The Carnival Master

5.

Maria guessed she had been bundled into the trunk of a car. Or a van. But even that idea had seemed to drift away from her. The fact was that they had tied her wrists and ankles, gagged and blindfolded her, then put some kind of bag over her head. Finally, they had placed what she reckoned to be a set of industrial ear-defenders over her ears. It was all classic special forces stuff: total sensory deprivation to befuddle the victim. Time ceased to exist. Maria was aware that her mind had been cut adrift from her body; she was losing the concept of arms, of legs, of being connected to her nervous system. She wriggled and strained against the bonds so that the rope would burn at the skin of her ankles and wrists. It worked for an instant and the connection to her flesh was reestablished, then faded and the pain became a vague ache lingering on the periphery of her being.

Maria had had no idea how long she’d been in the trunk, or even that the car had stopped moving, until she felt hands on her body, lifting her from the van. She was placed on a hard chair and left for a few minutes, a new bond tight around her chest and binding her to the chair. The tightness of the rope around her wrists had numbed her hands and the ear-defenders and the blindfold and hood deprived her of any sense of whether she was indoors or outdoors. She thought of how people were executed like this. Deprived of sight and hearing, she wouldn’t even hear the cocking of the gun or sense the presence of her executioner. It would be sudden and immediate: her existence snuffed out in an instant. Probably not the worst way to go, she had thought, but still her heart pounded. Only a few days ago Maria had been surprised at how little she feared death. But she had learned to live again by being someone else; her life had regained some value for her. She wondered if they would ever find her body. She imagined Fabel frowning as he looked down on her corpse, her hair bizarrely dyed.

The ear-defenders were suddenly gone. The hood was snatched from her head. Someone behind her untied the gag. Maria’s pulse quickened even more. Maybe torture would come before death. The blindfold was removed. The sudden restoration of her senses disoriented her and she sat, her head tilted down, blinking in the harsh light.

Her eyes adjusted. A man and a woman sat opposite her.

She appeared to be in a small empty warehouse or industrial unit. The whitewashed walls were naked and broken by a double door at the far end and a large thick sliding metal door to Maria’s right. There was a track system suspended from the ceiling, punctuated by pendant metal hooks. She guessed it was some kind of disused meat-packing factory.

The woman stood up and snapped a glass vial under Maria’s nose. Something powerful hit her system and she was suddenly and painfully alert.

‘I want you to listen to me.’ The man spoke first. His German was thick with a Ukrainian accent. ‘I need you to concentrate. Do you understand?’

Maria nodded.

‘We know who you are, Frau Klee. We also know why you’re here – and that you are acting on your own and without the knowledge, support or sanction of your superiors. You’re completely isolated.’

Maria said nothing.

‘You may be an accomplished police officer, Frau Klee, but when it comes to this line of work you’re a complete amateur. It takes more than a cheap hair-colour job to turn you into a surveillance expert.’

Maria looked at the woman. She was young and remarkably beautiful with bright, pale blue eyes. She wasn’t someone who could merge easily into a crowd. The man frightened Maria. He had the same kind of green eyes as Vitrenko, with that strange, penetrating brightness that so many Ukrainians seemed to have. His hair was almost black, and his pale skin was drawn particularly tight over the Slavic architecture of his face. He had an efficient, lean-muscled look, but Maria got the impression that he was tired.

‘So what happens to me now?’ said Maria. ‘Why have you brought me here instead of just dumping my body in the woods somewhere? Nothing I know is of any use to you.’

The Ukrainian exchanged a smile with the woman next to him.

‘Frau Klee, we have absolutely no intention of doing you any harm whatsoever. As a matter of fact we intervened, to put it mildly, because you were going to get yourself killed. And very soon. Did you really think that Kushnier didn’t know you were on his tail within minutes of him leaving the bar?’

‘Kushnier,’ said the Ukrainian woman. ‘Maxim Kushnier. Former Ukrainian paratrooper. Low-level operative in Vitrenko’s organisation. That was as far as you got… a street-level captain who has probably never met Vitrenko face to face. How the hell did you expect to have Kushnier lead you to Vitrenko?’

‘I didn’t. I thought it was a start.’

‘And it was very nearly the end,’ said the man. He stood up and nodded to the woman who came round behind Maria and cut through her bonds. ‘We were tailing you. Not that you or Kushnier would have noticed. You were both two busy performing that waltz on the Delhoven road.’

‘If we were dancing,’ said Maria massaging her now-free wrists, ‘then I was leading.’

‘Yes…’ said the Ukrainian, with a conciliatory nod. ‘That was impressive. But while you were wandering about lost in the Rhineland countryside, we tidied up your mess.’

‘Dead?’

‘You got him with three shots. Shoulder, neck and one through the kidney. The kidney shot would have caused him agony. Fortunately for him he bled to death from the neck wound.’

Maria felt suddenly sick. She knew she must have hit him, but not finding the car had meant, until now, not confronting the fact that she had taken another human being’s life.

‘So, you see,’ the Ukrainian said, ‘you’re now officially working outside the law. As are we.’

‘Who are you?’ Maria took the glass of water offered by the woman.

‘We are your new partners.’

‘Ukrainian intelligence?’

‘No. We’re not SBU. Technically, we’re police officers. I am Captain Taras Buslenko of the Sokil. It means “Falcon”… we are an anti-organised-crime Spetsnaz. And this is Captain Olga Sarapenko of the Kiev city militia, similar to your Schutzpolizei. Captain Sarapenko is part of the Kiev police’s anti-mafia unit.’

‘You’re after Vitrenko?’ asked Maria.

‘Yes. And he’s after us. What you see here are the remains of a seven-strong special unit put together to come here and… deal with Vitrenko.’

‘You’re planning to carry out an illegal assassination on German soil?’

‘Isn’t that exactly what you had planned to do yourself, if you got the chance?’

Maria ignored the question. ‘You said there were seven of you. Where are the others?’

‘Three dead. There were two traitors in the group. We met at an isolated hunting lodge in Ukraine. No one knew about it. By the time we worked out it was two of our own and not an attacking force, we were already exposed. Only three of us made it out of the woods, then Belotserkovsky took it in the back.’

‘My fault…’ The pain showed on Olga Sarapenko’s face. ‘I was injured and he was helping to get me out.’

‘I was supposed to be providing cover,’ said Buslenko. A silence fell between them and Maria could see that they were somewhere and sometime else. She knew what it was like to live and relive an experience like that.

‘So why didn’t you re-form a complete unit?’ she asked.

‘No time and no point,’ said Buslenko. ‘Time’s on Vitrenko’s side. We have to get to him before he gets to us. Hopefully, Vitrenko will have assumed that we have aborted the mission… that Captain Sarapenko and I are running scared. We couldn’t be sure that if we did rebuild a unit that we wouldn’t have infiltrators again. But we know we can trust each other. There’s only one other person we can rely on…’

‘Who?’

‘You,’ Buslenko said, handing Maria back her handgun.