August 1990, Kiev, Ukraine
Grigori Madvoda looked up from the kitchen table of his grimy Kiev flat as someone rapped on the door.
"Eto razblokirovan!" he yelled. The door wasn't locked.
"Dubroye utro, Comrade Madvoda. Dushi dvadtsati detey vas zhudet!" Harry barked as he strode into the kitchen; "Good morning Comrade Madvoda. The souls of twenty children await you!"
Madvoda had heard that a number of his ex-KGB colleagues had been dying in recent times. He'd simply dismissed it as suicides and the odd murder due to the fall of their masters who would once have protected them. Now he wasn't sure. Diving out of his seat, he leapt over the table and closed the distance with the man who had just entered, no older than some of the girls who had been 'enrolled' on his program.
Seizing the gunman's arm as he raised a pistol, they grappled for a moment, and then tried to twist the weapon from his grip. And then it was all over. The muzzle rested under his chin, and his own finger was on the trigger, trying to stop his opponent's finger tightening on it.
Harry released the stolen Makarov pistol and left it in the man's hands as he slumped to the floor, blood pooling around him. He'd made sure to wear disposable latex gloves and left no prints on the pistol, the magazine or the bullets themselves. He supposedly had jurisdiction to hunt down the perpetrators of the magical experimentation of the Soviet Union, but it was easier that as few as possible were blatantly murdered.
Satisfied, he nodded to the body and turned around, strolling out. He had an International Portkey to catch.
Natasha Romanova moved slowly around the corner of the Kiev penthouse, her favoured Tokarev TT33 carefully extended in front of her. Old the weapon may have been, but it was reliable, fairly powerful, the ammunition easily acquired and easily concealed. Slowly, she lowered the weapon, seeing the same scene she'd encountered many times in the last month.
Not that she wasn't satisfied, but these were her targets and every time she caught up with one, she was just days behind someone else with lethal mission. Every time, that person had eliminated her target.
"What do you think?" asked Katala Bokori, her former KGB partner-in-training and now KGB escapee.
"That we get out of here before the police arrive." Natasha said sharply, holstering her pistol.
Quickly moving back to their hotel to plan, Katala found a map and began plotting the locations of each of the deaths. A red marker rested on most of the major cities in what had been the Warsaw Pact.
"Do you think he's working east?" she asked, pulling her blonde hair back into a loose ponytail.
"Not exactly." Natasha frowned, marking a line between each kill. "The person started here, as far as we know. Prague. North to Leipzig. Three in Magdeburg. Rostock. Then finally two in Berlin before moving back to Czechoslovakia. Brno, Bratislava, Kosice. Then he is moving east. We should move a few jumps ahead."
"Dmitri Vilistenya lives in Volgograd, and he's on the list." commented Katala.
"The question is, will he stay in the former Soviet nations or go as far as Russia itself?" Natasha commented, tapping the end of the pen against her temple, running a hand through her fire-coloured hair; "It's a gamble. He might not show and in the time we're waiting for him, he goes in a completely different direction."
"The only ex-KGB employees who have been dying like flies recently have been from our... program." Katala commented; "As long as this person lives, I believe they will keep hunting."
"We'll go to Volgograd." agreed Natasha.
It wasn't much of a pattern, but it was better than nothing. After all, they'd encountered what the other killer had left in his trail from Germany to here. A little further wouldn't be too difficult and even if it came down to it, a little luck would have them coincide with the shooter, then Natasha and Katala could find out exactly why he was killing their targets.
Jabbing the enchanted pocket-knife Cedric had bought him for his sixth birthday into the lock, Harry pushed the door open, another Makarov already levelled. With deadly intent, he cleared the apartment room-by-room until he came upon the sitting room where he could see the side of a man's head sat in an armchair facing a television which was on, producing a background noise. Gently easing open the door, as soon as he had room, Harry fired a single shot, straight into the side of the man's head. He would need to move the expended cartridge, but it wouldn't be hard to set up another suicide.
That was when he felt the cold metal of a gun-barrel pressed against his temple.
"English?" she asked, glancing over the handsome face, marred by a single jagged scar down one side of it, moving down to his body where it was easy to see that, under his long dark-blue duster jacket and neatly pressed trousers, there were enough bulges to warn her of the probability of him having more weapons than his pistol.
"Yes." Harry replied, deciding that this wasn't the moment to bandy words or taunts.
"Lower the weapon please." she requested.
Harry was all too-pleased to do this, releasing his left hand from supporting the butt of the Makarov. Slowly lowering the gun in his right hand, he was surprised as there were several footsteps from another direction and a small hand twisted the pistol from his loose turned, twisting the arm holding the pistol at his head so the woman couldn't fire it, and then delivered a savage blow to the woman's side with his elbow.
To her credit, she only flinched a bit when most would be screaming on the floor, but it was enough for him cross the room and pull the other girl into his arms, her back to him and a knife held in his left hand against her chest. There was a loud click as he produced a Webley revolver and pulled back the hammer, putting the redhead in his sights, while the blonde froze, his knife pressed against her chest.
The young woman opposite was what the reserved Victor Dubose would call 'aesthetically pleasing' with slightly wavy red hair falling down to her shoulders, pale green eyes and wearing a tight blouse under her leather jacket which left little to the imagination, ditto for her jeans. However, he didn't waver in his aiming the cocked weapon at her.
"Now that we're on equal terms..?" he said smoothly; "Maybe you could inform me who you two are, why you're here and why you didn't shoot me when you had a chance?"
Scowling but realising the Englishman had her friend and her at his mercy, she replied;
"Natasha Romanova, formerly of the KGB, Katala is my former partner. The reason we're here is that you're hunting people we'd really like to kill ourselves. I didn't shoot you since you've not done anything more than irritate us and we want information."
Harry slowly lowered his gun and spun the cylinder so that the hammer fell on a spent cartridge before tucking the large knife away in a sheath under his jacket. The blonde, released, immediately crossed the room to her partner, keeping the commandeered Markarov close.
"Probably a bit of a mistake, but one I'm glad of. Why though are two ex-KGB agents hunting their own..." he said curiously.
"Neither of us were ever members of the KGB by choice." Katala replied, slowly lowering the pistol; "That's why we're after your targets. You never told us who you are, and how you've been finding our targets."
"Harry Potter. I'm cleaning up a group of KGB agents who were suspected of and confirmed to be involved in experimentation on human beings." Harry stated; "I lifted a couple from the streets and interrogated them for information and have been using that to track them down."
Natasha noticed he failed to say who he worked for.
"No, we were both amongst those kidnapped by them, we were forced into KGB training aged four until we were thirteen when the fall of the Soviet Union put an end to it." Natasha said evenly.
"Trained as assassins and spies with no choice. Tortured if we weren't good enough or if we didn't want to do something. If someone escaped, we were all tortured, if someone was found escaping, they were shot." Katala snarled; "We retired and ran before we could be 'retired'."
Harry's hand twitched towards the knife tucked through his belt as he glared at the body;
"Maybe simply killing them is a bit merciful."
"Nyet, I'm not one for school-children philosophy, but going down to their level wouldn't help." Natasha disagreed.
"So, what now?" Harry asked.
"Wouldn't it be easier if we split the hunt Tasha?" asked Katala.
"You have a list of the targets?" asked Natasha.
Harry silently produced a list from his pocket and threw it onto the table between them. Natasha picked up the scrap of paper with the list of names and glanced over it; "Why don't we split the rest of the two-dozen between us, get the job done and I get a bit of satisfaction?"
Harry had been extending his magical senses onto the young woman, receiving some slightly familiar but somewhat different responses, ones he was familiar with from people who had rituals performed on them, yet she had no magic of her own. The same went for the young Hungarian. He didn't want to risk a deep Legilimency scan, but he could work out that these were amongst the operatives that the Russians had used magic to enhance.
"I suppose we could do that." Harry replied, tearing the list in half and giving one half to her; "There's a rather nice cafe in Istanbul, in one of the old sections of Constantinople and Byzantium, meet there in a month as that's where the last target on your half of the list is, I'll give you the address for the cafe, and a transport to wherever you two want to go."
The two adolescent girls conferred for a moment before Natasha announced; "Deal." accepting the address on a slip of paper from him before they all quickly departed in case anyone had heard the gunshot.