Close Quarters

TWENTY-FOUR

I walked back and found the woman lying where I’d left her. She wasn’t trying to get loose, but staring up at the sky, face blank, numbed. Waiting.

I’d seen this kind of reaction before in defeated fighters; it’s a mixture of shock, of fear, of wounded pride, of not knowing what to expect next. And of judging by their own standard of life that their options were strictly limited. Even so I wasn’t writing her off as a spent force; there was a glimmer of something still present in her that told me if I let her, she’d be all over me.

‘What was your assignment, Olena?’ If she was in any way official, such as part of any government agency, I was royally screwed and had no time to mess around. It meant my presence had been blown and I was going to have to hustle out of here. But to do that I had to know which way to run.

She shook her head, lips tight, then spat out a gobbet of blood. This wasn’t going anywhere.

I knelt down beside her, getting right in her line of sight so she’d have to look at me. I wasn’t trying to intimidate her — I figured that wasn’t going to work. But she couldn’t ignore me completely and it might make her say something unguarded. I noticed she was wearing ear-buds to drown out the noise of the rifle shot, so I flipped them out. She’d heard me plainly enough but I wanted to show her I had control.

‘You had orders to kill me. Who from? You don’t have to say, but I’m kind of interested.’

She told me to go screw a goat. Mildly creative but not helpful.

I said softly, ‘Thank you. Your colleague is dead. You want to join him?’

There were no more insults this time and she blinked in spite of herself. If I’d raged and threatened her, it might have been different. Nobody likes to be asked that kind of question, especially in a soft voice. It carries an air of finality, as if a line has been crossed and there’s no going back.

The silence was enough. Tough as she was, she wanted to live.

‘Your choice,’ I said, and swung the rifle barrel round to point at her. I held it steady just an inch from her left eye.

She blinked with shock. It must have been like staring down a rail tunnel. She hesitated for three seconds, then began to talk, speaking softly, as if worried somebody might hear. She was a former army sniper, she told me, now employed on a contract basis. When I pressed her she said it meant anyone who could afford to pay for her services, mostly private clients with enemies they wished to eliminate. It happens a lot in Eastern Europe, where competition for power and influence is brutal and the means to blast your way to the top of the heap are there if you have the money and the ambition.

I asked her why me.

‘I do not know. We were told to find you and stop you for good. I get paid to do this work, not to ask questions.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s my job.’

‘So who gave you your orders?’ It was a vain hope but you never know.

‘Ivkanoy. It was Ivkanoy.’

Surprise, surprise. The fat man with the attitude problem. Max had been right; Ivkanoy really was pissed. So much so he’d sent a couple of contract shooters to kill me.

Ivkanoy was a big man in the region, she said. He had ‘friends’ all over, including across the border. I didn’t need to ask which border; Max had already told me that. She’d done work like this for Ivkanoy before, she admitted. Her mouth turned down at that. I couldn’t figure out if it was a grimace at the memory or if she was nervous at how this chat was going to turn out for her.

‘How did you find me?’

They had been checking all routes west out of Donetsk, she said, and had struck lucky as I pulled out of Vokzal’na Square. They had recognized the car immediately; it was one of Ivkanoy’s pool cars and used for clean jobs around the city. The plates didn’t match the originals, she’d noticed, but how many red Toyota Land Cruisers do you come across in this part of the world? They had tucked in behind me until I’d pulled in at the truck stop and they’d been forced to go on by. They had stopped further on, but when I failed to show, they knew I must have taken a different route. By the time they got back to the truck stop, I was gone. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where I must have pulled off the main road and they’d set off after me.

‘So what does Ivkanoy want with me?’

She looked puzzled and shook her head. ‘He said you stole the car. We had to find you, no matter how long it took. He was real mad. He put out calls all over to watch for you. He said you would have already left the city, but we were the ones who got lucky.’ She glanced towards the gulley at her late colleague, who I guessed wouldn’t have agreed with her. ‘Where I come from red is a bad colour.’

‘Well, I hope he doesn’t want it back.’

‘He doesn’t give shit about the car.’

So it was all pride. Nothing to do with Travis or my reason for being here. He wanted to show that he wouldn’t take what I’d done to him lying down. At least that was something good; it meant the mission wasn’t yet a complete bust.

I made a mental note never to drive a red car again, though.

‘What else did you do to piss on his feet?’ She had a sly look on her face in spite of the gun. ‘Make him lose face? Sleep with his mistress?’

‘He didn’t tell you?’

She shook her head. ‘He does not have to explain.’

‘There was no “else” about it. He tried to cheat me, spat in my face, so I kicked his ass and broke his finger. It happens when you don’t play straight.’

She agreed that it probably did and glanced towards the burning Toyota and the coil of dark smoke rolling across the grassland. ‘Actually, I think he’s going to be madder than ever when he sees that. He liked the car.’ She didn’t seem too distraught at the idea, and I figured Ivkanoy wasn’t her favourite employer.

I relaxed a little. At least the mission hadn’t been compromised. The number of people who knew what I was doing was no more than four or five, maximum. To have been able to find me so easily in a country this size meant they would have had to know my coordinates, description — everything. And they didn’t.

‘So what were your orders? Precisely.’

She looked at me pityingly, before nodding out at the grassland around us. ‘There are pools here. Bogs. Very deep. You go in, you never come up again.’

That was pretty terminal. I nodded and thanked her, but she didn’t respond. She wasn’t happy about having talked so easily and I guessed in another life she’d be on my tail again to finish the job so nobody ever found out. Longevity in her kind of game meant being trusted never to talk even under pressure. Talkers were a liability and usually ended up dead.

I stood up and lifted the rifle. She turned her head away and waited.

I used the rifle butt to break her ankle. It was a kinder fate than the one she’d planned for me, or that one in her profession might have expected. But it would slow her down until somebody came along the road. More importantly it would get her off my tail. I didn’t need to kill her to accomplish that.

She hissed sharply but never uttered a word. She was a tough cookie all right.

I smashed her cellphone and collected my bag, then walked up the ridge to the Isuzu. The most urgent task was to call in and tell support. Callahan would have to know about any potential police activity arising out of the past few hours. Even if the incident at 24 Obluskva was put down to the political situation, a dead body and a burning vehicle out here would cause comment. And that might spread ripples out to a wider area. Before speaking to Callahan, though, I needed to put some mileage between me and this place.