Eye of the Red Tsar

PROLOGUE

Through blood-dimmed eyes, the Tsar watched the man reload his gun. Empty cartridges, trailing hazy parachutes of smoke, tumbled from the revolver’s cylinder. Clattering and ringing, they landed on the floor where he was lying. The Tsar dragged in a breath, feeling the flutter of bubbles as they escaped his punctured lungs.

Now the killer knelt down beside him. “Do you see this?” The man seized the Tsar’s jaw and turned his head from one side to the other. “Do you see what you have brought upon yourself?”

The Tsar glimpsed nothing, blinded by the veil which filmed his sight, but he knew that all around him lay his family. His wife. His children.

“Go ahead,” he told the man. “Finish me.”

The Tsar felt a hand gently slapping his face, the fingers slick with his own blood.

“You are already finished,” said the killer. After that came the faint click as he loaded new cartridges into the cylinder.

Then the Tsar heard more explosions, deafening in the cramped space of the room. “My family!” he tried to shout, but only coughed and retched. He could do nothing to help them. He could not even raise an arm to shield himself.

Now the Tsar was being dragged across the floor. The killer grunted as he heaved the body up a flight of stairs, cursing as the Tsar’s boot heels caught on every step.

Outside, it was dark.

The Tsar felt rain against his face. Soon afterwards, he heard the sound of bodies dumped beside him. Their lifeless heads cracked against the stony ground.

An engine started up. A vehicle. A squeak of brakes and then the slam of a tailgate coming down. One after the other, the bodies were lifted into the back of a truck. And then the Tsar himself, heaved onto the pile of corpses. The tailgate slammed shut.

As the truck began to move, the pain in the Tsar’s chest grew worse. Each jolt over the potholed road became a fresh wound, his agony flashing like lightning in the darkness which swirled thickly around him.

Suddenly, his pain began to fade away. The blackness seemed to pour in like a liquid through his eyes. It snuffed out all his fears, ambitions, memories until nothing remained but a shuddering emptiness, in which he knew nothing at all.