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Aleksey pretended to glance at his watch whilst attempting to translate some of this. He’d thought his English was pretty good until he’d actually had to live in the miserable little country. It suddenly occurred to him that the colonel might be speaking Welsh, and he was about to make a totally innocuous comment in reply to test this theory, when four men came into the cell which had just been vacated.
They were in civvies—jeans and T-shirts—and one of them had a noticeable potbelly, his belt slung low beneath it. They began to ready the room, dragging a table to one side and putting the chair front and centre under the harsh fluorescent light.
Aleksey frowned and turned back to the other man. “What is this? They are not Special Forces interrogators this time?”
The older man came to stand next to him and pursed his lips. “My own chaps need to learn resistance to interrogation, too. They’re actually more likely to be compromised than the airboys, when you think about some of the jobs they do and beastly places they routinely go. We’re evasion specialists, though, so I don’t put my lads through that first phase of the exercise. But they do have to endure this. But as you saw with the pilot, my boys are disciplined. They know how to go just so far and no further. Then it’s pats on the back and home for tea and medals. That’s a bit of a disadvantage, though, when they have to deal with one of their own. I need my lads to be a tad more harshly treated. After a bit of trial and error, we discovered using a mix of soldiers from other regiments to start things off works rather well. Actually, they’re volunteers who failed Selection themselves... Found it a bit too...tough. Wanted to go home to mummy—that sort of thing. Not quite as elite as they thought they were, not to put too fine a point on it.”
Aleksey’s brows rose. Bitter, resentful failures to conduct the interrogation. He liked this idea. He liked it a lot.
The other man began to add, “These chaps are—”
Aleksey heard nothing more.
The floor opened up beneath him, and all he heard was the rush of air as he fell.
A prisoner had just been dragged into the cleared space, front and centre, right before the glass. Without that fragile barrier, Aleksey could have stretched out his hand and touched the bruises upon the man’s golden skin. The prisoner was entirely naked except for a hood over his head. It clicked somewhere in the back of Aleksey's never quiet mind that this practice was against the law in the UK—that rough woven covering obscuring sight and obstructing breathing—and that its illegal application here might actually be useful and relevant information to report to COBRA, but the reflection was thought and gone before he properly registered it. He was thinking other, much more interesting things.
Aleksey had spent his entire adult life surrounded by men, the alpha lion on a savannah of lesser predators, but here, on the other side of this frail obstruction, was a rival.
The naked man wasn’t struggling, but, even so, he held himself taut, aware, muscles flexing, testing and preparing for what was to come. He was a head and a half taller than his captors, possibly even Aleksey’s height, which was so rare Aleksey could not help but picture how they would square up, eye to eye.
And he appeared, to Aleksey’s exceptionally experienced assessment, to be anatomically perfect. Just as a mythical woman’s face had once been exquisite enough to launch an Armada of ships across treacherous waters, so this man’s body demanded such worship, such homage.
Aleksey was willing to fall to his knees, anyway.
A kick to the back of one leg took this superb physical specimen to that very position, and then the hood was ripped off.
Aleksey raised his eyes from the man’s previously most interesting feature and then saw his face for the first time.
* * *
Chapter 2
Six Months Before April
The moments when Nikolas felt undiluted pleasure in life were increasing, he’d noticed. He’d always had the occasional flicker of intense happiness, of course, even during the decidedly bad times in his life. He was lucky in that he had the kind of personality that could pluck little gems of amusement from very unfortunate circumstances.
But over the last few months, life had begun to be very agreeable most of the time.
Riding across Dartmoor one day in early October, the sun broke through a dark cloudbank on the horizon and struck him full force, warming his face. He glanced up from the rock-strewn turf and saw the expanse of moorland grass ahead of him in almost painful clarity. He didn’t know the technical term for the depth and quality of this light—if it even had one in English—but the combination of dark clouds and focused illumination turned the landscape into a surreal world of heightened colour and liquid shadows.
He turned his horse slowly as the filtered sunlight swept across the tors and then passed over the valley that held his life quietly and perfectly secure in ancient English oak, and genuine happiness struck him so forcibly he actually laughed, smiling at the thought of what awaited him upon his return—the actuality and the possibilities equally. Life was what he made it, yes, but luck was on his side as well. He knew this now, and respected it.
Happiness and love. They were twined like the plaits Molly had made in his horse’s mane and could not be separated. He fingered one of these strands now. She’d spent a long time crafting the fine decorations and tying them off with coloured bands. He hadn’t had the heart to stop her, as he once would have done.
As he stroked his finger along one twist, however, he frowned. There were three strands within each. Happiness, love and... He could not name a third ingredient for his newfound serenity, and this inability worried him more than it should. Two-stranded twists unravelled. Even he knew that. He had good cause to know this. He had suffered a major unravelling of his complex life once before, and in many ways he was still enmeshed in the tangle that had resulted.
Pondering this, he sensed, more than saw, a shadow flit across the turf alongside his restless horse. He squinted up into the enormous autumn sky. A hawk. No, two. Two birds soaring on a thermal, appearing almost to coil around themselves, spiralling into infinity. A mating pair? Their effortless flight brought back lines from a poem he had once learnt by heart—in Danish? Russian? He genuinely could not remember, but thought it must have been before the bad time came, so in Denmark. Yes, it had appealed to his restrained yet yearning ten-year-old heart. By the time he got to Russia he was hiding that side of his nature more successfully. No poetry for Aleksey Primakov. No heart, come to that.
I glance at you, at you all down there, there where the punished crawl. I rise skyward, sky high, bright sky, up here where the chosen fly. I stretch my wings and soar, taut feather lore. I live free, and I see eternity.
Taut feather lore? Perhaps it did not translate well to English.
Nikolas felt his horse turning uneasily beneath him, and with a twitch of his strong thighs stilled it to calm.
And he knew then that it was not eternity these birds were considering.
Hewas being observed.
