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Frank’s men were in dark suits and ties, as if they’d been taking fashion tips from the agents in
The Matrix
. I hadn’t seen Genghis and Mr Lover Man since Frank’s private jet had dropped me in Egypt five months ago. They hadn’t wasted any time with the 5:2 diet. These boys were still big; it was part of their job spec.

The one I didn’t recognize stood like a guardsman, eyes alert. I guessed he was ex-Spetsnaz, or at least trained by them. Mr Lover Man was a Nigerian man-mountain with nostrils like the Mont Blanc Tunnel. He always looked like he was about to inflict pain, and was probably the only black man in Moscow the right-wing gangs crossed the street to avoid. When I’d last seen him, there were blue and red beads tying off each braid of his cornrows, and a patch under his chin was pebble-dashed with shaving rash. The beads were all bright red now, and the zits had been replaced by a thin scar running up his left cheek.

The guy beside him was only fractionally shorter and had come straight from the steppes. He looked like a painting I’d seen of Genghis Khan, but with a number-one haircut and wispy
goatee. He could have been a direct descendant of the great tyrant for all I knew, but I wasn’t going to ask.

These two weren’t big on chat, even though we had plenty to talk about. We’d flown out of Somalia together after I’d rescued Frank’s son from kidnappers. But that was then. Time flies; things change.

Maybe that was why they stared at me now like we’d never set eyes on each other.

I slid out of Anna’s room and closed the door gently behind me.

Frank’s men stood like statues as I put out my hand. I got noncommittal shakes back, but so what? They were there, and that was all that mattered.

I gave Mr Lover Man my keys and the penthouse address. He studied them both for a moment, then passed them to the Guardsman. I could see Anna watching us through the blinds. Her eyes followed me back into the room.

‘What’s happening, Nicholas?’ Her voice was low. It was like the dim lighting toned everything down. ‘They’re not here to wet the baby’s head, are they?’

I closed the door and took the HK from my waistband. Anna watched as I sat back down and slid the weapon under my thigh. I knew she wasn’t happy. The oxygen machine gave a sigh. I knew exactly how it felt. ‘They’ve come here because I asked Frank for help. We need his help. So does Katya.’

I gave her the headlines. Anna showed no reaction, just con centrated on the details, until I got to the part about the body. She lifted a hand. ‘Is he still there?’

I nodded. ‘Frank’s lad is sorting it out.’ I hesitated. ‘But we’ve got a bigger problem than that.’

I told her I’d been back to Katya’s flat. ‘Her coat was still there, but she wasn’t. The picture was gone too.’

Anna’s jaw muscles tightened. She got it straight away. ‘That’s
why they came to our apartment?’ Her look of concern wasn’t for herself or for me. She glanced towards the incubator. ‘What now?’

‘You know anything? Anyone who wants to hurt her? Anything she’s said or done that you think was a bit … unusual … or out of character?’

She took a deep breath and the sigh that followed was more about being pissed off with me than wondering what might have happened to Katya. ‘You know what she’s like. She never told me much about herself, even in Mexico.’

‘She have man trouble, cash problems, drugs?’

Anna shook her head. ‘No, nothing like that – and if she did, she’d never have told me. She had a boyfriend in Mexico I didn’t know about until she let slip that things weren’t working out. I know you’ve never really liked her, but you know what? Not everybody lives in your shadowy, duplicitous little world.’

She was wrong about that, actually, but now wasn’t the time to tell her. I hadn’t made up my mind about Katya. I just knew that she’d been lying through her teeth ever since I’d picked her up at her apartment.

‘I’ve got to go away for a while.’ I leaned over her, not sure whether I should kiss the top of her head. Not so long ago I’d have done it without thinking. I tucked the HK under her pillow. ‘It’s loaded, with a full mag, and made ready.’

Anna had worked in a lot of hostile terrain and knew her way around a weapon. She knew ‘loaded’ meant the mag was inserted, even if it was empty. Made ready meant there was a round in the chamber. That way, there was no room for accidents.

Her eyelids flickered and she pushed herself upright. ‘Does this mean I’m on guard now?’

‘Not exactly.’ I gestured through the blinds. ‘Frank trusts them with his own kid. And I trust them too. Ninety-nine per cent …’

Her brow furrowed. ‘The HK’s for the other one per cent?’

I nodded. ‘The only way I can really protect you two is to find out what’s going on.’

She didn’t argue. ‘Where will you start?’

‘Peredelkino.’

I kept driving west, towards a much bluer sky than the one that still hung over the city. I’d come off the M1 a while back, and the potholes were getting more treacherous. The road was lined with trees. This wasn’t Navaho or Chelsea territory. The buildings I began to encounter were ancient and timber-framed.
Dacha
s three storeys high with massive overhanging roofs stood behind huge walls. These were the weekend retreats of wealthy Muscovites, first built in the time of Peter the Great. Then in the early 1930s the Soviets had decided to make it a writers’ paradise and all the Russian greats had come here to do their stuff.

I saw cedar tiles cladding a steeply pitched roof and condensation billowing from modern heating ducts. I turned through an enormous set of slowly opening wooden gates.

The VW crunched across the gravel. Trees circled a playground, gardens and a swimming-pool. I carried on round to the back of the house and pulled up behind a Range Rover. In Moscow, real people’s cars had white plates with black letters. The Range Rover had red ones with white numbers. Diplomatic plates. You could buy them on the black market – at least twenty-five thousand dollars, more if you threw in the blue flashing lights. They let you travel in the government-designated fast lanes and beat the Moscow jams. Lads with red plates were never stopped.

I got out and climbed the steps onto the wooden veranda. I
glimpsed a face at the window before its owner turned away and disappeared.

I knew from my last visit that three doors led off the veranda: a bug screen for the summer, a triple-glazed monster with an aluminium frame, and finally the hand-carved wooden original.

I stepped into a shiny modern kitchen the size of a football pitch, all white marble and stainless steel. It couldn’t have provided a more dramatic contrast to the exterior.

Frank was sitting at the white marble table with a closed laptop and a white mug in front of him. He was a small man with short brown hair brushed back and flat with a hint of grey at the temples. He looked like Dracula after a visit to the blood bank.

He obviously liked his men to look like extras in a sci-fi movie, but Frank’s own fashion model was less easy to pin down. He sported red cords over dark-brown suede loafers. His shirt was also dark brown, and buttoned all the way up. He’d added a touch of Italian gigolo with a pale yellow sweater draped over his shoulders. He might have thought it was cutting edge, but it wasn’t a good look for a man in his mid-forties who could have done with shedding a few pounds and buying himself some socks. What was going through his mind? As with almost everything else he got up to, it was impossible to tell.

‘Coffee?’ Without looking up, he pointed past me to a machine the size of a nuclear reactor. It stood beside a white marble sink large enough to dismember a body in. ‘Help yourself, and sit down over here with me.’

I walked over and pressed every button in sight, hoping that something would start coming out of one of the three spouts. Then I could shove a mug underneath and look like I knew what I was doing.

He leaned forward, gaze level. ‘Have you heard from them? Has anyone contacted you?’

The machine showed no sign of whirring into action. ‘If they had, I wouldn’t need you.’

‘And how is the child?’ He’d spun on a sixpence, but with no change in his tone. His English was precise, but his accent was surprisingly guttural. He sounded like Hollywood’s idea of a
Cold War Soviet colonel. His voice gave nothing away. The only time I had ever heard him become remotely human was when I had reunited him with his son. I hoped he could remember what it felt like.

The machine suddenly made a grinding sound.

‘He’s doing really well. Thanks, Frank.’

Viscous black liquid dribbled out of the middle spout. For a moment I thought I’d struck oil. I shoved a mug under it. ‘How’s Stefan? He settled in OK?’

I didn’t look round. I wasn’t too sure if it was the right thing to ask. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe his Somali kidnap experience had fucked with his young head. Seeing your mum’s dead body and then having to find a place in your dad’s real family was never going to be easy.

I spooned a couple of sugars into the pitch-black brew.

Frank’s expression still wasn’t giving anything away. He crossed his legs, revealing two very white and hairy calves. He shrugged. ‘Things are good. My family has gone to embrace the whales.’

He motioned me to sit beside him. ‘In Baja California you can reach out from your boat and touch the grey whales. Apparently they’re very friendly.’ He betrayed a hint of puzzlement. Frank wasn’t the cuddly type. In a dog-eat-dog world, he wasn’t top Rottweiler by accident.

‘So you’re alone?’

He devoted his considerable powers of concentration to the task of brushing a speck of something from the back of one large hairy hand with the other. His well-manicured nails glinted in the light, but not as strikingly as the half-million dollars’ worth of Lang and Söhne Tourbograph. Sapphire crystals and a hand-stitched crocodile strap obviously didn’t come cheap. Putin had one, and the papers were all over it. Someone had calculated that he’d have to live in a cave and go without food and drink for six years to be able to afford one on his declared income. Overnight, it had become the must-have accessory for Frank and his playgroup.

Once he’d attended to his personal grooming he waved at a small dark glass bubble in the ceiling above the sink. ‘They’re
next door, keeping an eye on us. Don’t be offended, Nick, but are you carrying a weapon? If so, just say. Don’t let them see.’

I caught his drift. If I had been carrying, his guys would have shot first and not bothered to ask questions afterwards. But I was there at Frank’s invitation. It would have been an insult for me to think I needed protection.

I shook my head, but Frank was already moving on. ‘You have read
Dr Zhivago
, of course. Pasternak wrote it here, you know. In this village.’

I wasn’t sure if he was taking the piss, but did my best to look impressed. Maybe, now that he had all the power and money a man could wish for, Frank also wanted respect. He’d bought a big slice of the great writers’ heartland. Perhaps he was now aiming to knock out a novel or two and join the immortals.

When he spoke next, it was very quietly. ‘To find this scum – is that all you want from me?’

‘Frank, I want as much from you as I can get. Finding him is the only way I’ll find Katya, the only way I’ll find out what the fuck’s going on here. And the only way I’ll be able to keep Anna and the boy safe.’

‘Everything has a cost, Nick.’ Frank sighed. ‘Everything.’

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’

‘Pasternak was a master of social realism.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I like to think we also do our best to maintain certain … traditions …’ He opened the laptop and swivelled it so we could both see the screen.

He sparked up Skype and tuned in to a webcam. I found myself looking at a naked man, plasticuffed to a chair. He was as heavily tattooed as his mate. There was a brick wall behind him, but no window. He was caught in the unforgiving glare of a mobile fluorescent lamp, the sort builders use on-site.

Frank didn’t seem remotely interested in the drama that filled his screen. The same went for whoever was behind the camera: the hum of voices sounded as if they were discussing what to have for dinner.

‘How did you find him?’

Frank brushed another imaginary speck off his trousers. ‘When you look for garbage, you go to the garbage dump.’

His lads kept chatting in the background, apparently oblivious to the loud rasps of their captive fighting to get oxygen into his lungs through swollen, lacerated lips. Frank was more concerned about his thumbnail – a fleck of varnish was starting to chip away from the immaculately buffed tip.

I leaned forward so that I could study the boy on the chair more closely. Just like his dead mate, the runner was covered with ink. A blurred crucifix tattoo took pride of place across his torso; Christ’s feet were nailed to his belly button and his face was covered with a tuft of blood-soaked chest hair. The only other patch of blue I could make out beneath the red was a drawing of an iron cuff around his right ankle with a padlock resting on the top of his foot. The prison ink of choice was usually a mixture of soot and piss, injected into the skin with a sharpened guitar string attached to an electric shaver.

The runner was so ravaged and swollen I couldn’t tell if his eyes were closed against the pain or so puffed up he couldn’t
have opened them even if he’d wanted to. His whole body was covered with bruises that were almost the same colour as his body ink. Blood dribbled from his nose, ears and mouth, and streamed down his legs from a knife cut across the top of each thigh. The damage I’d done him with the remote control paled into insignificance alongside the workout his new best friends had given him.

Frank gathered his empty mug and wandered over to the nuclear reactor. He didn’t offer me a refill. He’d have figured if I wanted another brew, I’d ask him for one – or get off my arse and fetch it for myself. He might have every material thing he’d ever dreamed of, and be rocking himself to sleep every night in the cradle of Russian culture, but some things never changed. Frank was Frank. I liked that. At least you knew where you stood.