Russian Roulette

НЬЮ-ЙОРК – NEW YORK

I had never spent so long in an aeroplane.

Nine hours in the air! I found the entire experience fascinating; the size of the plane, the number of people crammed together, the unpleasant food served in plastic trays, night and day refusing to behave as they should outside the small, round windows. I also experienced jet lag for the first time. It was a strange sensation, like being dragged backwards down a hill. But I was in excellent shape. I was full of excitement about my mission. I was able to fight it off.

I was entering the United States under my own name and with a cover story that Scorpia had supplied. I was a student on a scholarship from Moscow State University, studying American literature. I was here to attend a series of lectures on famous American writers being given at the New York Public Library. The lectures really were taking place. I carried with me a letter of introduction from my professor, a copy of my thesis and an NYPL programme. I would be staying with my uncle and aunt, a Mr and Mrs Kirov, who had an apartment in Brooklyn. I also had a letter from them.

I joined the long queue in the immigration hall and watched the uniformed men and women in their booths stamping the passports of the people in front of me. At last it was my turn. I was annoyed to feel my heart was thumping as I found myself facing a scowling black officer who seemed suspicious of me before I had even opened my mouth.

“What’s your business in the United States?” he asked.

“I’m studying American literature. I’m here to attend some lectures.”

“How long are you staying…?” He squinted at my name in the passport. “…Yassen?”

“One week.”

I thought that would be it. I was waiting for him to pick up the stamp and allow me in. Instead, he suddenly asked, “So how do you like Scott Fitzgerald?”

I knew the name. F. Scott Fitzgerald had been one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. “I really enjoyed The Great Gatsby,” I said. “I think it’s his best book. Although his next one, Tender is the Night, was fantastic too.”

He nodded. “Enjoy your stay.”

The stamp came down. I was in.

I had one suitcase with me. Both the suitcase and all the clothes inside it had been purchased in Moscow. Of course I carried no weapon. It might have been possible to conceal a pistol somewhere in my luggage but it wasn’t a risk worth taking. Thanks to America’s absurd gun laws, it would be much easier to arm myself once I arrived. I waited by the luggage carousel until my case arrived. I knew at once that nobody had looked inside the case either at Rome Airport or here. If the police or airport authorities had opened one of the catches, they would have broken an electrical circuit which ran through the handle. There was a blue luggage tag attached and it would change colour, giving me advance warning of what had happened. The tag was still blue. I grabbed the case and went out.

My contact was waiting for me in the arrivals hall, holding up my name on a piece of white card. He looked like all the other limo drivers: tired and uninterested, dressed in a suit with a white shirt and sunglasses, even though it was early evening and there was little sign of the sun. He had misspelt my name. The card read: YASSEN GREGORIVICH. This was not a mistake. It was an agreed signal between the two of us. It told me that he was who he said he was and that it was safe for us to meet.

He did not tell me his name. Nor did I ask. I doubted that the two of us would meet again. We walked to the car park – or the parking garage as the Americans called it – without speaking. He had parked his car, a black Daimler, close to the exit and held the door open for me as I slid into the back seat. He climbed into the front, then handed me another envelope. This one was also marked with a scorpion.

“You’ll find your instructions inside,” he said. “You can read them in the car. The drive is about forty minutes. I’m taking you to the SoHo Plaza Hotel, where a room has been reserved in your name. You are to stay there this evening. There’ll be a delivery at exactly ten o’clock. The man will knock three times and will introduce himself as Marcus. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. There’s a bottle of water in the side pocket if you need it…”

He started the engine and a moment later, we set off.

Nothing quite prepares you for the view of New York as you come over the Brooklyn Bridge; the twinkling lights behind thousands and thousands of windows, the skyscrapers presenting themselves to you like toys in a shop window, so much life crammed into so little space. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Rockefeller Centre, the Beekman, the Waldorf-Astoria… your eye travels from one to the other but all too soon you’re overwhelmed. You cannot separate them. They merge together to become one island, one city. Every time you return you will be amazed. But the first time you will never forget.

I saw none of it. Of course I looked out as I was carried over the East River but I couldn’t believe I was really there. It was as if I was sitting in some sort of prison and the tinted glass of the car window was a silent television screen that I was glimpsing out of the corner of my eye. If you had told me, a year ago, that I would one day arrive here in a chauffeur-driven car, I would have laughed in your face. But the view meant nothing. I had torn open the envelope. I had taken out a few sheets of paper and two photographs. I was looking at the face of the person I had come to kill. My first thoughts had been wrong. My target was not a man.

Her name was Kathryn Davis and she was a lawyer, a senior partner in a firm called Clarke Davenport based on Fifth Avenue. I suspected that the address was an expensive one. The first photograph was in black and white and had been taken as she stood beside a traffic light. She was a serious-looking woman with a square face and light brown hair cut in a fringe. I would have guessed she was in her mid-thirties. She was wearing glasses that only made her look more severe. There was something quite bullish about her. I could easily imagine her tearing someone apart in court. In the second photograph she was smiling. This one was in colour and generally she was more relaxed, waving at someone who was not in the shot. I wondered which Kathryn Davis I would meet. Which one would be easier to kill?

There was a newspaper article attached:

NY LAWYER THREATENED

In Red Knot Valley, Nevada, she’s a heroine – but New York lawyer Kathryn Davis claims she has received death threats in Manhattan, where she lives and works.

Ms Davis represents two hundred and twelve residents of the Red Knot community, who have come together in a class action against the multinational Pacific Ridge Mining Company. They claim that millions of tonnes of mining waste have seeped into their ecosystem, killing their fish, poisoning their crops and causing widespread flooding. Pacific Ridge, which has denied the claim, owns several “open pit” gold mines in the area and when traces of arsenic were found in the food chain, local people were quick to cry foul. It has taken 37-year-old Kathryn Davis two years to gather her evidence but she believes that her clients will be awarded damages in excess of one billion dollars when the case comes to court next month.

“It’s not been an easy journey,” says mother-of-two Ms Davis. “My telephone has been bugged. I have been followed in the street. I have received hate mail that makes threats against me and which I have passed to the police. But I am not going to let myself be intimidated. What happened in Red Knot is a national scandal and I am determined to get to the truth.”

I had also been supplied with the woman’s home address – which was in West 85th Street – and a photograph of her house, a handsome building that looked out over a tree-lined street. According to her biography, she was married to a doctor. She had two children and a dog, a spaniel. She was a member of several clubs and a gym. There was a blank card at the bottom of the envelope. It contained just four words:

MUGGING. BEFORE THE WEEKEND.

It is embarrassing to remember this but I did not understand the word ‘mugging’ – I had simply never come across it – and I spent the rest of the journey worrying that the driver or Marcus would discover that I had no idea what I was meant to do. I looked up the word the next day in a bookshop and realized that Scorpia wanted this to look like a street crime. As well as killing her, I would steal money from her. That way there would be no connection with Scorpia or the gold mines at Pacific Ridge.

The driver barely spoke to me again. He pulled up in front of an old-fashioned hotel, where there were porters waiting to lift out my case and help carry it into reception. I showed my passport and handed over the credit card I had been given.

“You have a room for four nights, Mr Gregorovich,” the receptionist confirmed. That would take me to Saturday. My plane back to Italy left John F. Kennedy Airport at eleven o’clock in the morning that day.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re in room 605 on the sixth floor. Have a nice day.”

During my training, Oliver d’Arc had told me the story of an Israeli agent working under cover in Dubai. He had got into a lift with seven people. One of them had been his best friend. The others were an elderly French woman who was staying at the hotel, a blind man, a young honeymooning couple, a woman in a burka and a chambermaid. The lift doors had closed and that was the moment when he discovered that all of them – including his friend – were working for al-Qaeda. When the lift doors opened again, he was dead. I took the stairs to my floor and waited for my case to be brought up.

The room was small, clean, functional. I sat on the bed until the case came, tipped the porter and unpacked. Before I left Malagosto, Gordon Ross had supplied me with a couple of the items which he had shown us during our lessons and which he hoped would help me with my work. The first of these was a travelling alarm clock. I took it out of my suitcase and flicked a switch concealed in the back. It scanned the entire room, searching for electromagnetic signals… in other words, bugs. There weren’t any. The room was clean. Next, I took out a small tape recorder, which I stuck to the back of the fridge. When I left the room, it would record anyone who came in.

At ten o’clock exactly, there were three knocks on the door. I went over and opened it to find an elderly, grey-haired man, smartly dressed in a suit with a coat hanging open. He had a neat beard, also grey. If you had met him in the street you might have thought he was a professor or perhaps an official in a foreign embassy.

“Mr Gregorovich?” he asked.

It was all so strange. I was still getting used to being called “Mr”. I nodded. “You’re Marcus?”

He didn’t answer that. “This is for you,” he said, handing me a parcel, wrapped in brown paper. “I’ll call back tomorrow night at the same time. By then, I hope, you’ll have everything planned out. OK?”

“Right,” I said.

“Nice meeting you.”

He left. I took the parcel over to the bed and opened it. The size and weight had already told me what I was going to find inside and, sure enough, there it was – a Smith & Wesson 4546, an ugly but efficient semi-automatic pistol that looked old and well used. The serial number had been filed off, making it impossible to trace. I checked the clip. It had been delivered with six bullets. So there it was. I had the target. I had the weapon. And I had just four days to make the kill.

The following morning, I stood outside the offices of Clarke Davenport, which were located on the nineteenth floor of a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, quite close to the huge, white marble structure of St Patrick’s Cathedral. This was quite useful to me. A church is one of the few places in a city where it is possible to linger without looking out of place. From the steps, I was able to examine the building opposite at leisure, watching the people streaming in and out of the three revolving doors, wondering if I might catch sight of Kathryn Davis among them. I was glad she did not appear. I was not sure if I was ready for this yet. Part of me was worried that I never would be.

The secret of a successful kill is to know your target. That was what I had been taught. You have to learn their movements, their daily routine, the restaurants where they eat, the friends they meet, their tastes, their weaknesses, their secrets. The more you know, the easier it will be to find a time and an opportunity and the less chance there will be of making a mistake. You might not think I would learn a great deal from staring at a building for five hours, but at the end of that time I felt myself connected to it. I had taken note of the CCTV cameras. I had counted how many policemen had walked past on patrol. I had seen the maintenance men go in and had noted which company they worked for.

At half past five that afternoon, just as the rush to get home had begun and when everyone would be at their most tired and impatient, I presented myself at the main reception desk, wearing the overalls of an engineer from Bedford (Long Island) Electricity. I had visited the company earlier that afternoon – it was actually in Brooklyn – pretending that I was looking for a job and it had been simple enough to steal a uniform and an assortment of documents. I had then returned to my hotel, where I had manufactured an ID tag using a square cut out from a company newsletter and a picture of myself, which I had taken in a photo booth. The whole thing was contained in a plastic holder, which I had deliberately scratched and made dirty so that it would be difficult to see. Maintaining a false identity is mainly about mental attitude. You simply have to believe you are who you say you are. You can show someone a travel card and they will accept it as police ID if you do it with enough authority. Another lesson from Malagosto.

The receptionist was a very plump woman with her eye already fixed on the oversized clock that was built into the wall opposite her. There was a security man, in uniform, standing nearby.

“BLI Electrics,” I said. I spoke with a New York accent, which had taken me many hours, working with tapes, to acquire. “We’ve got a heating unit down…” I pretended to consult my worksheet. “Clarke Davenport.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” the woman said.

“That’s right, ma’am.” I showed her my pass, at the same time holding her eye so she wouldn’t look at it too closely. “It’s my first week in the job. And it’s my first job,” I added proudly. “I only graduated this summer.”

She smiled at me. I guessed that she had children of her own. “It’s the nineteenth floor,” she said.

The security man even called the lift for me.

I took it as far as the eighteenth floor, then got out and made my way to the stairwell. It was still too early and I had a feeling lawyers wouldn’t keep normal office hours. I waited an hour, listening to the sounds in the building… people saying goodbye to each other, the chimes of the lifts as the doors opened and shut. It was dark by now and with a bit of luck the building would be empty apart from the cleaners. I walked up one floor and found myself in the reception area of Clarke Davenport with two silver letters – C and D – on the wall. There was no one there. The lights were burning low. A pair of frosted glass doors opened onto a long corridor, a length of plush blue carpet leading clients past conference rooms with leather chairs and tables polished like mirrors. My feet made no sound as I made my way through an open-plan area filled with desks, computers and photocopying machines, but as I reached the far end I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and suddenly I was being challenged.

“Can I help you?”

I hadn’t seen the young, tired-looking woman who had been bending down beside a filing cabinet. She was wearing a coat and scarf, about to leave, but she hadn’t gone yet and I had allowed her to see me. My heart sank at such carelessness. I could almost hear Sefton Nye shouting at me.

“The water cooler,” I muttered, pointing down the corridor.

“Oh. Sure.” She had found the file she was looking for and straightened up.

I continued walking. With a bit of luck, she wouldn’t even remember we’d met.

All the offices at Clarke Davenport had the names of their occupants printed next to the doors. That was helpful. Kathryn Davis was at the far end. She must have been important to the company as she had been given a corner office with views over Fifth Avenue and the cathedral. The door was locked but that was no longer a problem for me. Using a pick and a tension wrench I had it open in five seconds and let myself into a typical lawyer’s office with an antique desk, two chairs facing it, a shelf full of books, a leather sofa with a coffee table and various pictures of mountain scenery. I turned on her desk lamp. It might have been safer to use a torch but I didn’t intend to stay here long and having proper light would make everything easier.

I went straight to the desk. There was a framed photograph of the woman with her two children, a girl and a boy, aged about fourteen and twelve. They were all wearing hiking gear. There was nothing of any interest in her drawers. I opened her diary. She had client meetings all week, lunches booked in the following day and on Friday some sort of evening engagement. The entry read:

MET 7.00 p.m.

D home

I quickly checked out the rest of the room. All the books were about law except for two on the coffee table which contained reproductions of famous paintings. She also had a catalogue from an auction house… a sale of modern art. Briefly, I brushed my fingers over the sofa, trying to get a sense of the woman who might have sat on it. But the truth was that the office told me only so much about Kathryn Davis. It had been designed that way, to present a serious, professional image to the clients who came here but nothing more.

Even so, I had got what I had come for. I knew when and where the killing would take place.

I was back in my hotel room and at exactly ten o’clock there was a knock at the door. The man who called himself Marcus had returned. This time he came in.

“Well?” He waited for me to speak.

“Friday night,” I said. “Central Park.”

It hadn’t taken me long to work out the diary entry, even without a detailed knowledge of the city. The art books on the table had been the clue. MET obviously meant the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a New York landmark. I had already telephoned them and discovered that there was indeed a private function at the museum that night for the American Bar Association… Kathryn Davis would certainly be a member. The D in the diary was her husband, David. He was going to be home, babysitting. She would be there on her own.

I explained this to Marcus. His face gave nothing away but he seemed to approve of the idea. “You’re going to shoot her in the park?” he asked. “How do you know she won’t take a cab?”

“She likes walking,” I said. The hiking gear and the mountain photographs had told me that. “And look at the map. She lives in West 85th Street. That’s just a ten-minute stroll across the park.”

“What if it’s raining?”

“Then I’ll have to do it when she comes out. But I’ve looked at the forecast and it’s going to be unusually warm and dry.”

“You’re lucky. This time last year it was snowing.” Marcus nodded. “All right. It sounds as if you’ve got it all worked out. If things go according to plan, you won’t see me again. Throw the gun into the Hudson. Make sure you’re on that Saturday plane. Good luck.”

You should never rely on luck. Nine times out of ten it will be your enemy and if you need it, it means you’ve been careless with your planning.

I was back outside St Patrick’s Cathedral the next day and this time I did glimpse Kathryn Davis as she got out of a taxi and went into the building. She was shorter than I had guessed from her photographs. She was wearing a smart, beige-coloured overcoat and carried a leather briefcase so full of files that she wasn’t able to close it. Seeing her jolted me in a strange way. I wasn’t afraid. It seemed to me that Scorpia had deliberately chosen an easy target for my first assignment. But somehow the stakes had been raised. I began to think about what I was going to do, about taking the life of a person I had never met and who meant nothing to me. Today was Thursday. By the end of the week, my life would have changed and nothing would ever be the same again. I would be a killer. After that, there could be no going back.

The days passed in a blur. New York was such an amazing city with its soaring architecture, the noise and the traffic, the shop windows filled with treasures, the steam rising out of the streets… I wish I could say I enjoyed my time there. But all I could think about was the job, the moment of truth that was getting closer and closer. I continued to make preparations. I examined the house in West 85th Street. I saw where the children went to school. I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and found the room where the private function would take place, checking out all the entrances and exits. I bought a silicone cloth and some degreaser, stripped the gun down and made sure it was in perfect working order. I meditated, using methods I had learned on Malagosto, keeping my stress levels down.

Friday evening was warm and dry, just as the weather office had predicted. I was standing outside the office on Fifth Avenue when Kathryn Davis left and I saw her hail a cab. That didn’t surprise me. It was six forty-five and her destination was thirty blocks away. I hailed a second cab and followed. It took us twenty minutes to weave our way through the traffic, and when we arrived there were crowds of smartly dressed people making their way in through the front entrance of the museum. Somehow we had managed to overtake the taxi carrying Kathryn Davis and it took me a few anxious moments to find her again. She had just met a woman she knew and the two of them were kissing in the manner of two professionals rather than close friends, not actually touching each other.

As I stood watching, the two of them went in together. I very much hoped that the women would not leave together too. It had always been my assumption that Kathryn Davis would walk home alone. What if her friend offered to accompany her? What if there was a whole group of them? I could see now that I had made a mistake leaving the killing until my last evening in New York. I had to be on a plane at eleven o’clock the following morning. If anything went wrong tonight, there could be no backup. I wouldn’t get a second chance.

It was too late to worry about that now. There was a long plaza in front of the museum with an ornamental pool and three sets of steps running up to the main door. I found a place in the shadows and waited there while more taxis and limousines arrived and the guests went in. I could hear piano music playing inside.

Nobody saw me. I was wearing a dark coat, which I had bought in a thrift shop and which was one size too large for me. I had chosen it for the pockets, which were big enough to conceal both the gun and my hand which was curved around it. It was an easy draw – I had already checked. I would get rid of the coat at the same time as the gun. I was very calm. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I had played out the scene in my mind. I didn’t let it trouble me.

At nine-thirty, the guests began to leave. She was one of the first of them, talking to the same woman she had met when she had arrived. It seemed that they were going to set off together. Did it really matter, the death of two women instead of one? I was about to embark on a life where dozens, maybe hundreds of men and women would die because of me. There would always be innocent bystanders. There would be policemen – and policewomen – who might try to stop me. I could almost hear Oliver d’Arc talking to me.

The moment you start worrying about them, the moment you question what you are doing – goodbye, Yassen! You’re dead!

I put my hand in my pocket and found the gun. One woman. Two women. It made no difference at all.

In fact, Kathryn Davis walked off on her own. She said something to her friend, then turned and left. Just as I had expected, she went round the side of the museum and into Central Park. I followed.

Almost at once we were on our own, cut off from the traffic on Fifth Avenue, the other guests searching for their cars and taxis. The way ahead was clear. Light was spilling out from a huge conservatory at the back of the museum, throwing dark green shadows between the shrubs and trees. We crossed a smaller road – this one closed to traffic – that ran through the park. Over to the left, a stone obelisk rose up in a clearing. It was called Cleopatra’s Needle. I had stood in front of it that afternoon. A couple of joggers ran past, two young men in tracksuits, their Nike trainers hitting the track in unison. I turned away, making sure they didn’t see my face. The moon had come out, pale and listless. It didn’t add much light to the scene. It was more like a distant witness.

Kathryn Davis had taken one of the paths that circled the softball fields with a large pond on her left. She knew exactly where she was going, as if she had done this walk often. I was about ten paces behind her, slowly catching up, trying to pretend that I had nothing to do with her. We were already halfway across. I was beginning to hear the traffic noise on the other side. And then, quite suddenly, she turned round and looked at me. I would not say that she was scared but she was aggressive. She was using her body language to assert herself, to tell me that she wasn’t afraid of me. There was an electric lamp nearby and it reflected in her glasses.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you following me?”

The two of us were quite alone. The joggers had gone. There were no other walkers anywhere near. What she had done was really quite stupid. If she had become aware of me, which she clearly had, she would have done better to increase her pace, to reach the safety of the streets. Instead, she had signed her death warrant. I could shoot her here and now. We were less than ten paces apart.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

I was trying to take out the gun. But I couldn’t. It was just like when I had played Russian roulette with Vladimir Sharkovsky. My hand wouldn’t obey me. I felt sick. I had planned everything so carefully, every last detail. In the last four days, I had done nothing else. But all the time, I had ignored my own feelings and it was only now, here, that I realized the truth. I was not, after all, a killer. This woman was about the same age as my own mother. She had two children of her own. If I shot her down, simply for money, what sort of monster would that make me?

If you don’t kill her, Scorpia will kill you, a voice whispered in my ear.

Let them, I replied. It would be better to be dead than to become what they want.

“Who are you?” Kathryn Davis asked.

“I’m no one,” I said. I took my hands out of my coat pockets, showing that they were empty. “I was just walking.”

She relaxed a little. “Well, maybe you should keep your distance.”

“Sure. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Yeah – OK.”

She stood there, watching me, waiting for me to go. I quickly walked past her, then turned off in another direction.

I didn’t look back. Inside, I felt glad. That was the simple truth. I was happy that she was still alive. I was aware of a sense of huge relief, as if I had just fought a battle with myself and won. I saw now that from the moment I had climbed into the helicopter with Rykov – or Mr Grant – I had been sinking into some sort of mental quicksand. Mrs Rothman in Venice. Sefton Nye, Hatsumi Saburo and Oliver d’Arc on Malagosto… they had all been drawing me into it. They were like a disease. And I had come so close to being infected. I had been about to kill somebody! If Kathryn Davis had not turned and spoken to me, I might well have done what I had been told. I might have committed murder.

The sound of the gunshot was not loud but it was close and my first thought was that I had been targeted. But even as I dropped to one knee, drawing out the Smith & Wesson, I knew that the direction was wrong, that the bullet had not come close. At that moment I was helpless. I had lost my focus, the vital self-knowledge – who I am, where I am, what is around me – that Saburo had drummed into me a hundred times. Anyone could have picked me off.

Kathryn Davis was dead. I saw it at once. She had been shot in the back of the head and lay on a circle of dark grass, her arms and legs stretched out in the shape of a star. There was someone walking towards her, wearing a coat and black gloves, a gun in his hand. I recognized the neat beard, the unworried eyes. It was Marcus, the man who had met me at the hotel.

He checked the body, nodded to himself. Then he saw me. He had his gun. I had mine. But I saw instantly that there was no question of our firing at each other. He looked at me almost sadly.

“Make sure you’re on that plane tomorrow,” he said.

I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to explain what had happened, how I felt, but he had already turned his back on me and was walking away into the shadows. In the distance I heard the wail of a police siren. It might have nothing to do with what had happened here. Even if someone had heard the shot, they wouldn’t know where it had come from. But it still warned me that it was time to go.

I walked out of the park and all the way to the Hudson River with the darkened mass of New Jersey in front of me. I took out the gun and weighed it in my hand, feeling nothing but loathing… for it and for myself. At the same time, I was aware of the first stirrings of fear. I would pay for this.

I threw the gun into the river. Then I went back to the hotel.

The following day, I left for Venice.