Chapter Text
Bonn, West Germany, 1955
Marya hated staying late at the embassy. It was a drafty old building, with too-high ceilings and never enough heat. Every sound echoed too much and played tricks on her mind, making her think the clacking of her typewriter was coming from the staircase. It made her nervous. Her desk looked across the room at a large window, allowing anyone who walked along the street outside to gaze in and look right at her. A new building was under construction a little ways across town that would afford everyone much more privacy, and up-to-date insulation and heating, but Marya was just part of a typing pool for one of the diplomatic counselors so she and her co-workers weren’t likely to be moved from their somewhat dilapidated fish bowl any time soon. All the other girls had gone home already, and Marya knew she was already too late for the last bus to get her back to her apartment.
Her boss, Mr Aston, was in a meeting with Major Scharf, from the brand spanking new West German Foreign Ministry. Such meetings had become a regular occurrence, often running well past office hours, and little of anything concrete ever seemed to come of them. What exactly they talked about wasn’t clear, if there were ever minutes taken of those meetings, Marya never laid eyes on them.
Major Scharf was something of a self-important creep. He’d arrive late for his meetings and perch himself on Marya’s desk and spend an unbearably long time peering at her blouse before Mr Aston would be forced to come and collect him with an unimpressed expression. Scharf had been made a major in the Great War, in the trenches, before joining the civil service in the 20s. What exactly he’d done between then and now, and how important he’d been in the government was a matter of some debate. Scharf had been a member of the Nazi Party, but not such an ambitious or successful one that the Allies had felt the need to charge or punish him during the occupation.
Mr Aston’s office door opened, revealing he and Scharf shaking hands and agreeing to see each other in a few days’ time, same as they always did. It had become normal by now too for Marya to still be at her desk, making sure to finish whatever task she’d deliberately started too late in the day. Mr Aston always looked at her with a combination of concern and annoyance but Scharf never appeared bothered by her lingering presence. Scharf headed towards the exit, turning his head to leer at her.
“Still here, Fräulein? Mustn’t work too hard, now. I’m sure there’s a young man waiting for you at home. And if there isn’t, well… ” He gave her no chance to reply or retort, but winked at her and strode smugly through the door. Marya shuddered as she imagined Scharf waiting for her outside the embassy.
“As a matter of fact, there is a young man, isn’t there?” Mr Aston asked, still standing in the doorway of his office and looking out of the window. “It won’t do to keep him waiting.”
“Oh, I’m nearly finished, sir!” Marya replied sweetly, making a show of pulling the completed page from her typewriter. “Was there anything else you needed me to do?”
Mr Aston looked pensive for a moment, then held up a small stack of paper with a list of names and addresses on top. He walked over and placed them on Marya’s in-tray. “That’s a list of visa applicants who need to be sent those forms. But it can wait.” He tapped the stack of paper, clearing his throat and seeming somewhat twitchy. “I, uh, I’m almost finished myself. You head on home and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir. Good night.” Marya smiled steadily until Mr Aston returned to his office. He turned to look at her once again. She firmly, slowly, stapled a few sheets of paper together and placed them in her out-tray. If Mr Aston got the impression she was stalling, he said nothing and closed the door behind him.
Marya immediately fished out a small camera from her purse and photographed the top page of the stack, the list of the names and addresses of the applicants. She hurriedly put it back, making as much noise as humanly possible out of putting her purse on the desk and reapplying her lipstick, then scraping her chair on the floor as she stood up and put her coat on. She heard the telltale thunk of Mr Aston putting something inside his safe - whatever else Major Scharf had felt the need to give him - and took that as a sign to make herself scarce.
She walked sharply to the door, turning the hallway light off, and stepping out onto the dim, dreary street. The 17th century architecture of the embassy building and its neighbours did their best to block what little light remained in early autumn. A steady drizzle was settling over the town which would have soaked Marya through, if not for the large umbrella waiting in Erik’s hand just a few steps outside the door.
The other girls in the office seethed with jealousy that in the few months she’d been there, Marya had managed to snag herself a German boyfriend. Erik was tall and slim, with a handsome face and bright blue eyes. He spoke English very well and made sure to take Marya out for dinner several times a week. That those outings only ever took place on the evenings that Major Scharf came to visit the office escaped everyone else’s notice. Erik wasn’t any run of the mill suitor. He wasn’t even really her boyfriend, though that matter had become more complicated. He was, in actual fact, an agent of Mossad, Israeli intelligence, charged with gathering information on possible Nazis trying to escape trial by emigrating. The CIA had lost its interest in hunting down war criminals in the face of the rising communist threat from the Soviets, something which left a bad taste in Marya’s mouth and made it all the easier for Erik to convince her to sneak him information.
“Any luck?” Erik whispered in her ear as he pressed a kiss to her cheek.
“Just the usual,” she answered, somewhat on the loud side and making perhaps a bigger show than necessary of cuddling into Erik. “Are we going somewhere for dinner?”
“Of course, you must be famished. Let’s go.” Erik got the hint and held out his arm for her to take. As they walked away from the embassy building, Marya was sure she saw a car that looked exactly like the one belonging to Major Scharf finally pull away from the curb across the road.
Marya and Erik had originally simply posed as a young couple, their dates little more than handovers of information and instructions. But given enough walks in the park and trips to the cinema, the line between cover story and reality tended to blur. It was made significantly easier to appear as smitten little things, barely capable of keeping their hands off one another, if it were at least partly true. There were no gushing declarations of love, or promises of forever, but their kisses were not empty. And neither was Erik’s bed.
Marya sat up, Erik’s shirt draped around her but unbuttoned, and looked over at the desk by the window. Erik was sitting in nothing but his boxers, and smoking whilst holding up Marya’s most recent photo negatives to the desklamp.
“Anything useful?”
Erik shrugged. “Yes and no. The names will get looked into. No doubt if they’re sniffing around Scharf to get their visas fast-tracked it’s for a reason. But nothing specific.”
“You mean you’re looking for someone specific and I haven’t found them yet.”
She hadn’t meant to sound so dejected but it had become a little frustrating to be fishing around for something and not even know what it was. She was only supposed to be Erik’s source, not his partner in espionage, so if there was some grand master plan, he wasn’t sharing it with her. Erik, hearing her tone, abandoned the negatives and put out his cigarette. He climbed back onto the bed and pressed a kiss to her cheek, then her jaw, her neck, collarbone, laying her back down.
“You’re doing just fine,” he said in between kisses. “You want as much plausible deniability as you can get.”
Marya hummed noncommittally, pretending to ignore Erik and his hand tickling up her side. Deciding that being sultry was getting him nowhere, Erik gave up and laid down beside her, propping his head up with one hand.
“I’m looking for patterns,” he explained. “Where does Scharf send people? Are they connected to each other as well as him? There are specific names I want to find but I’d be lying if I said I expected them to come up in your office. They’re probably long gone already but figuring out if there’s a pattern might help trace them later on.”
“Besides - ” he placed his hand around her waist, slowly, softly caressing her skin with his thumb, then he leant down to place a kiss just above her breast. “ - I’d be reassigned if the job were over. Surely you’re not so keen to be rid of me?”
“Not yet, no,” Marya teased, smirking and reaching across to run her fingers through Erik’s pretty chestnut hair. It pained her to think about life after Erik. They’d never talked about what would happen when their connection was over, when he no longer needed her to access the embassy. By rights they were only meant to be pretending to be together. It felt dangerous to ask. In her silliest fantasies Marya imagined the pair of them running away into the sunset, to Israel, or wherever Erik was assigned, to a life full of light and free entirely of the shadows of war or nazism. But mostly she knew that wasn’t happening, or even possible, keeping herself and her heart in limbo.
Erik sighed and laid on his back, pulling Marya with him to lay her head on his chest. They’d fall asleep this way, as usual. “You’re thinking so hard I can feel it, Mari.” He only used that nickname when he was relaxed, never in front of others and never while they were working. It was a name for these soft moments in between waking and dreaming. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
He ran his fingers along the small of her back, tickling and tantalising. Marya pondered a while longer, unsure how to voice the pull of something unknown.
“I think there’s something in the safe,” Marya explained. “Scharf gives Mr Aston something that he puts in the safe. I don’t know what, but it happens every time. And whatever it is makes Mr Aston twitchy.”
“You think Scharf is bribing him?” Erik asked. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
There was plenty of money flowing in West Germany these days, but it wasn’t obvious why Scharf would need to bribe an American diplomat to get visas handed out faster. Anyone with skills the US could use would be taken, and a blind eye cast over any previous associations or hangovers from the war: chemists, physicists, weapons developers, aircraft engineers, anyone that could be put to work in America’s building belligerence against the Soviet Union. The Nazi regime had left behind plenty of men like that, who were rapidly blending themselves back into German society. Perhaps now that West Germany had regained its sovereignty, no longer occupied by other nations, some of those former Nazis - for whom the ‘former’ was nothing but a politically prudent suffix - had felt a creeping fear of being sniffed out and saw America as a land where they could still hide behind their skills.
Erik had long since infiltrated Scharf’s own office at the Foreign Ministry and found little of interest. Any paperwork that implicated Scharf or anyone of his acquaintance in so much as a traffic ticket, nevermind anything connecting them to any Nazi organisations, had been hidden or destroyed. Perhaps it was too fanciful to think those things might now be contained in Counselor Aston’s office safe, but something was.
“If you ever get a chance to have a look in the safe…” Erik said, gazing pensively at the ceiling. “... or better yet, a chance to let me in for a look, we’ll take it. If there’s nothing worth worrying about we’ll just put it back and Aston will be none the wiser. But don’t go getting yourself in trouble, hm?”
“Even if I could get you in, I don’t know the passcode for the safe,” Marya replied.
“Let me worry about the safe.”
Marya supposed he must know how to crack safe codes, or open them some other way; he sounded so confident.
“Did you know Scharf? Before…” she asked, nodding at Erik’s left arm. The careless writing of his tattoo was blurred and stretched now that Erik was a man and not the boy he’d been when it was forced upon him. Erik wore long sleeves in public even on the hottest summer days but had long since done away with hiding it from her; members of Marya’s own family, albeit ones she’d never met, had perished too, perhaps even in the same place as Erik had been held prisoner. But it so obviously hurt Erik to talk about it, so Marya left it alone most of the time.
“Yes,” Erik replied, barely containing a sneer. “Though I doubt he’d do me the courtesy of remembering me.”
Marya couldn’t help but wonder if, in the end, Erik was just waiting for Scharf to make a mistake; like a wolf waiting for one sheep to fall behind. When that happened, would Erik kill him? He was an intelligence agent, no doubt he had some sort of training for it, but would he? When Erik thought about things that made him angry he became cold and sharp and standoffish, but not violent.
Marya had, of course, only known the man for a couple of months. Her mother had impressed upon her a need to see a man lose his temper before she married him, not that that was on the cards any time soon. But she’d told her parents back in the States that she was seeing someone, omitting the truth of who Erik really was, and had been bombarded by advice. That was the only piece of wisdom that had stuck with her. She’d scarcely seen Erik snap at anything, though they weren’t attached at the hip all day.
Erik chuckled, a deep, warm, rumbling noise that Marya could feel in his chest beneath her.
“What’s gotten into you today, hm?” he asked, resting his head back on the pillow and letting his eyes drift closed. “You’re getting in too deep. ‘You are not obligated to complete the work...’”
“‘But neither are you free to desist from it,’ I know,” Marya finished. She sighed and tucked herself deeper into Erik’s side, closing her eyes and trying to force her brain to switch off. None of it was anything she could solve from there just by thinking about it. She had to hope that her small efforts would, in the long run, help others to achieve something greater.
Erik bid her goodnight and pressed a kiss to her head. She peeked her eyes open for just a moment. She must have been sleepier than she realised: she hadn’t felt Erik move to switch off the bedside light but the room was now blanketed in darkness.
It continued this way for a few more weeks: Scharf would come and go, Marya would take sneaky photos of the paperwork he left behind, and Erik would take the information and pass it on to Mossad. Marya had never actually witnessed that part but her negatives would disappear into Erik’s pocket and be replaced with fresh film by the time she was getting up for work the next day.
Autumn progressed, the nights drew in closer, the mornings became foggy and crisp and Marya celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday. Erik had gifted her a new purse, one that she had cooed over in a shop window some weeks earlier. It was a round canister shape, in a vivid turquoise leather with a silver clasp. At the time Erik teased her, describing it as ‘eye-watering’ in colour and just screaming to be stolen but he had, upon presenting it to her on the morning of her birthday, relented that the hard sides would better disguise the little camera she carried around than her old one did. Marya had waved away his practical prevaricating; if all he’d wanted was for her to have a purse that hid the camera, he could have bought her any old thing and not the fashionable, expensive bag he knew she liked. It became her prized possession, earning Erik plenty of kisses and taking up a near permanent space on her desk at work for all the other girls to envy.
If anything ever came of the details Marya was copying, she never heard of it. All the various names and addresses remained about as scintillating as a phonebook to her. Were their visas rejected? She never heard about any of them being arrested by the West German government. Perhaps Mossad would simply wait until an opportune moment and assassinate them, though of course she never heard about anything like that either. She wasn’t sure quite what she was waiting to happen, a moment to reveal all the past crimes the US was now ignoring, or a bubble-bursting piece of information that would send important heads rolling?
When the moment finally came, and Marya’s hunch proved right, it turned out not to be quite what she’d hoped for.
President Eisenhower called the Ambassador, which lasted half the afternoon. And the Ambassador then called a meeting with his counselors, including Mr Aston, that sucked up what remained of the day. The older, more experienced women in the office were called upon to take minutes and to furnish the meeting with tea and coffee. And Marya was left at her desk to make what little headway she could on the work that the others left behind. She felt a little put-out at being excluded from whatever was happening, but was soon presented with an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
“Marya! I, uh, need you to call Major Scharf and cancel my meeting with him today,” Mr Aston instructed, handing her a business card with a phone number scribbled on it in pencil. “I don’t know how late I’m going to run and he always likes to drag it out anyway.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Uh, reschedule for the same time next week, if you can. And tell him sorry for the short notice.”
“Yes, sir.”
Marya waited for any more instructions, her mind whirring at the possibilities, but Mr Aston just watched her back. After an awkward, empty few seconds, he cleared his throat.
“Get it done as soon as possible, please,” he asked, looking pointedly at Marya.
“Of course,” she replied, making a show of rolling her chair to the side of her desk with the phone, away from Mr Aston, and slowly picking up the receiver and beginning to dial the number. Mr Aston, seemingly placated, nodded gratefully at her and turned to rush up the stairs, leaving Marya alone in the office.
Once he was out of earshot, before she finished dialing, she hung up the phone. She opened her purse and pulled out her address book and pen, and then abandoned her desk for Mr Aston’s office. She made sure to close the door as quietly as possible, not that there was anyone downstairs to take notice of her, and sat at Mr Aston’s large, heavy, antique desk. Everything on it was nicer than hers; the notepaper, the fountain pens, the sleek black telephone. Marya brought the receiver to her ear and this time finished dialing Scharf’s office number. After a short, clean-cut conversation with Scharf’s secretary - in Marya’s heavily accented German - she hung up and scrawled a note of the rescheduled meeting time on the thick-grained notepaper for Mr Aston to read later.
Marya took a steadying breath. Then she flicked through her address book and found the telephone number Erik had given her for his apartment. She didn’t actually know he was going to be there but it was her only option. The call rang several times, long enough that she assumed Erik was out but just as she was about to hang up and change tactics, he answered.
“Erik, it’s me,” Marya whispered. “Listen, Mr Aston cancelled his meeting with Scharf, and he’s going to be upstairs all afternoon. I’m in his office right now, I’m going to look for the safe passcode. How fast can you get over here?”
Erik gave her quick instructions: open the office window for him to climb in; don’t bother looking for the safe code. That puzzled Marya because, short of blowing the safe up, without the code she had no idea how to open the damn thing, which was the entire point of this endeavour that would surely get her fired, or arrested, if they were caught. Erik dismissed that concern, confident he could get into the safe on his own, and with that she hung up the call.
By now Marya was very familiar with Erik’s voice; it was undeniably him but there was something stilted and robotic about his tone that seemed off to her. Like someone had flipped a switch and she was talking exclusively to the Mossad agent and not her Erik.
She opened the window closest to the back of the office a few inches, enough for Erik to reach in and open it further by himself, and then returned to the desk. She began pulling open all the drawers, as silently as she could for such an old piece of furniture, looking for anything, little notebooks, scraps of paper, old business cards, that might have the passcode written on them. She found not even a hint.
Just as she was weighing the risks of taking apart Mr Aston’s framed photographs to see if there was anything hidden in the back of them, there came a tapping noise at the window. She whirled around so see Erik, with a cocky smirk on his face, waving through the glass. Marya moved to open the window further and let him in, but he reached under and, with surprising ease and fluidity, pushed the old sash window up and hoisted himself in.
“Next time you raid someone’s office, close the shutters,” he teased, pressing a kiss to Marya’s cheek. “Find anything?”
“No, sorry.”
“Not to worry.” Erik walked over to the safe, held up on a short wooden table on the other side of the room. While it wasn’t the sort of devilish contraption out of a spy novel, it was still constructed of several inches of steel plate that would prove tricky to dismantle and they only had so long before someone, anyone, ventured back downstairs and discovered them.
To hammer that home, they heard a rolling sound come from directly above them - someone pushing their office chair along the boards of the floor above - and they both jerked their heads up in surprise. The clock was ticking.
“Well? What’s your super duper plan, then?” Marya hissed, the beginning of panic edging into her voice. “I still don’t know the code.”
Erik threaded the fingers on both his hands together and stretched, cracking his knuckles, then held his hands up to the safe door, hovering about six inches away from it.
“I don’t need the code.” He said. He frowned hard at the safe, biting his bottom lip, his hands starting to shake. There was a rumble, and the safe began to rattle and vibrate, the pen left on top of it rolling off onto the floor. Marya tried to take a step back from whatever Erik was doing, but she found her earrings pulling on her skin. As if they were stuck in place, or being dragged towards a giant magnet.
“H-how are you doing that?” Marya must be going mad, or dreaming. The drawers on the desk burst open, pulled along by their brass fittings, and the filing cabinet scooted inwards towards Erik. Marya couldn’t help but let out a squeak. Erik held nothing in his hands or in his pockets, no device that could do this. He was just standing there, focusing on the safe.
Finally, Erik let out a gasp and there was a clunk from the safe, its handle spun and the door fell open. It wasn’t broken, no smoke or steam came from the lock. It was just as if Erik had unlocked the safe, only without touching it. He made the metal move on its own.
He offered her no explanation of what just happened and wasted no time before rummaging through the contents of the safe, pulling out quite a few manila folders and handing them over to Marya. He picked up and checked a couple of passports, throwing them back into the safe with disinterest, and he completely ignored the hefty stack of deutsche marks. Deciding that everything even remotely relevant had been removed, Erik abandoned the safe and came around the other side of the desk to where Marya had started laying out the different documents to make them quicker and easier to read and evaluate. The folders themselves proved disturbingly easy: they were SS personnel files, branded with all the old Nazi symbols. Their existence was damning enough for Marya but Erik quickly checked all the names and photographs: he was looking for someone in particular. But that person remained elusive, or at least clever enough not to let their SS file end up in the US embassy.
Marya began to wonder if she wasn’t in over her head. Was Mr Aston in on this? Or was Scharf bribing or blackmailing Mr Aston into keeping these secret, sending these people somewhere to evade justice? Perhaps this was evidence he was collecting against Scharf? The whole thing was suddenly so much bigger than just Marya and Erik. But he didn’t seem to be going through the same epiphany as she was; he was an Israeli intelligence agent, of course he wasn’t. But if they were caught or found out, Marya would be the one arrested on charges of espionage, even treason. Erik had never actually said he’d be able to protect her from any of that, just like he hadn’t said what would happen between them after his mission was over.
Erik froze. He’d moved on from the actual personnel files to the various letters and telegrams that went with them. Marya could read German but not as fast as Erik, so it took her a few thunderous heartbeats to catch up, reading over his shoulder. It was a letter recommending one particular man, scarcely a decade older than them, to an on-going project in New Mexico, based on his work done previously with a doctor stationed somewhere ‘in the east.’ While it certainly implied some thoroughly unpleasant things, it never came straight out and said it. But Erik didn’t seem bothered by that. In fact, he hardly seemed to care at all about the letter itself. He was staring hard at the address under the signature of one ‘Dr Klaus Schmidt.’
There was something in Erik’s face, the look in his eyes, that was very far away. Like he was planning something out in his head, seeing a way to something that he never thought he’d get. He wasn’t moving, just staring at the page like it held everything he’d ever wanted.
“Erik?” Marya whispered. He didn’t even seem to hear her.
Marya heard a soft click behind her and turned. Fear bolted through her entire body as she saw Major Scharf standing by the door and aiming a pistol at Erik’s back. Marya’s hand grabbed hold of Erik’s sleeve but he didn’t pay her any notice, still engrossed in the paperwork.
“Herr Scharf! I- I thought we’d rescheduled the meeting for next week?” Marya asked, pleadingly. She hadn’t heard him come in the front door, or opening the office one.
Scharf seemed unperturbed, almost like he’d been expecting to find them rifling through the safe. “Yes, you did, Fräulein. And if you’d left well enough alone, I’d have simply pretended to be a senile old man who forgot. I knew I was being watched, you see. I just didn’t realise it was you, too.”
He slowly walked forward, scowling at Erik. “You’re such a lovely young girl, Marya. It’s a pity you had to go and get involved with trash like him.”
Erik finally turned, dropping the folders on the desk, and casually looking around at Scharf. Behind them, the lock on the office door clicked shut on its own. Erik smiled but it was unpleasant and frightening, never reaching his eyes. He strolled slowly across the office, as if Scharf was someone he’d just bumped into and not a Nazi holding him at gunpoint.
“Ah, Major. It’s been such a long time. I suppose the war was kinder to you than it was to me,” he said. He stopped only about a metre away from Scharf’s pistol. If Scharf pulled the trigger, Erik wouldn’t stand a chance. But there was something about his face, his posture, and the way the whole room had shuddered when he’d opened the safe, that made Marya wonder if Erik wasn’t much more dangerous than Scharf ever could be.
Scharf squinted at him, not quite sharing in the feelings of reunion that Erik clearly had. “Who are you?”
Erik stepped even closer, the barrel of the gun practically touching his head. “To you? I’m nobody.”
Scharf’s pistol shook in his hand nearly uncontrollably, with Scharf doing his best to hold it steady. He looked from Erik to the gun and back again, unsure what was happening, if Erik was doing this. The magazine unclipped itself and went clattering to the floor.
Erik looked smug. “You don’t remember me, of course. Why would you? I was nothing to you then, less than nothing. But you might remember, Major, that there was once a man who saved your wretched life. A man who later came to you for help, which you refused him.”
“J-Jakob?” Scharf began putting two and two together, recalling a little boy cowering on the pavement. “He was a Jew and a trickster! Whatever degenerate con he pulled to make me owe him I paid back. I could have just stood by and watched them shoot him like a dog in the street, but I let him get away with his life.” Scharf tsked. “Just postponing the inevitable, I suppose. I should have let them shoot you too.”
Erik snapped in an instant: he grabbed hold of Scharf’s wrist and wrenched his arm in the wrong direction. Scharf let out a wail and dropped the pistol, which hit the ground with a bang that sent Marya huddling into the corner as far away from either man as she could get, but without the magazine it couldn’t fire. Erik then elbowed Scharf across the face and hooked his foot around the man’s ankle, sweeping Scharf off his feet and crashing to the floor. Any attempt Scharf might have made at getting back up was curtailed by Erik reaching his hand out and every piece of metal - his watch, his belt, his cufflinks, the glasses in his pocket, the fillings in his teeth - pinned him down. Erik knelt down, straddling the old man, grabbed hold of his collar and leaned his whole weight onto Scharf’s collarbone. Gone was the charming young man Marya knew, replaced with a snarling monster.
“It should have been you! You would be dead in a ditch in France if not for my father, and you paid him back by letting him die in a ditch in Poland, instead! After suffering,” Erik swung down as hard as he could, with sickening cracks of Scharf’s face breaking underneath him, “after starving,” again, “after bleeding for a homeland that didn’t even want him!” and again, and again.
Erik sat back to catch his breath, his hair all out of place and his hand caked in blood. From her corner, Marya could see his animalistic expression. She was unsure if Erik even remembered where he was or what they’d been doing, and she forced herself to keep as still as possible, to not make a sound, for fear of that horrible mania being pointed in her direction.
Scharf’s face was unrecognisable, the old man no longer even struggling to fight back, choking on his own blood.
Erik got up off of Scharf’s prone body and held his hand out towards the pistol now lying halfway across the room. It obligingly floated up into the air and hovered over Scharf’s face. The magazine made its own way back into the gun, clicking decisively into place. Erik never put his hands on it and the hammer pulled back of its own accord.
“I have bigger fish to fry than you, Scharf. I’ll track them down, even if it takes me my whole life, but rest assured that I won’t hesitate to kill each and every bullying parasite that I find along the way. There’s nowhere the likes of you can hide where I won’t find you.”
Erik clenched his fist and the pistol fired.
The sound made Marya’s ears ring. There was no doubt that the ambassador and everyone else still upstairs had heard it and would come looking, but Marya couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t blink. All she could do was stare at the battered corpse on the floor and the flood of red spreading across the tiles, while Erik tidied himself up and gathered up the files.
He stepped into Marya’s field of vision, blocking the sight of Scharf, and she let out a whimper. She couldn’t bear to look at Erik, or whoever possessed him.
“Marya?” he started, and held out his hand for her to take. He would take her with him, like she’d wanted, but the thought of touching him now made her feel sick. She shook her head, unsure if she should beg him not to hurt her.
Erik sighed, disappointed and even a little hurt, and left her there.
Marya heard the door unlock and open, and prised her eyes open. Erik walked swiftly, stepping over Scharf’s body, and out towards the front door. As he passed by her desk, he waved: the silver clasp on her purse opened and the camera she’d kept in there flew out and into his waiting hand.
No sooner than Erik had left her line of sight, out of her life in a few brutal moments, did Marya let loose a bone-deep, blood-curdling scream. And she kept on screaming, crying, wailing, even as she saw Mr Aston and the others running down the stairs.