Except it hadn’t worked out like that.
The first hit he’d carried out ruthlessly, using a handgun, a SIG-Sauer P226. The target was a high-ranking officer in a dissident Irish Republican outfit who’d been amnestied under some accord or other. The amnesty was a smokescreen, strictly for public consumption. The Chapel had other plans. Calvary had seen photographs of the man’s handiwork. Six innocent people gunned down, three of them children under twelve.
He hadn’t flinched, had emptied half the clip into the astonished face, obliterating it. He was accelerating away almost before the body caromed off the wall of the terraced house. In the drive to Belfast’s airport, on the flight back across the Irish Sea, Calvary had felt nothing. No disgust, no fear, but no exhilaration either. No sense of sins assuaged.
Never mind, he’d told himself. It would take time. He’d accepted a second job, and a third. Llewellyn always took pains to remind him that he could turn down any job, on any grounds – moral, practical – he liked, and no hard feelings would be nurtured. But he’d never felt the need to refuse.
His first twinge of misgiving came with number four.
It was the first hit he’d carried out on continental Europe. Florim Zagreda was a truly vile human being, a trafficker in hard drugs and women – Zagreda’s definition of women included girls as young as eight – who had eluded conviction once too often, thanks to a combination of sharp legal representation and systematic intimidation of witnesses. He was an international problem, but his involvement in the Albanian organised crime networks of East London sealed his fate as far as the Chapel was concerned.
Calvary’s problem hadn’t been with removing Zagreda from the human pool. It had been with the way the hit had played out. Zagreda was at an arms fair in Hamburg, brazenly flaunting his recent acquittal on some charge or another. He normally moved about with a retinue of heavily-armed cronies, and was known always to wear a Kevlar vest in public. Neither of these measures protected him when he was lounging in his hotel bath at four a.m. after a night’s debauch, and Calvary appeared in his bathroom out of the closet he’d been hiding in since purloining the cleaning lady’s key card earlier that day. Before the bodyguards could run through from the bedroom Calvary tossed the most low-tech of improvised weapons, an old-fashioned battery-operated transistor radio, into the bath.
The crackle and scream were eardrum rending, the churning mix of water and blood and effluent like a shark attack. Zagreda didn’t die at once. Calvary was through the bathroom window, every inch of his escape route having been mapped out in advance, but although he couldn’t afford to waste time he stared back in fascination as the head thrashed, lips rolled back to reveal an impossibly huge rictus, and a claw hand grabbed at the air – at the very air – in desperation.
It had nothing to do with sorrow for a life lost. Zagreda deserved to die if anyone did. Nor did Calvary care particularly that the man had suffered. Again, on récolte ce qu’on a semé. No, what unsettled Calvary, left him with a gnawing in his gut all the way back to London and beyond, and through his sleeping as well as waking hours, was the last images of an organism clinging to life. Clawing at it, as though it had never had a right to anything else. Outraged at its being torn away.
Perhaps Zagreda deserved to lose his life. But did Calvary have the authority to take it?
*
Back at the restaurant, Llewellyn had said: In answer to your unasked question – how can you be sure I’m telling the truth when I say you’ll be left alone after this job – all I can say is, I give you my word. And whatever you think of me, you have to admit... I’ve never lied to you.
Llewellyn was right. He’d never lied to Calvary. And he was right about the other thing, too.
Killing Gaines would kill Calvary’s past. Finally.
Calvary felt grimy after his flight. In the shower a few minutes later he almost laughed out loud. He realised he hadn’t raised the matter of remuneration. Had no idea how much he was being paid for the Gaines hit, or even if he was being paid at all.
*
‘Rise and shine, boss.’
Krupina jerked her forehead off her wrist, squeezed her eyes tight against the dazzle. Through strands of lank fringe she saw a Tamarkin-shaped figure shoving a cup of tea across the desk at her.
His face came into slow focus. He looked cheery, eager even, with no trace of the practised cynicism that usually marred his good looks.
Yes, she had to admit that bit.
He’s twenty years younger than you, you old bat. Get a grip.
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ She was furious: at him for having caught her out, at herself for having been caught napping, literally.
‘Right. Whatever.’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘Lev and Arkady are in position. Oleg’s trying to find suitable vantage points round the back. They can’t agree. You know what they’re like.’ He bounced on the balls of his feet, simmering with energy. ‘Your call.’
God. She knuckled exhaustion from the corners of her eyes. She’d slept wretchedly the night before, the pain and the coughing shaking her awake every few minutes. At nearly fifty, she needed more than three hours’ staccato sleep a night. Deserved it.
No. She didn’t deserve anything of the sort. Not yet.
Krupina spun the mobile phone towards Tamarkin. ‘Get me Oleg. He’s good at this kind of thing.’
The digital display of the clock radio said it was 12.30 p.m. She didn’t believe it, till she glanced at the window and saw the early afternoon shadows lurking beyond the grime.
*
Tamarkin had been in favour of an immediate swoop, as soon as she’d told him. The impetuosity of youth. She’d considered it, an early morning assault, quick and hard. But this wasn’t Moscow. The neighbours wouldn’t meekly retreat behind their own doors, not wanting to get involved. They’d call the police at the very least. Also, Krupina considered the possibility that Gaines had some sort of bodyguard or watch detail. Sometimes British intelligence provided it for retired people of importance, as the FSB did for her country’s own grandees. An open confrontation with agents of the British state wouldn’t go down well, whatever the immediate outcome.
She’d favoured a few days’ initial surveillance, but tugging at her had been a sense that she was doing what she’d done all her career, all her life. Being overly cautious. And it would mean opportunity would escape her grasp yet again. This time, though, there’d be no recovering.
The message in the diplomatic bag had been unambiguous: Sir Ivor Gaines, British citizen and retired Foreign Office bigwig, knew the identity of the enemy mole, the British mole, within the Kremlin. The existence of TALPA had first been suspected in the mid-eighties, but after 1989 it had been largely forgotten about as more pressing concerns – the wrenching apart of the Empire – had come to the fore. After the Yeltsin victory in 1991 there’d been a feeling amongst some of the higher echelons that TALPA, if he or she existed, didn’t really matter. Britain was our ally, and bygones were bygones. TALPA would either throw in his (or her) lot with the Moscow body politic, or retire quietly back to London.
All that had changed on New Year’s Eve, 1999, when President Yeltsin stood down, the joking was over, and the motherland began the long climb back to self respect.
Her options were three. (Do nothing wasn’t one of them.) She could arrange an immediate abduction of Gaines, assuming he was at home. She could put tags on him and observe him for a few days, a week, on the principle that there was no rush, and a complete picture of his movements would help avoid any complications such as the snatch being observed by any British intelligence agents he might be in contact with. Or, and this was the compromise she settled on, a synthesis of her position and Tamarkin’s: she could grab Gaines later that day, after he emerged from his flat and once preliminary surveillance had made certain the field was clear.