Authors: Rob Sinclair
My body slumped back into the seat, my head in a daze. I closed my eyes, hoping that the world would stop spinning. But it didn’t. It only spun faster.
And within seconds, I was out.
The first thing I was aware of was the screams. At first, when I opened my eyes, I thought I was back in my cell – I’m not sure why – maybe because of the fog in my head, the disorientation. But as I came round fully, I quickly remembered what had just happened.
My head was throbbing. I pulled my hand up to it. A lump the size of a ping-pong ball protruded from my right temple. Two slight trickles of blood had wormed down my face.
I looked over at the seat next to me. The body of the dead passenger, the man with the rifle, was slumped in the seat, his head dangling forward at an unusual angle. The impact had snapped his neck. Not that it would’ve caused him any bother – he’d been dead well before the crash.
Only then did I make sense of the empty space next to me.
Lena was gone.
So too were the weapons: Lena’s Berretta handgun and the rifle the man next to her had used.
I cursed, reaching down to unbuckle my belt. As I pulled up, I jumped in shock when I saw a face plastered up against the window next to me. A grey-haired man, in his sixties or seventies, stood there. He looked worried. No, more than that: he looked terrified.
He stepped back from the window when our eyes met. I
pushed the door open. The man rattled off something to me in Russian, but my brain wasn’t able to process any of the words. It all sounded completely alien to me.
I looked over the scene. A few yards off to the side of me was the crumpled wreckage of another car. Two other vehicles had pulled over, their hazard lights flashing.
The man kept on talking to me. He wasn’t hysterical, but he wasn’t far off. I started to pick up most of his words amid the screaming still piercing the air. He was asking me who I was. What had happened to the people I was travelling with. Looking at the crumpled black mess, I could see why he was so concerned. Blood and lumps of flesh covered the inside of the car and were streaked across the windows. Clearly not the result of the head-on crash.
When I looked over to where the screams were coming from, I realised the woman who was screaming was doing so not because she was hurt but because of the horrors that lay within the car I’d come from. Three other people stood around her. All had blankets wrapped around them. I couldn’t tell which ones were the occupants of the car we’d collided with and which had just stopped to help. Each of them had a stunned look on their face. No-one seemed quite sure what to make of me. Or the car that I’d stepped from with the two bloodied dead bodies.
The man was telling me that I should sit down. That I was hurt and my head was bleeding. I wasn’t sure that I was bleeding any more. Other than the trickle from high up on my head, much of the blood on me was from the passenger I’d shot in the face. But I didn’t say that to the old man. He seemed distressed enough already.
He told me the police would be there any minute. A strange thing to say. Most people would have called for an ambulance after a road crash. But these people had been spooked, and they had every right to be. Mentioning the
police to me was his way of letting me know that I shouldn’t try anything funny.
‘Where did the lady go?’ I asked the man.
The concern on the man’s face grew. Maybe my tone had been off with him, or he’d heard my foreign accent, which had aroused his suspicions of me further.
‘What lady?’ he said.
‘There was a lady next to me. She’s gone. Did you see her?’
The man shook his head. He seemed confused by the question, like he didn’t believe what I was saying was true. I asked him to go and ask the other people. The question was better coming from him than from me. He was hesitant, but telling him that the lady was my friend and that I was worried about her seemed to help alleviate some of his tension. He turned, walked over to the others, and put his arm around the lady who’d been screaming. She stopped.
I heard the distant whine of police sirens. I didn’t recognise where we were but I guessed somewhere on the outskirts of the city. The sporadic residential units that were interspersed between the mostly commercial units told me that.
From where I stood, I couldn’t hear the conversation the old man was having with the others. But I could tell from the shaking heads and the bemused looks on their faces that they didn’t know anything about a lady who’d been travelling in the car.
Lena had simply disappeared into thin air.
With the fast-approaching police, I knew I too should make myself scarce. The body count I was leaving behind was mounting and I no longer had any friends to help get me out of a sticky situation.
Already isolated from the group of people that the old man was now with, I could quite easily slip away without much effort and probably without anyone seeing me, heading into the dense foliage that surrounded us. But where
would I go? I was miles from anywhere familiar with no mode of transport, barely any cash, and blood on my face and clothes. Lena must have thought the risk was worth taking, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be out in the cold, on the run.
I did know that I had to get away before the police arrived. And as much as I didn’t want to, I knew I had only one option.
I walked over to the group of people. Without a coat I was already shaking violently from the cold. Or maybe it was adrenaline, or anxiety, or a mixture of all three. Either way, even after standing out for only a minute or so, the cold was too much to bear without the extra layer of protection.
Heads immediately turned as I approached the group and their muted conversation and whispers stopped. The old man stepped forward, away from the others. He was small and slight, but he was obviously the plucky one in the mishmash group of people. The one willing to stand up for the rest. To protect them from me.
‘I need a coat,’ I said to him. ‘And a car.’
I was surprised when he simply nodded, took off his thick coat and handed it to me. He then gestured towards a compact hatchback pulled up on the kerb behind me, before fishing for the keys in his trouser pocket and holding them out. I took them from him without saying another word. He walked back over to the group and huddled under the blanket with the woman who’d been screaming.
He wasn’t going to try to stop me and neither were any of the others. I admired his handling of the situation. Sure, he and his group would have preferred the police to have been there to cart me off. But the police weren’t there. And allowing me to leave was probably a blessing for all of them. The threat gone. That was what he and the others wanted.
I walked over to the car briskly. It was already facing the
direction I wanted to head in: away from Omsk. It was an almost dead cert the police would be coming from the city and I didn’t want to end up in a face-off with them.
If Lena had escaped on foot, alone, then the chances were she would have headed in the opposite direction, back towards life and civilisation. She would have had no chance heading out into the cold wastelands that surrounded the city. It was different for me. I had a vehicle now. And at that moment, I wanted to get as far away from everything else as I could, Lena included. She could wait. I would get to her eventually. For now I had to get away.
And then I would figure out what the hell I was going to do next.
It wasn’t long before dusk was upon me – Omsk has few daylight hours during winter – and not too long after darkness had descended I left civilisation for good and the last of the streetlights faded away in my rear-view mirror. The headlights of the car were good enough to light up the frosted surface immediately in front of me, but I couldn’t make out anything else around. It just seemed like an endless black expanse. Traffic was sparse and becoming sparser.
After two hours of driving, I pulled onto a track off the main road. I crawled a few hundred yards up the frozen surface, into a wooded area, then shut off the engine. The cabin light came on and, without the beam of the headlights, made it seem even darker outside. The last building I’d seen was a farmhouse some five miles away. I presumed the track I’d taken would lead somewhere, maybe to another isolated house. From where I was I could see no streetlights, buildings or any other evidence of life. The place was eerily quiet.
My stop here was only temporary. I wasn’t planning on going on the run in the vast wilderness. Not in these temperatures. Not in this country. But I would make do for a few hours at least. I had the shelter of the car, and the blankets that the owner and his companion had brought with
them on their journey would protect me further. It was rare, foolish even, for people in conditions like this not to take precautions in case of a breakdown whenever they ventured out. In addition to the blankets, the old man had been sensible enough to have brought a large plastic bottle of water.
I stepped out of the car and used a handful of the water to wet my face, which I then wiped dry with one of the blankets. I wanted rid of the blood. And if nothing else, having a clean face would make me seem more normal should anyone come across me. My trousers and jumper were also covered with blood, and bone and tissue. At least the coat, taken from the man, was clean. Other than wiping off the lumps, I could do little about the clothes. I had nothing else to change into. I would have to just hope the coat covered up the worst of it.
Although I would be warm enough in the car for the night, I wouldn’t stay out in this place any longer than was necessary. I wasn’t going to be forced on the run. Coming here was simply a means of getting some breathing space to think about what to do next. I still didn’t know what was happening to me. I couldn’t be sure who my enemy really was. But I would find out.
The problem was, countless people were out there looking for me: the police, the Russians, my own agency. It wasn’t going to be easy to evade everyone. What I had to do, I realised, was get back to Omsk. I was going to pursue
them
. Lena, Chris, Mary, whoever else was coming after me. I had to get to the truth.
How to do that was a different question. I couldn’t take the car I’d commandeered back to the city. For all I knew there would be police patrols out looking for it. It would be game over before I’d even made it back to civilisation. And I’d already seen there were few others cars on the road so late
in the day. So I didn’t have many options left to me. I would stay here, in the warmth, and rest for the night. Then head out in the morning and somehow hitch a ride back to Omsk.
Once there, I would head off to find Chris and Mary first. Because they were the only people I knew how to locate. And a small part of me wondered whether – no, hoped – I could trust at least one of them. Which one, I wasn’t sure.
I lowered the driver’s seat as far back as it would go and placed the dank blanket over me. It smelled of oldness and mould and had obviously been left in the car indefinitely, awaiting its moment. But it would do.
My belly rumbled and grumbled. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I now regretted not having had anything in the café earlier. Though the very thought of being in that place, of seeing Mackie’s final moments of life, made me feel sick.
I didn’t want to replay my meeting with Mackie. I didn’t want to think about anything at all. But I couldn’t stop it.
Those last moments with Mackie had been anything but poignant. They’d been uncomfortable and messy. He’d thought I was working for the enemy. I hadn’t been sure whether
he
was the enemy.
Yet he was still the same man I’d once trusted with my life. And during our brief conversation, I’d really wanted to believe what he’d been telling me. I wanted everything to be just like he said. I’d been willing for him to show me the clincher, the one piece of evidence that would have convinced me that everything I’d been told about him was a lie. That every doubt I’d had was misplaced. Despite all my feelings of hurt and abandonment at having been left to torture, I’d wanted so badly for all of it to be washed away as we sat there in that café.
But in the end I hadn’t got there. And now Mackie was dead and I’d run away from the scene, straight into the arms of the people who’d murdered him.
I knew the moment of reconciliation that I’d so craved would never come now. Even if everything Mackie had said was the truth, nothing would ever be the same again.
I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the cold and the blackness all around me. But it was impossible. I was tired, cold, hungry, being hunted by the Russians and my own people. And more alone than ever.
It had been a long and shivery night in the car. I had been wide awake well into the early hours of the morning. When I finally managed to drift off it must only have been for a few minutes at a time.
It wasn’t just the cold air and the cramped, confined space that was the problem. I struggled with the ever-changing predicament that I found myself in. Every time I closed my eyes I could do nothing to stop the nightmarish thoughts. Of the torture chamber and Lena’s beautiful but evil smile. Of the last moments of Mackie, my friend and mentor. Of the Russians, closing in on me, willing me to join them. And finally, of my own people, hunting me down, bloody revenge on their minds.
By the time dawn broke, I was a groggy mess. Half asleep, the thoughts came and went even with my eyes wide open. At least I thought they were open. More than a few times I’d dreamt I was awake, looking out of the windows into the faint moonlight, only to open my eyes and realise that I’d in fact been asleep.
But morning had finally arrived and the car engine was now up and running. The heat was on, slowly thawing out my ice-cold hands, feet and limbs. I was en-route to Omsk. With the small amount of cash I had left I’d splashed out
on sugary drinks, snacks and sweets from a garage that was just opening for the day. I was riding the crest of a sugar rush. It would dwindle quickly, leaving me no better off than before. For a short while at least, though, I was feeling almost human again.
I was heading back to Omsk but I knew I needed to dump the car. Riding back into town on the same stallion I’d stolen to get out was asking for trouble that I really didn’t need. But I had no money left, having spent the paltry amount left over on food and drinks. The only other ways to get back to Omsk were hitching or stealing a car from another hapless victim. In the end I opted for the former.
I pulled up to the side of the road, put on my hazards. Then got out of the car. I had my coat on, buttoned to the top. It did a good job of hiding the mess on my clothes. I also had the blanket wrapped around me for extra warmth.
I waited. But for only a few minutes. I guess when the weather is cold enough to kill you in just a few hours you’re more likely to stop if you see a stranded motorist. Nobody wants an unnecessary death on their conscience. Even that of a complete stranger.
The very first car to approach rolled to a stop just a few yards past where I was. A beaten-up old compact from the Soviet era. Not many of them were left now. They were notoriously unreliable, uncomfortable and inefficient. They didn’t look too good either. But it was still a car and that was all I needed.
I walked up to the passenger door. The driver pushed it open for me as I approached, before I even had a chance to tell him who I was or where I was going. I leaned my head into the car. The warm air hit my face as it escaped through the open door, making me blink.
‘My car broke down,’ I said to the driver in broken Russian.
The man raised an eyebrow, probably at my accent. He looked to be in his forties and had a thick face with salt-and-pepper stubble that rose high on his cheeks and sank low on his neck. He was wearing jeans, a thick overcoat and a deer-hunter hat.
‘Come on, get in,’ he said. ‘You’re letting all the warmth out.’
I did as he said, got into the cramped seat and shut the door. The temperature inside the car was probably only ten degrees or so, but it certainly beat the outside.
‘Where are you heading to?’ the driver said.
‘Omsk.’
‘Me too.’
That wasn’t a surprise. What else was there within a few hundred miles in that direction?
‘I can take you there if you want,’ the man said. ‘Or do you want me to take you to a garage?’
‘Omsk is perfect.’
‘Okay, let’s go,’ he said, crunching the car into first and pulling away from the verge.
We drove on at a steady pace. A dusting of fresh snow lay on the ground but it wasn’t thick enough to cause any problems. The cars that had already been down the road since the last snowfall had cleared neat tracks along the way.
‘What are you doing in Omsk?’ the man asked. I detected just the slightest hint of suspicion in his tone.
‘I’m here on vacation,’ I replied.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You picked a funny time of year.’
‘Yeah. Those damn brochures,’ I said. ‘It’s never quite the same as the pictures.’
The man laughed and I felt the tension in the tin-can car lift a little.
‘What were you doing out of the city?’ he said, apparently
not yet convinced of my situation. Or maybe he was just being nice and wanted to chat.
‘Just a curious traveller, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, well, I wouldn’t bother. Not much out here.’
‘Apparently not.’
‘And you’re travelling alone?’
‘I usually do.’
‘Huh,’ was all the man said.
We managed little conversation for the rest of the journey. I sensed the man wasn’t quite sure about me. Who could blame him? But I didn’t care all that much. Unless I gave him a reason, he wasn’t going to go running to the police to report that he’d given a lift to a suspicious foreigner. And even if he did, what was the worst that could happen? In all likelihood the police were already looking for me and I’d be long gone, away from this man, by then.
The man said he was heading to the western part of the city, only a couple of miles from where I wanted to be. I didn’t bother to ask to be dropped off any closer. He told me I could take a bus to the centre, but I decided to walk. The exercise would do me good despite the freezing temperature.
I had an errand to run before heading off to find Chris and Mary. I had barely any cash left in my pocket. I needed more money, and other than stealing I had only one choice still left to me. The cash I’d had in the safety deposit box had gone. But I still had my bank account back in England. I could access that cash from the Western Union branch in Omsk.
First I needed to contact my bank to get them to set up the transfer. They would give me a ten-digit money transfer number to take to the teller in order to confirm the transaction. After walking for a few minutes I found a phone booth that was located just around the corner from the branch and put in a small handful of coins. I just had to hope it would
be enough for the long-distance call.
Both the number for the bank and my account details were well ingrained in my brain, I had used them so often. I dialled the number and listened to the ring tone.
A woman answered the phone. She had a sweet, high-pitched voice and her accent, I guessed, was North Yorkshire.
‘I need to set up an immediate wire transfer, please,’ I said.
‘Okay, sir. Let me just take some details.’
I rattled off answers to her questions about my name, date of birth, address and account number.
‘Okay, yes, I have you on-screen. You said you wanted a new transfer?’
‘Yes.’
A moment’s silence followed and I heard her typing away at her keyboard.
‘Into the account or out?’
‘Out,’ I said.
A few more moments of silence.
‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.
‘Do you have any other accounts with us?’ the lady responded.
‘No. That’s the only one. Is there a problem?’
‘Well, it’s just that the account details you gave me…that account has been cleared. It’s been closed.’
‘When was it closed?’ I said, feeling anger boiling up inside me.
‘Yesterday afternoon. The money was transferred to an offshore account with a different bank. Sir, you must have closed it? You’re the only signatory. Is there something wrong?’
Yes, I thought. There really is.
She was still talking as I smashed the phone back down into its cradle.