After a reasonably early breakfast the next morning, Sergei and his brother-in-law, Tomasz moved the rest of his belongings from Sergei’s SEAT[1] into the Nissan van. Tomasz added a rolled-up mattress and sleeping bag once Sergei had explained that he’d likely be spending at least one night on the road.

Tomasz agreed with him when Sergei told him the outline of his route north. He gave Sergei an old but usable Michelin Road atlas of France.

“That will be a great help, thanks.”

Iliana had prepared some food for the journey.
“Take care brother dear. From what you said last night, nothing and no one is safe from this man. And, don’t drive for too long today. You need sleep like the rest of us.”

“I know, but this is nothing more than I’ve prepared for. That is one thing that we can thank our late father for. His insistence that we live the life of KGB operatives even though we were just children.”

“Yeah. Just like his father did to him and look how he turned out eh?”

“We got away and are different people now.”

“I am,” said Iliana.
“You aren’t all that different from him.”

“I don’t get drunk on illicit Vodka almost every night and take my anger out on my children.”

“Errr? You don’t have any children. You kill people for a living. Didn’t the KGB do that?”

“You know very well that I only take down the bad guys that the cops can’t or won’t due to being bribed to look the other way. Political assassinations are and always have been a no-go area for me unlike our father. He made so many enemies in the party doing Putin’s bidding before he became President and now Dictator for Life. That is all I’m going to say. I don’t want to mysteriously fall out of a window. Honestly, you would think that the FSB could at least use a little Polonium from time to time…”
The last part of what he said was meant as a joke but it fell flat.

Iliana smiled at her brother.
“I know that you are trying to do good but… it can’t last forever.”

“That’s why I’ve not accepted any contracts for the last few months. I’ve been thinking about retiring for some time. Since I bought my place on Mallorca… It has had an effect on me. I don’t know what that place has done to me but I’ve been less and less inclined to want another contract, then this happens.”

“That is fate trying to tell you something,” said Tomasz.
“Fate told me to quit what… three years ago. I did just that and we came down here from Paris and we aren’t going anywhere. This place might be in the back of beyond but we have grown to love it. Besides, you are going to be an uncle in the new year…”

Sergei was surprised by the revelation.
“We have been approved to adopt. Because of our backgrounds, we are getting a six-year-old girl from Ukraine. Her home was bombed out when Putin invaded the Donbas. She and her pregnant mother escaped to Poland and made their way to Metz where they were supposed to have a relative. They were not there and to make matters worse, the mother and baby died in childbirth.”

Sergei was so happy for his family.
“That makes it even more important for me to get through this last job. Then I can be her uncle.”

The status of uncle in their family was important. Those few words told them that Sergei was going to be extra careful on this job.

Tomasz nodded his head.

Iliana came to him and after a hug and a kiss on both cheeks, she whispered,
“When this is over, it is time to become the person you have hidden from everyone but me for so long.”

He knew exactly what she meant. Sergei had been dithering over this decision for a long time, but right now was not the time nor the place to make it.

Sergei bade Iliana and Tomasz goodbye and set off on his long journey to his departure point for England. He’d deliberately not mentioned his real destination to his relatives. What they didn’t know, they couldn’t tell… not that they’d tell anyone short of being tortured but his way had always been ‘the less other people know about your business, the less that they can talk about it’.

Sergei stopped a few kilometres south of Toulouse and after filling up the tank with Diesel, he put his PAYG phone from Majorca into flight mode. After a moment’s thought, he simply switched it off and put it in one of those bags that were to protect film from X-Ray machines at airports.

He didn’t want anyone tracking him by mapping pings off of cell towers. Sergei certainly did not want to make it easy for ‘Uncle Vanya’ to track him on his journey to the UK. While parked up, he took advantage of a nearby supermarket and bought a freshly baked baguette with extra seeds and grains.

Iliana was a great sister, but her choice of food for him to eat on the journey was not to his liking. He was not in Russia and had very much gone off pickled cabbage and cucumber. Her parting gift went into the wastebin at a rest area about 50km from Toulouse.

He would make do with a tin of tuna, that he’d brought from his home and the baguette for his lunch when he’d passed west of Limoges.

The long drive gave Sergei time to go through his extensive list of contacts in the UK that he held only in his mind. None of their information was in his old phone or laptop. For once, he thanked his brute of a father for drilling into him the art of memorising names and phone numbers. What is not written down can’t be used against you, or them if a case went wrong.

---

[36+ hours after leaving Iliana]

Sergei arrived in the port of Roscoff feeling quite a bit the worse for wear. Nearly two long days behind the wheel of a noisy old Nissan van was not his idea of fun. The small hole in the exhaust was a lot bigger. He had stopped near Nantes and bought a patching kit. That was for later.

He’d avoided all the Autoroutes once he was north of Toulouse. His progress had been very slow and steady. Many of the countless towns and villages implemented 20kph speed limits plus innumerable speed humps. The Nissan’s shock absorbers were in a bad state before the journey. By the time he reached Brittany, they were providing almost zero damping.

Several times, he compared it to the Lada that his father had been assigned by the party before the breakup of the USSR. It was almost new when he’d first ridden in it. The clapped-out Nissan offered about the same quality of ride.

The lights of the nearby ferry terminal were very tempting. It would be so easy to get on the overnight ferry to Plymouth and be done with it but that wasn’t his plan.

Sergei pulled into a field entrance just north of the ferry and used his new phone and laptop to connect to his cloud email accounts. Two messages were waiting for him. One was from the fisherman named Georges whom he would meet in a few hours. Georges had agreed to take him on his next trip for the sum of €2000. That was within Sergei’s price range.

The other was from a Cornish Fisherman name Brian Falconer who operated out of the port of Newlyn. He owed Sergei a favour, so that part of the journey would not cost him one Euro.

Brian and Georges knew each other and neither of them were strangers to a bit of smuggling. This time, he’d be the cargo but was hardly an illegal immigrant. He had a valid British passport, therefore, strictly speaking, no laws of any significance were being broken by them transporting him across the English Channel. One of George's crew would take his van on the ferry to Plymouth the next morning and be exchanged for Sergei somewhere in the Channel at a later date. Once Sergei was in Plymouth, he'd have his van to get to his next destination, the city of Reading, but once again, he was keeping that bit of information very close to his chest.

He used the time he had in hand to fix the exhaust. Even if her never drove the thing again, at least it would not poison the driver from the exhaust gasses that seeped into the interior.

---

The saying about the ‘best laid plans’ came true that evening as the weather had decided not to play fair. The first of a series of gales blew in from the southwest that night. Sergei looked at the weather chart that Georges had downloaded and shook his head.

“You are right my friend. It is too risky to attempt a transfer at sea with them blowing up like this. It looks like mid-channel for a rendezvous will be out of the question for nearly a week.”

“That is what the sea is like. One minute, she is your friend. The next, she is trying to kill you,” said Georges.

He looked at Sergei. They’d done business a few times over the previous decade and it had all been to both their advantage. Not this time.

“What will you do?” asked Georges.

“I’ll take the ferry tomorrow. I checked before I left the port earlier, and there is plenty of space on the morning sailing.”

“That will leave a footprint. Didn’t you want to be what you say in English, incognito.”

Sergei nodded.
“I did and I have one last trick up my sleeve on that front.”

Sergei stood up and put on his jacket. He regretted not bringing a winter coat with him from Mallorca.
Then he turned to Georges.
“Keep the money. Consider it a deposit for the next time I might need your services.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I am Georges. You answered my call for help and that is all I can ask for. I’ll make sure that our friend in Newlyn is compensated. I have to do my bits for the entente cordial don’t I?”

“Sergei, you are not like any Russian that I have ever met.”

“Georges, you know very well that I’ve been out of Russia for a lot longer than I was in it.”

“My friend, you are a different person from when we first met.”

Sergei smiled.
“I would hope so. I am a lot different from the dirty dishevelled boy that tried to stow away on your fishing boat all those years ago. But mainly thanks to you, I saw the error of my ways.”

Georges laughed.
“That is true, but I meant from the last time you visited us. Something in you has changed.”

“For the better I hope?”

“Oh yes, for the better. You seem more certain about things in your life.”

Sergei said his goodbyes and went to the Hotel near the port, where he was staying with lots on his mind. That was now two of his closest friends and relatives who had remarked on his recent change in mood, attitude or whatever. He knew exactly what they had been hinting at but was afraid to admit it to himself. Doing so could cloud his judgement in the execution of this already difficult case.

---

Sergei used the next morning’s ferry to Plymouth to get to England. The weather was foul and all the fishing boats in Roscoff and Morlaix were securely tied—up at their moorings. He was glad that he’d taken George’s sensible advice.

After clearing customs and immigration in Plymouth, Sergei drove down to Newlyn to see his friend Brian Falconer. They met in a Pub in Penzance where over a pint, old times were talked over and some euro banknotes changed hands before the two men disappeared into the night.

By keeping those two fishermen on his side, he knew that if the shit hit the proverbial fan in a big way, then, he’d have a way out of the UK that was well off the books… provided the weather wasn’t as bad as it was on the way over.

---

The town centre of Reading was in Sergei's opinion nothing more than a prime example of brutalist architecture from the 1960s and 1970s that had dated badly, no make that very badly. Just the walk from the car park to his hotel made him depressed. In many places, the steel reinforcing in concrete beams in the car park were corroding badly. It would not be long before the place would fall down if it wasn’t condemned first. He’d seen that before as a child when a 12 storey Stalin era housing project suddenly collapsed due to steel rot. Hundreds of people died in their beds. Seeing the rot again made him very depressed. Sergei decided to park somewhere else after that night. A car park on the other side of the river Thames proved to be the perfect spot.

Some of the old buildings that had been constructed in the local style did survive but they were dwarfed by modern monstrosities. He smiled when he saw the demolition teams hard at work pulling down a late 1960s/early 1970s shopping centre. That hadn’t lasted very well.

He’d cheered loudly when a few years before, he had found a video of his childhood home being blown up. That fine example of a ‘project’ had resisted the wrecking ball so it was ceremoniously blown up. In doing so, the authorities of Novosibirsk had destroyed once and for all the remains of his early life. It was amazing what the walls of a Khrushchev era ‘project’ could contain including the bones of his mother. Sergei had gotten his revenge some years later for the crime of his father strangling his mother to death after a whole day binging on illicit vodka. His father had wrapped her body up in plastic and sealed her into a wall of their bedroom. Then he’d gone about life as if nothing had happened. That was the day that Sergei knew what he was destined to do in life starting with his father.

Sergei spent a whole day wandering around the town just to get the lay of the land. He walked past the building where ‘she’ worked just one time. That just happened to be at lunchtime. He observed the workers heading into the town centre for their lunch. He wasn’t expecting to see his target but he was pleased then she appeared in a small group of women. It was then that he spotted two men acting more than a bit out of the ordinary. They followed her at a distance as they headed towards a bar on Friar Street. As it was a Friday, he assumed that they were going to the bar for a celebration of some sort.

These two people certainly knew each other. There was a series of nods and shaking of heads between them. They were on different sides of the street so it made sense. Sergei moved away and observed things from a distance. Then he changed his mind. The 'target' was going to be in the bar for at least an hour, so he took the opportunity to get some lunch. On his walk around the town, he had noticed a sandwich shop called 'Pierre's'. That's where he headed for and bought a Tuna and Sweetcorn Baguette and a bottle of water. Tuna seemed to be becoming a staple part of his diet.

Suitably armed with some food, he returned to the scene of the ‘action’. The two men were still there. One of them was on his phone, so Sergei took the opportunity to walk close to him in the hope of finding out at least what language he was using.

That grand plan failed as the man ended the call just before Sergei walked by him. He did pick up one bit of information and that the man was probably from Germany if the label on the inside of his jacket was anything to go by. A familiar bulge under their left arms told him that they were probably armed. Then as he went to put the paper bag that had held his lunch into the bin, he got a glimpse of a pearl handled Glock 19. That wasn’t good but at least he knew a bit more about the opposition.

Sergei found a bench near the old Town Hall/Museum and ate the baguette. All the time, he was watching the men out of the corner of his eye. They didn’t move or even try to blend in. That made Sergei sad but it told him a lot about the job that they were doing. As for Sergei, he hoped that he appeared to be just another worker who had escaped from an office cubicle for an hour to eat lunch. He knew that his clothing would not stand close scrutiny and resolved to buy something to wear that wasn’t so summery by the end of the day.

When he’d finished his lunch, Sergei returned to his hotel whereupon, he composed and sent an email to the mysterious man who’d made him travel almost a thousand miles just to watch two clowns at work.

“To my nemesis Uncle Vanya,
I am in Reading and have seen the two idiots that you have tailing ‘her’. They stand out like two sore thumbs. Get rid of them and let me do my job in my way and in my own time. If I see or hear of others doing the same (or worse) then I’m out of here and you can do your worst. As you claim to know everything about me, then you must know how I work and that is alone and in my own time, so why not let me do it eh? I can make this operation a success which is what you want isn’t it?

I will be waiting and watching. There had better be action and soon. If not, I will make a call to the Police and drop those two goons right in it. Going around with Glocks in shoulder holsters in the UK, is just silly. That’s a five-year minimum stretch. Got it?

Sergei.

“
After some further thought, he saved the message after deciding to watch and wait for another day. He was not someone who acted irrationally and he mentally scolded himself for even writing the email until he had more evidence. He didn’t know if the two goons were even part of ‘his’ operation. Sergei scolded himself for reacting in haste rather than in a planned and controlled way.

Sergei wandered down to the river Thames and walked from Reading Bridge to Caversham Bridge. It gave him time to think about the mysterious ‘Uncle Vanya’ and his promise to destroy his hideaway in Rouen. He had not heard of any incidents in the city so he checked the website of the local newspaper. There was no mention of any suspicious events other than a local man falling into the river and being rescued.

To Sergei, that was the first mistake that Uncle Vanya had made since he had embarked on this project to get Sergei to take out this young woman. If the roles had been reversed, Sergei would have had the place set on fire just to tell his target that he was serious about the contract. He always carried out his promises. It appears that this so called ‘Uncle Vanya’ did not.

[to be continued]

[1] SEAT : for those readers outside Europe, SEAT is the Spanish arm of Volkswagen.