Russian Roulette (2 page)

Thirty guards had helped carry the various boxes to the waiting trucks, scrambling along the shoreline in the light of a perfect half-moon, the submarine looking somehow fantastic and out of place, half submerged in the slate gray water of the English Channel. And almost from the start Yassen had known something was wrong. He was being watched. He was sure of it. Some might call it a sort of animal instinct, but for Yassen it was simpler than that. He had been active in the field for nine years. During that time, he had been in danger almost constantly. It had been necessary to fine-tune all his senses simply to survive. And although he hadn’t seen or heard anything, a silent voice was screaming at him that there was someone hiding about twenty meters away, behind a cluster of boulders on the edge of the beach.

He had been on the point of investigating when one of Sayle’s men, standing on the wooden jetty, had dropped one of the boxes. The sound of metal hitting wood shattered the calm of the night and Yassen spun on his heel, everything else forgotten. There was limited space on the submarine, and so the R5 had been transferred from the beer barrels to less protective aluminium boxes. Yassen knew that if the glass vial inside had been shattered, if the rubber seal had been compromised, everyone on the beach would be dead before the sun had risen.

He sprinted forward, crouching down to inspect the damage. There was a slight dent in one side of the box. But the seal had held.

The guard looked at him with a sickly smile. He was quite a lot older than Yassen, probably an ex-convict recruited from a local prison. And he was scared. He tried to make light of it. “I won’t do that again!” he said.

“No,” Yassen replied. “You won’t.” The Beretta was already in his hand. He shot the man in the chest, propelling him backward into the darkness and the sea below. It had been necessary to set an example. There would be no further clumsiness that night.

Sitting in the hotel with the computer in front of him, Yassen remembered the moment. He was almost certain now that it had been Alex Rider behind the boulder, and if it hadn’t been for the accident, he would have been discovered there and then. Alex had infiltrated Sayle Enterprises, pretending to be the winner of a magazine contest. Somehow he had slipped out of his room, evading the guards and the searchlights, and had joined the convoy making its way down to the beach. There could be no other explanation. Later on, Alex had followed Herod Sayle to London. He had already been responsible for the deaths of two of Sayle’s associates—Nadia Vole and the disfigured servant, Mr. Grin—despite little training and no experience. This was his first mission. Even so, he had single-handedly smashed the Stormbreaker operation. Sayle had been lucky to escape a few steps ahead of the police.

KILL ALEX RIDER

It was what he deserved. Alex had interfered with a Scorpia assignment and he would have cost the organization at least five million dollars . . . the final payment owed by Herod Sayle. Worse than that, he would have damaged their international reputation. The lesson had to be learned.

There was a knock at the door. Yassen had ordered room service. It wasn’t just easier to eat inside the hotel, it was safer. Why make himself a target when he didn’t need to?

“Leave it outside,” he called out. He spoke English with no trace of a Russian accent. He spoke French, German, and Arabic equally well.

The room was almost dark now. Yassen’s dinner sat on a tray in the corridor, rapidly getting cold. But still he did not move away from the desk and the computer in front of him. He would kill Alex Rider tomorrow morning. There was no question of his disobeying orders. It didn’t matter that the two of them were linked, that they were connected in a way Alex couldn’t possibly know.

John Rider. Alex’s father.

The two of them together. Hunter and Cossack.

He couldn’t help himself. He reached into his pocket and took out a car key, the sort that had two remote control buttons to lock and unlock the doors. But this key did not belong to any car. Yassen pressed the unlock button twice and the lock button three times, and a concealed memory stick sprang out onto the palm of his hand. He glanced at it briefly. He knew that it was madness to carry it. He had been tempted to destroy it many times. But every man has his weakness, and this was his. He opened the computer again and plugged it in.

The file required another password. He keyed it in. And there it was on the screen in front of him, not in English letters but in Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet.

His personal diary. The story of his life.

He sat back and began to read.

“Y
ASHA! WE’VE RUN OUT
of water. Go to the well!”

I can still hear my mother calling to me and it is strange to think of myself as a fourteen-year-old boy, a single child, growing up in a village nine hundred sixty-five kilometers from Moscow. I can see myself, stick thin, with long, fair hair and blue eyes that always look a little startled. Everyone tells me that I am small for my age and they urge me to eat more protein . . . as if I can ever get my hands on anything that resembles fresh meat or fish. I have not yet spent many hundreds of hours working out and my muscles are undeveloped. I am sprawled out in the living room, watching the only television we have in the house. It’s a huge, ugly box with a picture that often wavers and trembles, and there are hardly any channels to choose from. To make things worse, the electricity supply is unreliable and you can be fairly sure that the moment you get interested in a film or a news program, the image will suddenly flicker and die and you’ll be left alone, sitting in the dark. But whenever I can, I tune into a documentary, which I devour. It is my only window onto the outside world.

Already there is so much to explain.

I am describing Russia—about ten years before the end of the twentieth century. It is not so long ago and yet it is already somewhere that no longer exists. The changes that began in the main cities became a tsunami that engulfed the entire country, and yet they took their time reaching the village where I lived. There was no running water in any of the houses and so, three times a day, I had to make my way down to the well with a wooden harness over my shoulders and two metal buckets dragging down my arms. I sound like a peasant, and a lot of the time I must have looked like one, dressed in a baggy shirt with no collar and a waistcoat. As a matter of fact, I had one pair of American jeans that had been sent to me as a present from a relative in Moscow, and I can still remember everyone staring at me when I put them on. Jeans! They were like something from a distant planet. And my name was Yasha, not Yassen. Quite by accident, it got changed.

If I am going to explain what happened to me and what I became, then I must begin here, in Estrov. Nobody speaks of it anymore. It is not on the map. According to the Russian authorities, it never existed. But I remember it well, a village of about eighty wooden houses surrounded by farmland with a church, a shop, a police station, a bathhouse, and a river, bright blue in the summer but freezing all the year round. A single road ran through the middle of it, but it was hardly needed as there were very few cars. Our neighbor, Mr. Vladimov, had a tractor that often rumbled past, billowing oily black smoke, but I was more used to being woken up by the sound of horses’ hooves. The village was wedged in between a thick forest in the north and hills to the south and west, so the view never really changed. Sometimes I would see planes flying overhead and I thought of the people inside them, traveling to the other side of the world. If I was working in the garden, I would stand still and watch them—the wings blinking, the sunlight glinting on their metal skin—until they had gone out of sight, leaving only the echo of their engines behind. They reminded me who and what I was. Estrov was my world and I certainly didn’t need an airplane to get from one side to the other.

My own home, where I lived with my parents, was small and simple, quite similar in style to the sort of building that might be found beside a French or Swiss ski slope. It was quite close to the church, set back from the main road, with similar houses on either side. Flowers and brambles grew right beside the walls and were slowly creeping toward the roof. There were just four rooms. My parents slept upstairs. I had a room at the back, but I had to share it whenever anyone came to stay. My grandmother, who lived with us, had the room next to mine, but she preferred to sleep in a sort of hole in the wall, above the stove, in the kitchen. She was a very small, dark brown woman, and when I was young, I used to think that she had actually been cooked by the flames.

There was no railway station in Estrov. It was not considered important enough. Nor was there a bus service or anything like that. I went to school in a slightly larger village that liked to think of itself as a town, three kilometers away down a track that was dusty and full of potholes in the summer, thick with mud or covered in snow during the winter. The town was called Rosna. I walked there every day, no matter what the weather, and I was beaten if I was late. My school was a big, square brick building on three floors. All the classrooms were the same size. There were about six hundred children in all, boys and girls. Some of them traveled in by train, pouring out onto the platform with eyes that were still half closed with sleep. Rosna did have a railway station and they were very proud of it, decking it with flowers on public holidays. But actually it was a mean, run-down little place, and nine out of ten trains didn’t even bother to stop there.

We students were all very smart. The girls wore black dresses with green aprons and had their hair tied back with ribbons. The boys looked like little soldiers with gray uniforms and red scarves tied round our necks, and if we did well with our studies, we were given badges with slogans—“For Active Work,” “School Leader,” that sort of thing. I don’t really remember much of what I learned at school. Who does? History was important . . . the history of Russia, of course. We were always learning poems by heart and had to recite them, standing to attention beside our desks. There was math and science. Most of the teachers were women, but our headmaster was a man named Lavrov and he had a furious temper. He was short but he had huge shoulders and long arms, and I would often see him pick up a boy by the throat and pin him against the wall.

“You’re not doing well, Leo Tretyakov!” he would boom. “I’m sick of the sight of you. Buck up your ideas or get out of here!”

Even the teachers were terrified of him. But actually, he was a good man at heart. In Russia, we were brought up to respect our teachers and it never occurred to me that his titanic rages were anything unusual.

I was very happy at school and I did well. We had a star system—every two weeks the teachers gave us a grade—and I was always a five-star student, what we called a
pyatiorka.
My best subjects were physics and math, and these were very important to the Russian authorities. Nobody ever let you forget that we were the country that had sent the first man—Yuri Gagarin—into space. There was actually a photograph of him in the front entrance, and you were supposed to salute him as you came in. I was also good at sports and I remember how the girls in my class used to come along and cheer me when I scored a goal. I wasn’t all that interested in girls at this time, which is to say I was happy to chat to them, but I didn’t particularly want to hang out with them after school. My best friend was the Leo that I just mentioned, and the two of us were inseparable.

Leo Tretyakov was short and dumpy with sticky-out ears, freckles, and ginger hair. He used to joke that he was the ugliest boy in the district, and I found it hard to disagree. He was also far from bright. He was a two-star student, a dismal
dvoyka,
and he was always getting into trouble with the teachers. In the end they actually gave up punishing him because it didn’t seem to make any difference, and he just sat there quietly daydreaming at the back of the class. But at the same time he was the star of our NVP—military training—classes, which were compulsory throughout the school. Leo could strip down an AK7 automatic machine gun in twelve seconds and reassemble it in fifteen. He was a great shot. And twice a year there were military games when we had to compete with other schools, using a map and a compass to find our way through the woods. Leo was always in charge. And we always won.

I liked Leo because he was afraid of nothing and he always made me laugh. We did everything together. We would eat our sandwiches in the yard, washed down with a gulp of vodka he had stolen from home and brought to school in one of his mother’s old perfume bottles. We smoked cigarettes in the woodland close to the main building, coughing horribly because the tobacco was so rough. Our school toilets had no compartments, and we often sat next to each other, doing what we had to do, which may sound disgusting, but that was the way it was. You were meant to bring your own toilet paper too, but Leo always forgot and I would watch him guiltily tearing pages out of his exercise books. He was always losing his homework that way. But with Leo’s homework—and he’d have been the first to admit it—that was probably all it was worth.

The best time we had together was in the summer when we would go for endless bicycle rides, rattling along the country roads, shooting down hills and pedaling backward furiously, which was the only way to stop. Everyone had exactly the same model of bicycle and they were all death traps with no suspension, no lights, and no brakes. We had nowhere to go, but in a way that was the fun of it. We used our imagination to create a world of wolves and vampires, ghosts and Cossack warriors—and we chased each other right through the middle of them. When we finally got back to the village, we would swim in the river even though there were parasites in the water that could make you sick, and we always went to the bathhouse together, thrashing each other with birch leaves in the steam room, which was meant to be good for your skin.

Leo’s parents worked in the same factory as mine, although my father, who had once studied at Moscow University, was the more senior of the two. The factory employed about two hundred people who were collected by buses from Estrov, Rosna, and lots of other places. I have to say, the place was a source of constant puzzlement to me. Why was it tucked away in the middle of nowhere? Why had I never seen it? There was a barbed wire fence surrounding it and armed militia standing at the gate, and that didn’t make sense either. All it produced was pesticides and other chemicals used by farmers. But when I asked my parents about it, they always changed the subject. Leo’s father was the transportation manager, in charge of the buses. My father was a research chemist. My mother worked in the main office doing paperwork. That was about as much as I knew.

At the end of a summer afternoon, Leo and I would often sit close to the river and we would talk about our future. The truth was that just about everyone wanted to leave Estrov. There was nothing to do and half the people who lived there were perpetually drunk. I’m not making it up. During the winter months, they weren’t allowed to open the village shop before ten o’clock in the morning or people would rush in as soon as it was light to buy their vodka, and during the months of December and January it wasn’t unusual to see some of the local farmers flat on their back, half covered with snow and probably half dead too after downing a whole bottle. We were all being left behind in a fast-changing world. Why my parents had ever chosen to come here was another mystery.

Leo didn’t care if he ended up working in the factory like everyone else, but I had other ambitions. For reasons that I couldn’t explain, I’d always thought that I was different from everyone else. Maybe it was the fact that my father had once been a professor in a big university and that he had himself experienced life outside the village. But when I was watching those planes disappear into the distance, I always thought they were trying to tell me something. I could be on one of them. There was a whole life outside Estrov that I might one day explore.

Although I had never told anyone else except Leo, I dreamed of becoming a helicopter pilot—maybe in the army, but if not, in air-sea rescue. I had seen a program about it on television and for some reason it had caught hold of my imagination. I devoured everything I could about helicopters. I borrowed books from the school library. I cut out articles in magazines. By the time I was thirteen, I knew the name of almost every moving part of a helicopter. I knew how it used all the different forces and controls working in opposition to each other to fly. The only thing I had never done was actually sit in one.

“Do you think you’ll ever leave?” Leo asked me one evening, the two of us sprawled out in the long grass, sharing a cigarette. “Go and live in a city with your own apartment and a car?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“You’re clever. You can go to Moscow. Learn how to become a pilot.”

I shook my head. Leo was my best friend. Whatever I might secretly think, I would never talk about the two of us being apart. “I don’t think my parents would let me. Anyway, why would I want to leave? This is my home.”

“Estrov is a dump.”

“No, it’s not.” I looked at the river, the fast-flowing water chasing over the rocks, the surrounding woodland, the muddy track that led through the center of the village. In the distance, I could see the steeple of St. Nicholas. The village had no priest. The church was closed. But its shadow stretched out almost to our front door and I had always thought of it as part of my childhood. Maybe Leo was right. There wasn’t very much to the place, but even so, it was my home. “I’m happy here,” I said, and at that moment I believed it. “It’s not such a bad place.”