Illegal Action

17

She had been trained to deal with any crisis, if necessary with violence, just as she’d dealt with that mugger the other month. In her lengthy training, they had made her kill. They took convicts out of the prisons—those who’d been sentenced to death—and put the trainees up against them. At the beginning they’d intervened to make sure the trainees survived. But later in the course, it was a free contest. No one interfered; it was a fight to the death. She had been determined that whoever died, it would not be her. She had surprised herself with the ease with which she killed—stuck the knife in or pulled tight the garrotte—and they had noticed too, the instructors, those hard-eyed, expressionless men whose job it was to turn out graduates of their courses who could survive in the most extreme situations. So she was chosen for assignments where violence was likely, though she had not expected to have to use it so early in this job, and not on the streets of London.

But, as she sat in her latest apartment off Victoria Street, it was not the possibility of violence that was causing her concern. It was something completely unexpected—the intrusion on the scene of British Intelligence. What, she wondered, had brought them buzzing around Brunovsky like flies? There must have been a leak, or why else would they have suddenly turned up? And why had he encouraged them? How much did they know and how best to deal with the situation?

Unzipping the computer bags, she took out the laptop and its small black companion, that would, she hoped, provide her with the answers, and laid them out on the dining table. Half an hour later, she leant back in her chair with a satisfied grunt and, looking out of the window at Westminster Cathedral, glowing pink in the setting sun, she imagined her message bouncing around the world, disguising itself as it moved from server to server, on its way to its eventual destination, a desk in a Moscow office building. A government office building.