A crash. A burst of footsteps. A shout.
Danny turned to see the older researcher stumbling for the stairs. He wasn’t the only one. His younger colleague, clearly terrified too, had also seized the moment when Danny and his team had been staring transfixed at the commandant as his last chance to escape.
Vasyl had reacted quickest, had already wheeled round, and was racing after them.
‘Don’t shoot,’ Danny shouted, seeing Vasyl already lining up the younger of the two men.
Too late. He had already fired.
But – thank God, Danny thought – he’d missed. Against the odds, the two researchers had made it as far as the stairs and were now scrambling up them out of sight.
Slowing, Vasyl glanced back, his eyes burning. But he’d heard Danny now, and stepped aside to let him race past.
Danny wove through the furniture and hit the stairs at a full sprint. He reached the first doorway at the top, just as it was swinging shut. He burst through onto the next floor and on up the next flight of stairs. Then an alarm bell rang inside his head. Not because he was worried about catching the two men – they were unfit and unprepared and panicking. No, what he’d just realized to his horror was—
‘Don’t!’ he yelled into his mike.
But even as the word left his mouth, it was drowned in a savage clatter of gunfire from above.
Then all he could hear was the sound of his own footsteps echoing off the walls and the thumping of his heart.
His spirits sank as he reached the ground floor and the wooden swing doors came into view. It wasn’t that he thought the researcher downstairs had lied when he’d said there were no more of Glinka’s people left in or around the building. It was because he already knew what he’d see waiting for him in the next room.
Viktor. He’d ordered him to guard the way in and out of the building. And he already knew that Viktor had just opened fire.
‘Stand down,’ he warned in Ukrainian, slowing to a stop as he reached the doors. Edging them open with one hand, the first thing Danny saw was the slick of blood spreading across the floor. Then he saw shoes, twisted legs, a thin white-coated torso, torn and bloodied from where the rounds from Viktor’s magazine had ripped into it. The thin researcher would have been dead before he had even hit the floor.
The fat man’s bloodied body came into view next as Danny pushed the door wider. In spite of his weight, it seemed he’d made it to the ground floor ahead of his scrawny colleague. And his prize for coming first? To take the full brunt of Viktor’s fire.
‘Hold your fire,’ Danny ordered.
A barked affirmative crackled in his ear, as he stepped into the doorway to see Viktor kneeling against the wall to one side of the bevelled delivery-bay window.
Far from having stood down, Viktor was staring along his weapon sight, his forefinger hovering on the trigger, covering both the window and the doorway that led to the abandoned administration centre, ready to shoot whatever other strangers might rush him next.
Danny knelt beside the two researchers and checked their pulses. Nothing. Both men were dead. The first shot clean through the head, the second twice through the chest. ‘I told you that once we were inside you were to try to disable people – that we needed them alive,’ he said, but even as he did so, he knew it was pointless. It was already too late.
It’s my fault, he thought. How was Viktor to know what was coming at him through those doors? If anyone was to blame, it was himself. He should have seen the risk sooner. He already knew from Spartak exactly how well the twins were trained and how lethal they were. The instant the researchers had bolted, he should have radioed Viktor and told him that the two men coming his way were unarmed.
Danny stared hard at the floor, at the slick of bright red blood he was kneeling in. Footsteps. A warning. Vasyl appeared through the doorway. Then Spartak.
‘Go check the prisoner upstairs,’ Danny ordered both twins.
‘And be quick about it,’ Spartak added. ‘Dead?’ he asked, looking down at the two corpses, as the twins hurried away.
Danny nodded.
‘No matter. All is not lost. Thanks to Sabirzhan, we know where Glinka and the others are going next.’
‘If it’s the truth,’ Danny said.
‘You think Sabirzhan is lying to us?’ Spartak’s face darkened.
‘No, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t lied to,’ Danny pointed out. ‘Sabirzhan may be right. Maybe he did get lucky and overhear their plans. But, equally, he may be wrong. They could have tricked him into thinking he knows what they’re planning next.’
The big man stared at him pensively. ‘But why?’
‘Just in case.’
‘In case what? They have him in a cage and he is dying.’
‘In case someone like us turned up here looking for them and found him still alive. Then he could pass on any disinformation he’d been tricked into believing.’
‘And send us on a . . .’ Spartak’s eyes narrowed ‘. . .
wild goose chase,
yes? That is how you say it?’
‘Yes. Or into some kind of a trap.’
Because that was possible too. Glinka and the Kid might have believed that someone would track them soon enough, and if that person was Danny, they might also have seen this as a chance to trick him once more and lure him to London to be either captured or killed.
‘Or Sabirzhan really
is
telling the truth,’ Spartak said.
Yes, and Danny hoped more than anything that he was. But he had no way of knowing. All he did know was that Glinka was no fool. In fact, the way Danny saw it, the only mistake his adversary had made so far was in not killing him when he’d had the chance.
‘So what now?’ Spartak said.
Darkness fell like a veil across Danny’s eyes. ‘I find out what that guy upstairs knows,’ he said, already rising.
Spartak nodded grimly. ‘And the commandant?’ he said. ‘Sabirzhan?’
‘Go back and find out what else he needs.’
Spartak inhaled deeply, as he steeled himself to walk back into that subterranean slice of hell. ‘And then?’ he asked.
‘Then I’ll make a decision,’ Danny said. About what is best for him, he thought. And what is best for us.
Spartak turned away and pushed back through the double doors. Danny picked up his weapon and walked quickly through to the administration centre where their prisoner was being held.
As he approached the room he’d last seen the prisoner taken into, he heard urgent whispers. On edge, he switched off his flashlight and pushed the safety off his AK-9.
The door to the administration centre was ajar. As he neared it, he saw Viktor and Vasyl crouched on the floor at either side of the prisoner. Vasyl held a flashlight in one hand, illuminating them as though the three were huddled out of doors beside a campfire. It showed deep slashes sliced across their now dead prisoner’s face.
It showed the blood too, dripping from the serrated combat knife gripped in Viktor’s hand.
‘What the hell happened here?’ Danny said.
The two mercenaries fell silent. Neither would meet Danny’s eye. He’d not lowered his weapon, even though there was no one else in the room. Instead he kept it trained on the two frozen members of his team.
In addition to the gleaming knife, Viktor had his rifle across his lap as he crouched, his left hand on it. Vasyl’s AK-9 was on the floor by his side. But still in easy reach. And Danny had already seen for himself how fast the twins could move.
‘Spartak,’ he said, toggling his mike. ‘Get up here.’
No answer.
‘Spartak,’ he tried again.
No reply.
‘Shine that light across his face,’ he told Viktor, unwilling to risk moving his hands from his weapon to put his night-vision goggles on. ‘Do it now.’
Viktor obeyed. The torch beam traversed slowly across the prone guard’s face, picking out the blood spattered there and his dark dead eyes.
The signs of torture, which Danny had first glimpsed as he’d come through the doorway, were now unmistakable. The man’s smile was slick and obscenely wide, where the knife’s blade had clearly been pressed hard into it, slitting his cheeks.
‘Now the body,’ he said.
Another slow traverse, even slower than before. It did not reveal fear or shame, but something more like satisfaction . . . pride.
The man’s hands were not tied, as Danny would have expected. His left wrist had been slit. The worst of the blood, pints of it, had clearly flowed from it. He looked like a suicide, but that was clearly impossible.
Danny had seen enough to know that the twins could no longer be trusted.
‘Both of you,’ he said, ‘put down your weapons and push them out of reach.’
He didn’t need to warn them to do it slowly. They knew the drill and, fast as they both might be, they knew how ruthlessly Danny had dealt with the guard in the car park outside.
‘Now roll him over,’ Danny said.
Because even though a lot of blood had pooled around the dead guard’s wrists, there wasn’t enough for him to have died from simply bleeding out.
A soft groan – air being expelled from the dead man’s lungs as the twins pushed him onto his front.
‘Shine the flashlight,’ Danny said.
An exit wound, glistening scarlet and white with blood and bone, was clearly visible in the pale glow of torchlight at the base of the prisoner’s skull.
‘He tried to run,’ Vasyl said.
‘It’s true,’ said Viktor. ‘Look there. He had a blade on him – he cut himself free and must have cut his wrists in the process.’
A stiletto blade lay beside the dead man’s open fist.
‘We got back here just in time,’ Vasyl said, nodding to where the rifle was propped against the wall.
Viktor: ‘He was running for it.’
Vasyl: ‘That was when I fired.’
You’re lying, thought Danny. Both of you. And not just because the exit wound in the dead prisoner’s skull meant he’d been shot close up through his mouth, which could not have happened if he’d been running away.
But also because of the amount of blood. Pints of it. Meaning his heart had kept on pumping for quite some time after his mouth and wrist had been slit. Whoever had done it had wanted him to think about it. They’d wanted him to know that he was dying. They’d wanted him to feel his life force draining away.
Revenge for his part in what had happened to Commandant Sabirzhan downstairs. That was Danny’s first thought – that Vasyl, having witnessed downstairs what had happened, had marched up here and summarily tortured and executed the prisoner for his part in it.
But for there to have been this much blood? It didn’t make sense. Vasyl had had just a couple of minutes’ head start on Danny. There hadn’t been enough time.
Meaning that the wrist and mouth wounds must have been inflicted on the guard while he, Spartak
and
Vasyl had been downstairs. So it must have been Viktor who’d set about torturing the prisoner.
But why?
What did Viktor know that Danny did not?
Footsteps behind him. Danny moved sideways in an arc, keeping the twins covered. Spartak entered the room and stared down at the twins beside the corpse.
‘What’s going on?’
‘They say he cut himself loose,’ Danny said, ‘then ran for his rifle. But he’s been tortured. Vasyl would not have had time. Viktor is responsible.’
Spartak didn’t question his analysis.
‘Why?’ he asked the twins.
A shared look between them. A mutual nod of acquiescence.
‘I told him to,’ Vasyl said.
‘What?’ Spartak asked.
‘When?’ Danny said.
‘The moment I found out who was down there, I radioed him . . .’
Danny remembered how Vasyl had been talking into his radio.
‘The commandant,’ continued the twin. ‘We met him once when we were students at the FSB Academy. We both shook his hand.’
‘This man deserved to die,’ Viktor said. ‘For what he’d done.’
‘I needed him,’ Danny snapped, his professionalism leaving him now, the weapon trembling in his hand as anger pumped through his veins. ‘I needed to know what he knew.’
‘And that is why I tortured him before I cut him loose,’ said Viktor. ‘He knew nothing. Not even the names of the people he worked for. He was locally hired. Nothing but a gangster.’
‘And so you executed him,’ Danny said.
‘I put him down,’ the twin answered, ‘like the animal he was.’
There was no apology in the younger man’s voice. In neither twin’s expression did Danny see regret. Only pride.
He thought fast. What had happened here – the torture, the execution – was wrong. But the man was dead. There was no way of bringing him back. And even though the twins had lied to him once about what had happened, he did not believe they were lying to him now. Not in front of Spartak. He did not believe they would dare.
‘Idiots,’ Spartak said. ‘I should shoot you both now.’
But in the way he’d said it, Danny heard something else: an undertone of respect. Yes, Spartak was angry with them for what they had done, but he understood – sympathized – with why they had done it.
He turned to Danny. ‘What do you want to do?’ he said.
Danny knew Spartak would back any decision he made. But at the same time, he knew there was no point in attempting to discipline the twins for what they had done. Spartak would do that in his own time and way. Maybe they’d still get fully paid for what they had come here to do, or maybe not. Maybe they would never work for Spartak or any of his associates or contacts again.
‘We move out,’ Danny said. ‘As soon as we’re clear, you call in whoever you think might be able to help the commandant. Do it anonymously. Tell them where he is and what has happened to him.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Spartak said. ‘The researchers said there’s no cure.’
‘But what if they’re wrong? The Soviet government made that virus. There may still be someone in the Russian government today who knows a way to cure it too.’
Spartak said nothing. A look of incomprehension, then surprise spread across his face.
‘It’s all right, I know what you’re thinking,’ Danny said. ‘That whoever you tell will come here and talk to the commandant and, of course, you’re right. If they do reach him before he dies, he’ll probably tell them exactly what he told us about where the people who did this to him are going next.’