53

Petrova had spotted Kursk coming into the café and tried to rise from the table where she’d been hunched over a cup of coffee, feeling sorry for herself. He’d seen her like that plenty of times before, filled with self pity and bemoaning her situation, like every other ungrateful whore. Before she’d even got to her feet, he’d wrapped an arm around her throat and was holding her tight enough to choke her. She struck out with her arms and heels, but the blows just bounced off Kursk. He didn’t even notice them.

There were two men in the room, an old geezer slurping soup at another table and a balding, middle-aged man wearing a white apron behind the counter. Kursk pointed his gun at him, gesturing for him to come out from behind the bar. The man started moving, never taking his eyes off Kursk. When he reached the middle of the room, Kursk gestured again, pointing at the floor. The man got down on his knees, and Kursk stepped over, dragging Alix as easily as he would a child with a cuddly toy, and stamped on the man’s back, forcing him facedown on the ground.

The old geezer hadn’t moved. Kursk figured he must be senile. There was no point trying to communicate with him, so he just swung a foot at the chair, knocking it out from under the old boy and sending him crashing to the floor. Kursk kicked him in the head, just to reinforce the message, and fired a bullet into the floor between the two men. They lay there, the older one moaning incoherently as Kursk put his gun to Alix’s head and hissed in her ear.

“You’re coming with me, you treacherous bitch. Yuri wants you alive, but just try anything clever and I’ll put a bullet through your jaw and smash your pretty face to pieces. You’ll live, all right, but you’ll wish you hadn’t. Now, move!”

They started toward the exit, and that was when Tom Johnsen walked up to the doorway. He stopped there for a moment, trying to make sense of what he could see, the two men lying on the floor, a third man holding a woman he was threatening with a gun. A coward would have done the smart thing and got the hell out of there. But Johnsen was not a coward. He was a trained agent. He was also a brave man faced with a felon abducting a woman. So he reached for his weapon.

Kursk put two rounds into Johnsen’s upper body before he’d even got a hand on his gun, the impact sending him sprawling backward into the street. Then the Russian turned back to the men on the floor, men who had just become eye witnesses to a homicide, and shot them point-blank in the back of their skulls, the bullets ripping half their faces off as they exited into the floor.

Alix turned her head and spat in Kursk’s face. “You bastard,” she croaked, gasping for the air to force her words out. “You didn’t have to do that.”

He pounded the pistol into her head, leaving her dazed and barely conscious as he pulled her out of the café. He didn’t have to do that, either. But it felt good.

As she watched Tom Johnsen walk up to the café, Jennifer Stock had been thinking about the weird ways life threw men and women together. When she got up that morning, she’d had no more expectation of meeting someone new than she had of spending the day cooped up in cars doing surveillance. But that was how the day had gone and that was how she’d found this man.

She liked him, that much was certain. She liked the way he’d smiled when he first opened his car door and let her in. She liked the way the sun had caught the golden hairs on his strong, muscular forearms when he held the steering wheel, his sleeves rolled up as he drove. She liked the way he’d tried and failed not to stare at her breasts, and his guilty-schoolboy look when she’d caught him at it. “Sorry”, he’d said, shamefacedly. Then he’d perked up and added, “Still, you look so great it would be rude not to.” She’d tried to be cross, but she’d actually felt ridiculously pleased.

She sighed to herself, knowing where all this would lead and wondering whether the pleasures would be worth the inevitable complications that arose from a relationship with someone else in the Service. Then she told herself to stop acting like a silly schoolgirl and start paying attention to her job. And that was when she saw the look of surprise on Tom’s face and the two steps he took as he staggered backward, as if hit by some invisible blow to his body, collapsed, and just lay there motionless in the middle of the street.

What she’d just seen was so far removed from what she’d been thinking that it took Jennifer a couple of seconds to make sense of it all. Then, understanding and horror collided in her brain and she was throwing open the car door, pulling out her gun, and racing up the street, crying out the name of the lover she’d never have, concentrating so hard on his dead body that she did not at first register the presence of the other, far bigger man, nor the woman in his grasp.

Then they were standing opposite each other, Jennifer and the killer, and immediately she knew that even though they were both armed, it really made no difference. During her small-arms training, Jennifer had been told that during the Second World War, 85 percent of soldiers in battle never fired their weapons in anger, even when their own lives were threatened. Normal, nonpsychotic human beings are overwhelmingly inclined not to kill one another. So the most important psychological element in military training is to overcome that inclination and turn decent people into killers. But in the case of Jennifer Stock, that training hadn’t worked. She knew she had to shoot the man in front of her or she herself would be shot, but she just couldn’t do it.

He knew it too. She could see it in his eyes, in the tiny twitch of a smile at one corner of his mouth.

Their whole encounter could be counted in seconds on the fingers of one hand, yet it seemed to stretch for hours as the smile spread and his finger tightened on the trigger and the muzzle of his gun flashed and then Jennifer felt herself being picked up by a force stronger than gravity and thrown through the air just like Tom had been. And then she felt nothing at all.

Kursk paused for a moment to be sure that the woman was dead, then continued on his way. When he got to the van, he yanked the rear cargo doors open, picked up Alix, and threw her in, locking the doors behind her.

As he walked around to the driver’s door, a flash of movement caught Kursk’s eye. He looked across to the far side of the street, up at the end of the road, and saw a man leave the Irish pub. It was Carver.

Carver spotted Kursk at the same time, and started to run down the street toward him, keeping his head down, his body covered by the line of parked cars as Kursk fired in his direction.

Kursk hunkered down behind the van door for a second, waiting to see if any of his men would follow Carver out of the pub. But there was no sign of them. Carver must have taken them out. Now they were one-on-one again, just like they had been in those Parisian sewers. Kursk didn’t like those odds. But he could see another way of getting at the Englishman: the woman lying helpless in his cargo bay.

Kursk fired two more shots in Carver’s direction, just to keep his head down, then leaped into his cab and fired up the engine, flooring the accelerator as he engaged the transmission. He could see Carver ahead of him, running into the street and standing there in the firing position, legs apart, arms outstretched in front of him. But Kursk ignored the bullets as they shattered the windshield in front of him and ripped into the bodywork at his side. He aimed the van straight at Carver, forcing him to dive out of the way and sideswiping a row of parked cars. The van careered back across the road, but then Kursk regained control of the wheel, sat up in his seat, and drove off into the night.

Carver couldn’t catch him now. If he wanted the woman back, he was going to have to beg.