Ultraviolet

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

I SAT ON my bed, fidgeting from one butt cheek to the other. A bead of sweat popped out on my chest and ran between my breasts, and I rubbed it away with my sweater. f**k. I closed my eyes for a second and let out a steady breath. This nervousness wasn’t something I felt often, but then again, it wasn’t often I tried to break out of a maximum-security military base guarded by a legion of Russian special forces and hundreds of miles from anywhere. And I’d never before attempted something so stupid with a two-year-old child in tow.

I looked down at her, nestled against my side, and for the thousandth time asked myself whether I was crazy enough to go through with what I was planning. In sleep, with her tiny hand curled into mine, her beautiful face showed none of the tension usually present. Tension no child should ever have to suffer. I knew the answer was yes.

It was the only chance, for both of us. It had taken years to come along, and I’d probably be dead before this sort of opportunity arose again. Then what would happen to my daughter? She’d be left alone with the monster who’d brought us here in the first place.

With that as the alternative, death seemed like the better option.

I ran through the plan in my head one more time. Until earlier today, when I overheard a group of the guards talking, I hadn’t been sure it was feasible. But when I ran through the logistics in my head, I decided the time window was just large enough that it could work. Not only did the guards have a potential distraction from Elizabeth and friends, the radio system had been malfunctioning all day, which meant they couldn’t call for backup. But there was no room for error on my part.

Boots sounded on the concrete outside my cell, and I forced my shoulders to relax in case an overly vigilant guard peered through the bars. That box, twenty feet by eighteen of stark white paint and industrial carpet, had been my home for the past three years. I wouldn’t miss it.

Deep breaths, Seven. I was as ready as I could be. I mean, it wasn’t as if I had a lot to pack. Just an extra pair of contact lenses and my daughter’s favourite toy, a fluffy rabbit she’d named Twixy after one of the more humane guards snuck her an American chocolate bar a month or so ago. As nothing was supposed to go in or out of our cell without prior approval, the poor sod hadn’t lasted long. A week later, I’d stood on my bed, watching through the bars as the general executed him in the courtyard for some perceived indiscretion. At least the mudak had done his own dirty work that day. Most of the time that fell to me.

Gently, I lay my daughter on the bed as I stood up and bounced on my toes. No noise. Good—I hadn’t left anything loose in the pockets of the lightweight cargo pants I wore. A few stretches helped me to relax, and as I sat back down, the sense of calm I’d felt many times over the years settled through me. I wasn’t a woman anymore, not a mother or even a human being. I was a b***h, pure and simple. He’d trained me that way.

I glanced at my watch again and took one last look around my prison. No, nothing else worth taking. The matte black Rolex I wore was the only thing of value I was allowed, probably because I couldn’t kill anybody with it. The thirty-thousand-dollar watch had been a thirtieth birthday gift from the general a year ago. By then, our relations had soured to the point that I spent my birthday dinner with my ankles shackled to the floor while his staff served up a five-course feast complete with a f*****g string quartet playing in the background. I’d refused to speak to him, and when we’d finished our coffee, the drugs he’d stirred into it kicked in, and he delivered me back to my cell to sleep it off. I know what you’re thinking—why did he bother? Because he could. With the general, everything was about control.

With that thought, I undid the strap. The bastard had probably put a tracking device inside. I’d already checked Twixy thoroughly, which was why he only had one ear now.

Another minute ticked by.

Please, let this work. According to the handful of books on child development I’d had access to, Tabitha was smart for her age, but would she keep to the plan? I’d always preferred to work alone because I never trusted a partner not to screw things up, but when my accomplice was two-and-a-half years old? Had I lost my damn mind?

No, General Zacharov had stolen it, and this was my only chance to get it back.

I pressed a kiss to Tabby’s forehead, waking her up, then put a finger to my lips.

“Stay still,” I whispered. “Okay?”

She stared up at me with her big brown eyes—her father’s eyes, not mine—and nodded.

It was time.

I took a deep breath and laid my beautiful little girl on the cold floor of our prison. She closed her eyes, a tiny smile on her lips. A smile that I mirrored. Yes, that was my daughter.

“Help! I need help!” I injected enough panic into my voice to make the guard stationed outside come right away rather than waiting until half-time.

He stomped up to the bars and peered through, his face screwed up in disgust.

“What do you want? I’m missing the football game.”

I waved over to where Tabby lay flat by the bed. “She just fell on the floor. I don’t think she’s breathing!”

Outwardly, I projected the fear of a mother with everything to lose, but inside I willed myself to remain calm as I studied every twitch of the bastard’s face, every movement of his hands. Did I look panicked enough? I was going for scared but not hysterical. No man wanted to deal with a hysterical female.

I increased the pitch of my voice slightly. “Help her. Please, you’ve got to help her!”

My fists wanted to clench, but I grabbed the bars instead. Please, Tabby, don’t move. Keep your eyes closed. I’d practised this over and over with her, always at night while the guards were lax, but training a toddler to keep still was almost as difficult as teaching a new conscript to think first then shoot.

The guard glanced through the doorway at the TV screen as it dissolved into static for a few seconds then looked back at Tabby.

“I’ll call for the doctor.”

He acted like he was doing me a favour, and I wasn’t sure whether his lack of compassion was passed down from his parents or instilled by the general.

Either way, his suggestion wouldn’t work. “The doctor’s on the other side of the base.” I collapsed to my knees beside Tabby and forced the tears to match my broken voice. “She’ll die before he gets here. Please, I need help with CPR. If she dies, I can’t go on without her.”

He knew that. They all did. From the procedures the general had put in place, anyone with half a brain could work out that he used Tabby to control me. Without her alive, I had nothing to lose but the general did.

If anything happened to my daughter, the young guard in front of me would have to explain to General Zacharov why he no longer had his favourite assassin under his thumb to do his dirty work. And the general was definitely the type to shoot the messenger.

A step backwards, a step forwards. I could see the indecision on the guard’s face and in his movements as I pretended to give my daughter mouth-to-mouth.

“Stay still, Tabby,” I whispered.

Come on, open the door. I willed the guard to make the right decision. Well, the right one for me. He knew as well as I did Dr. Kurkov would take at least ten minutes to arrive, and that was a long time to go without a heartbeat. I knew what was going through his mind—he was weighing up the general’s wrath against the harmless-looking woman before him. Sure, he’d heard the stories about me, legends, if you like, but in the three years I’d been in this room, neither he nor any of the other guards had seen for themselves why General Zacharov insisted they follow his security procedures to the letter around me.

Patience? It was one of the few things I had left, and I knew how to use it to my advantage. Zacharov had taught me well in that respect.

The rules were strict. When I came back from a job, I was drugged, stripped naked, and searched. Everywhere. Before I woke up, they threw me back into my cell, and only once the door was securely locked did they fetch Tabby and put her into the small room next door. Then the door between the rooms opened, and she came through to join me. Eleven times over the past two and a half years I’d woken from a groggy sleep, aching from work I was no longer fit enough to do, violated by the guards’ rough fingers, to find my daughter curled up against my side.

And every time I saw the fear etched into her face, my resolve to kill each and every one of those fuckers intensified a little more.

But how? When I went out on a job, the procedure was reversed. I wasn’t allowed to leave my cell with Tabby, ever, and everything that came in had to be approved by the general and checked by three separate guards, just in case I’d managed to corrupt a couple of them. I wasn’t even allowed a f*****g pencil, and my cutlery was the cheap plastic kind that snapped if I tried to eat anything of substance.

Guards sat in an ante-room twenty-four-seven, with checks done at irregular intervals just to keep me on my toes, and even left to my own devices, there wasn’t much I could do with a foam mattress and a beanbag chair.

My new best friends became patience and revenge.

I didn’t cause trouble, I didn’t talk back, and apart from the occasions I was alone with the general, I never challenged an instruction.

Tick tock, tick tock. The second hand on my overpriced watch swept around tirelessly.

Today’s guard was young, new. Yevgeny. Yevgeny liked football, ran three miles every morning, and had a weakness for his mama’s chicken pie. But I didn’t care about any of that. All I cared about was how much pressure it would take before his neck snapped like a dry twig.

Yevgeny chewed his bottom lip as he considered his options.

I thought back to the man I’d lost, Tabby’s father, and the events that led me to this hellhole, and let out a quiet sob. “She’s going to die,” I whispered.

Mind made up, Yevgeny eyed me warily as he reached for the lever that opened my door.

“You stay seated.”

His hand touched the pistol on his hip in an unconscious gesture. Nervous, and so he should be.

“Please, just hurry.”

The door slid to the side with a muffled thunk, and Yevgeny scurried across the room and knelt next to me. Tabby twitched as his shadow loomed over her, and I willed her not to move. We were so damn close.

“I’ll do the chest compressions,” Yevgeny said.

My daughter’s beautiful face was the last thing he ever saw. He may have been bigger than me, but I’d discovered many years ago that it didn’t take much more effort to break a big man’s neck than a small man’s. It was all about the angle.

However, it did take more effort to drag him over to our bed and squash him under the blankets.

Tabby opened her eyes as I stood back to admire my handiwork. Yes, anyone taking a quick glance would assume we were asleep. They didn’t get paid enough to check properly.

I’d liberated Yevgeny’s pistol before I tucked him into bed, and now I stuck it into my waistband. Its cool bulk comforted me, although all hell would break loose if I fired it.

“You did well, sweetie,” I whispered to Tabby, and her eyes flicked to the lump on the bed.

Damn the f*****g general for putting me into this position. No child should have to witness their mother kill a man.

The sound of a shampoo commercial drifted over from the ancient television as I hefted Tabby onto my left hip, leaving my right hand free for my weapon. The two hours I spent working out every day meant I’d kept some of my strength, even if my operational effectiveness was somewhat rusty.

“We’re going to take a little walk, okay, katyonak?” I’d nicknamed Tabby kitten when she was a baby because her name reminded me of the old tabby cat we’d had when I was her age. “You remember our game? We stay quiet, yes?”

She nodded, and I hoped she understood. Luckily, she’d never been a chatty child, probably because she didn’t have anybody to talk to but me and Olga, the old battle axe who took care of her when I was forced to work.

Extra sweater, extra socks, a blanket… I bundled my daughter up, ready for the cold. At the beginning of October, temperatures in southern Siberia hovered around zero. Another month and I wouldn’t even attempt this.

“Ready?” I asked, more to myself than her.

She looked up at me, eyes soft. She may have got her father’s facial features, but her personality was all mine, and she set her tiny jaw as she curled her fingers into the collar of the jacket I’d just put on.

The TV was back to football as we slipped out the door, and I closed the cell door behind us. A quick check around the guard’s room garnered me a chocolate bar and a metal pen. Useful—I could take a man’s eye out with that. So far, so good. Now for the second part of my plan, the part that wasn’t so much a plan as a prayer.

On a normal day, even if I escaped from my cell, I’d have no way to get off Base 13. The nearest city, Tayshet, was a four-hour drive away, and despite the base’s isolation, General Zacharov’s paranoia meant the perimeter of what had become his own private playground was well-guarded. Supplies and personnel went in and out by plane.

Sure, there were jeeps used for transport within the base, but even if I could sneak out in one, I didn’t rate my chances on the rutted road that led to civilisation. The general’s helicopter was loaded with a 30mm automatic cannon plus twelve anti-tank missiles, and he knew how to use them. For years, I’d fantasised about stealing a plane, but the rigorously maintained counter-air defences and Zacharov’s twitchy trigger finger ensured I wouldn’t get far.

But today? Today was different.

Because for the past four days, a team of international weapons inspectors had been touring the base, part of the Russian president’s attempt to appease NATO following a small hiccup with a bunch of terrorists and an escaped super virus. Far from being worried, Zacharov had been his usual arrogant self as he’d told me about it over dinner a couple of weeks back—him on one side of the bars, eating veal orlov off a bone china plate, me on the other with the same meal and disposable utensils.

“More wine, Seven?”

“f**k you.”

He leaned back in his seat and sighed. “That attitude is why we can’t have a proper meal together anymore. It saddens me.”

“You’re the one who locked us up like animals.”

“Only when you got a crazy notion to quit in your head. I didn’t spend sixteen years training you so you could play housewife with some American dropout.”

“Well, you got your wish when you had him killed, didn’t you?”

“I’ve told you many times, that was an accident.”

Accident, my ass. Like his apartment just happened to explode. I stabbed at a piece of veal with my fork, and two of the plastic tines snapped. Zacharov passed me another through the bars, and I resisted the temptation to break his fingers.

“You need to eat, tigryonak.” Little tiger. He’d been calling me that for years. “I have another job for you in a few weeks, after the inspection team has been through. Those fools,” he added under his breath.

“What’s happening with that, anyway?”

“The American president is stamping his feet again, and our ministers are prostituting themselves to please him. But no matter, they can look all they want. They won’t find anything.”

“You’ve moved the weapons?”

“No need. They’re hidden well enough. They want Likho, and it’s in the same place as it’s always been.” His face clouded over as he sprinkled more salt on his dinner. “But if I ever catch the traitor who told of its existence…”

I maintained my impassive mask as I forked up slimy mushrooms, but inside I was laughing. Me. I’d told the Americans about Likho. Back when I wasn’t tethered by my daughter, I’d given up a number of Zacharov’s secrets to the other side, although it took them forever to act on the information.

“Whoever it was is probably dead, anyway. Your staff don’t have a long life expectancy.”

“That’s because most of them are imbeciles. But you, Seven, you’re the one with talent. You shouldn’t let it go to waste.”

He locked me in a cell for most of my life, and I was the one wasting my talent? I bit back a snarky comment and chewed so hard I risked cracking a tooth. The general didn’t tolerate sarcasm well, or humour in any form, and I’d long since dialled mine back. His recruits could literally laugh themselves to death.

Anyhow, as Zacharov foretold, the inspection team hadn’t got lucky. He’d played the congenial host, showing them around all the areas he wanted guests to see and evading their questions while plying them with lies.

“Idiots!” he’d told me the night before last. “They couldn’t find their own zad with two hands and a map.”

I’d heard the guards talking too. Those guys gossiped worse than mothers at a school yard. The inspection team consisted of twelve people—six inspectors and six bodyguards. The bodyguards did nothing but stand around, and the inspectors did nothing but ask stupid and pointless questions. Apart from one of them, it seemed. Elizabeth was a woman with an extremely ample chest who not only asked stupid and pointless questions, she tripped over a lot and provided the guards with a source of entertainment too. And they didn’t get much of that on Base 13, believe me.

And today, when Yevgeny relieved Igor, they’d lamented her imminent departure. The inspectors would be flying out at eight o’clock this evening, one hour from now.