Hanlon rolled over Serg’s naked body and checked her phone. She sat up and pushed her hair back from her face. Serg ran his fingertips down her spine, tracing the beautiful outlines of the muscles on her back.
Sweat was drying on their bodies in the warm air of the FSB’s – the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s replacement and Serg’s employers – safe house.
‘So how did you know I’d be in Stuttgart?’ she asked. ‘I’m in Germany a lot,’ said Serg, ‘and I work in military
intelligence. I know many things. I thought I’d surprise you.’
‘Well, you certainly alarmed me.’ She stood up and walked to the window on Panoramastrasse. The street was wellnamed. It lay high above the city and the lights of the centre glittered down in the valley below.
He pushed himself up on one side. He had a long, lean gymnast’s body, the muscles sharply defined.
‘You have an amazing backside, Hanlon.’ ‘I know,’ she said.
She turned round. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing, Serg, following me like that? I was just about to severely hurt one of your men. He was about to lose all his front teeth.’
‘I was looking after you.’
‘Oh, were you? I’m capable of looking after myself.’
Serg propped himself up on one elbow in the rumpled bed. ‘I know. But you have powerful enemies, Hanlon. Belanov for one. And now you’re mixed up with Neu Schicksal.’
‘So you’ll know what I’m doing here in Stuttgart?’
‘Not precisely, in general terms. Neu Schicksal and Wolf Schneider are obviously of concern to the Kremlin. That’s what brought you to my attention when I looked for your name, when I started wondering what you might want that for.’ He nodded at the container he’d brought in a plastic bag for her. He grinned. ‘Most women want chocolates… Your half-assed English anarchists aren’t really my concern.’
‘And Al-Akhdaar?’
‘I’m more concerned with the growth of IS in Georgia, and its allies in Chechnya and Dagestan, but you could have guessed that, Hanlon.’
‘I did.’
She walked over to the bed and sat down by Serg’s side. She leaned forward and stroked the fine, almost oriental hair on his head. His mother had been Tartar and Serg’s green eyes had a slight Mongolian roundness. He had a kind of half-breed beauty that she found irresistible. Her fingers rested on a patch of scar tissue above his hip about the size of a playing card.
‘That must have hurt.’
‘A souvenir from Vladikavkaz in Ossetia… Twelve years ago.’ Serg propped himself up on one arm. Hanlon ran her hand over the taut biceps. She listened to his sonorous English as he told her of the firefight. The dilapidated dacha near the Tsey Valley. A semi-automatic in his hand, eighteen rounds in the magazine. The brilliant red of blood on pristine white snow. The explosion and the fireball, a running figure, the impact of the round in his side, knocking him over. Sprawled on the ground. Two two-round bursts from his gun. The fleeing man collapsing as if knocked over by a giant invisible hand.
‘But did it hurt? Not really, a bit. Now, this is another reason I was following you, to keep you safe from her.’
Serg sat up with easy grace and reached for his laptop. He entered a password and tapped away then showed
Hanlon the screen. She looked at Georgie Adams.
‘What’s she doing here? I thought you didn’t have any interest in half-assed British anarchists.’
‘I don’t. But she shows up on the files. She has Perm Mafia connections. Belanov has the same friends. Caucasus heroin mainly; that and prostitution. The anarchist stuff is just a front.’
Hanlon frowned. ‘How would that help?’
Serg said, ‘Your intelligence services regard them as a joke, a bunch of idealistic idiots, and most of them are. So, if they attend a rally abroad they’re not going to be checked rigorously or searched because they’ll scream it’s political persecution, so you can bring in coerced sex slaves to work in London brothels and say they’re here for a conference, and you can more easily bring in drugs and money.’ He shrugged. ‘Adams is the sort of person that officials respect, you know that. She’s of the establishment. We know they have links with student bodies in London.’
‘So Adams is a criminal, plain and simple?’
‘Sure, she’s just using Eleuthera. I have no doubt that most of them haven’t got a clue how the organization is financed. Or care. She’s a very nasty piece of work, though, implicated in several killings and torture and intimidation of women.’
‘That lying piece of shit, Hinds,’ said Hanlon bitterly. ‘Trouble?’ asked Serg.
‘No, not really,’ Hanlon said. ‘My colleague will be a bit disappointed, that’s all. She was led to believe that Eleuthera were some kind of international conspiracy with connections to major political parties, not some bunch of idealistic idiots being played for fools by a drug smuggler and general gangster. She’ll feel let down. I can’t have a printout of any of your paperwork, can I, make it official?’
‘I’m sorry, no. It is a confidential police document, but now you know it exists you can do a police to police request, it’ll just take a couple of weeks. Let me know when the paperwork is sent and I’ll take it from there. Without me, you’d never get it, not in today’s climate. I’ll authorize it, make sure it gets done.’
‘Thanks,’ said Hanlon. She thought Melinda Huss would be gutted to know that her conspiracy theory was just that, a mere fantasy. That Eleuthera were not connected with the Al-Akhdaar killings at all.
‘Anything else I can help you with?’
Hanlon looked at his body, the clock, calculated flight check-in, travel time to the airport. She slid on to the bed. Her mouth covered Serg’s as her tongue sought his tongue and her body straddled his.
‘There was just one thing,’ she breathed.
The laptop screen reflected their sweat-drenched interlocked limbs as Hanlon wrapped her legs round him beneath the inscrutable gaze of Georgie Adams, the sun glinting on her pierced nose ring.