reading

1

She could see her reflection in the lens of the digital camcorder. Standing behind it was the bald man with the vulture eyes who looked like a condor. He’d flung her into the boot of the armoured Falcon four-wheel drive and driven into central Moscow. Once there, he dragged her down long, empty corridors, like a hunk of meat. The few words he bothered to utter were in English, with that thick Slavic accent so typical of Russians. He spoke gruffly, barking commands. His movements were hurried and stiff, mirroring the cold-blooded expression on his face. The only sign of weakness was his panting. Every so often he sucked on an inhaler.

In a tiled room with blacked-out windows, he’d tied her to a chair in front of the camcorder. A man dressed in camouflage gear entered. He was holding a Kalashnikov and wearing two ammunition belts as well as a holster containing a powerful gun. From the way he talked to the condor, she figured the two must know each other well.

A woman in a black robe and a headscarf was filming everything on her mobile. With her pale skin and blue eyes, she looked quite striking. The man in the fatigues barked something at her, after which she disappeared and reappeared again seconds later, shoving a girl of barely twenty ahead of her. He took the girl and forced her to kneel down beside the condor, who switched the camcorder on and, without looking at the girl, casually pressed the barrel of his Zastava against her temple.

The girl begged for her life. Her mutterings in Russian sounded like a whispered prayer. The condor took no notice of her. He had eyes only for the woman handcuffed to the chair opposite him. His tattooed finger pointed to the lens.

‘Look at this!’

Farah Hafez raised her head and stared into the camcorder’s reflective black hole.

‘Now say what I want you to say, bitch. And do it convincingly. You can save this girl’s life.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ Farah murmured.

‘Repeat after me.’ Farah listened to the words he’d prepared for her, words that were not hers, words that would never even occur to her. She moved her lips in an effort to repeat them. The girl mustn’t die.

Her vocal cords barely vibrated, and the lines came out as little more than a sigh. The condor cocked his Zastava. The camcorder’s red light flickered. The girl flinched.

That’s when the words came. Unexpected and forceful. Like vomit.

‘I, Farah Hafez, support the jihad against President Potanin’s criminal regime.’

The condor smiled coldly and pulled the trigger anyway.

The Zastava’s dry click betrayed an absent bullet. When the girl fainted, the pungent stench of urine filled the air.

Farah swore at the man, yelled at him in Dari that his mother was worse than a whore – she’d done it with dogs and he was the spawn of that coupling.

The condor charged at her like he’d lost control. Despite being tied up, she kicked him as hard as she could in the shins. When she tried to avoid his next charge, she fell over, chair and all. Undeterred, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, still bound to the chair, out of the room and down a corridor to an auditorium, where a large group of young men and women had been herded together and were being held at gunpoint by a woman in black.

She was still handcuffed to the chair, and now he stuffed a piece of cloth into her mouth and taped her lips shut – she could hardly breathe. Then he picked up a small, flat, metallic box, connected to a laptop with wires, and strapped it to her chest.

He stood before her, sweating profusely and sucking hard on his inhaler.

‘You’re going to go out with a bang, you bitch.’ Somehow he reminded her of a giant bubble about to burst. He marched away.

2

The red-hot ash rain and thick, grimy smoke drifting across the road from the woods prevented the armoured Falcon from speeding ahead, allowing journalist Paul Chapelle and his Russian colleague Anya Kozlova to shadow it in their Škoda. They drove in the direction of the Seven Sisters, their destination the Moscow State University’s Mass Media Centre, where hundreds of students were being held hostage by Chechen rebels. A few hundred metres from the besieged building a ring of Russian Army tanks and trucks had hermetically sealed off the complex.

Paul and Anya were amazed that the Falcon, after a brief stop, was allowed on to the grounds.

The crisis centre was in complete chaos. No one could tell them what had happened, how many people were involved or what was going on inside.

Outside, next to a waiting ambulance, Anya spoke in hushed tones for a few minutes with two paramedics. Paul watched from a distance. Her persuasive body language was all too familiar: in the end, she got the men to hand over two white doctors’ coats and a handful of medical supplies. Paul saw her slip them a few rouble notes.

Dressed in medical garb and claiming some of the hostages needed immediate medical attention, they were allowed through the line of infantry surrounding the building where Anya herself had once studied and later taught. They had no problems entering the premises through a basement door, where they quickly dumped their white coats. Anya pulled out her press card and shoved the Nikon into Paul’s hands.

‘Zhurnalisty!’ she called as they made their way down a dark corridor. Within seconds they were surrounded by three women wearing black headscarves and brandishing Kalashnikovs.

‘Anya Kozlova, Moskva Gazeta. I’m here for Chalim Barchayev. He knows me. I’ve interviewed him before.’

The women planted the barrels of their rifles in Paul’s and Anya’s backs and led them to the canteen. It had been transformed into a command centre.

Barchayev’s brooding presence, Paul thought, made him look like Che Guevara reborn. He hugged Anya as if she were one of his girls. She was bluffing. He could hear it in her voice. But that didn’t stop her from chatting to him like an old friend. She wanted to report on the hostage-taking: to tell the world his side of the story. She asked if it was okay for her photographer to take some pictures.

In the auditorium, facing a large black flag inscribed with an Arabic text, Paul saw her. She was handcuffed to a rickety chair, sweating and trembling all over, a wide piece of tape across her mouth. A green metallic-looking box with the words FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY was strapped to her chest. Paul recognized the military explosive. It was filled with hundreds of steel balls designed to make just as many bloody wounds in the young bodies of the hostages. Two wires were connected to a laptop that showed a digital clock counting down.

It was as if he could feel her breathing, hear her heart pounding, faster and faster, just like his.

One of the black widows kept a close watch on him through the sight of her Kalashnikov. He tried to avoid any indication that he recognized her.

He brought the camera to his eye and slowly clicked … click, click.

Farah opened her eyes wide. It looked like she was out of her mind with fear.

Fear.

That was the last word that crossed Paul’s mind before a bash to the back of his head stopped time and snuffed out the light.

3

The heat was oppressive, and Farah was trembling all over. She’d stopped smelling the stench of urine, shit and cold sweat, and her limbs had become numb.

For a moment, she thought she was hallucinating.

Paul was standing before her: his tall frame; his longish, dark-blond hair more unkempt than ever; the distinctive square jaw that made him the spitting image of his father; those ice-blue eyes staring at her.

But she wasn’t imagining things.

The fear in his unshaven face, which was covered with scars, stitches and plasters, was very real. He was holding a camera, pretending not to know her. And, although her head felt like it was filled with blood-soaked cotton-wool, she got it.

They weren’t supposed to know each other.

Then she saw what was happening behind him. She opened her eyes wide, as wide as possible. It was the only way she could warn him. Although the gag in her mouth stopped her from producing a sound, inside she was screaming.

Turn around, turn around!

But he didn’t get it and came closer, snapping away with his camera.

The butt of a Kalashnikov slammed the back of his head and he crumpled to the floor.

The condor looked almost winded as he regarded his latest victim, sucked up some more oxygen and then dragged Paul out of the room by his legs.

Not long after, a dull explosion could be heard from another part of the building. Shouting. A flare was shot into the auditorium and commandos charged in. Russian special forces commandos: the Alpha Spetsnaz. Muffled shots rang out, sounding like a series of champagne bottles being uncorked, as all the women in black received a bullet to the head.

Seeing this, Farah lost consciousness.

Paul’s voice brought her to again. But he was standing behind her, so she couldn’t see him. She was still tied to the chair. When he removed the piece of tape and pulled the gag out of her mouth, she retched. All this time, she could hear his voice – snippets of sentences that would stay with her forever.

Do you know how that feels? Listen to me, it feels brilliant. It feels amazingly brilliant! We’re going to be okay, you hear me, you and I.

She felt his breath as he leaned over her, and drops of blood as thick as melting wax dripped on to her shoulder. He’d tell her later that it was blood mixed with bits of skin – the condor’s, to be precise. While he was talking to her, three commandos were trying to defuse the explosive attached to her body. Behind them, the man in fatigues came into view. He emerged from a cloud of dust, wailing like a wounded animal, his Kalashnikov aimed at the commandos. Bullets from the machine gun of an Alpha Spetsnaz commando riddled his body.

Farah looked into the solemn eyes of the commando leader who’d carried on defusing the bomb strapped against her chest.

‘Front towards enemy,’ he said in broken English, pointing to the text on the metallic box. ‘You no enemy.’ He smiled. ‘You free.’ With that, he removed the box, no longer wired up to the laptop.

She rose unsteadily to her feet and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him on the cheeks and thanking him. He gave her a hug and laughed in her ear – a resonant, masculine laugh.

She floated back down the same long corridors towards the exit.

A tiny, fragile bird in Paul’s arms.

Outside, she was blinded by floodlights. Male voices were asking questions in Russian that were answered by a woman. Anya – the name came back to her now. She was the Moskva Gazeta journalist.

Then she heard Paul’s voice again, talking to her calmly. ‘You’re safe. I’m with you.’

Those were the same words she’d spoken to the boy injured in the hit-and-run in Amsterdam barely two weeks ago. Now she realized that talking like this to someone in shock actually helped. She was lifted into an ambulance.

‘Where are we going?’

‘A hospital. I want to be sure you’re okay.’

Inside the Casualty Department of Hospital Number 5, the paint at the bottom of the walls and doors was peeling and the gurney’s squeaky wheels scraped across grimy linoleum. Farah saw Anya handing the doctor a bunch of rouble notes while whispering to him.

‘He hasn’t actually done anything yet,’ Farah muttered.

‘This is a way of thanking him in advance,’ Anya assured her.

Farah’s lungs were checked by a skinny doctor with a long nose and a face as drab and blotchy as his soiled white coat. It was like being examined by the spectre of death. Number 5 was known as one of the better hospitals in Moscow. But, however decent it was, it was always better to stay clear of any hospital at all when in Russia. There were more humane ways of kicking the bucket.

When the room began to spin, she asked Paul to take her hand. As he did so, she felt a needle enter her arm. Doctor Death explained that everything was fine. The injection had merely been to calm her nerves.

All went quiet inside and darkness descended around her.

5

She felt like she’d slept the sleep of the dead. And, when she woke, she had the weird sensation that she’d never be able to sleep again. Her whole body was rigid with tension. Her head was teeming with images of recent events. Panic racked her body. She remembered the hospital and the needle going into her arm.

She didn’t know where she was. It was far too dark. She broke out in a cold sweat and crawled out of bed. Floorboards creaked beneath her feet. By groping around, she managed to locate a door. On the other side of it was a corridor, and at the end of that a crack admitting a flickering light.

Steadying herself against the wall, she teetered towards the light, to the muffled sound of agitated voices. The corridor was no more than five metres long, she estimated, but navigating it felt like running a half-marathon. By the time she reached the door, she was out of breath. As she peered through the crack, she saw two figures, staring wide-eyed into the glare of a television.

She pushed the door open and heard herself speak. The words didn’t come from her own mouth, but from her likeness on the screen. From the terrorist she now was to the outside world.

‘I, Farah Hafez …’

Then her knees gave way and she slowly crumpled to the floor. The voices receded, and the light was swallowed by darkness.

She opened her eyes again when Anya covered her with a soft blanket and asked, ‘Do you know where you are?’

She didn’t know the answer.

‘You’re at my place,’ Anya said. ‘And you’d better forget this as quickly as possible.’

Anya vanished through a brightly coloured beaded curtain. As Paul placed an extra cushion under her head and smoothed her hair, she tried to smile at him. He asked her what she remembered.

‘Everything,’ she said. ‘I remember everything.’

‘That’s good.’

‘No, it’s not. I wish I could forget it all.’

‘No way. We want to know every last detail.’

She let her head fall back against the cushions. All she wanted was sleep. The sweet sleep of oblivion. But her eyes remained wide open, and the shadows cast by the television crept along the walls and up to the ceiling.

Anya came back in with a big bowl of soup in her hands. ‘I made a large panful,’ she said. ‘You need to get your strength back.’

Pieces of potato, beetroot and red pepper floated in the hot beef broth. No sooner had Farah eaten her first spoonful than she realized just how hungry she was. In no time at all, she emptied the bowl and held it up like a trophy. When Anya returned to the kitchen, Paul asked, ‘Why did we do this again? It was a crazy plan.’

‘It wasn’t even a plan,’ said Anya, re-emerging from behind the beaded curtain with a second steaming bowl. ‘It was just insane.’

With her eyes closed, Farah slurped up the second bowl of soup and thought back to how it had all started: to the night she’d seen Sekandar in the Emergency Department, a child made up to look like a woman, wearing cheap jewellery with little bells around his arms and legs. His injured body was covered in rags that might have passed for exotic and seductive earlier that evening, but that were by then smeared with mud and blood. She’d known it at once: he was Bacha Bazi, a ‘boy to be played with’, the way rich Afghan men had been doing for centuries in her native country. He’d been left for dead somewhere along a deserted woodland road, just outside Amsterdam, and she intended – no, she was determined – to find out who was responsible for it. After ten years with the Algemeen Nederlands Dagblad, she’d finally begun to make something of a national name for herself with articles about the way the Dutch government treated Afghan refugees. And now, through the hit-and-run, she’d discovered a shady connection between the Dutch Finance Minister, Ewald Lombard, and the CEO of the Russian energy conglomerate AtlasNet, Valentin Lavrov.

Lavrov was known the world over as an art collector who made extravagant purchases. The idea that her Editor-in-Chief, Edward Vallent, had come up with was ingenious and naive in equal measure: securing Lavrov as the guest editor of a special AND art supplement would be a quick and efficient way of getting close to the fire.

Lavrov agreed to take on the role and Farah joined him in Moscow.

And now here she was: clutching a bowl of soup with trembling hands in an unfamiliar Moscow apartment, caught up in a network of elusive figures that operated in the shadows, and wanted as an accomplice in the hostage-taking of innocent students.

She, an inexperienced journalist with a hidden agenda, had approached a Russian oligarch, who’d obviously carried out a thorough background check on her. It brought to mind the warning words of the Editor-in-Chief of Moskva Gazeta, Roman Jankovski, when they first met: ‘When dealing with Lavrov, you could hope for the best, but you’d better be prepared for the worst.’

Paul held the digital screen of the Nikon up to her eyes. She saw herself standing beside Valentin Lavrov on the large patio of a glass house on the edge of a lake.

‘We followed you,’ Paul said.

She gasped and relived the moment she looked into Lavrov’s grey-green eyes, set in his chiselled face with its broad jaw and narrow lips. She could smell his aromatic scent again – a combination of mint, lavender and bergamot.

Agonizingly slowly, Lavrov’s words came back to her. She heard him say, ‘Come and work for me,’ while holding out a glass of champagne. ‘Better than writing phony art supplements about naughty oligarchs, right?’ And then that complete composure with which he issued his threat while staring out across the lake, ‘I’m throwing you a lifeline, Farah, do you understand?’

She looked at Paul.

‘He knew,’ she said. ‘He knew … right from the start.’

6

The forests surrounding Moscow had been on fire for almost a week now. A thick layer of smoke crept through the suburbs, deeper and deeper into the city. The concentration of toxins in the air was seven times higher than levels considered safe by the authorities. Yet that didn’t stop thousands of illegal Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Kyrgyzs, Uzbeks and Kazakhs, crammed into dilapidated vans, from making the trip to the north-east of Moscow, as they did every day. They sold their contraband to the equally illegal stall-holders of Cherkizovsky Market, which was spread across an area three times the size of the Kremlin. In spite of the heat and smog today, hundreds of thousands of Muscovites and tourists would come to buy Caspian salmon, black caviar, spices, carpets and electronics of dubious quality, as always.

It was six o’clock in the morning. Besides the normal nervous energy of setting up the market stalls, another sort of tension hung in the air – caused by the whirr of rotor blades. As a military helicopter circled menacingly above, Paul and Anya made their way through the maze of thousands of stands to reach the heart of the market as quickly as they could.

They’d managed to hide Farah in such an obvious place that the authorities wouldn’t ever begin by looking there: Anya’s apartment. Still, Farah couldn’t stay for very long. Where would she actually be safe? Not in Russia, given she was still accused of being a terrorist by the media. Not in the Netherlands, which was now closely cooperating with Russia because of Farah’s alleged role in the hostage-taking and because there were Dutch students among the victims.

Thanks to Interpol, nowhere in Europe was safe.

She had to get much further away; needed a new look, a new identity.

That’s why Anya and Paul had come to this autonomous enclave with its wheeling and dealing, even its own infrastructure: security, hotels and brothels, and an entire underground industry for false travel documents. This trade had already helped hundreds of thousands of Chinese, South-East Asians and other illegals to escape to the West via Russia and the Baltic States.

Right here, in Cherkizovsky Market, lay Farah’s best chance of disappearing without a trace.

But time was running out.

Arriving at a bastion of steel-plated containers, they were stopped by two men, their dark Ray-Bans tightly hugging their tanned Caucasian heads, their Nagant revolvers visible in the holsters under their black leather jackets.

‘Mr Dadashov is expecting us,’ Anya said.

‘Not today.’

The helicopter made a low flyover. They instinctively ducked.

‘It’s important,’ Anya insisted. ‘He knows me. It won’t take long.’

The men quietly consulted. One of them walked away. Only then did Paul notice they were being watched from several vantage points by men in the same leather gear. All members of the private security force of the man who ruled over Cherkizovsky Market from a network of containers, like an emperor ruling over his realm from a throne. The son of a poor cobbler from Azerbaijan, Azim Dadashov had run a sophisticated smuggling operation for years, building his rogue empire into what it was today: a thriving hotbed of mainly illegals from Central Asia. But his days were numbered. The Russian President had recently enacted a law restricting the right to operate stalls in the market to Russian citizens only. A major purge hung in the air, and it had the whirring sound of helicopter blades.

Anya was afraid they were too late. She saw it in the men lugging heavy boxes and computers from the containers to a large waiting van. She saw it in the eyes of the surly bodyguard when he returned.

‘You’ve got five minutes,’ he said, much to her surprise.

After checking their IDs and thoroughly patting them down, he led them into an inner ring of containers. Via an antechamber, they entered an air-conditioned space, strewn with Persian rugs. One wall was covered in monitors. They were in the security control room. Three men kept watch over the shadowy contours of the Mi-24 combat helicopter, which was being observed via security cameras positioned at different vantage points in the market. The man in the middle turned around. His large, gleaming, bald head seemed to sit straight on the shoulders of his gigantic body, which was stiff with tension. In his shiny suit and red silk waistcoat he looked like a wrestler posing as the Maharaja of Jaipur. The moment Azim Dadashov made eye contact with Anya, a quizzical smile appeared on his troubled face.

She never stopped amazing Paul. Just a few days ago, she’d embraced a Chechen terrorist leader. And now it was the turn of a mafia boss from the Caucasus. But the two men had something in common. Both hated Potanin’s guts.

‘It’s the final countdown, my dove,’ Dadashov whispered to Anya after he’d given Paul a crushing handshake. ‘That helicopter is a sign that a major raid is about to take place. The National Guard is already on its way. They’ll surround the market. So I don’t have as much time as I usually do for you. Unless you care to run away with me?’

‘Perhaps another time, Azim.’

‘I’ll keep hoping, sugar-pie. What can I do for you?’

‘I need a passport, Azim. And an exit visa.’

‘Sorry, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Our entire operation is being dismantled as we speak.’

‘If it wasn’t a matter of life and death, I wouldn’t be here, Azim. You’re the only one who can help us. A friend of ours is in trouble. Serious trouble. She’s a journalist. If you’ve followed the news about the hostage-taking, you’ll have seen her message on TV. She walked into a trap. The recording is a fake. They forced her.’

‘They?’

‘The whole hostage-taking was probably bogus. Potanin is looking for an excuse to invade Chechnya again. We’re fighting the same enemy, Azim. The man everybody is afraid of. Except you and me.’

‘Wait,’ Dadashov said resolutely. He turned around, briefly consulted with two other men and motioned for Paul and Anya to follow him.

‘Does she know where she wants to go, our heroine? Scandinavia, England, America?’

‘The other direction,’ Paul said. ‘Indonesia.’

He thought back to that moment when Farah had come up with the idea.

They’d seen Valentin Lavrov on the television. He was giving a press conference in the Russian Embassy’s grand hall in Jakarta. Amid the flashes of the intrusive photographers, he announced that in the foreseeable future AtlasNet would sign a ‘historic deal’ with the Indonesian government: the construction of twenty-seven floating nuclear power stations in the Indonesian archipelago. Admittedly the plan still needed the approval of the 560 members of the People’s Consultative Assembly, but Lavrov smiled into the camera as if he’d already sealed the deal.

‘Saya pergi ke Jakarta,’ Farah had said. ‘I’m going to Jakarta.’

She’d been to Indonesia. Years before. She’d taken part in an intensive Pencak Silat training session in Bandung. She’d learned enough Bahasa to understand basic phrases and have a simple conversation. Jakarta was a city of millions. The perfect anonymous arena in which to find out how Lavrov had managed to get such a project off the ground. She’d suggested they each investigate the activities of AtlasNet from a different part of the world: Anya from Moscow, Paul from Amsterdam and she from Jakarta.

It was an insane plan. ‘But,’ he said to her, ‘the most courageous thing you could have come up with. Like three horsemen of the Apocalypse, we’ll bring down Lavrov’s empire.’

Paul and Anya followed Dadashov through a passageway that ended inside another container: a workstation, lit by glaring fluorescent tubes, in the process of being dismantled. Computer screens were turned off, documents hastily packed. Stacks of passports, undoubtedly false, disappeared into boxes. Dadashov shouted to a little man with an Asian appearance, snapped some orders and pushed him in Paul and Anya’s direction.

‘Tell him what you need and he’ll do it. But make it fast, very fast.’

‘I have everything with me,’ Anya said. She stroked Dadashov’s fleshy cheek. ‘Thank you, Azim.’

‘Anything for you, tough cookie,’ he said. The smile on his face was gone before he’d left the room.

The Asian sat down behind a computer screen and motioned, almost frenetically, for Anya to hand over the necessary info. She was well prepared. She’d hacked the Myspace account of a Russian woman who resembled Farah in age and appearance. The details, combined with the MRZ information, were fed into the data system. Everything happened very quickly. The printer spat out pages of a special, thick paper displaying a watermark. The Asian ran to a workbench, where he cut, stapled and placed the pages in a cover. Anya handed over the photograph of Farah, which she’d taken the evening before. The Asian added fake stamps and pasted in phony visas. The hectic activity in the container increased. The security guards in their black jackets shouted for everyone to evacuate the premises. The Asian shoved the passport into Anya’s hands, grabbed the laptop and quickly disappeared. They heard an explosion. The container shook. They ran in the direction of Lokomotiv Stadium, about two hundred metres away, to the nearest metro station.

They heard the cracking sound of breaking wood. Behind them bulldozers rammed stalls still filled with goods into a heap of wreckage. Desperate stall-holders tried to escape with their most valuable wares. Whoever was run down in the chaos fell prey to the security forces, who were beating people indiscriminately with rubber batons.

In the mêlée of collapsing stalls and fleeing people, Paul and Anya were able to reach the station, where they ran into the entryway and then descended on the long escalator. There they blended into the mob of people on the overcrowded platform.

It was well over thirty degrees in the metro. No air-con here. A uniformed man rolled around the car on a wooden board, holding out his hand. A Chechen veteran who’d lost his legs during the war. Anya gave him a clap on the shoulder and handed him some rouble notes. They sped under the centre of Moscow in possession of a new identity for Farah.

7

With Moscow’s dismal suburbs flashing past, Farah closed the curtains on the sliding doors of her compartment and pulled down the outside window screen.

She stared at the passport that featured her new likeness and the false name Valentina Nikolayeva. It would take some getting used to.

Moments earlier, under the glass roof of Platform 10 at Moskva Kiyevskaya Station, she’d stood opposite Paul. Without makeup, but with cropped chestnut-brown hair and dark lenses to mask her bright blue eyes, she was barely recognizable. She was wearing a faded pair of cords with a dark-grey T-shirt, and her small rucksack was filled with some underwear, a supply of nuts and dried fruit, a well-thumbed book called Bahasa for Beginners, a handful of roubles, her false passport and her laptop. On Anya’s instructions, she’d wrapped up her real passport and left it in a locker at the station, along with Raylan Chappelle’s letters to her mother.

In spite of everything, she had to laugh at the fact that, even in this heat, Paul was still wearing his leather jacket. With his Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, his loose-fitting, faded jeans and grimy cowboy boots, he looked like he was busy with a DIY project that would never see completion.

‘Are you sure you want this?’ he’d asked.

‘Positive.’

She’d pushed the visor of his baseball cap aside, given him a quick peck on the cheek and then boarded the train without looking back.

As she reached for her laptop and opened it, she could feel her heart racing. Her head wasn’t nearly clear enough to retain all the instructions Anya had given her last night. She was afraid she’d already forgotten most of it.

Her memory was like a sieve.

She raised her right wrist and turned it a few times this way and that to look at the charm bracelet Anya had given her as a parting gift. The charms included an orange-red heart, a butterfly, a flower and two small, book-shaped rectangles – one black, the other white. She gripped the white book between her thumb and index finger, the way she’d practised the previous evening. She squeezed and pulled a mini USB stick from its white case and inserted it into her laptop.

As she watched a seemingly endless sequence of code flash past on the black screen, she thought about what Anya had impressed upon her.

‘Even in Jakarta, disappearing in the masses will be difficult. The moment you phone me or Paul, use a search engine on your laptop or send one of us an email, you’ll be leaving traces. If we’re going to exchange sensitive data across large distances without being detected, and communicate without leaving a digital trail, we need to take strict precautions.’

The mini USB stick was one of those precautions.

It featured a Linux operating system that Anya had put together herself, which was now communicating with the hardware of Farah’s laptop. All the regular software she’d ever used had been removed by Anya, who claimed it contained built-in back doors. It allowed security services such as the FSB, as well as the FBI and the NSA, to gain easy access and scan her hard drive. Throughout her undercover operation, Farah must never save anything on that drive. The USB stick was protected: the file system was ‘read only’ and the stick formatted as such – no hacker would be able to change anything on it; it was like hardened cement.

Farah opened the folder Anya had installed for her. It contained the most important data on AtlasNet and the nuclear-energy project the company was hoping to realize in Indonesia.

Since the hostage-taking, she hadn’t so much as glanced at a newspaper, looked at a book or read a word. Normally, she could read an entire novel in a single evening. She was able to decipher and analyse all the stuff released by the international press agencies faster than any other AND editor. But now the sentences inched past slowly and without meaning, her head refusing to let in the information she needed to do her work.

‘You were teetering on the edge,’ Paul had said to her. ‘You had a narrow escape. Now you need to get up and learn to walk again – in every respect.’

He was right. She could tell by the way she’d floundered when she tried to tell Paul and Anya what had happened to her in the Seven Sisters. Several times she forgot halfway through a sentence what it was she wanted to say. Her memories were all in a muddle, lacking either a beginning or an end. She was trying to put the puzzle together, but kept getting lost in a jumble of fragmented details.

Feverish with fatigue and overcome by the heat, she swayed back and forth to the monotonous cadence of the hurtling train, without realizing that her eyes were falling shut.

She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious. Nor did she have the time to linger on the question. A male voice boomed in her ear. Forceful fingers curled around her upper arm. She felt the grip of a hand roughly shaking her awake.

She reached for the laptop, which was still open. She looked into a pair of bloodshot eyes. Framed by dark circles, they were set deep in the pale, sunken face of a man wearing a faded green uniform with Army-style epaulettes, which looked like it had never been washed. His Russian sounded irritable and insistent. She couldn’t understand a word of it, until she heard the phrase that instantly put her into panic mode.

Passport.

‘Minutuchku!’ she said. ‘One moment, please.’

With Anya’s help, she’d learned a few Russian sentences by heart. According to her passport, she was a Russian national. At immigration counters, you usually just hand over your passport without saying anything, but Anya reckoned it might be more convincing if Farah produced the occasional simple sentence.

As she rummaged around for her passport, a second man entered the compartment. He compensated for his skinny colleague’s sickly pale complexion with fleshy, bright pink skin, which was beaded with excessive sweat. Farah made a half-hearted attempt at a smile.

‘Tak ziarko segodnja,’ she said – ‘Gosh, it’s hot today’ – and handed him the passport with a small stack of rouble notes between its pages. The man with the bloodshot eyes looked at them disdainfully and casually threw them back at her. The notes whirled down on to her lap.

He spent a long time scrutinizing her passport and then asked her something she didn’t understand.

On the off-chance, she uttered her three fictitious names and her equally fictitious date of birth.

Both men looked at her as if she’d just told them a bad joke.

‘Izvinite, ya vas ne ponimayu, ya ne znayu,’ she stammered as sincerely as possible. ‘Excuse me. I don’t understand, I don’t know.’

The look in their eyes confirmed her worst fears. Before she’d even reached Kiev, before she even realized it, she’d been found out.

The wiry man slipped the passport into his breast pocket and ordered her to hand over the laptop.

Reflexively, she slammed the laptop shut and quickly set it down beside her.

As she did so, he leaned over to grab it.

The side of her hand shot out and hit the artery in his neck, hard enough to stop the blood flowing to his head for a few seconds; and long enough for Farah to weave the fingers of both hands together, link her arms and sharply ram her right elbow into her assailant’s left temple.

As he fell over, she stretched out her arm and landed the knuckles of her fist against the back of his head.

From the corner of her eye, she saw the other man reach for his gun. In the split second it took for him to look down to undo the safety catch, she grabbed his head with both hands and brought it down towards her knee as it shot up.

She heard the cracking of his nasal bone and gave him the finishing blow against the back of his head with her elbow.

Then she grabbed the revolver, which had dropped to the floor. She’d never held a gun in her hands before. Unsure what to do with it, she tossed it on the seat and found a set of handcuffs dangling from the second man’s belt. She clicked them open, grabbed the men’s wrists and slapped on the cuffs.

Panting, she reached for her laptop and pulled the USB stick out. Always take that USB stick with you. Anya’s orders. She reinserted the stick into the casing on her charm bracelet, slipped the laptop into her rucksack, which she hoisted on to her shoulders, and carefully slid open the door.

To her right, some ten metres away, an elderly man was smoking in the aisle. His head was sticking out of the lowered window.

As she watched him, all kinds of questions flashed through her mind. How much longer would they be under way? How many officials were on board? Were those two the only ones?

Either way, she had to get as far away from this compartment as possible. It was the front carriage she wanted to get to. Kiev was a terminus station. It meant that when they arrived, she’d be able to get off close to the main concourse. Farah closed the doors behind her and walked into the aisle, quickly glancing over her shoulder at the smoking man. He was fully concentrated on Kiev’s passing suburbs.

In the aisle of the third carriage, she saw two other men in uniform heading her way. She turned around and sought refuge in a toilet. It might be another fifteen minutes to the station, twenty at most. She could lock herself in and wait until everybody had left the train. But the officials would undoubtedly spot the red ‘occupied’ sign, knock on the door, and ask her to come out and show her ticket, maybe even her passport.

Her passport.

She’d forgotten her passport.

She made her way back to her compartment as quickly as she could. The smoking man in the aisle had gone. As she slid the doors open, the man on top stirred ever so slightly. She pushed him aside. The thin man lay motionless on the floor. Worried that he might be dead, she pressed her fingers against his carotid artery and was relieved to feel it beating.

With a great deal of difficulty, she managed to turn him over so she could retrieve her passport from his jacket pocket. She heard footsteps in the aisle. Two men walked past, talking loudly. She listened carefully and heard them disappear. She put her passport into her rucksack and checked for sounds in the aisle; only when it was completely quiet did she find the courage to slide open the doors.

This time, she walked all the way to the back of the train, straight into the restaurant car. There she spotted the same officials she’d seen earlier in the front part of the train. They were the men who’d passed her compartment while she retrieved her passport from the pocket of their unconscious colleague. She recognized them by their loud voices.

Keep moving now. Don’t turn around. If she turned around, she’d attract attention.

The younger of the two winked at her as she walked past and shouted something at her for ignoring him. She kept going, but, realizing it might be a mistake not react to him, treated him to a cheery smile before disappearing through the connecting doors and into the next carriage.

How much longer before they’d arrive in Kiev? How much longer before the two men in her compartment were discovered?

She stopped in the vestibule of the next-to-last carriage and looked outside. They were entering the centre of Kiev now. Passengers with hand luggage, suitcases and backpacks emerged from the various compartments. They thronged around her. It felt uncomfortable in the heat, but at least they also provided some protection.

A couple of minutes later, the train entered the station. The platform slipped past. She tried the door handle. It wouldn’t budge. She had no choice but to wait until the train came to a complete standstill and the doors centrally unlocked.

Farah was the first to get out. She looked towards the front, but was unable to see the end of the platform because it had a gentle curve. She started walking, trying to stop herself from breaking into a run. When she saw the customs officials get out, she slowed down and mingled with the men and women pulling their noisy rolling suitcases so as to draw as little attention to herself as possible. Cleaners in blue overalls entered the empty carriages with brooms and rubbish bags. When she passed the one that contained her compartment she noticed the screen was still down.

At the sound of animated voices from a walkie-talkie, she stiffened. She kept staring straight ahead and quickened her pace. Two station guards came towards her and walked past at a trot.

By now the men must have been discovered. They’d be able to give a very accurate description of her. Not long now before the alarm would be raised.

Don’t run. Whatever you do, don’t run.

Once she reached the top of the platform, she entered the main concourse and headed straight for the escalators leading to the metro line that ran in the direction of Boryspil Airport. Where she could, she mingled with groups, constantly scanning her surroundings for unexpected movements. In the metro carriage she stood next to a small band of backpackers as she waited for it to pull away. From where she was standing, she could see something of a commotion at the bottom of the escalators. A man extricated himself from the crowd and ran towards the train at full tilt. He was young, wore a dark suit and carried something black in his hand. He ran in her direction. When he squeezed in through the closing doors, she was relieved to see the logo of an airline company on his lapels.

The train started moving and ten minutes later it arrived just below the international departures hall for Terminal D. She took the escalator up and looked around. Perhaps it was the calming voice of the female announcer, the soft echo of the many footsteps and luggage carts, and the muffled voices of the passengers, but it all seemed quiet – too much so for her liking. It was as if something were hiding behind that layer of stillness.

She walked over to the Qatar Airways check-in desk and handed the ground stewardess a printout of her reservation and her passport. A few seconds after checking Farah’s data on her computer, the stewardess asked her to wait a moment. With a hint of nervousness, the woman checked something on another screen.

That’s when Farah realized that she might have walked into a trap.

They’d want to pick her up without a disturbance. Given the large numbers of passengers in the hall, there was a realistic chance of chaos breaking out. Instead they’d escort her to a quieter place. She’d have nowhere to turn.

She looked around. To her right, some twenty metres away, she saw two armed police officers lurking unobtrusively behind a group of tourists. It was the same story to her left: two more with automatic weapons trying to keep a low profile. At the main entrance to the hall she saw another two carrying rifles.

For a moment, she was unable to breathe, think or move. She was completely and utterly panic-stricken.

‘Madam?’

She turned to face the stewardess.

‘We’re able to offer you a free upgrade to business class, if you like.’

So that was the plan. Business-class passengers were always allowed to board first. They’d be waiting for her in the jet bridge, or perhaps even on the plane itself. With nobody else around, they’d be able to detain her discreetly. She wouldn’t stand a chance.

She heard a voice inside her head – her father’s voice. She could picture him too, towering above her. She was still a little girl. Never take a step back, he said sternly. As soon as you yield for your opponent, you’ll have lost the fight. There is only one way to victory, and that is forward.

‘Fine,’ she said to the stewardess.

After receiving her ticket, along with the necessary information, she made her way to the gate. Fifteen minutes to go until boarding.

At immigration, the official checked her passport, the way he must have done hundreds of times that day, and wished her a pleasant journey.

This is what it must feel like, she thought to herself, as she walked through the still empty passenger bridge on to the plane. This is how people headed for the scaffold or a firing squad feel. You know it’s over, yet you hope for a miracle that will never come.

A steward had been stationed by the entrance to the plane. Everything seemed normal. His uniform fitted perfectly and she couldn’t detect a weapon anywhere. When she showed him her boarding pass, he escorted her inside, where she took her place in one of the luxury business-class seats.

Passengers started trickling in, finding their seats and stowing their luggage in the overhead bins. The plane was still only half full when the doors were locked. Even now, she couldn’t believe everything was fine.

They taxied to the runway. The roar of the starter engines sounded like cheering rising up from deep within the plane.

When they took off, she knew for certain that she’d chosen the only path she could have taken.

Her way now was that of the attack, and it lay before her, wide open and welcoming.

Walter Lucius

ANGEL IN THE SHADOWS

The Heartland Trilogy

Part 2

Translated from the Dutch by
Lorraine T. Miller and Laura Vroomen

MICHAEL JOSEPH

Part One

ATTACK

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Part Two

RITUAL