Smoke and Mirrors (14 page)

Rodion laughed as Lamont all but skidded to a halt, grabbed Nell, and dragged her back from him.

“Are you all right?” the detective yelled as the cop with him dived at Rodion.

Rodion stepped farther away, still gazing into Nell’s eyes, and let the Guardian in. He rolled backward in a ball of blazing fire.

He heard Nell scream his name, heard Lamont shout, “Jesus Christ! He had an incendiary device on him! How the
fuck
did that get past us?”

And then he couldn’t hear anything because he was too far away.

Chapter Eleven

There was to be no peace. But then, she wasn’t sure she could really cope with any. It left too many opportunities for the image of Rodion burning up before her eyes. So when the doorbell rang that evening, she opened it.

Derryn stood there. She actually moved to shut it in his face, saw him react to stop her. Tiredly, she turned and walked back into the house, letting Derryn follow.

“Where the bloody hell have you been?” he demanded. He sounded like her father when she was fifteen and stayed out too late.

She sat cross-legged on the sofa and said, “Fife.”

He looked ostentatiously out of the living room window. “Well, this appears to be Edinburgh. How long have you been back?”

“A few hours.”

“You might have let us know.” How could a man who claimed to have the country’s safety in his hands be so damned
carping
? “We’ve been tearing the country apart looking for you. Imagine my surprise when I get a call from the local plods telling me not only that you’re back, but they achieved a major drugs bust with your help. Miss Black, you promised
us
a favour.”

“I
agreed
to do you a favour,” she retorted. “Without all the facts. You never told me I’d get shot at and kidnapped, to all intents and purposes.”

She was buggered if she’d let him ramble on, accusing her of this neglect and that, just as if he really was her boss rather than someone she’d done a favour for. Well, a favour in return for an alluringly fat fee that would not only pay the mortgage this month but contribute to her long-awaited holiday in the sun.

“Well, the shooting rather took us all by surprise. Bloody Russians.” He glanced at her. “They treated you all right, though?”

She couldn’t even be bothered with a smart-ass answer to that one, so she just spread her hands and let him look for himself. Although she was numb inside, the outside looked pretty normal.

“Is he dead?” Derryn asked.

“I don’t know.” Her voice was calm. Perhaps that meant she knew deep down he was alive. Perhaps.

“He doesn’t strike me,” Derryn said, watching her very carefully, “as a man who makes mistakes with incendiary devices.”

“I’d say not,” she agreed.

“And then we still haven’t found a body.”

“No.”
There are more things in heaven and earth.
Would Derryn have her certified if she told him all that stuff? It wasn’t hers to tell.

“What did you learn about him and his setup?” Derryn’s eyes reflected behind his glasses like George Smiley in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
.

“That he works for a Russian crime lord known as the Bear, but that he wants out.”

Derryn brightened. “Out? Why?”

“The Bear’s blackmailing him. He has Rodion’s young brother and sister imprisoned somewhere to force his obedience. The warehouse fire was to provoke an incident that would require the attention of the Bear’s chief assassin Marenko, who knows where the children are.”

“Knew,” Derryn interrupted.

She blinked. “What?”

“Marenko’s dead. Hit and run. No witnesses. I’d suspect our boy if several other witnesses hadn’t seen him burning himself to death five minutes before.”

So did Marenko tell before he died? Or was Rodion none the wiser for setting up this whole complicated situation? If he was alive… If he wasn’t, Anna would keep looking.

A sudden new fear washed over her. “If Rodion Kosar is dead, will the Bear just kill the children?”

“I don’t honestly know,” Derryn said, steepling his fingers. “I imagine he’d keep them alive at least until he’s sure of Kosar’s demise.”

“And what about you, Mr. Derryn? Will you keep looking for him?”

Derryn stood up and brushed down his smart trousers with a fastidious flick of the hand. “Kosar is a man of formidable talents.” He smiled at Nell without warmth. “Or at least he was. Good night, Miss Black. I can see you’re tired after your ordeal. But I’ll send someone to pick you up in the next couple of days for a
full
debriefing.”

He knows, she thought blankly as he let himself out. He knows Rodion’s talents aren’t normal, and he knows I haven’t told him everything.

Well, why the fuck should I? I barely know the man. He can have his bloody fee back.

In fact, she hadn’t even checked her bank account to see if she’d received the promised fee yet. It had seemed such a good evening for money at the time. She’d envisioned herself going out for dinner with friends, even grabbing that well-earned holiday and sending Gordon a smug postcard.

But everything had changed. She didn’t actually care about any of that stuff now. Like Rodion, she found she was planning and considering her next move.

And it was a big one. It required a lot of thought.

****

“Why did you do it?” The question she’d never meant to ask because she was afraid the answer would ruin any possibility of reconciliation before it started tumbled out without permission. Very early in the visit too.

Appalled, she stared defiantly across the table at her father. He’d aged in the four years he’d been in prison. There were fresh lines on his face, a weary, resigned look in his eyes that had never been there before. Almost worse was the new droop to his shoulders, as if he’d given up hope. Her ebullient, scallywag father.

Somehow, in the bright, impersonal calm of the prison reception centre, she’d imagined he’d be much the same as before, and that she’d hate him for it. But here in his prison, everything was different.

She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat, trying not to recognise how hard it must have been for him, not just to be in prison but to be deprived of his beloved wife and daughter, of any tiny word of comfort or even basic courtesy from her.

He’d stared at her when he’d first come in, as if he hadn’t believed she was real, and when he’d got to her, he’d just said her name in awe, and Nell had begun to wonder who was the bastard here after all. Almost at once, he’d asked her why she’d come now.

She’d twisted her lips. “I had a dream. I don’t want to be angry forever. And when all’s said and done, you’re my dad.” It wasn’t the whole truth, and it didn’t really deserve his eager smile.

As a smile, it hadn’t really measured up to the ones she remembered best, but it had been enough to bring back a flood of memories, of much happier smiles, of what he’d ruined by the utter stupidity of armed robbery. And so the question she’d never meant to ask tumbled out almost immediately. “Why did you do it?”

He sat back, rubbing his hand over his freshly shaven face. “Big question. With a short answer: I wanted the money.”

She tried to curl her lip and couldn’t. Disappointment in him, utter anger and frustration swamped her. She knew her parents’ story. He’d been a small-time thief when he’d met the poor, hard-working refugee from Zavrekestan and fallen in love with her. She’d got him to give up crime, get a job, and he’d stuck with it. Not a great job, but combined with her mother’s wages, it had been enough to feed and clothe them, to let Nell go to university. There had been odd characters in her life whom she’d accepted since childhood—amiable but not entirely honest people still trusted by her father as friends. But none of them, either those who’d sworn they’d given up crime or those who’d still pursued it more or less openly, had ever enticed him back into that world. At least, not as far as she knew. Not until the off-license.

“Were there others I didn’t know about?” she asked harshly. “That
she
didn’t know about?”

He shook his head tiredly, but she wanted to hurt him with her disbelief as he’d hurt her mother, as he’d hurt her. “After twenty years going straight, you just wanted more money?” she sneered.

He nodded, staring at his hands spread out on the table. The noise of the other visitors seemed to ring in her ears: a buzz of conversation, the scrape of a chair on the floor, a subdued burst of laughter and a child’s high, pleading voice as he pulled his convict father toward the door.

She looked away, back at her own father. His open hands curled into fists around the table edge.

He said, “I wanted to take your mother to Zavrekestan.”

It was so totally unexpected that she found nothing to say except a helpless, “Why?”

He shrugged. “I knew she wanted to go back at least once before she died.” His brow twitched and smoothed again. “And if I’m honest, I suppose I hoped someone there would cure her. She knew of healers there.”

“Bollocks,” Nell said roundly, very aware that she’d never used language like this in front of her father before. “We didn’t even know she was ill when you did it.”

His gaze lifted at last from his hands to her face. “
You
didn’t know,” he said deliberately.

It felt a little like life trickling out of her. Instead of merely certainty.

He said, “She wanted to keep it from you in case she found a way to make it better.”

“She could have tried a fucking doctor.”

“Nell,” he said but not loudly. He even closed his eyes, and she didn’t want to see the pain contorting his face. “She did all that first. Maybe she gave up on the doctors too quickly, I don’t know. She’d run away from Zavrekestan, but it was still in her blood. She wanted to go back, and if she couldn’t, she wanted to find here what she couldn’t have there. I couldn’t even afford the flights. I wanted to take her and keep her safe in a smart hotel, not some freezing peasant’s cottage, or some dump she could ‘disappear’ from. She was still afraid of that.”

Nell leaned back, staring blindly at the ceiling. Certainty, judgment, all at fault. And she wasn’t even talking about her father’s. This was something else she’d have to live with.

It didn’t make her father less stupid—after all, instead of making things better, he’d ensured her mother had died without the comfort of her husband by her side—but it did make him more understandable. More pitiable. More forgivable.

Suddenly, she realised she’d have forgiven him anyway. That was why she’d come.

She said abruptly, “Did you ever hear of a thief from Zavrekestan called Rodion Kosar?”

“I thought he was Russian.”

“Then you
have
heard of him?”

He shrugged. “A major-league player, uncaught, who’s got through impossible-to-break locks and alarms? And left unharmed with the goods? In here, he gets talked about. Why?”

“Someone told me about him,” she said weakly, if not strictly dishonestly.

Rodion, making her heart jump into her mouth just by looking at her
like that
, while he was already falling backward into the fiery somersault in which he’d disappeared. There had been fire and lots of smoke. But no body. They’d never found him. She hung on to that, hard.

The police had found Marenko, though. He’d been knocked down in a high-speed hit-and-run and died later in hospital.

“Don’t go there,” her father said suddenly.

She blinked. “What? Don’t go where? Zavrekestan?”

“Don’t pry into Kosar. He’s Russian organised crime, and that’s nasty.”

Very, very nasty. She wondered about the treasure-children, about Anna and Rodion. She still felt peculiarly raw around the edges, and yet she was sure, somewhere in her consciousness, that he wasn’t dead. Even that they’d meet again. Because she hadn’t yet made love with him in the wooden cabin with the smell of wood-fire in her nostrils.

She said, “I’m going back to Zavrekestan. For a visit.”

His eyes searched hers and this time didn’t fall. “For your mother’s sake? Or for research?”

She shrugged. “Both, probably.”

“I read your book,” he said. “I’m so proud of you.”

In spite of everything, there was still unique pleasure in a parent’s praise. “How did you find out about that?”

He smiled. “You’d be surprised what people know in here. Besides, they have it in the library. I hope it made you a fortune.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Hardly. Only an option on my next book. It’s with the agent. I still scratch my actual living from translating.” She moved her hands off the table and into her lap. “Thanks for reading it. I hope it wasn’t too much of a chore.”

A hint of the old grin passed across his face, and something painful constricted her chest, as if the man facing her was a mere shadow of her father. “Think I don’t have the brains to understand literary fiction?”

“Thought you were too prejudiced to try,” she retorted.

“I was never much of a reader,” he confessed. “Nothing much else to do in here, though.” He looked slightly embarrassed. “I’ve been studying English literature.”

“Wow. Good for you,” she said and meant it.

And from then on, it was easier. So much so that before it was time for her to go, she found it easy to ask him if her mother had ever dreamed.

He peered at her. “Not as
her
mother did, if that’s what you mean.”

It was the family myth that Nell’s mother had come to Scotland because
her
mother had had a dream that she’d be happy there.

“Were they true?” her father asked. “The dreams in your book?”

Nell shrugged. “I made most of them up. One could have been interpreted as foresight.”

“The July bombing in London?”

She nodded, blinking away the image that still haunted her, of broken bodies and paramedics and firefighters amidst the carnage of an underground station tunnel. Instead, she saw Rodion’s tattooed body moving above her in quite another dream, and flushed with the sort of adolescent guilt she should have been well over.

“Go to your uncle,” her father said. “Pyotr dreams.”

“She never told me that.”

“You never wanted to listen. Not to that kind of thing.” He smiled as if at fond memories rather than bloody irritating ones of a self-certain, know-it-all teenager. “You were a splendid sceptic.”

“I still am,” she retorted. And yet she’d seen people burn without cause, watched a fiery goddess form from flames and tell Rodion off, and stood back in horror as he was engulfed in a ball of fire. Either his own or the goddess’s, she didn’t know which, and he hadn’t stayed around to tell her.

All dreams weren’t prophecy. Perhaps, subconsciously, she’d seen his tattoos in the police station while the cops were swabbing his clothes. Her dream of him could have been pure erotic fantasy. He could be dead.