Oxana’s basic training was with the standard-issue Dragunov. Soon, though, she graduated to the VSS, or Special Sniper Rifle. With its exceptionally light weight and integral silencer, it was the ideal urban weapon. By the time she left Severka she had fired thousands of rounds under a variety of operational conditions, and in less than a minute was able to arrive at a firing point with the VSS in its polystyrene case, assemble the weapon, zero the sights, calculate windspeed and other vectors, and squeeze off a lethal head or body-shot (“one shot, one kill,” in the words of her instructor) at a range of up to four hundred metres.
Oxana sensed herself changing, and the results pleased her. Her observational ability, sensory skills and reactive speeds had all been extraordinarily enhanced. Psychologically, she felt invulnerable, but then she had always known that she was different from those around her. She felt none of the things they felt. Where others would experience pain or horror, she knew only a frozen dispassion. She had learned to imitate the emotional responses of others—their fears, their uncertainties, their desperate need for affection—but she had never fully experienced them. She knew, however, that if she was to escape notice in the world it was essential to wear a mask of normality, and to disguise the extent of her difference.
She had learnt, very young, that people could be manipulated. Sex was useful in this regard, and Oxana acquired a voracious appetite. Not so much for the act itself, although this had its satisfactions, as for the thrill of pursuit and psychic domination. For lovers, she liked to choose authority figures. Her conquests had included schoolteachers of both genders, a Spetsnaz colleague of her father’s, a young woman from a military academy in Kazan against whom she was competing in the University Games, and most satisfying of all, the psychotherapist she’d been referred to for assessment in her first year at university. Oxana had never felt the slightest need to be liked, but it gave her profound satisfaction to be desired. To see the look in her conquest’s eyes—that final melting of resistance—which told her the transfer of power was complete.
Not that it was ever quite enough. Because for all its fierce excitement, that moment of submission invariably marked the end of Oxana’s interest. The story was always the same, even with Yuliana, the psychotherapist. By yielding to Oxana, by surrendering her mystery, she made herself undesirable. And Oxana simply moved on, leaving the older woman bereft, her personal and professional self-esteem in tatters.
After the sniper course, she learnt about explosives and toxicology in Volgograd, surveillance in Berlin, advanced driving and lock-picking in London, and identity management, communications and coding in Paris. For Oxana, who had never left Russia before her appointment with Konstantin at the Chusovaya Bridge, the international travelling was dizzying. Each course was taught in the language of the country in question, testing her linguistic aptitude to the limit and, more often than not, leaving her mentally as well as physically drained.
Throughout it all, patient and imperturbable on the sidelines, was Konstantin. He maintained a professional distance between himself and Oxana, but was sympathetic towards her on the handful of occasions when the pressure became too much, and she demanded, coldly, to be left alone. “Take a day off,” he told her on one occasion in London. “Go and explore the city. And start thinking about your cover name. Oxana Vorontsova’s dead.”
By November, her training was almost over. She had been staying in a dingy one-star hotel in the Paris suburb of Belleville, and travelling every day to an anonymous office building in La Défense, where a young man of Indian origin was teaching her the finer points of steganography—the science of concealing secret information in computer files. On the final day of the course Konstantin appeared, paid her hotel bill, and accompanied her to an apartment on the Quai Voltaire, on the Left Bank.
The first-floor apartment was furnished with spare, minimal chic. Its occupant was a tiny, fierce-looking woman of about sixty, dressed completely in black, whom Konstantin introduced as Fantine.
Fantine stared at Oxana, appeared unimpressed by what she saw, and asked her to walk around the room. Self-conscious in her faded T-shirt, jeans and trainers, Oxana complied. Fantine watched her for a moment, turned to Konstantin, and shrugged.
And so began the final stage of Oxana’s transformation. She moved into a four-star hotel two streets away, and each morning joined Fantine for breakfast in the first-floor apartment. At nine o’clock every morning a car came for them. On the first day they went to the Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann. Fantine marched Oxana round the department store, ordering her to try on a succession of outfits—daywear, casual, evening—and buying them whether Oxana liked them or not. The tight, flashy clothes to which Oxana was drawn Fantine dismissed without a glance.
“I’m trying to teach you Parisian style, chérie, not how to dress like a Moscow streetwalker, which you obviously know how to do already.”
By the end of the day, the car was piled high with shopping bags, and Oxana was beginning to enjoy the company of her ruthlessly critical mentor. Over the week that followed they visited shoe shops and fashion houses, couture and prêt-à-porter shows, a vintage emporium in St. Germain, and the costume and design museum at the Palais Galliera. At each of these, Fantine offered an unsparing commentary. This was chic, clever and elegant; that was crass, tasteless and irredeemably vulgar. One afternoon Fantine took Oxana to a hairdresser in the Place des Victoires. Her instructions to the stylist were to proceed as she chose, and to ignore anything that Oxana suggested. Afterwards,
