Ivan
Chapter Twenty
Once the man has cut my bindings, he helps me to my feet before checking his gun. Despite the urgency, questions crowd my brain.
“Who are you? How do you—?”
“Later,” he says as he steps past me towards the lodge. “We’ve not much time. Right now, we need to get you a gun. Do you have one inside?”
“In the bedroom.”
“How easy is it to get to?”
“It’s not. We’d need to break a window or pass through the living room. But hang on.”
I hurry to the lock-up with him following behind. I hesitate for a few breaths before keying in the code, but I reason that he could have efficiently executed me by now. I reach in and pluck out a gun. After checking to ensure the firearm is loaded, I nod to the guy.
“Good. When we go in, stay behind me. They’ll be expecting my return. When you get a clear shot, push me out of the way and take down Vlad—the man. But do not shoot the woman.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if I took them both out?”
“Five, I’m helping you here, and I need you to do as I say. I’ll explain later, but I need Mila alive.”
As we creep up the wooden steps, a distant crack pierces the air, accompanied by the sound of a windowpane shattering somewhere inside the lodge. The man does not falter a second but barges headlong through the door.
Inside is a mess of confusion.
From behind him, I quickly scan the room.
Lorenzo is tied up and kneeling on a rug by the fireplace.
His complexion is ashen, but on a cursory inspection, I see no injury.
The bigger man’s body is on the floor by the broken window, the remains of his head pumping blood around a mess of bone, brain and glass fragments.
Standing over Lorenzo, with the cold fireplace behind her, the woman is stricken but alert.
Instinctively, she jerks her gun up at the tall guy, her eyes wild.
I push him out of the way and shoot her in the shoulder.
As she recoils, she trips on the hearth, hitting her head on the mantlepiece as she falls.
While I run to Lorenzo, the tall guy rushes over to check on her.
“Stay below the window ledge,” I shout to him as I kneel on the floor. “Are you hurt, Enzo?”
Lorenzo’s eyes widen in disbelief. He leans his bound body into mine and releases a stifled gasp. The powerful emotion startles me, and I hug him, feeling his body tremble.
“I heard shots,” he whispers, and I catch the anguish in his voice. Of course. The realisation hits me hard that he thought I had been executed.
“I’m fine, baby.”
“She’s still breathing,” says the man. “Here.”
He slides a knife across the floorboards towards me. I cut the bindings as Lorenzo tilts his head back and looks up at me with relief and confusion.
“What happened?” he asks, rubbing his wrists.
“He’s helping us,” I say before nodding at the body on the floor. “And I think Mrs Bellacci might be making her presence known. Can you get her to stand down?”
“My phone is in the bedroom. I’ll try messaging her.”
“Go then. Fast and low.”
While Lorenzo scrambles across the floor on all fours and heads towards the bedroom, I survey the room more carefully this time. I need to secure the space in case Mrs Bellacci did not see us enter.
“We’ve not much time,” calls the man, tending to his fallen colleague. “Mila calls in on the hour, every hour. This is a priority covert op. They’ll send another team if we don’t check in. I suggest we secure Mila, then you’ll have to do the same to me.”
I head to the broken window and pull the cord to close the thick curtains.
Once I’m done, I help drag the woman towards the bedroom with the twin beds, where the blinds are still closed.
Apart from the shoulder wound, which I ensured was a clean through-and-through, she has a nasty gash on the side of her head and is spattered with fragments of blood and other body matter from her dead colleague.
“She’ll recover,” says the man, pushing the hair from her face. “I must say, you’ve got a well-chosen location here. Even our drones would have had difficulty finding you.”
“How did you find us?” I ask as we arrange the woman’s body on the floor.
“Tracker on your motorbike.”
“Fuck. How the hell did you manage that?”
“Mila said we got lucky,” he says. I can see from the way he handles her with tenderness that there’s more than a professional relationship between them.
Once he’s finished, he perches on the edge of a bed.
“Your pal was identified by one of our operatives working around Tuscany. Spotted the two of you going into a coffee bar in a place called San Vincenzo. She said she parked up to take photos of you and the bike for confirmation, and while you were inside, she took the initiative to plant the tracker.”
I remember the trip to the coast well, an opportunity to step outside Eagle House with my new look as Aksel. Had we been careless that day or just unlucky?
“How much time do we have?” I ask.
“Fifteen to twenty minutes. I suggest you pack a bag and leave the bike. Finding the device might take too long. Is there a car you can use?”
“Not that I know of, but we’ll think of something.” I pull one of our rucksacks into the bed and begin removing clothes from a drawer. “Let me wait for Lorenzo to finish up. He may have some ideas. Are you working undercover?”
“No.”
“You’re a double agent?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I work for the Russian foreign intelligence services. Honestly, Five, had you not been here today, I would have followed orders. To bring your friend in or take him down. Him and his markswoman partner have caused us one embarrassment after another. We’ve got tough enough adversaries from the big players.
The Kremlin views Italy as little more than a mouse.
Except for those two. Three times they’ve shown us up, and the heads of the SVR do not take kindly to that sort of upstaging.
But when I saw you in the photograph, even with the dye job, I recognised you instantly.
And then I saw you swimming. That’s why I did what I had to. ”
“Do they know about us—?”
“Nobody knows. That part of my life is buried. And that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
“You said we trained together?”
“A lifetime ago. You were—are—a Knight. I was only a Pawn. P2, they called me, one of the poor wee buggers being groomed to eventually replace you. Bloody impossible task. They encouraged us to learn with you, to train with you, to emulate you. We considered you gods.”
“At the Hartfield Institute?”
“You remember?”
“Not a thing. That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“I’m told they burned the fucking place to the ground. Just as well, cause if they hadn’t, I’d have gone back there one day and finished the job myself.”
“It’s not there anymore?”
“No, not most of the buildings, anyway. Mila got me aerial footage from one of our spy satellites. Why?”
“I had a head injury. That part of my life is lost to me. I thought returning might bring back memories.”
“You might be better off not knowing, Five. All I can tell you is that Hartfield’s somewhere along the remote west coast of Scotland.
Until the night I left, I was confined to the grounds, except for the times we were driven to swim in an ice-cold loch.
They ran the place like a military boarding school coupled with a medical facility.
The last time I saw you I was eight, you were eleven.
Some of us used to call you the dolphin because of the way you torpedoed through the water.
But we rarely mixed. And you were often away on assignment.
Do you remember any of the language instructors? ”
“I told you. I don’t remember anything.”
“Well, we had the same Russian teacher. Shame you don’t remember, because speaking Russian was the only thing I could do better than you.
A natural, our teacher called me. My last memory of the place was of her shaking me awake in the middle of the night, whispering to me that the institute was no longer safe for me and instructing me to get into the boot of her car.
I always followed instructions—we all did—but I particularly trusted her.
Half an hour later, I’m climbing aboard a fishing boat in the pitch black.
Even in the dark, I could make out a sign on a warehouse for Kishorn Port.
Later that morning, as the sun rose, I boarded a Russian cargo ship.
Next thing I know, I’m taken in by a woman in the port city of Murmansk in the northwest of Russia.
That’s when I finally experienced a normal childhood.
I was given a real name, Ivan, instead of being yelled at as a Pawn.
Took me almost a year to sleep through the whole night.
Nobody said as much, but I get the impression our language tutor saved my life.
She stayed behind, and I don’t know what happened to her.
I didn’t know what had happened to any of you. ”
As he recounts his last days at Hartfield, I finish up packing our bags. I wish we could stay and talk more. As Ivan ends his tale, Lorenzo calls out my name, and I summon him into the room.
“I spoke to—our friend,” he says, his gaze drifting between Ivan and me. He has one of the guns dangling from his right hand. I can see he’s still not convinced by our rescuer, but I don’t have time to explain.
“We need to get out of here,” I say. “I assume she has transport. Can you get her to collect us out front?”
“What about my bike?”
“Unusable, I’m afraid.”
Lorenzo thumbs a quick message before looking at Ivan again, with a telltale narrowing of his eyes. I wonder if I should explain, but Lorenzo begins talking.
“Is he coming with us?”