88° North

Chapter Six

Nadia swam with Jake in the crystal blue waters of Anspida. The water was warm and the sun beat down on her head, glistening off the tops of the wavelets, the white sand beach fringed by swaying palm trees just metres away.

‘Nadia,’ he said, his eyes deep ocean blue. She took a few strokes toward him. But he was drifting away.

‘Nadia,’ he said again, more insistently. She swam harder, faster, but she was dragged backwards. Someone else surfaced right in front of her. Blue Fan, who raised her arm and slapped Nadia hard across the cheek. ‘Nadia!’

Nadia jerked awake. Not Blue Fan. Jin Fe.

‘Finally. Get up. Dress. We need to leave. Now.’

Nadia tried to move, but her left shoulder felt like a stake was driven through it, nailing her to the bed. She took in her surroundings. A small room with a bed and a lopsided cupboard. A drip in her left arm, leading to a half-empty transparent plastic bag on a metal stand beside her.

‘Get up, lazy bones.’ Jin Fe said it with sincerity, perhaps thinking it was a way of chiding her, whereas it made Nadia smile.

‘Lazy bones?’ Nadia felt light-headed. Morphine?

Jin Fe’s brows locked together. ‘Get. Up. They are coming for you.’

Nadia tried to remember, and then everything flashed back to her. She tried to sit up, but couldn’t do it on her own. She hated relying on anyone, but …

‘Help me, Jin Fe.’

Jin Fe got her off the bed and onto unsteady feet.

‘Clothes?’ Nadia couldn’t walk around Hong Kong in a hospital gown.

Jin Fe grabbed a rumpled plastic bag, and began pulling out trashy dresses that would make Nadia look like a cheap prostitute. She picked the least tarty one and again had to enlist the girl’s help.

‘Thank you,’ Nadia said. Jin Fe didn’t seem to notice.

‘That man’s scary. He threatened me.’

The Chef. Good, he was alive. If she had any chance of finding Jake, she’d need him.

Nadia pointed to her feet. Jin Fe dipped into the bag and pulled out two bright red stiletto-heeled shoes.

You have got to be kidding …

Jin Fe produced a cheap blonde wig, and some large sunglasses. ‘Come on! No time, we need to leave now. They are coming!’

Nadia supposed it was a good cover, and tried on the wig. Her scalp began to itch. She donned the sunglasses and staggered into the brightly lit corridor. She hadn’t worn heels in years, and was weak from whatever patch-up work they’d done on her shoulder. She knew she must look like a drunken whore. A clock on the wall told her it was 8:15. Jin Fe was right, she had to get out of the hospital before her description was linked to the video, which was probably all over YouTube and the TV channels by now. At the end of the corridor, they waited for a lift. Nadia would have preferred the fire escape, but not in her condition, and not in those heels. As the lift doors opened, she flinched at seeing the four Hong Kong policemen inside. One of them looked her up and down, lingering, holding the doors open for her. He gave her a toothy smile.

Jin Fe ushered Nadia into the empty lift, and rattled off something in Cantonese. The cop’s smile foundered, and he let go of the doors to go catch up his colleagues. The lift doors closed.

Nadia grabbed the waist-high bar for support as they descended. ‘What did you say to him?’

‘I told him you here for HIV treatment.’ Jin Fe said, matter of fact.

The lift doors opened into the garage. ‘This way,’ Jin Fe said.

Nadia suddenly wondered why she was trusting this girl she’d met less than twenty-four hours earlier. But a limousine pulled up, and as the driver’s window hummed down, she saw the Chef, and hobbled over to the car and got in the back seat. Jin Fe followed.

In the front passenger seat was a Japanese man, fifty-something, an unruly mound of salt and pepper hair. He seemed agitated, with fingers that drummed incessantly on the dashboard, and a deep frown that looked like he slept in it.

‘I guess we’re not going back to the hotel?’ Nadia asked.

The Chef didn’t answer. One of his rules. Never reward stupid questions. She tried a different tack.

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Later,’ the Chef said, his accent less Russian than she remembered. He pulled out of the garage. They hit the exit ramp and she was blinded by the sun. Almost immediately they were in a fast-moving river of cars, and she saw white-and-red taxis everywhere. The traffic weaved around tower blocks via concrete overpasses that made her imagine snakes and dragons writhing around the city. Must be the morphine. She needed an espresso to clear her head. Maybe a double.

As they climbed a slope – Fortress Hill according to the road signs – she glimpsed a bay full of expensive-looking yachts, then the Chef swung left into another underground garage, beneath a bland rose-and-cream apartment block.

The four of them got out and crammed into a tiny aluminium lift with crude fans instead of proper aircon. She began sweating as soon as the door closed. Upstairs the Chef dug out a set of keys and opened an iron grill before unlocking the main door. It was homely inside: net curtains, a painting on the wall of an elegant Chinese man, a plastic-coated table with a jug of water and mugs, and a stash of toys next to an ironing board propped up by the kitchen entrance. Someone’s home for sure, rather than a safe house, but it was deserted. Nadia knew better than to ask. She headed to a threadbare sofa and parked herself carefully while Jin Fe sat at the table and poured four glasses of water. Nadia recalled the bar where they’d rescued Jin Fe, and the young girl who had poured them champagne. She wondered how early Jin Fe had started in the business.

The Chef remained standing. She’d rarely seen him sit in a chair. He said chairs killed more people than assassins and cars put together, only more slowly. She hadn’t seen him in five years, yet he hadn’t aged. She guessed he was close to fifty now – chief assassin wasn’t an old man’s job. He had the same chiselled, square Russian jaw she remembered, jet black hair with just a sprinkling of grey near his ears, and a solid-looking brow good for head-butting. The only jarring features were his green eyes, almost reptilian. At least that’s what you thought when he looked directly at you. His body was the same fluid dancer’s frame it had always been. As if to prove it, his legs coiled down effortlessly into a cross-legged position on the floor, his back straight, eyes alert.

One of her fellow trainees used to call him Cobra back at the training camp in Siberia, partly because his movements were so fluid, but mainly because he seemed poised to strike at any moment. The Chef had also perfected an assassin’s technique called snake eyes, which he showed each of his students only once, along with a short lecture:

‘Your enemy must see their imminent death in your eyes. Then they will falter, they will hesitate, and they will blink, clinging to life. This is the moment you strike. It is physiological, predator and prey, and is the way of things, hardwired into all of us. You must always be predator, never prey. You must perfect this look.’

Nadia hadn’t, had never wanted to. She shivered. Only one other person she’d ever met had mastered that look, and he was currently holding Jake captive.

The Japanese man dragged a chair from the table and parked himself there. His handsome face was deadpan. Or just dead. There was more light in the eyes of the man in the portrait on the wall. His thick accent required him to speak slowly, to navigate his tongue around consonant-heavy English sentences.

‘My name is Sakuro,’ he said, turning to look directly at her. ‘I am an oncologist.’ His face darkened, as if a thundercloud had passed behind his eyes. ‘I was an oncologist. I was summoned to Fukushima. I treated radiation victims.’ His gaze lingered on her, studying her in a way that was totally opposite to the cop in the lift, then he gazed towards the window, or to nowhere, or maybe back to Fukushima. His hooded eyes were haunted. He’d seen terrible things.

Or done them.

Nadia felt her anger rise. Why had the Chef brought an oncologist? She didn’t need this.

‘This wasn’t part of the deal,’ she said, speaking to the Chef.

‘My deal is not with you, Nadia.’

True. The Colonel, her handler back in Moscow – the Chef’s deal was with him. The Colonel must have offered him something to work with her. She had no idea what, and didn’t want to know.

‘If we are to work together,’ he said, ‘I need to be sure you won’t collapse on me or start puking at a crucial moment.’

‘That will never happen.’ Because she’d eat a bullet before she got that far.

Sakuro spoke. ‘I wish to speak to Miss Laksheva alone.’

The Chef ushered Jin Fe out of the room, though not before she cast a worried glance back at Nadia.

Sakuro pulled out a silver cigarette case and opened it, revealing a row of white filterless cigarettes. He extracted one, produced an old-style silver lighter, and lit it up. Some kind of ritual, perhaps to calm his nerves. He inhaled long and deep, then stood and approached the window. He seized the brass lever and let some air into the stuffy room. The gap was narrow, the window held in place by a steel rod so that it couldn’t be opened fully, so that children couldn’t fall and parents couldn’t jump. Despite the narrow gap, the room was immediately inundated with the relentless hubbub of cars, taxi horns and shouting below, mixed in with hammering and drilling from the skinny tower-block-in-progress opposite. The heat and humidity of the city seeped in and easily conquered the air conditioning. Sakuro didn’t seem to notice. He leant his head against the glass and gazed downwards. He spoke quietly, so that she had to strain to hear his words. But then, she had the feeling he wasn’t really talking to her.

‘I knew the Prime Minister of Japan, and several ministers. I treated a few of their wives. I saved them. We live for the ones we save, because so many succumb, if not the first time, then later. So, I was trusted. When the tsunami hit, crippling the nuclear power plant, the country was thrown into chaos. The Prime Minister and his aides needed someone there they could trust. The scientists were contradicting each other, and as for the plant owners … So, I went, with my medical team.’ He inhaled again, then dropped the cigarette out the window, and watched it fall. He tugged the window shut, and turned to face her.

‘I did not believe in hell until that mission. There are few who were not there who could even begin to understand. But you were in Chernobyl, Nadia. You saw Fukushima-Daichi’s future, what it will become in twenty years.’

Nadia’s breathing slowed. Sakuro probably hadn’t intended it, perhaps didn’t even know what had really happened there, but images from her brief sojourn in Chernobyl – her sister lying dead in a pool of blood, her father putting a bullet into his skull after Salamander had chained him to a mound of radioactive slag – slapped into her. Hell didn’t cover it. She didn’t want to go back there. But who was she trying to kid? She’d never left. Because Salamander was still alive and breathing.

Sakuro took a few steps over to an armchair and sat down like an old man.

‘We watched the emergency teams go in, working in total darkness, their dosimeters and Geiger counters going crazy. Did you know they had to hook up car batteries just so they could activate the controls and displays, to tell them what was going on inside?’ He didn’t look at her or wait for a reply.

‘We had to get the reactor under some kind of control, in the most atrocious conditions. Floodwater everywhere. Every little thing, even the most basic task, was made extremely difficult and hazardous. I had to report every hour, on the hour, back to Tokyo. I was not there for the victims. I was there to keep the workers standing so they could go in, deeper and deeper, until we could stabilise the core and prevent secondary explosions.’ His head tilted back. ‘I worked with a small team of engineers. My “core” team.’ He tried to smile, but was clearly out of practice. ‘Most are ill now. There is nothing I can do. But we got the reactor under control. They got it under control. The Prime Minister thanked me personally.’ The way he said it, it was a curse.

He coughed, and it caught in his throat and became deeper, more violent. His eyes watered. He took a silk handkerchief out of his pocket and raised it to his mouth until the episode ended. He glanced at it for a few seconds before folding it and putting it back in his pocket.

‘Towards the end, I became aware the workers had a nickname for me. Doctor Death.’ He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Before Fukushima I spent twenty-five years battling cancer for my patients. More often than not I lost. But I always fought for them, until the very end.’ He paused, his eyes studying the ceiling. ‘After Fukushima, I could no longer practise, could no longer look my patients in the eye. And so I switched to research. The government gave me a generous grant, to keep my mouth shut. There was no need. I had little desire to speak about it.’ He dug out his cigarette case again, looked around, then perhaps decided not to pollute someone else’s home. He laid his head back again.

Nadia got up, poured a cup of water, and walked over to him. He sat back up, for the first time his features shifting, perhaps surprised. He took the cup.

‘So, I am your last engineer,’ Nadia said. ‘You have drugs to keep me going, to keep me working even while my body is disintegrating on the inside.’

He pulled himself up so he was sitting on the edge of the chair, and his face suddenly became animated, no longer Dr Death.

‘Yes, Nadia. And no. I want to offer you something. Something I have not told your … colleague.’

She flared. ‘Don’t you dare say you can cure me. I know how bad my condition is, and I’ve accepted it. If you want one last guinea pig to ease your conscience, try yourself.’ She was guessing, but the scant energy in his face deserted him.

‘You forget, I am – was – an oncologist. I am accustomed to the storms of emotions of my patients—’

She stood up fast, standing over him. Her hands balled into fists. ‘I am not your fucking patient!’ She reckoned the Chef and Jin Fe could hear her. She didn’t care. ‘Just give me the drugs to help me get the job done.’

He rose from the chair, but slowly, calmly. He was tall, and towered over her. ‘I will. But first you will listen to what I have to say, because soon everything will be silent for you.’

Not what she’d been expecting. ‘Your bedside manner’s a little unconventional.’ She sat down. The pain in her shoulder started up, as if someone had inserted a corkscrew into the bullet wound, and kept twisting it.

‘Most cancers start inside the body,’ he said. ‘Something goes wrong, a few cells get the wrong message, and start producing malignant cells that the immune system cannot clean out. Your situation is different, as it was for my engineers. You have been attacked from the outside.’

‘The net result is the same,’ she said. ‘Corrupted cells reproduce, immune system can’t cope, too much damage.’

‘The situation is different for the immune system, and science has made tremendous advances in immunotherapy for particular types of cancer. But it all depends on genes. The engineers didn’t have the right gene make-up, and it was too late for them by the time I perfected the technique. But you, Nadia—’

She held up her hand to make him stop. The Colonel had told her before she’d left. A radical therapy that might work, because she had a particular gene. But he’d also said they’d have to start before symptom onset, and she was way past that point now. She thought of Jake. If he was still alive … But right now she was focused. She needed to free Jake and take Salamander down. For Katya, for her father, for Bransk, for Jones, and countless others she’d never known. But mainly because Salamander was still plotting something. He was smart, always one step ahead. She knew he would probably take her down with him. That was the best outcome she could realistically hope for. And she could only take him down if she had no future, otherwise there would be a sliver of hope holding her back, making her blink at the crucial moment. She folded her arms.

‘I’ve listened to you, as you asked. The answer is no. It’s final. Just do what the Chef asked you to do, give me something to keep me going, and nothing more.’

Sakuro nodded. He took out the cigarette case, lit another one, opened a briefcase full of medical equipment, and began pulling on rubber gloves.

The Chef entered a few minutes later. ‘Are we good? Can you keep her going?’

Sakuro answered, facing Nadia. ‘We start now. It will be painful. I do not think that will be a problem for you.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, though she wasn’t sure why.

Nadia awoke to find it was 4.30 p.m., according to the clock fashioned inside a toy landscape, Star Wars, maybe. She was in a bed just big enough for her, in a child’s room. The late afternoon sun streamed in through ineffectual flower-pattern curtains. Sakuro’s procedure had indeed been painful, but she felt alert, all traces of nausea banished. She’d been sweating profusely – the sheets were soaked – a side-effect of the milky green concoction he’d pumped into her veins, using a syringe fit for a horse. In fact, she had no idea what he’d actually injected her with – whether it was something to keep her going, or something to try and begin a cure. Maybe both. As long as it did the former.

Never one to laze in bed with her thoughts, she took a cold shower using the handheld water spray while squatting in the half-bath, flinching when the water doused the still-raw wound in her shoulder. She dried off and found new clothes. Normal ones, this time. Feeling marginally better, she joined the Chef and Jin Fe in the lounge. Sakuro had left. When she saw what they were watching on the news, her good mood evaporated.

The network channels showed stills from the video – her fist connecting with Hanbury’s chin, her standing with the gun pointing at his head, Hanbury lying on the floor in a pool of thickening blood. The last had been taken later; there was yellow-and-black crime scene tape within the frame. Some of the other channels, including a Russian one, showed the doctored video. It caught Nadia’s harsh expression as she punched Hanbury, and then shot him. Impressive editing. Ninety-nine out of a hundred viewers would judge her a cold-blooded murdering bitch. A high-ranking Chinese official stated that she was armed and dangerous, public enemy number one. On BBC World a British official talked about this atrocious act, how no stone would be left unturned …

She slumped in the chair where Sakuro had been hours before. She felt like a pawn who’d just been flicked off the chessboard by a grandmaster. But Jake was still in play, for some reason she couldn’t fathom. Which meant she had to crawl back onto the board. She caught the Chef’s eye.

‘What did the Colonel say?’

The Chef interlocked his fingers. One of eight ninja signs that had multiple meanings. This one signaled conflict. It also meant they were stuck in the trenches of battle, and would have to wait. Patience. Not her strong suit. It had a third meaning, one she preferred not to delve into.

Defeat.

‘The Colonel will protect you as long as he can. But the British are already leaning on his superiors for answers.’

‘They know I saved their asses, right? Doesn’t averting a nuclear strike on London count for something?’

He gestured at the TV with the remote. ‘Would you like to watch it again?’

He was right. Salamander had played this well. Checkmate after only three moves into the game. Fool’s mate.

What made it worse was that Jake was missing. The Brits would be desperate to hear from him, to get his side of events. But he’d been unconscious, so couldn’t verify anything even if he was still alive. Which he was, she told herself, because otherwise … No otherwise. He was alive. Period.

‘We need to find Jake,’ she said.

‘We need to find Salamander,’ the Chef countered.

‘Then back to the original plan. Find Blue Fan.’

And that was where her plan tripped and fell flat on its face. Jake had intended to use police intel and Hanbury’s network to find her. When all was said and done, Hong Kong wasn’t that big, just very populous. Blue Fan was probably still in Wan Chai, not far from where they were right now. But that didn’t help locate her.

‘I may be able to help,’ Jin Fe said.

They both turned to her. Nadia had been wondering how to get the girl out of Hong Kong to … anywhere. Somewhere she could make a fresh start. She’d hoped to elicit help from Hanbury …

‘What do you know about Blue Fan?’ she asked.

‘Our line of business is run by the triads. Blue Fan is with the Green Dragon triad. We are owned by the White Tiger triad. They are rivals. You need to talk to the Judge. Then you will find Blue Fan.’

‘Just like that?’ Nadia asked.

‘Well …’ she lowered her eyes to the tablecloth, then lifted them and stared at the Chef. ‘You must go through the Judge, and offer to kill her. A challenge. That will get her attention. I’ve heard she rarely refuses.’

Nadia wondered how she knew so much. ‘And how do we get his number? Do you happen to have it?’

Jin Fe took out her phone, wiggled her fingers on its surface, then handed it to Nadia. ‘He will answer this number.’

Nadia stared at her.

Jin Fe shrugged. ‘The Judge likes girls who like girls.’ She fixed Nadia with her eyes. ‘Not just pretend ones, the real deal.’

Nadia recalled the way Jin Fe had stroked her arm back at the bar-brothel. She cleared her throat, and addressed the Chef. ‘What do you think?’

The Chef took the phone from Jin Fe, stared at the numbers for a few seconds, then handed it back to her. ‘Before I challenge Blue Fan, I would like to find out if she is as good as you say she is.’

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

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

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