ocean water, Calvary could hear shouting. He didn’t need to worry about hearing what was said; it would all be there in his memory when he eventually surfaced again. Calvary closed the window with his mind and retreated into his cocoon of light.

The cocoon took on, slowly, a tangible physical character, like some alien material, impossibly soft yet clinging to every exposed surface. It was comforting. It insinuated itself into his ears, his nose. Then it crept between his lips and slipped around his tongue, worming its unnatural substance over and under his teeth. Calvary gagged. It crawled down his throat, suffusing both his gullet and his windpipe. It was suffocating him. He couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breath.

Panic seared through him. Calvary began to rise, growing huge, barrelling back upwards towards the surface. A far-off part of him cried out, Not yet. He tried to listen to it, tried to stop and reverse and go back down and become small and safe, but there was no safety there and he couldn’t. Instead, Calvary focused on understanding what had been happening while he had been under, and on deciding what to do next.

He had been injured. The extent didn’t matter for now.

He had told them nothing about who was employing him, why he was after Gaines, or where Gaines was being held.

He had to tell them something, because they would know he was nearing the end of his usefulness to them.

It was time to come back and play his ace.

*

‘Where is Gaines.’

The drill’s whine was accompanied by the ripping noise of the tip of the bit breaking the skin. Calvary stiffened in his chair, his back arching as far as it could against the restraints.

Krupina watched his face. His eyes were half closed, his teeth bared and glistening like a feral beast’s.

‘Why are you trying to find him.’

A new sound, that of bone splintering. Through the cellar odour of stale wine and damp, the keener tang of burnt blood made her almost gag. The cellar was beneath one of the several safe houses Krupina kept across the city. They hadn’t used it before, certainly not for something like this.

‘Where is Gaines.’

‘Why are you trying to find him.’

The same two questions, almost contradictory in what they implied, repeated like a chant.

Lev had done this before. There was a real art to it, or a craft, at any rate. You had to know when to stop, so that you didn’t penetrate the dura mater, the outer covering of the brain. Or, worse, the frontal lobes of the brain itself.

The Englishman’s face was obscured behind a caul of blood. His eyes were closed now, his breathing disturbingly slow and even.

A professional. So pain wasn’t going to work, nor fear of mutilation.

*

Returning was always highly unpleasant, rather like being born: from the hot suspended cradle of safety to the violent, screaming world of light and pain.

His eyes were gummed and stinging, his cheeks tacky and his mouth clotted with congealing blood. He couldn’t see his forehead but knew what had happened. He felt violated, penetrated.

The pain was terrible, a living untameable beast ravening through Calvary’s skull, down his neck.

The woman, Krupina, looked down at him, her face expressionless. Then she said something to the younger man beside her, Arkady. The man drew a pistol from inside his jacket and stepped forward. He pressed the barrel against Calvary’s forehead, beside the hole there, flicked off the safety. The older man in shirtsleeves, the wielder of the drill, moved away.

Calvary looked back up at Krupina, her face distorted as his vision began to blur.

‘I have a cell phone number that will get me through to Blažek,’ Calvary said. ‘It’s me he wants. I can set up a meeting with him. You can take him down then.’

He didn’t dissociate then, just passed out.

TWENTY-TWO

Calvary fed himself water, lots of it, from a two-litre plastic bottle. He was perched on the chair, free from restraints: his head had been released from the clamp, the cords had been unwound, the plastic ties cut.

They hadn’t offered him any kind of dressing. He’d probed the wound with a ginger fingertip. It felt enormous, a crater lipped with bony spurs, though it could only be a few millimetres across. He wondered how far it had penetrated. His fingers came away bloody, but there was no clear cerebrospinal fluid.

He needed a dressing, and soon. Infection would be potentially fatal.

They stood before him in a neat crescent, the woman in the centre. She was smoking. Calvary didn’t think she’d been without a lit cigarette since he’d woken up in the cellar.

The older man, Lev, had woken him with open-handed slaps. At first they hadn’t untied him.

Krupina had come very close. ‘Explain.’

Calvary tried his voice, was surprised to hear it come out as normal, with no shake in it. ‘Blažek has two of my friends prisoner. He’ll be holding them as bargaining chips, but he doesn’t know how to contact me. I have their phone numbers. Blažek will be monitoring their calls.’

He watched her eyes, saw the calculating going on in the heavy silence. Then: ‘What do you propose?’

‘I offer myself in exchange for my friends. A public place somewhere – you can decide where, I don’t know this city well enough. Blažek’ll come armed to the teeth, with all the men he can round up. You take him out. You’re Chekists, you’ll have access to whatever resources you require.’ He broke off. The pain was starting to bore through his head again. ‘Two things. I want a guaranteed safe passage out for my associates.’

It was a ludicrous demand, and Krupina knew he knew it. She didn’t even bother to nod.

‘And I need a piece of equipment. Again, you’ll be able to get it if you ask.’

He told her, and explained what he needed it for.

Her cigarette stub burned down and she dropped it, twisted her foot on the flagstones. With a nod to Lev she turned away, Arkady moving off with her, out of Calvary’s earshot.

*

Yevgenia had phoned an hour earlier, while the Englishman had still been unconscious. ‘They’re here, Ms Krupina. The six men.’

Six trained operatives, plus Arkady and Lev. Krupina had little doubt they could do it, could face down Blažek. Her concern was with Calvary. What was he planning?

To Arkady she said, ‘Tell Yevgenia to organise what the Englishman asks for.’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘But with modifications.’

She told him. Arkady nodded, understanding. A smile at his lips.

Admiration. She seldom received any, insisted she didn’t need it. But it felt good.

*

‘Your plan is approved.’

It sounded ridiculously solemn. Calvary said, ‘We can speak Russian if you prefer.’

‘My English is not good enough for you?’

Touched a nerve. Calvary raised his hand to his forehead. ‘I’m going to need a dressing for this.’

‘It is coming.’

She’d returned without Arkady. Lev had taken a step back and stood watching him, arms folded. Krupina was taken suddenly with a hacking cough which she tried to suppress.

He thought about offering her some of his water. Decided against it.

She paced a little, then turned to him. ‘My associate in the hospital. Why did you kill him?’

‘I didn’t. Not deliberately. I was interrogating him. I pushed him too far.’

‘What questions were you asking him?’

For the time being Calvary would keep Tamarkin’s betrayal of her to himself, a card to be played later.

‘What he’d found out about Blažek. I knew he was SVR and that you lot were looking for Gaines. I thought your friend might be able to help me with the information I needed.’ Calvary shrugged. ‘He wasn’t.’

‘And how did he come to be in hospital in the first place?’

‘How did he get shot? He just appeared on the roof of the car park. I’ve no idea how he got there.’

Krupina stood, brow furrowed. Without looking at Calvary she said, ‘It is not likely that you will survive. When we come down on Blažek, you will be in the centre.’

‘By which I assume you mean one of your men will conveniently shoot me by accident.’ He shook his head, winced at the pain. ‘Bad idea. I’m more valuable to you alive. Your interrogators in Moscow will put on a more effective show than that travesty just now.’

Another nerve. This time she did look at him, eyes yellow and baleful.

‘No, Mr Calvary. The only Englishman who will be going to Moscow is Gaines.’

He kept eye contact, his thoughts churning. They were going to take Gaines back to Moscow when they found him. Did that mean he was still working for them, an asset who was now blown? Why would they grant him sanctuary if he was nothing but a Cold War relic?

*

Krupina met Arkady upstairs, out of hearing of the Englishman. He’d procured gauze, antiseptic, and bandages.

‘Yevgenia is discussing with the new men possible venues for the rendezvous with Blažek.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘And the item Calvary requested?’

‘It’s on its way, from a cache we hold in the countryside outside the city.’

‘Good man.’

Arkady disappeared down the cellar steps with the dressing material. Krupina remained in the front room of the safe house for a minute, gazing out at the deepening afternoon shadows on the patch of lawn.

Calvary was right on both counts. He was of value alive, and Moscow would be more successful in extracting information from him than she had been, or had time to be. And yet… Ensuring his survival might prove more trouble than it was worth. Her priority was to get Blažek, alive, or at the very least one of his lieutenants such as his brother, Miklos. Calvary’s safety couldn’t get in the way of that objective.

Plus, he killed Gleb. Let’s not forget that.

She shoved the thought away. She was a professional, and as such she couldn’t let personal considerations influence what had to be done.

Not for the moment, anyway.

*

Calvary wiped his hands and dropped the filthy cloth on the flagstones. They’d brought him a bucket of water which he’d used to wash his face and neck. Arkady had cleaned his forehead with antiseptic and packed a gauze pad against it, winding a bandage tight around his head. A spare shirt had been found, too, and a packet of ibuprofen tablets. He swallowed half a dozen.

The other man, Lev, had removed the table with the bloodied drill and brought another to Calvary’s right side. On it he placed a mobile phone.

Krupina said, ‘Make the call.’

She’d changed to Russian.

Calvary replied in kind. ‘Where do I say we meet?’

‘We’re still working on a location.’

‘The more advance warning we give Blažek, the more opportunity he’ll have to call up reinforcements.’

‘Granted. But I want you to hook Blažek now, before he decides he’s had enough of waiting and kills your associates.’

It made sense. Calvary picked up the handset, switched the speakerphone on, dialled Max’s number from memory. He punched the numbers in slowly, letting them hear that he was dialling an eleven-digit mobile phone number rather than sending a secret text message or something. Placed the phone back on the table and waited.

Three rings. Four. Then an urgent voice, not Max’s: ‘Ano?’

In Russian Calvary said: ‘This is Martin Calvary. The man you’re looking for. I want to speak to Bartos Blažek. No-one else.’

‘One moment.’

He heard confused shouting and footsteps in the background. After about a minute a voice close to the mouthpiece bellowed: ‘Where are you?’

‘Bartos Blažek?’

‘Yes. Where –’

‘Listen, don’t talk. You have my friends?’

‘Fuck you, you murdering –’

‘This is a once-only offer, Blažek. I’m not going to tell you again to shut up.’ He paused, but the man had stopped. ‘Okay. The deal is, we do a straight swap. You get me in return for them.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ll let you know the time and place. Stay near this phone.’ Calvary glanced at Krupina. ‘First, I need proof that my friends are still alive.’

Footsteps in the background again, then Blažek said, ‘Here’s the kid.’

A second later Max’s voice came through the speaker in English, sounding dazed. ‘Hello?’

‘Max, it’s me. Calvary.’

‘Calvary?’ The voice shook. ‘He killed Jakub, man.’

Not looking at Krupina now, Calvary said, ‘Put Blažek back on.’

When he heard the big man’s grunt he said, ‘You killed the other man. Jakub.’

‘No. I just told the kid that to spook him. I’ll put him on.’

A few seconds passed before Jakub came on, in another room, Calvary assumed. His voice sounded swollen.

Calvary said, ‘Are you in one piece?’

‘Nothing this pig can do to me.’

‘All right. I’m going to get you out of there.’

Blažek’s voice cut across. ‘You satisfied now?’

‘Make sure they stay intact, Blažek.’

‘You killed my son.’ The man’s voice was quieter, shot through with a thread of rage. Rage was good. It led to mistakes in planning.

‘I did, yes. It was no more than he deserved. And you’re next.’

Calvary reached over with his good hand and killed the call.

TWENTY-THREE

They converged on Bartos’s home from both sides of the Vltava River. Hard men who’d earned his respect through unflinching service, or undisciplined psychopaths who’d earned his coin for their breathtaking viciousness. From the cities of Ostrava and Pardubice they came, too, men based in the colonies of Bartos’s empire, called into service of the motherland. Of the emperor.

Including the ones with whom Bartos surrounded himself, there were twenty-eight men in all. Twenty-eight, to take down one man. However professional he was, and whatever rag-tag outfit he’d associated himself with – and from Bartos’s experience of the two he’d taken captive, he wasn’t impressed – there was no way the Brit, Calvary, could win against those odds.

Bartos stood in the turret at the peak of his mansion, the tower at the top of his castle, and stared out over the growing lights of the city.

His city.

Twenty-four hours earlier he’d been in control. A petty thief had dared to pick the pocket of one of his men and he’d pulled the boy’s face apart, before breaking his neck. He hadn’t had to care where the body was dumped. Nobody would find it, and even if they did, the police would never link it to him.

He’d had a grown-up son. A putrid waste of space, a whoremongering cokehead, but a son nevertheless. His son. Someone whose fate it was his to decide.

And this stranger, this strutting cock of a Brit, had breezed into his city and taken over. Had made him and his men look like prissy, mincing fairies. Had raped his empire and plundered his authority and made him a laughing stock.

And murdered his kin. The worst offence of all.

*

The night glimmered off the immense shifting bulk of the river, the castle towering on the opposite bank. The Audi headed south, Krupina driving, unusually. Lev was in the passenger seat, his arm across the back, his Makarov pointed at the Englishman. Arkady sat next to Calvary in the back seat, his own gun jammed into Calvary’s side.

The dashboard clock said it was 11.35 pm.

Yevgenia had come through with the location an hour earlier and Krupina had immediately agreed. Vysehrad Park, alongside the river south of the city centre. It was open late at night, a spot with enough hiding places for all her men, and unlikely to be riddled with tourists at this late hour. The dozen men sent from Moscow were already in position, placed strategically through the park.

In the mirror Krupina watched Calvary. The wound was seeping through the dressings. His face was pallid, waxy, his eyes half closed. She wondered if she’d pushed him too far.

*

There’d been a lot of sitting about in the cellar. Calvary had asked if he might stretch his legs and he’d been permitted to. At once he’d regretted it, each step sending a spike of pain through his head. But he persisted. There’d be running later, and he needed to acclimatise to the discomfort.

Krupina and Arkady appeared and disappeared, only Lev remaining with him at all times. Habit made Calvary size up the man, looking for weak points, but he knew there’d be no point in trying to jump him. The man was too professional, and Calvary too weakened at the moment. Instead he forced himself to breathe in to the pain and the nausea, accepting them as part of his being.

Once, when Krupina returned, Calvary said, ‘Any news on the location?’ They were conversing exclusively in Russian now.

‘Yes, we have identified one.’

‘And?’

‘You’ll be apprised of it in good time.’

‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ Giddiness made him sway. ‘You don’t have to be so cagey. You might as well tell me. This swap will work best if I know as much about the environment as possible. Otherwise Blažek might just pick me off before you even get close to him.’

‘All right.’ She called for Arkady. He came down the cellar steps with a laptop computer. Krupina opened it on the table beside Calvary’s chair. He sat down, grateful for the excuse.

It was a panoramic, Google Earth view outside some sort of battlement wall.

Krupina said, ‘Vysehrad Park. The birthplace of Prague, according to legend. It contains the remains of the city’s second castle. Have a look round.’

He advanced the view, passing through an arched gateway. Roamed paved and cobbled paths, noted trees, manicured lawns, assorted sculptures and statues.

She stopped him. ‘Here. The Devil’s Stone. This is where the exchange is set to take place. Deep enough in the park to be away from the entrance. It’ll give my people an opportunity to cut off the exit points.’

‘How many are there?’

‘Two. Tabor Gate in the southeast corner, the Brick Gate in the north.’

‘I meant how many of your men are there?’

Again the pause, as if on principle the truth ought to be withheld.

‘Twelve.’

Calvary breathed out slowly. ‘You’ll be outnumbered. Count on it.’

‘We have the advantage when it comes to quality.’

He poked around the site, ranging through the park. Noting the perimeter.

‘What time is it?’

She indicated the screen. ‘That clock’s accurate.’

Nine twenty p.m. He’d been in the cellar for close on eleven hours, most of those spent unconscious. He wondered where Nikola was. Whether she’d made it out of the hospital.

‘When’s the exchange?’

‘One a.m., provisionally. I’m waiting for my men to scout the location and get in place. And for the item you requested to arrive. Once we’re there, you notify Blažek.’

He gazed back at the screen. On the western aspect of the castle complex, beyond the perimeter wall, lay the river.

*

The man emerged from the shadows without warning, as though part of the scenery had suddenly detached itself. He was short, whip-lean, his face all hard planes and angles. His left eye socket was covered with a patch. He extended a hand.

‘Voronin.’

Krupina had read the brief biography she’d been sent. He was former Spetsnaz, special forces. A captain. Distinguished service in Chechnya. He was in charge of the reinforcement detail.

His eyes took in Calvary. If he was doubtful about the Englishman’s ability to play his part in what was to come, doubtful of his ability even to stay conscious for long enough, he didn’t show it.

They stood on the cobblestones before the Tabor Gate, Krupina and Calvary and Arkady and Lev, and the new man. A couple out for a late-night stroll glanced over incuriously as they passed. Voronin moved so that his back was to the couple and brought his hand out of the pocket of his greatcoat. He handed the object to Calvary.

To Krupina he said, ‘He knows how to use it?’

‘Yes.’

Lev remained with her. She watched the three of them pass through the gate, Calvary flanked by Voronin and Arkady. She didn’t know what Calvary had planned, but she doubted he’d make a run for it now. Not with a man on either side of him, not with the park crawling with concealed agents.

Krupina looked at her watch. Eleven fifty.

In ten minutes Calvary would make the call to Blažek, set up the rendezvous for one o’clock. He’d arrive early, of course, believing himself to be clever.

*

A light skein of rain hung from the sky. The path was lamplit and sodden with leaves. A jogger pounded past, not giving them a second look. Ahead loomed a second gate, a Gothic construction, and they passed beneath it.

His eyes roved, taking in the landscape, trying to match it to what he’d seen on the laptop. In the distance, lit up against the night sky, Calvary could see the twin spires of St Peter’s and St Paul’s Church. Looming to the right was St Martin’s Rotunda. They turned left and headed towards the western wall, beyond which the hill dropped steeply towards the river.

The two men on either side of him were silent, Arkady and the new one with the eye patch. Calvary recognised in him the bearing and physique of a special forces soldier. He recalled what Krupina had said, about the quality of her men being a match for Blažek’s superiority in numbers.

Krupina had given him a clean jacket, a little big for him. Into the pocket he’d put the object the soldier had handed him. It weighed heavily against his hip. Earlier Calvary had asked for a gun. The look Krupina gave him had been his answer. It was worth a try, anyway.

They drew nearer to the church. In the middle of a flat stretch of lawn dotted with trees sat an odd construction, three tubular rocks piled up against each other. The Devil’s Stone.

They stopped. Arkady handed him a phone.

‘Make the call.’

*

They came in from the other side, through the Brick Gate. Calvary was propped against the rock structure, bouncing a little on his toes, trying to keep his limbs from seizing up. More than once the burning in his forehead threatened to drop him to the ground and he had to clench his teeth against it, turn it into a tiny bead of agony to be filed away for later.

His watch told him it was forty minutes since he’d made the call. He was alone, and yet not alone: all around, in the darkness beyond the splashes of light from the lamps, he could feel the presence of men skilled in staying hidden for long periods.

There were six, approaching form the direction of the church. It was difficult to make out their features but none of them looked to Calvary like Blažek.

He stood and faced them. They stopped. He saw their heads moving as they glanced about. As though they didn’t believe it would be this easy, Calvary on his own.

He brought his right hand out of his pocket, held up what he had there.

‘You see this?’ he called out in Russian.

Even if they couldn’t quite see it, they would quickly work out what it was.

‘I want to see my friends.’

None of them moved. Slowly, very obviously, Calvary pulled the pin from the grenade and hooked his thumb over the safety lever. He took a few steps forward.

One of the men muttered something over his shoulder. Ten seconds later two stumbling figures were shoved forward. Their hands were fastened behind their backs, and from the sounds they were making Calvary realised they were gagged.

Max and Jakub.

Calvary put a finger to his ear and muttered quietly, nothing that made sense but he wanted to create the impression he was communicating on a hands-free mobile phone. He called, ‘Listen carefully. My friends are going to walk over here to me while you stay where you are. I’m going to untie them. Then they’re going to walk away. Once I get the signal they’re clear, I’ll put the pin back in this thing and you can have me. If you try to obstruct or harm them in any way, I’ll let go of the safety lever and you’ve lost me forever.’

Again a mutter, and a push at Max’s back. The two of them weaved towards Calvary. As they drew closer he could see they had both been roughed up hard.

Calvary walked the remaining distance to the two men. Keeping his eyes on the row of men ten yards behind them, keeping the grenade raised, Akos he pulled off Jakub’s gag with his left hand. Jakub gasped, his mouth writhing and bloody. He turned and Calvary picked at the cord binding his hands. When the knot was loose enough he pulled his wrists free and immediately set to work releasing Max. Calvary said to them, quietly, ‘You know where you are?’

‘Vysehrad,’ said Jakub thickly.

‘Are you familiar with it?’

‘Yeah.’ Max this time. He was staring at the bandage around Calvary’s head. ‘What –’

‘Shut up and listen. Lose yourselves in the park. There’s going to be a lot of shooting in a moment. There are Russian agents about, so try to steer clear of them. Get out however you can, but don’t use the exits. Use walls, trees, whatever.’

They stood there, staring at him. He said: ‘Get going, for God’s sake. There’s nothing more you can do here now. Find Nikola. I don’t know where she is’

Akos Jakub grabbed Max’s arm. Max stood, undecided, then took off with him. Calvary watched them disappear into the trees.

Come on, Krupina.

Calvary called, ‘Remember, until I get word that they’re clear, I keep hold of this thing.’

The damp air was starting to feel cloying and oppressive rather than bracing. The night was still, the trees insulating the park from the noises of the city on either side. Calvary caught the smell of wood smoke from somewhere, heady and redolent.

Calvary put his finger in his ear again and muttered, then lifted his head and called: ‘Blažek. Come out here. I need to see you as well.’

There was a sound then, the rustle of clothing and the crunch of boot on fallen foliage. Four more men emerged from the trees. Both were dressed entirely in black, crew-neck sweaters and combat trousers and running shoes. Both held handguns by their sides. They stood fifteen or twenty paces away, watching Calvary.

He raised the hand with the grenade higher and called, ‘Ten seconds, Blažek. If you haven’t shown yourself by then I’m releasing this pin.’

The first six men had begun to advance until they formed a semicircle with the four newcomers.

Then Calvary thought of something that made the skin on his neck contract.

The effective kill zone with most modern grenades was around fifteen feet in diameter. If he were close enough to the men it would be simple for Krupina’s people to shoot him where he stood, setting off the grenade and taking out ten of Blažek’s men at the same time. Improving the odds with one shot. Calvary eased backwards, fighting the urge to run, until he was backed up against a tree. He felt the sting of sweat in his eye and was thankful for the drizzle.

Then he heard it, the faintest ratcheting click from off among the trees, as if a gun were being cocked.

*

The Audi was parked in sight of the Tabor Gate. Through her earpiece Krupina listened to Arkady’s murmured monologue, fluid and concise.

‘All ten advancing now. Calvary’s backed up, and they’re still coming on. One of them looks like – yes, it’s Miklos. I repeat, we have visual confirmation of Miklos Blažek.’

Krupina let out a breath. ‘Go.’

*

None of the men reacted to the noise. They maintained their perfect semi-circle, evenly spaced along its curve as if they had rehearsed it, which they probably had. There was a poised tension in the arc they formed. At any moment there was going to be another sound and this time they would notice it.

It came out of sequence, a crack as of two fighting sticks being smashed together and trailing an echo behind it. By the time Calvary heard it he had already seen much more. One of the men was flung forward on to his knees like a supplicant prostrating himself at the feet of a religious leader before his torso and face hit the earth. A fraction of a second after the crack of the shot another of the men was hit, a large calibre bullet tearing through the side of his neck as instinct turned him partially to look behind him; his feet were lifted off the ground and he was hurled back down again several feet away.

Loud noises could have a paralysing effect on the human capacity to act. Calvary lost a second as his nervous system struggled to make sense of the assault. Two of the remaining men wheeled round and began blindly to return fire. The other two charged Calvary, pistols raised in double-handed grips. It was a risky move on their part because Calvary’s instinct was to drop what he was holding and extend his arms in a fending-off gesture; but they were giving him credit for professionalism and were assuming he wouldn’t do that, and they were right. Instead he darted round the tree against which he was backed. It was a large oak with a thick and ancient bole. As he slid round to the other side he heard the sing of a ricochet and saw a quick, violent disturbance of the leaves in one of the trees off to the side.

His forehead banged on a low branch. The pain was shocking, stalling Calvary’s breathing for a moment, and in the time he lost remembering how to inhale again, one of the men reached him and rammed his elbow into his face while the other came round from the other direction and grasped his right wrist, raising it high. Calvary aimed a sideways kick into the abdomen of the man holding his wrist but he was too close and Calvary overbalanced on his other leg and went down. The man who had elbowed him was on him then, snapping a head butt into Calvary’s face. Calvary reacted instinctively, lowering his head to allow his forehead rather than his nose to absorb the butt, before realising that this wasn’t perhaps advisable given his injury.

The hammer blow of agony caused Calvary’s right hand to open reflexively. He turned his head and saw the grenade drop and bounce once and come to rest six feet away against an exposed root.

TWENTY-FOUR

On his knees, Calvary reached forward with his left hand. The grenade lay several feet beyond his grasp, like some dark and gleaming malignant fruit. The man who’d grabbed his right wrist still had hold of it and was applying traction sideways, at ninety degrees to Calvary’s own direction of movement. The man on his left was on his feet.

Calvary pulled his right arm free and propelled himself a few inches closer to the grenade. The big man on his right, having abandoned his attempt to move Calvary away from the grenade, had turned and begun to run. The man on the left, who began to flee immediately, had covered more ground and was launching himself into a dive, away from the explosion he knew was imminent.

What happened next wasn’t immediately clear to Calvary. He found himself lying on his side with the man on his right now next to him, sprawled doll-like on his back. The right side of the man’s head was gone, and one of his arms splayed across Calvary’s waist in a grotesque parody of romantic attachment. Wet sucking mulch gripped Calvary’s face like a starfish: the man’s blood, and his brain, and the even more intimate fluids from his lymphatic system and his cerebrospinal circulation, had coalesced into an invading organism the size of a large palm that had chosen Calvary as its host. The man had been flung on to Calvary by the force of the gunshot which destroyed his head. His mouth was distorted by old scars. Distantly, Calvary registered him as the man he’d fought in the bookshop, ages ago. Pavel Kral.

The pin of the grenade had been knocked from Calvary’s fingers before he could reinsert it.

Calvary clambered to his knees again, his hands hooked into a scavenger’s claws, soil and leaves spilling from them in matted clumps. The grenade rested propped against his thigh. The pin had disappeared into the darkness.

*

In the classic World War Two ‘pineapple’ fragmentation grenade or Mill’s bomb, the flame that crept along the slow-burning material in the fuse reached the detonator within four to six seconds. The grenade Krupina’s man had given Calvary was more modern, but even so at least ten seconds had passed since he’d dropped it. Calvary doubted that it had been designed to work on such a long fuse. The whole point of grenade development was to keep the delay down to a minimum, long enough that one could throw it safely but not so long that the enemy might grab it before it exploded and lob it back.

Calvary had dropped the egg, fallen to his knees, wrestled off an opponent; had crawled to the egg, picked it up, found the pin in his pocket, lost the pin after the man had been shot and landed on top of him; had scrabbled around to find the pin. And still the thing hadn’t gone off.

Krupina, the harpy, had given him a dud.

It made sense when he thought about it. If he had decided to turn the tables on Krupina, Calvary might have used the grenade on her men. There was no way either he or Blažek’s people would have been able to tell it was a fake. She was a devious monster, Krupina, no question; yet Calvary was alive because of it. A laugh tried to ram its way up from his stomach, a mad condemned man’s cackle, but he ground it back down.

Tinnitus had set up a high background whine in his ears. Cutting across it was a confusion of shouting, gunfire near and distant, a scream.

Calvary stayed down, kneeling with his head low. There was a lot of gore, much of it decorating his face and hair. With the two of them, him and the dead man, huddled like that, it might be difficult for somebody coming upon the scene to tell if either of them was alive.

Calvary’s face was turned on the soil towards the half-headed body slumped beside him. Suddenly the head rocked up and forward and then came to rest again. Calvary understood that something had hit the body in the torso, an instant before the crash of the shot came, horribly close.

Jesus, they were shooting the corpses.

Calvary felt the bulk of the shape above and behind him and heard the sudden silence and then the racking of a spent magazine out of the butt-end of a pistol. He turned and hefted the dud grenade and hurled it at the man. It was one of Krupina’s Russians, a man he hadn’t seen before. The useless egg hit him hard between the eyes and he went down, his own weapon flying from his hand. Calvary stood, took a second to find his feet, then made a move for the man’s gun, but there was shouting and gunfire in the trees nearby and another ricochet howled off the bark next to his ear and made him fling himself back.

Then the beast kicked in and Calvary forgot about guns and grenades and the other beautiful trappings of modern life and barrelled himself away across the grass and into the trees, stumbling and crow-hopping and sprinting over fallen smoking bodies and dropped branches, his arms flailing, all pain ignored, his being contracting to the pulsing torrent of his heart and his lungs.

*

Bartos hit the path at a lumber, his phone pressed to his left ear, his right hand reaching inside his jacket for the stock of his pistol. Into the handset he screamed, ‘Talk to me, damn it.’

Ahead of him, beyond the spires of the church, the air flashed and sparked with gunfire, the noise rising and spreading above the city. Behind, his driver had abandoned the car and was racing to keep up.

‘An ambush –’ Miklos’s yell was cut off in a blast of white noise, as though something had rasped against the mouthpiece. ‘They’ve got us pinned.’

‘Where’s the Brit?’

‘I can’t tell how many there are, it’s –’

‘Where’s the Brit?’

‘He’s running.’

‘Which way?’

‘It’s hard to say. I’m pinned behind a tree.’ Before Bartos could reply Miklos said, ‘Wait. Looks like towards the art gallery. I’ll –’

His voice was torn away and the crash of a rifle set to rapid fire blasted down the line. Bartos listened as he charged down the path.

‘Miklos?’

The line was dead.

He knew the layout of the park. Had conducted late night business there several times before. He especially knew the gallery in the southwestern corner, because that was where the ruins of Libuse’s Baths were. The legendary prophetess Princess Libuse was supposed to have thrown her lovers to their deaths from the tower there. Bartos had himself done something similar, not to lovers but to business rivals.

He tacked right, towards the wall at the perimeter of the park.

*

At Calvary’s back was an unseen sound-picture of violence, the heavy crack of high-calibre fire in rapidly sequenced patterns. His animal brain told him he needed to be away, to insert distance between himself and the carnage.

The wall was ahead. He weaved instinctively, providing a zig-zagging rather than a linear target for whomever might be taking a bead on him from behind. A path separated the five-foot-high wall from the grass and he traversed it and peered over the edge. Dense wooded ground sloped away towards what he assumed form the noise of cars was a riverside road, far below.

He ran left, following the wall southwards. The gunfire was becoming more intense behind him, the bursts more prolonged. He wondered where Max and Jakub were, whether they’d made it out or were holed up in the park.

Ahead he saw a jutting promontory, some sort of ruined tower on the edge of a sheer cliff face. Beyond, the vast unsettled bulk of the river.

It was difficult for Calvary to distinguish individual sounds in the melange his brain was receiving: the pulse of blood in his head, exploding small-arms fire, human yells. But something was trying to rise to the foreground. He concentrated on it as he ran until it became clearer. It was the sound of footsteps pounding, but not his. It was coming from behind him. Then, suddenly, it stopped.

It could mean only one thing, that whoever was behind him was taking aim.  He sidestepped in mid-run and dived, rolling on his shoulder, an instant before the shot sang past. There was a double crack, that of the firing mechanism and the impact of the bullet against the wall, followed by the whine of a ricochet. Calvary came up on his feet and saw the large man, thirty yards behind, advancing at a trot, gun arm extended.

Bartos Blažek.

Calvary was unarmed and at that distance he didn’t have a hope of reaching the man without being hit, so he ran at the wall and leaped over, the second shot coming dangerously close this time, its slipstream tugging at the back of his jacket. He crashed into the foliage beyond the wall and landed hard on the leafy carpet of the ground and kept the momentum going, ignoring the knuckles of root and branch ploughing into him as he tumbled over the earth.

At the base of a large oak he paused and hugged the bole and risked a glance round. Almost vertically above him, Blažek was clambering gracelessly over the wall. Two other men, a couple of his minions, lither and quicker, had already dropped on to the slope a few feet along from Blažek and were scrambling down, their guns drawn.

Calvary was off again, dodging and slipping in the mulch, the low branches slashing at his face. One end of the bandage was flapping in front of his eyes. He shoved it aside. Dizziness and disorientation were beginning to take hold again.

He caught a glimpse of movement to his right. One of the men was flanking him, coming up at the five o’clock position. It went against every instinct but Calvary stopped when he drew alongside another thick trunk. He scrabbled at the lower branches, found one that was both dry enough to be wrenched off and solid enough for his purposes.

A quick glance round the trunk showed the man almost on him. Behind, the other man was closing the gap, Blažek further back, cursing. Calvary pressed his back against the trunk, counted to three, forming a mental image of the man’s position based on where he had last seen him, then whipped his arm across in a backhand strike. The branch caught the man across the throat and he howled and dropped to a sitting position. Calvary brought the branch down hard on the crown of his head.

There was no time to grab his gun because the second man was stumbling towards him, carried down the slope by his own momentum. Calvary turned to meet him. From further up came Blažek’s bellow and then a crackle of light scattered across the top of the wall an instant before the high-velocity rounds sizzled past down the slope, a salvo of furious wasps. Calvary flung himself down just as Blažek’s man ducked behind a trunk.

Both Blažek and his man were pinned, now, helpless behind cover. Calvary crawled headfirst down the slope, feeling like Dracula descending from his castle window. Ahead, not close but no longer impossibly distant either, he could make out the end of the trees, the main road.

He lifted his head but dropped it again as more stray slugs whined past. Behind him he was vaguely aware that Blažek and his man were returning fire, their handguns puny against the power of the automatic weapons levelled on the other side. The slope became steeper and Calvary dropped the last few feet, hitting the ground with a jar, fetching up against the base of a concrete wall.

He wanted to lie there, catch his breath. Instead he recoiled, cringing away as a man came crashing down through the foliage towards him. He was flailing, airborne, and he hit the wall with a crack and slid down. It was Blažek’s minion, the one who’d been after him on the slope. Calvary saw the dark hole in his chest where the slug from one of the automatics had caught him. His mouth gaped, his eyes wide and lifeless. Calvary stood and grabbed the top of the wall and hauled himself over, dropping to the other side just as he became aware of figures barrelling through the trees after him.

Beyond the wall the brightness and space was frightening after the stifling darkness of the wooded slope. A broad single-lane road ran along the edge of the river, the traffic light enough to allow him to see the pavement on the other side. Calvary didn’t hesitate, sprinted across the road, provoking a blast of alarmed horns. A low iron railing separated the pavement from the sloping concrete drop to the river’s surface.

For the last time he looked back. Men were scrambling over the wall, black-clad figures, three or four of them. Krupina’s people, not Blažek’s. It meant they’d followed him down the slope, had probably got Blažek.

He swung over the railing and slid down the slope on his bottom. The water yawned to meet him. Ten feet from the bottom he launched himself forwards and outwards with his legs, was airborne for a second, and hit the surface.

*

Krupina watched them come through the Tabor Gate at a run, three of them, hustling the big man between them at surprising speed. He was stumbling as though drugged, his hands restrained behind him.

She stepped out to meet them. One of them – Voronin, she saw as they drew close – hissed, ‘Stay in the car. The police will be here any minute.’

‘I want to see.’

They halted for a moment. She gazed up at him. His face was bloody, his shirt, which she assumed was expensive, torn. Even bowed, his head sagging, he exuded power.

‘Bartos Blažek.’

He stared back at her. Then spat. A bloodied tooth stuck to her shoulder.

From far off came the occasional single shot. Her men were mopping up.

Voronin gave her a terse update. No casualties on their side. At least six of Blažek’s men dead, one of them Miklos Blažek. The big man showed no reaction to this.

Calvary gone. But Voronin’s men were in pursuit.

Krupina wanted to smile, but didn’t.

‘Call your men in.’

She saw him raise his eyebrows.

‘We need all available personnel. Because Mr Blažek is going to tell us where he is holding our target.’

*

The shock of the cold was a hammer blow to Calvary’s chest. The drop had been only six feet or so and he hadn’t gone very far beneath the surface, but before his head could rise back above it he tipped forward and kicked away from the wall with his legs, sending himself as far as he could out into the river. He began a slow-paced breaststroke. Before he had plunged in Calvary had made sure there were no boats in the immediate vicinity, but even so as he swam he imagined the impact against his skull of a keel or propellor blades.

Holding his breath for impressively prolonged periods had never been among his repertoire of tricks, and although it felt like five minutes it was probably closer to ninety seconds when the burning in his airways began to feel like acid eating away the boundary between himself and the river. At the same time, instead of feeling panic he noticed a dream-like quality to his thoughts and perceptions. It was a bad sign. He needed to breathe.

He angled his legs downwards and kicked hard. A second later his head and shoulders burst through the surface and he was sucking in air, great sweet draughts of it.

There was no raking gunfire chopping at the water’s surface. Calvary trod water until his head had cleared. He reached up to feel his head. The bandage had disappeared, and the gauze pad was hanging off on a strip of tape. Calvary wasn’t medically trained, but he suspected filthy river water entering the skull through a trepanned hole wasn’t that good an idea.

He moved in a jerky circle, surveying the environment. He was close to a long, narrow island in the river. Far above on the opposite bank brooded the castle, swathed in mist and looking even more sinister than previously. On the other side, Vysehrad Park and the spires of its church were dark and still, but then a spattering of light rippled across the trees and shots echoed in its wake. Somewhere nearby sirens had started up en masse.

On the bank Calvary had left, standing at the rail, were three men, peering at the water. Reflexively he dipped his head so that the white of his face was obscured.

He waited, and bobbed. The cold was like a cocoon, sheathing him. The silhouettes on the bank didn’t move, just stood patiently scanning the water. Calvary’s feelings began to drift. It was pleasant to hang here in the water, not required to do anything but stay afloat. Come to think of it, even staying afloat seemed unnecessary. All he needed to do was relax, trust in the river to keep him safe.

The adrenaline jolt stabbed him alert and for a moment he wondered if his sudden jerky movement had drawn the attention of the men on the bank. One of them was straightening, raising his hand. Calvary drew a long breath, prepared to dive. To flounder away until his chest was on fire again, and then to surface into a sweeping fusillade of rifle fire. The end would be quick, at least.

Then the three men peeled away from the railing and started back across the road, disappearing from sight.

Calvary flexed his arms and legs, shaking life back into them. He struck out for the bank.

TWENTY-FIVE

‘We’ve brought equipment.’

By turning her head Krupina could see behind her, in the darkness of the car’s back seat, Voronin’s lone eye glinting whitely.

Lev was at the wheel of the Audi once more, Arkady in the back alongside Voronin. The Hummer was ahead. Moscow had sent it along with the men. Blažek rode in the rear, wedged between two agents on either side.

Krupina turned back to look through the windscreen. ‘We have all the equipment we need.’

‘Including canvas sheets?’

The balance of authority had shifted, ever since Voronin had brought Blažek through the gates. The act itself had said it all. Look, we have taken him. You couldn’t manage it on your own. You weren’t good enough.

Voronin went on, with measured quietness. ‘It’s the quickest way. I will achieve a result within fifteen minutes, maximum. I guarantee it.’

Krupina remained silent, watched the tail lights of the Hummer ahead. American methods. Her motherland’s intelligence services were embracing with enthusiasm, acknowledging as superior, even the old enemy’s interrogation techniques. It was the present, and she wasn’t a part of it. Nor would the future include her. She was a creature of the past.

To her left, through the window, emergency vehicles whipped by, their lights stuttering in disbelief.

The fist of triumph in her centre had opened, and claws of pain were growing through her as in a sped-up film.

*

He stumbled past the flashing headlights of a last terrified car and was free, on the other side of the road. At the fringe of the Old Town.

As he loped down a dim alley towards the lights of a tiny square redolent even at this hour with the aromas of spice and cabbage and roasting meat, Calvary reflected on his needs. He needed a phone, a map, and a gun. In that order. Food and sleep, blessed sleep, would also be good, but they were low on the ladder.

And a dressing for his head. Mustn’t forget that.

He had none of what he needed. Instead he was lurching like a vision of hell through the late-night streets, sodden from the river, his head violated and mutilated. He had no wallet, no money. No passport.

But he had an address.

In the brightness of the square he straightened his back, hearing Major Farnborough’s yelled command – for Christ’s sake, Calvary, put some spine into it – and inhaled deeply. He stopped, looked around. A few restaurants were mopping up, turning out their last stragglers. Across the way a bar was in full, raucous flow.

He toured the periphery of the square. In one corner he found what he wanted: a map of the vicinity on a vertical column. He squinted at it. He’d got the right side of the river, at least.

North was Josefov, the Jewish Town, and on its eastern side the Spanish Synagogue.

The most direct way would be through the Old Town Square, where a day and a half ago he’d tailed Gaines, but it was large and exposed and Calvary didn’t want to risk being stopped by the police patrols that must be crawling all over the city by now. Instead he worked out an alternative route, one that would keep him as far as possible in the shadows.

He ducked along alleys and narrow streets, emerging into a larger square with an enormous renaissance hall across from him – the Rudolfinum – and the expanse of the river to his left. Keeping to the edge of the square, he headed west, skirting the Old Jewish Cemetery. The gravestones staggered and tumbled into one another and for a moment Calvary paused at the railing, seeing something heaving beneath the ancient earth.

The dead were returning for him, coming to claim him as one of their own.

He stumbled on, shaking the image from his head. From either side visions lurched at him. Here was an enormous red Golem, hewn from clay, which groped for his shoulder but revealed itself to be a tacky decoration outside a restaurant. Over there was the arched face of a malevolent puppet leering from a shop window.

Rest. You need to get your head together, you’re starting to lose it. At least slow down a little.

But he couldn’t rest, or even slow down, because if Krupina had taken Blažek and taken him alive then she would soon have the address from him, the whereabouts of Gaines, and then Calvary would lose Gaines forever.

*

An Art Nouveau clock on a street corner told him it was just shy of two a.m.. Perhaps an hour since he’d fled the park.

The Spanish Synagogue reared to meet him and he stopped to orientate himself. Before it stood the bronze Kafka statue, the man sitting on the shoulders of a striding, empty suit. Calvary wandered about until he found another street map. The address he wanted was to the north.

The street led into an increasingly residential district, tall terraced houses giving way to individual building, quirky in their contrasting shapes and sizes. There was the side road he was looking for, off to the right. It was dimly lit with infrequent, Gothic streetlamps. He squinted at the numbers. Twenty three: it would be on the right-hand side, where the odds were.

Cars were parked end to end on the opposite side of the street. Calvary crouched and duckwalked behind the row until he drew abreast of number 23. He peered round the rear bumper of the nearest car.

It was a cottage, a narrow two-up, two-down building with one corner forming part of the entrance to another alley. There were lights on downstairs, coming through the spaces between the horizontal slats of wooden blinds.  The blinds were closed too tightly for Calvary to be able to see through. He shifted further along and looked down the alley alongside the house. It was dark and featureless.

Keeping low, he crossed the road and went down the alley. There were two plastic wheeled bins at the end. High up on the side of the cottage that formed one wall of the alley there was a small window, dark and curtained within. Calvary took hold of one of the bins and lifted it across so that it was beneath the window. Then he climbed on to the bin so that he was balanced on the top. He reached up and got a grip on the rough sill below the window, hauled himself up so that his elbows and forearms were on the sill. It was about six inches wide and as he pushed himself higher he tipped forward so that his face was almost against the glass.

There was no light whatsoever coming through the curtains. It was the type of window that consisted of two casements, one below and in front of the other and which slid up to open the window. The lower casement was secured by a latch which he could see through the pane.

As quietly as he could Calvary dropped back down again and searched the alley. Finding nothing of use, he searched the bins. In one he found a plastic knife and fork in a discarded tin foil food container.

He climbed back up on to the sill. After several slips and false starts he succeeded in raising the latch off its peg enough that he could push the lower section of the window upwards with his right hand while the left provided a brace against the sill. The gap created by the raising of the window was about two feet wide. He decided against parting the curtains to inspect the room before climbing through, because if there was anyone in there they could easily have pushed him off the sill. He grasped the sides of the window frame and levered himself through.

If the man waiting in the dark had chosen a garrotte or even to use his bare hands he would have incapacitated Calvary. Instead he had a handgun, and the cockiness that came with it. Calvary saw it coming sooner in the darkness than he would have if the lights had been on, lamplight from outside glinting off the barrel to his right. Calvary snapped out a sideways kick which connected with the man’s hip. It surprised him and it gave Calvary a chance to sweep low with his heel in an arc across the floor and catch his ankles. The man went down.

Calvary grabbed for him because he would have a noisy landing on the thinly carpeted floor, got hold of his hair in both fists That stopped his fall, but it meant Calvary’s hands were occupied, and in that crucial moment the man swung the gun up. Calvary pulled his head forward by the hair and drove a knee up under his chin. The neck snapped, and his body sagged like a sack of grain. This time Calvary couldn’t catch him in time and he hit the floor with a heavy noise.

There was sound, then, from downstairs. Calvary picked up his gun and stepped over to the open door. Beyond was a landing with a wooden railing that overlooked the stairs. Light was coming up from downstairs. There were voices from below, but low ones, as though they were trying not to let Calvary hear.

The gun was a SIG Sauer. Checking the magazine would produce a tell-tale sound so Calvary didn’t do it, but from the heft of the weapon he could tell that it was loaded. On the floor behind him the man was breathing thickly, almost snoring. Calvary paused at the door, crouching, not moving out into the landing in case the floorboards creaked. He aimed the SIG at the top of the stairs and waited.

The door opposite him across the landing moved an inch. God, he’d been slow, because there was someone in there, in the other bedroom, waiting in the darkness just as the first man had been.

It meant that they had been lying in wait. It was an ambush.

Calvary fired off two shots in rapid succession at the door, which looked cheap and modern and not very strong. The slugs smashed through the wood and there was a cry of pain which he barely heard, because he was up and running at a stoop to the top of the stairs where he stopped again.

Halfway down, hanging on the wall, was a large mirror. Reflected in it he could see the living room at the foot of the staircase. Two men were moving quickly into position, guns raised.

Seated beyond them on a sofa was a small, molish man, head hung, eyes watchful behind dense glasses.

At last. Gaines.

*

Calvary hung back and aimed down along the banister into the room. As one of the men, shaven-headed and black-clad, came into his line of sight he fired. He was a fraction shy. A coffee table exploded in a rainbow of glass. The man lurched back as Calvary himself withdrew.

He watched the mirror. The bald man jerked his head at his partner who stepped behind Gaines, grey and expressionless on the sofa. Put a gun to his head.

The bald man disappeared beyond the periphery of the mirror. Calvary moved forward to adjust the view he had of the downstairs room.

This move saved his life because an instant later a shot blasted past his left ear, so close that he could feel the flick of the bullet’s slipstream against the lobe. Calvary spun. Before he could complete the turn he saw that the second bedroom door was open and the man he’d shot through the door was sitting in the doorway, his gun levelled, blood streaking his face and arms.

Calvary became aware of punctured viscid screaming from below. He understood: the shot meant for him had hit one of the injured man’s associates instead. He took aim at the sitting man and pulled the trigger. It wouldn’t go back, the first or the second time. It had jammed, Swiss precision engineering letting him down. Calvary dived forward and grabbed the base of the banister, swung himself round so that he was rolling down the stairs even as the sitting man fired again, this time striking the mirror which erupted above Calvary and sent knife-like shards of silvered glass showering across the staircase.

Calvary hit something with his back, an ornamental statuette of some sort, at the bottom of the stairs. Then he was up on his knees, pointing his useless jammed gun at the room. At his feet was the shaven-headed man, on his back, his throat blown away, his limbs jerking like a marionette’s, his acrid urine boiling on to the carpet and stinging the air. Ten feet away Gaines sat on a leather sofa, watching Calvary. The other man squatted beside him, jamming a pistol muzzle into his right temple. Killian looked wan but unhurt physically.

Calvary threw himself forward as the dying man upstairs let off another shot, but it didn’t even make it downstairs this time. He rose to his feet on the carpet in the middle of the floor, aiming at the face of the man beside Gaines.

‘Shoot him and I’ll kill you,’ Calvary said, in English. The man wouldn’t have seen him trying to fire his jammed gun upstairs and would assume it was in working order.

Calvary watched his eyes. They blazed, dark and malign. For an instant they flicked to the staircase and then back. Calvary said, ‘Forget about him. He’s no use now.’

He hoped he was right.

Calvary was five or six feet from Gaines. With his arm extended, the barrel of the gun was less than a yard from the man’s face. He raised it so that he was looking down it. There was sweat, Calvary observed, on the smudged pouches below the man’s lower lids. As he watched he saw a tiny flicker of muscle leap in the man’s cheek.

It was a problem, his being so jumpy. It meant he might pull the trigger as a reflex, in response to a sudden movement or sound.

As if on cue a mobile phone rang somewhere. Calvary saw the man’s eyes move first, jerking to one side, saw the tightening of his finger on the trigger.

Calvary began the pressure that would squeeze the trigger of his own gun, believing as he did so in magic, that the gun would miraculously unjam itself.

The man got control of himself at the last moment, fished the phone out of his pocket. He pressed the muzzle of his gun – another SIG Sauer – harder against Gaines’s head for emphasis and spoke quickly and softly into the phone, his eyes remaining on Calvary’s. He listened, mainly, except when he rattled off a burst which I assumed was his updating the caller on the situation.

The expression in his eyes had changed from hate to fear.

He folded the phone away. Calvary eased himself forward, barely moving his feet, putting most of the motion into a lean until the barrel of the SIG was less than a foot from the man’s face. He could see the tension in him, feel it lashing off him.

The problem Calvary had created for himself by moving so close was that he no longer had an adequate view up the stairs, which were behind him now. He heard stirrings from above, a low groaning punctuated by a thump. He glanced at Gaines’s face. He was looking past Calvary. His eyes swung up to meet Calvary’s. Barely perceptibly his head shook. Calvary nodded. It was clear behind him, for the time being at least.

A second problem, also of Calvary’s own making, was that the longer he continued his bluff the higher the risk that the man would call it. He would soon start wondering why Calvary hadn’t shot him, would start thinking that he hadn’t the nerve, even if he didn’t work out that the gun was jammed.

‘Lower your gun,’ Calvary said, ‘or I’ll shoot you.’ He repeated it in Russian.

The man didn’t move, didn’t appear to react at all. Calvary pushed the muzzle forward so that the metal was an inch from his forehead.

‘I’m not joking,’ Calvary said. ‘I’m here to get Gaines. I’d prefer it if he were alive, but I’ll take him even if he’s dead. The difference is, if he dies, you die. If you let him go I promise you I will not kill you.’

There was something in his eyes, then a change. Calvary said, ‘Oh, bloody hell, have it your way,’ and pulled back as hard as he could on the trigger.

The man didn’t have time to notice that it was jammed because he did what Calvary had suspected he would do and moved the pistol away from Gaines’s head to aim it at Calvary. It was an extremely fast move but Calvary had been expecting it. He swiped his useless gun hard against the back of the man’s hand and felt the metal connect with the brittle bones. The man screamed, his fingers loosening. At the same time Calvary headbutted the man in the face. The man let go of the gun and Calvary prised it free. He stepped back, Gaines dropping sideways off the sofa, free of his captor.

The man launched himself at Calvary, his other hand coming out, a blade flashing.

Calvary shot him in the face. It stopped his forward dive in mid-air, flinging him back against the sofa into the crimson spray his blood and brain had made an instant earlier.

Gaines sat on the carpet, his expression dazed.

Calvary said, ‘Wait here.’ He went up the stairs swiftly, ready to fire at the first sign of movement. The man was crumpled on the landing, prone but for one leg bent under him. When Calvary had fired through the door he must have hit him in the left shoulder and in the chest because there were exit wounds in the backs of both. His head was turned sideways. Calvary could tell from his open dulled eyes and the way the blood was no longer gouting from his wounds that he was dead.

Calvary moved back downstairs. Gaines had risen, was staring down at the bodies, the man sprawled on the sofa and his bald associate, throat-shot at the foot of the stairs.

‘How many of them?’ said Calvary.

Gaines didn’t respond at first. Calvary shook his shoulder.

‘How many?’

‘Four.’ His voice sounded as if he hadn’t used it for a while, throaty and quiet.

Only four. There would have been more, previously, but most of them would have been drafted in for the rendezvous at the park. Some of the survivors would have fled, some would be trying to find the Russians and their boss. But some would be heading back here, to protect the prize.

It would have to be quick.

Calvary stepped away from Gaines, aimed the gun at him at arm’s length.

He said: ‘On your knees.’

TWENTY-SIX

The Kodiak had changed species. Had squealed like a pig.

That was how some would see it. Bartos didn’t agree. He hadn’t betrayed anybody, hadn’t dishonoured himself or anybody he respected.

They’d allowed him to sit up, were over at the far end of the cellar, ignoring him, it seemed. He slumped forward, his shirt and trousers sodden, his ham hands massaging his throat. Impossibly, he was breathing once more. Air, dank underground air that was purer than anything an Alpine meadow might offer, was actually passing through his windpipe.

So they find the English hostage. They win this battle. What the fuck. Live to fight another day.

They’d strapped him down on some sort of metal table, four hard and ugly men who knew their business – unlike his own people, the shitty rabble he’d relied on to take down Calvary – and the small guy with the eyepatch had flung the hood over Bartos’s head. The canvas had stunk of old sweat and rot. Then the water had come, a fast thin torrent straight on to his face, moulding the canvas against his nose and lips, driving it up his nostrils and down past his tongue into his gullet.

It was the most frightened he’d ever been in his life. He’d shat his pants, cried like a snot-nosed baby, tried to shake the hated wet mask off him. They’d done it again, and a third time, and he’d heard himself screaming, promising he’d tell them everything.

And through it all, he’d kept his wits. Had admired, professionally, the technique, and had made a note to himself to use it himself in future.

If his men, not his brother Miklos who he assumed was dead, but the others, the shower of shit he’d made the mistake of considering worthy of his trust, had any common sense, they’d give up looking for him and instead protect the Russians’ target, Gaines. Would recognise there was more they could achieve that way. But Bartos assumed they’d be scrambling to find him, and of course they’d fail.

Gaines was lost, because Bartos had told the Russian bitch where he was. Shit happened. Now he needed to concentrate on buying his freedom. And he had no doubt he could do so.

Everyone had a price.

*

‘We should leave him behind, under guard.’

‘No. We take him with us.’

Krupina felt the atmosphere had altered. The balance of power had tipped in her direction. Voronin had taken charge during the waterboarding, directing the mechanics of the process, doing the initial shouting; but it was her questions that had evoked a response. Including – praise the Lord who didn’t exist – the blurting of the crucial address.

They’d agreed, Voronin and her, that Blažek must be kept alive for now. What happened to him in the long run remained to be decided. H could be an extremely useful asset in the city, but if he proved uncooperative then he would have to be despatched. For the time being, however, they needed him alive, both as insurance against his own people and in case he turned out to have been lying about Gaines’s whereabouts.

They disagreed about what should happen to him in the mean time.

Voronin said, ‘He will get in the way. His presence will encourage his men to fight harder.’

‘Just the opposite. It will be a blow to their morale, seeing their leader captive. And we can use him to enforce their cooperation.’

He stared at her eyes, then dipped his head in a curt nod. ‘As you wish.’

*

‘Why?’

It threw Calvary. He was used to displays of defiance, of bravado even, but not this level of genuine incredulity.

Gaines had complied, his cheeks working, his unshaven face making him look more mole-like than ever. He’d turned and knelt and put his interlinked hands behind his neck.

The question had come over his shoulders.

Normally Calvary didn’t engage in banter with his targets. Do the job, get out. Nothing personal. Something about Gaines’s smallness, his age, made Calvary say: ‘Use your imagination.’

Gaines’s voice was flat, with no hint of a quaver. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’ He half turned his head. ‘You were on the tram. You tried to stop them taking me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you mind telling me who you are? It makes no difference to you, surely.’

Do the job, get out. Now. They’ll be here any moment, the Russians, the police.

‘My name’s Calvary. I’m here because of what you did in the seventies and eighties.’

A frown crept into the man’s voice. ‘Could you be a little more specific?’

Calvary drew a deep breath, pressed the muzzle of the SIG against the base of Gaines’s skull, making him flinch a little. ‘Selling out your country. Betraying your colleagues to the other side and getting them killed.’

A beat.

Gaines said: ‘I’ve absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘And I presume you’ve no idea why there happened to be a Russian surveillance detail on your back while I was tagging you? Why the local SVR cell has been as hell bent on finding you as I’ve been?’

‘SVR –’ It was Gaines’s turn to exhale deeply. ‘My God.’

What are you waiting for. Calvary’s hooked finger began to squeeze the trigger.

‘Mr Calvary, I’m not trying to bargain here. But before you shoot me I think you should hear what I have to say.’

Calvary stepped back. Kept the gun extended.

‘All right.’

‘May I turn round?’

‘Yes.’

*

It took two minutes, Gaines perched on the arm of a chair and reciting in clipped, concise sentences, replying to Calvary’s interruptions when he thought them relevant, ignoring them at other times.

Calvary took a long breath, wrestled down his feelings. There was no time to confront them now.

In the dead men’s pockets he found three sets of car keys. To Gaines he said, ‘Do you have any idea where they’re parked?’

‘No. I arrived here blindfolded. But it was a short walk from the car, so I imagine not too far away.’

Calvary picked up the gun belonging to the man who’d been shot in the neck. A Glock 17 with an almost full magazine. He hesitated, then pushed it into the pocket of his sodden jacket. He didn’t offer it to Gaines, didn’t trust him enough yet. He took two of the mobile phones he found, pocketing them.

In the tiny kitchen off the living room he found a drawer with clean dishtowels. Using a roll of duct tape from another drawer he bound the towel around his head. He filled a pint glass with tap water, drank it off, did it a second time.

He jerked his head. ‘Let’s go.’

The street outside was ablaze, every light on in the surrounding houses, dark silhouettes peering from behind curtains. He pressed the buttons on the three car keys one after the other. The second unlocked a vehicle several yards down the road on the opposite side, its alarm chirping, its lights flashing. A twin-cab Ford pickup truck, dark in colour.

‘Follow me and keep low,’ he said to Gaines. He began to run in the direction of the pickup, the SIG in his hand but kept low at his side.

Then the headlights came on, two sets, full-beam, shocking in their closeness and in a rapid one-two beat, from ahead and behind, pinning the two men.

*

‘It’s the Englishman, it’s Calvary, he’s got Gaines.’

Arkady’s yell made her recoil from the handset. Krupina was in the Audi once more, Lev driving, south of the Spanish Synagogue and of the address Blažek had given. Arkady and three of Voronin’s men had parked up the street. Voronin himself, together with three of his men and Blažek, were in the Hummer at the other end. There’d been shooting from the direction of the address as they’d approached, and they’d parked to watch and wait. The rest of Voronin’s people, the four remaining ones, were in two cars several streets away, providing backup.

‘We’re moving in.’

Krupina said to Lev: ‘Get us there.’

*

Calvary shouted at Gaines to run and he did, surprisingly quickly, mimicking Calvary’s crouch as the engines gunned and an exhaust backfired and tyres screamed against tarmac. Calvary reached the pickup and rolled over the bonnet while Gaines fumbled with the door handle on the passenger side nearest the road. Because Calvary didn’t think Gaines was going to get the door open in time, he aimed the SIG at the oncoming headlights and pulled the trigger, twice, more to take their attention off Gaines than because he thought he had a chance of hitting anything worthwhile. He heard glass shatter and the headlights veered sideways on to the pavement on the opposite side of the road.

Calvary dropped into the driver’s seat just as a shot passed above his head from behind. Gaines was in, and Calvary got the key in the ignition on the first attempt and fired the engine, mashing down on the accelerator and swinging the wheel to the left rather than rightwards, aiming for the pavement. The corner of the bumper hit the car in front but tangentially enough that Calvary was able to get clear. He weaved to avoid the low wall on the other side and then straightened out so that the car was pointing directly down the pavement. Then he hit the accelerator again, hard.

The pavement was wide enough to accommodate the car, but only just. Gaines cringed away from the window, shielding his face, as the pickup scraped past the cars lining the road and one side mirror after another smashed off, car alarms firing in a bizarre and discordant attempt at harmony. Calvary swung the wheel a fraction to the left and the panels on the left-hand side of the car scoured against the low wall in a grinding shriek of metal, his own side mirror catching a gate post and spinning away. In the rear view mirror he saw frantic manoeuvring in the road, the car that had mounted the opposite pavement trying to move out of the way so that the car that had been behind them – a huge beast of a vehicle, an American Hummer – could take off along the road in pursuit.

At the end of the pavement there was a lamp post. Calvary swerved in time to miss it and clipped the front bumper of another parked car again before pulling free. They were back on the road, just in time to see the headlights of the Hummer behind them advancing at speed.

‘Get down in your seat,’ Calvary said. Gaines didn’t move.

Calvary punched him on the shoulder. ‘Sir Ivor. Get down.’

He ducked below the headrest, burrowing into the back of the seat.

Ahead loomed the river, curving eastwards. Calvary tried to remember the geography of the area from the maps he’d looked at. He spun the wheel and took them through ninety degrees to the right, gunned the engine.

The lights came round the corner behind them quickly, too quickly. The Hummer was bigger and faster than the pickup, but that might be an advantage as it was possibly less manoeuvrable. Calvary floored the pedal and the needle on the dial crept past eighty kilometres per hour, then ninety, but the truck behind was gaining. In their wake he could see a trail of lights coming on upstairs in the houses.

He fished one of the mobile phones out of his pocket and dialled and switched it to the speaker function and laid it on the dashboard.

She answered immediately, a frantic yell. ‘Yes?’

‘Nikola, it’s me. Calvary.’

‘Martin?’ There was undisguised joy in her voice, shot through with relief. And he had to admit he felt a jolt himself, hearing her. She was alive, at least.

‘Can you talk? Did you get clear?’

‘Yes, I –’

‘Did Max and Jakub get free?’

‘Both are with me now.’

Thank God.

‘I have Gaines. I think the Russians have got Blažek. They’re after us now, several cars. We’re heading eastwards along the river, on the northern edge of Josefov. I need to know the best direction to take to lose them.’

He heard her voice off in the wings, talking to somebody in the background. She came back: ‘There is no best way. Max suggests taking the Hlavka Bridge across the river, then left into the Letna district. You are more likely to lose them there if they are based this side of the river.’

‘Got it. I need something else. Can you check something for me? An internet search, as quick but as thorough as possible?’

He told her.

‘Of course.’ Then: ‘We will come find you.’

‘No, you need to keep away.’

‘We will come. What are you driving?’

‘A black Ford pickup.’

‘Martin?’

‘Yes.’ The Hummer was gaining ground, and something was happening at the passenger window.

‘Thank you for what you did for Max and Ja–’

He hauled the wheel over as the flash of the shot blazed behind them and heard the bullet sing past the side of the car. The movement threw the phone to the floor, cutting off the call.

Gaines was craning his neck, trying to look through the gap between the seats and out through the rear window. Calvary snapped, ‘You’ll get one in the eye if you’re not careful.’

As if they had heard him there was a brittle crack followed by the thump of the shot. In the mirror Calvary saw the glass of the back window craze and star. Reflexively he pulled his head down on to his neck as the bullet embedded itself in the soft padding of the interior of the cab above their heads with a thwock.

His attention was riveted suddenly, shockingly, to the scene directly ahead as the nose of another car appeared from a sidestreet to the right. When Calvary saw it wasn’t going to stop he ground down on the pedal. The engine roared like a beast, the rev counter going wild, and the front bumper of the pickup clipped the other car at an angle, its headlight exploding in a shower of glass. The impact had done little damage to the other car, a Toyota, and it pulled out in pursuit of them, the Hummer dropping back to let it in.

Up ahead Calvary could see the Hlavka Bridge spreading across the river to the left, lit up in gold against the black haze of the sky. It crossed an island in the middle of the river before reaching the opposite bank. He jerked the wheel to angle them up the approach, avoiding the tunnel that loomed ahead dropping below the bridge, and he gunned the car straight at the traffic lights beyond which a left turn would take him on to the bridge, a right back towards the Old Town. He leaned on the horn so that a pair of cars waiting at the lights peeled aside frantically, and jumped the red light, angling rightwards, the Toyota close behind. Calvary lifted the handbrake as smoothly as he could manage and the back of the pickup slewed round to the right. As it hit ninety degrees Calvary released the handbrake and the pickup shot down the road to the left and across the bridge.

Behind them Calvary saw in the mirror that the Toyota had overshot, taken in by his feint, but the Hummer braked in time and swung round to follow, less elegantly and thereby losing a few seconds. Calvary was able to pick up speed, but there was traffic at the end of the bridge and within moments he was backed up against a slower driver, while cars flashed in quanta of light and metal in the opposite direction so that he was unable to overtake.

The Hummer was gaining. Calvary slipped out the SIG and twisted in the seat, took aim through the shattered rear window and squeezed the trigger twice. The shots were almost intolerably loud in the confined space of the car and he saw Gaines duck his head. Calvary was off-centre and thought he’d hit the frame above the windscreen with one of them because he heard the whine of a ricochet, but the lights dropped back. Just then there was no oncoming traffic, so he went for the gap and overtook the car in front of him and was off again, weaving round a second car and putting space between him and his pursuers.

The bridge became a broad road running straight ahead on the north bank, perpendicular to the river. Again the Hummer was closing on him. Calvary saw a narrower street leading off on the left and did another handbrake turn, timing it less well this time so that the rear end fishtailed. The Hummer was anticipating something like this because he saw in the mirror that it managed not to overshoot and roared round the corner after the pickup. The end of the street was coming up and Calvary was headed for a T-junction. He decided on a left turn again because it would represent a fairly tight doubling-back which might throw the Hummer.

It might have been a mistake because a hundred yards ahead a car came screaming from a side street to the left and swung to face the pickup. Calvary realised it must have crossed at an earlier bridge, anticipating his flight across the river. He was going too fast not to hit it unless he braked, so instead he turned to the left, up the street from which the second car had emerged. It was a short street and ended in another T-junction.

Headlights came fast from behind and the new car came speeding on the wrong side of the road and overtaking him before swerving in ahead and slowing. It was an Audi, one he’d seen before. Calvary tapped the brake. The Hummer came round the corner and shoehorned its way in behind him.

They had him then, boxed and ready for shipping to wherever it was people like Calvary went when they died.

TWENTY-SEVEN

In the mirror Krupina could see Calvary’s silhouette through the windscreen, backlit by the headlights of the Hummer behind him. She couldn’t see Gaines. Calvary had probably shoved him down below the dashboard or in the back seat.

She said to Lev, ‘Slow down. Give us some space in front.’

‘He may choose to ram us.’

‘It gives us more room to manoeuvre if he tries to break out.’

Lev did as he was asked. The speedometer dial dropped to sixty kilometres per hour.

*

Behind the Hummer the cars were hanging well back, leaving the convoy of three – Hummer, pickup and Audi – isolated.

For the show of it Calvary tried nosing out to overtake, but immediately the Audi veered to block him. In the orange from the streetlights that strobed past he could see two heads in the Audi, the driver and a passenger. Through the Hummer’s tinted windows he could see nothing.

Calvary estimated he had perhaps ten seconds to decide what to do, because it was about to turn into an execution. He assumed they were going to try to bring the speed down to minimise inconvenience and, sure enough, the brake lights flashed on the rear of the Audi. He nudged the brake pedal of the pickup.

Beside him Gaines was a dark, huddled shape, his eyes glinting in the intermittent light from outside. Calvary said, ‘Brace your feet against the dashboard. Keep yourself doubled over and press yourself back against the seat.’

He twisted and grunted in compliance. They were down to forty. In the Hummer the passenger in front was starting to lean out of the window, something dark in his hand.

Calvary lifted the SIG so that they could see it.

Then he hit the brake, extending his leg fully, grinding the pedal into the floor. The tyres screamed on the road surface and he watched the mirror where the Hummer was growing huge, the driver realising at the last minute and braking himself, but not quickly enough. Just before the impact Calvary twisted and loosed off a shot – again, so loud, even against the cacophony of rubber on tarmac – through the hole where the rear window had been. This time he was more accurate and the windscreen on the driver’s side spackled.

The Hummer rear-ended the pickup at a slight angle because Calvary’s braking had swung the back of the car to the left. He felt himself rammed back against the seat, managed to hold himself there enough that he wasn’t flung forward too far by the recoil. A car’s horn raged past at the same moment and Christ knew how it missed them; it swerved back onto the right side ahead of the Audi, which had shot forward and was only now braking.

The collision left the pickup stalled and at an angle across the road, blocking it in both directions. Beside Calvary, Gaines slumped with his head lolling back, but he rolled his neck to look at Calvary and although there was blood on his face he blinked and nodded. Calvary knew he was all right for the time being.

The temptation was to get out and run, but that was what they would be expecting. Instead Calvary fired the engine again and saw in the mirror that the passenger door of the Hummer had been flung open by the impact. A man was clambering out, his hand coming up with his gun in it.  Calvary hit reverse and smashed straight through him as he pulled the trigger, the shot going off into the night. He went down below the field of view afforded by the mirror and Calvary felt the bump and flop of him beneath the wheels and saw him emerge on the road in front of the truck, bent and crushed.

Calvary kept the car in reverse gear, veering past the stalled Hummer. He saw that the road was clear for at least fifty yards behind him, a queue of frightened and bewildered drivers stacked up behind an imaginary barrier. He built up some speed before spinning the wheel and executing a J-turn which took them through 180 degrees. He found second gear and put his foot to the floor again so that he was heading towards the queue. A couple of cars had pulled over into the oncoming lane to see what was going on but they veered to one side when they saw he wasn’t going to stop. Behind him the Audi had turned, more quickly than he was expecting, and was in pursuit.

Calvary had to hope the police would take their time getting to the area. There were two reasons why this might be the case. Calvary and his pursuers were on the move constantly so it would be difficult for the police to co-ordinate themselves in the absence of a specific location. Also, they would be stretched thinly because of what had been happening elsewhere in the city. Nevertheless, somewhere, far off, perhaps on the other side of the hill, sirens were slicing the air.

The pickup hadn’t been badly damaged in the collision but there was a noise from the back, the flapping of metal torn loose. Calvary took it up to a hundred and ten kilometres per hour. A judder started up in the pickup’s chassis, not strong, but a warning growl of discontent. He pushed it harder. A hundred and twenty. Headlights stabbed by, seeming to be aiming straight at them before disappearing on the left. The Audi was gaining ground, and wasn’t even up to full speed yet.

There was a flash above and to the side of its headlights, the crash of the shot before glass splashed up from the rear of the pickup. Calvary swerved instinctively. They had hit one of the rear lights.

The pickup crested a hill and shot down a steep drop towards a built-up area, the wheels leaving the road surface for a second before crashing back down and jarring the entire body of the car. Calvary had to dab the brake because he wasn’t going to be able to sustain this speed and keep control of the car in terrain like this. The road curved to the right and he was thankful because it would make them a marginally more difficult target. The Audi was almost on them now, ten yards back. A surge in its acceleration would slam it into the back of the pickup.

Another shot sang past Calvary’s head, coming straight through the empty rear window and hitting the windscreen, cracking it into a ragged many-armed star. Because of the angle, the damage was on the passenger side and he could still see through, but visibility on the right was badly impaired. There was a sharp turn ahead to the right which Calvary spotted only because of the apparent end of the road in front of him. He craned his neck to see round the damaged windscreen, then slowed as little as he dared before taking the corner, not judging it as well as he was hoping and hitting a wooden front gate with the left rear end of the car, sending the gate shearing into the front garden beyond.

The Audi took the corner more carefully but at the expense of speed, so Calvary was a few seconds ahead when he straightened out again. Some sort of complicated junction was coming up ahead with lots of exits. Calvary did the counter-instinctual thing and chose one that bent off to the left and backwards like a hairpin. He hit the horn to keep the traffic off the junction before spinning the wheel and sending the rear of the car scudding across the tarmac so that the front was pointing about a hundred and thirty-five degrees left of where it had started. He took off down the new road. It put further distance between him and the Audi, and for the first time he thought he might lose them.

*

Bartos took his chance just as the pickup ploughed through the guy who’d got out the passenger side of the Hummer. Voronin, the bastard who’d been in charge of his interrogation.

Seconds earlier the driver’s head had rocked back in a dark crimson spray and the bullet had sung past Bartos’s head and embedded itself in the seat beside him. An instant after that, the Hummer had slammed into the rear of the pickup truck. The men on either side of Bartos in the back seat had been jolted by the impact, as he had, but they kept their grips on the guns jammed into his flanks.

Voronin rolled out of the passenger door and through the remains of the windscreen Bartos saw him aim his gun before the reversing pickup smashed into him. The man on Bartos’s left gave a yell and for the first time he felt the pressure of the barrel ease against his side as the man lifted it away and began to bring it up to face the front.

Bartos grabbed the raised arm and brought it across his body, using the heel of his left hand to bend it against the elbow so that the bone cracked. Reflexively the man pulled the trigger. By this time the gun was pointing directly at the man on Bartos’s right. The shot caught him in the temple, snapping his head to bounce off the window. Bartos hauled on the other man’s arm, drawing his head down towards him, and got his arm around the man’s neck. He clasped his hands together and tightened his forearm across the throat. The man’s arms flailed but he was trapped. Bartos was a big man. He was the Kodiak. The Russian gave a last choking hiss and was silent.

Bartos shook his head, trying to clear the ringing from the close-quarters gunfire. He peered through the wrecked windscreen. The pickup was gone. Inside the Hummer were three dead men, with another on the road outside.

But he, Bartos, was alive.

He began to laugh.

He opened the rear doors on either side and shoved the bodies out on to the road. Then he clambered through to the front. The driver’s seat was a mess, gore splashed across the upholstery and the dashboard. He kicked the corpse on to the tarmac, tried the engine. It fired up.

He remembered something. When they’d first loaded him into the Hummer outside the park, before the interrogation, they’d blindfolded him, but not before he’d noticed them loading something into the boot.

He pulled to a halt down a side street, went round to the back. Lifted the false bottom away from the base of the boot. Saw the hardware clamped into place.

Beautiful.

*

‘Talk to me, talk to me.’ Her yell faded to a croak on the last word. Beside her Lev’s head was hunched forward as though he could increase their speed that way.

Arkady’s voice came through, raised but calm. ‘We’re on the Letna side, between the river and the southern edge of the Gardens.’

‘Heading which way?’

‘West, towards the castle.’

‘Keep going. We’re behind him on Milady Herakove, same direction.’

‘You operational, boss?’

‘Yes. The Hummer’s out of action.’

And Voronin was dead. She’d seen him go down under Calvary’s truck..

The pain in her abdomen was like a spear impaling her to her seat. Coughing made it worse, so she stifled it, spluttering. Lev didn’t waste time asking her how she was.

‘Where’s the other car?’ She meant the one carrying the remaining two Voronin men.

Arkady was quiet for a moment, consulting. Then: ‘Approaching from the castle side.’

The end game.

*

Calvary used the roads creatively, choosing a direction at the last minute, swinging left and right and right and left in what was probably some sort of pattern if one were to study it closely but seemed random enough to suit my purposes. Some kind of park was to his left. Ahead he recognised the sign for the Metro system. In the near distance was the Gothic grandeur of the castle.

The pickup was shaking violently as if in the grip of some ague and the speedometer showed one hundred and forty kph. Still the Audi kept at its back, matching the lane switches and the feints.

Then the shots came, a volley of three, two so close together as to be virtually simultaneous with the third lagging by a fraction of a second. There was no impact, no crash of projectile striking metal. Instead there was an explosion, briefer and sharper than the shots that had preceded it, followed by the high-pitched screech of a naked wheel rim scouring across tarmac.

Calvary risked a glance up at the mirror and saw the Audi slewing to the side, the driver spinning the wheel, his mouth stretched wide as he fought for control over the vehicle. I braked, quickly but steadily, and swung the Passat Mercedes round. The Audi’s front passenger wheel bounced up on to the pavement and the bumper hit a concrete bollard with enough force that it crumpled like crepe paper. The car came to a halt, its rear tyre on the driver’s side hanging off the wheel in a ragged ribbon, steam coming up in clouds from beneath the sharply arched bonnet.

There was no time to reflect on what had happened because the front doors of the car were already opening, the one on the passenger side with difficulty because the impact had buckled it. Calvary had time to register that the figure emerging from the passenger side was the woman, Krupina . Twenty yards , behind, Calvary saw the lights of another car, a VW – the rental from earlier – and through the windscreen Nikola at the wheel and Jakub beside her.

He used the brake firmly but not sharply, taking the pickup round in a fast but steady arc and gunning back the way he had come. Be side him Gaines peered about , confused. Ahead the man who had been driving the Audi was now crouching and using one of the doors as cover , and peering back towards the VW. Jakub had opened the passenger door of the VW and was sighting along the top of the door, a gun – Calvary assumed the Browning or the Glock – in his hand. Calvary understood. Jakub had shot out the Audi’s tyre.

Calvary braked to a stop fifty yards away. as He kicked out the windscreen of the pickup where the glass was starred. F rom behind the shield of the dashboard he fired off three shots in rapid order, catching the driver with two of them so that he slammed back off the Audi and hit the ground.

The woman cowered behind the cover of her own door. There didn’t seem to be any others in the Audi. Calvary was about to call across to Jakub when Nikola put her head through the driver’s window and screamed, ‘Martin. Behind you.’

Calvary looked over his shoulder, saw the lights coming fast from the direction of the castle, two sets of them.

And the roar of a bigger beast caused his head to snap back round. Beyond the crashed Audi, beyond the VW, its half-severed bumper sparking off the tarmac, the Hummer was advancing.

*

The trail was like that of an explorer hacked through the jungle. Cars were pulled over to the side, their shaken drivers jabbering into phones, and pedestrians milled about staring off into the direction the pickup and the Audi had passed. Bartos followed with ease, feeling a thrill at the throbbing power of the vehicle even in its battered state.

Across his lap was the assault rifle he’d chosen from the stash in the boot. He didn’t know the make but it looked Russian and modern, futuristic even. There’d been a spare box magazine and he’d taken that as well. Best of all, mounted under the barrel was a grenade launcher. He’d found a single grenade clipped into its own compartment.

It was as though an invisible police cordon had been drawn across the road running along the northern edge of the park. Cars were stalled or reversing. One or two idiots had climbed out and were frantically motioning at the oncoming traffic to turn back.

Bartos barrelled past, leaning on the horn. He was invisible behind the darkened windows, a masked king of the city that was his once more.

He took in the tableau ahead. The Audi had crashed into the pavement, looked wrecked. A body lay near the driver’s door. Between the Audi and Bartos was a dinky VW, some guy with a gun ducking behind the passenger door. In an instant he recognised the man: that dickhead journalist, one of the ones Bartos had captured earlier. On the far side of the Audi, the pickup was turned to face the scene. There was the Brit, Calvary, behind the wheel.

Beyond the pickup two other cars were hurtling towards them.

Bartos braked, pressed the button to lower his window. Fitted the grenade on to the launcher. Hefted the rifle and leaned out.

Eeny, meeny, miny…

TWENTY-EIGHT

The end game. And it was going to play out as so many of her contemporaries and her superiors had privately predicted the Cold War would: in an all-obliterating, man-made rain of fire.

Krupina was on her knees behind the open passenger door. It was, bizarrely, a relatively comfortable position; any attempt to straighten sent lances of pain through her chest, her abdomen. Her mouth had hit something in the collision and she tasted blood and broken teeth.

She couldn’t see what was happening behind, had no idea if the occupants of the car that had come out of nowhere and blown out the Audi’s tyre had got out and were stalking her. She could see the pickup, and the two cars approaching it from behind. That would be Voronin’s remaining men, and Arkady.

Closer by, she could see Lev’s body, his face turned away. His gun lay on the road a few feet from her.

Krupina shuffled forward on her knees, holding on to the side of the car for support. The pain pounced. The scars of a life lived well. She reached the pistol, gripped it.

She didn’t like guns. They were useful, but in the right hands, which hers weren’t. She had undergone basic firearms training as had all KGB staff, and she’d had occasional refresher courses which she’d attended for the show of it. She had never fired a gun in anger.

With the Makarov as awkward as a dumbbell in her hand, she began to crawl the distance between the Audi and the pickup truck.

*

The first volley came from the lead car. Calvary ducked his head low, hoping the gunman was aiming at him and not at the car’s fuel tank. He felt the shots pass overhead and exit through the space where the windscreen had been. Calvary raised his head again and saw that Jakub was returning fire. Nikola was still behind the wheel of the car but had the window down and was aiming the other gun, the Glock, at the approaching cars. She withdrew her hand as a salvo spattered the VW’s windscreen and wing mirror, sending up a burst of glass.

The two cars were almost on him now. Calvary took quick aim and squeezed off two shots at the blinding glare of the lights, aiming low. Vaguely he realised that they weren’t firing at him any more, nor even at the VW.

He glanced back, saw the Hummer had pulled to a stop. A man leaned out of the driver’s window, aiming something a lot bigger than a handgun.

Blažek.

Calvary understood what was about to happen. He grabbed at Gaines’s collar and shouted, ‘Get out,’ and began to drag him across even as he kicked open the driver’s door, knowing he’d be too late, he was tilting at windmills. Then came the crack of the firing mechanism followed instantaneously by the rocketing whine past the side of the car.

Calvary looked back, actually saw the grenade smash through the windscreen of the car closest to him even as the driver braked and the vehicle skidded sideways.

The first flash lit up the interior. Calvary imagined he could see screaming faces.

The car leapt, its chassis lifting ten feet into the air, cushioned on a flattened ball of orange and black flame, and the sound was a muffled crump which seemed to suck all peripheral noise into it before hurling it out again in a screeching blast of rending steel and fragmenting glass. Something was flung past Calvary’s ear and jammed in the gap between the front seats of the pickup. He glanced at it: a windscreen wiper, absurdly whole. The black skeleton of the car crashed down on its side and swayed there in a grotesquely parodic ballet stance before toppling back with a low groan on to the wrecked arches that had held its wheels.

*

Bingo.

Bartos let out a whoop.

King once more. Fuck that. Emperor. Bloodied but, by Christ, unbowed.

The car behind had been following too closely – stupid assholes – and although the driver managed to handbrake it round in a squealing semicircle he couldn’t avoid bashing the side of the car against the burning wreck.

Bartos flicked the switch to fully automatic fire.

They were fast, these Russaks, he had to give them that. And they had balls. They were already returning fire, three or four of them, from the far side of their crappy little car, with their tiny water pistols. He raked an arc back and forth across the car, the glass from the windows dancing, the body juddering. He’d got at least one guy inside the car, judging by the scream.

Pick them off, nice and easy. Then: Calvary.

*

Calvary reached over and gripped the top of Gaines’s head with and crammed him down into the footwell. Over the rim of the passenger door he watched the exchange. The remaining car was at right angles, three men crouched on one side, returning Blažek’s fire in a systematic way: they were laying down a hail of lead, each of them emptying one handgun before opening fire with another, taking turns to replace the clips in a co-ordinated way.

They were ignoring Calvary. He could have shot at least two, possibly all of them from where he was. But they were keeping Blažek occupied, and that suited Calvary fine.

Something hit at his arm and he glanced down and saw Gaines’s white face, his eyes frantic and looking past his shoulder. Calvary whipped round, saw the vision of hell looming at the window – bloodied mouth and chin, wild hair, yellow flaring eyes – an instant before the shot came.

*

Just for a second, she had seen the target. Gaines.

She thought, dimly, that that was what had thrown her. The shock of recognition, of realising how close she was to her goal.

Calvary had reacted with unbelievable speed, had kicked at the unlatched door at the very moment she pulled the trigger. The door crashed into her, knocking her back and down, and her head hit the tarmac.

Stars. Scars. The scars of a life lived…

She embraced the pain, then. Sucked it into her lungs, her blood, her marrow. It was fuel, just like the petrol and diesel that saturated the air and the ground with their stink all around her.

Fired up by this fuel, fuel that was miraculously replenishing itself, she rolled.

*

The shot flicked against Calvary’s hair. He flinched back. The kick against the door had sent her down, the devil woman. Calvary leaned out the open door and fired again twice, heard the ricochets sing off the road

She was under the truck.

He didn’t think she’d risk firing upwards through the chassis because it was too confined down there and she’d be more likely to shoot herself, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He heaved himself up and through the gap where the windscreen had been and slid down the bonnet, crumbled nuggets of shattered glass gritty between his torso and the metal. It was an extreme risk because hanging there on the bonnet he was an open target for both the Russians and Blažek, but he had to hope they were otherwise occupied with each other.

Calvary let himself slip over the front of the bonnet and braced himself against the tarmac with his left hand. Upside down, he aimed under the car and saw her splayed there on her back, one eye glinting at him. He pulled the trigger.

The hammer slammed down on an empty chamber, once, twice.

He’d failed to keep count.

Her shot sang past as he jerked himself up on to the bonnet. He threw the empty SIG aside and rolled sideways off the bonnet and landed hard on the tarmac next to the driver’s side. She had already crawled so that her head was at the passenger side, but she heard him and was quick with her feet, one of them catching him on the cheekbone. It wasn’t hard enough to put me off. Calvary began to crawl beneath the chassis alongside her.

She brought her arm down and around so that it was pointing down the length of her body and the gun’s muzzle was pointing directly at Calvary’s head. He got his hand across her wrist and slammed it down on to the road surface so that when the gun went off the shot whipped past her and between them, nearly catching her own leg. She tore her arm free and as she did so Calvary punched her in the armpit. Her hand released the pistol reflexively and it went skittering across the tarmac, out from under the car on the passenger side.

Calvary crawled up so that he was right alongside her. She began to lash out with a knee and a fist. When Calvary twisted his thigh to protect his groin, the movement made his head bang against the chassis, a protrusion of some kind grinding through the dressing into the hole in his forehead.

He thought he was going to be sick from the pain, cried out in agony and rage. It was no good, she’d got the upper hand and was already crawling out from under the car, her left hand reaching for the gun gleaming on the road surface. Although Calvary managed to get his right hand up and grab on to her belt it wasn’t enough to stop her inching towards the gun. Her hips were just behind the front passenger wheel now, and Calvary saw what he had to do, his last chance.

He used his purchase on her belt to haul himself forward till his head protruded from under the car on the passenger side. Although she reached her right hand round to press down on his forehead, he managed to half turn his head away and called up, as loudly as he could, ‘Gaines. Handbrake.’

Gaines’s head and shoulders loomed above them from the footwell and his eyes were frightened. For a second Calvary thought he wasn’t up to it, or hadn’t heard. Then he disappeared from view.

Just as Krupina’s fingertips met the butt of the gun and drew it into her grasp and she began swinging it down for the killing shot, there was a creak as the Ford pickup began to roll backwards, , the gradient some thirty degrees .

She screamed long and harsh as the passenger wheel rose up on to her buttocks and eased down again on the other side. Her hand opened, releasing the gun, clawing at the air, before shaking a last time and dropping limp.

Calvary scrambled clear, grabbed the gun and slapped the side of the car for Gaines to reapply the handbrake. He crawled round the rear to the driver’s side again and got in behind the dashboard.

The shooting was sporadic but ongoing. He saw two men by the side of the car, still firing. A third lay sprawled, his foot still jerking. Directly ahead, Nikola and Jakub sat in the VW, Max in the back, he now saw. They stared alternately at the exchange of fire and at Calvary, uncertain.

Calvary jacked the magazine of the Makarov. One bullet fired. Eight left. He slammed it back.

It was time to end this.

*

Bartos was annoyed. Not worried, yet, but the feeling of ecstasy he’d had five minutes earlier had disappeared. He was on the second and last of the magazines for the rifle. The first had been emptied disappointingly quickly, after perhaps thirty or forty rounds. He’d killed two of the four men, one of them the driver when he’d first opened fire, the other when the guy had put his head round the rear of the car to take aim. Apart from that he’d shot the car up so that it looked like a shack that had been hit by a tornado, but there were still two armed men behind it. Plus Calvary in the Merc, and those losers in the VW, who didn’t look like much but who he knew were armed with at least one piece.

Sirens were massing in the direction of the river, probably on the other side but getting closer. He couldn’t be caught there, in the open.

Bartos grabbed the handgun from the passenger seat beside him, a Makarov he’d taken off one of the men guarding him in the back. He took it in his right hand, which he also used to grip the steering wheel, awkwardly. With his left hand he hefted the rifle across the dashboard so that the barrel protruded through the hole in the Hummer’s windscreen.

Then he put his foot down, aiming straight at the pickup, opening fire with the rifle as he advanced. Once he was sure he was on course he let go of the steering wheel and stuck his left hand out the window and began firing on the Russians and the car they were crouching behind.

*

The moment Calvary understood what Blažek was doing, he turned the ignition key of the truck, letting the clutch out too quickly and stalling it.

There wasn’t going to be a second chance.

He dived across Gaines and scrabbled for the door release on the passenger side and shoved the older man out, following him and rolling on the tarmac, feeling the slap of the car door against the very sole of his boot as the Hummer smashed into the pickup, not quite head on. The impact spun the truck on a vertical axis through almost one hundred and eighty degrees so that it was facing the opposite direction.

Calvary stumbled to his feet and peered about for Gaines, seeing him scrambling away.

He yelled, ‘Gaines, over here,’ and raised the Makarov. Blažek leaned out the window of the Hummer and fired. Calvary leaped and rolled, hearing the rapid fire raking off the tarmac, waiting for the bullets to rip across his back. He took cover beside the wrecked pickup, risked a glance round.

Saw Blažek hauling Gaines into the Hummer one handed, the rifle pointed now back towards the VW where Jakub was trying to get a shot in.

Gunfire was coming from somewhere else now, the Russians on the other side of the Hummer, but all of a sudden there wasn’t a Hummer there because Blažek had taken off. Calvary stood and saw the big vehicle rocketing away in the direction of the castle. He waved, frantic, to Nikola behind the wheel of the VW, saw the rear door flapping open even as the car swung close to him, and dived in beside Max.

*

‘Darya Yaroslavovna. Can you hear me?’

Usually the city’s lights, especially around the castle, made it hard to see the stars, but Krupina had a perfect view of them now. Something quick and sudden had happened and the darkness that veiled her eyes had vanished. There’d been some sort of impact, and the car was no longer over her.

There was no pain, at last. Just an overwhelming coldness.

Arkady’s face loomed pale and close. He was crouching over her, blood on his hands. She tried to ask him if he was all right. Then she angled her eyes down, saw that the blood was hers. Noticed something odd about her hips, the whole lower half of her body, in fact: it was twisted at right angles to the upper half.

‘Arkasha…’ She couldn’t remember his patronymic. Careless of her, and rude.

‘I have to get you away.’

From nearby came the singing of urban angels: the sirens of emergency vehicles.

It was too late. Arkady knew it; she could read it in his gaze.

Her boys. Arkady and Gleb. Her only constants in a treacherous world.

She gripped his hand in both of hers. Whispered, ‘Did you get him? The Englishman, Gaines?’

His eyes burned into hers.

‘Yes, Darya Yaroslavovna. We got him.’ A beat, then: ‘You’ve won.’

She closed her eyes.

A life well lived.

TWENTY-NINE

The giddiness Bartos had felt as he lurched out of the car and grabbed the skinny old guy was wiped away by the cold air blasting through the gap where the windscreen had been. The bonnet of the Hummer was stove in, one corner lifting like an old piece of lino, but the machine was still going, its rumble harshened to a roar.

I need to get myself one of these, he thought.

First things first. The old guy had tried to grab at the door handle and although Bartos had locked it centrally, he didn’t like this display of defiance and busted the man in the chops. He remembered to pull his blow – the guy looked seventy or more – but even so there was blood, and when the man slumped sideways Bartos worried for a moment that he was dead. He seized the man’s meagre hair and bellowed at him, shaking his head back and forth. The Brit stirred, mumbling. Bartos cuffed his face once more.

‘Pull that shit again and I will let you out. Straight into the river.’

In the mirror Calvary and his loser buddies were picking up speed. Their car wasn’t worth shit compared to the Hummer, but they had the advantage of a vehicle that hadn’t been in two collisions.

He was heading south west, towards Mala Strana, the Lesser Town. A big, fast car wasn’t much use there among all the cobbled streets. Plus, the sirens were all around. The cops would be looking for a car of the Hummer’s description; it was one that would have stuck in witnesses’ minds. Best to ditch it.

Bartos yanked the wheel to the left, took a steep winding street at almost one hundred kilometres an hour, doing some serious damage to the side panels against the narrow stone walls. He banked right again, saw a dead end ahead with a railing and a drop beyond it, slammed on the brakes and killed the engine.

He jumped down, came round to the passenger side and dragged Gaines out, the pistol pressed against his head. Bartos reached back into the car for the rifle, which he hoisted awkwardly over his shoulder. Clamping his hand over the old man’s mouth, he marched him back up to the end of the side street. The mouth of a tiny alley, so narrow it could barely fit them both, loomed blackly.

*

Calvary hated sitting in the back seat of anything: a taxi, a car like this one, with an amateur gunman of only modest ability riding shotgun in the passenger seat up front. He glanced back. Through the still-flaming wreckage of the car that Blažek had blown up with the grenade, he saw no headlights flashing in pursuit. The Russians were out of the game, for now at least.

He craned to look at the surface of the road behind them.

‘Are we leaking oil?’

Nikola said, ‘No.’

‘Then the Hummer is. He hasn’t got much time left.’

In front of him, Jakub cocked his gun ostentatiously. Calvary said, ‘When we find him, keep back. For God’s sake. You’ve done enough. You came at just the right time. You need to leave this to me now.’

Jakub made a sound like a snort.

It wasn’t the time for small talk but Calvary couldn’t help it. ‘Nikola, are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You got away.’

‘Only just. I reached the car, came looking for you. I drove around the hospital many times. I thought they had you.’

‘They did.’

In the mirror she touched her forehead. ‘What did they –?’

‘It’s nothing. I’ll tell you later.’

Behind them the first flashing blue and red lights crested the road. Calvary said, ‘Slow down.’

‘He is turning.’

‘All right. Follow him, but be discreet.’

They dipped alarmingly, the streets losing their broad functionality and becoming medieval. Ahead the Hummer had disappeared. Nikola took the VW judderingly down the cobbles, peering left and right. Max pointed: ‘There.’

Nikola pulled in. The side road ended in a railed balcony. Thirty yards ahead, parked sideways alongside the balcony, was the Hummer. The light from the city beyond showed no human silhouettes in the windows.

Calvary said, ‘Stay here.’

He climbed out, keeping low, the Makarov in a two-handed grip.

Blažek was either in the car, out of sight with Gaines, or he’d ducked behind it. Calvary flattened himself against the cobblestones, peering into the blackness beneath the bulk of the vehicle, looking for telltale glints of metal or teeth. Nothing.

He duckwalked to the car, rose up and dropped just as quickly. The snapshot he’d glimpsed of the interior of the car had confirmed that nobody of Bartos’s bulk was inside.

Nikola’s shout made him whirl, on his knees, the gun extended.

From the obscure mouth of an alleyway Blažek had emerged and got his forearm across the throat of Jakub, who’d been standing by the open passenger door of the VW. The big man’s other hand was jamming a pistol against the side of Jakub’s head.

Blažek roared something in Czech. Calvary stood and advanced. Blažek switched to Russian: ‘Step back or I kill him.’

‘Give it up, Blažek.’

Jakub had the Browning in his raised hand. Blažek snarled something at him and increased the pressure across his throat. With a hiss, Jakub dropped the gun on to the cobblestones.

Into the car Blažek yelled, ‘Get out, now.’

Behind the wheel, Nikola stared at him. Calvary took a step forward. Gaines cowered in the mouth of the alley, looking dazed.

Blažek lowered the pistol for a moment, pointing it straight down, and shot Jakub in the foot. Jakub howled, twisting in the bigger man’s grasp, his bloodied leg flailing. Once more Blažek pushed the muzzle agains the side of his head.

‘Last warning. Get out of the goddamn car. Now.’

Nikola and Max swung themselves out simultaneously. Calvary saw that Max had his rucksack with him. They stepped away, watching Blažek.

He said over his shoulder, to Gaines: ‘Get in.’

The man stumbled to comply. As he did so Calvary took another step forward, silently urging Jakub to move his head a fraction to the left, to give him a clear shot.

Blažek threw something heavy, the rifle he’d been using earlier, into the car after Gaines.

‘Now go sit in the Hummer. All three of you.’

Nikola and Max glanced at Calvary. He gave a nod, keeping his eyes on Blažek’s. They moved past him and he heard the Hummer’s doors opening.

Blažek said: ‘You too, asshole. But first, put the gun down.’

‘No.’

Blažek sighed, pointed the gun downward again. For a second his head was a clear target but then Jakub moved in the way, arching his back, and the chance was gone. Calvary said, ‘All right,’ and laid the Makarov down.

As he rose again he saw Blažek lift the pistol, extend it towards him. Calvary dived, taking the impact on his shoulder, as the shots came, spanging off the cobblestones, too close. He rolled past the rear of the Hummer and ducked behind it. From his worm’s-eye view he saw Blažek hesitate, as if debating whether to come after him, and then ram the barrel against Jakub’s head again.

Blažek said, ‘Bye bye, asshole,’ and pulled the trigger.

The exit wound spread the opposite side of Jakub’s head into a fan-shaped spray of bone and blood and brain matter.

From the Hummer, Nikola screamed, harsh and primal.

Calvary scrambled out from behind the vehicle and was going for the Makarov he’d placed on the cobblestones, but although Blažek had let Jakub’s body fall and had dropped into the driver’s seat of the VW, the door was still open and he reached through and opened fire, causing Calvary to flinch back. The VW’s engine revved and the car surged forward. Calvary rolled sideways, coming up hard against the wall hemming in the narrow street. He saw that the Hummer’s door had opened and Max had clambered out. Calvary shouted a warning as the kid leaped forward on to the bonnet. Blažek braked, punched the car into reverse, and Max dropped off on to the cobblestones. Again the car lunged forward. A wheel caught Max’s arm, pinning it with a crack, and the kid yelled.

Then the VW reversed again, all the way up the side street this time. Calvary rolled and got his gun and loosed off three shots after the car, just as it executed a three-point turn into the main street. He heard glass give way. By the time he reached the junction, the tail lights were weaving away, heading further down the cobbled street.

*

Son of a bitch. The shot had been a lucky one, but Bartos had been lucky, too. The bullet had passed through the windscreen and through the big fan of muscle joining his neck to his shoulder. The pain was enormous, as though a fiery boot had stamped on his shoulder, and he found he couldn’t raise his left arm. But he didn’t think anything vital had been damaged.

Behind him the old guy raised his head and Bartos snapped at him, wincing at the stab this provoked. The road before him twisted to the right and plunged even more steeply, down into the Lesser Town. He braked, too quickly, and felt the tyres slip on the cobbles.

He’d put some distance behind him, then ditch the VW and get himself a new car. Then he’d be away and dry. Let the cops find Calvary and those other assholes at the Hummer.

*

Calvary ran, staggering because of the slope and the uneven surface, the town before him with its medieval quaintness tilting crazily. Yet again the bandages had come loose from his head and he tore them away. He barged past a late-night couple, their faces agape.

The brake lights ahead kept flickering on, the VW moving uncertainly through the streets not meant for cars.

Calvary found his phone in one of his pockets and punched the button while running.

‘Nikola, it’s me.’

Her reply was halfway between a cry and a gasp.

‘Is Max okay?’

‘His – I think his arm is broken.’

‘You have to get away from there, Nikola. Get Max away and to a hospital. Drag him if you have to. Get clear of the Hummer, and then call an ambulance. The police will be there any moment. Oh, and don’t take the guns with you.’

‘What –’

‘Make up some story. He slipped and got run over. It’s not a bullet wound, it won’t be treated as suspicious.’

‘Jakub –’

‘He’s dead, and you have to leave him there.’

‘Where are you?’

‘After Blažek, on foot. I’ll find you later.’

‘Martin –’

He stumbled on, listening.

‘You must kill him. Blažek.’

‘I promise you, he’s not getting through this alive.’

*

The bullet might not have hit anything critical but there was still blood loss, and it was starting to get to Bartos. Through the windscreen the Baroque buildings rippled. A lamp post toppled towards him and he jerked the wheel aside, felt the front bumper on the passenger side hit something hard and buckle.

He restarted the engine, tried to reverse. No good: he was jammed against the obstruction, a hydrant or something. The hell with it.

He took several attempts to open his door, reaching across his body with his right hand to do it. He almost fell out, grinding his teeth against the fire in his shoulder. But he had a degree of movement in the joint, he realised.

A tiny dog on the end of a lead began yapping near his feet and he brought the pistol to bear and watched the terrified owner back away, hauling the mutt after her. He glanced up and down the street. Nobody about, all the windows dark. Beside him was a narrow church, Gothic spires barely visible against the dark of the sky.

Bartos dragged open the rear door and seized Gaines’s collar. The man collapsed on to the pavement. Bartos hauled him to his feet.

Footsteps, and he turned and looked back the way he had come.

Calvary was lurching down the street towards him.

Bartos took aim but the ground tilted again and there were suddenly two of the Englishman. He shook his head and blinked.

Need to get a grip.

Drawing breath deeply, he yanked Gaines in front of him, ignoring the pain in his shoulder – he was, after all, the Kodiak – and stumbled towards the church.

*

When Calvary became aware that Blažek wasn’t going to shoot – could barely stay upright, it seemed – he lifted his own gun, but his phone buzzed and he fumbled it out.

A text message, from Nikola: Max took this.

He looked at the attached photo.

Calvary put the phone away. Down the hill, Blažek had disappeared with Gaines around the side of the church. Calvary heard glass smash.

He ran almost headlong into the church wall, his own co-ordination failing him. For a few seconds he stood with his eyes closed, fighting down the tide of fatigue and nausea.

He ejected the magazine from the Makarov. He’d fired three at the VW. Five bullets left.

He’d noticed Blažek had the same handgun, doubtless taken off one of his Russian captors. He’d be close to empty, given the shooting he’d been doing back there at the Hummer. Two bullets into Jakub, four at Calvary as he’d rolled away. Three left, at most.

Unless of course he had a spare magazine.

Calvary crept along the church wall towards the side window. It had been stained glass, and was shattered. Through it, dim candlelight provided a degree of illumination. Alongside the wall was a small rockery. Calvary prised a Frisbee-sized rock loose, nearly overbalancing as he bent down, and tossed it through the window space.

The flash came from somewhere to the right of the window at the back of the church, the crash of the shot echoing in the confined space.

Two left.

Calvary launched himself through the space, using his left shoulder to roll and coming up on one knee. He was alongside a row of pews, his view of the back of the church obscured.

He crawled down the aisle on this side of the pews, risked a glance over the top. Blažek was there, Gaines slightly off to his side. Calvary took the shot, missed, heard the ricochet sing off something brass. Blažek fired back and Calvary dropped, feeling the slug pass above him.

One.

Calvary stood up. Blažek was behind the rearmost pew, Gaines clamped in front of him with his left arm. Calvary saw the awkwardness, the blood saturating Blažek’s shoulder. Once again the gun was jammed against Gaines’s head.

‘It’s over, Blažek. One bullet left. You shoot Gaines, or me, or yourself.’

The big man glared, his eyes swimming out of focus for an instant.

‘I’ll make it easier for you.’ Calvary tossed the Makarov to one side. Spread his hands. ‘Here I am. A sitting target.’

Blažek’s eyelid flickered in bewilderment. He moved the pistol, at first uncertainly and then with more resolve, so that it was aimed directly at Calvary’s face.

‘But first, you might want to have a look at this.’ Using his fingertips he drew the phone from his breast pocket. He found the picture, placed the phone on the floor and sent it spinning towards Blažek.

Blažek stopped it with his shoe, glanced at it. Keeping his eyes and the gun on Calvary, he stooped to pick it up, wincing.

Gaines blinked at Calvary, his face wary, as if he thought he might be expected to make a move. Calvary shook his head minutely.

Blažek looked at the picture.

*

He was the Kodiak. The king of the city.

The asshole kid had taken the picture from the back of the Hummer. It was a lucky shot, the angle perfect. In the picture, Bartos had his arm round the neck of the other guy, the gun against his head. Bartos’s face was clearly visible, and the camera had caught him clenching his teeth so it looked like he was grinning.

Bartos dropped the phone.

In front of him the Brit, Calvary, said, ‘Within the hour, every paper in the country will have that picture. Every TV broadcaster, every internet news site. You’re finished, Blažek.’

He wasn’t. The Brit was wrong.

‘One bullet. If you shoot Gaines, I’ll make it to my own gun before you can. If you shoot me, you’ll kill Gaines as well, but you’ll have nowhere to run. Your men are dead or scurrying around trying to cover their backsides. Your empire’s in ruins. Nobody’s scared of you any more.’ Calvary shrugged. ‘Though, I suppose you could always go on the rampage. Go down in a blaze of glory. Death by cop.’

He wasn’t finished. Because when a man controlled his destiny, he was very much still in charge.

Bartos put the muzzle of the gun under his chin.

In his native Czech – fuck all this Russian – he said, ‘I win.’

He squeezed the trigger.

THIRTY

The city chattered and echoed, sirens competing with shouted voices. The clocks said it was after three in the morning but the streets were ablaze with light, as though Prague was burning.

They were on some sort of foothill, the castle far above. Calvary kept up the pace, his arm under Gaines’s, heaving the older man upright every time he faltered. They kept as far as possible to back alleys, cringing into doorways whenever an emergency vehicle flashed past.

Parkland loomed ahead, sloping up the hill. Quickly Calvary marched them across the main road and through the nearest gate. The park was lit only by occasional lamps along its paths.

Outside the church, Calvary had examined the VW. Blažek had crashed it into a bollard and the front was too mangled for it to be of any use. He glanced inside, saw the rifle in the back seat. He pulled the door open and retrieved it. A Russian A-91. For a moment he debated, then took it, carrying it vertically by his side like a walking stick. It was conspicuous, but not as conspicuous as it would be if he strapped it across his back. Silhouettes counted for a lot.

They stumbled along the winding tracks until they were deep in the park. At last Calvary let Gaines sag on to a bench. He sprawled sideways, managed to pull himself into a sitting position with great effort. He sat with his eyes closed, the blood crusted around his mouth, his breath shallow.

Calvary crouched before him.

‘Are you hurt? Chest, abdomen?’

Gaines tried several times to speak, his lips drily sticky. ‘Just winded. And the face. Mustn’t grumble.’

Calvary liked him for that. He sat on the bench himself, propped the rifle, took out his phone.

Before dialling he said, ‘You understand that you’re going to have to disappear. From Prague, and you’ll certainly never be able to set foot in England again either.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you have any idea what you might do?’

He almost smiled. ‘You’re a resourceful man, Mr Calvary. But you’re not the only one. I have a little money squirreled away. I’ll manage.’ He coughed. ‘Just not quite what I was planning for my retirement, that’s all.’

Calvary thumbed in Llewellyn’s number.

He answered on the first ring, sounding startlingly clear. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Calvary. I have Gaines.’ Calvary turned up the volume, moved closer to Gaines on the bench, nodded, holding the handset to his face.

Gaines said, ‘This is Ivor Gaines.’

Calvary said, ‘Satisfied it’s him?’

‘Yes.’ Llewellyn sounded more than satisfied. Delighted, in fact. ‘But I would have believed you anyway, Martin.’ He paused a beat. ‘The news channels are going berserk. What on earth have you been up to? The whole of Prague seems to have gone mad.’

‘I’m not going to do it.’

‘Say again?’

Calvary drew a breath. ‘The hit. I’m not going to kill Gaines. And you know why. He’s innocent. He was never a suspected double agent.’

‘If that’s what he’s telling –’

‘You said he gave regular talks here in the city. He’s never given any. All you said about his being a well-known left-wing polemicist in Prague… it’s a lie. I checked. Nobody’s ever heard of him. He’s just a retired expat, keeping his head down.’

He waited, expecting bluster. Instead Llewellyn chuckled.

‘Very astute, Martin. All right. It’s a fair cop.’ The rustle of cigarette paper. ‘What else do you know about him?’

Calvary glanced at Gaines. ‘That he’s former SIS. That during his diplomatic service in Prague and Berlin and elsewhere, he was running networks of agents.’

‘Correct. Has he told you why he’s so special, though?’

In profile, Gaines looked hangdog. Calvary watched him as he said, ‘No. But you’re going to.’

‘Being a little demanding, aren’t you?’

‘I hold the cards, Llewellyn. Your blackmail threats don’t scare me any more. I’m never coming back, anyway.’

His ear rang with Llewellyn’s laughter, rich and heartfelt. ‘Oh, we never had any intention of shopping you to the press or the police, Martin. Think about it. The Chapel handing over one of its best operatives, with all his inside knowledge of our operations, risking exposure like that… it would be madness. Certainly worked as a bluff, though, didn’t it?’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’ll put you in the picture. But first, I need to know something. The Russian SVR woman? Krupina?’

‘She’s dead.’

There was a slow outlet of breath down the line, with the hint of a whistle.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Positive. I saw her crushed under the wheels of a car.’

The silence was longer than any Calvary had experienced in Llewellyn’s company.

At last Llewellyn said: ‘All right. I’ll explain.’

*

‘It was, as I told you in the beginning, all about revenge for the Grechko murder. But revenge of a far more subtle, British kind than a straightforward tit-for-tat killing.’

Calvary had debated whether or not to allow Gaines to listen in. Had decided it couldn’t hurt, and kept the volume up high, his head close to the older man’s.

‘Sir Ivor Gaines has been too modest with you. He wasn’t just a humble SIS operative running a few tuppeny-ha’penny networks. He knew – knows – the identity of our agent in the Kremlin. The one the Russians call TALPA. The Mole.’

Calvary glanced at Gaines, saw no expression.

‘That’s why Comrade Krupina was so desperate to find Gaines, to get him back from this gangster and from you. He was gold dust. The ultimate trophy for a Russian intelligence operative.’

‘How did she know about him?’

‘Because we tipped her off.’

The stillness of the park was almost a physical entity, the turmoil of the city seeming miles away.

‘It’s easy to do. A message from one of their supposed agents in London who’s really working for us, sent to his handlers in Moscow. They would have informed Krupina at once.’

Gaines had turned his head a little. The unspoken question between them – why – hardly needed voicing.

Llewellyn went on: ‘But of course, Sir Ivor doesn’t really know the identity of TALPA, even though he thinks he does. He’s been fed disinformation, as have several others in his position. Insurance, you might call it, in case they were ever captured. You were never supposed to succeed in killing Gaines, Martin. You just had to be seen to try, and to try so convincingly that there was never any doubt that the information he had was genuine, was so important to the British state that we were prepared to send an assassin in to ensure our own man didn’t fall into enemy hands.’

‘So I fail to kill Gaines, the Russians take him back to Moscow, find out from him the identity of the mole and deal with whoever that is –’

‘Thereby diverting attention from the real TALPA. You’ve got it. And the irony? Gaines is captured by Darya Krupina, the murderer of Pyotr Grechko.’

Calvary’s breath caught in his throat.

‘Yes. I told you we knew for certain who’d killed Grechko, but couldn’t extradite them. Krupina was in London at the time of the Grechko hit, was identified by several sources as being in the vicinity when the murder took place. Left the country hours later. It was her. Not any of the other people our government has made a public show of accusing. But we’ve no proof. So we take revenge on her. Not by killing her, but by making her unwittingly complicit in one of the most sophisticated disinformation exercises since the Cold War. Delicious, isn’t it?’

Calvary said, ‘Except it hasn’t come off the way you wanted.’

Llewellyn hissed through his teeth. ‘Well, yes and no. It’s true that a lot of the elegance has been lost along the way. We can probably blame that gangster chappie for that. But at the end of the day, as the cliché has it, Darya Krupina is dead. She was dying anyway, from cancer, but we got there first. We’ve had our revenge. Thanks to you.’

There was almost too much to process. The cold was settling like a shroud and Calvary felt himself starting to shiver.

‘There still?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve really been most helpful, Martin. Yes, I admit, I made a mistake. I assumed you’d fail to get Gaines. You didn’t. You’ve beaten both the Russians and the most powerful crime lord in Prague. You’re even better than I gave you credit for.’

‘And?’

‘And, I need you to come in now. Bring Gaines in. He can’t be left out there, it’s too messy. As for you, I have great things in mind for you. No more hits. The kind of work you’d enjoy, as well as be skilled in. A senior position.’

Calvary let the silence hang. Then he said, ‘You must be mad.’

‘I can assure you –’

‘This is the last time we’ll ever speak. You’ll never see me again. Or Gaines.’

‘Wait –’

‘Rot in hell, Llewellyn.’

He flung the phone high into the darkness, watched it arc over a row of bushes.

*

They were on the march once more, having found a water fountain and gorged themselves repeatedly. Calvary no longer supported the older man but had to put out a hand once or twice when he staggered.

From a pocket Calvary retrieved the other phone he’d taken from the cottage where Gaines had been kept.

‘Ano?’ She sounded guarded.

‘Nikola, it’s me. Can you talk?’

‘What happened? Where –’

‘Blažek’s dead. Killed himself. I showed him the picture Max took.’

She gasped.

‘How’s Max?’

‘We’re at the hospital. It’s a clean fracture of his upper arm. He doesn’t need surgery. They’re keeping him in overnight, though.’

‘Any trouble on the way?’

‘No. We got a few streets away, called an ambulance. The police are everywhere.’

He was at a loss for a moment. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I am unhurt.’

‘I mean... not physically.’

She didn’t answer, said, ‘Martin, is it over?’

‘Yes. Blažek’s gone for good, and most probably his empire with him. The Russians have failed to get Gaines and most of them are dead, anyway. They may come after us, so Gaines and I need to get away.’

‘Can we meet –’

‘No. I need to get away.’ Your life’s here in Prague, it seemed unnecessary to say. ‘And you need to get some rest.’

‘Jakub, and Kaspar.’ She sounded as if she was talking to herself.

‘I didn’t know Kaspar, but Jakub was a good guy. He saved me. You all did.’

‘Martin –’

‘Best that we go. Goodbye, Nikola. And good luck.’

*

It hit him an hour and a half later.

They’d gone west, Calvary and Gaines, stumbling through the streets like two refugees from hell. Eventually the city streets gave way to suburbia. They had no money on them and they looked roughed up.

Calvary broke into a family saloon, a Mazda, that was parked outside a moderately prosperous house. He hotwired the ignition and disabled the alarm within seconds, too late to prevent lights from going on in the house. He felt bad about the theft, and made a mental note of the house number and the name of the street, telling himself he’d send some money in compensation whenever he next had the chance. He wondered if he was kidding himself.

Beside him Gaines dozed. They both needed food – he found a child’s chocolate bar in the glove compartment, which made him feel even more guilty, and they shared the meagre mouthfuls – and sleep. Plus medical attention, especially Calvary. The hole in his forehead was throbbing and when he touched the discharge seeping from it, his fingers smelled.

He kept off the motorways, with no real idea where he was going other than that it was in the broad direction of Austria. What he would do once he got there he didn’t know.

The unease tugged at him all the way. Something Llewellyn had said; or rather, something he’d said to Llewellyn.

On a country road winding between dark fields, the odour of manure pungent in the night air, Calvary slammed on the brakes, sending the car slewing sideways. Gaines jerked awake against his seatbelt, mumbling.

Calvary grabbed the phone.

It was answered, but in silence.

He said, ‘Nikola?’

The chuckle, the one he’d thought and hoped he’d never hear again.

‘Martin. I was so hoping you’d call.’

Calvary pressed himself back into the seat, his head pinned against the headrest. His fists gripped the phone and the steering wheel. His stomach roiled emptily. Bile felt as if it were sludging his throat closed.

Llewellyn had the upper hand.

THIRTY-ONE

The sun had risen an hour earlier and hung low and watery in a pale cocoon of cloud. It would have been warmer to sit in the car with the engine running, but Calvary needed to keep moving to loosen up the joints and get the blood through the muscles. He paced slowly and steadily beside the vehicle. Gaines sat in the passenger seat, glancing about.

The field lay on the outskirts of the city, to the north west. A potholed mudstreaked track curved down from the main road to a gate in a low stone wall. Calvary had pulled through the gate and driven some way in and swung round to face the gate, a hundred yards or so from it. Behind, sweeping up to the road, was a grassy bank with a drainage ditch separating it from the field. Off to the left, half a football pitch’s length away, was the edge of a pine forest.

Every time the noise of a car came down from the road he turned to look, but each one swept by without slowing. Calvary wasn’t all that conspicuous, a man standing next to a car in a field, but he assumed it was private property and didn’t know how likely it was that whoever owned it would find him there.

His phone said it was seven fifteen. He’d synchronised it with Llewellyn an hour before.

*

‘A straight swap. You and Gaines for the young lady.’

Gaines frowned and blinked in the seat beside him.

When Calvary didn’t answer Llewellyn said, ‘Oh, come on, Martin. It’s nothing personal. You know that.’

He’d screwed up, in two ways. By asking Llewellyn to run a check on Nikola and the others earlier, he’d allowed the man to find out her address. And by telling Nikola the battle was over, he’d given her the green light to return home. Llewellyn had already guessed what Nikola meant to Calvary.

‘How long have you been in Prague?’ His voice grated like an unoiled hinge.

‘Since yesterday morning. As soon as you told me the mobsters had taken Gaines, I decided to come over.’

With how much backup? Calvary had no idea. There’d be SIS agents here in the city. How many were affiliated with the Chapel?

Llewellyn went on: ‘Let me give you the location of the rendezvous. There’s a –’

‘No. I decide.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Do you think I’m stupid? If you set it up it’ll be an ambush.’

‘You’re hardly in a position –’

‘To be dictating terms? Aren’t I? if this exchange doesn’t happen, I have the girl’s fate on my conscience. You on the other hand lose both me and Gaines. I don’t think you’d like that.’

The smile was there again in Llewellyn’s voice. ‘Fair enough. Name your place.’

‘I will once I’ve decided on it.’

‘Within the hour.’

‘That’s not possible. It’ll take me two hours at least to get back to Prague.’ It was an exaggeration, but it would buy him time. ‘I’ll call you.’

*

It was seven thirty-five when two vehicles turned and began to lumber down the track towards the gate. A Skoda saloon and a minibus.

Calvary tapped on the roof of the car. Gaines clambered out and they watched the vehicles pass through the gate. Calvary gestured at them, indicating that the drivers should move deeper into the field so that they were closer to the gate than he was. The drivers complied; it was insurance and Llewellyn understood it. When the Skoda and the minibus were a hundred yards or so away, Calvary held up a palm and they stopped.

Llewellyn stepped out of the passenger seat of the Skoda. He raised his chin, beamed. The driver emerged as well: nobody Calvary knew, an impassive functionary. Two men appeared from the back of the minibus, helping Nikola step down through the sliding door. Calvary could see she was pale, gaunt, her hair straggling over her face.

Calvary drew the Makarov from the back of his waistband and held it away from him so that it was clearly visible. At the same time, casually, the two men from the minibus stepped forward in front of Llewellyn. They drew handguns of their own, as did the driver.

Llewellyn led Nikola forward by the arm, not roughly. She was staring across, but Calvary wasn’t sure if she recognised him. Had they drugged her?

Calvary had phoned Llewellyn nearly an hour earlier from the field, giving him the location, referring to a few distinctive features he’d spotted on the way to make it easier to find. He’d ended by saying: ‘The girl gets swapped for Gaines first. I need to know she’s safe, before you take me.’

Calvary raised his hand, waving it until it caught Nikola’s gaze.

‘Nikola. Start walking forward, slowly. Don’t run, but don’t stop, either.’

Slowly, as if stepping on a path of stones across a pond, she began to pick her way forward across the wet grass.

Calvary said, ‘All right, Sir Ivor.’

The older man started moving towards her.

Calvary raised the gun and aimed it at arm’s length at Llewellyn. Gaines’s pace was a fraction quicker than Nikola’s. Calvary muttered to him to slow down a bit.

Nikola seemed to be taking ever smaller steps. Calvary reflected that anyone driving by on the road above who gave them even a cursory glance would see the guns. He didn’t want to panic her so he said, loudly enough to be heard, ‘You’re doing great, Nikola. Just a bit further.’

He kept his eyes on her, but on the borders of his vision he saw Llewellyn standing motionless a little behind the other three men, who held their guns pointing down at their sides. For a few moments the only sounds were the susurration of a light wind in the pine trees off to the left and the faint mulchy noise of Gaines’s and Nikola’s footsteps, and the slow intake and outlet of Calvary’s breathing.

They would pass each other in ten seconds, he estimated.

He watched Gaines angle inwards a fraction so that he passed directly by Nikola as they drew parallel. Beyond, Llewellyn’s men tensed visibly. Calvary couldn’t hear the older man’s murmur, hoped it had come.

Nikola advanced, her eyes fixed on Calvary’s now.

The crack arced across the flat expanse of the field.

Gaines gave an oddly high-pitched cry and was flung off his feet to land in a sprawl with his neck twisted and his face pressed against the grass.

Calvary yelled at Nikola to run but she had stopped and was standing with her hands pressed to the sides of her head. Across the field there was bewilderment and shouting as the men assimilated what had happened and the three with guns turned to look at the forest. Hoarseness rasped in Calvary’s voice, and at last Nikola’s gaze swung from the body on the ground back to Calvary. She took off at a scramble toward him, feet slithering for an instant on the wet grass.

The men across the field were swinging to stare in their direction again when a second crack lashed the air and Nikola went down.

A third, two seconds later. Calvary bounced off the door of the Mazda, his face hitting the sodden grass.

*

He’d landed on the passenger side of the Mazda, which was angled out of the line of sight of Llewellyn and his men. From beneath the car he watched the turmoil across the field, Llewellyn ducking inside the Skoda alongside his driver while the remaining pair of men crouched facing in the direction of the trees, weapons levelled but not firing – there was nobody they could see to fire at – and backing towards the minibus.

Much nearer, Nikola’s face was turned towards him on the grass. He caught her eye. Gave a nod, which she returned.

She’d caught Gaines’s whispered instruction.

Calvary rose and hauled open the passenger door, which Gaines had left ajar, dropped in. Through the windscreen he saw Nikola scramble to her feet and reach the driver’s side. She was fast now, all fatigue gone, and she fired the engine and brought the Mazda swinging in an arc alongside Gaines, who was still prone, his head raised. Calvary reached behind him and popped the rear door and Gaines slumped inside, almost catching his leg as he slammed the door shut.

Nikola floored the accelerator and J-turned the car, the wheels churning the ground in a fan of mud and grass. They’d spun a hundred and eighty degrees and the Mazda was now facing the grass bank at the back of the field, leading up to the road and separated from it by a wooden fence. She gunned the engine.

Calvary checked his wing mirror, realised the impact of the bluff had worn off. Both vehicles were on the move, the minibus coming after them, the Skoda veering away towards the gate, meaning to head them off up on the road if we managed to get there. Through the front window of the minibus one of the men aimed his pistol.

The first shot smashed off Calvary’s wing mirror. Ahead the drainage ditch was approaching fast, six feet wide. Beyond it was the bank. Calvary leaned back through the window with the Makarov and loosed off two shots. He heard glass shatter. Then the Mazda leaped across the ditch and its nose hit the base of the grass bank, the front bumper crumpling and the jolt flinging them forward in their seats. The front tyres found purchase on the bank and they were scrabbling and clawing their way up the verge, Nikola having geared down to first. Calvary risked a look back out the window. His shots hadn’t done much damage but they’d caused the driver to slow down, and that had been his undoing because he’d reached the ditch at too low a speed. The van had tipped into it and slammed to a stop. One of the gunmen had been thrown out of the open door into the ditch. The front passenger was trying to kick through the shattered windscreen.

The Mazda approached the top of the bank, building up speed as the slope became less steep, and as they crested it Calvary saw the Skoda reach the top of the track off to the left in parallel with them and begin to turn right on to the road. Nikola muttered something in Czech, a prayer perhaps, and the battered front of the car bashed through the wooden fence at the top of the bank, splintering the wet and rotten wood. The Mazda swung right on to the road as the Skoda gunned towards them from their left, a hundred yards away and closing fast. The Mazda’s gears and tyres shrieked as they took off down the road through the forest.

Nikola took them through an S-bend with astonishing skill, but Llewellyn’s driver was good, too, and he kept pace. Calvary didn’t look back, kept staring at the forest flashing past until he said, ‘There.’ Between the trees, a slight figure had emerged, one arm encased in white, the other hauling the rifle like a hod of bricks.

Max.

‘Brake,’ said Calvary. Nikola slowed and Calvary pushed open the door and rolled out on the tarmac and was up instantly, waving Nikola on and loping over to Max and grabbing the rifle from his hands. He swung it to bear just as the Skoda rounded the bend.

Calvary took out the front passenger tyre with a single clean shot.

The saloon swerved wildly and veered to its right and smashed into the base of a tree, glass shattering.

Calvary said to Max, ‘Stay back.’ He laid down the rifle and drew the Makarov.

Steam billowed from beneath the sails of the car’s buckled bonnet. Calvary couldn’t see much inside the car as he approached because the airbags had bloomed and were obscuring the interior. He peered in through the driver’s window. The driver had his eyes closed, was murmuring. Calvary found a stick with a sharp point and slit the airbag. It hissed and settled across the man’s lap. Calvary reached in and switched the ignition off.

He walked round the other side and deflated Llewellyn’s airbag. He was conscious, shifting each arm and leg in turn to test them. When he looked up, Calvary couldn’t read his expression.

Calvary raised the Makarov and touched the muzzle lightly, gently, against Llewellyn’s forehead. He looked past it, at Calvary’s eyes.

Enough.

Calvary lifted the gun away from his head and flicked the safety on and walked down the road towards Max. Beyond him Nikola was reversing back up the road towards them. Another car was bound to come past any moment and they needed to be out of there.

Halfway down the road Calvary turned.  He didn’t know why.

The smile, the mocking eyes.

Llewellyn raised a hand to his forehead and tipped Calvary a salute.

THIRTY-TWO

Through the window the early afternoon light soaked the trees in shades of green and gold. The engineering of the train was precise so that the quiet rhythm of the carriage’s wheels on the tracks was barely noticeable. The middle-aged woman sitting opposite had glanced briefly at Calvary, at the bandage swaddling his head, but lost interest quickly and was now asleep.

He put his head against the window where it was cool, and closed his eyes.

They had crossed into eastern Germany an hour earlier. There had been no checkpoint, as there seldom was nowadays on the borders between EU countries. Nonetheless he’d watched for roadblocks on both sides. Given what Prague had been through over the last forty-eight hours he was unsurprised by the number of police vehicles that seemed to have infested the country’s roads.

*

After calling Nikola’s phone and finding Llewellyn on the other end, he’d told Gaines about the change of plan. Gaines hadn’t protested, had simply closed his eyes and nodded. A few calls had established which hospital Max was at. Calvary had rung Max on the ward phone – there was no way he’d get in to visit at this hour – and told him about Nikola.

‘I’m out of here,’ said Max. He’d discharged himself against medical advice, had met Calvary in the car park outside. He walked painfully, his chest bound and his left arm in a cast and supported by a sling.

They’d gone through the plan. Max had never fired a rifle before. Calvary made him understand that it would be ludicrously awkward to try to fire one with one arm in plaster. Max told him to stop being an old woman.

‘Fire in our direction, but not at us.’

‘Got it.’

‘I’m serious, Max. If you hit any of us by accident, we won’t be getting up.’

‘Dude…’

And he’d done it, masterfully, creating the impression that some unknown third party, perhaps a remnant of Blažek’s or Krupina’s group, was picking off Calvary and his friends.

They’d returned to a city reeling in bewilderment, the chaos of the night’s events beyond most people’s grasp. There was no chance of returning to Nikola’s flat, or Max’s either. They’d found a motel on the northern outskirts, where they could access a room without all four of them parading past the desk.

In the shabby confines of the motel room Nikola tended Calvary’s head, applying antiseptic and bandages, wincing every time he did. She turned her attention to Gaines. He tried a smile.

‘I’m first class, young lady. But thank you.’

Calvary said, ‘You need to get Max back to the hospital.’ The young man’s face had a green hue, and each breath clearly lanced at his chest.

Max said, ‘Can’t believe they drilled your head.’

They ate and drank all they could manage. Nikola and Max came up with the price of a train ticket for both men. They would have offered more but Calvary refused.

It was time to go. Calvary gripped Max’s hand.

‘Ah, jeez.’ The kid turned away, sniffed. ‘Arm hurts, man.’

Nikola pressed herself against Calvary, her body and her mouth. He started to say something but she waved him away, her glance quick and liquid.

‘Go.’

*

Calvary dropped Gaines off just inside the German border. He parked near a bus depot and walked the fifty yards with him to the depot’s office, where there would be timetables.

Gaines said, ‘What will you do?’

‘I’m not going to tell you. Obviously.’ Calvary said.

Gaines turned, gave Calvary his hand. ‘I’m really most grateful.’

‘Even though I might have killed you. Even though you’ve been through two days of hell, and your life here is destroyed forever.’

‘They would have fed me to the Russians sooner or later. This… Chapel, or whatever they call themselves. And that would have been disastrous.’

‘Yes.’

He gave a silent laugh. ‘I don’t just mean for me personally.’ Stepping a little closer he said, ‘I might as well tell you. Your Mr Llewellyn can’t be aware of this, but I know who TALPA is. The mole, the real one. Yes, I’ve been fed disinformation; I knew that was what it was at the time, and I assumed it was so that I wouldn’t compromise the real mole if I ever fell into Moscow’s hands. I might have held my own under questioning, enough that my interrogators would have believed the false information. But I might not have. By delivering me from Mr Llewellyn, from Moscow, you’ve done your country a great service.’

My country. Calvary suppressed a laugh of his own. He said, ‘And you’re not going to tell me who this mole is.’

‘Obviously.’

Calvary watched his back as he headed for the office, an old man with a stoop now that was more pronounced than in the beginning, as if his shoulders had recently taken on a weight.

*

The last light of the afternoon came coldly through the window. Alone in the carriage now, Calvary huddled into the corner of his seat. His eyes were closed, the unfamiliar Saxony fields and towns through the window having long ago lost their appeal. The train’s destination was Berlin, but he was going to change well before that.

He thought about Llewellyn, and how he’d looked as Calvary had pressed the barrel of the pistol against his forehead. For a second his face had morphed into that of the young man, Pelabo Ghilzai, the one he’d failed to kill in Garmsir.

But of course it wasn’t him. Nobody ever would be.

Calvary thought of the old man, Gaines, a stranger to him until right at the very end, an object he’d been intending to erase like a speck of grease. He thought of Nikola, of Max, of Jakub, dead. He thought Gaines and the three Czechs were among the bravest people he had ever met.

He had money to last a while, shored up in bank accounts Llewellyn wouldn’t be able to reach. Apart from that he had nothing. He could never return to England. He’d be looking over his shoulder forever, expecting to see Llewellyn’s Punch-like grin close behind.

And he needed urgent medical attention, because he’d had a bloody great hole drilled in his head.

But he was free, for now at any rate. He’d helped bring down Blažek, a blight on the lives of Prague’s citizens. He’d saved Sir Ivor Gaines, a good man – and, it seemed, an important one – from torture and death in a Moscow cell.

And he was alive.

For the first time in as far back as he could remember, Calvary smiled.

THE END

Martin Calvary will return in a new novel, Annihilation Myths, to be published for Kindle in autumn 2013.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I was born in England and raised outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Currently I live near London with my wife and daughters, and work full time as a doctor on the National Health Service.

My other novels include the thrillers Ratcatcher and Delivering Caliban, both of which feature spy hunter John Purkiss and are available for Amazon Kindle.

My blog is Dead Drop, where your comments are always welcome. You can also find me on Facebook here and on Twitter @TimGStevens. If you’d like to email me, perhaps with comments about this novel (good or bad!) please do: timstevens@aol.com.

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Tim Stevens

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