The Heist (32 page)

“What is it now?” he asked.

“Money,” replied Gabriel.

“Who does it belong to?”

“The Syrian people. But for the moment,” Gabriel added, “it’s in the hands of Evil Incorporated.”

Seymour raised a baronial eyebrow. “How did you find it?” he asked.

“Jack Bradshaw pointed me in the right direction. And a woman named Jihan told me how to get my hands on the treasure map.”

“And you, I assume, intend to dig it up.”

Gabriel was silent.

“What do you need from Her Majesty’s Secret Service?”

“Permission to conduct an operation on British soil.”

“Will there be any dead bodies?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“Where will it take place?”

“The Tate Modern, if it’s still available.”

“Anywhere else?”

“Heathrow Airport.”

Seymour frowned. “Maybe you should start from the beginning, Gabriel. And this time,” he added, “it might be a good idea if you told me everything.”

It was Jack Bradshaw, the fallen British spy turned art smuggler, who had brought Gabriel and Graham Seymour together in the first place, and so it was with Bradshaw that Gabriel began his account. It was thorough but, by necessity, heavily redacted. For example, Gabriel did not mention the name of the art thief who had told him the long-missing Caravaggio had recently been sold. Nor did he identify the master art forger he had found dead in his Paris studio, or the thieves who had plucked
Sunflowers
from the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam, or the name of the Swiss secret policeman who had given him access to Jack Bradshaw’s gallery of the missing at the Geneva Freeport. It was the letter found in Bradshaw’s safe that led Gabriel to LXR Investments and, eventually, to a small private bank in Linz, though Gabriel neglected to point out that the trail had passed through a pan-Arab law firm based in Great Suffolk Street.

“Who was the chap who took your forged version of the van Gogh to market in Paris?” asked Seymour.

“He was Office.”

“Really?” said Seymour dubiously. “Because the word on the street was that he was British.”

“Who do you think put the word on the street, Graham?”

“You do think of everything, don’t you?” Seymour was still standing before the bookshelves. “And the
real
van Gogh?” he wondered. “You do intend to return it, don’t you?”

“As soon as I get my hands on Waleed al-Siddiqi’s notebook.”

“Ah, the notebook.” He pulled down a volume of Greene and sliced it open with his forefinger. “Let us assume that you succeed in getting access to that list of accounts. Then what?”

“Use your imagination, Graham.”

“Steal it? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“Steal is an ugly word.”

“Does your service have that sort of capability?”

Gabriel gave a wry smile. “After all we’ve done together,” he said, “I’m surprised you would even ask that question.”

Seymour returned the volume of Greene to its original place. “I’m not opposed to having a look at a bank’s ledgers every now and again,” he said after a moment, “but I do draw the line at theft. After all, we’re British. We believe in fair play.”

“We don’t have that luxury.”

“Don’t play the victim, Gabriel. It doesn’t suit you.” Seymour plucked another book from the shelf but this time didn’t bother to open the cover.

“Something bothering you, Graham?”

“The money.”

“What about the money?”

“There’s a good chance that some of it is held by British financial institutions. And if several hundred million pounds were to suddenly vanish from their balance sheets . . .” His voice trailed off, the thought unfinished.

“They shouldn’t have accepted the money in the first place, Graham.”

“The accounts were undoubtedly opened by a cutout,” Seymour countered. “Which means the banks have no idea who the money really belongs to.”

“They will soon.”

“Not if you want my help.”

A silence fell between them. It was broken eventually by Graham Seymour.

“Do you know what will happen if it ever becomes public that I helped you rob a British bank?” he asked. “I’ll be standing in Leicester Square with a paper cup in my hand.”

“So we’ll do it quietly, Graham, the way we always do.”

“Sorry, Gabriel, but British banks are off-limits.”

“What about branches of British banks on foreign soil?”

“They’re still British banks.”

“And banks in British overseas territories?”

“Off-limits,” Seymour repeated.

Gabriel made a show of deliberation. “Then I suppose I’ll have to do it without your help.” He rose to his feet. “Sorry to have dragged you away from the office, Graham. Tell Nigel I can find my way back to Heathrow.”

Gabriel started toward the door.

“You’re forgetting one thing,” Seymour said.

Gabriel turned.

“All I have to do to stop you is tell Waleed al-Siddiqi to burn that notebook.”

“I know,” replied Gabriel. “But I also know that you would never do that. Your conscience wouldn’t allow it. And deep down, you want that money just as badly as I do.”

“Not if it’s deposited in a British bank.”

Gabriel looked at the ceiling and in his head counted to five. “If the money is in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, or any other British territory, I get it. If it’s here in London, it stays in London.”

“Deal,” said Seymour.

“Provided,” added Gabriel quickly, “that HMG puts those assets in a deep freeze.”

“The prime minister would have to make a decision like that.”

“Then I’m quite confident the prime minister will see it my way.”

This time, it was Graham Seymour who looked at the ceiling in exasperation. “You still haven’t told me how you intend to get the notebook.”

“Actually,” said Gabriel, “you’re going to do it for me.”

“I’m glad we cleared that up. But how are we going to get al-Siddiqi to come to Britain?”

“I’m going to invite him to a party. With any luck,” Gabriel added, “it will be the last one he ever attends.”

“Better make it a good one, then.”

“I intend to.”

“Who’s throwing it?”

“A friend of mine from Russia who doesn’t care for dictators who steal money.”

“In that case,” said Seymour, smiling for the first time, “it promises to be a night to remember.”

A
FALLEN
B
RITISH SPY, A ONE-EYED
Italian policeman, a master art thief, a professional assassin from the island of Corsica: this was the menagerie of characters through which the affair had flowed thus far. And so it was only fitting that the next stop along Gabriel’s unlikely journey was 43 Cheyne Walk, the London home of Viktor Orlov. Orlov was a bit like Julian Isherwood; he made life more interesting, and for that Gabriel adored him. But his affection toward the Russian was rooted in something far more practical. Were it not for Orlov, Gabriel would be lying dead in a Stalin-era killing field east of Moscow. And Chiara would be lying next to him.

It was said of Viktor Orlov that he divided people into two categories: those willing to be used and those too stupid to realize they were being used. There were some who would have added a third: those willing to let Viktor steal their money. He made no secret of the fact he was a predator and a robber baron. Indeed, he wore those labels proudly, along with his ten-thousand-dollar Italian suits and his trademark striped shirts, specially made by a man in Hong Kong. The dramatic collapse of Soviet communism had presented Orlov with the opportunity to earn a great deal of money in a brief period of time, and he had taken it. Orlov rarely apologized for anything, least of all the manner in which he had become rich. “Had I been born an Englishman, my money might have come to me cleanly,” he told a British interviewer shortly after taking up residence in London. “But I was born a Russian. And I earned a Russian fortune.”

Raised in Moscow during the darkest days of the Cold War, Orlov had been blessed with a natural facility with numbers. After completing his secondary education, he studied physics at the Leningrad Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics and then disappeared into the Russian nuclear weapons program, where he worked until the day the Soviet Union breathed its last. While most of his colleagues continued to work without pay, Orlov quickly renounced his membership in the Communist Party and vowed to become rich. Within a few years, he had earned a sizable fortune importing computers, appliances, and other Western goods into the nascent Russian market. Later, he used that fortune to acquire Russia’s largest state-owned steel company along with Ruzoil, the Siberian oil giant, at bargain-basement prices. Before long Viktor Orlov, a former government physicist who once had to share an apartment with two other Soviet families, was a billionaire many times over and the richest man in Russia.

But in post-Soviet Russia, a land with no rule of law and rife with crime and corruption, Orlov’s fortune made him a marked man. He survived at least three attempts on his life and was rumored to have ordered several men killed in retaliation. But the greatest threat to Orlov would come from the man who succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia. He believed that Viktor Orlov and the other oligarchs had stolen the country’s most valuable assets, and it was his intention to steal them back. After settling into the Kremlin, the new president summoned Orlov and demanded two things: his steel company and Ruzoil. “And keep your nose out of politics,” he added ominously. “Otherwise, I’m going to cut it off.”

Orlov agreed to relinquish his steel interests, but not Ruzoil. The president was not amused. He immediately ordered prosecutors to open a fraud-and-bribery investigation, and within a week Russian prosecutors had issued a warrant for Orlov’s arrest. Faced with the prospect of a long, cold stay in the neo-gulag, he wisely fled to London, where he became one of the Russian president’s most vocal critics. For several years Ruzoil remained legally icebound, beyond the reach of both Orlov and the new masters of the Kremlin. Finally, Orlov agreed to surrender the company in what was effectively history’s largest payment of hostage ransom—$12 billion in exchange for the release of three kidnapped Office agents. For his generosity, Orlov received a British passport and a very private meeting with the Queen. Afterward, he declared it the proudest day of his life.

It had been more than five years since Viktor Orlov had come to financial terms with the Kremlin, yet he remained at the top of the Russian hit list. As a result, he moved about London in an armored limousine, and his house in Cheyne Walk looked a bit like the embassy of an embattled nation. The windows were bulletproof, and parked at the curb was a black Range Rover filled with bodyguards, all of whom were former members of Christopher Keller’s old regiment, the Special Air Service. They paid Gabriel little heed as he arrived at the appointed time of half past four and, after slipping through the wrought-iron gate, presented himself at Orlov’s stately front door. The bell, when pressed, produced a maid in a starched black-and-white uniform, who escorted Gabriel up a flight of wide, elegant stairs to Orlov’s office. The room was an exact replica of the Queen’s private study in Buckingham Palace except for the giant plasma media wall behind Orlov’s desk. Usually, it flickered with financial data from around the world, but on that afternoon it was the crisis in Ukraine that held Orlov’s attention. The Russian army had invaded the Crimean Peninsula and was now threatening to push into other regions of eastern Ukraine. The Cold War was officially on again, or so declared the commentariat. Their logic had but one glaring flaw. In the mind of the Russian president, the Cold War had never ended in the first place.

“I warned this would happen,” Orlov said after a moment. “I warned that the tsar wanted his empire back. I made it very clear that Georgia was just the appetizer and that Ukraine, the breadbasket of the old union, would be the main course. And now it’s playing out live on television. And what do the Europeans do about it?”

“Nothing,” answered Gabriel.

Orlov nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on the screen. “And do you know why the Europeans are doing nothing while the Red Army runs roughshod over yet another independent nation?”

“Money,” replied Gabriel.

Again Orlov nodded. “I warned them about that, too. I told them not to grow dependent on trade with Russia. I pleaded with them not to become addicted to cheap Russian natural gas. No one listened to me, of course. And now the Europeans can’t bring themselves to impose meaningful sanctions on the tsar because it will hurt their economies too much.” He shook his head slowly. “It makes me sick to my stomach.”

Just then, the Russian president strode across the screen, one hand rigidly at his side and the other swinging like a scythe. His face had been recently put to the knife again; his eyes were stretched so tight he looked as though he were a man of the Central Asian republics. He might have appeared a comical figure were it not for the blood on his hands, some of which belonged to Gabriel.

“At last estimate,” Orlov was saying, his eyes fixed on his old enemy, “he was worth about a hundred and thirty billion dollars, which would make him the richest man in the world. How do you suppose he got all that money? After all, he’s spent his entire life on the government payroll.”

“I suppose he stole it.”

“You think?”

Orlov turned away from the video wall and faced Gabriel for the first time. He was a small, agile man of sixty, with a head of gray hair that had been coaxed and gelled into a youthful, spiky coif. Behind his rimless spectacles his left eye twitched nervously. It usually did when he was speaking about the Russian president.

“I know for a fact he pocketed a large portion of Ruzoil after I surrendered it to the Kremlin to get you out of Russia. It was worth about twelve billion dollars at the time. Rather small beer in the grand scheme of things,” Orlov added. “He and his inner circle are growing vastly rich at the expense of the Russian people. It’s why he’ll do whatever it takes to stay in power.” Orlov paused, then added, “Just like his friend in Syria.”