Die for Me (Killing Eve #3) - Luke Jennings Page 0,68
thought you might like to see the city where Miss Vorontsova grew up.”
No such thought has occurred to me but I nod blankly. I have to go somewhere, and it might as well be Perm as anywhere else. Dima takes my breakfast tray, and returns shortly afterward carrying a suitcase and a winter coat. The suitcase contains new but nondescript clothes, washing things, and a plastic folder of documents.
An hour later I’m sitting in the passenger seat of an unmarked 4x4 vehicle, some kind of Lada, beside a plain-clothes officer. Alexei, as he introduces himself, doesn’t say much, but radiates tough, unhurried competence. As he swings the Lada through the narrow, slushy streets east of Lubyanka Square he conducts a speakerphone conversation with a woman named Vika, telling her that he will be away on official business for four days, and asking her to take Archie to the vet if his limp persists.
Twenty minutes later we are on a motorway, headed east. The windscreen wipers thump back and forth, and a snow-blurred landscape rolls past, dull gray and frozen white.
“Music?” Alexei suggests, and I turn on the radio, which is tuned to a classical station. A violin concerto is playing, all spun-sugar romanticism, not my sort of thing at all, but I feel the tears running down my cheeks. Alexei affects not to notice. “Glazunov,” he murmurs, transferring a packet of cigarettes from his tunic pocket to the glove compartment. “Heifetz recording.”
As the movement ends I wipe my eyes and blow my nose on a tissue, sniffing loudly. “I’m sorry,” I say.
He glances at me. “Please. I don’t know the details, but General Tikhomirov told us that you did a brave thing for us. A brave thing for Russia.”
Seriously? What the fuck did he tell them?
“Undercover work is hard,” he says, speeding up to overtake a line of slow-moving vehicles. “It’s stressful. We are in your debt.”
“Thank you,” I reply. It seems wisest to leave it at that.
Warm cars always make me sleepy. After a time I close my eyes, and dream of Oxana, rising up out of the steamy Shanghai street, with her cobra gaze fixed on me. I try to reach her but the pinprick of monsoon rain quickly becomes the slap of bullets into our flesh. We fall into the North Sea, and there, suspended in the icy half-dark, are Charlie, Anton, Kris in her velvet coat, and a naked and gray-lipped Azmat Dzabrati, all of them watching as the currents draw us apart until only our fingers are touching, and Oxana drifts into invisibility. I try to call after her, but the seawater rushes into my mouth, and I wake up.
Alexei tells me that I’ve been asleep for more than three hours. We stop at a service station for sandwiches, coffee and Milka chocolate. Then Alexei fills the Lada with diesel, takes his cigarettes from the glove compartment, and hands me a loaded Glock. “Five minutes, OK?”
“Sure. Am I in danger?”
“Not at all. But I agreed not to leave you unarmed and unprotected until we reach Perm.”
“Right.” I pocket the Glock, go for a pee in the foul, frozen toilet, and wonder about shooting myself, as I did in Dasha’s apartment. Is this my future? Moving from place to place, never settling, never resting, never forgetting? That afternoon we drive for a further six hours in a hissing column of trucks and cars. To either side of the motorway an endless vista of snowbound plains and shadowed forests unrolls beneath cloud-packed skies. At intervals we pass small administrative settlements.
Alexei seems as disinclined to talk about himself as I am. Instead, we listen to music, about which he appears to know a great deal. As each piece starts, he gives me a thumbnail sketch of the work in question. His favorite composer, he tells me, is Rachmaninoff, who saved his sanity in the days and nights following the Dubrovka Theatre siege, his first experience of action, in which a hundred and thirty hostages died.
Alexei points to the passenger-side glove compartment, where among the crumpled cigarette packets and spare Glock magazines I find a cracked plastic case housing a CD of Rachmaninoff’s first piano concerto. As the music plays Alexei glances at me, as if to check that it’s having the appropriate effect. Perhaps it is, because while I find it complex, and its themes difficult to follow, the act of listening to it occupies me to the exclusion of everything else. It doesn’t anesthetize my grief, but