43

Grigori Kursk put down his mobile phone, kicked the hungover blond out of bed, and threw some money after her as she grabbed her clothes and scuttled from the room. He reached for the empty vodka bottle on the bedside table and held it up to the light to see if there were any dregs left at the bottom. He needed something to kick-start his day. He’d been given new orders and was getting back to work.

He called Dimitrov’s room, just down the hall of their two-star hotel in the center of Milan. “Wake up, you lazy cocksucker! Yuri called. We’ve got a job, Geneva, three hours’ time. . . . Yeah, I know that’s not enough time. That’s why you’ve got to get your ass out of bed and down to the lobby. Tell the others. By the front desk, five minutes. Anyone who isn’t there, I will personally ram an Uzi up their backside and let rip. Got that?”

Five and a half minutes later, Kursk was at the wheel of a BMW 750, forcing his way into the lunchtime traffic on the Via de Larga. He had 330 kilometers between himself and Geneva, and the cars around him were moving slower than a legless man in a tar pit. He pressed his fist to the horn and kept it there, screaming locker-room obscenities at every other driver on the road. No one around seemed too impressed; in Milan that passed for everyday behavior. Kursk slumped back in the driver’s seat. “Fucking Italians. They move fast enough when there’s an army after them.”

Finally, the lights ahead turned green, the traffic began to move, and they started to make progress. Kursk relaxed a hair. He took a pack of Balkan Stars from his shirt pocket, pulled one out of the pack, then reached for the car’s lighter. He took a deep drag and kept driving, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the cigarette.

Sitting next to him, Dimitrov decided it was safe to risk a question. “So, what are we doing in Switzerland?”

Kursk blew smoke toward the windshield. “We’re meeting some French bastard and he’s going to take us to that whore Petrova and her English lover boy.”

“And then?”

“Then we kill the Frenchman and we take the other two back to Yuri. And then, God willing, we kill them too.”

Kursk rolled down the window and yelled at the car ahead of them. “Get that useless pile of crap out of my way, you spaghetti-eating son of a whore!”

“Forget it, Grigori Mikhailovich,” said Dimitrov. “He doesn’t understand Russian.”

Kursk pulled his head back inside the car. “Oh no, Dimitrov, that gutless bastard knows exactly what I’m saying.”