The Silent Oligarch: A Novel (17 page)

“I have.”

“Then you know about Dmitry Gerstman?”

“Yes, I do. Nasty business. Around Malin it does not surprise me.”

“It surprised me.” Webster and Tourna shared a look. “We don’t know who killed Gerstman, or if anyone did. But one thing I do know is that Lock is very scared.”

“This is a hypothesis?”

“No, this is fact. We had someone talk to him after he had given evidence in Paris.”

“My God, he was horrible in Paris.” Tourna gave a short bark of a laugh. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He started OK, he’d been prepared, but Christ, when our QC got his claws out? It was bloody. Bloody. If I were Malin I’d have called me after an hour and begged to settle. Who spoke to Lock?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“OK. What did he say?”

“He’s scared. He knows he did badly this week and he’s scared to go back to Moscow. At least he was; he might be back there by now. I should imagine he’s terrified that he’s going to be next.”

“He’s scared. Good. He should be. So what?”

Webster hesitated for a moment. It crossed his mind that this was an ugly business, trading in a scared man’s fear. He went on. “Malin can’t live without Lock. Without Lock the fiction collapses. It’s a big lie, and he’s the man paid to do the lying. If we persuade him to tell the truth, then it will almost certainly win your lawsuits. Malin has to explain himself to everyone, and his business will be crippled at the same time. All his financing will dry up. Bryson Joyce may have to resign.”

“I don’t get it. If Lock gives evidence for us, he’s out of a job and he’s just made a big fucking enemy. Why would he do it?”

“Because,” Hammer said, “we’re at the stage now where the FBI and a number of others are taking an active interest in Mr. Lock’s case. I had a conversation with a friend of mine at the Bureau this week and they see great potential in him. In pure dollar terms, he’s one of the biggest money-launderers they’ve ever seen. And I hear from them that the Swiss are having a good look too.”

Tourna sat back, pushed his chair a foot or two away from the table, and pulled at his bottom lip while he thought. Like Hammer, he was a fidget, but where Hammer tapped and chewed he used his whole body. His leg jigged, he sat forward. As he watched him, Webster wondered whether Hammer had indeed made that call, and if so what had been said. He thought they were holding off until after this meeting.

“Mr. Hammer,” Tourna said at last. “What do you think?”

Hammer put down his pen. “It’s a big opportunity. Like all big opportunities, it comes with risks. The risks here are not really to us. They’re to Mr. Lock. You risk some fees, we risk reputation, but Lock could be in real trouble. Ben has had a difficult couple of weeks. It’s not usual for the people we interview to wind up dead. It’s not usual for us to be accused of causing it, either. But I think I’ve persuaded him that the best way to protect Lock, long term, is to help him out of this mess. He’s in way over his head. I can tell. I’ve seen so many of these guys. Some are tough enough, but he isn’t. So one day, something’s going to happen to bring Malin’s castle tumbling down, and Lock? He’s going to wind up dead or in jail. If he’s lucky, under house arrest in Moscow. The one way he can avoid that is by seeing the light. I suggest we show it to him.”

For perhaps a full minute Tourna sat pulling at his lip.

“What happens to your fees?”

Webster fielded it. “We’ve spent a lot of money so far because we had to have a lot of people doing a lot of work. Where this case is now, the only person billing hours to it is me. We’ll probably need some surveillance as well. We’re going to need to know where Lock is and what he’s doing. When he comes west. But we can scale back the monthly payment quite hard. The success arrangement remains the same.”

“How long do you think you need?”

“I’d say two months,” said Webster, “perhaps one.”

“What if Lock doesn’t go for it?”

“No harm done,” said Webster. Hammer nodded.

Tourna thought for a moment longer, pulling at his lip again.

“This is the only way,” said Webster.

Tourna nodded. “OK. Let’s do it. I want a cap on surveillance, though. I know what that shit can cost. If I need to follow my second wife I’ll just give her the money in alimony. It’s about the same.” He gave another short laugh and stood up to leave. “Mr. Webster. Mr. Hammer, nice to meet you. Do this for me, gentlemen. At any time this looks like it’s not working, stop the clock, yes? I know you’re having fun but not at my expense, OK?” Hammer smiled.

Webster saw Tourna out and then returned to the boardroom. Hammer was still there, still smiling.

“What was that about the Bureau?” said Webster, half enjoying one of Ike’s occasional surprises, half irritated by it.

“Sorry. I meant to tell you before he arrived. I called when you were in Berlin.”

“Are they interested?”

“Oh yes,” said Hammer. “They are.”

Nine

N
O ONE COULD
get you in the air, thought Lock. No one could point out your mistakes. No one could politely criticize your performance. Best of all, no one could treat you with that embarrassed delicacy that suggested you were already incurable.

It was only a brief recess. Four hours from Paris to Moscow in the sun above the clouds. Then at Sheremetyevo airport he would switch his BlackBerry back on and it would all start again. The calls from Cayman, from Cyprus, from Gibraltar, everyone nervous about those people from Ikertu; e-mails from Kesler and Griffin about the horrors of Paris and what on earth we do next; maybe for good measure a call or two from a journalist late to the party. He wondered which had been the worst moment of this relentlessly grim week: being unpicked piece by piece by the acid Mr. Lionel Greene, QC; learning from his secretary that Malin had asked to see him immediately on his return; or being told by the dependable and normally untroubled Herr Rast, the oldest and calmest of Lock’s cohorts in Switzerland, that the Zurich prosecutor had been asking him questions about Faringdon and Langland. Probably the call from Rast, by a shade. Greene had done his worst, and at least Malin was the devil he knew; Swiss prosecutors, however, were a new and frightening apparition.

God, these Queen’s Counsels were good. As he looked at the virgin world of sunshine and deep blue and pure white outside his window it occurred to him that he had been in awe of Greene, and that even while he was being savaged a small part of him had been held rapt by his agility, his utter sureness. Lock wondered whether, in another life, he could ever have been that good. He wasn’t sure he had the appetite to scoop all the meat from a man’s bones as Greene had done to him, like a surgeon eating a crab.

There were faint reasons for hope; Kesler, at least, was forcing himself to be optimistic. Lock may have failed to convince anyone that he was an oil tycoon but Tourna had failed to demonstrate that he had been defrauded. Paris was unlikely to be the end of it by any means. Kesler had also reminded Lock that it was not his plausibility that was on trial, which was just as well, and that none of it would be reported in the press. And that was the greatest relief.

But Malin. Christ. Lock wondered how much he would know. Presumably Kesler would report how the hearing had gone, and it was in his interests to spare the direst details. But that wouldn’t be like Kesler. He could feel the shame of it all rising from his chest into his throat.

Still, at least it was done, and he wouldn’t have to do it again. Malin would be angry, that was certain, but there was little he could do. Little he could say, perhaps, since hadn’t he, after all, hired Lock in the first place for this ridiculous job? Ultimately Malin was responsible, in every sense. Lock smiled, without enthusiasm.

He looked at his watch. Half past ten by French time, half past one in Russia. A respectable time for another drink. He finished the one in front of him.

To distract himself, he took a notebook from his briefcase, cleared pretzel wrappers from the flimsy drop-down table, passed all the rubbish across the empty seat beside him to a stewardess and asked her for more gin. He opened the book at a fresh page and took a pen from his pocket. He started with the date, and was about to write “Dossier” before he decided that was imprudent and changed it to “Ideas.” Then he sat for a while, looking at the words, waiting for inspiration to come, doodling on the opposite page. Under his original heading he drew three boxes and annotated each: What Malin Knows, What I Know and What I Need to Know. Concentrating now, he wrote in each box. The last slowly began to fill up.

What he needed to know was where the money came from. This was difficult. What he saw was only the first layer. His offshore companies received transfers from a dozen companies incorporated all over Russia, and it was only beyond these that real businesses generated the money itself. From sitting in a thousand meetings Lock knew roughly what these did: they overcharged their captive, state-owned clients for goods and services; they bought product cheap and sold it on at market rates; they secured licenses that they never intended to use and could sell on at vast profit. But that was all. He had never been shown the workings.

Finally he drew a fourth box: Where That Information Exists. He thought for a while. Malin’s head; it existed there. He wrote it down. Government files. Probably, somewhere, deep inside some unimaginable part of the Kremlin, there was a file that he and many others would dearly love to see. Where else? Malin’s office at the ministry. Malin’s home? Possibly. He wrote that down. Chekhanov’s office. What about the Russian lawyers? Yes, there might be something there.

Chekhanov’s office. Everything must be in that office, surely? If you were going to pick someone to testify against Malin, it would be Chekhanov. He knew everything. Every corrupt payment, every shaky transaction, every fraud Malin had ever committed.

That was the place. Could he break in? A crazy idea. But he could have others do it for him. Any one of those former government security companies that advertised in the Moscow papers would do it. They would have to do it discreetly, of course; any indication that the office had been breached might lead back to him. Was there some way of making it look like Ikertu? Leave a trace back to London. He could ask those half-soaked London investigators to engage the Russians on his behalf.

Lock sat back in his seat, wondering dizzily about the plan. It wasn’t bad. In fact it was good. This, after all, was the sort of thing that happened in Moscow every day. He was beginning to think like a Russian.

But then he began to think like a lawyer. The loyalty of Lock’s investigators, of InvestSol, could that be relied upon? All it would take was for one of them to realize what was going on and he could end up being blackmailed. Or, more likely and far more dangerous, someone would mess up the job and the fearsome Horkov, or some even more frightening creature from Malin’s crack regiment of brutal old spooks, would track it all back to him.

He was not a master criminal. After three large gin and tonics on a morning flight it was important to remember that.

He circled around the problem for a while, discounting ideas as too timid or too reckless. Chekhanov, though, wouldn’t go away. He was the weak spot. Well, the only spot that felt weak at all. There had been a time, years before, when he and Lock had had offices next to each other in a building just off Novy Arbat until Malin had decided that this gave the wrong impression and separated them. But even now he was in Alexei’s office regularly. If he could only have twenty minutes in there alone. There were what, five or six filing cabinets in there?

Every Tuesday at seven, an hour before Lock, Chekhanov met with Malin, and every two or three weeks he and Lock would see each other beforehand to prepare for their respective sessions. Invariably Chekhanov ran out of these meetings in a rush, apologizing to Lock and leaving him to see himself out. All Lock had to do was arrange their meeting for next Tuesday and arrive a little late with a full agenda. Better still, what if his phone rang as Chekhanov was leaving? He could take it, make some grave noises, and ask Alexei whether he could stay to finish it. The scene played out neatly in his mind.

L
OCK SLEPT
for the last part of the flight, a heavy sleep that left him feeling slow and thick; he woke as the plane bounced gently off the runway at Sheremetyevo. Moscow looked flat and gray, beset by low cloud, already almost dark. Aching across his shoulders and down his back, Lock unclicked his seat belt, stood up to retrieve his suitcase, and stretched in the aisle. It was a quiet flight. At least that was something; no London flight was ever like this. With luck he would be near the front of the passport queue and be through the airport without that awful shuffling wait.

An hour and fifteen minutes, in the end: two planes’ worth of Koreans and Bulgarians had arrived just before him. He had had worse. Wheeling his bag behind him he strolled through Customs, handing his declaration to an officer, and then out into Russia proper to search for Andrei and his car. Usually he waited by the Hertz desk, but today he wasn’t there. Lock stopped and looked down the length of the hall in each direction. No sign. He set his bag straight and took out his Russian phone. As he was finding the number he felt a hand on his upper arm.

“Mr. Lock.” A deep, flat voice, Russian. Lock looked around to his right and then up. The man talking to him was tall, perhaps six three, and broad. He had fine, fair hair cropped so short that Lock could see the white scalp beneath.

“Yes.”

“Can you come with us please? We will take you into the city.”

Lock turned to his left. Another man, similar in build, a little shorter, with gray hair and a broken nose stood there with his hands clasped respectfully in front of him. Both were wearing impenetrable black winter jackets and jeans.

“Where’s Andrei?”

“We are standing in for Andrei today.”

Lock was awake now. He had no idea what this meant. Fear flickered through him.

“Who sent you?”

“We’re from the ministry.”

The gray-haired man took Lock’s bag and started wheeling it across the concourse. His colleague let go of Lock’s arm.

“Come. Please.”

Lock followed. He became conscious of his briefcase. Why had he written those stupid notes? He should tell them that he needed to go to the bathroom, then tear out the page and flush it away. What if they took the briefcase off him while he went? God, he was hopeless at this. They hadn’t taken it, he reasoned; if they had wanted to, they would have.

Down below in the mess of smoking cars parking and waiting a black BMW flashed its lights and the three of them got in, Lock in the back, his reception party bulky in the front. It was dark now, and the gray-haired man drove at speed through the lumbering traffic like someone used to immunity. Lock didn’t talk. He knew that he wouldn’t get answers from these two. They looked like special forces. Not that he really knew about such things, but they were clearly a different breed from Andrei.

Slowly the tower blocks and the billboards became denser and from the dark Moscow began to coalesce into a city. They passed Dynamo Stadium and carried on down Leningradsky Prospect toward the ministry. But at Mayakovskaya they turned east onto the Garden Ring. That didn’t make sense. Lock felt, like a shock, a new fear: what if these men had nothing to do with Malin at all? What if they were FSB? Or worse, someone else’s people, which would mean—what? That Malin had fallen from grace?

They were off the Ring now and into the messy heart of the city. The BMW swept through a tangle of small streets, the stuccoed buildings low around them and a dull orange in the street light. Lock knew this route. It would take him close to his flat. The car turned left into Maly Zlatoustinsky pereulok, his street, and pulled up outside his building. The blond man got out of the car and opened Lock’s door for him. Lock, wary, lifted himself slowly out of the car while the blond man fetched his suitcase.

“What are we doing?” Lock asked.

“We’re taking you home. That is all.”

Lock walked up to the building, found his keys and opened the front door. In the lobby he called the lift. The blond man stood next to him as they waited, looking straight ahead at the lift door.

Lock’s apartment was on the fifth floor. He took his keys, opened the three deadlocks, and went in. The blond man followed, setting the case down in the hall.

“Thank you,” said Lock.

The blond man said nothing and left.

Lock took off his coat, threw it over a chair and went into the kitchen. He had gin, but no tonic. There was vodka in the freezer and he poured himself two inches into a water glass and drank it in one slack swallow. It felt like light, cool and warm in his throat.

He closed his eyes for a moment and gave a small shudder. He had no idea what was going on. Was Andrei simply sick? Of all the outlandish possibilities flying around his head this, absurdly, was one of the more plausible. He walked into his sitting room, which ran the length of the apartment at the front, and looked out the window. The BMW was still there, parked right outside. Presumably it would wait to take him to the ministry in an hour or so. As far as Lock could tell only the driver’s seat was occupied. He watched for a while. The army veteran in winter camouflage who looked after parking for this building left the car alone. Two or three minutes passed.

Then an icy thought took Lock. He went to his front door and looked through the spyhole. It was clear. He opened the door to scan the corridor, and there, standing to the right with his arms crossed and his back straight against the wall, was the blond man. Now Lock understood.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Waiting for you.”

He didn’t need to ask anything more. He closed the door, went to pour himself another drink, and sat at the kitchen table. He was under house arrest.

That was the logical assumption. If they had wanted to shoot him they would have done it by now.

There were different kinds of house arrest. Sometimes you were allowed out under close watch; sometimes you weren’t allowed out at all. Sometimes it ran and ran; sometimes it came to a most definite end. How long had the Romanovs had? A year? A little more?

For twenty minutes he sat and thought and drank. Then his doorbell rang. Again he walked to the spyhole. A large man in a suit was there, rounder than usual in the distorting lens. Malin had never been to his apartment before. Lock opened the door.

“Richard.”

“Konstantin.”

“May I come in?”

“Of course, of course.”

Malin followed Lock into the sitting room.

“Can I get you a drink?” said Lock.

“No, thank you.”

“Please, have a seat.”

Malin sat in the one armchair, where Lock usually sat when he was watching television. The room was sparsely decorated; this was not a home. Lock sat on the sofa and tried to appear relaxed.

For a second or two Malin simply looked at Lock, and Lock as ever was at a loss to read his face. It held no expression. The eyes were blank and sharp at once. Had they always been like that? Were these the eyes that slowly seduced me so long ago?