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.