Maria rolled onto her side and her body was racked by involuntary, empty retches. She eased herself up onto her knees and elbows, head still down, her shrunken gut still in spasm. She felt the dirt and grime beneath her skin and realised she was naked. It was then that the intense, freezing cold hit her like a glacial wave. A second wave collided with her, as chill and harsh as the cold: raw terror. Vitrenko. She couldn’t believe it: Buslenko had been a fiction. Taras Buslenko was Vasyl Vitrenko. She had been right about his eyes. It was the one thing he couldn’t change. Vitrenko had completely convinced her with his fiction of a Ukrainian government mission. He had been true to form: Vitrenko liked to get in close for the kill. He liked to mess with his victims’ minds. He had been playing with her all along. And now it was endgame.

Maria tried to work out how long she’d been unconscious. Shuddering with cold, she checked her arms and saw a number of puncture wounds. They’d kept her out for hours; or days; even weeks. She dragged herself up into a sitting position, drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. The spasms that convulsed her body went beyond any description of shivering. Great racking muscular convulsions. Her naked skin had puckered into gooseflesh and had lost all its pigmentation. It was now going past white and had started to look like frosted glass shot through with a cobalt bloom. So it was true, she thought bitterly, you really do go blue with cold. She looked around her confinement. Even the light was cold: a wire-caged neon strip flooded the space with a sterile and cheerless light. No window. No sound. Outside it could be any time of day or night. They had achieved the all-important first stage of interrogative torture: the complete disorientation of the subject.

They had put Maria in the cold-meat store and turned the refrigeration on. The cold-meat store that Buslenko … no, that Vitrenko had told her wasn’t working any more. Had he known, even then, that this was where he was going to kill her? She scanned the meat store for anything, any scrap or rag with which to cover her nakedness; to try to delay her death by slowing the rate at which her core body heat was being dissipated. There was nothing. She hugged herself even tighter. But this wasn’t Vitrenko’s style. Death in here would be too easy. True, she was experiencing agonising cold now, but she knew how hypothermia worked: very soon she would stop shivering; then, perversely, she would actually start to feel warm again, along with a gentle, sleepy euphoria as her brain flooded her body with endorphins. It would be at that peaceful point that she would quite contentedly fall into a sleep from which there would be no waking.