Cold (13 page)

They called it Lunnaya Polyana – Moonglade. It was the one place on earth where Zoba could go and no one could find him without his express permission. Here, his control over his environment, always an obsession with him, was nigh on absolute. Here, only his innermost circle was permitted – the oligarchs who always paid up, who had never wavered when things hadn’t been so rosy for him. And their women and – how to put it? – the other entertainers.

Minions had to tramp through the snow for two, sometimes three days to see Zoba and his inner circle when he was in residence, because no roads were allowed up here in the High Caucasus, lest the national park lose its special UNESCO status. So it pleased Reikhman to be flying in a helicopter, and not just any old helicopter, but a special service troop-carrier with not one but two rotors. It was a symbol of his status these days, and besides, he was on special business.

Down below, sunlight splintered off peaks of ice as bright as knives. Reikhman knew that he had to tread warily. He had dealt with Pyotr, Vysoky and the old schoolteacher. That had been easy. He’d been told to take care of them by the highest authority. Besides, they were insects, and even if some louse of a police officer got ideas above his station, the special service would very quickly deal with him. Konstantin, the driver, had been a nobody. But Iryna had some qualities. A foolish mistake to kill her? Maybe. But he had been told by the highest authority to leave behind no living witnesses. Iryna could have become an inconvenience, which would have had consequences for him, too. Hence the insurance policy.

Mirroring the contours of the Caucasus beneath them, the helicopter rose and fell, fell and rose. They had half an hour to go. Reikhman climbed up the two steps to the cockpit to talk to the pilot, an old friend from the Second Chechen War, when they had flushed the
hajis
– as they called the jihadi fighters – down the bog. The co-pilot noted Reikhman, unbuckled his belt and got up and left, closing the cockpit door. The two of them were left alone in the convex plastic bubble; below was a world of ice and rock. Over the racket of the rotors, Reikhman studied the communications console, then made a throat-cutting gesture. The pilot hit a switch. No one could overhear them.

Reikhman raised the flat palm of his hand: a question.

The pilot raised two fingers, and then moved them backwards.

He mouthed ‘yesterday’ and the pilot nodded.

Reikhman said nothing.

The pilot put out his left hand, five fingers spread, then two, three fingers of his right hand, and wobbled it.
Seven, maybe eight.

Reikhman twirled his finger, a suggestion of a tape or a camera reel spooling away. The pilot nodded and fished out a tiny digital card from his left breast pocket. Reikhman palmed it and went back to his seat for the corkscrew landing. The border wasn’t far away and you never knew what new tricks the hajis might get up to.

The landing was so-so, the pilot nervy, the chopper coming down with a heavy clunk. Reikhman had seen him land a big troop-carrier under fire in Grozny with the gentleness of a kitten lowering itself onto a duvet.

Moonglade got to people. Power and isolation do not mix sweetly. Reikhman had been to the Kremlin often enough. There, power had been seeping through the wide corridors under the onion domes, its wretches weeping in the sunless dungeons, for centuries. There, at the dread centre of the old imperial city, it made a kind of sense. But up here in this snowed-out nothingness, with only wolves for company? You could feel the intensity of it: the orders given; the petitions for mercy or money, for forgiveness, ignored. With the back of his palm he wiped his lips. Bone dry. Altitude? Or fear?

One of the aircrew opened the perspex door, and Reikhman was out and running towards the main entrance while the rotors still clattered above his head and their downwash created a small snowstorm.

A security apparatchik called Bekhterev – taller than him, blond, arrogant, whom Reikhman had hated on first sight – met him at the front door and led the way in silence. There could be little doubt that Moonglade was home to a twenty-first-century tsar: gold fittings; paintings of nabobs from the old times, trouncing the French, the Poles, whomsoever; the sound of telephones ringing in the distance, never to be answered.

Bekhterev led Reikhman to a suite of offices below ground, ignoring two technicians at their computer screens. He took Reikhman into a conference room and gestured for him to sit down on the other side of a smooth black granite table shaped like a coffin. Bekhterev stared at Reikhman; Reikhman stared back. Minutes passed, an hour. This was how it was with power. You hurried like a mad thing for them, and then you waited your turn. And waited and waited.

Two hours after he had landed, the door to the conference room clicked open and Reikhman smelt the lavender before he saw him.

‘So?’ asked Grozhov. Fatter than Reikhman had ever seen him before, beautiful Savile Row suit, hooded eyes, pale face – as if his skin never felt the grace of sunlight – extraordinarily intelligent and yet dark beyond imagination.

Grozhov was the gatekeeper for Zoba’s spy networks – official, unofficial, money-raising, life-terminating – and so, perhaps, the second most powerful man in the whole country.

‘I’m not reporting in the presence of this fashion mannequin,’ said Reikhman, nodding towards Bekhterev. Grozhov smiled and gestured for Bekhterev to leave, which he did, silently and resentfully.

‘Well?’ asked Grozhov.

‘All three neutralised.’

‘Video?’ His voice was peculiar, high-pitched, almost like a eunuch’s.

‘The whole thing shot on one card, not copied.’ Reikhman produced an envelope containing the film card and offered it to the gatekeeper.

Grozhov studied the envelope, but did not accept it.

‘Not copied, you say?’

‘No.’

The lids of Grozhov’s eyes drooped down so the pupils were all but hidden, and his voice softened to a whisper: ‘Are you sure?’

‘Don’t take me for an idiot, Grozhov. If you wanted such a person, you should have hired him.’

‘It would be an insurance policy, would it not?’

Reikhman felt a slight tension high up on the left side of his chest. Palpitations? Or was he letting Grozhov get to him?

‘Not an insurance policy, a suicide note. Enough of these games, Grozhov. Watch what’s on the card. If you’re happy, then I can get on with my life. If you don’t like it, then all I ask for is nine grams of lead in the back of the head, the way Josef Vissarionovich did things, back in 1937.’

He pushed the envelope towards Grozhov with the flat of his hand. Grozhov, ever the subtle adversary, bowed gracefully and pocketed the envelope.

‘Let me have a look. In the meantime, I’ll take you to a suite where you can be comfortable. But please, stay where I put you. Zoba doesn’t like people poking their noses into his private business.’

‘Of course.’

Grozhov led him slowly through a series of doors, occasionally stopping to dab his face with a white silk handkerchief. They arrived at a suite of white and gold. The door closed behind Reikhman and he lay on the bed, wide awake. Once, he heard a door open and through that a few bars of ABBA’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, causing him, despite the strain, to smile to himself. Zoba might be running rings around the Americans, telling them tales about the poison gas supplied to the Syrians, playing games in Ukraine, but his taste in music was, well, terrible.

The video was two and a half hours in all and Reikhman knew Grozhov well enough that he would watch every single frame. So he had time to explore, provided he was careful and didn’t bump into that prick Bekhterev.

Reikhman tried the door handle: unlocked. He opened it and walked down the corridor, ears straining for the slightest sound. No CCTV inside, or none that he could see. He knew the reason for that. Out here, no visitor could come and go without the knowledge of security. But there might be things that happened here for which a recording would be most unsuitable.

Five doors along, Reikhman found what he was looking for. Through the door he could hear the soundtrack to a film. He squeezed open the door and the two packages turned from the vast screen they were gazing at to look at the source of the disturbance. They were watching
Toy Story 3
. He bowed an apology, put his finger to his lips –
shh!
– and closed the door. They didn’t know it, but he’d captured them on film.

He returned to his room, took his pen from his shirt pocket and wrote something, then tucked it into his inside jacket pocket. He would download the film later. He lay down on a sofa and reflected on what Grozhov would do to him if he ever found out what Reikhman had just done, then closed his mind to it.

Grozhov returned three and a half hours later. Why had he taken so long? To make his own personal copy of the film, Reikhman realised.

The gatekeeper studied him, judging.

‘So?’ Reikhman said.

‘Good work.’

The silence indicated this wasn’t the end of the matter. Grozhov couldn’t possibly know what the pilot had told him, couldn’t know that he knew about the packages or their taste in Hollywood movies.

‘Pity about the general’s daughter,’ said Grozhov.

‘Who?’

‘Iryna Dozhd.’

Reikhman extemporised: ‘A tragic car accident.’

‘Yes, that’s what the police say.’

So Iryna had been connected. Not just a rising star in the department, the Special Directorate of the Tax Inspectorate, but also a general’s daughter. Pity.

Grozhov’s lizard eyes held Reikhman’s gaze, unblinking.

‘Operational necessity,’ Reikhman said. ‘She knew too much, as did the driver, and they could not be trusted to keep quiet.’

‘Zoba doesn’t know,’ said Grozhov.

‘Good.’

‘But the general was one of the Afgantsy. Fought his way into the presidential palace in 1979, held back the dukhi in Jalalabad. A Hero of the Soviet Union. If he makes heat for us, it could be difficult for you. I came across him in Kabul a number of times.’

‘And?’

‘The general can be overly sentimental.’

From the way Grozhov’s jowls quivered, Reikhman knew that he hated him.

‘I had no choice,’ he insisted. ‘The driver was a nobody, but she was no fool. She was beginning to connect the dots.’

Grozhov fell silent, lowered his head. At this angle, to Reikhman, he suggested one of those ancient tortoises from the Galapagos: old, reptilian, prehuman. The silence grew longer and more oppressive. Eventually, one word fell from Grozhov’s lips: ‘Dots?’

‘Dots.’

‘Dots, you say.’

‘Yes, dots.’

‘What dots?’

‘The people who ended up dead. The bully, the pig man, the teacher. The dots.’

‘Hold your tongue, Anatoly Mikhailovich.’

Stung, Reikhman did his best to defend himself. ‘You cannot expect such a difficult operation to have one hundred per cent success without some fallout.’

‘Hold your tongue or you may lose it. Do not utter that thought. Bury it. Understand, Anatoly?’

Reikhman had killed five people the day before, but there was a quality to Grozhov that turned his bowels to ice. He fell silent.

‘We admire your work, Reikhman, but no one is invincible. It was a mistake to rub out the general’s daughter. It was a second mistake to do it in the way you did. That was messy.’

Reikhman was about to correct Grozhov, but the gatekeeper brushed him away with a sweep of his hand. ‘Don’t quote what the police say in their official report. They spout gibberish, that’s their function. We know the true facts. Here, at this level, you’re allowed one mistake. You’ve known that, ever since I found you in the orphanage. Two is a problem. Three is retirement.’

The last word came out almost as a whisper. He didn’t say ‘nine grams of lead’. He didn’t have to. Of all things, Reikhman hated being reminded of where he had come from. Once Grozhov raised the orphanage, he knew he was in far deeper trouble than he had imagined. He did his best to claw his way back into his master’s warmth, knowing he was far too old to comfort him in the way Grozhov liked best.

‘It won’t happen again.’

A pause, then: ‘If necessary I will make a visit, to ensure the trash have paid full attention to the clean-up. Be straight with me, Anatoly. Were there any witnesses?’

Reikhman nodded. He had no choice but to appear acquiescent. ‘Perhaps three. At the block of flats where the old teacher lived. There it became necessary to deal with the female operative. I was seen by a young mother and a small boy, dark hair, about five. He’s old enough to be a witness.’

Grozhov shrugged. ‘The mother sounds socially irresponsible. We shall consider taking the boy into our special protection.’

‘Don’t,’ snapped Reikhman.

‘Don’t?’

‘It would not be necessary. I was overstating the difficulty. The main witness is a concern, a soldier with a shock of white hair.’

‘Name?’

‘I didn’t get his name.’

‘Why not?’

‘He ran like a rabbit.’

‘I will attend to the White Rabbit. Now, on the positive side of the balance, Zoba liked the video. I showed him only the school bully, but he liked it very much.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing. But I can tell from the way he watched it, unsmiling. He found it . . . satisfactory.’ Grozhov paused to pat his forehead and cheeks with a handkerchief. ‘Zoba indicated that we should show you some appreciation for your work.’

‘That would be most gracious.’

‘You are to be awarded the Best Investigator prize for the whole of the Tax Inspectorate. Zoba himself will present the award. Congratulations.’

Reikhman’s lips pressed into a thin smile. A prize was fine. But he had been hoping for something more substantial.

‘Thank you. This is a great honour.’

‘But?’ asked Grozhov, his eyebrows hovering, quizzical.

‘A great honour.’

‘Tssh, your uncle is playing with you. There is something else, potentially of material benefit to you. We have been irritated by the activities of an American investment fund based in Moscow. While lecturing our government about morality and the rule of law, it is, effectively, stealing the birthright of the Russian people. The owner is an American citizen and, regrettably, cannot be touched. We want you to hollow it out.’