The Secret of Excalibur

Tense would have been closer. Or nauseous.

A voice in her left ear. Chase.

‘Nina, if you can hear me, clear your throat.’ She did. ‘Okay, I’m not far behind you.’ She glanced back, seeing headlights in the distance. ‘I’ll call you again soon as I get to the entry point.’

The lights dropped away. There was a faint crackle as if he had opened the line to speak again, but then it faded to nothing. Out of range.

She was on her own.

The minivan came to a stop at a gate with a high wall to each side - the same wall she had seen in the background of the spy photo of Kruglov.

Vaskovich’s mansion. The dragon’s lair.

Security guards opened the doors and shone bright flashlights into the faces of each of the van’s occupants in turn. Nina was the last to be checked. A chill swept over her, not solely from the night air. What if they recognised her, if she wasn’t on the guest list, if Prikovsky had betrayed her . . .

The light swept down to her legs, paused for a moment - and flicked off. The guard leered, then shut the door. The minivan drove on.

Vaskovich’s mansion lay directly ahead, at the end of a long drive surrounded by lawns. Nina leaned forward for a better look, impressed despite herself by the brightly lit edifice. It was as huge as she had imagined, but elegant where she had expected nouveau-riche vulgarity, a perfectly restored neo-classical building of the early nineteenth century, tall arched windows blazing with light.

The vehicles lined up outside more closely matched her preconceptions, however. Expensive, showy and mostly vulgar, a procession of stretch limousines and supercars. Valets drove them round the corner of the mansion after the occupants emerged. Nina imagined that a scratch on any of the vehicles would cost the careless perpetrator more than a docked pay packet.

The vans pulled up. More security guards in heavy coats lined the front steps, watching them. The girls got out, to be met by a man in a white tuxedo. He quickly spoke to each in turn before pointing to the doors above, reaching Nina last.

‘Uh, I . . . I don’t speak very good Russian,’ she said in response to his instructions.

He frowned. ‘You don’t speak Russian? Oy! Pavel is getting lazy; I should send you home. What are you, American?’ Nina nodded. He chewed his lip for a moment. ‘Well, there are some Yankees in there. Easy to find - they’re the ones who can’t hold their drink. Stay with them. What’s your name?’

‘Nina.’

‘Nina, okay. I’m Dmitri; if you need a private room, find me. The top floor is off-limits. Okay, shoo, shoo!’

Even with a coat over her outfit Nina was still freezing, and she was about to hurry gratefully inside when a blast of noise halted her mid-step. She looked up to see a helicopter sweeping over the mansion, swinging round to land on the lawn. But it was no ordinary helicopter; clearly military, black as the night sky and with two sets of rotor blades mounted one above the other on a single shaft, it was one of the most bizarre - and menacing - machines she had ever seen.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

Dmitri looked annoyed. ‘That is the new Deputy Defence Minister Felix Mishkin, showing off and ruining the grass! Go in, go, I will greet him.’ He turned to watch the helicopter power down.

Nina clacked up the stairs on her heels, entering to have her coat taken by another man in a white tux. A few groups of people were talking in the marble lobby, all men - and all taking the time out from their conversations to watch her strut past in her tight, shiny dress. Feeling horribly self-conscious as well as scared, she nevertheless remembered her role and smiled politely at them before going through the double doors into the next room.

Whether it was a ballroom or just a very large hall she didn’t know, but it was clearly the hub of Vaskovich’s party. A DJ on a platform in one corner pumped out thudding techno, but even this was overpowered by the hubbub of hundreds of voices all talking at once.

The air was thick with smoke, and everybody seemed to have a glass in their hand. The men were in tuxedos or more playboyesque designer suits; the older women were formally dressed, the younger women showy trophy attachments to wealthy husbands . . . or ‘entertainment’, Prikovsky’s girls having already spread out amongst the crowd.

Nina had barely taken five steps before a red-faced man in a straining tuxedo budded off from his group and blocked her path, treating her to a glassy-eyed smile as he spoke in slurred Russian. ‘Hi,’ she replied, her own smile fixed and fake as a pungent reek of aftershave assaulted her nostrils. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak much Russian. Er . . . nyet Russki? American.’

‘Ah, American!’ the fat man boomed. ‘Pamela Anderson, da?’ He cupped his hands in front of his chest as if holding a pair of beachballs, and laughed.

‘Yeah,’ said Nina, less than impressed. ‘By the way, congratulations on your breasts - they’re nearly as big as hers. Excuse me. Oh!’ She flinched as a hand slid over her right buttock and squeezed it. She turned, expecting to see another drunken man, and was taken aback to find instead a drunken woman.

‘So, you are American?’ the woman said. She appeared to be in her late fifties, hard-faced and thin, but from her hairstyle and clothing apparently still thought she could pass herself off as two or three decades younger. ‘How are you finding our country?’

‘Just went through Poland and, ha, there it was!’

The woman let out a high-pitched, tinkling laugh. Her bony hand encircled Nina’s wrist like a handcuff, and she pulled her into the crowd. ‘Come, come, you must meet my friends.’

‘I’m, er, supposed to go and see Mr Vaskovich,’ Nina said desperately.

The woman laughed again. ‘Then you are in luck - he is one of my friends!’

‘Oh, he is? Oh. Shit,’ she added in a whisper.

The woman led her through the room. Nina looked round, trying to get a feel for the mansion’s layout. She spotted a staircase at the rear of the hall, polished marble and red carpet. Dmitri had said the top floor was out of bounds; that was presumably where Excalibur was being kept.

She heard a buzz in her left ear. ‘—an you hear me? Nina?’ Chase’s voice was distorted by interference, at the very limit of the earpiece’s range.

‘Mm-hmm?’ she said through closed lips, as loudly as she dared.

‘I guess you can’t talk, then. But I’m in position. Was that a chopper landing in the garden?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘Some rich bugger’s always got to show off, don’t they? All right, soon as you get a chance, find somewhere quiet so Jack can tell you what to do next.’

‘O-ay,’ she mumbled.

The woman glanced back at her. ‘What?’

‘Just, ah, clearing my throat. I’m a little thirsty.’

‘I’ll tell a waiter to bring you a drink. Come on, just over here.’ She guided Nina around a knot of people—

And Nina found herself looking straight at Aleksey Kruglov.

He walked towards her, grimly purposeful. Three steps away, two, eyes flicking at her . . .

And gone. He passed so close that his sleeve brushed Nina’s arm. But he hadn’t recognised her, hadn’t made the connection between the briefly glimpsed, seductively dressed escort and the dirty, scared archaeologist he’d seen in England. But she couldn’t help glancing nervously back in case some suspicious synapse fired in his mind, finding common features of the two redheads and making him return for a closer look . . .

He kept going, disappearing into the throng. She gasped in relief.

The woman stopped, Nina almost bumping into her. She spoke in Russian to a slender, unassuming man in rectangular wire-framed glasses - who Nina realised with a chill was Leonid Vaskovich.

The man behind the entire plot. The man responsible for the murders of Bernd Rust, Mitzi Fontana, Chloe Lamb, and others whose names she didn’t even know, collateral damage of his quest to gain the power of Excalibur. He was within arm’s reach, unsuspecting, defenceless.

But there was nothing she could do. Her skin-tight latex dress had no room to conceal a weapon, even had