SEVERANCE KILL (19 page)

She headed down the passage after Arkady, ignoring the angry sister. Said, ‘This one,’ and indicated the door of the side room.

TWENTY

The first thing Tamarkin noticed was the saline drip bag, held aloft, and he relaxed a fraction. It was another patient who’d wandered into the wrong room.

Then the man dropped the bag, ripped the cannula from his arm and pulled a chair over to the door, tipping it so that the back was under the handle, jamming it.

In two strides he was beside the bed.

Tamarkin watched through the slits between his lids, keeping his breathing even. It was Calvary. Last seen a second before the muzzle flash.

He was doing something to the infusion set linking the drip bag to Tamarkin’s own cannula. Tamarkin made his move.

*

If he’d been stooped a couple of inches lower the plastic shard would have gone into his neck, the jugular or the carotid. As it was the point pierced Calvary’s pectoral muscle through the cloth of the gown and through his shirt. He raised his elbow, tearing the shard out of the man’s hand, and tugged the point free. It had penetrated half an inch.

Tamarkin slumped back on the pillow. There was no fight in him, Calvary could see. He’d played his only card, a surprise attack, and he had nothing left.

Calvary heard the handle of the door being jiggled. Then the banging began.

He worked swiftly, drawing back the plunger of the syringe he’d palmed on his way to the room, fitting the needle to the end. Holding Tamarkin’s arm down with one hand he slipped the tip of the needle into the rubber stopper that sealed the projection from the infusion set, the one that allowed injections to be given using the same cannula.

Tamarkin’s eyes took in Calvary’s movements. He tried to pull his arm free but Calvary had it in a vice grip.

‘What are you doing?’ It was a whisper. His throat would be sore from the tube the anaesthetist had put down it.

‘Air embolus,’ said Calvary. ‘Fifty CCs of air to the heart. It’ll be relatively quick, don’t worry.’

The banging at the door was becoming frantic. Calvary heard the first of the kicks.

‘I’ll tell you –’

‘I didn’t come here for information. I came here to dispatch you.’ Calvary began to depress the plunger with his thumb.

‘
For God’s sake.
’ The more Tamarkin tried to raise his voice the more quietly it emerged. ‘
I can give it to you. All of it. I know where Gaines is.
’

‘As I said, I’m not really that interested.’

The kicks were coming hard, now. Calvary heard something splinter.

Always start an interrogation hard. Never cajole, never build up slowly. Go in at the extreme.
He’d found it useful advice in the past.

Tamarkin gave him Gaines’s location.

Calvary memorised it, hoping he’d grasped the pronunciation.

He had what he needed. He looked down at Tamarkin.

There was no justification for it. Except that if he didn’t do it, Tamarkin would alert Blažek as soon as he was able. And Blažek would immediately move Gaines to a new hiding place.

Calvary had no option.

He pressed down on the plunger.

The single opening window in the room swung on a horizontal hinge at the top. He pushed it. As expected it opened only a few inches, not enough to fit a human body.

Calvary jumped onto the bedside table, kicked the window out so that it snapped off its hinges. He peered down. A short drop on to a grass verge.

He was airborne as the chair wedged under the door handle finally gave way behind him and the door was flung open.

*

Krupina yelled, ‘Lev, he’s out the window, it’s Calvary, get round the back,’ into her phone as Arkady slipped out after him. The policeman stood in the middle of the room, staring at Gleb in the bed, at the second man disappearing through the window. The nursing sister and one or two other staff were trying to peer into the room. Nearby a patient had started to scream.

Krupina barged past into the room, shouldered even the policeman aside. Looked down at Gleb.

Then hurried to the window and gazed out.

*

The drop felt further than Calvary had been expecting, and the air was cold and sharp after the controlled temperature of the ward. He landed on his feet, his knees bent to absorb the impact, and he rolled on his shoulder and let the momentum carry him down the grass verge until it levelled out. With a fluid continuation of the movement he was on his feet and running.

He had a sense that if he followed the wall to the left he would arrive eventually at the area where the trolleys had been left, not far from where they’d parked the car. It was possible – unlikely, but possible nonetheless – that Nikola had already got out of the building. More plausible was that she’d either been caught, or was roaming somewhere inside, trying to evade capture.

Calvary felt the exhilaration in his belly like an accelerated pregnancy. Wherever she was, he’d find her. Make her safe. He had what he needed: Gaines’s whereabouts. All else was detail.

Something batted at his heel and he looked over his shoulder and suddenly he was tumbling, rolling over his shoulder again, this time on the hard concrete of the pavement. He’d been kicked, a low blow at his foot, expert, and it had sent him spinning. Through the blur of movement he saw the man, young, lean, coming in fast. Calvary extended a leg, rigid, and his boot caught the man in the stomach and jackknifed him, but he’d been ready and had tensed his abdominal muscles and so the blow wasn’t incapacitating. His extended knuckles raked at Calvary’s throat. Calvary parried with a sweep of his own fist, followed up with a jab at the man’s face. He fell short but the man jerked his head back and lost some of his impetus. Calvary heaved with his leg, threw the younger man off and was up again and running.

He came through the window after you. You should have been expecting that.

He rounded a corner into a blaze of sunlight, but that wasn’t why he recoiled. A car was heading towards him, breaking the rules, riding across pavement and chipping flint off bollards. He dodged left, finding himself hard up against the cold of the wall. The car slammed to a stop behind him and he ran on, aware of two presences at his back now, the lean man and whoever had come out of the car.

Nikola
, he thought.
Where are you? Did you get out?

He had the address where Gaines was being held. It was what he’d been seeking ever since the job had started to go wrong. He was close, he was
so close
. It couldn’t play out like this. He refused to let it.

Ahead he fancied saw the car park where they’d left the rental VW. It was unlocked with the keys tucked above the driver’s mirror. He just had to reach it, climb in, grab the keys and take off. Lose them, then circle back, find Nikola.

Then get Gaines.

The first blow crashed into the backs of his legs, dropping him into a kneeling position on the pavement. The second lashed across the back of his head, knocking the world into a grey, sickly haze. At some point he turned, felt his head crack the concrete. Saw two faces swimming over him. He punched out, hit something soft, saw one of the faces rock away. Then fists, battering his visual fields, crowding all else out.

It wasn’t supposed to play out like this.

The final blow landed and the daylight reversed itself into night.

*

Krupina reeled away from the window. She’d lost them, Calvary and Arkady, round the corner.

To the policeman’s confounded and terrified face, she said, for show: ‘My Embassy will expect a full explanation of how this was allowed to happen.’

She stormed out of the ward into the corridor. Gripped her phone, stared at the screen.

Calvary. Slipped away like quicksilver.

As though responding to some psychic communication of hers, the phone vibrated. Arkady.

‘We’ve got him.’

She closed her eyes.

*

The kid was scared, no question about it. But he hadn’t pissed himself yet.

Bartos brought his face close. This one wouldn’t spit.

‘You heard the shot.’

The kid tried to avoid his gaze, but couldn’t.

‘Your friend – Jakub, was it? Yes.’ Bartos edged closer. The boy’s fear smell pulsed off him. He wasn’t even tied. Was parked in the bare wooden chair without any restraints except the knowledge that he was helpless.

Bartos had barged through the door a few minutes earlier. He’d noted Miklos’s quick shake of the head and had known the young man – Max, he’d admitted to – hadn’t said anything.

‘Brainy guy, that Jakub. And how do I know this? Because his brains, lots of them, are painting the walls of the room next door.’

For a moment Bartos wished Janos was there. His deadbeat son hadn’t been good for much, but he shared his father’s sense of humour and knew when to appreciate a joke.

‘So I ask you once more, Max. How do we find your friend, Calvary? An address, a contact number. A car licence plate. Any of them will do.’

The sweat beaded on the boy’s forehead. His mouth quivered.

Bartos sat back on his heels. ‘Who are you, anyway? You and your late buddy Jakub? Do I know you? Has Bartos Blažek ever had anything to do with you before?’ He chewed the inside of his cheek, watching the wide eyes. ‘And how are you connected to this Calvary guy?’

The silence stretched between them until it was close to breaking point.

*

Blackness shaded to slate like dawn in a stormy sky. The aural veil began to lift as well: a miasmic slurry of sound gave way by degree to human speech, then distinct voices.

Calvary had been aware, intermittently, of travel. The ragged rumble of a vehicle’s chassis under his back. Hands beneath his armpits, lifting him. A supported propulsion forward and downward, his partially suspended feet tripping over steps that receded beneath him.

By the time his vision cleared entirely and he was able to be certain of what he was seeing around him, rather than experiencing it in some sort of dream, his overwhelming sense was of nausea.

He was in a windowless room of some kind, lit only by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cobwebbed flex directly above his head. By angling his eyes downwards he could make out flagstones. The sour, winey smell suggested he was in a cellar.

He was seated in a steel chair with one leg shorter than the others. His legs were secured to the chair with plastic ties around the ankles. Thin, tough cord lashed his waist and chest to the back of the seat. His arms, curiously, were free. He flexed his elbows, rolled the shoulder joints.

He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.

Somewhere off in the darkness, fluid dripped in an intermittent rhythm.

The uniformity of the shadow shrouding his immediate environment was torn open as a shape detached itself and stepped forward. A woman.
The
woman. Fiftyish, or past seventy. Of medium height, dumpy, ungainly. The flesh hanging off her like peeling wallpaper. Blue ribbons of smoke twined towards the lit bulb from the cigarette between her fingers.

‘Mr Calvary. You’re awake, I see.’ She spoke English, her accent heavy.

His eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. He could make out the horizon where the far wall and the ceiling joined. Over to the right, beyond the woman, sacks packed to splitting were piled man-high.

To the left, he made out a small wooden table. An orange lead curled from a wall socket up to the surface of the table. 

The lead ended in a grey appliance, scarred and dull but instantly recognisable.

An electric hammer drill.

TWENTY-ONE

The young man, Arkady, peeled out of the shadows beside the woman. In his right hand he bounced something. He tossed it at Calvary.

Calvary caught it, left handed. He didn’t need to look at it to know what it was. A squash ball.

He dropped it.

So it was going to be the hand.

Arkady had thrown the ball to see which hand Calvary used to catch it, reflexively, and thereby establish which one was dominant. They would think he’d have more to fear from damage to the hand he used the most. Calvary had anticipated this and used his left, non-dominant hand. This way his right hand might be spared.

The woman raised the cigarette to her mouth. From behind Calvary’s right shoulder a second man emerged. Bigger, older. Possibly the driver of the car that had cut Calvary off outside the hospital wall. He grabbed Calvary’s right arm and forced it round behind his back. Then he seized the left hand. Secured them together with a plastic tie.

It wasn’t going to be the hand, then. That had been a bluff, to get Calvary to relax a little. To make him feel as though he was in control.

The man moved behind Calvary once more. Calvary turned his head. He could see the man pushing forward something heavy. A workbench of some kind, with an iron clamp protruding past the edge.

The man’s hands forced his head round so he was facing forwards again. He felt the wooden edge of the bench against the back of his neck, felt cold metal press against his temples, smelled machine oil. Felt the jaws of the clamp tightening, compressing his head.

He tried an experimental shake of his head, found he had no range of motion at all in any plane. All he could move were his eyes.

Still the woman watched, the only movement her hand rising to her mouth to draw on the cigarette.

The big man stepped into Calvary’s field of vision. He took up the drill. Hefted it. Thumbed the switch.

The whine was ragged, as though the motor had done battle with hard surfaces scores of times before. The confined walls and ceiling of what Calvary assumed was the cellar amplified the noise.

The man brought the spinning tip close to Calvary’s eyes. Stopped the motor for a moment. Protruding from the clamped jaws was a masonry bit, eight or nine gauge by the look of it. The tip was shaped like a blunt arrowhead, designed for boring holes through tiles.

The man fired the drill up again, held it horizontal. Gripped Calvary’s hair in his other hand. Brought the blurred tip of the bit towards the centre of Calvary’s forehead.

It was time to go.

*

In the last four years Calvary had carried out six hits for Llewellyn and the Chapel. The kills had required meticulous planning, incorporating sometimes months of research beforehand.

Nonetheless, Calvary knew that at a metaphysical cocktail party someone would eventually approach him, gin and tonic in hand and ask: In between jobs, what do assassins actually
do
?

Calvary would have an answer in such a situation. He had spent the time in between hits mastering his weapons, his tools of the trade. He had achieved a high standard of knowledge in geopolitics, in military history, in game theory.

And he’d burrowed deep into the psychology and physiology of interrogation science, and implemented what he’d learned. Usually he’d been on the dishing-out end, finding out what he needed to know about the location of a target. Start extreme, with a serious threat to physical integrity – this was the most useful tactic in the interrogator’s arsenal. He’d employed it with Janos on the roof and with Tamarkin in the hospital room. And it seemed his captors, Krupina and her minions, were doing the same with him. No questions initially, just the promise of mutilation.

Calvary had practised being on the receiving end of a hostile interrogation, though until now he’d never found himself in such a situation while on a job. The best advice he’d had was from an elderly Chilean man, a survivor of the Pinochet terror in the early seventies. From this man he’d learned the technique of dissociation.

Most people he’d read of who’d undergone dissociation in whatever form found it unpleasant in the extreme. The Chilean dissident had described as a waking dreaming state, waking death, a sensation of cosmic, existential wrongness. It was a biological survival mechanism, kept alive in the species by its value in preserving the integrity of the psyche at times of extreme physical or emotional stress. It could therefore be usefully employed deliberately for the same reason, or to some other end, such as uncoupling the perception of pain from the recognition of what needed to be done to end that pain. Put simply, it enabled one to tolerate torture without providing the information that the torture was intended to elicit.

Dissociation which is achieved voluntarily was, however, no less unpleasant than the other kind, said the Chilean. It required one to do something profoundly counter-instinctive, which was to focus inwards rather than outwards towards the threatening stimulus. It involved disciplining one’s self to ignore something that all the senses scream was
not
to be ignored at any cost.

The first thing Calvary did was turn the drill into a snake, a special type of snake that was deadly but could detect only moving prey. If he remained absolutely still, slowing his breathing so that not even his ribcage moved, it would be unaware of his whereabouts. Calvary concentrated on stillness.

The next thing he did was find a tunnel within himself. Calvary’s knowledge of human anatomy told him there were plenty of tunnels leading from the head to the rest of the body: the oesophagus, the trachea, the foramen magnum in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passed. He needed a narrow passage, one down which the snake would have difficulty following him. The foramen magnum was the narrowest and least flexible, so Calvary opted for it. He became a small huddled homunculus, perched on the bony lip of the orifice, aware of the approaching snake and aware that the only escape, terrifying though it seemed, was downwards. He made the homunculus that was himself lean back over the edge until he was past the point of no return, and drop into the void.

Black walls with strange starry silver streaks in them rushed past as he built up speed. Calvary felt as though he were hurtling through time as well as space, plummeting away from the present with its immediate concerns – the drill/snake, Prague, Nikola and the others, Gaines – and towards a place in the distant, primeval past, where his sole concern was to perpetuate his life, existence becoming an end in itself. Calvary saw, or imagined he saw, primitive life forms as he descended: bizarre deep-sea beings festooned with machine-like attachments, blurred jelly shapes skittering past shrieking through enormous fanged maws.

Then Calvary stopped falling.

There was no trauma involved, no jarring. He simply ceased to drop, and hung in utter stillness. Around him, and above and below, the darkness was absolute. Calvary created a soft cocoon of gauzy light around him, a fire substitute evoked by his species memory to keep predators at a distance. Within the sheath of light he concentrated on making himself smaller, curling himself up into a ball, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped tight around his legs. He remained like that for a long time.

After a while Calvary looked up. Far, far above there was a pinpoint in the blackness. He made his eyes able to see with telescopic vision. This allowed him to identify the pinpoint as a square window. Through the window he saw a tiny man, himself, tied to a chair. A woman and one other men stood off near a wall, watching him. Another man stood over the man in the chair and did something to him. As though through miles of ocean water, Calvary could hear shouting. He didn’t need to worry about hearing what was said; it would all be there in his memory when he eventually surfaced again. Calvary closed the window with his mind and retreated into his cocoon of light.

The cocoon took on, slowly, a tangible physical character, like some alien material, impossibly soft yet clinging to every exposed surface. It was comforting. It insinuated itself into his ears, his nose. Then it crept between his lips and slipped around his tongue, worming its unnatural substance over and under his teeth. Calvary gagged. It crawled down his throat, suffusing both his gullet and his windpipe. It was suffocating him. He couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breath.

Panic seared through him. Calvary began to rise, growing huge, barrelling back upwards towards the surface. A far-off part of him cried out,
Not yet
. He tried to listen to it, tried to stop and reverse and go back down and become small and safe, but there was no safety there and he couldn’t. Instead, Calvary focused on understanding what had been happening while he had been under, and on deciding what to do next.

He had been injured. The extent didn’t matter for now.

He had told them nothing about who was employing him, why he was after Gaines, or where Gaines was being held.

He had to tell them something, because they would know he was nearing the end of his usefulness to them.

It was time to come back and play his ace.

*

‘Where is Gaines.’

The drill’s whine was accompanied by the ripping noise of the tip of the bit breaking the skin. Calvary stiffened in his chair, his back arching as far as it could against the restraints.

Krupina watched his face. His eyes were half closed, his teeth bared and glistening like a feral beast’s.

‘Why are you trying to find him.’

A new sound, that of bone splintering. Through the cellar odour of stale wine and damp, the keener tang of burnt blood made her almost gag. The cellar was beneath one of the several safe houses Krupina kept across the city. They hadn’t used it before, certainly not for something like this.

‘Where is Gaines.’

‘Why are you trying to find him.’

The same two questions, almost contradictory in what they implied, repeated like a chant.

Lev had done this before. There was a real art to it, or a craft, at any rate. You had to know when to stop, so that you didn’t penetrate the dura mater, the outer covering of the brain. Or, worse, the frontal lobes of the brain itself.

The Englishman’s face was obscured behind a caul of blood. His eyes were closed now, his breathing disturbingly slow and even.

A professional. So pain wasn’t going to work, nor fear of mutilation.

*

Returning was always highly unpleasant, rather like being born: from the hot suspended cradle of safety to the violent, screaming world of light and pain.

His eyes were gummed and stinging, his cheeks tacky and his mouth clotted with congealing blood. He couldn’t see his forehead but knew what had happened. He felt violated, penetrated.

The pain was terrible, a living untameable beast ravening through Calvary’s skull, down his neck.

The woman, Krupina, looked down at him, her face expressionless. Then she said something to the younger man beside her, Arkady. The man drew a pistol from inside his jacket and stepped forward. He pressed the barrel against Calvary’s forehead, beside the hole there, flicked off the safety. The older man in shirtsleeves, the wielder of the drill, moved away.

Calvary looked back up at Krupina, her face distorted as his vision began to blur.

‘I have a cell phone number that will get me through to Blažek,’ Calvary said. ‘It’s me he wants. I can set up a meeting with him. You can take him down then.’

He didn’t dissociate then, just passed out.