Fit For Purpose by Julian Parrott (novels for students .TXT) 📕

of the nose. The Russian put his hands up to his face as blood gushed between the fingers of the cupped hands over his nose, he groaned and staggered into the alley. Gagnon turned quickly to face the second man who was reaching into his coat. Gagnon was surprised when the hand that came from the coat held an evil looking knife rather than a gun. Gagnon smiled and pulled the paring knife from a jury-rigged cardboard scabbard from under his belt at the base of his spine.

“You want to do this, fucker?” Gagnon asked, again smiling with a confidence he didn’t really feel.

The Russian smiled back, showing surprisingly good teeth, and moved towards Gagnon. Gagnon felt himself being grabbed from behind. He immediately thrust his head back connecting again with the first Russian’s already broken nose. This time, the Russian groaned in pain and went down and stayed down. Gagnon swung to face the knife man, saw the blade a moment too late and felt it sting across his chest. Instinctively he thrust his own knife somewhat blindly up and out towards his attacker just as the Russian tumbled into him. The Russian held him as if initiating a hug, and Gagnon heard a low grunt and gurgle and watched the FSB man’s eyes appear to turn opaque with death. Gagnon let the Russian drop onto the alley’s wet and dirty concrete.

Everything happened so quickly, Gagnon didn’t have time to think. His chest burned and his hand returned covered in blood after he touched it to his breast. The knife wound on his chest made a deep breath painful, but he realised that he’d been lucky as the knife had glanced off a rib and had not pierced a lung. The Russian, however, had not been so lucky. Gagnon’s knife strike had been quick, luckily accurate, and fatal. The Russian had fallen to his knees almost immediately and was dead by the time he toppled forward on to his face. Even as an analyst, Gagnon had received some field training, and even while he tried to clear his head, some of the training had taken over. He quickly went through the man’s pockets lifting his wallet, phone, pocket litter and his watch. Gagnon moved to the first Russian, but he was coming around. Gagnon stood up and a deep breath reminded him of the pain in his chest. He decided to move. He needed to confirm his attackers had been SRV, FSB, or GRU, clean up, see to the wound, from which he could feel the blood seeping through his coat, and inform the authorities.

Gagnon tidied himself up. He used his scarf as a crude chest bandage and, with a quick last look down the alley to where the Russians lay behind the skip, walked as nonchalantly as possible to a more populated and better lit street and turned and walked to the front entrance of his hotel. He passed the check-in counter and the patrons that always seem to be hanging out in the foyer as quickly and nonchalantly as he could. He made it to his room before collapsing onto the bathroom floor. He wound a towel around his chest and called Tom on his burner phone.

Gagnon sat in a hot bath whilst his blood pinked the water. He went through the Russian’s wallet. He was relieved, the attacker’s documents clearly suggested he was a foreign agent of some sort not some unfortunate mugger. Gagnon guessed FSB. The Russian’s UK driver’s licence was good but a fake, suggesting he had been in the country only a short time. Gagnon wondered why he had been followed, how did the Russian know his name, why had the FSB dispatched heavies, possibly trained assassins, from outside of its London station to case him? Given the clothes, it looked like the Russian had come directly from Europe.

Gagnon dressed the shallow knife wound and bagged his bloody and torn clothes and the towels he had used to staunch his wound. He called the front desk asking for a couple of additional towels. He planned to dispose of the most heavily bloodstained towels in waste bins outside of the hotel. He then packed his things. He felt dead tired. The adrenaline rush of the fight, of being alive, was dissipating, leaving him feeling smothered in fatigue. He went through the events in his mind as an after-action report. He had formed a sense of the narrative he’d share with MI5 when there was a knock on his door. He placed a towel over his wound and tightened a hotel robe around him.

He expected it was Tom. Gagnon reached for the doorknob, then hesitated.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Room service, sir,” replied a young female voice in a thick Scottish accent. “Dropping off more towels.”

Gagnon looked through the door’s peephole and could make out a young woman in a maid’s uniform holding a stack of towels, a chambermaid’s cart directly behind her.

He opened the door to the young woman who was small, pretty and red-headed and looked good in her tight uniform. She held a pile of towels in her arms. She had a sweet smile. As Gagnon approached, she squeezed the trigger of the suppressed Walther PPK/S she was concealing among the towels. The nine-millimetre bullet caught Gagnon high above the left breast. He fell back into the room. The woman moved in quickly, she kicked the door behind her, but it failed to catch and close. She approached Gagnon who was prostrate on the floor gasping for breath. The assassin was disappointed with herself. She had meant to shoot him in the heart but had missed by a centimetre or two. She dropped the towels and took aim for a shot to the head to be sure this time. Tom entered the room at a run and barrelled into the woman. She fell across Gagnon and rolled to her right before she