80

Yuri Zhukovski took his time. Three hours passed before Alix heard his footsteps coming up the stairs, then striding down the corridor. She’d been listening to the men drinking downstairs, bragging to one another and singing the filthy locker-room songs they’d learned back in the old Soviet days. At one point the partying stopped, there was a tramp of feet across the flagstone hallway, and then, a little later, a muffled crackle coming from somewhere deep in the belly of the building.

Was that gunfire? Alix tried to pretend that there might be some other explanation, but she could not escape the obvious conclusion: Carver had been shot. She closed her eyes and prayed.

Please God, let him live. Don’t take him from me now.

The men had returned to the living room, the brays of their boastful laughter even louder than before. Finally, the party had broken up. A few moments later, the door to the bedroom banged open and Yuri stood before her, silhouetted against the light from the corridor, one hand holding the computer case.

Alix patted the bedspread next to her. She was arrayed there for his pleasure, on top of the bed, leaning against a pile of snow white pillows in a short, satin nightdress the color of café au lait, trimmed with lace and cut high on the thigh. She had one knee up, the other leg stretched out in front of her, revealing a pair of tiny matching panties.

“Come here, my darling,” she purred. “I’ve been missing you.”

Yuri placed the black bag on the floor, took a few steps into the room, then stood quite still in the middle of the carpet. She knew he must have been drinking with his men, but his voice betrayed no trace whatsoever of drunkenness when he replied, “No. You come here and prove how much you’ve missed me. Prove it on your knees.”

Afterward, she helped him out of his clothes, nuzzling against him, dutifully arousing him as she led him to the bed. But now that Yuri’s immediate physical needs had been satisfied, he seemed more interested in discussing the pain he’d inflicted on Carver.

“We let him stay there for an hour or so,” he was saying as they slipped under the covers. “Then Kursk and his boys burst into the room and dragged him out of his chair. He was totally disoriented. It was obvious that he was completely unable to see, he’d been looking into that light for so long. He was waving his arms around in front of him like a blind beggar.”

Somehow Alix managed to give a little titter, as if amused by Carver’s degradation. Yuri seemed encouraged by her appreciation.

“They led him out of the room, into the garage. Then they put him up against a wall and he stood there, cowering like a whipped dog, looking around with his pathetic staring eyes, still taped wide open. I must say, it made me feel quite nostalgic, just like the old days. And the fascinating thing was, his hands were free. He could have taken the tape off his eyes, closed them for a bit, but he just couldn’t figure it out. I was glad. I wanted him to see what was happening. I wanted him to know.”

“I want him to know too,” said Alix, nibbling Yuri’s ear and wrapping her thighs around his.

“Still, after a while, I ordered Titov to tear off the tape, to see what would happen. Carver blinked a few times and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he was crying, weeping quite pitifully. Kursk slapped him a few times and that seemed to wake him up. That was when he realized where he was, standing up against a wall with four men pointing guns at him. And then, then—and I must say, this was, perhaps, the most satisfying moment of all—he tried to stand up straight, die like a man . . . and he couldn’t. He fell over. One of the men had to go over and drag him up again, just prop him against the wall. . . .”

Alix had been trying not to listen. It was just too painful. So it took her a few seconds to comprehend what Yuri was saying. He was describing Carver’s death. Her prayer had gone unanswered. It felt like a knife to her heart. She couldn’t breathe. She gasped for air.

“Are you all right?” asked Yuri.

She nodded and smiled apologetically. “Sorry. I’m fine. Tell me the rest of the story.”

He took one of her breasts in his hand and gave the nipple a contemplative stroke with his thumb, his eyes fixed on her face, his expression impassive as she gave a little gasp.

“So as I was saying,” he went on, “the men were all armed with their guns. But the guns were loaded with blanks. So they fired a volley at Carver and he was huddled up against the wall and it took him a second to realize that he was still alive. And then he wet himself all over the floor, like an animal. So naturally I made him get down on his knees and crawl through his own urine. It was really quite satisfying.”

Carver was alive! It was all Alix could do to stop herself rolling off Yuri and simply flopping over on the bed, overwhelmed by relief. Yet that joy was mixed with a bitter shot of anger and shame at the ordeal he was enduring on her account.

“Where is he now?” she asked, raising her head from Yuri’s chest.

“Back in his favorite comfy chair,” Yuri replied.

Alix knew what that meant. Yuri had taken her to see the basement torture chamber the day before, when it was being prepared. It was a test of her loyalty and a warning against betrayal. The unspoken message was clear: You too could end up in that chair.

She tried to keep her voice calm. “Will he survive the night?”

Suddenly Yuri’s eyes turned hard and suspicious, with a new intensity that seemed to cut through the semidarkness of the bedroom.

“Why do you ask? You seem concerned for his safety.”

Somehow, Alix forced a laugh. “Of course I am! I do not want him to die just yet. I want a long, deep sleep. Maybe in the morning I will have a little breakfast in bed. Then I will have a bath, get dressed . . .” She lay back down again so that she was whispering into Yuri’s ear, “In my sexiest new clothes. . . .” She paused again. “And then I want to go downstairs and watch him die with my own eyes, right in front of me.”

Yuri gave a sharp, almost cackling laugh and slapped Alix hard on the rump. “You are a bad, bad woman. That must be why you make me so hard.”

Hating herself for her complicity, Alix let him screw her and pretended to enjoy it. Then she remained motionless and silent until he fell asleep. She was tempted, oh so tempted, to kill Yuri there and then, press a pillow against his smug face until he suffocated. But there was just a chance he might wake up and fight back, and she could not afford to be defeated now.

There was a gun in the bedside table, on Yuri’s side of the bed. Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, agonizingly aware of every sound, Alix slid the drawer open and removed the pistol. It was a SIG-Sauer, like the one Carver had used. The two men in her life had that in common, at least.

The glowing red numbers of the digital clock on the table gave the time as 4:01.

The master bedroom suite had his and hers walk-in closets. In Yuri’s, she found a pair of jeans and a belt and stuffed them into a laundry bag, which she hung over her left shoulder.

Would Carver be in any fit state, mentally or physically, to get dressed and make a run for it? Could he fight his way out if they were discovered? Alix longed to see and hold him again. But that ache of anticipation was undermined by an equally powerful fear of what she might find. Part of her wished she could just run away and hide from the strain of multiple deceptions and the pummeling of repressed emotions. But there was no point trying to close her eyes and wish all this away. Life was as it was. She just had to deal with it.

She pulled on a robe and tiptoed barefoot back across the bedroom to the door, turned the handle with painstaking care, and, never taking her eyes off the bed, opened the door a few inches. Just enough to see into the hallway.

It seemed clear. The men would be upstairs, Kursk in his own small room, the others in an attic dormitory. They would not believe that Carver could possibly escape. Even so, knowing Kursk, there was bound to be a man standing guard somewhere. For all his crude brutality, Kursk was very seldom inefficient and never, ever careless.

The ground floor was completely unoccupied, though the air was still heavy with the stench of stale smoke and spilled alcohol. If there was a guard, he would be downstairs, in the cramped control room next door to the main chamber.

Standing by the heavy door that led down to the basement, Alix thought back to her side-arm training, almost a decade ago. She checked the magazine and made sure that a round was chambered. Then she stepped down the stairs, holding the gun out in front of her, clasped in both hands, ready to fire at any moment.

There was no one in the basement corridor. She stepped noiselessly across the bare concrete floor to the door of the control room. Now she held the gun in her right hand, behind her back. With her left, she eased the door open. If there was anyone inside, she planned to tell him she wanted to see the Englishman suffering. The men all knew she was back in Yuri’s good graces. They would want to indulge her for fear of angering him.

The door swung into the room. Alix slipped in after it, side-on, trying to conceal her handgun. She needn’t have worried. There was a guard in the room, Rutsev, but his piggy, round head was slumped against his chest and the only sound in the room was the slow, even snuffle of his breathing. In the quiet room, with no reason to believe that anything could happen, he had succumbed to the effects of all the vodka he had consumed that night.

Alix wondered what to do next. She could not allow Rutsev to wake up and sound the alarm. But there didn’t seem to be anything in the room that she could use to tie him up or gag him. There was no alternative. She would have to shoot him while he slept.

She held out the gun, barely a hand’s breadth from his head, trying to keep it from trembling, trying to summon up the will to kill another human being in cold blood. She thought of all the times his lecherous eyes had played across her body, the hands he had let slide oh-so-accidentally across her ass and breasts. It wasn’t enough. And then, for the first time since she had entered the room, her eyes were caught by the glow of a TV monitor.

She turned her head and saw Carver, his limbs and body bound, his mouth and eyes forced open, the earphones clamped to his head. It was the absolute silence and stillness that shocked her most of all. He must be undergoing agonies beyond all comprehension. Yet there was no sign whatsoever of his suffering. Even the ability to communicate his pain had been denied him.

Alix couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. For all the horror, there was something mesmerizing about the sight of such pure, unrelieved torment. For ten long seconds she stood there, unmoving, then she tore her gaze from the monitor, spun around, and put two bullets into Rutsev’s skull without an instant’s hesitation.

A stew of blood, brain, bone, and hair sprayed against the bare gray wall behind him, heavy drops of thick red matter clinging to the rough surface of the concrete before they spattered onto the floor. Once again, Alix had killed a man. But this time she did not double over in shock. This time she barely even looked at the remains. Seconds later, she was sliding open the bolts on the white cell door.