“So, where are we, Connie?”
“You have to guess,” she told me, not looking up from the newspaper she’d brought from the plane.
“I give in. Where the hell are we?” I put just a little edge into my voice.
“Set your watch forward two hours,” she told me.
“Seriously,” I said.
“Seriously,” she said, nodding at my wrist. “Two hours.”
I gave her a look but she wasn’t paying attention. I left my watch alone. I checked my mobile. No reception. Not even emergency numbers. Fucking marvellous.
There was a partition between us and the driver. He looked old. Worn-looking uniform, open shirt, no cap. Connie lifted up what looked like one of those very early mobile phones with a separate handset and looked at a dial on its top surface. Then she put it back on the floor of the limo and went back to the newspaper.
We sped down this weedy highway. No other traffic at all. There was what looked like a big town or a small city off to one side. We turned towards it, hurtling along a four-lane road still with no other traffic. The buildings looked pale, blocky, very Fifties or Sixties and all the same. I caught a glimpse of what might have been a helicopter, low over the horizon.
It was a bit stuffy in the car. There was a big chrome rocker switch by the window that looked like it might lower the glass. I tried pressing it. Didn’t work.
“Don’t bother,” Connie said. She clicked another switch on her side and spoke to the driver via a grille I’d thought was for ventilation. Again, sounded like Russian. The driver’s voice crackled back at her and I could see him gesticulating as he looked at us in his rear-view mirror. The car wove from side to side a bit as he did this, which would have been even more alarming than it was if there had been anything else on the road.
Connie shrugged. “The air-conditioning is not working,” she told me, and went back to her paper. “The filters are okay.”
“Window on your side work?”
“No,” she said, not looking up from her paper.
I bent forward, studying the sun roof.
“I wouldn’t bother,” she said.
I looked out at the deserted city whistling past. Long tall lines of identical apartment blocks, all abandoned.
“Connie, where are we?”
She looked over the paper at me. She said nothing.
“Is this fucking Chernobyl?” I asked her.
“Pripyat,” she said, and started reading again.
I reached over and pushed the front of her paper down. She glared at my hand holding the newspaper.
“What-eh-at?”
“Pripyat,” she said. She nodded. “The city near Chernobyl.”
“What the fuck are you doing bringing me here?” I actually felt quite angry. No wonder we couldn’t open the windows to all that dusty air. The big mobile-phone whatsit would be a Geiger counter, I guessed.
“It’s where my client would like to see you.”
“Why?”
“They have their reasons, I’m sure,” she said smoothly.
“Is it one of these fucking oligarchs or something?”
Connie appeared to think about this. “No,” she said.
We came up to a big shed of a building that looked like it had been a supermarket once. A wide metal door rolled part-way up and the car drove straight in. We got out inside this brightly lit loading area that held a couple of other cars and a small military-looking truck with big wheels and lots of ground clearance. The air was cool. A couple of very large bald guys in shiny suits greeted us with nods and walked us up some steps, through a couple of those transparent plastic-curtain doorways. Between the two plastic curtains there was a bit with a big circular grating in the ceiling and another in the floor. A blast of air was roaring out of the overhead grating and down into the one beneath our feet. Then we went down a hushed, wood-panelled, soft-carpeted corridor to a door which opened with a sucking noise. There was a very big plush office inside, all bright lights and potted plants and desks and comfy leather sofas. One whole wall was a giant photo of a tropical beach with palm trees, shining sand and blue sky and ocean.
A very pretty round-faced girl with a bit too much make-up smiled from behind a desk with a couple of computer monitors and said something in Russian or whatever. Connie fired something back and we sat down on two of the plush leather couches, facing each other across a glass table covered in the sort of magazines you only seem to see in posh hotel rooms.
Before I had time to get bored there was a buzzing noise from the receptionist’s desk. She said something to Connie, who nodded at the wall of beach photo. There was a door in it that had been concealed until now. It was opening, all by itself.
“Mrs Mulverhill will see you now,” she told me.
(Ensemble)
A man bursts into a book-lined room. On a chaise longue, there’s an old man lying underneath a younger woman. They both look groggy and confused, lying/kneeling on the chaise. The man who has just burst in hesitates because the old man looks like the person he is supposed to kill, but he seems vacant, like a husk or something, and when the old guy’s gaze meets his – the man who has just broken into his private study and caught him mostly naked in flagrante with his mistress – the old fellow doesn’t seem outraged, ashamed or embarrassed. He just stares up, blinking, at the younger man, and looks confused. The young woman straddling the older man is staring, fascinated but unconcerned, at the gun he is holding. The younger man remembers what he is supposed to be doing and shoots them both in the head, twice.
They found the woman sitting against a tree just off the hill path. She was humming and making little chains of flowers. Three of them held her while the fourth garrotted her. She offered no resistance and they knew something was wrong. There followed some debate regarding how much they ought to tell the people who had hired them.
The body washed up on the beach near Chandax was patently still smiling, despite having been nibbled by various aquatic fauna. A small crowd was gathering on the morning-cool sand. A man standing at the back looked at the expression on the body and frowned. He’d known it had been too easy, on the yacht, the night before. He thought about lying to his superiors.
The woman who’d sunk a razor-chisel between two of the Graf’s vertebrae conscientiously reported that her target had stopped humming along with the aria a moment or two before she’d struck, though she was adamant that she had been so silent – and so mindful as she’d entered the box of give-away drafts, not to mention careful of where her shadow might fall and her reflections might lie – that he could not possibly have realised she was there.
It was agreed that the admiral had been staring ahead rather blankly in the instant before she was shot, despite the fact her lover had just been cruelly cut down in front of her. Under pressure, the team agreed that perhaps the admiral had been transitioned just before her death. Under further pressure, they agreed to consider the possibility that so had the Commandante.
The assassination teams still could find no trace of Mrs Mulverhill.
I set some chips down on a green square, changed my mind and pushed them over to blue. I sat back as the last few gamblers placed their own bets and the croupier looked expectantly, impatiently around. He announced “No more bets” and spun the wheel. It whirled, glittering, forever if banally like a Ferris wheel from a funfair.
Through its whirring gilt spokes I saw the woman approaching the table. The ball inside the wheel clacked and rattled around the vertical spinning cage of spokes, battering off the blurred edges like a fly trapped in a bottle. The woman – girl? – moved with an easy, swinging step, almost like a dance. She was very tall and slim, dressed in flowing grey, and wore a small hat with an attached grey veil. I thought of Mrs Mulverhill immediately, though the woman was too tall and seemed to move differently. Not that that meant anything at all, of course. Veils were just about still common enough at the time for her not to look out of place wearing one, though she still attracted some looks.