Exit wound

An image filled my mind – of a twenty-one-year-old kid lying on a mortuary slab with the back of his head removed by a tumbling missile fragment. ‘So Semyon works for M3C. He was working in one of the companies sucked up by Brin? Weapons that Semyon had helped to build killed his son?’

She gave a shallow nod. ‘That’s why Semyon and I do what we do.’ She checked her watch. ‘Come, time to go and see him.’

Her wheelie-case bounced behind her as we carried on towards the station in silence. I could see the lights of the metro up ahead. I’d been keeping one eye on it. In the couple of minutes since I’d last looked, the crowd outside had almost doubled in size. Anna had noticed it too. In the harsh light of the entrance, over the heads of the people waiting to get in, I could see two grey peaked caps. Police were checking everyone returning from the flea-market as they passed through the turnstiles.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe they are searching for drugs. It happens sometimes…’

‘Let’s walk to another station, yeah?’

We edged around the back of the crowd and onto a main drag.

At the time Grisha was killed, everything was still for sale. Now it was more organized, and that made it more dangerous. It was easy to see why she was a woman with a mission.

But I had one too.

And if Semyon had found out where they were staying in the city, I could be done and out of here by the morning.

100

2348 hrs

Grey apartment blocks loomed either side of us. We kept in their shadows while holding the trigger on Semyon’s equally drab concrete building. Lights pushed through net curtains on two of the five windows that made up his second-floor flat.

An old diesel truck, a product of some ancient Soviet factory, belched fumes as it trundled past. We were about eight K away from the Gucci and Prada stores off Red Square. The tarmac was cracked and potholed. Areas of hard-packed mud that had once been turf were covered with a layer of dogshit and rubbish.

‘It’s a company apartment, Jim. He has done very well. The higher he has gone, the more information he has been able to discover.’ Anna told me this was a middle-class area, but it was like the old USSR had never gone away. Communism had produced generations that couldn’t have cared less about public areas. Why should they? The Party told them they’d take care of everything. Anything the other side of their own front door meant nothing to them. They weren’t even allowed to feel any responsibility for it.

‘Do you two have any tell-tales? You know – a sign to show it’s OK to go up?’

‘Yes – it’s always at night, so he has the kitchen light on, the one to the far right.’

I checked again to see if anyone else was watching his windows. ‘You sure that’s the only way in and out?’

‘Yes, Jim, it’s an apartment block. Just the one entrance and exit. And before you ask, those are the only windows. He has none facing the back of the building.’

She was getting a little bit crisp, but so what? Questions like these kept you alive.

‘He got a car? You see his car out here?’

‘No. He uses Grisha’s motorbike. It will be in the garage.’

She dug about in her pocket and replaced the battery. ‘Let me call him.’ She started pressing away.

‘How come you use a mobile if you two need to be so disconnected?’

‘It’s a pay-as-you-go. We both bought them for cash and only use them between us.’ She closed down the mobile. ‘His isn’t on.’

I took a breath and started to move.

‘No, Jim, it’s OK. He often forgets. He is getting old, that’s all. Come, we’ll check if his bike is there. Will that make you happy?’

I took her arm and we walked down an alleyway. The long, one-level strip of concertina garage doors ahead was covered with graffiti.

She led me to one about two-thirds of the way down, stood on tiptoe and pulled out a piece of broken concrete to retrieve a key. We lifted the door together. The smell of petrol and oily rags hit my nostrils.

Once inside and the door was down again she hit the power. A dull orange bulb hanging from a dodgy wire sparked up in the middle of the ceiling. Anna walked over to the bike. As she ran her hand over the metal it was as if her memories returned.

I knew about Urals. I’d blown a few up in Afghanistan with our IEDs. They were big, clunky pieces of Soviet engineering, a little underpowered but solid, and ideal over rough terrain, which was why the Red Army had bought them in their tens of thousands. This one still had its bullet-shaped sidecar fixed on the right-hand side, and was a mass of immaculate, gleaming chrome and black gloss – Semyon’s mobile shrine to his dead son.

Anna walked around the machine, reliving old times. ‘I come here by myself sometimes… birthdays, anniversaries…’

I felt the working parts while she sat in an old cane chair pouring her heart out. They were warm. Semyon had been using the Ural less than an hour ago.