The nemesis manifesto, p.22
The Nemesis Manifesto, page 22
Gorgonov stared at it as if it might bite him.
“Sir?” Maks was waiting for an order.
With difficulty, Gorgonov tore his gaze from the phone, which seemed to be magnetized to the instrument. “Yes, well, all right. Get some of the string they use here to sew up the birds after they’re stuffed. Repair the bear and then bring it back to Lolita. Sit with her until I return. Don’t let her out of your sight for even an instant.”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
Scooping up the mobile, Gorgonov left the kitchen and returned to the restroom. There he entered a cubicle, locked the door, and turned on the phone. As soon as it grabbed hold of the network he saw that there was one text message waiting for him. His thumb hovered over the key for a moment before pressing it.
DOES SHE LIKE YURI? YES? NO? he read. No salutation, no signature. But then none were needed. ONLY TWO WAYS TO PROCEED. WHICH ONE?
His suspicion was confirmed. Boyko was behind this. Their feud had gotten out of hand. Bringing their children into it had been an enormous miscalculation. But now they were in it up to their necks. Boyko had begun this war by poaching Brady Thompson. Added to that, he had trashed an SVR safe house, in the process executing two of Gorgonov’s men. Proceeding along either of the two paths Boyko was implying was out of the question. He was not going to back down. FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING BEAR, he typed.
With a strangled growl he pressed SEND.
28
“Bad news?” Charles said as Brenda came across from the other side of the space where she had been conversing with Butler.
“Just the opposite,” she said brightly. “Send me that photo of Limas and Gorgonov, would you?” She gave him her phone number.
Charles nodded. “Right away.”
Taking out his mobile, he pulled up the photo. The moment it appeared on her screen, she forwarded it to Butler’s private server. That done, she looked around the large space. As elsewhere in the building, murky light came through small grimy windows high on the exterior walls. A large wooden table with a scarred and burned top stood in the center of the room. Charles led her into the small space where Voron had tapped into the existing electrical wiring that had led him into the smaller room with the photographs.
She went over to the table. “This must be where she assembled the bombs.”
“That’s right,” Charles said, following her over. “Every scar, every burn tells another story of her work. Look here.” He pointed. “She’s meticulous, neat, precise. No shards of metal, plastic, or wire insulation anywhere. It’s the bomber’s equivalent of policing your brass—gathering up the spent shells after you’ve fired your weapon.” He grunted. “Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
As she stared at the tabletop, Brenda fell into a kind of reverie or trance, as if trying to conjure up the afterimage of the bomber, catch a scent of her, intuit what was in her mind. It was in this altered state that she became aware of the hint of airflow caressing her cheek.
“Charles, is there a window open somewhere?”
He craned his neck to look up at them, one by one. “No. They’re all closed up tight. I don’t think they’re meant to open at all.”
“I need to calm down.” She held out a hand. “I could use a smoke.”
“What, now?” He regarded her quizzically for a moment. “Really?”
She waggled her outstretched fingertips, and, shrugging, he shook out a cigarette. She took it, put it between her lips, and he lit it for her. She inhaled, went over to one of the walls, blew smoke at it, watched it dissipate. She did the same thing as she moved along the wall, into the far left corner. She repeated this process along the back wall, and then, finally, the right-hand wall. Through the length of this odd ritual, Charles trailed after her with a bemused look.
When they returned to the table she smiled at him, as if to say, “No, I’m not crazy.” Then she squatted down, exhaled smoke under the table. Charles squatted down on the other side of the table, just in time to see the smoke swirling down between the floorboards.
Brenda looked at him, pointed to where the smoke had disappeared, and he nodded, getting it. They both stood and, without a word, picked up the table, moved it off to one side, exposing the floor underneath. Stubbing her butt out on the tabletop, Brenda drew her sidearm while Charles squatted again, ran his fingertips over the rough-hewn boards. The nature of their surfaces made detection difficult and laborious, but after several moments he discovered a short length of clear plastic cord jammed into the crevice between two of the boards. He pulled it slowly upward until it was taut. He looked up at Brenda briefly. She was standing three or four paces away, in the classic shooter’s stance: arms stiff, legs at shoulder width, both hands on her gun, aiming directly at the center of what they now saw was a trapdoor to what must be a root cellar.
They both knew, without voicing it, that Voron might well be hiding down there. Brenda’s pulse quickened. Her senses sharpened; she could feel the blood flowing through her veins and arteries, the ticktock workings of her heart.
Ready? Charles mouthed.
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Nodded.
Charles pulled up on the cord. Slowly, firmly, with a constant motion. The trapdoor began to rise up, like a vampire’s coffin lid. He paused, checked for a tripwire. Seeing no sign of one, he continued to pull on the cord. The trapdoor opened.
And the blast hit Charles full force.
The percussion threw Brenda backward, off her feet. She lay stunned, hearing only the echo of detonation filling her ear canals, an incessant pressure against her eardrums. Smoke and debris filled the air, sawdust in a carpenter’s work space. Charles lay on his back, legs twisted under him. He had been lucky and unlucky all at once. The wooden trapdoor had protected him from the brunt of the blast, but as it flew apart a thick shard of wood had pierced his chest like a javelin thrown by a powerful adversary.
And as Brenda watched, half-stunned, deafened, that adversary rose up from the root cellar where, indeed, she had secreted herself when she heard their car driving up.
Voron. The bomb-maker. The Raven.
Dark-haired, light-eyed, her body small and compact, a gymnast’s body, unformed, like a prepubescent girl, or, even, a young man not yet grown into whiskers. When she was only halfway into the room she swiveled her torso, even as she continued her ascent up the stairs or ladder that was hidden from Brenda’s view. A basilisk stare that would have creeped out Medusa struck Brenda like a stone from David’s slingshot. She felt it in the center of her chest, could swear her muscles contracted, convulsing as if with trauma.
Voron raised a Springfield Armory 1911 TRP pistol, a 10mm with a 6-inch longslide barrel that could stop a bear in its tracks. Her fingers, long and spidery thin, were wrapped around the polymer grips. Brenda watched mesmerized as the Springfield’s muzzle swung toward her. The pain in her chest lurched her brain into survival mode. The autonomous nervous system, working faster than conscious thought possibly could, brought her sidearm up and fired it, all in one smooth motion.
Voron grinned, the longslide bucked, an explosion resounded a hairsbreadth from Brenda’s left temple, though she felt, rather than heard it, which was even more terrifying. She screamed, fired, rolled, all at the same time.
Brenda lifted herself to her knees, keeping her eyes on Voron the whole time. The grin on Voron’s face remained fixed. The bomb-maker was still staring at the spot where Brenda had lain mere seconds before. Brenda’s thighs were trembling so badly she couldn’t stand up. Crawling across the floorboards, she approached Voron. As she did so, the basilisk stare turned in her direction, and she shuddered. That stare was impossible to process.
Voron’s face turned very white, her eyes reflected an all-encompassing pain, and that’s when Brenda saw the blood. Her first shot had fractured the right clavicle, rendering Voron’s gun arm useless. It flopped on the floorboards like a landed fish, the back of the hand banging and banging, seemingly of its own volition. The grin was abruptly transformed into a rictus and her entire body began to thrash just like the useless hand. Brenda’s second and third shots had passed through Voron’s throat to sever her spinal column, ripping apart nerves as well as muscle and bone.
As Brenda drew close to her, the bomb-maker’s mouth gaped open and a torrent of blood gushed out.
“Oh, God,” Brenda whispered, and crawled on, past the trapdoor and its bloody occupant to where Charles lay.
“Charles,” she called with all her might, though it was only the soft, hoarse cry one emits in a dream. “Charles, wake up.” She was weeping openly, past knowing or even remembering that he never would wake up.
Agonized moments later, her eyes rolled up, and she collapsed, unconscious, stretched between Charles and the devil.
29
Brenda awoke with the unholy racket of an AC/DC concert thundering through her head. For some time, she lay where she had fallen, disoriented and suffering from temporary amnesia. During this time she just concentrated on breathing and making sure that she was still alive and not inhabiting some ghostly limbo suffused with the stench of an abattoir.
Then, as was the nature of these things, in the blink of an eye everything came flooding back: the discovery of the hidden trapdoor, her giving Charles cover while he pulled the cord, the explosion catching both of them, Charles fatally, and the subsequent rise of Voron with her demonic weapon that by the grace of God had not killed Brenda herself.
Slowly, painfully, she rose onto all fours. Her head hung down, the pit of her stomach churning like the sea in a hurricane. She coughed, retched several times, brought up nothing but bitter bile, a tiny bit of her insides that lay between the mess Voron had made of Charles and she, Brenda, had made of Voron. Then, still slowly, feeling as fragile as blown glass, she looked at Charles. Immediately, she wished she hadn’t. He lay sprawled, one arm outstretched, the other in front of him as if trying to ward off the inevitable. The shard of wood sticking out of his chest seemed to have penetrated through to his spine, severing it.
Up on her haunches at last, Brenda made her wobbly way over to him. Dizzy, sick at heart, she knelt beside him, took his outstretched hand as though to comfort him in his time of need, when it was in fact her own time of need. In death, she had granted him the power to comfort her. There was little doubt in her mind that he had given his life to protect her. In retrospect, neither of them should have pulled that cord. Easy enough to say now, to think that they should have stood well back while peppering the trapdoor with bullets. But that was blood under the bridge now, and the only thing to do was to go on, one step at a time.
His entire front was covered in blood, drying, darkening, stiffening, which made her deep dive to find his mobile phone particularly unpleasant. She couldn’t wish away the feeling that she was plundering the dead. Still, it had to be done, and only after she had found it, pocketed it, did she break down.
“Dammit, Charles,” she whispered hoarsely. “Dammit to hell.” She sobbed soundlessly, head bowed, hand in his, her heart hollow and aching. At some point, she came to the realization that she was crying for herself, for allowing herself to be gulled, used by Peter, and this made her feel small and petty. But, upon further reflection, it also caused her to understand better Evan’s coolness to her and to everyone else who came into her orbit. It was a form of self-protection against just what Brenda was feeling now.
All cried out at last, she slipped her hand from Charles’s and turned her attention to Voron, the source of their misery. She rose, picked her way over to the trapdoor, never mind that she shambled like someone from the Night of the Living Dead. As a matter of fact, that was precisely what she felt like: mindless, rageful, cold as a graveyard at midnight. For some time, she studied Voron’s face, which looked to her much like it had when the bomb-maker was alive; her eyes had been dead long before Brenda had shot her. Her torso had been pushed back against the side of the floorboards farthest from where Brenda had pulled the trigger. Her arms were half spread out, palms lying upward. Brenda bent down, the rush of blood to her pounding head causing chorus lines of black spots to dance before her eyes. She sucked in a breath, let it out, and picked up the bomb-maker’s weapon: the Springfield 1911 TRP 10mm longslide. Brenda was familiar with its profile and workings. She emptied the gun, stashing the bullets in her pocket before jamming it between her skin and her waistband. She took out her mobile, snapped a boatload of photos of Voron from every conceivable angle, close-ups and long, establishing shots, so Butler could get a sense of the bomb-maker’s corpse in situ.
Then she hunkered down in front of Voron. She wished she had a pair of latex or even leather gloves to put on, though surely the leather would be ruined five minutes after she started rummaging around the bloody corpse, but all she had were her bare hands. She began by hauling the bomb-maker all the way out of the trapdoor and laying her out on the floorboards.
Her dark hair was close-cropped, her light eyes large and staring. Soon enough they would milk over. She had a round face, almost as unformed as her body. Brenda tried to guess her age, but failed. She could be anywhere between twenty and her late thirties. Her nails were cut short, square across, except those on her thumbs, which were ragged, bitten down to the quick. Nerves, then, at least sometimes, though surely not when she was building her bombs.
Though there was even more blood across her front than on Charles’s, it was still possible to tell what she was wearing: tight black jeans, a silver-gray tank top that betrayed just the barest hint of breast buds. Her shoulders were square and wide, her arms hairless, and as powerful as a gymnast’s. Patting her down, searching for any personal effects she might have on her, Brenda found herself wondering what Voron had been like, what had caused her to become a bomb-maker, what her personal politics and prejudices had been. Was she someone who would listen to viewpoints other than her own, or had she been radicalized beyond any form of civilized communication? Brenda found herself feeling a certain form of sadness which, under the extreme circumstances, she knew to be inappropriate. And yet she felt sad. Another unfathomable attribute of being a human being.
She found no mobile on the woman, no ID, nothing. Turning away from the body, she descended into the root cellar on an almost vertical wooden ladder. She pulled a string hanging from the ceiling and a bare bulb came on, its sickly yellow glow illuminating, sadly, nothing much at all. Taking a tour around the circle of light, it seemed clear that Voron had beat a hasty retreat down here; there was no sign at all that she had bunked here: no blankets or bedding of any kind, no torn-open wrappers of packaged foods, no pizza boxes, no cans of soda. The root cellar was as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboards.
Except …
At the farthest edge of the circle, in the penumbra, where the yellow light dimmed into shadow, lay a small slip of paper that, Brenda thought, had likely slipped out of Voron’s pocket. Brenda stooped and picked it up, opening it as she moved back into the center of the circle where the light was bright enough to see without eyestrain.
It was a receipt from Willie’s Swap’n’Shop, a pawnshop in Anacostia. The ticket was for a Springfield Armory 1911 10mm longslide, the very same 10mm that now resided at the small of her back.
* * *
Copper and salt. She smells the blood. On the walls, the floor, or simply hanging in the air. Her nose is filled with it as she is rolled down a narrow corridor. Fluorescent lights above, like arrows pointed toward—where? Slipping in and out of another dreamworld, a dense forest of pines, icy, snow-bound. She is running. Above her a conspiracy of Ravens follow, yellow eyes fixed on her as she runs. With a whoosh, the shaft of an arrow passes by the side of her head, so close she ducks away, falls, regains her feet, keeps running.
Running into the snare …
* * *
She awoke with a scream in her throat, a scream in her room: the mobile phone given to her by Butler was lit up. Its ring was like a prison Klaxon. Bleary-eyed, she rolled out of bed and answered it.
“Evan.”
She needed a moment to shake free of the tide of dreams that had borne her away across the mysterious ocean of sleep, out of sight of all land. “Here, Butler.”
“Got your photos.”
The photos of the MI6 agents. Right. “Mmm. So, hold on … so one thing we now know for sure is the park is a secondary crime scene.” Evan scrubbed the last of her dreams out of her eyes. “The agents were all hung upside down, throats torn out, and blooded somewhere else.”
“Any idea where the primary is?”
Evan picked the plastic evidence bag with the red-brick dust she had found in the shallow cave up off the night table. “Not yet.”
“Are you any closer to the killer or killers?”
“On the way to Obersalzberg.”
“Decided to take in the Alpine air in the middle of it all, have we?”
“Right.” She laughed. Butler was just attempting to lighten the mood.
“The jet is refueled and waiting for you at Shota Rustaveli. Is that where you are now?”
She stood by the window staring out at a child’s bicycle lying on the grass of the inn’s front yard, by the side of the road. It looked mournful and forlorn, the visual equivalent of a far-off train’s hoot in the night.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Something I need to do before we leave.”
“Do you know anything about the person you’re chasing in Germany?” he asked. Butler knew better than to query her on the subject of where she was and why.
“A mobile number. And his name. Cuervos, if you can credit it.”
“Ravens.”
“Right.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Butler observed. “And Limas?”
“He’s started making noises about wanting me to go with him to Moscow to find his long-lost sister.”
