The Pure

handle. Swiftly, Avner and Uzi searched the Poles, taking their knives and lining them up on the table. They gagged them and handcuffed them with plastic cords. Then, gripping Andrzej by the hair, Uzi removed his disguise, peeling off his beard and moustache and tossing his cap and glasses to the floor.
    ‘Remember me?’ he said in Russian. ‘Oh I forgot, you can’t see very well at the moment. Don’t worry, you will soon.’ Andrzej, behind his gag, gurgled. His skin and eyes were crimson from the acid-laced beer. Uzi struck him a blow across the face and left him to his muffled moaning sounds on the floor. ‘I am your Russian master. Nobody fucks with me. I want you to remember that.’ Andrzej shook his head feverishly as Uzi turned away, coldness pouring from his eyes, heat raging inside him.
    Avner left the room and Uzi jammed the door closed again behind him. Then he turned towards the three Poles, who were slumped against the red drapes like dolls. He raised his gun. Three pairs of bloodshot eyes stared out blindly. ‘I have a gun in my hand,’ he said, ‘and I need some target practice.’ One soiled himself, then the other. Not Andrzej, though. Not yet.
    From his rucksack, Uzi took several rolls of brown packing tape. This was a technique he had picked up from the Christian militias in Lebanon, but he’d never had to use it. Until now. He started with Andrzej, winding the packing tape around one of his ankles. The man kicked frantically, and Uzi struck him in the groin, wincing with pain from the wound in his shoulder. As Andrzej writhed in pain, Uzi wrapped the packing tape around both of his ankles, binding them together, then around his feet, and up his legs, leaving no gaps, layer upon layer. Andrzej struggled, but it was too late. Uzi carried on, up and up, passing the roll of tape from hand to hand under his body, until he reached his neck. The brown tape covered his chin and mouth. Then his nose, eyes, hair. Uzi peeled back the tape around his nostrils to prevent him from suffocating. All that was left was a man-shaped shining parcel, glistening like wood in the gloom. Uzi stepped back and stared at the other two men. Their faces were shiny and sore from the acid. He picked up another roll of tape.
    It took Uzi and Avner some time to get all three ‘parcels’ out of the window, down the fire escape and into the van. Uzi’s injuries made it difficult; it was as if being in the presence of the people who had stabbed him was causing his wounds to smart. The men were arranged in rows in the back of the van. They made no noise. Then Avner gunned the engine and they threaded through the night-time traffic in the direction of the M1.
    ‘A job well done,’ said Avner in Russian, still full of adrenaline. He threw back his head and laughed.
    ‘It’s not over yet,’ said Uzi in the same language. He reached into his rucksack, pulled out a CD and slid it into the machine.
    ‘What’s that?’ asked Avner as the sound of strident classical music swelled.
    ‘Mily Balakirev,’ said Uzi, ‘the most Russian of Russian composers.’ He turned it up louder. ‘A little psychological flourish for our Polish cargo.’
    The van, one vehicle among hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, crept under the dystopian network of uplit flyovers at Staples Corner and pulled into an all-night car wash, music still blasting. Long fluffy cylinders fell softly on the bonnet, climbed over the windscreen and spread tendrils of foam across the van. Uzi and Avner lit cigarettes, breathed ropes of smoke through their noses. On the front and back bumpers, the water covered the false number plates. As a result of contact with the soap the top layer cracked. The fragments slipped, eroded and gradually dissolved, exposing a second set of number plates below, another false identity. The wash cycle finished. Avner steered the van out of the carwash and back on to the road. Uzi looked in the rear-view mirror, all around; nothing untoward could be seen. But he could feel it. He’d felt it all night. They were being watched.

 
11
    Adam stepped out of the white Mercedes and laid eyes for the first time on the prime minister’s summer residence. Now he knew for certain what he was dealing with, and this only heightened the tension. There was only one organisation based here. Everybody knew it. Its name was legendary. The massive, whitewashed building, set on a hill and surrounded with every luxury imaginable, was the seat of