Hunted Read Free Page B

barrel hard into the colonel’s testicles, making him groan in pain.
    ‘You know, if I fired this up your arsehole,’ she said, ‘it would blow off the top of your head.’
    A wave of terror swept through the colonel’s guts. Not because he thought she was about to pull the trigger. But because she knew so much about the weapon. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. She was a professional. Military or intelligence.
    But who was she working for? That was the question upon which all other questions now rested, he knew. For Russia? Was that what this was all about? Was she here as the result of some counterintelligence operation? Was he suspected of somehow betraying his country?
    Or was she a terrorist? Or in the employ of some foreign business multinational or intelligence agency? One of Russia’s many enemies? Was she planning on somehow attacking or undermining Russia through him?
    Noise.
    Colonel Zykov’s breath caught in his throat. From through the open bedroom doorway, he’d just heard the faint but familiar soft hum and click of the lift docking in the penthouse’s entrance hall.
    A clatter and rumble of boots.
    ‘You’d better do what they say,’ the girl said.
    The bearded thief from the café – the one who’d sprawled into Colonel Zykov three days before – was the first through the doorway. Only now he was dressed in clean, neutral running gear and his black hair was combed straight back from his brow. He looked the colonel over dispassionately before unfurling a large plastic groundsheet across the bedroom floor.
    Tears swelled in the colonel’s eyes as he thought of the sheet and why it was there. To catch fluids. Urine, faeces, blood. To limit mess.
    Two more men marched in. The first was mid forties, stocky and tall, with a shock of blond, almost white hair. He had tapered sideburns and was dressed like he’d just stepped out of an exclusive nightclub, in a smart dark suit with a heavy gold watch hanging at his left wrist.
    His companion was older, perhaps sixty, balding, grey, unshaven, tall and extremely thin. He was wearing wire-framed spectacles and an oversized blue raincoat. He wordlessly set down a blackattaché case on the bed and started to hum tunelessly, as if he were the only person in the room.
    Colonel Zykov recognized neither man. Which wasn’t true of the equipment the bespectacled man now took from his case’s moulded-foam bed. Swabs. A loaded hypodermic. When he flicked the syringe with his forefinger, tiny bubbles spiralled to the top. A vein just above the man’s left eye socket started to slowly pulse, like the throat of a lizard basking in the sun.
    ‘Well?’ the girl said in Russian. She was talking to the younger, blond man.
    His hooked nose and gaunt face combined to give him a predatory, hawk-like look. He hadn’t taken his ice-blue eyes off Zykov from the moment he’d entered the room. He hadn’t so much as blinked.
    ‘It’s him all right,’ he said, also in Russian. ‘This is the one who fucked up my life.’
    This man knows me? thought the colonel. He raked desperately through his memories, trying to work out where he might have seen him before.
    He came up with nothing. The man must have made a mistake. Because those eyes … that face … there was something about it … a capacity for … violence … that … surely, the colonel thought, once encountered would be impossible to forget …
    ‘Make the call,’ the man said.
    The blonde girl walked into the bathroom with her phone. The man with the glasses squirted a tiny jet of clear liquid from the syringe into the air. It pattered like raindrops across the plastic sheet.
    ‘I’ve got a clear visual on the phone,’ the girl said.
    The hawk-faced man snapped his fingers first at the bearded thief. They lifted Colonel Zykov up and slid the crackling groundsheet beneath him. They pinioned him to the mattress, while the bespectacled man crouched beside him and gripped his wrist.
    Zykov’s breath