just maybe, you would kill me.' He inclined his head toward the Cossack. 'But neither of us would live to tell the story.'
Kaplinski laughed and slapped the table. 'Same old Klein! You always did have a sense of humour buried under that overbearing sense of duty.'
'Duty's done, Kaplinski.' Otto poured himself a tumbler full of bad Chinese scotch and drank it down with a grimace. 'I did my part.'
'And now you are a mercenary, like me.'
'Not like you. I am no murderer.'
'You are a killer, Klein, we both are.'
'I do only what is necessary.'
'So you still have your sense of duty,' countered Kaplinski. 'You carry it around with you like a full kitbag.' His face switched, becoming disdainful. 'You always were maudlin; honour, duty, responsibility. A good little German. Still pining over your dead wife?'
Otto looked into Kaplinski's face and fought down the urge to attack him there and then. He'd never forgive the things Kaplinski had done. That time in Brazil when he'd roasted a container full of frightened women and children had just been the start of it. Otto had brought Kaplinski's erratic behaviour to the attention of his superiors more than once, but they'd let him serve; the EU mission to Brazil had been stretched tight, and personnel like Kaplinski were expensive.
Idiots, thought Otto. The girls, three of them found raped and ripped up, near their barracks in Magdeburg: only that had brought Kaplinski down and got him locked up. Then he'd escaped, running wild and murderous across the state until they'd brought him to ground outside of Hasselfelde.
Otto remembered the hostages — not his word, the response team's — he'd never thought it the right one. Kaplinski hadn't wanted to trade them for anything, hadn't taken them to bargain. By that point Kaplinski had devolved to a point of animalistic savagery. They were playthings. The mentaug presented Otto with the memory in merciless clarity. He was sighting down a flechette railgun at Kaplinski while he picked out the eyes of bound shop assistants in a car charge station. Kaplinski's face at that moment, oblivious to the moans of his captives, his fingers slick with humours, his expression that of a child crushing ants. He'd looked up preternaturally swiftly when he heard the crack of the dart as it broke the sound barrier, staring right at Otto before he went down. He should have waited for the catch team to get into position, but twenty men had already died, and it was such a perfect shot, and what Kaplinski was doing…
When they'd got to the charge station, Kaplinski had gone.
Otto pushed the memory away, looking deep into the soulless pits Kaplinski had for eyes. Perhaps the purestrain parties were right; altered men like them were not improvements, they were less than human. 'You're an animal, Kaplinski, a sick one. You should be destroyed.'
'Not tonight,' said Kaplinski. His smile returned as if someone had flicked a switch. He sipped his drink. Otto smelled it, sweet. His adjutant put the name into his mind: Furugi, thick pseudoJapanese stuff made of almonds. Kaplinski finished it off, brought up the menu on the glowing surface of the table, ordered another. His fingers slid over the menu in the table. Music filled the quiet of the privacy cone: 'Clair De Lune'. 'I like piano, so calming,' he said. 'I have found it hard to be calm, in the past. I…' He stopped and shook his head hard, a man trying to shake bad thoughts away. He smiled again, and Otto saw some of that old feverishness creep back onto his face. 'You know, Otto, we could be friends again.'
'We were never friends, Kaplinski.'
Kaplinski's smile became fixed, his teeth small and sharp. Had he always been bad? Some men were born predators.
Kaplinski ran a finger round the top of his glass where a smear of his drink glowed in the UV. 'We could have been friends, then,' he corrected himself. 'We still could be. k52's fixed me, Otto.' His smile jumped up and down his face, as if he couldn't quite pin the emotion down. 'He can fix you too.'
'I'm glad you decided to celebrate your new-found sanity by trying to kill me,' said Otto. 'That was you in the Rockies, and in London, trying to blow up my partner.'
Kaplinski inclined his head. 'Yes. Regrettable. You had to be stopped. Orders are orders.'
'Money is money, you mean.'
'Not this time, Klein. What k52 intends is worth a few lives.'
'I feel honoured one of them is mine. How much did he pay?'
'I promise you, money had nothing to do with it. You will understand, in time.'
'We've fallen for this kind of shit before, Kaplinski, or don't you read history?'
Kaplinski laughed. 'Otto, what can I say? Sorry? Will that satisfy you, if I apologise?'
Otto sucked another glass of whisky through his teeth and squirted it round his mouth. He breathed in hard. His progress through the bottle was not improving its flavour. 'No.'
'It's not too late, Otto. Help me find Waldo.'
'He is a threat to your boss? Well, that just means I will do my damnedest to make sure you never set eyes on him. You shouldn't have shot Kolosev. You didn't get what you wanted from him, or you wouldn't be here. Did he stop being so helpful before or after he was dead?'
Kaplinski stared, smile hard and close to cracking, fingernails scratching the table's active surface as his fist clenched.
Otto swilled his drink round his tumbler. The liquid was too quick to run down the glass. Chinese shit. 'Kolosev, he was a mummy's boy, but he wasn't an idiot. He hid that data well, but I have a genius on my side. Where is your genius, Kaplinkski? Now we've got what you thought you had. Whatever k52 is paying, it's too much. You're a joke.'
Kaplinski glared at Otto for a long moment, smile feral, then leaned back, choosing to break the tension. That was a change; the old Kaplinski would have gone for him by now. 'That trick you pulled back in Kharkov was a good one, Otto, hiding in plain sight — ' he looked around the bar '- but we won't be in plain sight for much longer. Once we're out in the zone I will not hold back.'
'Try your best,' said Otto. 'It won't be good enough.'
'I could have killed you tonight, Otto. I didn't have to see you. I knew you'd come here. The mentaug. It was a problem for me, I guess it's a problem for you too. Tell me, Otto, do you sleep much? I think that you don't. That damn machine whirring away up here all the time.' He tapped his temple, and renewed his jerky smile. 'We don't have to fight, Klein; k52 can stop it. Join with us. The memories, the violence. It can all stop.'
'Screw you, Kaplinski.'
Kaplinski dropped his attempt at warmth. Frustration warred with anger on his face. 'You're a fool, Otto. I have changed, why can you not see that? What do I have to do to convince you?'
'As the English say, Kaplinski, leopards do not change their spots, and you're the most fucked-up leopard I ever met.'
'Soon we'll all be better, only if you don't join with me, you won't live to see it.'
'Thanks for the offer, but no thanks. I prefer to see what I'm buying. I don't trust k52.'
'You trust Richards.'
Now Otto smiled. 'No. I don't.' He stood and turned to go, but Kaplinski called to him.
'Tell me, Klein, I have been meaning to ask you, for years now. When you had the chance, why not just kill me there and then? Is that why you left the army, Otto? Because you couldn't kill a comrade-in-arms? Did your sense of duty desert you for a moment? Did it shake you, Otto?'
Otto stared at Kaplinski. They'd asked him that in the inquiry, asked him almost as many times as he'd asked himself since: why not go for the head shot?
He'd given neither them nor himself a satisfactory answer, and he didn't have one for Kaplinski either. He stared a moment longer, then walked away.
'Klein!'
The privacy cone cut out Kaplinski's voice and Debussy, and he was back in a world of bad Russian music and the pornographic dreams of the Slavic resource elite.
The others were eating breakfast when he returned to their compartment, the sky outside lightening.
'Where are we?' Otto said, reaching for his bag to pull out a water bottle.
'Three hours out from Bratsk,' said Chures. 'You been drinking, Klein?'
