“Fuck you, sobaka!”
“Hrraaahhh!”
A group of young guys ran shouting into the street. They were all wearing Adidas and wielding Kalashnikovs—they’d been so intent on showing how individual they were that they’d lost all individuality. Now they yelled and let loose with their weapons.
The good citizens of Moscow probably didn’t appreciate it, but I couldn’t have been more grateful.
If you didn’t do something like that, you would hardly see a traffic jam in our motherland.
At least not if I hadn’t asked Mariya to fiddle with the TsODD, the transport bureau.
“Damn, I can’t even tell if this is an act or if there’s a real war going on,” I muttered. The brigadier sure didn’t do anything by halves. I wondered how he was planning to handle the cleanup.
Whatever; didn’t matter to me. I’d paid my money. That was all I had to know.
From my back alley, I eyed the VAZ-X limo, with its sleek, space-age design. The nice thing was that you didn’t have to try too hard to spot such a distinctive vehicle. All I needed to know was the time and place, and the rest would work out. It was child’s play.
I didn’t know what I would have done if Lieutenant Adam had had a taste for plain, inconspicuous cars.
Then there was the moment the limousine’s door opened right in the middle of the traffic jam. That just about gave me a heart attack.
I was relieved in more ways than one when a beautiful woman in a black dress stepped out of the car.
She wasn’t that much older than Mariya or Nora. It did cross my mind to buy them a dress like hers.
The heels of her shoes click-clacked sweetly down the street as she walked away, never so much as glancing in my direction. Was that perfume I smelled wafting from her hair? She looked like a doll. This was dangerous, and I hoped she would keep running.
—I don’t want to get her involved.
What about the driver, then, eh? I’d just have to think of it as his unlucky day.
I’m the one who decides how I feel. From the moment I got into this career, I was never going to be anything but the bottom of the social ladder anyway.
“Davai, davai, davaaaaiiii!”
“You piece of shit!”
I glanced at the Adidas- and Nike-clad ugolovniki yelling and shooting at one another. They seemed to be having fun; that’s what counted. I wondered: Was their life an easy one? Or an awful one?
Considering that it consisted mostly of waving guns around and shouting and shooting at things, it wasn’t that different from what I did for a living.
If they succeeded, would they rise in the mafia ranks? Would their brigadier, their adviser, their boss, praise their work?
—Khren znaiu.
Figuring it was about time, I reached into the tin can beside me. I found what I was searching for amid the frozen garbage—something long and hard—and pulled it out, bracing it against my shoulder.
I took a quick look back. No walls behind me. No people, either. No problem, then.
I looked through the sights, only to see the limo driver, who’d figured out that my prey was in the line of fire, scrambling out of the car. Smart guy. I was holding one of the motherland’s greatest inventions—just one more legacy of the late, great Dr. Tsiolkovsky’s work. It was a hand-held tank-mounted gun called RPG: ruchnoi protivotankoviy granatomet.
“Take a good look, kid!” I shouted, and then I let loose with my RPG.
With an earsplitting roar, the rocket went flying at 150 meters per second, slamming into the limousine almost before you could blink.
I didn’t actually see it, though, because my vision was obscured by the smoke.
The rocket plunged straight through the limousine’s armor and then straight through its engine block, turning the front of the car into a conflagration of orange flames. Unlike in the movies, it didn’t go flying off or spinning through the air. It just hit its target, and boom. All that was left was a big bonfire in the shape of a car.
“What the hell?!”
“Suma sashol! This is no joke!”
“Shit, I don’t wanna get hit by a goddamn rocket!”
I watched crowds of people jump out of their cars and start running at the confusion I had caused. I let out a breath. Then I tossed the launcher back into the trash can—its job was done. It hadn’t been cheap, and I could have reused it, but I wasn’t going to go running around lugging it with me.
“Proshai <Farewell>, Lieutenant Adam.”
I got his schedule, I got an RPG, I got the mafia to make a little ruckus, and I got my traffic jam.
I didn’t even see a shadow of MI6—just goes to show how much money they must have spent—but then again, if I could see their shadow, this would have been over already.
At least I had a chance of winning if it was only MI6…
“I’m no Captain Ilya Murometz!” I grumbled, grabbing the PPSh I’d hidden in the trash can and lunging out into the road. My job wasn’t done yet. I still had to take care of the materials.
I waded in among the panicking crowd, some people running away, some taking advantage of the chaos to do a bit of smashing-and- grabbing.
I thought my heart might burst, but so what? I felt a twinge of regret that I hadn’t gone cyborg at all.
Let me die—I’d still keep running.
Stasia’s life hung in the balance.
Besides, I’d gotten my money. Better do enough work to earn it, Danila Kragin.
As I raced along, a GAZ truck flew past me. Without quite meaning to, I spent one precious instant looking at it.
“Tsk!” I spat.
I recognized the driver, with his dark sunglasses to shield his eyes from snow blindness. And I recognized the girl with short black hair waving at me from the cargo bed.