Wanted Read Free

before her father had died.
    It was this, above all else, that had brought Valentin to the village tonight. First, Katarina had been his goddaughter, and second, he didn’t believe she’d been randomly killed by a rapist. He suspected that she’d been tortured in an attempt to get Nikolai to surrender the secret whereabouts of the six stolen smallpox vials.
    Five had been successfully recovered during the last few hours by Valentin’s comrades from other locations in Russia. The one in this village was the last.
    Valentin hoped that Nikolai had done his duty and had taken the secret of the vials’ locations with him to his grave, regardless of how his daughter had suffered. He hoped, too, that whoever had broken into Nikolai’s office in the Russian Embassy on the night of the London massacre had left with nothing of use.
    But he had come here to make sure.
    A feathering of fresh snow was beginning to fall. Valentin moved wraithlike through the outskirts of the village, adrenalin overriding fatigue, powering him on through the shadows and past the small school, until he reached a tree-shaded playground at the rear of the shops.
    No one must know he was there. As well-funded and influential as his clandestine, hardline organization was, he had no official business there. He needed to retrieve the vial, which did not officially exist, and fade back into the mountains.
    Ahead he could see the silhouettes of the dairy and slaughterhouse rising up into the twinkling night sky. A dog howled in the distance. Closer, a diesel engine grumbled out a muffled, monotonous tune.
The dairy lorry,
Valentin supposed.
    His face glistened with sweat as he wove between the swings and slides, momentarily picturing his grandson laughing last summer, as he’d stabbed his tiny finger towards a jet plane bisecting a clear blue Moscow sky.
    Valentin slipped through the playground’s gate and ghosted past the back yards of the shops, until he reached the last. The tump-tump of the diesel engine was louder now. He could even see the back of the lorry, red tail-lights glowing, a suction pipe running from its roof to the taps set into the dairy wall.
    Valentin scoped the shadows with his rifle’s night-sight. Nothing. He peered through a gap in the fence of the building he’d positioned himself behind. A thin line of yellow light beneath a ground-floor curtain indicated that someone inside was awake.
    The pharmacist. Valentin’s last contact with him had been less than twenty-five minutes ago, just before the helicopter had dusted down. By now he should have taken the vial from its refrigerated storage unit in the concealed safe room and readied it for transportation. In less than two minutes, Valentin hoped, Lyonya and Gregori would be in, out and gone.
    ‘Report status, Alpha Two,’ Valentin said softly.
    ‘At rendezvous now.’ Lyonya’s voice came crackling back through his microbead earpiece. ‘All quiet except one civilian in the cab of the lorry. Looks like he’s pouring himself a coffee from a Thermos.’
    The driver, Valentin thought. He’d be keeping himself warm while the truck’s tank filled. Valentin hunkered down, peering again at the building, cursing the pain in his lower back and leg.
    He checked the back door. No signs of forced entry. None of the windows had been tampered with. The only footprints were child-sized and iced over.
    ‘Proceed to target,’ Valentin said.
    The snow was falling thicker now, spiralling dizzily to the ground. Valentin waited, eyes trained on the back of the building.
    He pictured Lyonya and Gregori entering its front. There’d be no greeting, no words. The pharmacist would hand over what they’d come for. Then Lyonya and Gregori would leave.
    But there . . . Valentin felt it again: the swelling of apprehension, the prickling sensation at the back of his neck. His sixth sense for danger. ‘Look at you, twitching like a cat . . .’ Wasn’t that what Nikolai had always said to him in the