SEVERANCE KILL (18 page)

Calvary muttered something hoarsely and she bent to hear. He whispered: ‘Take us into the emergency room itself. I need to get a couple of accessories.’

They proceeded into the emergency room proper, the inner sanctum which those fortunate souls who were ill or damaged or persistent enough to get past the triage nurse were privileged to penetrate. Elderly quavering wails rose from curtained cubicles, and the sound of drunken puking was interspersed with clotted expletives. At the central hub, dog-tired young women and men spoke into phones or scribbled notes.

Nikola parked the trolley beside a wall of drawers and pretended to study a notice board. Calvary snaked an arm out from under the blanket and rummaged in one of the drawers, coming away with a roll of tape and a few alcohol swabs in individual packets. He groaned, struggling to a sitting position, and Nikola put her hands on his shoulders and began to talk to him in Czech in a half-consoling, half-chiding tone. His new position allowed him to peer into the other drawers and he lifted out a cannula, a plastic bag of saline and an infusion set. These he buried beneath the blanket before slumping back.

She wheeled him out of the emergency room into a corridor that led off into the depths of the hospital, pausing near the door to allow him to lift a cheap-looking stethoscope from where it was coiled on a small steel table. Nikola draped it around her neck, and instantly her appearance was transformed: she became a doctor.

A short passage off the corridor appeared to lead to the locked door of a disused ward. Calvary said, ‘Down there.’ They had to be quick; anybody glancing down the passage would wonder what they were doing there. Motioning Nikola to keep her back to the corridor and thereby provide a degree of cover, he lifted back the blanket and began to peel open the plastic packaging of the cannula.

He attached the infusion set to the saline, ran a little of the fluid through, hung the bag on the hooked rod that protruded vertically up from one corner of the trolley. ‘Squeeze my arm,’ he said. Nikola gripped his upper arm, making the veins in the forearm bulge. He inserted the cannula, used tape to secure it. It wasn’t much, an added detail, but it would help.

  Back in the corridor she stopped at a signboard indicating the directions of various wards and departments.

‘The theatres and pre- and post-operative wards are on the first floor,’ she said.

Now came the tricky part.

NINETEEN

The pain had hold of his entire body. It wasn’t the sharp burn of earlier, but a duller, less localised sensation that was aggravated whenever he moved.

Tamarkin opened his eyes to harsh lighting glaring into his face. For an instant he was back in Moscow on a training exercise, in the subterranean cells of the Lubyanka, being put through his paces while an interrogator alternately shouted and wheedled.

Then his situation snapped into focus as if a camera lens had been adjusted. He’d been shot, abdomen and leg. He was in hospital. He was alive.

He tried to lift his head. Apart from the pain the move set off, he felt the groggy, spinning nausea caused by the anaesthetic. Before his head sagged back he took in a small, low-ceilinged room. He was the only occupant, apart from a lone nurse who moved about amidst the beep and flicker of monitoring equipment. She caught his eye, smiled distractedly.

Tamarkin had a few memories of what had happened after he’d seen the muzzle flash from Calvary’s gun and felt the hammer blow to his stomach. He recalled finding himself at some point alone on the rooftop, and sliding the agonising distance towards where his gun had landed. He’d managed to kick the Makarov a good ten feet and was delighted through his pain to see the stock land near the gunman Calvary had shot. The immediate assumption would be that the pistol belonged to the dead man.

Further vague memories included shuffling backwards on his bottom until he reached the stairwell, then flopping back down it, before blackness claimed him again. Then, thirty seconds or two hours later, he couldn’t tell which, the intolerable racket of a helicopter’s rotors almost on top of him. Later, faces crowding over him as he was lifted on to some sort of bed – the operating table, he supposed.

He closed his eyes to take further stock. He remembered groping for his phone, finding it smashed by the impact of his fall; so the hospital staff would have been unable to run through his contact list to call anybody he knew. They’d have found his Mikhail Dubrovsky ID, so that was the persona he’d have to remember to use. They might already have contacted the Embassy, in which case Krupina would have been notified and would be on her way, if not already waiting outside.

He would have to come clean with Krupina. Not entirely, not about his association with Blažek; but he’d have to tell her that he’d attached a tracker to Calvary’s Fiat without her knowledge. Had done it to try and catch the man on his own initiative. She’d bawl him out, would probably arrange for his demotion. But he thought part of her might understand.

Calvary
. Had he learned of Gaines’s whereabouts from Janos? If he had, then Tamarkin thought he might succeed in springing Gaines. A few hours ago he would have thought this impossible. But time and again Calvary had evaded Blažek, had got the better of him, and Tamarkin had to assume this might happen once more.

Krupina had requested reinforcements from Moscow. Might even have received them by now. A dozen highly trained operatives versus what Tamarkin was coming increasingly to regard as an inept mobster rabble.

It was time to play a different hand. Time to throw in his lot with Krupina once more. To tell her where Gaines was being held.

*

A small group of people outside the lift stepped aside and Nikola smiled her thanks, easing the stretcher through them. Calvary kept his expression set, his eyelids fluttering.

By twisting his head Calvary managed to scan the corridor. Double doors ahead were marked with the legend OPERACNÍ SÁLY. Operating theatres. Another pair of doors on either side of the corridor halfway down appeared to open into wards.

They’d discussed what to do. Nonetheless, it was a tense moment. Nikola left the trolley and went forward alone, pushing through one of the sets of ward doors.

A porter came past with another patient on a trolley. He glanced incuriously at Calvary, on his own in the corridor.

She was back in under a minute.

‘Our man.’

‘Dubrovsky?’

‘Yes. His name is marked on the wall chart. He is in a side room.’

That would help. ‘Any guards?’

‘Two policemen. At the nurses’ station.

He considered.

It was a plan of such immense risk, to her as well as to him, that he almost rejected it out of hand. Almost.

‘Okay. This is what we do.’

*

Krupina was put through just as she was pulling the door of the Audi closed.

A bright young female voice said, ‘Yes, Mr Dubrovsky’s in recovery now. He’s doing well.’

Lev drove, swiftly but not at breakneck speed. Behind him Arkady watched Krupina’s eyes in the mirror, caught the relief, smiled.

‘Thank you. Please tell him that Krupina is on her way.’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘I’m a colleague.’

‘From the Russian Embassy?’

‘No.’ Had Gleb spun them a story? ‘Were you expecting an Embassy person?’

‘Well, the gentleman earlier said he was going to send someone down.’

‘Which gentleman?’

‘The one from the Embassy,’ the girl said patiently.

Krupina rubbed her face in confusion. ‘Did he give a name?’

‘I think so. It was Dr Grossman who took the call. I don’t know if he wrote the name down.’ There was the sound of rummaging through paper. ‘No, doesn’t seem to have.’

Krupina’s first call had established that Gleb had been operated on for a gunshot to the abdomen and another to the tibial bone in the right leg. She hadn’t been able to find out any further details.

While Lev drove she made another call, this time to an acquaintance at the Embassy. No, nobody at his end was aware of Tamarkin’s having been injured, nor had they been in contact with the hospital.

Arkady said, ‘What’s wrong, boss?’

For a moment she didn’t answer, trying to piece it together. She couldn’t.

‘Lev, step on it. Gleb’s in danger.’

*

The doors opened into a warm, brightly lit area saturated with the aroma of coffee and antiseptic. From his supine position Calvary glimpsed a flow of people in scrubs or white coats on either side. Standing at the nurses’ station were the two uniformed men, one of whom looked over his shoulder at them before turning back to his conversation. Calvary took in the pistols at their belts.

Nikola wheeled the trolley straight past the desk and further into the ward. From where he lay Calvary saw a whiteboard with names. Dubrovsky, M. Side room C, by the looks of it.

A nurse glanced across, called something out. Nikola replied, and Calvary caught the name they’d agreed on for him: Peter Farber.

The nurse came over, a stern matronly type. Nikola said, ‘Please, can we use Russian? The patient does not speak Czech.’

The nurse – her name badge identified her as Sister Anna Jelinek – stared at Calvary. ‘Why have you brought him here? We haven’t been notified.’ Her Russian was thickly accented.

Nikola ran a hand through her long hair, gave a harassed sigh. ‘He’s for surgery. They were supposed to let you know down in casualty.’

‘Where are his notes?’

Nikola made a pretence of looking on the rack under the trolley, then straightened, burying her face in her hands. ‘They’re not here. Oh God, they haven’t put the notes on.’ When she took her hands away Calvary saw she was actually weeping. ‘I’ll have to go and get them.’ She turned away.

Sister Jelinek said, ‘You can’t leave him here.’

Damn
, thought Calvary.

Nikola swallowed. She put a thumb to her mouth, bit the nail. Her hand shook.

‘Sister,’ she said. Her voice had the edge in it Calvary had noticed before in fellow soldiers after several hours of waiting for the enemy to show its hand. ‘Let me tell you something. I came on duty at one p.m. yesterday. It’s now ten a.m. I haven’t slept. I’ve had a sandwich and a bottle of water. That’s all. I’ve been forced to bring this bloody patient up here myself because there aren’t enough porters around. And now you have the gall, the –’

‘
Control yourself, doctor.
’ Sister Jelinek’s voice was like a bullwhip.

Nikola cut across the last syllable: ‘The
nerve
to tell me to take the patient away with me, as though it’s a pet of mine, a toy.’ Her voice rose to a shriek. ‘You know what? I’ve had enough. Of your attitude and those like you. Of this hospital. Of this job.’

‘
Doctor. Get a grip on yourself. Now.
’

Nikola backed towards the door, still shouting. A small crowd gathered at the nurses’ station, staff and patients alike, staring in alarm. The policemen were moving towards her as well.

‘I won’t be responsible, sister,’ she yelled. ‘I won’t be. For what happens next.’

He saw her turn and run, barging past the policemen. Calvary saw one of them start after her.

God bless you, Nikola
, he thought.
Now run. Just run.

Sister Jelinek shook her head, disgust etched into her face.

As quietly as he could, Calvary swung his legs off the trolley, acutely conscious of his booted feet and how out of place they’d look beneath the hospital gown. To a young nurse who was staring at the door, mouth agape, he said, ‘Toilet?’ She pointed vaguely down the passage separating the dormitories from the individual rooms.

He lifted the saline bag off the hook and carried it, moving unhurriedly down the passage, closing his ears to the shouts that would come after him. There was room C, on the left. He pushed open the door and went in.

*

Tamarkin had asked the nurse who seemed to be in charge of attending him for a phone. She’d said she would see what she could do, but so far she hadn’t come back.

Krupina would find him eventually, but if possible he wanted to get in contact sooner rather than later. He’d asked the nurse for a clock as well and she’d put a small digital display on the bedside table. Ten oh-nine. A little over three hours since the rooftop battle. Calvary might be working his way into the safe house where Gaines was being kept; might even have him by now.

A morphine pump in his arm allowed him to self administer pain relief. He’d used it sparingly until now, wanting to keep a clear head. But the screeching message from his leg in particular was overwhelming. He clicked the button. Sweet relief poured into his veins, his mind, almost immediately. For the first time he felt some sympathy – no,
empathy
was the word – for the raddled junkies he saw crawling around the edges of Gorky Park back home in Moscow.

Something slipped through the balm of warmth induced by the morphia. A scratchiness. He attended to it in a detached manner. A sound, was it? Yes. Not pain; definitely an aural stimulus.

Shouting. A woman’s fishwife shriek. Not the wails of the post-surgery patients in the ward outside his room, the ones he’d learned to accept as wallpaper noise in the short time he’d been conscious. Other voices: one of the nurses’, one he recognised from afar; a man’s, authoritative.

In his left hand the morphine trigger whispered:
love me. Use me
.

For the moment he didn’t need comfort. Pain would be more useful.

Tamarkin dropped the trigger. With his right hand he groped at the plastic water jug on the table beside the digital clock. Using both hands he snapped the jug, pulled a splinter free, a jagged length with a fat end tapering to a point. He writhed so that he could wrap the thick end in the blanket. He buried the weapon beneath the covers, and waited.

*

Lev dropped them at the entrance. Krupina and Arkady navigated the front doors of the hospital and the reception area, found the directions on the wall. Took the lift to the first floor.

When they stepped out, a young woman raced past them and down the stairs beside the lift, a doctor by the look of her: white coat, stethoscope draped over the neck.

She was screaming, yelling.

A uniformed police officer followed her at a run. Darya realised the doctor was speaking German. She didn’t understand the words but could tell the woman was both distressed and saying things that were perturbing the policeman.

Krupina peered down the stairs after them and caught a glimpse of the woman’s face as she looked back. Very pretty, long dark hair. In hysterics.

It was a ruse. Her eyes connected with Arkady’s. He’d reached the same conclusion.

She had her phone out and was calling Lev, saying, ‘Watch out for a young woman escaping, slim, dark hair,’ as Arkady went through the doors of the ward, the Makarov still inside his jacket. By the time Krupina entered the ward he was peering into the dormitories off to the right even as a battleaxe of a nursing sister clutched at his arm and shouted at him. A second policeman stood at the nurses’ station looking nonplussed.

A Babel of confusion rose and dipped around her but she ignored it and stared at the whiteboard on the wall. Saw the room where Dubrovsky, M. was being cared for.