Free The Kremlin Device by Chris Ryan Page B

total at sixteen. The three other men present were paying them no attention whatsoever.
    Soon it was clear that Rick had spotted someone he fancied. I saw him getting eye contact, and his gaze kept wandering off across the room.
    â€˜Bloody hell!’ he muttered. ‘There’s going to be some crack when the rest of the lads get here.’ Then he said, ‘Look at that, too.’
    Above my head and behind me, on a high shelf in the corner, sat a television set. I turned to look at it, and saw a guy, with his bare arse to the camera, humping a woman, going at her hammer and tongs.
    When I turned back, the two girls had left the dance floor and their place had been taken by a single, pasty-faced man. The guy, who looked to be in his twenties, was pissed out of his mind. He could still just about stand upright, but he staggered whenever he tried to walk. Lurching, faltering, tripping over his own feet, he seemed oblivious to his surroundings, but at the same time hell-bent on staging a grotesque solo dance.
    Only when he started a strip-tease did he become too much for the management. Two security heavies hustled in and took him away.
    We had another round of beers, watched the hookers vainly circulating, and then decided to get our heads down. At least, Whinger and I did. Rick said he was staying on for one more round.
    â€˜Watch yourself,’ Whinger told him. ‘This place is hopping with Aids.’
    â€˜How d’you know?’
    â€˜I can smell it.’
    Out in the corridor we were accosted by yet another pair of tarts, one dark, one fair. The blonde came straight for me, stopped a foot away and said, ‘We go to the bedroom.’
    It was a statement, not a question. I twisted a smile into position and said, ‘No thanks. I’m happy.’
    â€˜I make you more happy.’ She moved even closer and ran her fingers down my chest.
    â€˜It’s OK.’ I gestured towards Whinger. ‘I’m with a friend.’
    â€˜All four go to the bedroom.’ She pointed at her companion.
    The blonde was slim and quite pretty, with a good set of tits on her, but the dark girl was a nightmare, flat chested, and with a complexion like the surface of the moon. I shook my head, pushed past them and made it to the lift.
    Safe inside my room – so I thought – I had a shower and stretched out on the bed to watch CNN news.
    The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. The light and the TV were still on. I looked at my watch: 1.30.
    I picked up the receiver.
    â€˜Meester Sharp?’ It was a woman’s voice. ‘I think you are lonely.’
    â€˜Am I hell!’ I spluttered. ‘Get lost. Valite otsuda! ’
    I slammed the phone down, switched everything off and lay down again.
    Fifteen storeys below, traffic was still surging along Tverskaya. Opposite my window, huge, bright neon advertisements for Panasonic and Technics blazed on the top of another high-rise building. What a place, I thought. What a shit-heap: overrun by commercialism, yet scruffy as hell. Nowhere else in the world had I ever known such unpleasant vibrations: nowhere had I sensed so clearly that if I got into trouble, nobody would help or protect me. When the rest of the team came out, we were going to have to take care.
    Back in Hereford Valentina had told us all about babushkas – literally grannies – the old ladies who do menial jobs like sweeping the streets, shovelling snow and sitting at desks on the landings of big hotels. Sasha had mentioned how they also run little kiosk shops and sell illicit vodka to soldiers.
    Whinger and I clocked our first specimen when we went down for breakfast: eighteen stone if she was a pound, with eyes set too close together in a huge pudding of a face, and a stack of violet-tinted grey hair piled six or eight inches above her head. On the wall behind her was a notice half in English, half Russian: CONTINENTAL ZAVTRAK : 50 ROUBLES , and the babushka