Gordin bellowed in frustration and Buryakov was just about to tell him to calm down when he felt a sharp pain in his right calf. Buryakov yelped and Gordin immediately looked around. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
The pain had gone and Buryakov wondered whether it had just been a cramp. The big man with the umbrella was moving away, his face impassive.
‘I don’t know. Nothing. I’m not sure.’ Buryakov was finding it hard to breathe. The alarms all went off together. The American contingent ducked into a fleet of black limousines and sped off flanked by German motorcycle outriders with sirens blaring.
‘Thank you so much for fucking off,’ Gordin muttered at the departing vehicles.
Buryakov’s chest felt suddenly tight, as if something was pressing on him. He tried to take a deep breath but stopped when a searing pain shot down his left arm. ‘Andris,’ he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.
Gordin turned towards him. ‘Boss, are you OK?’
Buryakov opened his mouth to say that no, he wasn’t OK, when his legs buckled beneath him and he hit the marble floor with a dull thud.
Gordin knelt down next to him and began screaming for a medic, first in Russian and then in English. The designated doctor on duty rushed over with her medical bag. She was a middle-aged German woman with badly dyed hair that had probably been advertised as red but had turned out purple. She carried out an immediate visual and touch check, running her hands down Buryakov’s front, sides and back, searching for major injuries, but found no blood and no sign of trauma. She cleared Buryakov’s airways, but noted his shallow, irregular breathing, and at once inserted a cannula and set up a saline drip. Buryakov’s pulse continued to be very rapid and increasingly erratic, and when the doctor checked him again a minute later, she noted that it had now become even more feeble and irregular.
‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ asked Gordin in English.
‘Heart attack,’ said the doctor brusquely. ‘Please keep back, give him air.’ She pulled a transceiver from her pocket and began to talk into it in rapid German. Ambulanz was one of the few words that Gordin recognised.
Two hours later, Yuri Buryakov was lying in a hospital bed, connected to a drip and several monitoring machines. He was in a private room and Gordin was sitting outside, glaring at anyone who came near the door.
A doctor in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck and holding a clipboard walked up. He looked over the top of his horn-rimmed spectacles and said something to Gordin in German. The German shook his head. ‘Russkij,’ he growled. ‘Russian.’
‘I don’t speak Russian,’ said the doctor in accented English. ‘You can speak English?’
‘Some,’ said Gordin. He stared at the ID badge clipped to the pocket of the white coat. Dr Bernd Jaeger. Kardiologe.
‘How long will you be sitting here?’ asked the doctor.
‘So long as Mr Buryakov is here, I will be here,’ said Gordin. ‘I am in charge of his security.’
‘Mr Buryakov is a very sick man,’ said the doctor. ‘He may be here for several days.’
Gordin shrugged. ‘Then I will be here for several days.’
The doctor nodded. ‘If it would help, I could ask for a small bed to be put in the room so that you can spend the night. Would that be agreeable?’
‘You can do that?’
The doctor nodded and wrote something on his clipboard. ‘Of course. Mr Buryakov has had problems with his heart before?’
‘No. Never. He had a medical last month and his heart was fine. A heart like a lion, the doctor said.’
‘A very sick lion, perhaps,’ said the doctor, putting his pen in his pocket. ‘I shall be with him for a few minutes, if you need to go to the bathroom or get a coffee.’
‘I’m OK,’ said Gordin, folding his arms.
‘Mr Buryakov is lucky to have a man as loyal as you,’ said the doctor, and he smiled as he opened the door and went inside.
The doctor took off his spectacles and put his clipboard at the bottom of the bed. Buryakov was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling with each breath. The doctor took a syringe from his pocket, pulled off the cap, and looked for a vein in the patient’s right arm. Buryakov grunted as the doctor injected the contents of the syringe, then put the cap back on and pocketed it.
He walked around the bed and switched off the machines. The drug he had injected into Buryakov was a powerful tranquilliser that would render him immobile without inducing unconsciousness. The doctor slapped Buryakov, left and right, and Buryakov groaned. ‘Wake up, Yuri,’ said the man in Russian. ‘You’re not dead yet.’
Buryakov opened his eyes and blinked.
‘That’s good,’ said the man. ‘Now look at me closely.’
Buryakov tried to focus on the man’s face. ‘Do you remember me?’ the man asked.
Buryakov shook his head. He tried to speak but his mouth was too dry. His arms lay like dead weights at his side.
‘I don’t have many friends, but the friends that I do have call me Monotok. The Hammer.’ He held up one of his massive hands. ‘My party trick is to hammer six-inch nails into planks of wood with my bare hands.’ He grinned, showing white slab-like teeth. ‘To be honest, it’s more about technique than it is about strength.’ He cocked his head on one side. ‘What about my name? Does my name mean anything to you? Kirill Luchenko?’ He looked for any sign of recognition but there was nothing in Buryakov’s eyes. Monotok shook his head sadly. ‘That’s a pity. You fucked up my life, I mean totally fucked it up, and you have no idea who I am.’ He smiled and patted him roughly on the cheek. ‘But that’s why I’m here, Yuri. That’s why I put you in hospital and didn’t kill you in the street. I could have done. So easily. I know of a dozen poisons that could have killed you within five minutes, but only one that would put you in hospital with the symptoms of a heart attack.’ He patted him on the cheek, harder this time. ‘Your security is good, though. The best. Your head of security is to be commended. The street was the only place I could get near you. And I’ve been trying for a long, long time.’ He smiled again. ‘Still, you’re here now.’ He reached into the pocket of his white coat and pulled out another syringe.
‘First we’re going to talk. Well, actually I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen. I’m going to explain to you what you did to me and how what you did made me the man I am.’ He held up the syringe and waved it back and forth in front of Buryakov’s eyes. ‘Then I’m going to inject this and you’re going to have a fatal heart attack.’ He grinned, the smile of a shark about to bite. ‘So if you’re lying comfortably, let’s get started, shall we? Once upon a time …’
Button had been right about the tattoos – after just fifteen minutes in a Harley Street clinic a young Asian doctor with a German-made laser made short work of LOVE and HATE. The skin was red and sore around the knuckles but Shepherd could see that the ink had all gone. The doctor’s pretty blond assistant gave him a tube of ointment to rub into the skin and a business card with a phone number to call in the unlikely event of him developing a reaction to the laser.
It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon when he walked out of the surgery, so he decided to pop into a pub for lunch before catching the train back to Hereford. He was just tucking into steak and kidney pie and chips when his phone rang. The caller was withholding his number so Shepherd just said ‘hello’.
‘Spider?’
Shepherd frowned. He didn’t recognise the voice. ‘Who is this?’ he asked.
‘Is that Spider Shepherd?’
‘Who’s calling?’
‘I’m calling. Look, don’t fuck around, either that’s Spider or it’s not and if it’s not tell me so I don’t waste any more of my time.’