of smiles. “Villanelle, we have a job for you. The one that all the others have been leading up to.”
“And if I say no?”
“You won’t say no. This will be the greatest challenge of your career. And afterward, you’ll be free to go, with more money than you’ll ever be able to spend.”
“Of course. You’d really let me go.”
“We really would. The world would be a different place.”
“And Eve?”
“Right now, her knowledge threatens us all. Kill her and move on.”
“No. Eve comes with me.”
Richard regards her patiently. “Villanelle, there are other women. This one’s really very ordinary. She’ll hold you back.”
Her eyes a frozen gray, Oxana returns the barrel of the Sig to her temple. “Eve lives. Agree, or I fire.”
Anton regards her expressionlessly for a moment. “If Eve lives, you accept the contract.”
“Who’s the target?”
“You’ll learn in due course. But I guarantee that you’ll be impressed.”
“And if I’m not?”
“If you decline the contract, then you and your… girlfriend”—he says the word as if it nauseates him—“will be loose ends that we have to tie up. And we will. No faked deaths, no last-minute escapes. Just two anonymous bodies in a landfill.” Swinging the barrel of his weapon toward me, as if to warn Oxana not to try anything, he takes back the Sig. “But don’t let’s spoil the moment. You won’t decline this one. And the really heartwarming news is that you’ll be working with Lara again. She can’t wait.”
“They can’t wait,” says Lara.
7
We spend the rest of the day in the black Mercedes, traveling to Moscow. Anton drives, Richard is in the passenger seat, and Lara, Oxana and I are in the back. It’s a perverse situation. My back hurts like hell, the slightest bump or vibration tearing at the stitches. Oxana gazes wordlessly out of the side window, Lara looks bored, and I sit between them, watching the flat, snow-blown landscape race past. Meanwhile, Oxana’s Sig and my Glock are in Anton’s pockets.
“… shoot Eve in the head.”
At intervals I find myself weeping, or shaking uncontrollably. When this happens Oxana looks at me with frowning concern. She doesn’t know what to say or do. At random moments she takes my hand, wipes my eyes with a tissue, or puts an arm around me and presses my head awkwardly to her shoulder. Lara pointedly ignores all of this.
“Kill her and move on.”
I don’t respond to Oxana. I can’t. I’m locked in to the events of the morning. Kris’s sudden weightlessness as she is borne backward by the high-velocity sniper round, and the softness with which she falls to the marble floor. The sound of bullets smacking into clothing and flesh. The tiny blur of orange announcing the shot that furrows through my back, and the way that the sound seems to follow the pain. The sight of Dasha’s men as we leave. One sprawled across the stairs, glued in place by his own congealed blood. Two others sitting on the half-landing, wounded but alive, and one of them, the one that Oxana struck on the head with her Sig Sauer, raising a rueful hand in farewell as we pass.
“… shoot Eve in the head.”
We pass exits for Gatchina, Tosno, Kirishi.
“Quickly please.”
Velikiy Novgorod, Borovichi.
“Kill her and move on.”
Oxana takes my head in her hands, and gently turns it until we are face to face. “Listen to me,” she says, very quietly, so that only I can hear. “I’m going to tell you a story. A story about my mother. Her name was Nadezhda, and she grew up on a farm, a few miles from the town of Novozybkov, although her family was originally from Chuvashia. She was very pretty, in the Chuvash way, with a high forehead and long dark hair. Something about her eyes, perhaps the arch of her brows, gave her a surprised expression. When she was fifteen there was the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, a hundred and fifty kilometers away. The wind carried the radiation northeast to the Novozybkov district, and everyone from my mother’s village was evacuated. Soon afterward the area became a Closed Zone.
“I’m not sure how my mother ended up in Perm. Perhaps she was sent to relatives. She married my father when she was twenty-two, and I was born a year later. I was a very clever child, and I’m not sure how, but I always knew that Mama was sick, and would die before long. I hated her for that, for forcing this sadness on me, and sometimes at night I