She knew he was upset because he was speaking in Russian and he was trying to hide the slur in his voice.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Nothing," he lied.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm fine. Everything is fine. How are you?"

"I'm okay. It's morning here. I had my cla.s.s. Are you still in Ireland?"

"Yes."

"Where are you?"

"It is place called En-nis-kill-en," he said, sounding the difficult word in increments.

"What time is it there?"

"Night," he said and lapsed into silence.

A Boeing 777 air-braked on its final approach.

A police radio crackled.

Sun glinted off the pyramid at the Luxor a mile to the west on the Strip.

"Do you want me to call you back?" Marina asked.

"No. No. I will go to sleep now. I have an early start in the morning. I am so tried," he said.

Marina waited for the other shoe to drop. The confession. The tears. Sasha was an emotional man and Marina was his only outlet for these emotions. To everyone else he was Starshyna - the Sergeant - but to her he was Alexi Alexander, little Sasha of the golden hair.

Of course now he almost always shaved that hair "for the job".

A fire truck pulled noisily up outside to deal with the accident and she closed the balcony door.

"What's going on there?" he wondered.

"Nothing. It's paramedics. There was a car accident."

"Did you wear your bike helmet to the college?"

"Of course. And I always ride on the sidewalk anyway"

"Tropicana is bad street, many drunks," Sasha said in English.

She switched to English too. "Are you all right?" she asked.

There was another long pause.

"Yes, it was just, little tense."

"Have you been doing your stress ball? Remember Dr Keene, Sasha. Do your stress ball."

"I have been doing stress ball!" Markov snapped.

Marina said nothing and waited. She didn't have to wait long.

"There was an incident. An unpleasant incident," he said back in that Volgograd dialect of his.

"Are you hurt?"

Sasha muttered something that she couldn't get.

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm fine. Other people are hurt when they deal with me," he said. "Old f.u.c.k, old, interfering f.u.c.k. I should have cut his throat."

"But you didn't - you didn't hurt anyone that badly did you?" Marina asked.

Five thousand miles away in the Quality Hotel, in Enniskillen, Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, Sasha looked at the phone as if it had just bitten him. Did she really know? Was she still buying into this denial? She, who was so clever that she had graduated first in her English language cla.s.s and was now studying at the University of Nevada. Was he such a monster that she had to do this in order to live with him?

He smiled at the mirror above the writing desk in his hotel room.

Yeah, she did.

And worse, he had to play the game too when he was back with her. And no, not for her. For himself.

He shuddered, frowned, sat down on the edge of bed.

He bounced his rubber ball off the wall, but it didn't help.

The old woman had screamed so sickeningly.

The man had begged him.

He hadn't wanted to kill them.

Their daughter's f.u.c.k up was nothing to do with them.

No good deed went unpunished. He had let the old f.u.c.k in Carrickfergus live and because of that he had to kill three people.

It wasn't necessary. He would have made the husband talk eventually. If he'd been given the time. If the old f.u.c.k had only given him the time. That fool he had sent to do his dirty work for him. Barging through the door. Was that really the best they could do in this country? It was bulls.h.i.t. This country was bulls.h.i.t.

They thought they were tough? They thought they had had it hard?

They were spoiled.

"If you want to see the aftermath of a real civil war visit f.u.c.king Grozny sometime, a.s.sholes," he muttered inaudibly.

He thought of the boy with the parachute in the McDonald's.

And this time it came.

This time he didn't suppress it.

"Sasha?"

But he was there. Being herded out of the Tupelov by an officer with a drawn side arm. Jumping from 2000 metres with no live jump training because they always took the strips now or landed you in helicopters. A dozen of them falling from the sky. Screams, frantic pulling at cords. The ground coming to meet him, green and brown like a wet, lethal family dog. Accelerating towards him so fast, so eager to hug him, so eager to smash him to bits, to send his tibias through his kneecaps and into his skull.

Free fall. Open your eyes maggot, open your f.u.c.king eyes.

Clouds, apartment buildings, grey evil.

Yuri face's covered with blood. Yuri - his buddy. Falling with him. What the f.u.c.k had he done to himself?

Buildings.

Screams.

"The orange toggle," he remembered somebody somewhere saying once. A slurred voice, a drunken voice. He pulled the orange cord and the yelling next to him ceased, the drama around him displacing itself into a silent world.

They lost a quarter of the platoon.

Pancaked.

Worthless dead conscripts that n.o.body would ever miss.

The corporal, high on moonshine he'd brewed from boot polish, lived. The officer who'd "saved" the plane from Chechen AAA got promoted.

"Sasha?"

"I am still here."

"And you're sure that you're okay?"

"Yes," he said impatiently "You're not in any kind of trouble? Should I call Bernie?"

Sasha laughed. "No! You worry too much. Don't call Bernie. I just called because I wanted to hear your voice," he added.

"Well, here it is," she said.

"Tell me about your day, how was your cla.s.s?" he asked.

In Las Vegas Marina smiled. She told him about the cla.s.s, about who hadn't showed up, about what the professor had been wearing, about his talk on the tensile strength of I bars and how disappointed he had been that none of the Americans had understood calculus.

"But you understood it, didn't you?" Sasha said.

"Of course."

"What else?"

"Nothing else. I came home. I saw the accident. I saw Greghri."

"I like him, he is a good man, for a Lithuanian."

"Yes."

Sasha yawned. "I must go darling," he said.

"I love you."

"I love you too."

He blew a kiss down the phone and hung up.

Marina walked back out to the balcony and set the phone on the gla.s.s coffee table.

The accident in front of the Liberace Museum had finally been cleared away, much to the disappointment of a camera crew from Channel 7 who now had nothing to shoot.

He hadn't sounded that intoxicated, she told herself.

She sat down, sipped her tea and closed her eyes.

She crossed herself and prayed to St Andrew that Sasha wouldn't drink himself into oblivion and that he wouldn't do anything stupid, and finally that he would come home safe.

CHAPTER 11.

THE BIG SLEEP.

Killian watched from the car park until the hotel light went off. Earlier than he'd been expecting. The phone said 10.33 and the Fiesta clock said 10.42 which was probably more or less the same thing. He figured Ivan for a night owl, but he'd seen him knock back five bottles of Bud and five double vodkas in the hotel bar.

He'd seen him go outside and bounce a rubber ball up and down ten times and then go back inside and get two more double vodkas.

A lot of booze and the fella was skinny...

He'd give him half an hour to toss and turn and take a p.i.s.s before he'd try anything.

The rain had stopped. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes. The dead rising from their graves. The f.u.c.king rain had stopped.