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Everything has been building to this, as all secrets are revealed in the thrilling conclusion of MOSCOW RULES!

On a mission to fulfil a request for his employer on the streets of Moscow, Marc Dane finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…

In Part 9, after a deadly confrontation in the snow and ice, Marc has nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide – but the hunt for a KGB spymaster’s secret files still has one last twist in the tale…

Read on for the final chapter…

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MOSCOW RULES part 10 – KEEP YOUR OPTIONS OPEN

A tougher guy – a real operator, a true-blue tier one type – would have pulled the old dear out of the car and got away at a high rate of knots; but Marc Dane was exhausted and running on less than two hours of sleep, so he fell into the back seat of the grumbling Volga sedan with a weary grunt.

He was dimly aware of Galina guiding the car like a racing driver, catching glimpses of trees whipping past as she kept her dainty foot down. “Stay out of sight,” she told him, without looking back. “The police will pay no attention to an old lady on her own.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“A safe place,” Galina replied, her voice like smoked honey. “Trust me. The answers are coming.”

Answers. The word followed him into the semi-darkness, searching for something to connect with. Answers to questions like: what was all this in aid of? How am I going to get out of Moscow alive? And why was Sergei Morozov’s elderly widow driving a getaway car?

            After what seemed like hours of speeding, the road evened out and Galina eased off on the gas. The car pulled on to a gravel drive and halted, and the woman spared Marc a winning smile. “We are here,” she said. “Would you be an angel and help me out?”

Marc’s innate Britishness made it impossible for him to refuse a request from a nice old pensioner, and he shook off his fatigue long enough to exit the car and open Galina’s door for her. She had brought them to a rural train station in the middle of nowhere, little more than a couple of snow-covered platforms, a signal box and a waiting hall in the heart of a flat, white forever that disappeared into the hazy distance.

Marc provided a hand that Galina used to pull herself out of the car, and then she led him into the station proper – where, mercifully, it was warmed by the heat of a crackling wood stove, atop which there was a big samovar of hot black tea.

An old man sitting on a nearby bench, who looked almost but not quite like Sergei Morozov, saluted Marc. He rose from a heavy brown overcoat pooling around him. and embraced Galina. The old couple exchanged quiet words, then Galina excused herself.

Marc couldn’t take his eyes off the man. It wasn’t Morozov. It could not be Morozov. Too many people, allies and enemies alike, had certified that the body in the coffin Marc had seen go into the ground at Novodevichy was definitely the former KGB spymaster. He was dead. That was a fact.

“What is wrong, Mr. Dane?” said the old man. “You look as if you have seen a ghost.”

“You…” Marc struggled to find the right words, and then gave up. “You crafty old bastard.”

“Worse has been said of me,” he replied. “I apologise for drawing you into this. But I am afraid, I had very few avenues left open to me, at the end.” The old man absently ran a hand over his wispy beard and moustache, and looking closely, Marc saw they were very good fakes. That and the big spectacles, the darkened hair, and Sergei Morozov resembled a man ten years younger than his actual age.

Marc shook his head, and went to the samovar, pouring himself a tall glass of the tea. “I am the Idiot,” he said. “Lucy was right, you were playing a game all along. But not just on me. On everyone.”

“You look tired.” Morozov sat on the bench once again. “When you get to my age, it sometimes feels as if that is all one can feel.” He looked away. “I have done more for my nation and my people than any man could have…or should have. But they would never let me go, do you understand? Even with the fiction of a retirement, my duty could only end with my death.”

“Lose your taste for it, did you?” Marc sipped his tea and eyed the old man. Looking at the slight, stooped figure, it was hard to picture him at the height of his powers as a Lion of the Lubyanka, as the King of Ghosts. In a very real sense, this elderly gent was the embodiment of an enemy Marc had been training to fight for his entire adult life – but here and now, he just looked like someone’s grandad.

“This used to be a game of cunning, for intelligent men.” Morozov’s voice hardened with resentment. “We kept it clear of civilians and non-combatants. We were precise.” He shook his head. “But now the work, it lacks any grace and subtlety. It has become a playground for belligerent thugs and other crude minds. The wilderness of mirrors is filled with criminals instead of craftsmen.” He looked up at Marc. “So, yes, Mr. Dane. You are right, I did lose my taste for it. I wanted to hang up my sword.” His gaze drifted to where his wife stood warming herself by the stove. “Live what last remaining years I have with love, not fear.”

“You faked the tram running you down on the street. You made sure there were witnesses.” Marc tried to plot out the scheme. “How? Literally everyone believes you were either killed in an accident or assassinated on purpose.”

“Let an old spy preserve some of his mystique,” said Morozov. “How I did it does not matter. But what came next, that was the thorny part.”

“The ledger.”

“The ledger,” repeated Morozov, following with a curse under his breath. “At first it was my armour, my shield against every enemy who tried to unseat me. But eventually…” He paused. “What is that British aphorism? It became the millstone about my neck. It kept me alive for so long, but I knew if I were to die unexpectedly, there would be a mad scramble to find it. Chaos in the ranks of the FSB and beyond! Rykov and that moron Gurik would stop at nothing to find the fabled Morozov File…” He chuckled humourlessly.

Marc fixed the old man with a steady eye, and he voiced the suspicion that had been pulling at him since this whole mess had kicked off. “How do you think they’ll react when they figure out it doesn’t exist?”

Morozov raised his head to meet Marc’s gaze and the old man’s expression betrayed nothing. But he didn’t need to; Marc knew he was right.

“The ledger isn’t real,” he went on. “It never was. You created a useful fiction to protect yourself, you laid a false trail for people to follow. You left a file full of unbreakable nonsense code at the end of a treasure hunt. The ultimate disruption operation.”

“You are quite perceptive,” Morozov allowed. “I see now why Ekko Solomon holds you in such esteem. He is a good judge of character.” He made a beckoning motion. “Please, I enjoy stories like these. Tell me more. Tell me how you believe it would play out.”

Marc sat down, and put himself in Morozov’s place. “You knew the moment you were declared dead, everyone who ever wanted to stick a knife in your back but couldn’t do it for fear of what you had on them, they’d come running. They’d be willing to tear Moscow apart looking for that file…” Then he thought about his own part in things. “Which is why you needed an outsider to muddy the waters. You knew Solomon would send a Rubicon agent to the funeral because he couldn’t come himself. Did you know it would be me?” Morozov didn’t reply, and Marc carried on. “You wanted the FSB and whoever else to be at each other’s throats, because you wanted them distracted. You needed a smokescreen to cover your escape, so while everyone is searching for this non-existent thing, you and the missus could just… Slip away.” He gestured towards Galina. “How am I doing?”

“Very entertaining.” Morozov pulled back his sleeve with an age-spotted finger and consulted the time on the face of a heavy cosmonaut’s wristwatch.

“I see a big flaw in that plan, though,” Marc noted, and that drew him a sharp look from the old man’s hawkish eyes.

“How so?”

“You said you were tired of the game. But that’s a lie, isn’t it? You love it, almost as much as you love her.” Marc nodded at Morozov’s wife. “That’s your biggest weakness, Sergei. Anyone else would have been on a beach in Fiji by now, with a new identity and a nice pina colada. But you couldn’t help yourself… You had to stick around to watch it unfold, despite the risk.” Marc leaned in. “You like being the puppet-master, yeah?”

Emotions passed across the old man’s features – a flash of fear, then anger, finally settling into cool arrogance. “As I noted, you are quite perceptive.”

“Husband?” Galina called out from beside the window. “It’s time.”

“Of course.” Morozov rose to his feet, and as he did, Marc caught the sound of a diesel engine. “You will forgive me, but we have a train to catch.”

“Let me help you with that.” Marc picked up the suitcase at Morozov’s feet and followed the elderly couple out to the icy platform. A light was visible through the snowy haze, growing brighter as a hulking passenger locomotive took form, slowing as it approached. “Heading east?” Marc went on. “Risky.”

“They will not expect it,” said Galina. “Rykov and Gurik are linear thinkers.”

“We won’t meet again,” said Morozov. He offered his hand and Marc shook it. “Tell Solomon his cause is righteous. Men like he and I have done much harm to the world. Perhaps that balance can still be redressed.”

“Yeah,” Marc sighed, feeling the weight of the past few days settling heavily upon him. “I’ll pass that along.”

The train rolled to a halt and a lone conductor got off to help Galina aboard, but no-one else disembarked. Morozov hesitated, giving Marc one final, measuring look. “You think this has been a wasted effort,” he said.

“I’ve got nothing to show for it,” Marc noted.

“No. You do not go home empty-handed,” said the old man, shaking his head. “You have something men in our line of work value more than diamonds, Mr. Dane. You have information.”

“About what?” 

Morozov leaned in and spoke quietly. “Aleph. You saw them first-hand, their mercenaries walking through Moscow as if they owned the city, defying Russian state security, doing as they wished and answering to no-one. Their star is rising, my friend, and they are unopposed.”

Marc frowned, unable to escape the feeling that he was missing something vital. “Aleph are private military contractors, they’re just guns for hire. They do as they’re told, they don’t initiate action.”

“Things change,” said Morozov. “The pattern of our dark world has altered. You and Rubicon saw to that when you demolished the Combine. Aleph have seized the initiative.” He stepped up on to the train, as a horn hooted, signalling an imminent departure.

“We couldn’t track where their orders were coming from,” Marc pressed. “Who are they working for?”

“Nobody,” said Morozov. “An army of highly-trained, technologically-sophisticated soldiers with no loyalty to any nation-state, and no ethical code. They have grown weary of fighting other men’s wars, I think. They want to start a few of their own.” He gave Marc a final nod as the train began to pull away. “Move against them now, while there is still time,” he called. “Before they move against you.”

Marc watched the train vanish into the mist, and the cold prickled down his spine as he weighed a dead man’s warning.

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SIX DAYS LATER

“Sir?” The willowy French woman picked her way down the wooden boardwalk over the sand, careful to avoid the places where planks had broken or smears of oily grime collected. “A moment?”

She was dressed completely wrongly for the locale. The tiny Greek fishing village was a place for ordinary people, tough men and women who worked with their hands at the business of bringing in the daily catch. The kind of folk with sun-cured skin and calloused hands, whose entire wardrobes – perhaps even their homes – wouldn’t be worth the price of the expensive outfit worn by the executive secretary.

And yet, even if she did seem better suited to one of the brash, multi-million dollar yachts floating in the resort marinas up the coast, she was still highly competent and very motivated. She didn’t allow the circumstances to affect her performance, and that kind of person was one that Kastas Laskaris valued greatly.

He leaned back in an old wooden chair, and waved off the other men who had been working with him around the buckets of mackerel. They melted away without a single word from him, even though Laskaris seemed the same as any one of them at first glance.

But to a careful observer, the differences were there. Laskaris carried himself like a soldier, not a fisherman. The muscle beneath his baggy shirt was toned and chiselled by a punishing regime of nutrition and exercise designed to sculpt him into as perfect a form as his body would allow. Rough-hewn, but handsome enough to be a Hollywood leading man, his looks still couldn’t quite hide the air of cruelty that danced in his eyes. He moved with fluidity, absolutely assured in every motion, turning to look at the woman.

“Marguerite,” he murmured. “I told you to remain in the villa.”

“This will not wait, sir,” she replied, bobbing her head respectfully. She gestured, and for the first time Laskaris saw the two men trailing warily behind his secretary.

He knew their names – Yevgeny Borodin and Avgar Dova, the two operatives from the failed Moscow operation – and their downcast expressions made it clear they were adequately cowed by their summons to meet him.

“Ah, of course. That will be all,” said Laskaris, and Marguerite took her cue to leave. He glanced at the men and pointed to the empty chairs around him. “Do you know how to clean fish?”

Borodin and Dova exchanged wary glances, then shook their heads.

“I’ll show you. Sit with me.” Laskaris handed them wickedly sharp knives, then he set to gutting the mackerel, his own blade whispering through the meat of the fish in swift cuts. Watery blood stained his hands as he worked, and after a moment, the two mercenaries began to copy his actions. They were inexpert and slow, but neither of them dared to refuse their commander’s orders.

“The ledger,” he said, at length. “The handful of pages you recovered are worthless.”

Borodin licked his lips and ventured a reply. “The situation became… complex, sir. The FSB interfered, and the other contractor, the Englishman from Rubicon…”

“No excuses,” said Laskaris, and he sighed. “The operation was doomed from the start. There was no file. It was a ruse.” The two men exchanged another look – perhaps they thought that would let them off the hook – so he continued on to disabuse them of that assumption. “That does not justify your substandard performance. Aleph expects better. There are consequences for inadequacy.”

He sighed, looking toward the blue waters of the Aegean and the flotilla of kaika fishing boats moored up on the nearby quay. It was so peaceful here. It gave him a clarity that he could not find anywhere else.

Laskaris put down his knife and stood, and the two mercenaries rose as well, each still holding the blade he had given them. “I want proof you are strong enough to continue to work for me,” he said. “I don’t accommodate failures. I want survivors.” He turned his back on them and made a vague gesture. “Decide which of you that is to be.”

Laskaris walked away, turning toward the villa up on the hill overlooking the village. Wiping the blood off his hands, he pulled a slim smartphone from the pocket of his work shorts and spoke into it. “Marguerite. Assemble all the information we have on the Rubicon group.”

“Yes, sir.”

He glanced back toward the quay. One of the men was already on his knees, clutching at a spurting knife wound. “I want a complete tactical evaluation,” Laskaris went on, “and termination options by the end of the day.”

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We’re entering the final week now, as today’s blog features the penultimate chapter of my brand-new Marc Dane story MOSCOW RULES!

On a mission to fulfil a request for his employer on the streets of Moscow, Marc Dane finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…

In Part 8, as Marc moves ever closer to the hiding place of Sergei Morozov’s blackmail ledger, he knows the net is tightening around him as Russia’s FSB and the ruthless Aleph mercenaries are hot on his trail…

Read on for Part 9 of MOSCOW RULES; the final part of the novella will be released on Friday, but if you’d like to read it before then, sign up to the James Swallow Reader’s Club at this link or type your email address in the box at the bottom of this page.

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MOSCOW RULE part 9 – PICK THE TIME AND PLACE FOR ACTION

With the museum shut down and Russian agents combing the exhibits, it was a matter of when and not if they found the hiding place of Morozov’s ledger.

The KGB spymaster had secreted it inside one of the dozens of aircraft fuselages out in the cold daylight across the quadrangle, and Marc didn’t doubt that the Russians would take every last one of those old hulks to pieces, down to the rivets, if it meant finding the file.

But he had the one detail they did not; he knew where to look.

           

Marc moved fast and low, out from under the wing of a derelict transport and across an open path. He took care to stick to the edges where the frozen earth met the asphalt of the walkways, well aware that footprints across the fresh snowfall would betray his passing. He spotted two men in heavy coats a few hundred meters away, in the shadows cast by the fuselage of a huge bomber, as they probed the early morning gloom with handheld flashlights. Marc kept his distance, making his way toward his target as the wind picked up.

The last hint in Sergei Morozov’s deadly scavenger hunt was the tin toy souvenir from the museum gift shop, but it had only been one component of the clue. On discovering it, Marc had discarded the box it came in – but not before memorizing the propaganda art on the lid. The gaudy illustration showed a bold Soviet-era pilot and a sleek supersonic aircraft blazing a path to the future – an aircraft that only existed here in Monino, a machine of which only one had ever been built. Marc silently thanked his younger self for growing up obsessed with weird jet planes, as anyone else might not have made the vital connection.

As he moved between the exhibits, their wings creaking in the stiff breeze, he ticked them off a list in his thoughts as he searched for his quarry. Unlike most air forces of the world, the Warsaw Pact military machine had rarely cared to hang evocative or aggressive titles on their planes, preferring to stick to simple numerical manufacturing codes. But NATO forces had their own bestiary of common ‘reporting’ terms for Russian hardware, arranged by letter for ease of recall – so helicopters had names like Hind, Helix or Hokum; fighters were Flankers, Fitters, Floggers; and bombers were Bears, Backfires and Blackjacks.

            Among them, the Myasishchev M-50 Bounder sat alone on the snow, nearly sixty meters of slim cylindrical fuselage pointing up at a shallow angle into the dull skies above. High delta wings mounted with nacelles for powerful turbojet engines groaned in the wintry gusts, and the whole assemblage seemed ready to blast off into the clouds. A creation from the halcyon years of the Jet Age, the prototype was a supersonic strategic bomber designed to range across the polar cap with a war-load of cruise missiles. Built to be fast and aggressive, the martial dream of the M-50 was to create a platform that could send nuclear fire to any point within the continental United States, at speeds beyond the capability of any USAF interceptors to respond. But the jet had never fulfilled its potential, instead becoming little more than a ghost threat that had terrified Western generals into believing the Soviet bomber fleets vastly overmatched theirs.

Marc could see why Sergei Morozov had chosen the M-50 as the hiding place for his secrets – it, like him, had been a weapon in a war of phantoms, the physical manifestation of a bellicose lie sold to Russia’s enemies.

He slipped under the span of the delta wings and found a crew hatch, pulling at the ice-rimed release switch until it finally gave. Metal creaked loudly, and Marc winced, fearful that the sound would carry. He scrambled inside, the freezing cold metal of the fuselage stinging through the material of his clothes, and yanked the hatch shut behind him.

The narrow interior of the old bomber was claustrophobic and colder than a meat-locker. Marc crouch-walked forward to avoid cracking his head on the panels above as he edged forward. Blade-sharp pieces of torn steel caught on his sleeves in the places where instruments had been removed from the aircraft, and bunches of wires with crumbling insulation dangled from empty sockets. He moved with care, placing each step and testing his footing before advancing.

The fuselage narrowed to a tight tandem cockpit, and Marc sat in the bare metal frame of the pilot’s position, risking a look out through thick panes of the canopy. The old glass was grubby and covered in a layer of frost, but he could see the men in heavy coats nearby as black blobs sliding over the white snow. They’d given up their search of a retired Tu-95 Bear and had moved on to its neighbour. The M-50 would be next.

The wind was getting stronger, blowing curls of white flakes up and around the old jet, and the breeze moaned through holes in the metal frame, the aircraft rocking slightly as if in faint memory of its final flight. Marc exhaled a gust of breath and let his gaze fall over the old bomber’s control panel, across dials and switches labelled in Cyrillic. His mind wandered for a moment. He imagined what it would have been like to be strapped into this thing atop a load of atomic hellfire, hurtling across the roof of the world at multiple Mach speeds, and he put one hand on the flight yoke, the other automatically dropping to rest on something beside the seat.

He looked down. There was a small log book cubby beside the pilot’s station, and in it was something wrapped in a heavy waterproof cloth. Marc’s pulse rate jumped.

Is that it?

The object was an ordinary ring-binder, the kind any college student would be familiar with, and clipped inside were countless plastic sleeves, each containing sheets of thin, almost translucent paper. Marc removed one at random and held it up to the weak light through the canopy, his eyes narrowing.

The sheet was filled from top to bottom with dense lines of numbers and odd symbols – not English or Russian characters, but something he didn’t recognize – and on the binder’s spine there was a single word. Scheta.

“Accounts,” Marc translated aloud. “Like a ledger.”

Any sense of victory at finding the prize at the end of Morozov’s treasure hunt was dampened by the reality of the file’s contents. Another bloody puzzle, Marc thought, the whole damn thing is written in code!

But then, he reflected, what else had he expected? Glossy photos of the sitting Russian president in compromising positions, account details for all the Kremlin’s black banks, or launch codes for their ICBMs? Of course it would be encoded. Morozov’s thoroughness wouldn’t have allowed for anything else.

He returned the sheet to its sleeve, and considered the other pages. At first glance, the ledger appeared to be what it promised. Even after decoding, reading, and translating, parsing the contents would take months of dedicated analysis. There were easily hundreds of thousands of words of material there, and with them the promise of decades of secrets. Or maybe it’s just a scrapbook of Morozov’s family recipes. Carrot soup instead of komopromat.

Knives of cold air invaded the cockpit as the morning chill deepened, and Marc peered outside again. The black-coated men were nowhere to be seen. He felt a tremor work its way up from the middle of the aircraft, and heard the grinding creak of the access hatch coming open again.

Trapped! He was out of the pilot’s seat in an instant, tucking the binder awkwardly under his hoodie. Spears of light were coming in through the hatch and Marc heard voices crackling over walkie-talkies. They’d be inside in moments, and then Marc would most likely become a permanent addition to this particular museum piece.

He cast around. In action, the M-50’s flight crew would have strapped into rocket-powered ejector seats that could blast them up and out of the fuselage in the event of an emergency, but all of those mechanisms had been stripped decades ago, after the prototype bomber was bequeathed to the museum – not that punching out of a sixty year-old static aircraft would have been anything less than a death sentence. But the release panels above the seats were still in place.

Marc stood up, pressing his shoulders into the curved steel sheet and shoved it with all the force he could muster. Metal and rust cracked and gave, splitting along pre-cut lines of fracture. He tried again, and this time the panel gave out, splintering as it slipped off the fuselage and away into the snow.

The jet rocked as the black-coated FSB agents climbed inside, but Marc was already scrambling out into the cold day, fumbling for purchase back down the incline of the M-50’s canted neck. He hauled himself toward the rear of the aircraft, before sliding out over one of the snow-covered wings. He let gravity take him, the icy wind whipping at his face as he sprawled over the tarnished metal in a half-controlled fall toward the ground.

At the last moment, Marc kicked out and arrested his forward motion before he was thrown off, jamming his bootheel into a raised strake above the bomber’s jet nacelle. He rolled to his knees and into a crouch. Another delta-winged jet was parked close by, near enough that he’d be able to leap the short gap between the two aircraft. Then, he could sprint into the lines of mothballed helicopters, and –

A salvo of gunshots ripped through his train of thought, bullets punching holes through the thin wings of the bomber, close enough that flecks of hot shrapnel stung his legs.

“Shit!” Marc stumbled and over-balanced, slipping back toward the three-meter drop at the edge of the wing. He grabbed hold of the engine strake and held on for dear life.

A second wave of shots didn’t follow, but a voice did. “You found it, yes?” Melor Rykov called out from the ground below. “Come now, Mr. Dane. No more games. I do not wish for the gentlemen accompanying me to damage this rare aircraft any more than they already have.”

Marc weighed his options, quickly coming to the grim understanding that he didn’t actually have any. “I’m unarmed,” he called back. “Don’t shoot, all right?”

“Stand up,” said Rykov. “Show it to me.”

Taking his time about it, Marc rose to his feet until he was standing with his arms raised, balancing unsteadily on the edge of the M-50’s triangular wing as the wind whipped at his legs. Below him on the snow, he saw Rykov and his pugnacious second-in-command Gurik, and a couple more FSB types. But what he hadn’t expected were the others – five stocky figures in Aleph jackets and tactical rigs, among them the two operatives from the confrontation at the safehouse. All the Aleph mercenaries had submachine guns, and the weapons were pointed toward Marc, not the Russians.

Rykov noted the flash of confusion on his face and showed a toothy smile. “An arrangement has been made. We decided to pool our resources,” said the agent, by way of explanation. “Your attempt to create conflict between our parties had an unfortunate side-effect.” He paused. “Unfortunate for you, that is.”

“Where is book?” The Aleph operative called Yevgeny spat the question, the same one he’d asked the first time they met.

“You’re going to split it fifty-fifty, is that how it goes?” Marc found Yevgeny’s partner and shot him a look. “Is your employer going to swallow that, Avgar?”

The other mercenary grimaced at the thought that Marc knew his name, shifting uncomfortably. “Just kill him and take it.” The other Aleph men raised their guns.

“Be calm.” Rykov’s smile was fading. He wanted to be in charge here, and it was clear the temporary alliance in play was a tenuous one. “The ledger, Mr. Dane. Don’t be a fool. You have lost. Hand it over, and I promise you will live.”

With a weary sigh, Marc slowly pulled the ring-binder from beneath his hoodie. “You let me find this, didn’t you? That’s why I wasn’t arrested getting here.”

Rykov nodded. “We would have uncovered it eventually. But you earned the right to recover Sergei’s prize…”

“But not to keep it,” rumbled Gurik. “It belongs to us.”

“Right.” Marc was silent for a moment, then he let the folder fall open, the plastic pages inside rippling in the wind. “Let me ask you something: do you know what’s in here? I mean, really know?”

Rykov’s expression was stony and unreadable, but Gurik didn’t have the same self-control, and doubt flashed over his features.

“You don’t, do you?” Marc went on, glancing toward the Aleph operatives. “What about you lot? Any clue what you’re actually fighting over?”

Yevgeny grimaced. “There are rumours. It is valuable.” Then the mercenary straightened. “Give it, now.”

“To who?” Marc looked between Yevgeny and Rykov, offering up the folder with one hand. “You? Or you?

“We will secure the ledger,” Avgar said firmly, and for the first time the guns held by the Aleph mercenaries dropped a few degrees. Suddenly the men on the ground were looking at each other and not at Marc.

“That was not our agreement,” Rykov retorted.

“Plans change,” said Yevgeny.

Marc looked down at the open pages of the file in his hand, at the dense lines of impenetrable, nonsensical code-writing, and a choice crystallized in his thoughts. “Sod it,” he said, “you twats can sort this shit out yourselves.”

He flicked his hand up, snapping open the binder’s ring clips so the pages were suddenly released. With the wind pushing at him, the papers were abruptly caught in the updraft over the old bomber’s wings. They blew away in a fluttering swarm, out over the quadrangle.

Gurik shouted in alarm and ran after the tumbling and wheeling papers, and the group broke into confusion, shouting at one another, uncertain how to react.

But Marc was already moving by the time Avgar decided to start shooting. He pitched himself off the M-50’s high wing at a full-tilt run, landing in a thick drift of snow gathered around the rear of the static jet.

Breath blew out of his lungs and he tasted blood in his mouth, pain shocked through his joints like jolts of fire – but he couldn’t slow down, couldn’t chance that the men with guns would be slow to come after him.

Gasping, growling with the effort, Marc forced himself up and started to run. Gunfire cracked through the cold air behind him, and he couldn’t be sure if they were shooting at him or one another – until a ricochet spanked off the tailplane of a snow-covered MiG as he stumbled past it. He veered away, trying to put more metal between him and his pursuers, gambling that they would be more intent on finding those windblown pages than coming after him.

What the hell have you done? The admonishing voice in his thoughts sounded like Lucy’s. He heard her chastising him over the thudding pulse of his blood in his ears. All the running and the shooting and whatever else, and you threw away the goddamned ledger?

“Nothing matters if I’m dead,” he puffed, responding to the icy air. Marc skidded over a rise and past a line of trees, hearing angry voices coming from different directions. They were close, and he was worn out from the cold and the fatigue, his adrenaline crashing with every step.

He loped toward the gatehouse at the museum’s entrance, dimly aware that the barrier was now raised. A black car came toward him, slowing as it approached, slewing around. Marc had nowhere to go, the vehicle directly between him and his only escape route.

The driver’s side window dropped and an elderly woman leaned out from behind the dashboard, her kind eyes wide, her elegant features creasing around a smile.

“Get in, boy,” said Galina Morozova, her breath white in the air. “You will catch your death out there.”

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The latest chapter of MOSCOW RULES is here…

On a mission to fulfil a request for his employer on the streets of Moscow, Marc Dane finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…

In Part 7, Marc was caught in a trap laid by the FSB, and learned that the Russian security services will stop at nothing to get the missing file – and when a firefight ensues, he races to escape the crossfire…

Read on for Part 8 of MOSCOW RULES; future chapters will be released via this blog, but if you’d like to get early access, sign up to the James Swallow Reader’s Club at this link or type your email address in the box at the bottom of this page.

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MOSCOW RULES part 8 – DO NOT HARASS THE OPPOSITION

The first train to Monino left Yaroslavsky Station just before sunrise, so after Marc convinced a half-asleep teller to sell him a ticket, he hid out for the rest of the night in a dingy corner of the rail terminus’s upper tier, doing his best to avoid the attention of any roving Moscow cops.

He was too wired to sleep, for fear he’d nod off only to be shaken awake again by the mercenary thugs from Aleph, or worse, find himself on the wrong end of an FSB intervention. Instead, he did his best to disappear into the city’s invisible night population of homeless people, petty criminals and lost drunks. Every raised voice that he heard, every footstep that passed too close made him tense – but it was this or chance something more dangerous, and risking being caught along the way.

Time oozed by at a glacial pace, but after what seemed like an eternity, his departure crawled on to the boards and Marc found his way down to the snow-clogged platforms. He boarded a near-empty carriage at the front of the elektrichka, a Warsaw Pact-era electric commuter train that hissed and rattled its way out of Moscow and into the pre-dawn. It was damp and cold in there, but at least he could pull down his FC Spartak cap and gratefully snatch some much-needed rest without interruption. He set a timer on his spyPhone to buzz him an hour or so later, and went out like a light. He didn’t dream – his mind went into a dark, silent nothingness.

Marc reached the outskirts of the suburb as he gasped awake like a man coming up from drowning. For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was, but then the brief panic quickly ebbed and he blinked at the buildings passing by outside.

Cupped in a bend of the river Klyazma, just another sprawl of blocky conurbation clustered on the outskirts of the Russian capital, the garrison town of Monino was known for two things; the first was VVA-Podmoskovye, a famous Rugby Union team with a string of championship title wins, but the second was the reason Marc was on his way there. Monino was home to the Central Air Force Museum, on the grounds of the Gagarin Academy, where the future officer corps of Russia’s VKS aerospace force were trained. He’d forgotten completely about the existence of the place until one of Gurik’s agents had mentioned it back at the café.

The museum? She’d said the words after the FSB agent saw the name of the town embossed on the tin toy plane Sergei Morozov left as a clue. It was one more hoop for Marc to jump through in the search for the dead man’s so-called ‘ledger’, the prize that everyone seemed desperate to get their hands on at any cost.

It was a race to the finish line now. Marc knew as much as the Russians did, and his only hope of getting to the ledger first would be if the conflict he’d sown between the other two interested parties – the FSB intelligence agency and the Aleph mercenary contractors – was enough to force them on to the back foot. The Monino clue wouldn’t take a lot of decoding, but only if Gurik or the mercs took it at face value. There was a tendency in the espionage world to overthink things, even when the simplest explanation was usually the most obvious one.

However it plays out, Marc reflected, I’ve pissed off everybody at this point. He gave a wry smile at that. No change from normal, then.

The outbound platform was deserted as Marc disembarked at Monino, but the other one leading in to Moscow was busy with workers on their way into the city, everyone in heavy coats, gloves and hats to fight off the cold from the grey snow. Marc felt the chill, so he kept moving to stave it off, cap down tight, hood cinched in, hands in his belly pocket under his stolen raincoat. As he marched over the icy streets in the direction of the museum, he felt his phone buzzing again.

He put the ear-bead back in. “Yeah?”

“Still in the game?” Lucy Keyes’s voice warmed him a little.

“Still,” Marc confirmed. “Close run thing.” He gave her a precis of his experience at the café, finding the secret safe-boxes, and the next piece of Morozov’s posthumous puzzle.

“Didn’t I tell you not to poke the bear?” She sucked her teeth. “You’re not supposed to annoy the locals out there, it never ends well. You do understand I am trying to make sure you don’t get buried under a snowbank somewhere, right?”

“The situation on the ground was fluid,” Marc replied. “I had to improvise.”

“Same old, same old,” Lucy noted. “One day you’re gonna run out of luck, Marc.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Marc had this fanciful idea that luck was like a bank account – you started off with a set amount, and every dumb or risky thing you did was taking a withdrawal, gradually clocking it down toward zero. But you could never know how much was in that account, or how much a given risk might cost. So when the tally went into debt, as it inevitably would, well… That’d be the end of you.  “Hopefully, not today, though.”

“This is your last chance to get out,” she said, after a long pause. “The Russkies and those merc assholes, they’ll be distracted. You can slip away, if you go now.”

“You reckon?”

“I called in a couple of markers. Rubicon still has a few people who owe us favours inside Russia. I can have a cargo plane fuelled and ready to get you across the border, but we gotta pull the trigger soon or it won’t happen.”

He slowed to a halt, considering it. “If we let Morozov’s ledger get loose when we know we have a chance to grab it, then we’re ignoring the whole reason for Rubicon’s existence.” He shook his head. “Small actions with large consequences, that’s what we do. We’ve got a chance here to take something dangerous off the board before it can be used to do evil. I mean, think about it… Imagine the uses a high-level KGB kompromat file could be put to, if it was in the hands of somebody with no moral compass.”

“I know that,” she said. “But are you willing to get killed over it?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

Lucy snorted dryly. “You know, most people become less reckless as they mature.” She paused again, then pressed on. “Let me ask you this, if you’re not gonna step away. Have you considered that Sergei Morozov is playing you? Playing everyone? You read his file… He like to run people like puppets on a string. Why wouldn’t he want to make his enemies run through the maze one last time after he died, even if he wasn’t around to see it?”

Her point was undeniable; Morozov would have known how things would play out after his unanticipated death. He could easily have set up some mechanism to destroy his deadly legacy in the event of his untimely end – but instead he had left the pieces of a scavenger hunt in place, knowing full well that whomever came in his wake would end up fighting over the book that had kept him safe during his career.

The old spy wanted all of this to happen. He wanted men chasing each other through the streets of Moscow. He wanted blood spilled for it.

“Do we even know what’s in Morozov’s ledger,” said Lucy, “I mean, actually know for sure? Has anyone ever seen the thing?”

The same question had been rolling around Marc’s thoughts all night. He remembered the expressions on the faces of Melor Rykov and his thuggish subordinate Gurik – both had shown genuine pause at the notion of Morozov’s secret blackmail file, which suggested they had something to fear from it. That kind of dread only came from a guilty conscience, so clearly they didn’t doubt the suggestion that Morozov had dirt on them. In the dark world, everyone had blood on their hands, everyone had their own secrets to keep. This wasn’t a career where a person could stay clean, only one where they might hope to hide the worst of themselves from the world.

“Rykov and Gurik believe in it,” Marc went on, as he started walking again. “If they do, then so does the FSB and the Russian government. And whomever is paying Aleph’s high price to send their men after it, they believe it too. People want that ledger, and they’re willing to kill for it. So like it or not…” He frowned.

“You’ll only know if it’s worth the hassle when you have the thing.”

“Exactly.” He shook his head. “Sergei, you were a crafty sod.”

“I’ll keep working on an exit plan,” continued Lucy. “On the outside chance you actually get your hands on the ledger, you’ll need to get the hell out of there real quick.”

“Copy that,” Marc agreed. “Push the details to my phone when you’re ready.”

“Good luck-” She started to sign off, but he had one final question for her.

“The contractors, Aleph,” he said. “Did Kara find out who is employing them?”

“Weird thing,” Lucy noted. “Kara tracked deployment patterns from a bunch of Aleph assets, all inside Russia, all over the last week. But there’s been no shift in Aleph’s cash reserves… No incoming payments from any new clients for new operations. It doesn’t track.”

She left him chewing on that as she cut the call, and Marc continued on, approaching the main gates of the Central Air Force Museum through the light but steady snowfall.

“Mercenaries don’t work for free,” Marc said aloud, the words escaping his mouth in a pop of vapour. “It’s in the job description.” With the FSB agents, the motivation for going after Morozov’s ledger was clear-cut – but Aleph’s soldiers were wholly transactional. The fact that he couldn’t guess at the hidden hand directing them bothered Marc more than he was willing to admit.

He put that thought aside, slowing as he came toward the gate, catching the sound of raised voices. Parked directly in front of the entrance was the slab-sided shape of a motor-coach, the windows misted with condensation, the passengers inside pressing up to the glass to observe the source of the angry conversation unfolding. He soon realized that the coach was full of kids – pre-teens, so it appeared, who couldn’t keep still, making noise and moving around as they tried to get the best vantage point. A class trip? That seemed the most likely explanation.

Then Marc heard the distinctive sound of what could only have been a backhand slap and his attention snapped to the man and the woman standing near the front of the coach, confronting a pair of armed guards blocking the gate. The man – middle-aged, with the look of a history teacher about him – staggered back a step, holding his face where the blow had landed, and in the same instant the kids on the bus all fell silent.

Marc moved closer, taking care to conceal himself among the trees lining the roadway. He got a better look at the guards – they were both sporting Bizon submachine guns on straps over their shoulders, but their uniforms were not Air Force, meaning they weren’t from the nearby military academy.

One of the guards snarled at the teacher’s female companion, threatening to give her a dose of the same treatment if she didn’t do as he said. Marc struggled to follow the words, but he got the gist of it.

A sob catching in her throat, the woman tried to explain to the angry guard they had permission to be here, they were a party from a school in Minsk that had travelled overnight to visit the museum. The armed man advanced toward her, his comrade following him, pointing his Bizon in the woman’s direction. He thundered a final warning that Marc had no trouble translating.

“The museum is closed, by military order! Take these noisy brats and get lost, or you will be arrested!”

Clutching his nose, trying to stem the stream of blood flowing freely from it, the male teacher stepped in to usher his counterpart away, back on to the coach under the wide-eyed stares of their pupils.

Seizing the opportunity, Marc moved while the guards still had their attention on the bus, slipping unseen from his cover and around the empty gatehouse. A barrier lay across the drive leading up to the museum proper, so he took a different path, finding a service road that snaked toward the main buildings.

As much as the cold made him want to keep it, Marc shrugged off the purloined raincoat so he could move faster, and jogged along the treeline. Careful to stay low, he crested a shallow rise, painfully aware that it would only take one observant guard to spot him and raise the alarm.

He’d hoped that the museum would have its usual population of tourists and visitors, but that faded quickly as he got his first look at Monino’s snow-patterned layout. Dozens of Soviet-era aircraft lay out before him, arranged in lines around a central quadrangle. It was a field of white snow and old steel the colour of tarnished silver, dotted here and there by stars and identity numbers rendered in blood-crimson. Missile-shaped fuselages large and small faced toward one another, many of them with canted or delta-formed wings. Some were narrow-waisted fighter-craft, archetypical MiGs of all generations from Korean War jets to Cold War interceptors, others huge multi-engine long-range bombers built to carry apocalyptic nuclear payloads. There were roosts of helicopters across the way, gunships laden with cannons, heavy cargo birds and small scouts, with their rotor blades drooping toward the earth under the weight of thick ice.

Before this life, before Rubicon, Marc had been a military aviator for the Royal Navy, and part of his training had drummed into him the NATO codenames and capabilities of many of these aircraft. It was strange to see so many of them here, silent predators gathered as if they were waiting to shake off the frost and take to the skies again.

From his vantage, Marc could spot pairs of figures moving around the pathways surrounding the static aircraft. They had flashlights, some swinging them up to pan along under the spans of huge wings, searching.

And Marc knew exactly what they were looking for. He waited for his moment, and then slid down a shallow incline, lurching toward the cover of a massive, rusting transport plane and the sharp-angled Su-27 fighter jet that stood beside it.

Catching his breath, he heard the thudding of rotor blades cutting through the low cloud above and looked up. A sleek shape sliced through the cold air, a glossy black shark that wheeled and turned before nosing away toward a landing on the far side of the field. It wasn’t a military craft from the nearby academy, but a high-end civilian helicopter of the kind used by private corporations – and as it swept low, Marc glimpsed figures inside in dark jackets, readying their weapons.

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Read the next chapter of MOSCOW RULES, the new Marc Dane serial novella…

On a mission to fulfil a request for his employer on the streets of Moscow, Marc Dane finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…

In Part 6, Marc learned that Rubicon’s old adversaries Aleph are involved in the hunt for Sergei Morozov’s secret leger – but the latest clue to the whereabouts of the file adds even more layers to the dead man’s intricate puzzle…

Read on for Part 7 of MOSCOW RULES; future chapters will be released via this blog, but if you’d like to get early access, sign up to the James Swallow Reader’s Club at this link or type your email address in the box at the bottom of this page.

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MOSCOW RULES part 7 – LULL THEM INTO A SENSE OF COMPLACENCY

Somebody with a colder heart might have let the café owner perish and hope the FSB agents didn’t check the basement – but Marc Dane was never going to be that kind of man, and he loathed the idea of being trapped below while Gurik did whatever he wanted.

To get out of this alive would take timing and guile. Setting things in motion, he climbed the stairs loudly enough to be certain that the Russians heard him coming. Emerging from behind the bar, he found the old man kneeling with Gurik’s silenced pistol at his head, and two more FSB agents pointing other guns in Marc’s direction.

Gurik’s comrades were a man and woman of similar ages, both possessing that unnerving manner of looking ordinary and predatory at the same time. The man had short, dark hair and could have been an accountant; the blonde woman wore the harried aspect of an over-worked mother, and they were dressed in nondescript outfits that would blend into any Moscow crowd. He could have passed either one on the street and never sensed anything amiss.

Marc raised his hands. “Let’s not do anything hasty.”

Gurik prodded the old man with his gun, switching to English. “Very selfless of him, eh, grandfather?” Gurik snapped his fingers and pointed at Marc. “Search him.”

The male agent handed his weapon to his partner and stepped up, methodically patting Marc down.

“I did not bring them,” implored the old man.

“No, he betrayed nothing,” Gurik spoke over him, pitching over a stacked chair so he could sit astride it. “His neighbour did that.” The senior agent pointed into the alley. “The fool who sells the washing machines across the way, he is paid to watch this place.” Gurik grunted with amusement. “Not so secret after all.” Then his smirk faded, growing cold. “We have eyes everywhere, Englishman. Are you so stupid to think you could escape us?”

The male agent emptied Marc’s pockets, laying out on the counter his pocket change, the roll of American dollars, the two smartphones. He gave a curious look at the crumpled fold of tin foil and the toy plane, but dutifully lined them up beside everything else.

“The man whose throat you cut outside the Meridian Hotel was the cousin of my wife,” Gurik went on. “I will get nothing but grief over that, because of you.”

“No weapon,” said the male agent, completing his work.

“You disposed of it.” Gurik eyed him.

Marc fixed him with a steady look. “You don’t have eyes everywhere, no matter what you say.” He folded his arms. “If you did, you’d know I didn’t slot your guy. He parked his motor in a security blind-spot, and that’s how Aleph’s boys managed to take him out without anyone seeing.” He deliberately threw in the name of the private military contractor to see how Gurik reacted.

The Russian cocked his head. “You say it was them. They would say it was you.” He gave a shrug. “Who to believe?” At length, Gurik produced the tag from the vodka bottle. “You hid this from us. Rykov was too quick to let you go. I told him we should have stripped you naked and dumped you in Gorky Park.”

“Don’t blame me for your sloppy work,” Marc shot back.

Gurik unfolded the card and read the quote on it. “The world will be saved by beauty.”

“Dostoevsky,” Marc said, with a sniff.

The Russian’s smirk returned. “Do you know the title of the book this line comes from?” When Marc didn’t respond, he actually chuckled. “It is called ‘The Idiot’. Perfect for you, eh?”

“I don’t have Morozov’s ledger,” Marc told him, ignoring the jibe. “And clearly you don’t either. So neither of us is being particularly clever right now, yeah?”

Gurik rose and walked to the counter, pawing irritably at the items atop it. “That decrepit, senile old dog! He hated anything modern. He was hard work. Everything on paper, always leaving a trail. I was glad to see him retired. He was… What is the word? An anachronism. Morozov and his kind are a drag on progress.”

“What does that make you, then?” Marc looked Gurik up and down. The hatchet-faced man had to be the same age as him, in his mid-to-late thirties. “Bit old to be the new boy.”

“We are the sons and daughters of the New Russia,” the other man hissed, including himself and the agents in a sweeping gesture. “Not yesterday’s men, clinging to old ideals and communist fantasies. Rykov understands this. He will soon follow Morozov into anonymity, but unlike that old fool, he accepts his lot. When the time comes, he will step aside.”

“You want your boss’s job,” said Marc. “Finding the ledger, that’d be a good way to show you deserve it.”

“There is too much dead wood,” muttered Gurik, and he directed a terse nod at the old man kneeling on the tiles. “Remnants that should be cut away. They curse us, Englishman, you understand? Your nation is no different. The old guard think they are still fighting the Cold War, but they are too blinkered to see the changes in the world. And their allies, the rich men lining their pockets, are only too happy to let it be.” He made a spitting noise. “They are leading Russia toward collapse.”

“But things will be different when you’re in charge, right?” Marc eyed him, then snorted. “You’re deluding yourself, pal. Old Russia, New Russia, it’s the same bear in a different coat. You’re as big a liar as Morozov was, you just have another name for it.”

Gurik’s face coloured and he took an angry step toward Marc, his knuckles whitening around the grip of his pistol. He checked himself and tamped down his annoyance. Instead, he picked up the toy plane, turning it over in his fingers, finding the word embossed on the fuselage. “Monino…”

“The museum?” the female agent said quietly, breaking her silence – and with it, a flash of understanding went off in Marc’s thoughts. Suddenly, he knew exactly where Sergei Morozov had been leading them.

“I think,” said Gurik, drawing out his words, “that you, the Idiot, and this old wretch here, will be shot while resisting arrest. You are impediments, best removed.”

“Got everything figured out, have you?” Marc met his gaze. “All the angles covered?”

“A lesson a Russian learns as soon as they are weaned,” Gurik retorted. “Fate rewards patience. No-one of import will mourn your disappearance.”

As the words left Gurik’s mouth, the stolen Aleph phone let off a low buzz that made it vibrate across the counter. The sound drew everyone’s attention, and Marc retreated a step.

“I’m not what you should be worrying about right now,” he told Gurik, as the bright headlights from a vehicle outside washed through the café’s windows. Marc heard the thud of car doors slamming and boots crunching on asphalt.

Gurik snapped his fingers again and the female agent was moving, sliding up to the half-shuttered front door to peer out into the snowy evening, her gun at the ready. Her eyes widened, and she looked back at Gurik, holding up her hand with all fingers raised, the thumb tucked in. Four targets approaching.

Before anyone could react, a sudden, snarling chorus of supressed automatic fire came from outside, the metallic ripping growl deadened by the falling snow. A hail of bullets splintered the threshold, shattered glass and keened off the steel roller-door, ricocheting across the cramped interior of the café. Gurik’s agent took a glancing round across her throat and she went down clutching at her neck, the wound fountaining crimson.

Marc threw himself at the foot of the counter, scrabbling to find his smartphone and whatever else he could reach up and grab as bottles and glassware exploded over him under the onslaught of silenced gunfire. 

Gurik ducked, shooting back through one of the windows, as the other agent went to his partner and dragged her into cover, blind-firing his own weapon into the alley. In panic, the café owner stumbled to his feet and lurched toward the back of the room, but he went down again just as swiftly as red blotches bloomed on his body. He died as he fell, collapsing across a stool.

There was no other safe way out of the place, Marc had clocked that troubling detail the moment he had entered – but there was another narrow staircase in the far corner, leading up into darkness. He slid along the floor staying as low as he could, cutting his hands on pieces of shattered glass.

“It’s them,” he heard the male FSB agent say. “Did they follow us?”

Not exactly, thought Marc. Before revealing himself to Gurik, he had deliberately peeled off the metal foil wrapped around the stolen Aleph sat-phone, allowing the signal from the tracking circuit inside to become detectable. He knew Aleph’s mercenaries would investigate, but he hadn’t expected them to come in guns blazing.

I am an idiot, he chided himself, they always shoot first, and sod asking questions!

Gurik threw a look back and caught Marc making his retreat. “Stop him!” he barked.

The FSB agent hesitated, then swung around and fired as Marc threw himself at the staircase. A bullet smacked the wooden frame, peppering him with splinters, but he hauled himself up the flight on all-fours, rolling on to a tiny landing on the level above. The agent didn’t come after him; Gurik and his people had more than enough to deal with.

The first floor of the building was as cramped as the one below, the space crowded with a single bed, cupboards, shelves and a kitchen alcove. A window looked over the alleyway, and through it Marc saw the shiny black shape of a UAZ Patriot SUV. The vehicle’s headlights blazed white fire, catching the shape of shadowed figures as they advanced toward the café’s entrance. Each held a compact submachine gun with a lengthy suppressor, and they kept up covering fire as they moved.

He backed away. There was another window in the bedsit’s tiny toilet, barely large enough to fit through, and Marc wrenched it out of its frame, his fingers sticky with blood. He dove out through the gap head-first, hearing the crash of the front door below falling in as he went.

Marc landed in a pocket of grimy snow atop a steeply sloping roof that adjoined the café, the washing machine store and the nearby apartment block – and immediately he started sliding toward a drop that would toss him into the alley, in full view of the Aleph mercenaries.

He scrambled against gravity, reaching for the ice-rimed bars of a metal balcony leading to a darkened flat on the block’s lower levels, and a puff of frost spurted up from a section of the roof. Then another and another, and he realized someone was beneath him, randomly firing silenced shots through the wood and metal framework.

Marc fought for purchase, but the snow on the sloped roof started moving as one whole slab, taking him with it toward the drop to the ground. He grabbed at the balcony before it was out of reach, painfully wrenching his shoulder as he pulled at a hard angle. The snow-mass fell away with a dull thud and his heels hit the slippery metal of the roof, scraping as he pushed himself up. More shots cracked and pinged through the sheet steel, but Marc ignored them, reaching the balcony, yanking at the edge of a window frame.

He got his fingers into a gap and it came open, sliding wide. Marc rolled through into a stiflingly warm room, immediately assailed by the reek of boiling vegetables.

He landed on his back on a grubby rug in the middle of another small apartment, and an elderly woman hove into view, brandishing a cast iron frying pan with clear intent to smack him with it. Marc crabbed backwards, bumping into an armchair as she let loose with a torrent of invective he couldn’t begin to follow. There was an old gent in the chair, snoring open-mouthed, dead to the world and oblivious to what was transpiring.

Marc waved off the combative babushka, staggering through the living room and into a short hallway, halting at the front door. The angry woman followed, yelling loudly enough that the armed men downstairs wouldn’t miss it. Marc tried to look contrite, and dug in his hoodie pocket – the roll of cash he’d retrieved on the way out of the café was still there, and he offered her a generous bribe to shut up.

She gave him a withering look, folding her arms. Marc sighed and doubled the offer.

This time the negotiation took, and the babushka snatched the payment from him so fast, Marc felt the impulse to make sure she hadn’t taken his dive watch off his wrist into the bargain. Unlocking the apartment door, he decided to add something more to the deal, and helped himself to the sleeping man’s raincoat. That earned him a new burst of ear-splitting invective, but he was already moving, jogging down a covered walkway that ran the length of the building.

The woman’s cries were joined by men’s voices, and he knew his window for escape was rapidly closing. Marc went down the concrete stairs at the other end of the walkway two at a time, until he bolted out and on to the street, on the far side of the block.

They’ll be on me in seconds. Marc dragged the old man’s coat over his shoulders and cinched it in tightly, scowling at the stale odour it gave off. He pulled up the collar and then, fighting against every impulse in him to run like bloody hell, Marc slowed to a steady pace and started toward the nearby metro station, stuffing his lacerated hands into his pockets.

He was halfway there when the black SUV roared past him, skidding to a halt outside the rear of the apartments. He heard slamming doors and hushed, angry voices, but he kept walking, merging once more into the trickle of travellers, disappearing back into the warm embrace of the subway.

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