Free The Blind Spy by Alex Dryden

Sevastopol.’
    He stared at her and she saw confusion, then fear.
    ‘Can I get in?’
    He looked at her wide-eyed as if she were a bomb that was about to go off.
    She got into the passenger seat. The other man’s gun that she’d taken was hard to draw in the confined space. She slid a knife down her arm invisibly from inside her jacket and into her left hand and, in the same movement, thrust it with the precision of a butcher under the man’s ribs on the side of his body furthest away from her, where his heart was. Then she forced it upwards, driving the honed blade into the centre of his heart. He rocked back then forward violently. His fisted hand flailed at her and struck her hard in the face, drawing blood. But his life was already leaving him.
    Anna withdrew the knife and climbed out of the car. She wiped her bloodied hand and the blade on the grass and put the knife back into her sleeve. She checked the road was empty and then she hauled the dead body across the seat and out of the open door. She turned out the pockets of his coat: a wallet with an FSB identity card, another gun which she gratefully took, some money and keys. She took the money. Then she dragged the body a few yards on to the grass and left it, deliberately visible from the road. She got back into the car, in the driver’s seat, put the car in gear and pulled away.
    She drove fast along the road until she saw a farm track a mile or so away and to the left. There were deep tyre marks on the track, from a tractor most likely, and she drove with the car’s wheels in the tyre tracks until she found a cutting in the hill to the side where she could conceal the car from the road. She pulled over into the cutting, double-checked that the car couldn’t be seen from the road, and closed the door. The man’s phone on the dashboard had started to ring. When they found the body, they would look for the car. Their first assumption would have to be that she was driving it towards Sevastopol. She opened the door and disabled the phone, flinging the batteries into a pool of water. Now they couldn’t locate the car from his phone.
    As soon as she’d got clear of the car, she began to run, up towards a ridge that was slowly forming above her through the fog. She kept running, up through soggy grass meadows and into the hills that rose to the north. It was a long climb that finally took her over a high ridge and down into a valley on the other side. There was a village there, sufficiently far away from the road they’d travelled along, away from any pursuit. And she knew they would look for the car first.
    Just over an hour after she had been dropped at the crossroads by the truck, she entered the single street of the village. There was a store, a service station with a single pump, some bedraggled scavenging dogs that combed the gutters and doorways. But she saw few people. She entered the service station and inside found a boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, she guessed. She asked him how far it was to Sevastopol.
    ‘Four or five hours if you’ve got a decent car. There’s no bus from here.’
    ‘I need a ride. I’ll pay.’
    The boy shouted into the back and a man she took to be his father emerged. He wore oily overalls and looked like he’d been fixing a car. He had a bad-tempered expression and said something abrupt to the boy. The boy repeated her request to him, then disappeared into the back, and the man stared at her.
    ‘I can give you a hundred dollars,’ Anna said in Ukrainian. ‘My grandmother is sick.’
    ‘How did you get here?’
    ‘Friends brought me this far.’
    The man looked at the mud on her trousers and at her wet hiking boots. ‘Make it a hundred and fifty,’ he replied too quickly.
    Half an hour later, and having paid in advance, she was on a small rural road that would take them eventually to Sevastopol. The man drove fast and in silence, as if he were unwilling to earn the money, or just disapproved of being paid by a