Execution

ONE

She awoke to the scuff of leather shoes in the corridor. Eyes dragged open, gummy with sleep, then closed again, a reflex action. Easy does it. Relax. You’re safe.

She froze as a random thought wormed slowly through her befuddled mind. The nurses don’t wear leather shoes. She was familiar enough with the hurried tread of the consultants, or the heavier, measured stroll of the security guards. So who?

Outsiders. Not good.

She willed her breathing to remain steady. Not easy with a hole in her side. She focussed instead on the air around her, going over the small details to get her brain working. She’d been shot. She was in a hospital. King’s College, south London — the Major Trauma Centre, they had told her. She kept forgetting that bit. Stuff seemed to leak out of her head all the time like water from a holed bucket.

She concentrated. It was night, she was certain; at a guess, two a.m. There wasn’t the hum of daytime activity, the rush of feet, the voices; nor the beep of electronics signifying seconds to someone’s total blackness and a bed left empty. Wakefulness brought a throb in her temples and a woozy feeling from the drugs, and the stickiness between her shoulder blades from lying in the overheated, cloying atmosphere for too long. There was a tightness across her middle and the tug of plaster against skin, still tender and sore.

So who was out there? And why now?

The door to her room whispered open. Soft footsteps approached the bed, accompanied by a man’s nasal breathing. Her body shrieked with a sense of vulnerability but she remained still. It wasn’t hard — she’d had a lot of practice in this place; using it to distance herself as much from the probing of questions as of fingers, of their barely restrained curiosity about what had brought a civilian woman here with a gunshot wound.

A ghost of warm peppermint fanned her cheek. Along with it came the tangy smell of damp clothing. It made a change from the sickly aroma of anaesthetics and cleaning fluids. Must be raining outside. God, what she wouldn’t give for a walk in the rain and a lungful of fresh air. And a Starbucks to go. With a double shot.

Some hope.

She tensed as the man leaned further over her. She didn’t need to open her eyes to see him. Normal times, she’d have reacted by kicking back the covers and planting her foot in his face for invading her space. Watched him fall and lie still, before stepping over him and kicking him in the balls for good measure.

But these weren’t normal times.

‘She awake?’ A whisper from over by the door. A second man, the accent rough.

The peppermint smell receded. ‘I don’t think so.’ The air around her shifted and she sensed the man move to the foot of the bed, heard the clank of the clipboard being lifted.

‘What’s her problem?’

‘She has a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Not pleasant.’ This man sounded more educated.

‘So she’s army.’

The clank of the clipboard being replaced. ‘It doesn’t say. Most of them are, here. Who cares? She’s out of it, so not our problem.’

Footsteps moving away. The door closed and she once more felt the emptiness of space. They had gone.

She continued to remain still, fighting against the temptation to open her eyes. A minute ticked by in silence. Two. Three. Then the door huffed, as she knew it would.

Heavy breathing. They were back.

‘Well?’ The one with the rough accent.

A long pause, then: ‘She hasn’t moved. Come on, let’s get this done.’

‘What if she hears us?’

‘Then we’ll have to finish what the bullet started, won’t we?’

‘We could save the bother — do it now.’

‘No. There’s no time. The guard might come back.’ A pause, then a whisper, very close: ‘You’re lucky, Miss Jardine, whoever you are.’

The soft tread of footsteps moving away.

Lucky? Why am I lucky? Where the hell are the security guard and nurses?

She followed the men’s progress, visualising a mental picture although she’d never seen anything of the corridor outside. You don’t, when you’ve been gut-shot, see much of anything beyond the chaotic inner world that is the shock and pain and confusion of memories, some imagined, some real. All the rest is a blur of vague faces and ceiling lights.

The men didn’t go far. Next door or across the way, she couldn’t be certain. The corridor ended there. Two other rooms, two other patients. No, wait. Next door had gone not long after dark. Rushed to theatre in a controlled scramble of feet and wheels and clanking equipment.

They hadn’t come back.

If it was across the way, she knew who they were going to see.

Knew what they were going to do.

Because like the patient in that room, who had gabbled on almost non-stop since his arrival two days ago, including shouting his name several times, the two men had been speaking Russian. And suddenly the mush of details sloshing around in her brain was starting to make sense.

She understood Russian. And from what the man across the way had been saying over and over again, between bouts of silence, there was only one reason for these two men to be right here, right now, in the middle of the night, when the security guard was away, probably on a fag break.

They were going to kill him.

And if they found out who she was — and what she had once been — she would be next.

So much for being lucky.