‘Where’s Ivan?’ Viktoriya demanded.
‘Out in front of the hospital with the others.’
With a rising sense of alarm, she grabbed him by the arm. ‘Go and find him.’
The second bodyguard came back with the glass of water. She took a long gulp knowing that it might be her last for a while.
‘Vladimir, Kostya’s men are coming.’
Viktoriya did not question her intuition. The police had abandoned them, and they weren’t going to be there when Kostya’s men returned and the shooting started.
One guard here and around seven between the ward and exit, she thought; enough to put up a resistance but not to overcome a determined attack. There were too many exits, and there was no way they could cover them all.
Ivan appeared, breathless, gun in hand.
‘We’ve got to get Misha out of this room!’
More bodyguards appeared. Moving Misha might kill him, but staying was certain death.
‘Okay, Vladimir, we need to move Misha to another floor. Disconnect the monitors; be careful not to touch the IV.’
Vladimir waved at a colleague. Carefully they began disconnecting the monitor. A third man quickly arrived as a nurse responding to the flat monitor signal ran into the room.
‘What are you doing? He’s in no state to be moved!’
‘The people who tried to kill him this morning are coming back for him now. They’ll be here any minute,’ said Viktoriya, grabbing hold of one corner of the bed and flipping the wheel locks with her foot.
The nurse looked terrified.
‘We need your help,’ said Viktoriya. ‘We’ve got to get him off this floor, hide him.’
‘There’s an empty ward two floors down. I can show you,’ she said, pulling herself together and checking the IV was properly in place.
‘Thank you,’ said Viktoriya. ‘I’m going to ask you another huge favour,’ she pleaded. ‘We’re not staying in this hospital; it’s too difficult to defend. I need you to come with us.’
‘But I have a ward to look after… this is totally irregular… I am not a doctor. Where are you taking him?’ she protested, no doubt frightened to be caught up in a street killing.
‘There are other nurses on duty tonight. You are not on your own. I’m afraid I can’t give you a choice in this but you will be well rewarded.’ Viktoriya mentioned a number greater than her annual salary.
‘Let me tell the other duty nurse. I’ll need to get medical supplies to take with us. Where are you taking him?’ she asked a second time.
‘I’ll fill you in on the details when we are on our way but you will need enough medical supplies for the night and tomorrow at least.’
Viktoriya turned to Vladimir. ‘Go with her!’ And to the nurse, ‘Don’t give your colleague any details. If the ward needs cover you can have them call one of the off-duty nurses. I’ll make it well worth their while too.’
‘Take him down to floor two, ward six. I’ll be down there in a minute.’ The nurse pointed down the corridor to the service lift.
The security men wheeled the bed out of the room while Vladimir and the nurse headed to the nurses’ room.
Viktoriya walked back into the office and picked up the receiver and dialled. Come on, come on. The phone rang for a minute before it was wrenched out of its cradle. A breathless voice answered.
‘Grigory, I haven’t time to explain. Get yourself over to Morskaya.’ She hung up without giving him the opportunity to respond, and dashed out the room.
The two men’s transit passed unnoticed as they made their way up from the underground staff car park. Moving from floor to floor, gripping automatics concealed underneath green hospital orderly overalls, they headed for the fourth floor. It had not been difficult to find out on which ward Mikhail Revnik had been placed; one call to a police contact had quickly resolved that.
It took them less than five minutes to reach the lift and take it to the fourth floor. Overalls hanging loose and unfastened, fingers tightly round the trigger guards of their automatics, they exited the lift. It was empty; the hallway was deserted.
‘Fourth floor, right?’
The other nodded and pointed at the room number.
The abandoned cardiac monitor stood there flatlining, making its singular high-pitched monotone.
‘Somebody left in a hurry.’
Dashing back into the corridor, they almost bowled over a nurse.
‘Where is Mikhail Revnik?’ the first man asked threateningly. He edged out the barrel of his gun from under his gown. Her eyes travelled up to the lift floor indicator. It rested on two.
‘We haven’t got time, lady.’ He raised the gun and put it to her head. ‘Now where is he?’
She hesitated.
‘I’m going to count to three and then pull the trigger.’
‘It’s probably the second floor… second floor, ward six,’ she stammered.
Ignoring the lift, they took the staircase down to the second floor and listened for the sound of movement. A motorbike zipped by on the road below; a flashing blue light strobed the length of the hallway. Holding their automatics in front of them, they eased out onto the empty, wide, green-lino-covered walkway. Above them a faulty fluorescent light flickered on and off. Flattening themselves against the walls, one on each side, they edged forward, moving door to door, alert to any sound or movement. Two-thirds of the way along, they froze. A chair scraped against the floor. Silently, one of the men pointed to a ward door, three down on the left, very slightly ajar. It was marked with the number six. His partner a few feet ahead of him crept forward and squinted through the narrow aperture. The room was dimly lit. He could make out the edge of a hospital bed and the slim figure of a blonde woman leaning forward, plumping up the patient’s pillow.
Where were the guards? His partner pointed to the swing doors further down. She must have stationed her guards on the other side. Their best escape would be back up the stairway. He held up two fingers indicating the number of people in the room, braced himself and kicked open the door.
A bullet hit him full in the chest, sending him cartwheeling backwards towards the door. Viktoriya was already on her feet by the time the second man rushed into the room; against the back light of the doorway he was a perfect target. Viktoriya squared the barrel of the Makarov to the silhouette and loosed off two shots in rapid succession. Still standing, a look of shock horror on his face, he raised his gun to exact his dying revenge on the woman he knew had killed him. The patient rose from his bed and shot him at almost point-blank range.
A bullet exploded from the chamber of the dead man’s gun. Viktoriya felt a searing pain in her leg.
‘You’ve been hit!’ shouted Ivan, jumping out of the bed.
‘It’s all right, it’s only a scratch… I can have this attended to later.’
They were still half deafened by the close proximity of gunfire. The whole episode could not have lasted more than thirty seconds.
‘There’ll be more from where they came from, and others outside. We’ve got to get Misha out of here quickly,’ Viktoriya said, as two of their own men appeared from the corridor.
‘We need an ambulance.’
Two doors down, a nurse attended Misha guarded by two security men.
‘Where is the ambulance bay?’ she asked urgently of the nurse who was clearly terrified by the thunderous exchange. ‘Look, we are all going to get out of here,’ Viktoriya reassured her, ‘but you’ve got to focus now,’ she said calmly.
‘On the east side of the hospital.’ The nurse clicked the ward phone disconnect bar up and down and was quickly put through to the ambulance bay. A voice she recognised answered. ‘Albert, we have an emergency. We need to transfer a patient to the Aleksandrovskaya Hospital.’