Free Silencer by Andy McNab

chamber. That way, there was no room for accidents.
    Her eyelids flickered and she pushed herself upright. ‘Does this mean I’m on guard now?’
    ‘Not exactly.’ I gestured through the blinds. ‘Frank trusts them with his own kid. And I trust them too. Ninety-nine per cent …’
    Her brow furrowed. ‘The HK’s for the other one per cent?’
    I nodded. ‘The only way I can really protect you two is to find out what’s going on.’
    She didn’t argue. ‘Where will you start?’
    ‘Peredelkino.’

20
    I kept driving west, towards a much bluer sky than the one that still hung over the city. I’d come off the M1 a while back, and the potholes were getting more treacherous. The road was lined with trees. This wasn’t Navaho or Chelsea territory. The buildings I began to encounter were ancient and timber-framed. Dacha s three storeys high with massive overhanging roofs stood behind huge walls. These were the weekend retreats of wealthy Muscovites, first built in the time of Peter the Great. Then in the early 1930s the Soviets had decided to make it a writers’ paradise and all the Russian greats had come here to do their stuff.
    I saw cedar tiles cladding a steeply pitched roof and condensation billowing from modern heating ducts. I turned through an enormous set of slowly opening wooden gates.
    The VW crunched across the gravel. Trees circled a playground, gardens and a swimming-pool. I carried on round to the back of the house and pulled up behind a Range Rover. In Moscow, real people’s cars had white plates with black letters. The Range Rover had red ones with white numbers. Diplomatic plates. You could buy them on the black market – at least twenty-five thousand dollars, more if you threw in the blue flashing lights. They let you travel in the government-designated fast lanes and beat the Moscow jams. Lads with red plates were never stopped.
    I got out and climbed the steps onto the wooden veranda. Iglimpsed a face at the window before its owner turned away and disappeared.
    I knew from my last visit that three doors led off the veranda: a bug screen for the summer, a triple-glazed monster with an aluminium frame, and finally the hand-carved wooden original.
    I stepped into a shiny modern kitchen the size of a football pitch, all white marble and stainless steel. It couldn’t have provided a more dramatic contrast to the exterior.
    Frank was sitting at the white marble table with a closed laptop and a white mug in front of him. He was a small man with short brown hair brushed back and flat with a hint of grey at the temples. He looked like Dracula after a visit to the blood bank.
    He obviously liked his men to look like extras in a sci-fi movie, but Frank’s own fashion model was less easy to pin down. He sported red cords over dark-brown suede loafers. His shirt was also dark brown, and buttoned all the way up. He’d added a touch of Italian gigolo with a pale yellow sweater draped over his shoulders. He might have thought it was cutting edge, but it wasn’t a good look for a man in his mid-forties who could have done with shedding a few pounds and buying himself some socks. What was going through his mind? As with almost everything else he got up to, it was impossible to tell.
    ‘Coffee?’ Without looking up, he pointed past me to a machine the size of a nuclear reactor. It stood beside a white marble sink large enough to dismember a body in. ‘Help yourself, and sit down over here with me.’
    I walked over and pressed every button in sight, hoping that something would start coming out of one of the three spouts. Then I could shove a mug underneath and look like I knew what I was doing.
    He leaned forward, gaze level. ‘Have you heard from them? Has anyone contacted you?’
    The machine showed no sign of whirring into action. ‘If they had, I wouldn’t need you.’
    ‘And how is the child?’ He’d spun on a sixpence, but with no change in his tone. His English was precise, but his accent was