Betrayal (40 page)

Drake hesitated, momentarily daunted by the strength of his friend’s barely restrained fury. ‘Nobody wanted that to happen to you.’

‘Yeah? I didn’t see you shedding any tears,’ Mason raged. There was no way he was stopping now. ‘You know what it’s like to watch everything you spent your life working for just slipping away? And for what? For Anya? Look around you! You could have prevented all this, but instead you chose to protect
her
.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘You want to talk about fucked-up, Ryan? Maybe you should look in the mirror.’

Reaching out, he snatched the bottle of pills from Drake’s hand and made to leave. Only when he reached the doorway leading back inside did he pause and turn around.

‘And don’t worry, I doubt we’ll be seeing much of each other once this is over.’

He made sure to slam the door in his wake. Drake made no move to stop him. He felt numb as the full magnitude of today’s events settled on him. He could have told the FSB everything he knew about Anya, shown them exactly who they should be hunting for, but instead he had done nothing.

And people had paid for it with their lives.

So absorbed was he in these dark thoughts that he barely registered the buzzing of the phone in his pocket. Still churning over Mason’s words, he reached for the phone and hit the receive-call button, not even bothering to check the caller ID.

‘Yeah?’

‘Ryan, where are you?’ Miranova demanded. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

‘Why? What’s going on?’

‘We have something on Kalyuyev. I think you should get back here now.’

Drake let out a breath. Self-recrimination would have to wait for now; he still had a job to do.

‘On my way.’

He found Miranova in the makeshift operations centre, bent over her laptop with a pair of headphones covering her ears. She glanced up as he approached, her expression making it obvious they’d found something significant.

‘Kalyuyev just received a call from an anonymous number,’ she explained, laying aside the headphones. ‘The caller was a woman.’

Unplugging the headphone jack from the computer, she hit playback on an audio file.

The first voice was a man’s. Coarse and gravelly, and none too pleased to be taking the call as he mumbled what Drake assumed to be a cursory greeting.

Then he heard it. A woman’s voice. Strong and confident, with an underlying intensity that he knew straight away was matched by her piercing, icy blue eyes.

Anya.

‘What are they saying?’ he asked.

‘She is telling him that she has what he is looking for,’ Miranova explained. ‘And that she is ready to make an exchange of some sort at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘Where?’

‘Moscow, Poklonnaya Hill.’ Seeing his blank expression, she added, ‘It is a war memorial.’

Drake could guess what she was thinking. It was unlikely that two different women were involved in an operation like this.

‘Ryan, do you understand what I have told you? We have a lead on Masalsky’s killer,’ Miranova pressed, bemused by his lack of enthusiasm.

‘I understand,’ he replied quietly.

‘We are already preparing a flight out of here. If we hurry, we can be there in time to intercept them.’ She stood up from her workstation, visibly excited. ‘When Kalyuyev and this woman meet tomorrow, we will be ready.’

Drake couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Far from being elated at such a dramatic breakthrough, he knew the true implications.

Anya was walking right into a trap.

In the nationwide crackdown following the Beslan Massacre, more than 10,000 people were arrested and detained by Russian police. It was the biggest operation of its kind since the Cold War.

Afghanistan, 2 November 1988

The floor of the cell was freezing; nothing but bare concrete through which the relentless cold slowly seeped into her body. There was no heating, no bed, nothing. She lay there shivering, breathing in small gasps, each movement bringing a fresh stab of pain deep inside. Her only item of clothing was a man’s shirt that barely reached halfway down her thighs.

Her back was a mass of wounds, some old and slowly healing over with pink scar tissue, others still painfully raw and bloody. The clotted blood had soaked into the rough fabric of her shirt so that every movement tore the fresh scabs away and reopened the cuts.

She barely felt the pain of them any more. She had grown accustomed to it.

The last interrogation session had been hard even for her to endure. Twice she had been held down and raped, though the crude remarks and laughter that had once accompanied the experience had long since stopped. Even for her guards, it had become a grim task to be completed as quickly as possible.

If anything, it was worse to look up into their eyes as they did it to her in uncomfortable silence. She wasn’t even an enemy to be humiliated or reviled now. She was just a thing; just a piece of meat.

This was her life now. No one was coming for her. She knew that, and more importantly, she had at last accepted it.

She supposed she had always known, and yet she had clung to the forlorn hope that somehow there was meaning in this, that her suffering would one day be vindicated, that one day she would be rescued.

But she wouldn’t. She was alone, forgotten, abandoned. Her life meant nothing, either to her enemies or to her supposed friends.

Everything, every layer of armour she had surrounded herself with, every belief, every justification she had clung to, every source of strength and solace, had been stripped away. Her once strong and athletic body, hardened by years of training and experience, had been broken and battered into submission, barely enough to sustain her life.

She would never again be the soldier she had once been.

She squeezed her eyes shut as warm tears carved little tracks down her grimy cheeks. She had come down to it at last. The end of the line.

She was going to die here in this filthy, windowless prison cell. Cowed, beaten, broken down. This wasn’t the end she had imagined for herself; the glorious last stand where she could at least meet her death with honour and courage. Where she could die as a soldier should.

Not this. Not here. Not now.

Drawing her knees up to her chest, she at last gave in to the quiet sobs that she had been holding back all day as absolute, crushing despair pressed down on her like a physical weight.

Then suddenly she gasped, stirred from her grief by the horrible grating clang of a door being thrown open further down the block. She knew with terrible certainty what that sound meant.

They were coming for her again.

She felt her weary heart beat faster. Even now her broken and exhausted body was trying to help her survive, readying itself for the ancient, primal response to danger – fight or flight.

She could do neither thing. Her hands were bound behind her back, and even if they weren’t she doubted she had the strength to put up much resistance now. She was helpless, utterly vulnerable.

She could do nothing but lie there and wait for the end to come.

Moscow, 24 December 2008

Moving with the subtle grace born from long practice, Anya slowly lowered herself to the ground until she was kneeling on the cool earth. She reached out with both hands, allowing her fingers to gently brush the dew-covered grass stalks that swayed all around her, then bent down and wiped her hands across her face.

The touch of the morning dew was cool and refreshing, helping to focus her mind and sharpen her thoughts, to prepare herself for what was coming today.

She had performed this ritual many times in her life. It was one of the few things she had learned from her mother that she could still remember; some lingering vestige of the ancient beliefs that she kept alive.

In her heart she knew that she no longer understood its context or purpose, that in her ignorance she was just blindly following a half-forgotten memory long devoid of meaning, but she did it anyway. Just for a moment or two it recalled some wispy shadow of the woman who had brought her into this world.

Anya had often caught herself wondering what her mother would have thought of such a ritual being used before going into battle, whether she ever could have foreseen the future that lay ahead for her young daughter all those years ago.

She had lost count of the number of actions she had fought, the number of men she had killed, the number of times she should have died but hadn’t. Almost everyone she had ever cared about, everyone she had trusted and tried to protect, was gone now. But somehow she remained in this life. Old, damaged and worn down, she defiantly stood when all the others had fallen.

And once again she was going into the fray, risking her life to fight enemies she didn’t hate, serving a master she didn’t love. She had killed innocent men, betrayed those who trusted her, made herself a criminal and a terrorist. But it would be worth it, she told herself. To reach her final goal, it would all be worth it.

The ritual complete, she lifted her head up, opened her eyes and took her first breath of the chill morning air. She was renewed, reborn, ready.

‘Forgive me,’ a soft voice said. ‘I didn’t want to interrupt.’

Anya glanced over her shoulder to see Atayev standing a short distance away. She had been aware of a presence nearby, had heard the soft rustle of footsteps in the grass and known someone was watching her, but she had allowed it to pass.

She had also known it would be him. This was their prearranged meeting spot, and at this early hour the chances of a random encounter were practically nil.

‘I’m finished,’ she said, rising up from the ground.

The man looked uncharacteristically subdued and pensive, as if her actions had awoken a long-buried memory in him. ‘Who do you pray to?’

To a casual observer it must have seemed as if she were praying, prostrating herself before the God of Islam or some other deity. Anya had never known such faith, and certainly had no need of it now.

‘I don’t,’ she replied flatly. ‘We live or we die. Prayer won’t change that.’

‘Spoken like a true soldier,’ he remarked, then paused for a moment as if considering his next words. ‘I used to pray to Him, every night. Can you believe that? Asking God to keep my wife and child safe, to give me the strength to protect them and provide for them. I used to believe that would be enough.’ She saw the flicker of a grim smile cross his face. ‘When I realised how wrong I was, when I realised He didn’t care about me or anyone else, it was the most … liberating moment of my life. It freed me, to do what I had to without fear, without conscience or remorse.’

As he spoke, a change seemed to come over him. She saw that same cold, hard, remorseless look in his eyes that she’d seen when he emerged from Masalsky’s torture room. It was the same look she had seen in the eyes of many soldiers over the years – men who had witnessed such suffering and horror that it simply ceased to make an impression.

The man standing before her, small and overweight and untrained, no longer cared about living or dying. And that made him more powerful and dangerous than the men he had pitted himself against.

‘When this is over and I’m dead, what do you suppose they’ll say about me?’ he asked. ‘That I was a murderer, a terrorist … a sadist?’

He wasn’t asking for reassurance, for justification or comfort. His was a question born from idle curiosity; a man contemplating the end of his life and how it would be weighed up in the final analysis.

‘It doesn’t really matter now, does it?’ Anya replied. ‘What people say about you won’t change what you did, or why you did it. That’s what is important.’

‘I suppose so,’ he conceded. ‘Is it the same for you?’

Anya met his searching gaze without hesitation. Perhaps more than anyone she’d ever met, she felt as if she could be honest with him. He wouldn’t judge her, no matter what she said. ‘We each do what we have to, Buran. I can live with the choices I’ve made. That’s all I have to say.’

She knew now why he had sought her out this morning, why he wanted to speak privately with her. He had come to say goodbye, in his own way. In all likelihood they would never see each other after today.

‘The others are waiting for us,’ he said, assuming a more businesslike air now. ‘All except Goran. I haven’t heard from him since last night.’

‘You won’t,’ Anya promised him. ‘He turned against us. I had to deal with him.’

‘I see.’ There was no emotion, no regret over the man’s death. And no question over how it had come about. ‘Do you think he has compromised us?’

She had asked herself the same question many times since last night. Unfortunately, they would only find out for sure when they put their plan into effect. ‘Would it make any difference?’

Atayev shook his head. Like her, he was committed now. The only choice for either of them was to see this through.

‘We should leave. We don’t have much time.’

Anya nodded, rallying herself for this last effort. One more move, and her part in the game would be over. Her only hope was that Drake wouldn’t cross her path again.

Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow,
24 December 2008

Christmas Eve in Moscow’s main airport was about as far removed as it was possible to be from the world of war-torn cities and abandoned airfields that Drake had found himself in for the past few days. Everywhere he looked he saw cheerful decorations, robotic Santas, Christmas trees festooned with lights, expensive retailers selling last-minute gifts for frazzled travellers, and restaurants and coffee shops packed with customers.

The atmosphere of excitement, expectation and relief was the sort that one could only find in an airport on Christmas Eve. Most of the people here were on the final leg of long journeys home to spend the holiday period with their families.

For Drake too this airport represented the last leg of a journey that had carried him from Washington to Chechnya, and finally here to the Russian capital. Unfortunately for him, there was no family gathering or roast turkey waiting at the end of it.