Conspiracy of Blood
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Synopsis
A complex and absorbing crime novel which finds Sasza Zaluska, the profiler and former undercover cop first encountered in Girl at Midnight, plunged even deeper into the web of corruption and criminality that has engulfed all levels of Polish society since the fall of Communism.
Sasza decides to return to the police, but first she must ensure the safety of her daughter by putting to rest the demons evoked by terrifying ordeal which led her to leave Poland for seven years in England. No sooner has she begun the process, however, than she is drawn into the deeply disturbing case of a woman who has disappeared from a village - and she is not the first to do so. The roots of the crime seem to reach all the way back to the dark enmities of the second world war.
Release date: December 1, 2022
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages: 576
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Conspiracy of Blood
Katarzyna Bonda
Sasza Załuska
Sasza Załuska is a psychological profiler with a history of alcohol abuse. For years she lived in England with her daughter Karolina, hiding from her past. Before she left Poland, Sasza used to work as an undercover cop, investigating a man suspected to be the Red Spider – a diabolical serial killer targeting young women, whose calling card is the fact that he paints pictures of his victims. During the investigation, Sasza made a rookie mistake and grew emotionally attached to Łukasz Polak, the man she was supposed to keep under observation. At some point, he found out who Sasza really was and, out of desperation, took her prisoner. Unable to find a way to escape, as a last resort Sasza decided to seduce her captor in the hope of gaining his trust. As soon as Polak let his guard down, Sasza called for help. Before the anti-terrorist unit managed to storm the flat the Red Spider was keeping her in, Polak, determined not to be taken alive, set fire to the apartment. Sasza was saved by firefighters, but sank into a coma. When she regained consciousness weeks later, she learned two things – that Łukasz Polak was dead, and that she was carrying his child. At that point, Sasza decided to turn her life around. She left the police, quit drinking, and moved to England, not returning to her home country until many years later.
Podlasie
The north-eastern border of Poland, or Podlasie as the region is called in Polish, is a beautiful, fascinating land – home to the last primordial forest in Europe and hundreds of historical monuments and places of remembrance. It is a highly diverse region with a rich history and a stunning heritage. It is also a melting pot of cultures and religions with a dark and difficult past. As a place where the fighting during World War Two was especially fierce, it is a region where the scars to the psyche of the local populace run deep, and the memories of crimes committed in the past still divide people.
Two major religious communities dominate the area – the Catholics and the Orthodox. The former are mostly Poles, while the latter include Belarusians and Ukrainians. Because of the difficult history between the two groups, parts of both have radicalised, and in recent years far-right nationalistic movements have dominated the political scene of the region. Tensions between the two groups are common, and tend to revolve around the historical injustices and terrible atrocities committed by roving bands of deserters who refused to acknowledge the cessation of hostilities in the mid-forties, after the war had officially ended. These groups of soldiers-gone-rogue are referred to as the ‘Cursed Soldiers’. After they turned their backs on the newly formed communist regime, parts of the guerrilla brigades under the command of Romuald Rajs, nom de guerre ‘Bury’, went on a bloody rampage across the land of Podlasie, murdering hundreds of innocents – mainly Orthodox Belarusians. Now, nearly eighty years later, those war crimes are still far from forgotten, while their perpetrators are idolised by some Polish nationalists and reviled by the ethnic and religious minorities in Podlasie. (‘Bury’ in Polish is ‘The Grey’ or ‘The Dun’.)
Prologue
Sopot, May 2014
When, after the third signal, he finally picked up the receiver, she kept quiet, though she should have asked about Zofia.
In the background, she could make out the sound of the TV and the laughter of children. A family reunion, she thought. A tureen of chicken soup on the table, home-made cake on porcelain saucers. The kids, unaware of the things their grandpa, playing the role of Santa Claus each Christmas, did for a living, are running an obstacle course across the apartment. Tom and Jerry is blaring from the TV. The adults have to raise their voices to be heard. They toast each other with glasses of pear schnapps. Their guns, clips pulled out and stacked next to boxes of spare ammo, are safely locked in an armoured cabinet.
‘Zofia’s out,’ one of them said. ‘Gone to the labour ward.’
Sasza breathed out with relief. When she had left, her handler had already had forty-one years of service behind him, but apparently he was still on duty. His first grandchild had been born after the man had recruited her. She remembered taking notice of the newborn’s photo on the desktop of his PC. ‘Marcel,’ he had beamed, adding, ‘his sister’s already on her way.’ Since that exchange, she had always referred to the officer as ‘Gramps’. The moniker had stuck and now everyone was calling him that. For years she hadn’t learned his real name. Until yesterday, that is. She counted on Gramps not realising she knew. That would be the first time she would actually have an advantage over him.
‘The labour ward?’ Sasza smiled. The man wouldn’t hang up now. He’d be too curious about what his erstwhile underling wanted. ‘What’s up with that?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he grumbled, falling back on his old routine.
She heard a wheeze in his breath, then a cough, and a crackling noise. He must have excused himself and was now slowly making his way to another room. When he finally closed the door and a silence fell, she felt the need to add something by way of explanation, but he spoke first.
‘Telephone books are a thing of the past and I’m not on Facebook, so—’ He broke off.
‘Guess. You found my number when you mixed me up in that affair with Needles, didn’t you?’
‘You’re not that good.’
‘Probably,’ she conceded, ‘but I have my ways, too.’
‘Two more seconds and it’ll start recording,’ he warned. His voice didn’t sound hostile. Bored, more like. ‘We’ll both get in trouble.’
She hung up and sat down on the floor, cross-legged, lighting a cigarette.
The PC screen flickered and went out. Before it did, Professor Tom Abrams’s photo filled the desktop. Her PhD supervisor. They still had to discuss the last seminar. She hadn’t contacted him for a while and Abrams was getting worried. He had been trying to catch her on Skype for the last couple of days, messaging her what seemed like dozens of times. Sasza had been working, but she wanted to finish the last chapter first and only discuss her thesis with him when she was finished. She promised herself she would catch him at the institute tomorrow. She finished her cigarette, got up and doused the butt with water from the tap. Her phone buzzed, playing ‘Jism’ by Tindersticks. She glanced at the screen. Unlisted number. She picked up before the chorus.
‘One question,’ she said immediately, the soggy fag still in her hand. ‘What was my role in Needles’s case? Was Łukasz working for us, too? I have the right to know.’
‘I’ve never lied to you,’ Gramps replied. He was composed. His voice was less raspy than earlier. The background hiss was nearly inaudible. He must have used an inhaler before calling her back. ‘I had my orders. Besides, that was two questions.’
She breathed in.
‘Does Łukasz know?’
‘Even I don’t know everything,’ he started, but quickly trailed off. ‘You’re a mantis, you know?’
Sasza headed to the fridge and poured herself a glass of milk. She took a sip and waited.
‘So the Red Spider was a smokescreen, after all?’
‘I’ve been quite confident that this was the case, but after you left it wasn’t that obvious all of a sudden. Polak’s aunt, a famous director’s wife. One phone call was all it took. You know how it is. How things work. I’d wager it was Sońka, Karp’s bootlicker. He was in charge of the clean-up detail. Everything snowballed. The DI made sure the papers were clean. It was out of my hands.’
‘Was. He. Working. For. Us.’
‘You’ve had your question already.’
‘I’ll take that as a “yes”,’ she sighed. ‘You screwed me over.’
‘Not how I would have phrased it,’ he retorted, ‘but if you really have to know, I don’t think he was working for us.’
‘He’s still doing it,’ Sasza said. ‘You remember that case of the student from Tarnów who disappeared? Lidia Wrona.’
This was a case from three years ago, still unsolved. On the day of her disappearance Lidia Wrona had published an artsy photo on social media. It was easy to find on the web. All you had to do was type in: ‘Lidia Wrona, disappearance’. When Sasza had done just that, she froze. The Red Spider’s style was present and correct. Top-down perspective. A beautiful, painting-like frame. Contrasting colours, enhanced with Photoshop. Lidia lying on her back, wearing a red dress that looked like a spatter of blood over the lush green of grass.
The police had recently abandoned their last lead and the case had been dismissed, with no one under suspicion.
‘We don’t know that,’ Gramps said after a long pause. ‘I can only tell you the Spider didn’t work alone. He was never a sexual killer or a psychopathic maniac, like we suspected at first. The network of connections reached high, though. Very high. Higher than you suspect.’
‘Politics?’
‘If only. It was more of a . . .’ he hesitated, ‘a higher ideal.’
‘Blood and honour?’
‘Something of the sort, but not exactly.’
‘So it’s about money?’
‘It’s always about money, sweetheart.’
Sasza didn’t know what to make of this. ‘A higher ideal’ could mean anything. She knew that despite official assurances about the Red Spider case being closed, the CBS´ was still monitoring it and that as soon as they found anything new, they’d get the investigation back on track. (Central Investigation Bureau of Police in Poland.)
‘Can you get me in?’
‘No chance.’ He reacted a bit too quickly.
‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ he added.
‘I don’t drink any more.’
‘I know, Sasza.’
She felt a twinge of pain at the sound of her name. He usually always called her by her official aliases: Milena or Thumbelina – or her badge number, 1189. Was this a good time to play the ace up her sleeve? But if she told Gramps she had him exposed, it might spook him. She took a piece of paper and started doodling a flowery mandala on it.
‘I had to make a technician cough up some of her own cash for a portable drive so we’d be able to copy data from a suspect’s PC,’ Gramps continued. ‘I knew we’d need something to cover our arses in court. But we had no official funding.’
‘Incredible.’ Sasza couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Did the Polish police really have to worry about things like this? In the twenty-first century?
‘That’s what I told them,’ Gramps agreed. ‘Anyway, the search turned up squat. The PC was clean. That must have been the seventh cock-up like that this year, if I’m keeping count. Everyone’s constantly a step ahead of us. Two years of working our fingers to the bone for nothing. I’m not sure, but I think someone might have tipped the perp off. Or maybe we were being bullshitted from the get-go. Anyhow, all I got was conjecture and a bunch of names. Famous names. Front-page names. As you can guess, nobody spilled. A few small fry who wanted to squeal suddenly bellied up in jail. “Suicide”, of course.’
‘And “accidents”,’ Sasza added. ‘Typical.’
‘So, as you can see, I haven’t really got an argument for expanding the team.’
‘I can work for free,’ she said. ‘I want that profile.’
‘Listen, I know you’re good, I really do,’ he said, ‘but it’s a top-secret case. Anyway, we’ve got no body. And you know what they say: no body, no—’
‘—crime,’ she cut in. ‘Ex nihilo nihil fit. But there’s precedent. There have been a few cases when people have been sentenced before the body was found.’
‘It’s not that I don’t trust you,’ he said.
She didn’t believe him. He was talking to her, though, and he never did anything without a reason. He’d told her much already, knowing that she could read between the lines. She realised he was taking a risk. Gramps was at an impasse. Maybe he was afraid for his position? Or maybe he already knew the high-ups were going to give the case to someone else. Someone who wouldn’t have an issue with sweeping it under the rug. But Gramps kept talking. Maybe he suspected Sasza might come in handy soon and maybe they’d finally meet. It crossed her mind that Gramps’s openness might have something to do with the recent election of the new prime minister. For the previous government, this case had been a priority and nobody seemed to have skimped on the expenses.
‘You can just tell me,’ she said.
‘I’ve already said too much.’
‘Just between you and me.’
‘This is not a private conversation.’ He suddenly seemed in a hurry. Was he afraid? Was the line tapped? Surely it was.
‘Did you ever think that Łukasz Polak might be innocent?’ she asked.
‘You’d know that better than me. I didn’t sleep with the guy for a week. He’s not the father of my kid.’
She gritted her teeth for a moment, then went on, ‘Maybe we had it wrong?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you think?’ She didn’t relent. ‘I have Karolina now, and if they charged him wrongfully . . .’ She paused, threw the soggy cigarette butt in the bin and headed to the window, looking at her own reflection.
‘You know how much that means to me,’ she went on. ‘It would change everything. Not for me, per se, but it would mean the world for my daughter. She’s already asking for her father. What am I supposed to tell her? I know you understand. You have children yourself. Grandchildren.’
‘It wasn’t him,’ he croaked. She heard the hiss of the inhaler. Her heart raced. ‘Or at least not alone. He wasn’t the mastermind, that’s for sure. But he did have his fingers in it. If you ask me, he knows who’s behind this.’
‘Is?’ she asked. ‘This is still happening? I knew it!’
The photo: lush green grass, like an avocado. Red dress. Lidia’s pale, full breasts. Red, curly hair. Dead eyes. The girl could be Sasza’s younger sister. The similarity was striking. Why had it dawned on her only now? The hypothesis was far-fetched, but that was her job, wasn’t it? She had to take every possibility into account. Even the possibility that the Red Spider had kidnapped her simply because she matched the profile of his victims. It couldn’t be just a coincidence. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
‘You know who the real Red Spider is, don’t you?’ she said.
Amazingly, she felt relieved. As if someone had taken a great weight from her shoulders. Could she still trust Gramps, though?
‘Ask Polak.’ He brushed the question off. ‘Maybe you’ll get an answer before they bump him off. I don’t know about you, but I won’t cry for him.’
He hung up. She dialled the number, but a voice told her it was temporarily unavailable. Nonetheless, she added it to her contacts as Kajetan Wróblewski – Gramps.
KOLA
(2000)
The hog was lying on the steel table with its trotters up. Its snout was crooked in a rictus grin, as if mocking its own disembowelled stomach. Mikołaj Nesteruk was just finishing gutting the animal. He shook off bits of intestine into a bucket standing next to the table and then shoved the bucket away with a foot. It spun but didn’t topple. Good. He swept the sweat from his brow with a sleeve. He was in no mood for cleaning up. His wife would dress him down for slaughtering pigs in the garage anyway. She could always smell the blood afterwards. Everyone wants to eat meat, but when it comes to slaughter, gutting, and roasting there’s suddenly no volunteers.
Back in the day, a man had to be able to slaughter and butcher a hog, a hare or a deer, although preparing a chicken had been a woman’s job. An axe should always be kept sharp for that purpose. A dull axe-blade meant a landowner didn’t properly care for their homestead, was a layabout, or drank to excess. A properly performed slaughter didn’t cause too much pain; if the butcher knew his craft, death came quickly. But those times had gone. Nobody now had the slightest inkling about slaughtering, or about how to butcher a carcass – that you had to hang it on a hook for a while to let the blood out. And catch it all in a bucket without wasting a single drop. There ain’t any proper men left in this world, Mikołaj grumbled under his breath.
It would take him a few hours to stuff the pig with buckwheat, lard and offal, get it into a hole in the ground and roast it. The wedding party guests would already be waiting, dressed in their freshly starched shirts and new dresses, for the special bus that would transport them to the restaurant.
Suddenly, there was a loud bang.
Mikołaj froze and listened to the ensuing silence. There was a road nearby. Probably just a flat tyre, he thought, and returned to his work. But the bang was soon followed by three more. Now Mikołaj was sure – gunshots. The forest was too far away; it definitely wasn’t a poacher.
He walked to the water bucket and scrubbed his hands clean, then left the garage. The grey light of early morning limited his vision. He headed across the field, towards the road. He looked around. Nothing. But he wasn’t the only one who had heard the sound. Lights were on in several houses. When he turned round to go back home, he noticed a silhouette. Someone was running towards him, hunched over.
‘Help! Somebody help me!’ A man. He fell to the ground and went still.
Mikołaj ran to the dark figure as fast as he could, although that wasn’t saying much – he was getting on and couldn’t run like he used to.
He reached the man. ‘What happened?’ he rasped, trying to catch his breath.
‘Murder,’ the man grated out. He raised his head.
‘Petya?’ whispered Mikołaj, shocked. He crouched down and pulled apart the lapels of the man’s jacket. His shirt was soaked through with a thick, dark fluid.
‘Who did this to you?’
‘I couldn’t see,’ the man replied.
This had to be a gut shot. The man was bleeding like a wounded deer. Big-calibre gun, probably. A hunter’s weapon? A rifle for hunting deer or bison. Home-made? One bullet had gone straight through the collarbone. The hole was wide enough to fit two fingers. The other rounds were probably still inside. Mikołaj knew what to do. During the war he had dealt with wounds like this. He took his shirt off, tore it into strips and tried to stem the squirting blood. He worked steadily for some time. Sweat dripped from his forehead, stinging his eyes. When he finally dressed the wound, the sun was already casting its first rays across the pinkish sky. The weather was going to be perfect again.
Mikołaj pushed himself to his feet, intending to head towards the buildings. He knew there was a phone at the old mill. The poor sod needed help immediately if he was going to live. That’s when the prone man shot out an arm, clutching desperately at Mikołaj’s hand.
‘Help her, Kola,’ he whispered in Belarusian. ‘There’s a car over there. Łarysa is still there. Dead.’
Mikołaj raised his head and looked around. There was no car to be seen.
Gdańsk, 2014
The target moved with a clatter and a gust of air blew it upwards, like a kite. Sasza grabbed the lower right corner of the paper sheet, straightened it and counted the bullet holes. The corner of her mouth rose in a half-smile, but she kept quiet. She hit all her shots. All six in the lower part of the silhouette. Just as planned. The aggressor was incapacitated but alive. She put the revolver on the small felt-covered table and let the spent shells drop to the counter. It was Sasza’s first time at a shooting range for eight years. She felt like she was back on her first training sessions – but then again, you never really forget how to ride a bike.
‘Impressive,’ the instructor praised her. ‘What is that, a Glock? Or a Kalashnikov?’
Sasza took off her glasses. The earpieces, squished by the sound-dampening headphones, had been causing her some pain. Chief Inspector Robert Duchnowski was standing with his back to a wall plastered with instructional posters – ‘How to incapacitate an aggressor’. He smiled approvingly, thumbs tucked into the pockets of his jeans. In those, and his chequered shirt and leather boots, he looked like someone straight out of a Western flick. At least he had got rid of that horrible braid, Sasza thought. His hair was short now, dishevelled, and, in spite of it having lost its natural deep brown colour and turned steel-grey, Ghost looked younger than when they had met after Needles’s murder.
He reached out for a firearm catalogue and clicked his tongue dramatically.
‘I’d prefer something better suited to a woman’s hand,’ Sasza grumbled. ‘A little stinger.’
‘A Beretta, maybe?’ asked Duchnowski.
‘Yeah, that’ll do. I’ll try again from longer range.’
She turned, estimating the distance. She could barely see the target from that far away, let alone the bullseye. She put her glasses back on.
‘I counted on you saying that,’ she heard him saying.
Sasza shook her head like a mother at a prankish little boy.
‘Easily pleased, aren’t you?’ she retorted.
‘Not true, but since you don’t want to find out yourself . . .’ Ghost smirked, provocatively.
The instructor shot them a grossed-out glance from over the target.
‘Ten metres is the standard range,’ he told Sasza. He marked the previous hits with a marker pen. ‘Twenty-five is the Olympic distance.’
‘The customer’s always right,’ Ghost said, and pressed the green button on the console. The target whizzed all the way to the wall. The instructor fled to his cubicle.
In the next booth, a guy in cargo pants and a ripped vintage T-shirt was spewing shots from a machine gun, Rambo-style. His son, who must have been no more than thirteen, was waiting in line. The guy’s wife, covered in colourful tattoos, sporting a clutter of blue-yarn dreadlocks and wearing barely more than a bikini, was listening to the metallic clangour of the spent shells cascading to the floor. She didn’t seem at all impressed by the gun range. She was clearly a regular spectator at her hubby’s little shooting show. Every now and then she fished in her purse for lip gloss and compulsively applied it to her already lustrous lips. In between, she would drop her eyes and vacantly gaze at the tips of her purple wedge-heeled shoes. Sasza studied her with interest, like an unusual weather phenomenon. For a while, she got lost in thought.
When she came back to the present, a Beretta 950 and a box of ammo were already lying on the table in front of her. She tried the diminutive gun in her hand. It was a perfect fit. Black, with a slightly worn grip. A little beauty, she caught herself thinking. She’d like to keep it. It suited her better than the previous ones. Being back at the shooting range was making her reminisce about the time when gunplay had been her bread and butter. She had always been a natural when it came to sharpshooting. It suited her better than showing off with large-calibre cannons.
‘She’d be happy to find a place in your pocket.’ Ghost read her mind.
She shook her head. The decision was already made – she’d return to the firm and become a police officer again, focusing on profiling. A good shooting-range score was as important for an officer as a good food hygiene assessment for a restaurant. But other than that formality, she’d never use a gun again – not even for work. Her intellect would be her only weapon.
She loaded the gun and disengaged the safety, bracing in a wide-legged stance and relaxing her upper body. She locked her arms, lined up the sight and the target, and aimed the gun.
‘All right, you’ve got the baddie in your sight. Now, show us what you got,’ Ghost encouraged. She could barely hear him. The headphones were doing their job. ‘Left circle, three shots. The rest at the right one,’ he instructed.
She didn’t respond, but followed the order. After the very first shot, she knew it wasn’t going well. The lightweight Beretta puffed up a cute little gust of smoke with each shot, but was very unstable. And the more Sasza tried to focus, the more difficulty she had keeping the target in sight. She wanted to get this over with. Eventually the clip was empty. She squeezed the trigger again, just to be sure, then put the firearm back on the table. This time, Ghost examined the target himself.
‘It’s not all bad,’ he said, comfortingly. ‘Just take the machine gun now and let’s get this over with.’
She took a peek at the sheet and realised that she had actually only missed twice. Both were perfect head-shots. The rest had hit the body, just as Duchnowski had instructed her.
‘I killed him,’ she sighed.
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.’ Ghost shrugged. ‘I didn’t realise you were that good.’
‘I haven’t shot a gun in years.’ The modesty was a facade – she was pretty happy with herself.
‘You don’t forget that. If you’re a fighter, that is,’ he said, grinning. ‘And you are a warrior. Just as I suspected.’
‘All-knowing and all-important, as always.’
‘That’s me, all right.’ He beamed.
She grabbed the Kalashnikov. The clip was old and prone to jamming. She broke a nail trying to load the last bullet, but at least her confidence was back. Only an utter knobhead wouldn’t be able to hit something with a machine gun, as her ex-boss used to say. Sasza tended to agree with the man. At first, she didn’t brace properly and the recoil made her shoot off-target, but she compensated swiftly. Her right shoulder would hurt like hell after that. It went pretty well, all things considered. With relief, she took the headphones off, briefly rubbed the skin behind her ears and tossed her glasses into her bag without looking for the case.
‘You can’t see a thing without those, can you?’ Ghost teased. She didn’t respond. He took her silence as confirmation.
‘Give me a cigarette, will you?’ she asked as they left the building. They shared it for a while. Sasza broke the silence first.
‘It went pretty well!’ she exclaimed, yanking at Duchnowski’s sleeve. ‘Come on, you have to give me that.’
He grimaced, though his eyes were smiling.
‘Maybe, if you do as well on Monday. I won’t be there for you,’ he replied, putting out the cigarette with the sole of his shoe. ‘You hungry?’
‘Are you saying I won’t make it without you?’ Sasza furrowed her brows. ‘And you didn’t have the balls to take me where the guys practise?’
She gestured to the building. It was the local gun club, huddled in the middle of a little pine wood. One of the walls boasted a large sign reading: ‘Wedding parties, first communions, banquets. Cheap and convenient!’ First you shoot a gun or two and then you get shit-faced at the party. Or the other way round, Sasza thought.
‘This place was on the way.’ Ghost was obviously lying. ‘You’ll show what you got on Monday and nobody will doubt that you’re ready to join the team.’
He wasn’t looking at her any more.
‘Wait. Wasn’t that supposed to be a done deal?’ Sasza could smell deception. She bristled. ‘So what were all those reports and applications for, then? I won’t suck up to anyone.’
‘I know,’ said Ghost, trying to placate her. ‘Though I’d like to see that. How does Sasza Załuska suck up to someone? That could be interesting to watch.’
She laughed. He was the first man in a long while who had made her do that. They had buried the hatchet some time ago, but their conversations still tended to sound like schoolboy banter. He had convinced her to return to the force, reminding her of all the advantages police life could offer. When they had promoted him to chief of the criminal investigations division, he’d booked a spot for her. She was supposed to get his old post. Chief Waligóra had no objections to it. He valued Sasza and sometimes even recommended her to other units. If it hadn’t been for Duchnowski’s and Waligóra’s proposal, Sasza wouldn’t even have thought about returning. She had filed the papers, done her basic training in the nearby town of Piła, and then easily passed all her advanced exams.
It’s always easier to leave than to return. Leaving is liberating, a bit like diving head-first into the sea. One quick decision and it’s done. To return is a bit like climbing up a sheer cliff. In Sasza’s case, it meant she had to prove herself all over again, demonstrate her worth.
Ghost wouldn’t be Ghost if he hadn’t made an additional condition. If she was to earn a place in his team, she had to pass all the trials she had always hated the most: fitness and shooting tests. She had passed the psychological evaluation with flying colours, of course. But that only made her feel the weight of the burden on her back. Waligóra and Duchnowski had vouched for her. She couldn’t fail their trust. She knew that, and it was only her natural pride that didn’t allow her to voice it. Anyway, either you do something properly, or you don’t do it at all – her motto, that. Life has a way of taking you down a peg or two at times, though. You can dream all you want, but sometimes you just have to fall back a few steps and pull yourself together. If something went wrong and they didn’t take her in, she wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
All the things she had imagined she would do before she returned to Poland – all the commissions, court analyses and freelance jobs – had quickly fizzled out to n
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