88° North. J.F. Kirwan

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to find out if she is as good as you say she is.’

      Nadia considered the Chef at least a rook on the chessboard. She’d asked for his help, but he had no real obligation to her. ‘You already saved my life. I won’t ask you to get yourself killed. It’s not your fight.’

      She thought she glimpsed his cobra eyes for a moment, then they were gone.

      ‘Salamander is your fight,’ he said. ‘The Colonel told me to come, and he is persuasive, but I am also here for my own reasons.’ He drifted to the door, as if gliding on ice. ‘But if I am to fight her, I also need to practise. Victoria Park is close. I have a couple of hours of light left. Stay here.’ With that, he got up and left.

      ‘How does he move like that?’ Jin Fe asked, once the lift had descended.

      Nadia recalled how they used to joke about him back in the camp, because you had to joke about people who scared you that much. ‘They removed all his bones when he was a baby, and replaced them with tendons.’

      Jin Fe laughed and went back into the kitchen, and then the full weight of what Nadia had been trying not to think about slammed into her like a truck. Jake. Salamander had Jake. He might be torturing him, killing him … FUCK! This was not supposed to happen. She was meant to die, not him. They’d only just started out, and Salamander had bloody kidnapped him. And they had no idea where Salamander had gone, where he’d taken Jake, or even why. She needed to do something, anything, but what, exactly? An idea struck her. A long shot. She went back to the kid’s room and fished around in her holdall, and breathed a sigh of relief when she found her phone. She came back to the lounge.

      The phone had a stealth function, bouncing the signal off a minimum of six satellites. She activated it, found the number she wanted, and hit ‘Call.’ She knew she’d have forty-five seconds before any one of a number of agencies could trace it.

      Somebody picked up. Inspector Chen. He answered with a barrage of antsy Cantonese. Not too happy about getting a call. A busy man.

      ‘It’s Nadia.’

      His tone changed, and the background chatter in his office ceased. She imagined him drawing a line across his throat to make everyone else shut up, while he put the call on speaker, signalling someone to start a trace.

      Ten seconds.

      ‘You must give yourself up, Nadia. We have orders to shoot you on sight. What you did to Hanbury –’

      ‘I didn’t pull the trigger, and they had a knife to Jake’s throat. The video skipped a few things.’

      ‘Who are they?

      ‘Blue Fan and Salamander.’

      ‘Nonsense. Salamander is not here. We would know.’

      Twenty seconds.

      ‘Salamander has Jake. You need to arrest Blue Fan. Three of her men were killed two roads down from the house where Hanbury was executed, on a direct line to Repulse Bay. There must be blood. DNA. Empty cartridges. They shot at me.’

      ‘There was a downpour last night. Surrender now, Nadia, give yourself up, then we can talk, you can present your side of the story—’

      He was stalling. Thirty seconds. What else was there to say?

      ‘Jake was unconscious. He never saw any of it. Just tell the Brits that Salamander has him.’

      Forty seconds. She hung up.

      Had it been pointless? Chen wouldn’t believe her. But she’d done it for Jake. Chen had put a trace on the call, which meant it was recorded and therefore non-deniable. He would jump at the chance to talk to MI6 directly, though probably his superiors would steal that opportunity from him. It didn’t matter. MI6 had to be put on the right track. Maybe they could do something, maybe they could find Jake and rescue him, because he was one of their own, and right now she didn’t fancy her chances of saving him, even with the Chef.

      Jin Fe appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Hungry?’

      ‘No,’ Nadia said. A reflex, because these days she never had any appetite. She’d lost weight in the past two weeks, even though she’d had none to lose in the first place. But she was hungry. As if to emphasise the point, her stomach rumbled.

      ‘Actually …’

      Jin Fe beamed and disappeared back into the kitchen.

      Nadia sat up and scrolled through the phone address list. It was very short. Five numbers. Her fingers hovered over one of them. What had he said to her at Jones’s funeral, back in London?

      Anything, anytime, anywhere.

      She barely knew him. Yet Greaves was the only other survivor from a team of six who’d chased Salamander into the sewers beneath London, and stopped him from detonating a nuclear warhead. What was the phrase? Brothers in arms? He was a foot-soldier for MI6. Not like Jake, certainly not like the Chef. And not like her. He would have seen the news. The Chef would absolutely not want her to bring in someone else. But Greaves had said what he’d said. And it was his private cell, so he wouldn’t do anything like try to put a trace on it.

      The aroma of cashew-and-chicken wafted towards her, the sizzles and pops of a good home-made stir-fry. She tapped the number, and pressed ‘Call’. There was a sizable chance he wouldn’t pick up. Nadia was by now both a disavowed Russian agent and an enemy of the British Crown, her slaughter of Hanbury a matter of public record, going viral on YouTube. The weight of it pressed down on her. He wouldn’t pick up. She and the Chef and Jin Fe would all be dead soon, and Jake not long afterwards, despite Salamander’s oath. She’d been outplayed. The Colonel was right, Sakuro was right. She should have taken the offer, and stopped kidding herself, she was ill for Christ’s sake, bloody well dying. She recalled the Chef’s hand signal earlier, and its third meaning. Defeat. Salamander had …

      Greaves picked up.

      She couldn’t speak for a moment. She got up and paced. ‘It’s Nadia,’ she said, sounding hoarse even to herself. ‘Listen, the video, you must have seen it. I didn’t … that is, it wasn’t the way—’

      ‘Stop, Nadia. What do you need?’

      She leant her back against the door, slid down into a sitting position, and began talking.

      Afterwards she returned to the table and ate with gusto, and thanked Jin Fe for the best Chinese meal of her life. Then she retired to the bathroom, closed the door, and stared into the mirror. It was high time she practised snake eyes, because Salamander wouldn’t be an easy kill. And what Jake and the rest of the world needed right now was a predator.

Chapter Seven

      The Chef needed to call in a favour. They were holed up in Fortress Hill for a reason. He walked down the curving road, then stopped at a pharmacy that was also a herbalist – not uncommon in Hong Kong – waited until the owner was free, and spoke to him in fluent Cantonese. The herbalist gave him a curious look as he listened to the order, then nodded and disappeared out the back for ten minutes, returning with a brown paper bag stuffed with roots. The Chef paid, left the shop, and hopped on a tram, paying with a Hong Kong two-dollar coin as the dilapidated, СКАЧАТЬ