Zero kill, p.23
Zero Kill, page 23
‘You’re RedQueen?’ she asked.
Arkady shook his head. ‘Camille is RedQueen, but she also works for me. Unfortunately, as soon as we got what we what wanted from you, Camille didn’t waste time in arranging for you to be killed. But she, like everyone else, I may add, underestimated you, Elsa, and all she succeeded in doing was to send two of my men to watery graves. Camille of all people should have known better.’ He gave her another sweet smile. ‘She would have killed you at Pettifore’s apartment, for sure. But as well as being tenacious and indestructible, it’s also your great fortune to have a guardian angel, which is how you came to be here now.’
They reached a large reception area. ‘Pettifore?’
He giggled. ‘Noah is a brilliant man, a genius. His work will change the world in so many ways, and it’s been a great honour to work with him over the years, but he’s nobody’s idea of an angel.’
‘Where’s Saint?’ Elsa demanded.
‘Saint…’ He stared for a moment, until the penny dropped. ‘Ah, the gentleman with the questionable hygiene.’
‘Did you kill him?’
If Arkady was intimidated by her aggression, he did a good job of hiding it. ‘Let me find out.’
The reception was the kind of foyer entrance she had seen in movies about grand hotels, with staircases lifting up both sides of the space, equestrian paintings, suits of medieval armour standing sentry, crests, stag heads on the walls, and hanging dead centre a sparkling chandelier. Packing boxes were stacked beside the open doors, and men were carrying them outside and placing them in a lorry.
‘Kieron?’ Arkady called over a large man with a cruel face. ‘Was Elsa brought here alone?’
‘We were instructed to bring the drunk,’ the man called Kieron said. ‘He’s in the bar.’
‘Good.’ Arkady turned to Elsa. ‘Your friend is here, and taking full advantage of my hospitality. You’ll have plenty of time to catch up with him, but we must—’
‘I want to see him,’ Elsa said.
‘Later.’
‘Now,’ she insisted.
Arkady blushed, as if acknowledging a terrible lack of social etiquette. ‘Of course you do, it’s only natural to want to see your friend. This way.’
He led her down another corridor behind reception.
‘You’re leaving here?’ she said, watching the men carry the boxes outside.
‘I’m shipping out a few things for reasons that will soon become obvious, and I won’t be returning here again. I’ll be honest, this place has never felt like home. Not since Natalya left me.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘She fell in love with a younger man and took my millions. My advice to you, Elsa, is never get old.’
‘Not much chance of that happening,’ she said.
‘I believed we’d spend our twilight days here, but I hate this place now.’ Arkady got his bearings at the intersection of two corridors. ‘This way, I think.’
He led her into another big room with a full-length bar running the length of it, where slumped on a stool, head lowered into his arms, his guttural breath misting the polished surface of the counter, was Saint. A couple of Arkady’s security team stood inside the door.
‘He’s been drinking all my alcohol. It’s just as well I’m a rich man.’
‘Saint.’ When Elsa shook him by the shoulder he grunted, his eyelids fluttering momentarily, but he didn’t wake up. ‘He needs to lie down somewhere.’
‘He was carried to one of the guest bedrooms, but he keeps finding his way back here, according to my men. Your friend is a man of singular purpose. Any injuries he’s sustained have been mostly to his liver, and self-inflicted. Now, I want you to see—’
But Arkady’s words were drowned out by the sharp sound of footsteps.
Elsa turned just as Camille punched her hard on the side of the face. She fell to the floor, ear shrieking. Expecting another attack, Elsa tried to lift herself, but Camille pulled a gun and pointed it at her chest.
‘Did you think I didn’t know, Elsa? Did you really think I didn’t have a clue?’
Uncertain of what to do, Arkady’s men stepped forward. Arkady lifted his hands in a placatory gesture. ‘Please, Camille, not this again. I thought we had agreed. Our friend will not be happy. If you kill her, there will be consequences.’
When Elsa tried to get up, Camille brought a heel down hard on her lower back and she collapsed back onto the parquet floor.
Arkady snapped, ‘That’s enough!’
Camille smiled nastily, her top lip curling over her straight white teeth, but she stepped back.
‘Help her up.’ At Arkady’s command, the men lifted Elsa to her feet. Hands braced on her knees, she got her breath back. ‘Elsa, would you like anything while we’re here?’
‘I just want to know what all this is about.’
‘What a good idea.’ Arkady clapped his hands. ‘Come, we’ll show you.’
Leaving Saint comatose at the bar, Elsa followed Arkady again, conscious of Camille behind her. She felt her former friend’s hateful gaze boring into the back of her head; half expected a bullet in the back at any moment.
‘He never loved you,’ Elsa said quietly without looking around. ‘It was me he always wanted.’
‘Oh, Elsa,’ complained Arkady. ‘Please don’t antagonize her.’
A tall man in a suit came hurrying along the corridor to whisper in Arkady’s ear.
‘Thank you, Anthony,’ said the Russian, and he rubbed his hands in glee. ‘My associate is on their way now!’
At the end of a corridor, Arkady pressed his palm against a biometric reader, unlocking a pair of double doors, and led them into a large wood-panelled room where half a dozen men and women worked at screens. Walking to the far wall and placing his palm on another reader, a second pair of doors clicked open. He pulled one of the bar handles to allow Elsa inside.
The room, complete with chandeliers and wood panelling, was vast. But the windows had been boarded up, and the harsh illumination in the room came from free-standing industrial lamps in each corner.
‘Our biolab,’ said Arkady proudly, nodding at the large installation of transparent plastic that dominated the middle of the room. Figures in biohazard suits moved about inside. Generators and humming filtration units surrounded the structure and lined the walls.
In the centre of the lab was an isolation chamber, where a man and a boy lay on cot-beds, their gaunt, feverish faces covered with livid pustules and seeping lesions. Blood had dried around their noses and mouths. The young boy was unconscious, possibly dead, but the man’s red eyes bulged in agony, his body arching as he convulsed in pain.
‘They’re dying, of course.’ Arkady smiled gently at Elsa. ‘And it’s all thanks to you.’
37
Justine Vydelingum found Plowright in his office, kneading his temples between closed fists, a technique he’d used to alleviate stress in the past, but which was doing nothing for him now.
‘Don’t you ever knock?’ he said sharply.
‘Everything all right?’
No, everything wasn’t all right. He’d been nearly throttled by a trained killer, who had walked into the building, supposedly one of the securest in the country, wearing the face and body of a dead woman, and then escaped into tunnels deep underground by using him as a human shield. This was the very same person he’d been tasked with hunting down and killing.
Plowright felt unbearable tension in the back of his neck, which was very definitely on the block right now.
‘I’m alive, so there’s that,’ he said, trying to look on the bright side. ‘What is it?’
‘We have two dead Russians in a house in Ealing, and a Land Rover in the Thames. Two unidentified men were found in the car, one shot dead and the other skewered to the back seat with a headrest. A witness saw four passengers in the vehicle and heard a gunshot before it tipped into the river.’
‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
She handed him a tablet, which he began to read.
‘The property in Ealing is owned by a man called Douglas Heston,’ Justine said. ‘He and his wife, Roberta, returned home early from holiday to discover a deranged man in their house.’
‘Max Saint.’ Plowright scrolled down the page to a blurred photo – captured on the doorbell video camera of a neighbour’s house – of Zero and Saint hurrying along the street.
‘Saint was drunk and violent, and tied them up. Accused them of being assassins who had come to kill him. Heston says Zero arrived and saved his life twice, once from Saint, and then when an actual pair of killers, a male and a female, turned up dressed as police.’
‘Why Heston?’
‘He’s on Zero’s list of training clients.’
Plowright grimaced. ‘She knew his house would be empty.’
His team had pulled Elsa Zero’s business contacts from the cloud, but hadn’t worked their way through the list. The limited resources he had to work with were a joke, cutbacks had made his job almost intolerable, and the resources he’d been promised were too little too late, even in such exceptional circumstances. He’d pulled in as many staff with the necessary security permissions as he could, but considering the enormity of the crisis, not enough.
He guessed his counterpart in Langley, Virginia, with her tailored suit, glossy hair and dazzling white teeth, had far more people at her disposal, and all the latest surveillance tech, even if they had fewer feet on the ground in London. The same was probably true for the Vladimirs in Moscow, too.
‘We’re sure they’re Russians?’
Justine sat where Zoe Castle had the previous day, pinching a piece of fluff from the shoulder of her jacket and dropping it on the floor. Plowright’s threadbare suit was entirely held together by random bits of lint.
‘He said they spoke Russian, so they’re either GRU or SVR, take your pick, sent to kill or grab Elsa.’
‘How on earth did they find her before us?’
‘They probably copied her client list from the cloud, then hacked the home security company Heston uses and saw the alarm was turned off, despite the fact that he and his wife had booked holiday flights and hotels online.’ She pointed at the tablet. ‘The neighbours directly opposite have a security camera above their garage. If the Russians hacked it, they’d see who was going in and out of the house.’
‘Those people,’ said Plowright bitterly. ‘They know all the angles.’
He glared at his deputy as if it were her fault he hadn’t thought of any of it, but she met his gaze impassively. That was the thing about Justine Vydelingum, she never took his bursts of petulance personally, she just got on with the job. Which was why she was going to have a successful career, and why he was likely to have a breakdown and move to a bothy on the Isle of Skye.
And good luck to her, because if he didn’t start getting traction in his pursuit of Elsa Zero soon, his career was toast. He felt a headache brewing, and hoped to God it wasn’t one of his occasional migraines.
She stood. ‘But we do have some good news.’
‘Finally.’ He slapped the top of his desk, making the flat of his hand sting, and followed her from the office, along the corridor and into another part of the maximum-security area; to the ops room full of screens, where real-time surveillance images of London streets, parks and squares, every kind of public space, covered the walls.
As soon as anyone walked, cycled or drove into view, a grid triangulated across their faces, identifying them and placing their personal details up on the screen. All vehicle registrations were instantly logged. But he knew that the chances of Elsa Zero appearing were slim.
‘Play it,’ Justine told a man at one of the desks.
On the central screen, which dominated the wall directly opposite the banks of work stations, an image appeared: a field at twilight. Filmed by a satellite two hundred miles in the sky, the resolution was poor, the image in danger of fragmenting into blocks of pixels. But Plowright saw the tops of the heads of two figures running around.
‘This was recorded last night at the farm of Zero’s parents, Howard and Greta.’ She turned to him. ‘What do you think?’
‘Definitely kids.’ He stepped forward. ‘Send in a drone to get confirmation it’s them, maybe?’
Justine shook her head. ‘Zero’s old man is retired military, a former Royal Marine. And the mother, well… look in the file.’
She handed him a tablet. On the screen was a digital document, copied from SIS’s physical archives, which had been typed, complete with smudged addendums in ink, on a manual typewriter many decades ago. Using his fingers to move and manipulate the image, Plowright found other digitized scraps of information too.
‘She’s something completely different, by all accounts.’
‘So I see,’ he murmured as he read.
With parents like that, it was no wonder Elsa Zero was as mad as a box of frogs.
She could have killed him down in the dead vault, could have snapped his neck easily; he was under no illusions about it. But she hadn’t. As far as Elsa Zero was concerned, SIS was attempting to kill her, he was attempting to kill her. If she was aligned with a hostile foreign power, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
She meant what she said in the vault; there was only one reason for Zero to sneak into the heart of the very organization hell-bent on killing her, and that was to figure out why.
‘Howard and Greta will hear the drone a mile off and they’ll disappear,’ Justine said. ‘If we go in, it has to be hard and sudden.’
Sometimes she spoke to him as if he was a trainee spy, wet behind the ears. But he liked her ambition and drive, her confidence. She reminded him of himself as a young man, back in the day; her clear eyes blazed with passion and focus.
But when Plowright was Justine’s age, a good twenty-five years ago, the only way he’d been able to work all night long was by fuelling on coffee and cigarettes. Justine had been working just as long as he had, a good forty-eight hours now, but she sipped peppermint tea and bottled water.
He was shattered, and just wanted to go home, but reasoned he’d get plenty of rest soon enough. There was no way he was going to survive in his job, not after this fiasco. He’d be kicked out, or obliged to resign. If Zero continued to evade capture, his own compulsory retirement would be small beer compared to the wider consequences.
‘How sure are you?’
Images from the edge of space could be spectacular these days – the Yanks reputedly had equipment that could peer up a gnat’s bumhole – but the UK’s own surveillance satellites were still not good enough to positively identify the little girl and boy on the screen as Zero’s kids.
‘Howard and Greta are old now, and in ill health,’ said Justine. ‘They’ve lived alone on that farm for decades and keep themselves to themselves. We’ve spoken to their nearest neighbours, and they don’t have visitors, full stop. There’d have to be a bloody good reason for children to be there. It’s them, one hundred per cent.’
‘Then send in a team,’ Plowright told her. ‘Get those kids, we get Elsa Zero.’
38
The children made incessant, infuriating noise.
For all her faults, Elsa had been a withdrawn and sullen child who rarely raised her voice. But her own children were an ill-disciplined and relentlessly cheerful pair who chattered and laughed from the moment they woke to the moment their exhausted heads hit the pillow. They spent the first day running around the field and yard screeching like hyenas.
‘They’ve never seen a chicken, and it’s made them giddy,’ is how Howard explained it.
He and Greta had been surprised to discover Elsa was a mother, she didn’t seem the type, and there didn’t appear to be any father in the picture, which was irresponsible in these final, fraught decades of the human race, with societal breakdown on the brink.
They had no idea when Elsa would return for the children, if she even would, so on the second day they put their foot down. Harley and India had to adhere to the busy schedule of the farm. There were animals to care for, horses to feed, cows to milk, chores to be completed.
But removed from the soul-deadening grind that must comprise their London lives, it was gratifying to see the joy on the faces of the children, even if Greta and Howard didn’t say it aloud; it was probably the first time they had spent any time in nature. For all their short lives they had been enslaved by the devices they stared at all day, becoming brainwashed by Woke propaganda.
The children were full of questions, the great majority of them idiotic and pointless. But even the Zeros had to admit that they had brought an unexpected energy to their usual routine. Howard and Greta had been self-sufficient for years, had discouraged visitors of any kind, and it was a shock that their home now reverberated with giggles and blather.
There had always been an unspoken understanding between Howard and Greta that they had somehow failed as parents – Elsa’s arrival had been unexpected, to say the least – and their estrangement from her was a source of pain they never discussed. The rift was hardly surprising, Elsa had always been wilful and insolent, but they never acknowledged that their daughter was as uncompromising as they were, her stubbornness and disconnection a reflection of their own.
So Greta and Howard never expected for a single moment that she would turn up out of the blue to ask them to babysit. It was obvious that she was in trouble, and despite the long years of separation, she was still their daughter. The Zeros were aware that neither of them was getting any younger – and it could be the only time they would get to see their grandchildren.
But they didn’t want to contemplate what would happen if Elsa never came back.
