Smoke and Mirrors (3 page)

Chapter Three

He’d said nothing since she’d run from him in the car park. Not even a cry of surprise when that car had burst into flames. Flames she’d seemed to glimpse in his eyes when he’d grasped her by the shoulders and put her in the stolen car like some troublesome toddler. He’d driven like a maniac, largely through back streets by a very circuitous route, to Waverley Station. Nell had no idea if they were being followed.

Was Derryn following? Did he know?
You could have got me killed, you bastard. It could still happen…

At the station car park, Kolnikov got out, opened the passenger door, and pulled her out too before closing the door and opening that of the car next to them. She’d been staring at his face, so she didn’t see how he did it. But another sudden glimpse of that flaming aura she’d imagined in the police station seemed to snap her brain back to life. She blinked the aura away and noticed that, just like with the first stolen car, he pulled his sweatshirt cuff over his hand to touch the handle. Was he bothered about fingerprints?

This time, he didn’t let her go until he’d bundled her into the passenger seat and locked the door on her. She felt too numb to care. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat, hot-wired the car, and drove sedately out of the station.

She swallowed and found her voice at last. “Are we safe now?”

“Not sure yet. Keep your eyes open.”

She nodded, quite willing to help now in any plan that would keep her alive. Only as she glanced out of the window did it strike her. She jerked her head round to stare at him. Without thought, she’d spoken to him in English; and he’d answered in the same language.

“Yes. I speak English,” he admitted. In fact, his accent was so slight you barely noticed it.

“You mean I got into all this for nothing?” she said bitterly.

“Not from my point of view. I needed time for my people to get out of the city before a hue and cry went up for them. I set the police a difficult task.”

“Oh well, that’s all right, then,” she said sarcastically. “Obviously, I’m glad I could help.” In spite of everything, a faint hope fluttered. She glanced at him uncertainly. “Was it these people who set fire to the warehouse?”

There was a pause, just long enough for her to begin to think it might be true. Then he said, “No. That was me.” And his voice sounded strange. Flat, dull, and bleaker than a January storm. His hard eyes gazed ahead at the road.

She shivered. “How come that gunman’s car went on fire?”

“Luck.”

“Not for him!”

He glanced at her. “Save your compassion. Even his mother won’t mourn him. He’d have shot you without a blink, just to get at me.”

“To get at
you
? You only met me last night!”

“They don’t know that. They must have been watching for me. To them, I came out of the police station and went straight to meet you. It must have looked as if we were getting into your car together. I’m afraid you’re pegged as my girlfriend.”

She pressed her head back into the headrest. “God, I wish I
was
the barmaid at Deacon Brodie’s.”

It was a throwaway remark, made aloud to herself. But she caught the faint upward tug of his mouth and realised with some surprise that she amused him. In the café too there had been a certain disturbing heat in his eyes… Perhaps, if she was bloody,
bloody
careful, she could make that work for her?

“I don’t suppose,” she said lightly, “that you’ll tell me what’s going on?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Maybe not,” she retorted. “But for my mental and physical well-being, I need to.”

“No, you don’t.” He pulled into the side of the residential street and halted the car just beside a litter bin. “Look, Nell, I’ll do my best to get you out of this because you should never have got into it. But until I can figure out how, you need to disappear.”

“I can stay with a friend in London,” she offered with little conviction and less intention.

“Friends are traceable. I’m not.”

She met his gaze. It didn’t hold hers for long, since it was busy scanning the traffic that passed them. She said, “What do you have in mind?”

His eyes flickered back to her face. “Put yourself in my hands until this is over.”

“How long will that be?”

“A few days. A couple of weeks at most.”

“And how, exactly, will it be over?”

“If all goes well, you’ll be able to go home to your old life with your old car.”

“That’s not what I meant. Are you…? Oh Jesus, I can’t believe I’m saying this! Are you planning on—on
hurting
anyone in order to get me out of this?”

He glanced at the road, then at his hands, and finally at her face. His eyes were clear as ice and hard as agates. “I’m planning on hurting people anyway. Your security is a side benefit.”

She dragged her hand through her hair and tugged. What was left of her elegant knot tumbled down around her face and shoulders. “Shit, how can you sleep at night?”

“Not very well,” he confessed flippantly. “I have a lot on my mind.”

“And on your conscience?”

“I don’t have a conscience.”

“Even Raskolnikov had one in the end.”

“I am, in many ways, inferior to Raskolnikov,” he allowed. “But I plan better. You agree to put yourself in my hands?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not one that’s likely to keep you alive.”

Could Derryn keep her alive?
Would
he?

She took a deep breath. “All right, then.”

“Good, then start by giving me your mobile phone.”

“Get stuffed!” she exclaimed.

“These things can be tracked. Hand it over.”

“No! It can
not
be tracked; that’s stupid. It’s not even an i—”

He leaned over, and although she tried to scoot out of his way, there was nowhere for her to go. He pinned her hands firmly in her lap with one of his and rifled her jacket with the other. At least it felt like rifling, although in fact he went straight to the inside pocket where she kept it. How the hell did he know that?

She tried to shake him off, wriggling and struggling to make it more difficult, because her every instinct was to hang on to that phone. It was her one link to the real world, to Derryn, to anything at all beyond
him
.

Somehow, her writhing pushed her breast into his seeking hand, and she froze, suddenly hot and tingly all over. As if he heard the catch in her breathing, his gaze lifted to her face. For an instant, he didn’t move at all. There was just his warm palm on her breast, and her betraying nipple under her shirt and bra, tightening to his touch. And the fingers of his other hand gripping hers, pressing them into her thigh.

This wasn’t right. He was a stranger. His touch should repel her, not inspire this ridiculous, paralyzing attraction.

Still watching her as the desperate, unwanted heat spread between her legs, he deliberately moved his hand, sliding it off her breast to the inner pocket of her jacket and removing her phone with swift, economic efficiency. As he seemed to do everything.

She swallowed. “Please,” she begged, shaken. “There are people I need to call if I’m going to disappear for days on end.”

“Call them after.” His hands and eyes released her. He opened the car door and tossed her phone into the bin. Then he restarted the car.

There seemed to be no pattern in his driving around the city, but she noticed when they were leaving it via Queensferry Road.

“Where are we going?” She was relieved her voice sounded neither harsh nor small, merely curious, as if she’d accepted her fate. Which she had, for the present.

“Fife,” he said with unexpected relish.

“Why?”

“I love the sound of it, don’t you?
Fife
.”

Her brows twitched. “Are you actually insane?” she asked before she reflected that if he were, it might not be a very diplomatic question.

“Certifiable, according to many. But for present purposes, I can just about hold it together.”

****

After they’d crossed the Forth Bridge and left the main roads behind, he appeared more relaxed. Nell still found herself checking every car they passed, looking for any signs of weapon or aggression. She even looked up at the sky, wondering if helicopters were beyond the people who’d just tried to kill her and who could, according to her companion, find her wherever she went. Unless she went with him.

He said, “So who’ll miss you over the next few days? Who do you live with?”

“Myself,” she said without thinking. Then, annoyed with herself for a missed opportunity, she added hastily, “But there are friends I’ve arranged to meet…”

He threw her a glance. “Boyfriend?”

She shook her head. Boyfriends were a sore point. Since Gordon had buggered off—having asked her to marry him only the week before—hurling accusations of frigidity over his shoulder. She hadn’t seen him since.

“Why not?”

“Well, I suppose I must be a lesbian,” she retorted. “Otherwise, I’d be sleeping with anything that ever hogged a remote control.”

“And here was me thinking you had standards.”

She couldn’t help the twitch of her lip. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You wouldn’t give me your phone number.”

“That’s hardly a very high standard.”

“Ouch. Harsh but fair. What about family?”

She shrugged. “My mother’s dead.”

“Father?”

She smiled sourly. “Not at home. Let’s just say he’s in your line of work.”

Another of those quick glances hit her. Exhaustion had formed lines and shadows around his eyes. It struck her he was asking questions primarily to keep himself awake. And yet he sounded genuinely interested. “He steals cars?”

“Anything that’s not nailed down,” she said contemptuously. “Although that’s probably not very rewarding in Saughton.”

“Your father’s in prison?” He sounded surprised. Not quite as surprised as she. It wasn’t usually something she volunteered.

“Say hi from me when you see him.”

“I’d love to,” he said. “But I’ve no intention of going back to any prison.”

Fuck
. She’d almost forgotten exactly who and what she was dealing with. She went back to traffic watching.

“They don’t know about this car,” he said casually. “We weren’t followed. To all intents and purposes, we’re safe.”

Although she felt anything but, there was no point in riling him by saying so. Surreptitiously, she watched his handsome profile as he drove. His eyes were steady on the road. Despite the shadows darkening his eyes, he looked almost carefree, his strong hand relaxed on the wheel, shifting occasionally to the gear lever.

Even allowing for the circumstances, he was, bizarrely, almost fun to be around. He hadn’t needed to look after her when the first gunman had struck, or when she’d bolted nearly into the arms of the second. It was too easy to forget that this man had burned down a warehouse with two people in it. Whether or not he’d known they were there, he’d killed them. That kind of ruthless violence was anathema to her. Alien, incomprehensible, and terrifying.

She didn’t kid herself that the victims were likely to have been responsible citizens or even very nice people. They were gangsters, drug dealers of some kind, no doubt responsible for untold misery, suffering, and death. But that didn’t make it right to burn them to death.

She shivered, blotting out the image of the burning gunman blasted away from his car. How the hell had that happened? Had Kolnikov—it can’t have been his name, but she had no other for him—previously planted some kind of incendiary device? Had the first gunman fired again and by some freak accident got his colleague’s petrol tank rather than her own or Kolnikov’s head?

She refocused on his eyes, deep blue like some calm but wintry sea. He wasn’t immune to all of this. In the police station, she’d glimpsed something in his eyes she recognised as pain, whatever its cause. And he’d been agitated. His hands had been shaking, his foot constantly vibrating. Then, before he’d seen her in the café, he’d looked almost—desperate. Tired, sick, and desperate.

The truth was, she couldn’t begin to read him. Mr. Enigma.

Mr. Highly Dangerous Enigma. That must never, ever be forgotten.

The car slowed; he changed gear and turned right into a mud road that was little more than a track. Her heart began to beat faster, her stomach roiling with all sorts of imaginary threats. Then, just around a wide bend that turned into a paved drive, she saw the house. Large, detached, with one turret, like a tiny segment of a fairy castle.

He parked near the front door, which stood open. Two men lounged on either side of it; one young, lanky, and bespectacled, the other stocky, hairy, and villainous. They both grinned when Kolnikov got out of the car. Nell wasn’t sure, gazing at the villainous one through the side window, that it was any more comforting than their previous glowers.

Then someone else cannoned out of the house and launched herself at Kolnikov. “Rodya!” she exclaimed as she hugged him fiercely.

Rodya? The diminutive of Rodion, the name of Dostoyevsky’s main character in
Crime and Punishment
. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.

Nell’s stomach twisted. Who was this woman? His real girlfriend? His wife? And why should it matter? He was a gangster and a murderer, and the most important point in all of this was not that he’d appeared to flirt with her in the café. Nor that she’d read speculation and open admiration in his eyes as they’d scanned her body.

He hugged the woman back with minimum fuss, which was when, over his shoulder, the woman saw Nell sitting watchfully in the car.

“Who the…?” she began in Zavreki as Kolnikov released her and walked around to release the child lock on the passenger door. He really hadn’t trusted her not to bolt again.

“This is Nell Black,” he said. “She speaks our language, and Gadarin’s boys just tried to kill her.”

“Why?” the woman asked, glaring at Nell as she emerged from the car, as if the attempted murder was her own fault. Nell said nothing, just stared back because she’d had a hard day and it was a long time since she’d won a contest in rudeness.

“Because I bought her a cup of coffee,” Kolnikov said. “She translated at my police interview.”