66 Metres (30 page)

She walked up to him, but he forestalled her, holding up his palm. ‘Jake asked me, all of us, which is why we're going out there. He never asks for anything. Said it was important, but also said we should be quick.'

She nodded without replying, and went inside the shack.

While she and Jake got changed under a harsh lightbulb hanging from the door, Nadia searched the equipment room.

Pete walked up behind her. ‘Is this what you're looking for?' He held out a brass large-bore pistol, which looked as if someone had jammed a fire-cracker inside it.

‘Yep, a flare gun might come in handy.'

Claus joined them. ‘No one will see a flare from where we'll be, it's too far offshore.'

Gary lowered his gear to the floor. ‘I don't think that's what she has in mind.'

Pete pocketed it.

‘The SEALs will be in a RIB, like us,' she said, addressing them all. ‘Aim for one of the rubber sides, the flare might just puncture it if it doesn't bounce off.'

Claus gave her a level stare. ‘They'll drown.'

Nadia shrugged. ‘They're called SEALs for a reason.' The SEALs would find a way to survive. Adamson might be a different story. She made the stakes clear. ‘Don't let them get close. If they board –'

‘Got it,' Pete said. ‘But they may not venture out anyway. We're in a lull right now, but the sea could easily get worse again over the next few hours before it finally clears up.'

As Pete locked up the shack and switched off the light, they boarded the boat quietly. Nadia knew that the reality of what they were doing had finally sunk in.

‘Listen, all of you,' she began, ‘you don't have to go. It's not too late.'

Gary cast off and Pete gunned the engine, reversing out then heading off at some speed. Above the noise, Claus yelled to Gary. ‘What did she say?'

Gary yelled back. ‘Dunno, I think it was Russian for “can we please get a move on?”'

She cleared her throat, then looked at each one of them. ‘Spasiba. From my sister as well.'

Pete glanced around for a moment. His face cracked a smile. ‘
Now
you tell me you have a sister?'

Jake answered for all of them. ‘You're welcome, Nadia, Katya too.'

It took longer than planned to get to the dive site. Dawn was arriving, and Nadia watched the layer of blood orange on the horizon. It was as if the sea had caught fire. Jake nudged her arm to get her attention, and raised his voice to enlist Gary and Claus while they slipped from relatively smooth waters into deeper swells.

‘Okay, listen up all of you. This is the plan…'

He outlined it, including a Plan B and C in case the SEALs arrived while they were down or were waiting for them when they came up.

It was reassuring, but she knew that if the SEALs arrived early, this would end badly.

‘Okay, get ready,' Pete shouted. ‘Almost there.'

She and Jake already had all their gear on. She put the regulator in her mouth, Jake opposite her. Claus and Gary weren't kitted up yet – they'd go in later.

Pete started the countdown, the engine still in gear.

‘Five.'

She thought of Katya and Kadinsky.

‘Four.'

Adamson and the two SEALs.

The engine shunted out of gear. She raised her right hand to her mask and regulator, ready for the backward roll.

‘Three.'

Janssen's shattered face.

‘Two.'

Danton, stone cold dead.

‘One.'

She locked eyes with Jake, kicked hard with her heels, and rolled backwards off the boat.

As she hit the dark water, her father swam into her mind, as if he were below, waiting for her. Good, he could watch her back. She met Jake under the boat, exchanged OK signals, and they both headed down into the darkness lit by the two cones of light from their lamps. Jake finned fast ahead of her, and she followed. The rusted prow of the Tsuba loomed out of the blackness to greet them. This was it. The Rose was down there.

She wasn't coming up without it.

Chapter Eighteen

Lazarus dreamed. He was younger, thinner, playing basketball, leaping high and sailing through the air, the ball in his right hand, the perfect slam-dunk, Sasha cheering him on at the finals. So fucking happy. Best time in his life. Then he was in his beloved red Lada. Sasha's hand on his thigh, her pinkie nudging the erection swelling inside his denims. He glanced at her and she winked. As he turned his gaze back to the road in front, the full beam of his headlights lit up a man swaying, the empty bottle in his hand glistening in the glare of the oncoming traffic. Lazarus swerved to miss him, ripped through the crash barrier like it was paper. The brief rasp of metal tearing was followed by the shrill revving of the engine as the Lada's wheels spun without traction. His breath caught, and Sasha's fingers clawed into his thigh as the white of the frozen river raced towards them.

The bounce slammed his head against the wheel, fracturing the bridge of his nose. His right hand uselessly reached across to try and hold Sasha back, but her gorgeous face smashed into the dashboard. They were in the air again, a fairground ride in a frozen hell. The second bounce, a crunch from the axle as the rear wheels gave way and the engine cut out. The Lada skidded like a drunken skater, spewing up a fountain of ice. Everything stopped. Ear-splitting silence. His heart pounded. Sasha looked towards him, bloody but not broken, and he pulled her into an urgent kiss as the first crack of the frozen Moskva's surface splintered the silence. The car pitched down.

‘Take three breaths,' he shouted. ‘As soon as the doors are clear of the ice push them open with your feet.' Frightened trust in her eyes, her breasts rising and falling in harmony with his own lungs pumping oxygen into his body. The car slid into the dark water, jagged ice scraping the metal like fingernails down a blackboard.

His hands braced against the steering wheel. The car tipped vertical, the silent darkness below punctured by one stubborn headlight. It imploded, leaving them encased in a freezing black coffin. ‘Now,' he shouted, and they both turned back-to-back, shoulder blades against shoulder blades, as they shoved with all their might against the doors and the turgid water flooding around them. It stung his legs, torso, head, made him scrunch his eyes closed, but the door opened. He waited till Sasha's weight left his back. She was out. He bolted upwards, kicking frantically with his legs, towards the dim light marking the hole that would freeze over in less than a minute, locking them in the river's depths till April. But his jeans caught on the bumper, and he was dragged down. He undid his belt with numb fingers and then kicked hard, free from his denims and shoes, and headed up again. Where was Sasha?

He half-shot out of the water onto the sticky ice, gasped in air, almost slipped back in again, but clambered and scrambled like a mad dog until he was on the surface. Sasha lay a few feet away, not moving. He crawled over to her. No breath cloud from her lips. There was shouting. Torch beams lit her up in flashes, like the club where he'd first spied her a year earlier. He heard voices of people who'd stopped on the road and run down to help, yelling words he couldn't understand. He gave her mouth-to-mouth, pushed against her sternum, two breaths and five compressions like he'd learned at school.

‘Come on!' he screamed. ‘BREATHE!'

Others arrived, but stood back. He could only see their lower legs.

‘Help me!'

But they didn't, and he knew she was gone. Weeping like a child, wracked by sobs, he kissed her mouth one last time. As he drew away, he saw a bloody hole in her forehead, a gunshot wound, clean, precise. That was wrong, she hadn't been shot, and he knew he was dreaming. He didn't care, any nightmare with her face in it was welcome. But it wasn't her face any more. He drew back and stared.

Katya.

Lazarus lurched awake, immediately sensing his far larger body, an orca compared to how he'd been at nineteen. Rubbing bleary eyes, he remembered where he was, on a small fishing boat destined for the Scillies. The stabbing pain in his gut visited him again. This time it was like two savage hands inside his body, rinsing his colon. He leaned over the side, threw up, thought he was finished, then threw up some more. Wrung out, he scooped his hand into the seawater and washed his face.

‘Don't blame you, that was a rough crossing, but we're almost there.' The bearded skipper shouted above the boat's engines in a strong accent Lazarus guessed was Cornish. ‘There's a cup of tea if you want.'

Chilled from the dream, Lazarus heaved himself up and cupped the mug in his hands, gulped the tea down greedily, then slumped back against the plastic padded bench. He refused to think about the cancer, because he knew how it could consume you not just physically, but psychologically as well, as it had his father. No, he was going to cheat it, die before it could win. And save the girl, Katya, into the bargain. Maybe take out Kadinsky as well, especially as it might be required to save the girl. Cheng Yi would be even better, but that was just plain dreaming.

Ahead of him, hazy yellow lights bobbed up and down, a sleepy town at two-thirty in the morning. St. Mary's, Hugh Town, harbouring less than two thousand locals, a few hundred tourists, and three people who didn't belong to life any more: Danton, Adamson, and the girl, Nadia.

Kadinsky had been clear. He wanted all three dead. Lazarus always considered his missions as a set of epitaphs already chiselled in marble.
Danton
– a torturer twisted by fate, leaving behind no one who would care.
Adamson
, an apple gone bad, survived by a family who would forget him and move on.
Nadia
… He knew less about her. Kadinsky had been unusually evasive. So, she was just another unknown soldier, who'd probably chosen to work as an agent for Kadinsky rather than become one of his whores. A poor choice as it turned out, though one Lazarus could respect.

It was done. In his head the three were already dead. Walking corpses who dreamed they were still alive. A bullet in the face for Danton and Adamson because they deserved to see it coming, one in the back of the head for the girl because she probably didn't deserve it at all. Then the Rose, back to Kadinsky, and a trade for Katya instead of payment.

Then… if he got that far, a second-hand Lada, a night-time drive along the banks of the Moskva, a midnight dip. What would his own epitaph be?
Second time lucky?
No, he didn't want it related to his second, post-Sasha, fat-man's life, defined by killing. Instead, he thought back to his younger days, of basketball, of Sasha, something she'd said to him once when cheering him on, after he'd executed a perfect, game-winning slam-dunk. He smiled. That was it.

He could really jump.

The engine slipped out of gear as the skipper grabbed a rope and leapt up onto the concrete harbour to secure the boat to the shore. Lazarus waited. He never hurried anything. He put down the empty mug, picked up his battered leather bag and stepped up onto solid ground, taking a moment to allow his head to adjust to the non-rocking version of the world, so he wouldn't stumble.

‘There's a few hotels that'll be open on the main street, you can see the lights of one of them right there.'

Lazarus glanced in the direction indicated by the skipper, nodded and headed off. But after several minutes he stopped at a deserted bus shelter, sat down and opened the bag. First he assembled the gun, a crude plastic and metal affair whose pieces, scattered inside his overcoat, had escaped the security agent monitoring baggage at Bristol Airport, not to mention the bullets secreted in the battery of a functional laptop.

It seemed like overkill – whenever he passed through security, what they saw was a dangerous-looking mountain of a man who could probably break heads with his bare hands. They always patted him down, as if he were stupid enough to have a Kalashnikov stuffed down his pants, never figuring he might have something more subtle hidden in his coat. Western security didn't get it. It wasn't about tech and hardware, it was about profiling, knowing who people were, watching them when they thought they weren't being watched. The West still had a lot to learn from Mother Russia.

He fished out his smartphone, activated the tracker. A map lit up, showing where he was, and Danton's location based on the phone Lazarus had given him. He'd start there, have a conversation, then close that particular unhappy life with a quick ending. No epilogue. Then he'd find Adamson, who'd be stupid enough to be in the best hotel in town, as if only criminals stayed in dumps. Then the girl. He got up, pocketed the gun, and wandered towards the edge of town, then picked up the single track road that led to Danton's digs on the southern promontory.

Remembering protocol, he paused and dug an earpiece out of his pocket and plugged it into his left ear, and tapped a short code into his phone. It took a minute, but he found the local police channel. Not much going on, nothing relevant at any rate. Continuing along the road, he tried to whistle, but he'd never been able to carry a tune. Still, he persevered for a while, an old folk song Sasha used to sing when she was in the kitchen making breakfast. But as he finally neared the only house in sight at the end of the road, he stopped whistling, and moved off the wet tarmac onto the grass so he could approach silently.

As he came closer, the light from the very last street lamp picked up a swirl of red in a puddle. Walking over towards it he found a sliver of bloody flesh, a remnant from a bullet's exit wound. It had been raining, so most of the evidence had been washed away. He put down the bag and retrieved his gun. Sasha had told him once that he could move like a tiger when he wanted to. Right now he very much wanted to. He stalked towards the house.

When he found Danton's corpse he put the gun away, and donned a pair of surgical gloves. He'd known Danton for twenty years. They'd had beers together, even done a few jobs together in the early days and cracked a few heads, but Lazarus had never turned his back on Danton for a second. The world was better off with him gone.