“Mr Grant,” she said, and it took me a moment to realize she was talking to Rykov. “How did it go?” Her voice was very young. She spoke English with a strange accent which I couldn’t place.
“There was no problem, Mrs Rothman,” Rykov – or Grant – replied.
“You killed Sharkovsky?”
“Three bullets. I got into the compound, thanks to the helicopter pilot. He flew me out again. Everything went according to plan.”
“Not quite.” She smiled and her eyes were bright but I knew something bad was coming and I was right. Slowly she turned to face me as if noticing me for the first time. Her eyes lingered on me. I couldn’t tell what was in her mind. “I do not remember asking you to bring me a Russian boy.”
Grant shrugged. “He helped me and I brought him here because it seemed the easiest thing to do. It occurred to me that he might be useful to you … and to Scorpia. He has no background, no family, no identity. He’s shown himself to have a certain amount of courage. But if you don’t need him, I’ll get rid of him for you. And of course there’ll be no extra charge.”
I had been struggling to follow all this. My teacher, Nigel Brown, had done a good job – my English was very advanced. But still, it was the first time I had heard it spoken by other people, and there were one or two words I didn’t understand. But nor did I need to. I fully understood the offer that Grant had just made and knew that once again my life was in the balance. The worst of it was that there was nothing I could do. I had nothing to say. I’d never be able to fight my way out of this house. I could only sit there and see what this woman decided.
She took her time. I felt her examining me and tried not to show how afraid I was. “That’s very generous of you, Mr Grant,” she said, at last. “But what gives you the idea that I can’t deal with this myself?”
I hadn’t seen her lower her hand beneath the surface of the table but when she raised it, she was holding a gun, a silver revolver that had been polished until it shone. She held it almost like a fashion accessory, a perfectly manicured finger curling around the trigger. It was pointing at me and I could see that she was deadly serious. She intended to use it.
I tried to speak. No words came out.
“It’s rather a shame,” Mrs Rothman went on. “I don’t enjoy killing, but you know how it is. Scorpia will not accept a second-rate job.” Her hand hadn’t moved but her eyes slid back to Grant. “Sharkovsky isn’t dead.”
“What?” Grant was shocked.
Mrs Rothman moved her arm so that the gun was facing him. She pulled the trigger. Grant was killed instantly, propelled backwards in his chair, crashing onto the floor.
I stared. The noise of the explosion was ringing in my ears. She swung the gun back to me.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” she asked.
“Sharkovsky’s dead!” I gasped. It was all I could think to say. “He was shot three times.”
“That may well be true. Unfortunately, our intelligence is that he survived. He’s in hospital in Moscow. He’s critical. But the doctors say he’ll pull through.”
I didn’t know how to react to this information. It seemed impossible. The shots had been fired at close range. I had seen him thrown off his feet. And yet I had always said he was the devil. Perhaps it would take more than bullets to end his life.
The gun was still pointing at me. I waited for Mrs Rothman to fire again. But suddenly she smiled as if nothing had happened, put the gun down and stood up.
“Would you like a glass of Coke?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Please don’t ask me to repeat myself, Yassen. I find it very boring. We can’t sit and talk here, with a dead body in the room. It isn’t dignified. Let’s go next door.”
She slid out from behind the desk and I followed her through a door that I hadn’t noticed before – it was part of a bookshelf covered with fake books so as not to spoil the pattern. There was a much larger living room behind the door with two plump sofas on either side of a glass table and a massive stone fireplace, though no fire. Fresh flowers had been arranged in a vase and the scent of them hung in the air. Drinks – Coke for me, iced tea for her – had already been served.
We sat down.
“Were you shocked by that, Yassen?” she asked.
I shook my head, not quite daring to speak yet.
“It was very unpleasant but I’m afraid you can’t allow anyone too many chances in our line of work. It sends out the wrong message. This wasn’t the first time Mr Grant had made mistakes. Even bringing you here and not disposing of you when you were in Boltino frankly made me question his judgement. But never mind that now. Here you are and I want to talk about you. I know a little about you but I’d like to hear the rest. Your parents are dead, I understand.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me how it happened. Tell me all of it. See if you can keep it brief, though. I’m only interested in the bare essentials. I have a long day…”
So I told her everything. Right then, I couldn’t think of any reason not to. Estrov, the factory, Moscow, Dima, Demetyev, Sharkovsky … even I was surprised how my whole life could boil down to so few words. She listened with what I can only describe as polite interest. You would have thought that some of the things that had happened to me would have caused an expression of concern or sympathy. She really didn’t care.
“It’s an interesting story,” she said, when I had finished. “And you told it very well.” She sipped her tea. I noticed that her lipstick left bright red marks on the glass. “The strange thing is that the late Mr Grant was quite right. You could be very useful to us.”
“Who are you?” I asked. Then I added, “Scorpia…”
“Ah yes. Scorpia. I’m not entirely sure about the name if you want the truth. The letters stand for Sabotage, Corruption, Intelligence and Assassination, but that’s only a few of the things we get up to. They could have added kidnapping, blackmail, terrorism, drug trafficking and vice, but that wouldn’t make a word. Anyway, we’ve got to be called something and I suppose Scorpia has a nice ring to it.
“I’m on the executive board. Right now there are twelve of us. Please don’t get the idea that we’re monsters. We’re not even criminals. In fact, quite a few of us used to work in the intelligence services … England, France, Israel, Japan … but it’s a fast-changing world and we realized that we could do much better if we went into business for ourselves. You’d be amazed how many governments need to subcontract their dirty work. Think about it. Why risk your own people, spying on your enemies, when you can simply pay us to do it for you? Why start a war when you can pick up the phone and get someone to kill the head of state? It’s cheaper. Fewer people get hurt. In a way, Scorpia has been quite helpful when it comes to world peace. We still work for virtually all the intelligence services and that must tell you something about us. A lot of the time we’re doing exactly the same jobs that we were doing before. Just at a higher price.”
“You were a spy?” I asked.
“Actually, Yassen, I wasn’t. I’m from Wales. Do you know where that is? Believe it or not, I was brought up in a tiny mining community. My parents used to sing in the local choir. They’re in jail now and I was in an orphanage when I was six years old. My life has been quite similar to yours in some ways. But as you can see, I’ve been rather more successful.”
It was warm in the room. The sun was streaming in through the windows, dazzling me. I waited for her to continue.
“I’ll get straight to the point,” she said. “There’s something quite special about you, Yassen, even if you probably don’t appreciate yourself. Do you see what I’m getting at? You’re a survivor, yes. But you’re more than that. In your own way, you’re unique!
“You see, pretty much everyone in the world is on a databank somewhere. The moment you’re born, your details get put into a computer, and computers are getting more and more powerful by the day. Right now I could pick up the telephone and in half an
hour I would know anything and everything about anyone you care to name. And it’s not just names and that sort of thing. You break into a house and leave a fingerprint or one tiny little piece of DNA and the international police will track you down, no matter where in the world you are. A crime committed in Rio de Janeiro can be solved overnight at Scotland Yard – and, believe me, as the technology changes, it’s going to get much, much worse.
“But you’re different. The Russian authorities have done you a great favour. They’ve wiped you out. The village you were brought up in no longer exists. You have no parents. I would imagine that every last piece of information about you and anyone you ever knew in Estrov has been destroyed. And do you know what that’s done? It’s made you a non-person. From this moment on, you can be completely invisible. You can go anywhere and do anything and nobody will be able to find you.”
She reached for her glass, turning it between her finger and her thumb. Her nails were long and sharp. She didn’t drink.
“We are always on the lookout for assassins,” she said. “Contract killers like Mr Grant. As you have seen, the price of failure in our organization is a high one, but so are the rewards of success. It is a very attractive life. You travel the world. You stay in the best hotels, eat in the best restaurants, shop in Paris and New York. You meet interesting people … and some of them you kill.”
I must have looked alarmed because she raised a hand, stopping me.
“Let me finish. You were brought up by your parents who, I am sure, were good people. So were mine! You are thinking that you could never murder someone for money. You could never be like Mr Grant. But you’re wrong. We will train you. We have a facility not very far from here, an island called Malagosto. We run a school there … a very special school. If you go there, you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life – even harder than in that dacha where you were kept.
“You will be given training in weapons and martial arts. You will learn the techniques of poisoning, shooting, explosives and hand-to-hand combat. We will show you how to pick locks, how to disguise yourself, how to talk your way in and out of any given situation. We will teach you not only how to act like a killer but how to think like one. Every week there will be psychological and physical evaluations. There will also be formal schooling. You need to have maths and science. Your English is excellent but you still speak with a Russian accent. You must lose it. You should also learn Arabic, as we have many operations in the Middle East.
“I can promise you that you will be more exhausted than you would have thought possible but, if you last the course, you will be perfect. The perfect killer. And you will work for us.
“The alternative? You can leave here now. Believe it or not, I really mean it. I won’t stop you. I’ll even give you the money for the train fare if you like. You have nothing. You have nowhere to go. If you tell the police about me, they won’t believe you. My guess is that you will end up back in Russia. Sharkovsky will be looking for you. Without our help, he will find you.
“So there you have it, Yassen. That’s what it comes down to.”
She smiled and finished her drink.
“What do you say?”
ОСТРОВ
THE ISLAND
They taught me how to kill.
In fact, during the time that I spent on the island of Malagosto, they taught me a great deal more than that. There was no school in the world that was anything like the Training and Assessment Centre that Scorpia had created. How do I begin to describe all the differences? It was, of course, highly secret. Nobody chose to go there … they chose you. It was surely the only school in the world where there were more teachers than students. There were no holidays, no sports days, no uniforms, no punishments, no visitors, no prizes and no exams. And yet it was, in its own way, a school. You could call it the Eton of murder.
What was strange about Malagosto was how close it was to mainland Venice. Here was this city full of rich tourists drifting between jazz bars and restaurants, five-star hotels and gorgeous palazzos – and less than half a mile away, across a strip of dark water, there were activities going on that would have made their hair stand on end. The island had been a plague centre once. There was an old Venetian saying: “Sneeze in Venice and wipe your nose in Malagosto” – the last thing you could afford in a tightly packed medieval city, with its sweating crowds and stinking canals, was an outbreak of the plague. The rich merchants had built a monastery, a hospital, living quarters and a cemetery for the infected. They would house them, look after them, pray for them and bury them. But they would never have them back.
The island was small. I could walk around it in forty minutes. Even in the summer, the sand was a dirty yellow, covered with shingle, and the water was an unappealing grey. All the woodland was tangled together as if it had been hit by a violent storm. There was a clearing in the middle with a few gravestones, the names worn away by time, leaning together as if whispering the secrets of the past. The monastery had a bell tower made out of dark red bricks and it slanted at a strange angle … it looked sure to collapse at any moment. The whole building looked dilapidated, half the windows broken, the courtyards pitted with cracks, weeds everywhere.
But the actual truth was quite surprising. Scorpia hadn’t just watched the place fall into disrepair, they had helped it on its way. They had removed anything that looked too attractive: fountains, statues, frescoes, stained-glass windows, ornamental doors. They had even gone so far as to insert a hydraulic arm into the tower, deliberately tilting it. The whole point was that Malagosto was not meant to be beautiful. It was off-limits anyway, but they didn’t want a single tourist or archaeologist to feel it was worth hiring a boat and risking the crossing. The last time anyone had tried had been six years before, when a group of nuns had taken a ferry from Murano, following in the footsteps of some minor saint. They had still been singing when the ferry had inexplicably blown up. The cause was never found.
Inside, the buildings were much more modern and comfortable than anyone might have guessed. We had two classrooms, warm and soundproof with brand new furniture and banks of audio visual equipment that would have had my old teachers in Rosna staring in envy. All they’d had was chalk and blackboards. There were both indoor and outdoor shooting ranges, a superbly equipped gymnasium with an area devoted exclusively to fighting – judo, karate, kick-boxing and, above all, ninjutsu – and a swimming pool, although most of the time we used the sea. If the temperature was close to freezing, that only made the training more worthwhile. My own rooms, on the second floor of the accommodation block, were very comfortable. I had a bedroom, a living room and even my own bathroom with a huge marble bath that took only seconds to fill, the steaming hot water jetting out of a monster brass tap shaped like a lion’s head. I had my own desk, my own TV, a private fridge that was always kept stocked up with bottled water and soft drinks. All this came at a price. Once I left the facility, I would be tied by a five-year contract working exclusively for Scorpia and the cost of my training would be taken from my salary. This was made clear to me from the start.
After I had met Mrs Rothman and accepted her offer, I was taken straight to the island in the back of a water ambulance. It seemed an odd choice of vessel but of course it would have been completely inconspicuous in the middle of all the other traffic and I did not travel alone. Mr Grant came with me, laid out on a stretcher. I have to say that I felt sorry for him. In his own way he had been kind to me. I turned my thoughts to Vladimir Sharkovsky, probably lying in a Moscow hospital, surrounded by fresh bodyguards watching over him just as the machines would be watching over his heart rate, his blood pressure – all his vital signs. Who would be tasting his food for him now?
It was midday when I arrived.
The water ambulance pulled up to a jetty that was much less dilapidated than it looked and I saw a young woman waiting for me. In fact, from a distance, I had mistaken her for a man. Her dark hair was cut short and she was wearing a loo
se white shirt, a waistcoat and jeans. But as we drew closer I saw that she was quite attractive, about two or three years older than me, and serious-looking. She wore no make-up. She reached out and gave me a hand off the boat and suddenly we were standing together, weighing each other up.
“I’m Colette,” she said.
“I’m Yassen.”
“Welcome to Malagosto. Do you have any luggage?”
I shook my head. I had brought nothing with me. Apart from what I was wearing, I had no possessions in the world.
“I’ve been asked to show you around. Mr Nye will want to see you later on.”
“Mr Nye?”
“You could say he’s the principal. He runs this place.”
“Are you a teacher?”
She smiled. “No. I’m a student. The same as you. Come on – I’ll start by showing you your rooms.”
I spent the next two hours with Colette. There were only three students there at the time. I would be the fourth. The others were on the mainland, involved in some sort of exercise. As we stood on the beach, looking out across the water, Colette told me a little about them.
“There’s Marat. He’s from Poland. And Sam. He only got here a few weeks ago … from Israel. Neither of them talks very much but Sam came out of the army. He was going to join Mossad – Israeli intelligence – but Scorpia made him a better offer.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Where have you come from?”
“I’m French.”
We had been speaking in English but I had been aware she had a slight accent. I waited for her to tell me more but she was silent. “Is that all?” I asked.
“What else is there?” You and me … we’re here. That’s all that matters.”
“How did you get chosen?”
“I didn’t get chosen. I volunteered.” She thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t ask personal questions, if I were you. People can be a bit touchy around here.”