Die for Me (Killing Eve #3) - Luke Jennings Page 0,42

do you think we’re going?” Charlie asks me.

“Hawaii?”

We leave at midday, and as we step out of the lift in our designer outfits and follow Richard through the building’s endless succession of lobbies, no one gives us a second glance. We could be an upscale tour group, or prosperous Russians setting off on holiday. Outside, it’s wonderfully cold, and I turn into the wind for a moment so that the snowflakes fly into my face. Then, all too soon, we’re climbing into a Porsche SUV with dark-tinted windows. Anton drives, Richard takes the front seat, and I sit between Oxana and Charlie.

We drive northwest, following the signs to Sheremetyevo airport. Visibility is limited, and the road surface treacherous. The outlines of broken-down vehicles are visible on the hard shoulder, hazard lights winking. I’m nervous, but glad that Oxana is at my side. I’m even glad, in a perverse sort of way, that Charlie’s there.

We’re crossing the outer ring road when a police vehicle swings in front of us, blue lights flashing. “Fuck’s sake,” Anton mutters, bringing the Porsche to a halt in the slush. “What now?”

There’s a sharp tap on the passenger-side window and Richard lowers it. The features of the uniformed figure outside are obscured by his helmet and face mask, but his shoulder patch identifies him as an officer of the FSB, Russia’s internal security service. Ahead of us, other vehicles similar to ours have been stopped. Several drivers and passengers have been ordered out of their cars and directed, documents in hand, to an armored truck with iron-grille windows and FSB insignia, parked on the side of the highway.

“What’s going on, Lieutenant?” Richard asks the officer, as wind and snow blast into the Porsche’s interior.

“Security check. Passports please?”

We hand them over, he checks them carefully, and peers at us one by one through the passenger window. Then he returns all the passports except mine. “Out please,” he tells me, pointing to the truck with a gloved hand.

It’s freezing outside, and I pull the hood of my parka over my head as I join the line outside the truck. “Must be looking for someone important,” I say to the woman in front of me, a grandmotherly figure in a pink woolen headscarf.

She shrugs, indifferent, and stamps her booted feet in the snow. “They’re always looking for someone. They just stop cars at random.”

Eventually, it’s my turn. I climb the steps into the truck, and when I get inside stand for a few seconds, eyes narrowed. It’s dark in there after the snow-brightness. Two officers are sitting on metal benches opposite me, and one is in the shadows to my left. At a signal from the man in the shadows the others leave.

“Mrs. Polastri. Eve. I’m so glad that the reports of your death were exaggerated.”

I recognize the voice, and when he moves into one of the shafts of light admitted by the iron-grille windows, I recognize the man. Broad shoulders made broader by a military greatcoat, buzz-cut silver hair, a wry smile.

“Mr. Tikhomirov. This is a surprise. And yes, it’s good to be alive.”

“I saw the photograph. It was good, and would have fooled most people but… what do they say? Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. In our world, as you know, nothing is what it looks like, even life and death. Everything’s a simulacrum.”

Vadim Tikhomirov is a senior officer of the FSB. A general, in fact, although he’s not the kind of man to advertise his rank. We first met in complicated circumstances after Charlie—or Lara as they were then—tried and failed to shoot me in the VDNKh Metro station in Moscow. On that occasion Tikhomirov not only got me out of Russia, he discreetly alerted me to the fact that my boss, Richard Edwards, was an asset of the Twelve.

Tikhomirov is the refined face of an often brutally uncompromising organization, and where his own loyalties lie I’m not sure. Is he, as he appears to be, a dedicated servant of the Russian state, and if so, what does that actually entail? Unquestioning obedience to the diktats of the Kremlin, or the playing of longer, more ambiguous games?

He leans toward me on the bench. “Eve, we have very little time. If we don’t keep this short your friends outside are going to be suspicious. First, you’ve done brilliantly to insert yourself into a Twelve operation.”

I stare at him. Does he really think that’s why I’m here? That I’m still working for MI6?

“How do I know this? Let’s just