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

personal collection which was now quite extensive. It would fuel his fantasies for years.

The SVR agent was snapped out of his reverie by the front door opening and Nia stepping out into the morning cold with a visible shiver. She was dressed for a run and the Russian grinned at her figure in her tight running clothes. Yes, he thought, he would like to get cameras into her bedroom and bathroom. He focused a camera on her as she stretched her calves, then moved into a lunge, and followed up with a quad stretch. He noticed her adjust something with her ear buds and watched as she moved off down the square at a good pace. He radioed her movement and direction to other members of the surveillance team.

Nia liked the quiet, cold mornings when she was able to rouse herself out of bed and go for a run. Although she had become something of a gym rat, she enjoyed the freedom and simplicity of a road run. She felt she got a better workout than the gym’s treadmill could offer, in half the time of a gym trip, and she enjoyed being out and about in her neighbourhood. She had enjoyed her towpath runs with Tom and she felt close to him as she ran, even when apart. More so this morning as she had downloaded another playlist, he had sent her. The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ played quietly through her ear buds, she wanted to be aware of the noises that emanated from the roads, houses and parks along her running route.

The opening chords of Bonnie Tyler’s ‘I Need a Hero’ began as Nia ran through a neighbouring Georgian square’s central beautifully kept park. She guffawed out loud, getting Tom’s habit to include a Welsh singer in every playlist. Still, Nia thought, the song had a good driving beat and she increased her pace. She ran through deserted streets, the city still slumbering, through another square and across another park accompanied now by XTC’s ‘Making Plans for Nigel’. She noticed another female runner across the park. Nia didn’t recognise her but couldn’t miss the young, petite woman’s flaming red hair and her blistering pace as she closed the distance between them. Nia noticed that the redhead’s face was set almost in a grimace. Nia raised her head to give the usual runners’ nod as the young woman passed. It was not necessarily unusual for a runner not to acknowledge the greeting, but the redhead appeared to diverge from her direct path, drop her shoulder, and her elbow caught Nia a glancing blow as they passed. Nia’s right bicep immediately ached.

“Hey,” Nia shouted. She stopped and turned but the redhead was already sprinting away across the park, through its gate and was gone.

“What the fuck was that?” Nia thought, as she rubbed her bicep. She shook her arm and then began to run again. “Bitch,” she said out loud.

Nia continued her run turning onto pavements that bordered major streets, now filling with early commuter traffic. She ran down a few more streets before beginning to circle back closer to home. She ended the run with Elton John singing ‘I’m Still Standing’, enjoying another of Tom’s jokes. Once home and in the shower, she noticed the bruise on her bicep.

Outside of Nia’s home, the Russian listened in to the surveillance team’s radio conversation, his English comprehension was excellent. He heard a woman’s voice, accented, implying that the actress was an easy mark and that they could take her out at any time. The surveillance man recognised the deep voice that entered the conversation: Kamenev. The watcher heard Kamenev order the hit for the next time the actress took a solo early morning run. In his embassy office, Kamenev ended the call. He picked up the hard copy of the newspaper with Nia’s photo from the BFI Vampire Moon event. Lovely looking woman, he thought with a sigh, collateral damage in the ongoing dirty war. He had approved her removal via a Georgi Markov type hit. The redhead would run past the actress bump into her as she had today but, the next time, she would inject her with enough insulin to cause a massive heart attack. A sloppy pathologist would simply pass her death off as a coronary brought on by exercise, but a good pathologist would find the needle mark, the insulin, and it would be filed under a mysterious, pointless homicide. Any parallels between her death and the 1978 assassination of Bulgarian dissident, Markov, poisoned with ricin via a stab of a sharpened umbrella, were too few to draw any conclusions as to the murders. And, Kamenev reflected, the post Brexit Brits were so anxious to keep up trade treaty negotiations with Russia they probably wouldn’t even pursue any investigation that led to Moscow. The Russian smiled and took a sip of his hot tea.

***

 

Ditchling, January 22nd

The MI5 team was good, very professional and experienced. They had quietly infiltrated the village, unobserved. They established furtive observation posts across the village at strategic points. Anyone entering or leaving the village by road would be viewed and identified. Three members of the team had snuck unobserved by neighbours into Daria Kirov’s cottage under cover of darkness. From their observation positions, they continually monitored the quiet street in the front of the cottage and the meadow behind.

Daria had agreed to the deputy director’s plan of, essentially, using herself as bait. Daria had called her agent and suggested a meet with the Irish daily that had expressed an interest in publishing the Russian’s work. The DD hoped that such a ploy would lure out the red-headed assassin and her Russian support team. Like clockwork, Daria’s agent called her and suggested a meet with the Irish journalist at a rather popular pub in Brighton. Daria said that, as she was about to move to a new house, she was fine with meeting