Revenger

55

Celina Novak could still get a man into her bed. It was just a matter of quality. She had once had her pick of suitors begging for her favours, men willing to maintain her in a style to which she had very rapidly become accustomed. She had never had any qualms at all about accepting accommodation, clothing, jewellery and whatever other gifts might have come her way from men for whom she had felt precisely nothing. To her, all life was essentially a series of transactions. Now, though, she had much less value as a marketable commodity, and so she had to look for the kind of man who was drunk enough, or indifferent enough, not to care about a face, or the woman behind it, if the tits were big enough, the ass tight enough and the legs wide enough. The drunken Austrian businessman she had picked up in the hotel bar was proving to be so tediously unexciting that when the phone rang it came as a relief, rather than a distraction.

‘Stop,’ she commanded him. And then, ‘Get off me,’ as she rolled over to take the call.

‘Zhukovskaya gave me your number, Ms Novak. I have an assignment for you. The fee that we have agreed is more than double your usual rate. But I require your immediate presence. Are you available?’

‘Absolutely,’ Novak replied, silently shooing the Austrian out of her bed.

‘I’m so glad to hear that. An associate of mine is not well. I fear he may not last the night. I was also hoping you might be able to look after two friends of mine. Sadly, they are also very poorly.’

‘I’m so sorry. Can you give me the names of these individuals?’

‘Yes. They’re a charming couple: the Carvers — Samuel and Alexandra. I believe you may know them.’

‘We have met, yes,’ said Novak, giving no trace whatever of the exultant thrill those names had given her. ‘How do you wish to proceed?’

Fifteen minutes later a private ambulance had pulled into a side street half a dozen blocks from Novak’s hotel. She climbed aboard. As the ambulance drove away she undressed and sat on the edge of the gurney while a male nurse, working with deft efficiency, wrapped her head in bandages. Novak had to fight back the nauseating rush of alarm that came with the sensation of disappearing behind the gauze. It was too familiar to her, too closely associated with all the agonized, mummified months she had already spent having plastic and metal prostheses inserted where healthy bones had once been; new skin to replace burnt tissue; chemical fillers substituting living tissues. Her nostrils seemed to fill with the smell of her own roasting flesh, and her ears could hear the crunch of her face hitting the counter top. But then Novak remembered why she was doing this, and the momentary anxiety disappeared. More bandages were wrapped around her torso and along her left arm and hand. Then she lay down quite calmly on the gurney and held her bare arm out for the saline drip to be inserted.

The ambulance raced away, its light flashing and siren blaring, towards Le Bourget airport in the north-west suburbs of Paris. En route to the waiting jet her attendants presented the passport control official with documentation that gave her name as Mrs Anja Morrison, a UK citizen seriously injured in a road crash, who was being flown home to be close to her husband and three children. Minutes later, the plane’s wheels left the runway tarmac.

Soon after that, Novak sat up. She was handed a tablet computer. On it was a file containing details of her first target and the location where the hit would take place: a building in the West End of London. She examined the plans of the building and the description of its likely occupants and then, since she could not talk through the bandages, typed one-handed on to the pad, specifying what she would need in order to do the job.

Then she lay back down. Her drip was swapped for another that provided a high concentration of glucose, proteins, C and B-complex vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, giving her the energy and endurance she would need for the night ahead. As the liquid seeped into her system, Novak dozed. There were still twenty minutes left of the flight, and she wanted to be as well rested as possible before she went into action.