‘Are you okay?’ Stoyan asked. Tenishchev nodded, but Stoyan put his rifle down and eased back the parka where it was soaked in blood.
‘You say Serduchka killed Vorobyeva?’
Tenishchev nodded again. Stoyan was worried: there was a lot of blood but he couldn’t find the wound that was causing it.
‘Serduchka is one of Vitrenko’s men?’
‘Yes…’ said Tenishchev. ‘It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Do you know what’s even harder to believe…?’
Stoyan stared wildly into Tenishchev’s eyes. He found that he couldn’t breathe. He looked down and saw where Tenishchev had rammed his hunting knife up and under Stoyan’s sternum.
‘… So am I,’ said Tenishchev into Stoyan’s already dead eyes.
11.
Buslenko and Belotserkovsky had been lying flat, scanning the forest fringe for fifteen minutes. The sky was now dangerously light.
‘We’re going to have to move on…’ said Buslenko.
‘We can’t just leave Stoyan behind,’ protested Belotserkovsky.
‘Stoyan’s dead,’ said Olga Sarapenko with sudden authority. She was below them, down by the river, watching the opposite bank. ‘And so will we be if we don’t get out of the wilds. There’s a reason why Vitrenko’s targeted us here… either he is simply making sport of us as if we were a herd of wild boar, or he’s decided that we represent too much of a threat to him if we get to Germany.’
‘We’ll never make it to Germany,’ said Belotserkovsky dully.
‘He’s not going to get us here,’ said Olga defiantly. ‘I’m going to watch that son of a bitch die.’
Buslenko smiled. He turned to Belotserkovsky. ‘You ready to roll?’
Belotserkovsky nodded. Something drew his attention upwards to the brightening sky.
‘Take cover!’ he screamed.
12.
Maria had planned to sleep until mid-morning. She had put the ‘do not disturb’ notice on the doorknob of her room and had thrown herself onto the bed and fallen asleep almost immediately. When she awoke she was annoyed to find herself still fully dressed – her unbrushed teeth and mouth felt coated. She lay for a moment not knowing, not remembering what it was that was causing the nauseating ache in her chest. Then it came back to her: the crushing remembrance of firing into the car. She had probably killed someone. Maria had committed the crime that she was supposed to prevent, to solve. She could probably quite legitimately claim in a court that she’d been acting in self-defence. But the gun was illegal. And so was the intent: Maria had fired into the cabin of the car and had wanted to kill the Ukrainian. She no longer had the right to call herself a police officer. She was a vigilante, nothing more.
She went to the window and pulled back its curtains. There was no light from the apartment opposite and the curtains there were drawn across the glazed doors that opened out onto the roof terrace. The sky was a dull glimmer above Cologne’s rooftops. It was barely dawn but Maria knew she wouldn’t sleep again. She looked blankly at the growing light in the sky and it looked blankly back at her. Time to move on.
She stripped and showered and packed her bags. She went down to reception and checked out. The hotel was good enough for her purposes, but she had used her own name and credit card, added to which the hotel staff had looked somewhat surprised at her sudden change of appearance. Maria’s plan was to check into another hotel in the same area. She would pay cash and stay a couple of nights. After that, she could move into the flat of her friend who was working in Japan.
She carried her bags out of the hotel and into a bright winter morning, without the slightest idea of how she was going to get back onto Vitrenko’s tail.
13.
There had been no cover to take. They had all seen the dark, round object arc through the sky towards them and had thrown themselves in different directions, scrabbling on the frost-hardened ground and waiting for the blast to finish them off.
It didn’t come.
Buslenko saw the object dark against the snow and crawled towards it. It was a head. He grabbed the hair and turned the face towards him. Stoyan. Belotserkovsky was next to Buslenko now and looked down at his friend’s dark, handsome Tatar face.
‘Bastards! I’ll kill the fuckers!’ Belotserkovsky turned towards the river bank but Buslenko seized his sleeve and pulled him down.
‘Don’t be a fucking amateur,’ he said. ‘You know what this is about. Don’t lose your cool now. We’re moving out. And we’ll take our chances along the river. I need us to move fast.’
Belotserkovsky gave a decisive nod and Buslenko knew he was fully back in the game.
‘Let’s move.’
They moved in a half-run, covering a considerable distance in a short time. The forest on either side of the river had begun to thin out, offering less cover for their pursuers. Added to which the dawn that Buslenko had dreaded now worked in their favour. Maybe they were going to make it after all.
The only thing that worked against them was that the Teteriv river was wider and shallower here, and they had lost the cover of a steep bank. Buslenko heard a cry behind him and turned to see Olga Sarapenko fall, her rifle clattering on the stones.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
She sat up and cradled her ankle. ‘Nothing broken.’ She got up with a struggle. ‘It’s badly sprained, but my boot saved it from anything worse.’
‘Can you walk?’
‘For now,’ she said, with an apologetic expression on her face. ‘I’ll slow you down.’
‘We stick together,’ said Belotserkovsky. The big Ukrainian threw his rifle to Buslenko and then hoisted Olga Sarapenko onto his shoulders as if she were a deer that he had bagged hunting. ‘We’re nearly there. You have to keep us covered, boss,’ he said to Buslenko.
Buslenko grinned and shouldered both Olga’s and Belotserkovsky’s rifles. At his command, they made off again towards the houses on either side of the river that marked the outskirts of Korostyshev. But Buslenko was focused on more than making it alive to the town of his birth. Instead he was fixed with grim determination on a goal far to the west: a strange city in a foreign country. Where he had an appointment to keep.
Part Two
KARNEVAL
CHAPTER SIX
1-3 February
1.
Fabel put the phone down. It all made sense now.
Something had been nagging away at him for days and he hadn’t been able to put his finger on what it was. It had unsettled him, because every time he had had a feeling like this in the past it had turned out to have a solid foundation. He understood the process behind it: little scraps of seemingly unrelated information that he had picked up coming together in his subconscious to start an alarm bell ringing. There had been nothing unusual about the telephone conversation that he had had with Maria, but her claim that her psychologist had said she should cut herself off from her colleagues for a while had rung false with him.
And now, two weeks later, Minks had called him at the Presidium and everything had fallen into place.
Fabel had come across Dr Minks as part of a previous investigation. Minks was an expert in post-trauma stress and phobic behaviour. As such he had set up a specialised Fear Clinic in Hamburg. The Polizei Hamburg had brought in counsellors to help Maria, but the main element of her treatment was now provided by Dr Minks. Minks had been one of Susanne’s lecturers at Munich University and she rated his skills very highly.
‘Obviously I cannot go into the specifics of Frau Klee’s treatment,’ Minks had said on the phone. ‘But I know that she values your… guidance… very highly. I mean not just as her professional superior. That’s why I thought I’d give you a call.’