“OK,” she says.
Lara has dropped Villanelle off at a cafe in Odessa’s Bird Market, in the Moldovanka district. It’s a dingy place, with yellowish lighting, faded travel posters on the walls, and a blackboard advertising the day’s special. Perhaps half of the tables are occupied. By single men, mostly, and a couple of women who might be prostitutes, fuelling themselves for the night’s work with solyanka soup and dumplings. From time to time the men glance at Villanelle, but on meeting her flatly hostile gaze, look away again.
She’s been waiting here for twenty minutes now, sipping a cup of tea and skim-reading a copy of Sevodnya, a Russian-language tabloid, in one of the booths at the side of the room. At intervals she raises her eyes to the cafe’s rain-blurred glass frontage, and the dimly lit streets beyond. She’s hungry, but doesn’t order anything in case she has to leave.
A lean figure slips into the booth opposite her. A man she’s met before: the man who talked to her in Hyde Park the previous winter, and who spooked her.
And now here he is again. There are the patchy beginnings of a beard, and a battered leather jacket has replaced the tailored coat, but the frozen darkness of the eyes is the same. When they first met he spoke English, but now he is calling to the elderly waitress in fluent, Moscow-accented Russian.
“You’re hungry?” he asks, running a hand through rain-damp hair.
She shrugs.
“Borscht and pirozhki for two,” he orders, and sits back.
“So,” says Villanelle, her face expressionless.
“So we meet again.” He gives her the ghost of a smile. “I apologise for failing to identify myself in London. The time wasn’t right.”
“And now it is?”
He looks at her, assessingly. “We were impressed by your handling of the Kedrin action. And now we are faced with a situation requiring your assistance.”
“I see.”
“You don’t see, but you will. My name is Anton, and I’m a colleague of the man you know as Konstantin.”
“Go on.”
“Konstantin has been abducted. Taken hostage by a mafia gang, based here in Odessa.”
She stares at him, speechless.
“And yes, we’re quite sure. The gang is called Zoloty Bratstvo, or the Golden Brotherhood, and it’s headed by a man named Rinat Yevtukh. According to our information, Konstantin is being held in a well-secured house in Fontanka, a half-hour away from here. The house is owned by Yevtukh. The gang’s intention, apparently, is to demand a ransom.”
Her expression remains neutral, but alarm is jolting through her with nauseating force. Is this a set-up? An attempt to panic her into revealing who and what she is?
“You have to trust me,” he says. “If I was a hostile, you’d be dead already.”
Still she says nothing. Even if he’s telling the truth, and Konstantin has been abducted, she’s still lethally compromised. If they—whoever “they” are—can get to Konstantin, with his serpentine wariness, then they can get to her.
“Tell me,” she says eventually.
“OK. We’re certain that the kidnappers know nothing about Konstantin’s connection to us, or even that we exist. As far as they’re concerned, he’s just a visiting businessman, whose company will pay up in the usual way. What concerns us is that Yevtukh’s organisation has, for some time, been under the control of the SVR, the Russian secret intelligence service. And the SVR have wind of us, as MI6 do. They don’t know who or what we are, but they know we exist. So the question is, have they organised this abduction with a view to interrogating Konstantin about us? We’re not sure. We’ve got our own people in the SVR, naturally, but it’ll take time to find out what’s really going on. And we don’t have time.”
He pauses as bowls, spoons and a steaming casserole of borscht are placed on their table, followed moments later by a plate of pirozhki—small buns filled with minced meat. As the waitress shuffles away, Anton ladles out the beetroot soup, splashing the front of Villanelle’s cheap sweater with spots of dark purple.
“Konstantin’s tough,” he continues. “But even he can’t beat an SVR interrogation.”
Villanelle nods, dabbing absently at her sweater with a paper napkin. “So what do you propose?”
“We get him out.”
“We?”
“Yes. I’ve assembled a team of our best people.”
She meets his gaze. “I don’t work with other people.”
“You do now.”
“I’ll be the one who decides that.”
He leans in towards her. “Listen, we don’t have time for this primadonna shit. You’ll do what you’re told. And there’s a good chance we can all walk away from this.”
She sits there, motionless. “I’ve never taken part in a hostage-rescue.”
“Just listen, OK. You have a very specific role to play.”
She listens. And knows that she has no choice. That all that she is, all that she has become, hangs on the success of this mission.
“I’ll do it on one condition. That I’m not recognisable. I don’t want anyone else on the team to see my face. Or find out anything about me.”
“Don’t worry, the others feel the same. You’ll wear full-face masks throughout, and communication will be limited to an operational minimum. Afterwards, when the mission’s completed, you’ll be returned separately to where you came from.”
She nods. There’s so much about him that she distrusts, and from which she instinctively recoils. But she can’t, at that moment, find fault with his plan.
“So when do we go in?”
He surveys the cafe, and takes a mouthful of soup. The rain beats harder against the glass frontage.
“Tonight.”
Niko doesn’t raise his voice, but Eve can hear that he’s upset. Two of his colleagues from the school are expected for dinner, Chilean Pinot Noir has been bought, and a small but expensive shoulder of lamb is waiting in an oven-proof dish, stuck with cloves of garlic. The subtext to the evening is that Eve will make herself look nice, and wear the St. Laurent scent he bought her, and her prettiest
