Red Notice

71

Haunted by images of what was happening to Tom and the children, Delphine choked back tears as she listened to the bullets blasting through the darkness. She fought to erase the horror from her mind. And failed. Her head twitched with every burst.

The old man lay dead beside her, along with his dreams of one more summer of love. His flesh no longer twitched from the shock of the two ceramic rounds that had torn apart the back of his head, but the blood still smeared the window where his face had been pressed against the glass. Giselle would never see her red roses. They would now just wither and die on the table by his seat.

Laszlo had switched off the mic. He wanted to make Woolf and the rest of them sweat. They, too, would be haunted by the memory of the gunfire. He was bored by Woolf’s constant attempts to play for time. He caught Delphine’s eye as he turned over the old man’s body with his boot. ‘It was almost a mercy killing,’ he said. ‘The old fool was shaking so much he nearly made me miss.’

‘Why did you not kill the woman too?’ Sambor goaded. ‘Has living in London made you soft?’

Laszlo liked it when his brother was happy. Sambor had become his responsibility now their parents were gone. South Ossetian and Russian troops might finally have won the 2008 war, but victory had come too late for their parents. Along with the rest of the elderly, the women and the children of their village, they had been massacred as the Georgians withdrew. It must have been so easy: their menfolk were all away at the front.

‘You’re a good man, Sambor.’ Laszlo held his brother’s massive head in his hands. ‘But you need to leave the strategic thinking to me.’ Then he smiled gently and hugged him, as he remembered the frenzied search in the burned-out ruin of their parents’ home, and their discovery of the two charred bodies.

Both boys had taken the deaths very badly. They had sworn vengeance against their murderous enemy. But while Laszlo could wait and plot his retaliation with infinite care, Sambor had had to lash out immediately. He had led the Black Bears on a one-night killing spree that would remain in Georgian memory for generations.

Laszlo had left Sambor in command as he’d linked up with his Russian allies and guided them to their final attack. He had had no objection to the slaughter. He had spent years killing ethnic Georgians. But now that they were so close to victory, such clumsiness had made the South Ossetians appear the aggressor, not the aggrieved. It had angered him — and saddened him too. Laszlo knew he should have comforted Sambor in his grief. He had let him down. He had let their parents down.

And so it was that Laszlo Antonov had done the honourable thing. He had allowed himself to be blamed for the massacre. He had protected his brother and his men from prosecution after the conflict had come to a swift resolution. At his trial he had been sentenced to death — unless he was prepared to name his accomplices.

Laszlo had held his silence. Despite the beatings, the starvation, the months in solitary confinement, he had never taken the easy road. That was what had made him a true folk hero. If ethnic Russians had idolized him before the war, those in the know had started to think of him as a true hero.

For more than a year he had sat on Death Row, knowing that at any moment the door might be flung open and he’d be marched in front of a firing squad.

The Black Bears had remained fiercely loyal. Under Sambor’s leadership, they’d tried their best to hatch a rescue plan. Aside from a suicidal storming of the impenetrable prison fortress, they hadn’t come up with one.

In the end, a combination of lies, bribes and promises of future positions of power had left eyes turned and keys hanging where they shouldn’t have been. And Laszlo was finally free.

He had defeated the Georgians. But the first promise he had made his brother at their joyous reunion was that, one day, they would have an even more satisfying revenge.

Their faithful followers had also waited for this moment. They had lived too long with their guilt over Laszlo’s sacrifice. They had missed the brotherhood of combat and the sense of purpose that battle provided. Better to be a small part of just one mission than to stare at an empty factory and swim around the bottom of a vodka bottle. Better to live just one more day as a Black Bear than to spend a lifetime scampering around the mountains of the Caucasus like a neutered goat.

Laszlo kissed his brother hard on the cheek, then stepped back and held up Delphine’s mobile phone. It still displayed Tom’s text message. ‘Look upon her as an insurance policy.’ He winked, and relished the sight of Sambor’s slow smile. ‘If that 7.62 fire hasn’t solved our problem, the lovely Delphine will be much more valuable to us alive than dead.’