A silent acknowledgement passed between the two men. Comrades in arms. The merest of smiles. Then the light faded from Zukovsky’s eyes and his head rolled forward.
Elektra stared at the Russian with confusion. She didn’t see where the bullet had gone, only that it had missed Bond.
She sighed, turned back to Bond and said, ‘Excuse me a moment.’ She picked up a walkie-talkie and spoke into it. ‘Everything’s under control up here. Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ came Renard’s voice. ‘I was afraid that you -’‘I'm all right. You had better get on with it.’
‘Very well. Au revoir . . .’
‘Goodbye,’ she said Lost for a moment, she breathed heavily. She dropped the walkie-talkie, glanced at Zukovsky’s corpse, then back at Bond.
‘Zukovsky really hated you, didn’t he?’ she said, slightly puzzled. She then moved back to the chair and straddled his lap again. ‘Time to say your prayers.’
She kissed him, long and hard, then reached behind to deliver the killing twist . . .
In a lightning-fast move, Bond’s hand broke free and grabbed her throat tightly. He held her, their faces close together, disdain in his eyes. He then hurled her backwards, her nails scratching his face as she went.
She was momentarily stunned. Bond quickly reached over and freed his other hand, then tugged at the garrotte, loosening it until he was able to slip it off. He got to his feet, but by then Elektra had recovered, run out of the room and up the stairs. He went to Zukovsky, felt his pulse, then picked up the bloody gun.
He took the walkie-talkie and had a moment’s hesitation — should he race below to the submarine, or follow Elektra?
He decided to go after the girl. The bitch had gone too far . . .
Outside, at the quay, the submarine’s engines roared into life.
15 - Unholy Alliance
As he felt the powerful engines rumble throughout the submarine, Victor Zokas, aka Renard the Fox, felt the bullet in his skull vibrate. Of course, he knew it was not really an actual ‘feeling’, for his nerves were completely dead there. It was what that Syrian doctor had warned him about — the kind of sensation one felt at a dentist’s surgery after being given novocaine. The dentist would always say, ‘What you’ll feel is a bit of pressure . . ’ That was precisely what Renard felt. Pressure.
He had noticed some physical changes over the last twenty- four hours that he hadn’t mentioned to Elektra. While his strength and tolerance to pain were increasing by the minute, his capacity to smell, taste and touch was diminishing rapidly. The foolish doctor had told him that his sensory abilities would almost certainly degenerate rapidly just before ‘the end’. Renard hadn’t liked what he’d been told by the idiotic doctor who couldn’t remove the bullet, so he had strangled him.
Renard looked around the sub’s control room and noted that his skeleton crew were at their positions. Two men here. One in the tank room. A man in the torpedo room. They believed they were going to get rich and return home. Little did they know that they were on a collision course with destiny. The sub was moving and there was no stopping it. All was going according to plan. Everything was fine.
So why did he feel so lousy? Was that what was happening to him? Was he dying? Had the end come already?
He tested his reflexes by performing some simple exercises with his fingers and hands. They seemed to be working fine. He could see perfectly well. His hearing had not been affected. He just felt . . . out of body, somehow. It was as if he had separated from his physical self and was looking down upon the world. Nothing seemed real.
Well, he thought, if this was the end, then he was going to see the mission completed before it happened. If that meant speeding up the schedule, so be it.
What was going on in the tower? Elektra had sounded breathless on the radio, even though she said everything was under control. Had Bond escaped? Surely not. Elektra had been looking forward to making the MI6 agent die slowly and painfully. Perhaps she was simply feeling the excitement of nearing her goal.
Renard thought back over the past year and how he had changed as a human being. Before meeting Elektra King, he had been a bitter, loveless man who had cared about nothing but anarchy. He had never been successful with women. A prison psychiatrist once told him that his penchant for evil was due to some sort of lack of affection when he was a child.
Renard thought about his mother, a bar tart in Moscow. She had never been at home to look after him and his three older sisters. Each of the siblings could have claimed a different father. Renard never knew his own.
His mother often came home late at night, drunk and irritable. He could vividly recall the smell of alcohol and smoke that wafted into the small, dank flat where they all lived. There was always something that she found to shout about: one of his sisters had forgotten to do the laundry, another sister hadn’t cleaned the toilet, he hadn’t scrubbed the floors.
Sometimes his sisters would blame him for the minor transgressions. His mother would beat him, and his siblings would watch and laugh. God, how he hated them all.
He was no psychiatrist, but even Renard could understand why he might have a problem with women.
Another memory suddenly flooded into his brain. He was fourteen, and he had decided to leave his family and fend for himself on the streets. He had crept into his mother's bedroom, thinking she was asleep in a drunken stupor. She awoke and caught him stealing money from her handbag. She chased after him, but he ran outside, without a coat or any belongings, and never went back. It was the last time he had seen his mother.
He saw his eldest sister once, two years later. She had been looking for him all over Moscow. It was pure chance that they ran into each other at a shelter that was handing out food for the needy. She told him that a drunken sailor in a tavern had murdered their mother. The three girls had split up and each was on her own. Two of them were working as prostitutes. She had managed to get a job as a seamstress. They were penniless. His sister begged him to come to their aid.
Renard, who hadn’t forgotten the cruelty his sisters had shown him when he was growing up, refused to help. He walked away from his family and never looked back.
When he was eighteen the Soviet Army caught up with him. Surprisingly, he took to the vigorous routine and applied himself in all aspects of military life. He became adept with firearms, learned how to make explosives and mastered hand- to-hand combat. He enjoyed training exercises and was reprimanded twice for taking ‘simulations’ dangerously close to reality. One time he killed two fellow recruits and made it look like an accident. It had been a pleasurable experience knowing that he could control life and death in that way. In many ways, he was a problem for the Soviet Army. He had aggressive tendencies that were often disturbing and disruptive. He was mean-spirited and made no friends. But once the officials realised that they had a cold-blooded killer on their hands, they moved Renard from the regular army and into a special branch of Army Intelligence.
The position was much more to Renard’s liking and temperament. He worked as an assassin and explosives expert until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among his many accomplishments was the murder of at least three MI6 agents, four CIA men, and seven from the Mossad. He had kept a chart on the wall of his room in the barracks in Moscow, marking off kills as he made them.
After the USSR broke up, he went AWOL, left Russia, and found that his reputation had preceded him nearly everywhere he went. Obtaining freelance mercenary jobs was incredibly easy. He especially enjoyed working for anti-Capitalist groups who wanted to see the return of Communism. At least it was something to believe in. He became more publicly outspoken, issuing grand statements and warnings when he committed an atrocity.