action.
The foresight rested on the centre of mass and I finished my squeeze. The trigger went back. The round kicked off.
I didn’t check to see where my round had hit. I’d find out soon enough when I retrieved the target. I just carried on firing, bringing the weapon down, then slowly up again into the same point of aim.
The only negative about coming down to Gunslingers was that it gave me itchy feet. Not to get out of Moscow, or away from Anna – far from it. But there was only so much reading, art and opera you could take in one burst. If I wanted to get out there again, it wasn’t because I needed the money. There was still plenty of that left. If Anna had taught me one thing, it was that money isn’t everything. It certainly wasn’t her motivation. It was easy for me to say that money wasn’t mine now that I had plenty of it, but I was starting to understand why Anna did what she did. Besides, going away for a bit of work the next time Anna was on a trip would make me want to come back to her and Moscow even more.
I squeezed off round after round, no double taps, just slow-time singles, making sure my skills and my eye were still in. I was in no rush. I’d bang out a couple of mags, clean my weapon, and take a walk home to get stuck into a bit of Punishment .
4
09.45 hrs
THE COFFEE SHOP was further down the corridor, in an area that looked as if it had once been a Cold War nuclear bunker. The new owners had given it a complete makeover. It was warm and welcoming, and did a good trade in coffee and a roaring one in vodka and Baltika beer. Nobody saw a problem with customers having a few looseners before they picked up a weapon.
There wasn’t one Moscow bar or coffee shop that was what it seemed. Once you were in, they didn’t want you to leave. Almost every bar doubled as a restaurant, a bowling alley, snooker hall, casino, bookshop or, in this case, a gun club. Moscow is so huge and cabs are so expensive that bar owners want their customers to have everything they could possibly want from dawn till dusk – and on from dusk till dawn.
I’d only been to Gunslingers a couple of times in the evening, and only because Anna said I should see Moscow when the cash was really being flashed. All of a sudden there were dancing girls, acrobats and laser light shows. Buying a table, which I didn’t, but which gave you guaranteed entrance, a place to sit and a bar-tab, cost five thousand dollars. That was cheap; in some places it could be more than twenty thousand.
There were about five others in the bar that morning. Leather jackets weren’t back in vogue as it wasn’t yet spring. For now it was anything that was thick and padded.
At night, it was wall-to-wall Prada. The clubbers I’d seen were a mix of the beautiful, the rich, the well-connected, and those who wanted to be – mostly models, hookers, and girls with cocaine sparkling in their eyes as they scoped the room for ‘sponsors’. And there were always plenty of wealthy men offering.
I was watching one of the six huge plasma screens hung around the walls. Two of them were linked to the ranges, so you could watch people trying to shoot under the influence. The first two tourists to come into view were German, judging by the flags sewn onto their parkas. They had that comfortable look about them, with premature beer bellies and thick moustaches.
The screen I was watching was linked to the English news channel on Russia Today. The girls always made sure it was on for me at ten a.m. so I could watch Anna’s first report of the day. I never had a clue what she said because the sound was kept down, but that didn’t matter. I could see that she was alive, and that she didn’t have loads of holes in her. You could tell that she loved what she was doing, even in the middle of a war zone.
I was a bit early today. The screen was filled with images of Japanese military helicopters dropping water on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they tried to
The foresight rested on the centre of mass and I finished my squeeze. The trigger went back. The round kicked off.
I didn’t check to see where my round had hit. I’d find out soon enough when I retrieved the target. I just carried on firing, bringing the weapon down, then slowly up again into the same point of aim.
The only negative about coming down to Gunslingers was that it gave me itchy feet. Not to get out of Moscow, or away from Anna – far from it. But there was only so much reading, art and opera you could take in one burst. If I wanted to get out there again, it wasn’t because I needed the money. There was still plenty of that left. If Anna had taught me one thing, it was that money isn’t everything. It certainly wasn’t her motivation. It was easy for me to say that money wasn’t mine now that I had plenty of it, but I was starting to understand why Anna did what she did. Besides, going away for a bit of work the next time Anna was on a trip would make me want to come back to her and Moscow even more.
I squeezed off round after round, no double taps, just slow-time singles, making sure my skills and my eye were still in. I was in no rush. I’d bang out a couple of mags, clean my weapon, and take a walk home to get stuck into a bit of Punishment .
4
09.45 hrs
THE COFFEE SHOP was further down the corridor, in an area that looked as if it had once been a Cold War nuclear bunker. The new owners had given it a complete makeover. It was warm and welcoming, and did a good trade in coffee and a roaring one in vodka and Baltika beer. Nobody saw a problem with customers having a few looseners before they picked up a weapon.
There wasn’t one Moscow bar or coffee shop that was what it seemed. Once you were in, they didn’t want you to leave. Almost every bar doubled as a restaurant, a bowling alley, snooker hall, casino, bookshop or, in this case, a gun club. Moscow is so huge and cabs are so expensive that bar owners want their customers to have everything they could possibly want from dawn till dusk – and on from dusk till dawn.
I’d only been to Gunslingers a couple of times in the evening, and only because Anna said I should see Moscow when the cash was really being flashed. All of a sudden there were dancing girls, acrobats and laser light shows. Buying a table, which I didn’t, but which gave you guaranteed entrance, a place to sit and a bar-tab, cost five thousand dollars. That was cheap; in some places it could be more than twenty thousand.
There were about five others in the bar that morning. Leather jackets weren’t back in vogue as it wasn’t yet spring. For now it was anything that was thick and padded.
At night, it was wall-to-wall Prada. The clubbers I’d seen were a mix of the beautiful, the rich, the well-connected, and those who wanted to be – mostly models, hookers, and girls with cocaine sparkling in their eyes as they scoped the room for ‘sponsors’. And there were always plenty of wealthy men offering.
I was watching one of the six huge plasma screens hung around the walls. Two of them were linked to the ranges, so you could watch people trying to shoot under the influence. The first two tourists to come into view were German, judging by the flags sewn onto their parkas. They had that comfortable look about them, with premature beer bellies and thick moustaches.
The screen I was watching was linked to the English news channel on Russia Today. The girls always made sure it was on for me at ten a.m. so I could watch Anna’s first report of the day. I never had a clue what she said because the sound was kept down, but that didn’t matter. I could see that she was alive, and that she didn’t have loads of holes in her. You could tell that she loved what she was doing, even in the middle of a war zone.
I was a bit early today. The screen was filled with images of Japanese military helicopters dropping water on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they tried to
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