As if responding to a cue, the other three men reached into their leather jackets and Buslenko found himself staring down the muzzles of three heavy-calibre automatics. But no one pulled a trigger.
‘Your name is not Rudenko,’ said the Russian. ‘And you didn’t serve with the Titan unit. Your name is Taras Buslenko. You served with the Sokil Falcon organised-crime Spetsnaz units and you are now an undercover agent of the organised-crime division of the Interior Ministry.’
Buslenko gazed past the Russian at the glass wall. He was in there. Buslenko was sure of it. Close to the kill, the way he always liked.
‘You’re alone, Buslenko,’ said Kotkin. ‘You couldn’t wear a wire and you couldn’t come armed. Your people are outside but we are better than your people. By the time they get in here, you will be dead and we will be gone. In short, you’re fucked.’
It was then that Buslenko heard the slightest hint of someone moving across the room behind him. He anticipated the next move perfectly. He had already worked out that they would want to kill him as quietly as possible and as soon as the loop of wire was whipped down in front of him he slid down in the leather chair. The wire dug painfully into his forehead before slipping off, having failed to hook under his jaw and the soft tissue of his throat. Buslenko rammed his heels into the coffee table. It was heavy and protested as it slid on the floor and it did not slam into the shins of the gunmen with the force he had hoped. He rolled sideways on the floor. Still no gunshots: it was clear that they were certain they could kill him without opening fire.
Buslenko rolled again but the fifth man, the one who had failed to strangle him with the high-tension wire, slammed his boot into the side of his head. It hurt like hell but Buslenko was not stunned as his assailant had intended and caught the boot as it came down again – expertly, edge first – towards the cartilage of his throat. Buslenko twisted his attacker’s foot and swung his own boot upwards and into the other man’s groin. Buslenko knew he was going to die. What the Russian had said was true: his support would not get here in time, but he sure as hell was going to take someone with him. Now Buslenko moved without the panic of someone fighting for his survival; instead every part of his training came together in a perfect final performance. He leapt to his feet, spun his assailant around and in a single, continuous movement, snapped his neck and threw his dying body into the path of his attackers. The Russian feinted to the left and let the body fall on his companions. Buslenko saw something bright flash towards him and only just dodged the first thrust of Kotkin’s knife. With a grace and skill to match Buslenko’s own, the Russian changed his grip on the knife and brought it back in an arc. This time Buslenko did not move fast enough and, although he felt no pain, he knew the blade had sliced into his shoulder. The other three had now recovered their composure and a series of blows rained onto Buslenko. He found himself pinioned to the wall by his assailants, helpless against their combined strength. Kotkin moved close. He lifted the knife and jabbed the point into the side of Buslenko’s throat. Buslenko knew what was coming next. It was a classic form of silent killing: forcing the blade in behind the windpipe then forwards and out. It was how they used to kill pigs on farms. No squealing. Just a breathless second of silence, then death. Buslenko looked straight into the Russian’s cold grey eyes.
‘Fuck you,’ he said, and waited for the knife to sink deeper.
There was a cursory knock and the door to the entertaining room swung open. Everyone, even Buslenko, turned to look. The Ukrainian Beauty stepped in, a tray in her hands and started to ask if they needed more drinks. Her words trailed off as she saw the dead man on the floor and Buslenko pinned against the wall, a knife at his throat.
‘Get her!’ Kotkin barked at the others and two of them made towards her, leaving Kotkin and one other with Buslenko.
The girl dropped the tray, under which she had been concealing a Fort17 automatic. Calmly, she took Kotkin out first. Buslenko heard the round smack into the centre of the Russian’s forehead, and felt a light splatter of fluid against his cheek. As the Russian dropped, Buslenko grabbed the knife from his grasp and arced it up under the jaw of the man who still held him. The knife sliced up through the soft tissue of his victim’s underjaw, through his mouth and tongue and jammed into the hard palate of the roof of his mouth. There was a series of other shots and Buslenko knew that the other two men were dead. He shoved his last assailant, the knife still lodged in his jaw, away from him. As the man staggered back, Ukrainian Beauty fired two more rounds. The first hit the man in the body and brought him to the floor. The second, textbook style, hit him in the head.
She kept her automatic at locked-arm’s length, scanning the room. There was a commotion outside and a troop of Spetsnaz burst into the room. Buslenko, clutching a handkerchief to the side of his neck where the Russian’s knife had cut him, gestured towards the glass wall at the back of the room.
‘In there! I think he’s in there.’
Ukrainian Beauty walked over to Buslenko. ‘You okay?’
‘I think I owe you a large tip, waitress.’ Buslenko smiled bitterly and looked at the body of the man he had stabbed and she had shot twice. He had wanted to take at least one prisoner alive for interrogation and thought Ukrainian Beauty’s coup de grace had been unnecessary. But considering she had just saved him from being slaughtered like a farm pig, he passed no comment.
The Spetsnaz commander came back from the other room. Like Buslenko, Peotr Samolyuk was a Sokil Falcon officer.
‘It’s clear.’
‘What do you mean, “clear”? He was in there,’ said Buslenko. ‘Watching. I know it.’
Peotr Samolyuk shrugged black armoured shoulders. ‘There’s no one there now.’
‘You sure it was him?’ asked Ukrainian Beauty.
‘Our primary fucking target was in there. I could feel him. And he’s the only reason we’re here. The intelligence we had that he would be with this group was as solid as it could be. But him…’ Buslenko frowned and nodded down to where the body of the scar-headed Russian lay. A halo of dark crimson had oozed from the exit wound in his skull. ‘He just doesn’t make sense… what was Dmitry Kotkin doing here?’
‘He’s part of the organisation. Why wouldn’t he be here?’
‘Right organisation, wrong side of it. He’s a Molokov man.’ Buslenko was still looking at the black glass wall. ‘And it wasn’t Molokov in there behind the glass. Watching. It was the big guy himself. Vasyl Vitrenko. Some big business has brought him back. Something really big or he wouldn’t have left himself exposed. Even Kotkin’s far too senior to be recruiting thugs. He’d reached a level where he was becoming less and less visible.’
‘All I can say is that we’ve got this place sealed up as tight as a drum. Whoever you thought was in there couldn’t have got out.’ Ukrainian Beauty followed Buslenko’s gaze to the adjoining entertaining room. ‘It was always going to be a long shot, Taras. Our intelligence was contradictory. We had information that Vitrenko was back in Ukraine and we had equally sound intelligence that he is still in Germany.’
‘Well,’ said Buslenko, turning to face the beautiful Captain Olga Sarapenko of the Kiev police militia, who had made such a convincing nightclub hostess. ‘That was what my grandmother always said about the Deviclass="underline" he has the craft to be in two places at the same time.’
5.
Fabel waited to be shown into Criminal Director van Heiden’s office and thought about how he would soon become someone else. And how everyone except Susanne seemed to be doing their best to talk him out of it. He guessed that van Heiden might be about to try again.