Killing Eve: Die For Me by Luke Jennings

Author:Luke Jennings [Jennings, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

8

The clothes arrive the next morning. Boxes of weatherproof jackets and parkas, winter hats, trousers, thermal underwear and boots. None of it ostentatious, but all designer-branded and clearly expensive. Then a cabin suitcase for each of us, and folders containing used Russian international passports, driving licenses, credit cards and other identifying papers in the same names.

“Where do you think we’re going?” Charlie asks me.

“Hawaii?”

We leave at midday, and as we step out of the lift in our designer outfits and follow Richard through the building’s endless succession of lobbies, no one gives us a second glance. We could be an upscale tour group, or prosperous Russians setting off on holiday. Outside, it’s wonderfully cold, and I turn into the wind for a moment so that the snowflakes fly into my face. Then, all too soon, we’re climbing into a Porsche SUV with dark-tinted windows. Anton drives, Richard takes the front seat, and I sit between Oxana and Charlie.

We drive northwest, following the signs to Sheremetyevo airport. Visibility is limited, and the road surface treacherous. The outlines of broken-down vehicles are visible on the hard shoulder, hazard lights winking. I’m nervous, but glad that Oxana is at my side. I’m even glad, in a perverse sort of way, that Charlie’s there.

We’re crossing the outer ring road when a police vehicle swings in front of us, blue lights flashing. “Fuck’s sake,” Anton mutters, bringing the Porsche to a halt in the slush. “What now?”

There’s a sharp tap on the passenger-side window and Richard lowers it. The features of the uniformed figure outside are obscured by his helmet and face mask, but his shoulder patch identifies him as an officer of the FSB, Russia’s internal security service. Ahead of us, other vehicles similar to ours have been stopped. Several drivers and passengers have been ordered out of their cars and directed, documents in hand, to an armored truck with iron-grille windows and FSB insignia, parked on the side of the highway.

“What’s going on, Lieutenant?” Richard asks the officer, as wind and snow blast into the Porsche’s interior.

“Security check. Passports please?”

We hand them over, he checks them carefully, and peers at us one by one through the passenger window. Then he returns all the passports except mine. “Out please,” he tells me, pointing to the truck with a gloved hand.

It’s freezing outside, and I pull the hood of my parka over my head as I join the line outside the truck. “Must be looking for someone important,” I say to the woman in front of me, a grandmotherly figure in a pink woolen headscarf.

She shrugs, indifferent, and stamps her booted feet in the snow. “They’re always looking for someone. They just stop cars at random.”

Eventually, it’s my turn. I climb the steps into the truck, and when I get inside stand for a few seconds, eyes narrowed. It’s dark in there after the snow-brightness. Two officers are sitting on metal benches opposite me, and one is in the shadows to my left. At a signal from the man in the shadows the others leave.

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