“Especially these days,” Powell said. “With the end of the art trade, Russian state security is weaker, but only on the civilian side. Their rivals in military intelligence, which is a separate world from the Chekists, are stronger than ever. Now that the war in Georgia is over, there’s a whole new source of guns headed this way unless we can shut down these networks first. And the arms trade wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t approved at the highest levels of the Russian government—”
The room erupted. In the corner, Wolfe was tuning out the clamor of voices when she saw the deputy director’s eyes on her own. “Wolfe, you’re our liaison,” Cornwall said. “What do you think?”
At once, the conference room fell silent. Feeling thrust into the spotlight, Wolfe took a breath, sensing nothing resembling divine inspiration, and spoke slowly. “The Bureau’s official stance remains unchanged. We’ve seen an explosion in armed crime on both sides of the ocean, fueled by Russian guns. To stop the flow of illegal weapons, we need to go to the source.”
“Yes, yes, I know all that,” Cornwall said irritably. “But what about this operation?”
Wolfe saw Powell waiting for her response. Before she knew what she was going to say, she heard herself speak: “If we wait any longer, we’ll lose our chance. We need to move in now.”
Across the room, Powell sank back into his chair, the disappointment visible on his face. Cornwall nodded. “All right. I think I have enough to go on. I’ll inform you of my decision soon.”
The meeting ended. As the other officers left, Wolfe went up to Powell. “Alan, I—”
Powell ignored her and turned to Cornwall, who was heading for the door. “We need to talk about surveillance. My guys at the Met want to watch the garage until the end of the week, in case anyone else shows up.”
“A bit like locking the barn door, isn’t it?” When she stood, Cornwall revealed herself to be startlingly small, coming only to the level of Powell’s chin, but there was no doubt as to who was in charge. “They’re only interested in the red-ink time. Shut it down. We’ll talk later about what comes next.”
She left the conference room. Once they were alone, Wolfe turned to Powell again. “Alan, don’t kill me.”
“It’s all right,” Powell said. He reached up to remove his glasses, then, as if thinking better of it, lowered his hand again. “I don’t blame you. If I were in your position, I might have stabbed myself in the back as well.”
Wolfe followed him to the door. “If I wanted to stab you in the back, I’d have to get in line. This is the right call.”
“You’re wrong. This isn’t when you shut a case down. It’s when you break it wide open.” Powell paused at the door. “I expect that Cornwall will listen to your recommendation. She likes you, and it’s safe to say that she’s lost patience with me. But when this is all over, you’ll see that I was right.”
Turning off the lights, he left the room. Standing in the darkness, Wolfe found herself thinking of a pilgrimage she had made soon after arriving in this city. Baker Street had turned out to be nothing but a line of shops and fast food restaurants, and she had sensed, even then, that this city was only going to frustrate her ambitions. There were no great detectives here, and she was far from one herself, just a hopeless exile, alone, from the country of the saints.
5
The agent at passport control, an attractive woman in a blue head scarf, studied the document in her small hands, then looked up at the traveler before her. “And what is the purpose of your visit?”
“To see a few sights,” the traveler said. “And perhaps to look up some friends.”
The agent’s eyes met his own, their expression cool but oddly teasing. “And how did you choose this city?”
He smiled. “I used to live here. I am curious to find out how things have changed.”
“I see.” She held his gaze for another beat, then stamped his passport and handed it back. “Welcome to London, Mr. Muromets.”
“Thank you.” Ilya Severin tucked the passport into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, then continued on through customs. After changing some money, he bought a newspaper and prepaid phone at the airport drugstore, then went down to the lower level, where he gave a taxi driver an address in Golders Green. As they drove away, he set his watch an hour back, looking out at the overcast sky. Then he opened the paper and began to scan the headlines.
It was strange to be back in London. After the attempt on his life, he had driven to Málaga, where he had retrieved cash and documents from a locker at María Zambrano Station, along with his last clean passport. The drive had given him plenty of time to think. It was impossible, he had seen, simply to fade away again. He had to learn more. Which was why he had returned to this city.
In Marbella, he had tried to disappear into books, believing that this was the life for which he had been intended. It was only now, with the clarity of hindsight, that he saw that he had really been trying to become something he was not. And he was still brooding over this fact when he opened the newspaper to the next section, nearly turning past an article about the death in Stoke Newington.
A second later, the face of the dead man, which appeared in an inset at the bottom of the page, caught his attention. Ilya frowned, then began to read the story more closely. It was not a long article, with most of the page taken up by a photo of the scene, and when he was finished, he read it again.
At last, he set the article aside, trying to decide what it meant. Aldane Campbell was a name he knew well, but there were other details, such as the use of potassium permanganate, that disturbed him even more deeply. The article implied that the armorer had been killed by one of his own associates or by an underworld taxman, but the more Ilya considered the situation, the more convinced he became that something else was at work here.
Looking out the window, he saw that they had left the highway and were moving north through a drab section of Ealing. He leaned forward to speak to the driver. “I’m sorry. But I just remembered that I need to stop somewhere else. Shacklewell Lane. Off Kingsland High Street.”
“Stoke Newington?” The driver did not seem pleased by the change of plans, but finally grunted and eased the cab ponderously onto Uxbridge Road. As they headed east, Ilya settled back in his seat. The article had not given the garage’s address, but he knew very well where it was.
Half an hour later, the taxi arrived at its revised destination. Ilya paid the driver, then got out. As soon as he shut the door, the cab roared off, leaving him with his luggage on the damp curb.
Taking an umbrella from his suitcase, he looked around. One side of the street was occupied by a looming council estate, all brown brick and dead windows. Across from it rose a construction site, long since abandoned, its plywood fence covered in graffiti and peeling flyers.
He opened his umbrella and headed north. This neighborhood had never been particularly lovely, but it had also been hit hard by recent austerity measures. The downturn had been only the latest in a long series of local disasters, the most visible of which had revolved around drugs and guns. Ilya had never concerned himself much with the former, but guns were another matter entirely.
As he went up the street, he passed rows of ethnic restaurants and salons, their signs the brightest colors on the cheerless block, and entered an area given over to even greater desolation. Aside from a few car washes, the buildings he saw, with their soaped or dirty windows, seemed to have been shut up for ages.
Rounding the corner, Ilya found himself on a familiar stretch of road. Up ahead, he saw the garage. Instead of approaching it at once, he continued to the end of the block, pausing in front of a Turkish restaurant. Glancing up and down the street, he saw only a few cars and buses passing along the avenue in the distance. Satisfied that he was alone, he retraced his steps to his destination.
He studied the garage. From the leve
l of his eyes upward, it was shabby brick, but lower down, the outside wall had been painted canary yellow, curiously free of graffiti, as if spared out of respect. To his right, a mural depicted a row of brown people in wide hats working in a wheat field, presumably in an idealized Jamaica, far from the real squalor of Kingston.
Approaching the entrance, Ilya found that the front door had been replaced by a sheet of plywood, a police seal fixed across the edges. To the left stood the garage itself, set against a small paved lot, with a steel gate and two brick walls topped with loops of razor wire. Through the dusty windows, which were covered in mesh, he could make out a workbench and tool chest.
Ilya had seen this place before. Years ago, he had come to negotiate a purchase for Vasylenko, his old mentor, in the days when they had been expanding their operations from Bayswater out into the beckoning city. Brodsky, he recalled, had given them the name. According to the terms of the deal, only one man had been allowed into the garage, and Ilya had volunteered at once.
He had been expecting a disdainful Yardie, and had been surprised by Campbell’s intelligence. After confirming Ilya’s identity, the armorer had taken him inside, where he had removed the lid from a packing crate. Inside had been a number of welder’s gloves, and inside each glove had been a gun.
Ilya had examined the weapons carefully. Most had been deconverted pistols or revolvers, but there had also been two glistening submachine guns. Ilya suspected that the armorer had included the Uzis to tempt him into expanding his purchase, but he had kept to the original order, selecting four Glocks and two Tokarevs at three hundred pounds each. He still remembered the armorer’s clever hands, and how gently, almost lovingly, he had handled the weapons.
And now he had been murdered. Looking into the darkened garage, Ilya sensed that this death had not been random. He knew an intelligence operation when he saw one, and he could already discern the outlines of a plot. There were cabalists, he recalled, who spent hours gazing into water, seeking something divine in the reflection, and it was this sort of distorted image that he was contemplating now.
Even as he weighed the next step, however, he became aware of a voice in his head, soft but insistent, telling him to walk away. If he got involved, it argued, it would mean exposure, perhaps death, when he had already taken an enormous risk by coming back at all. Far better, it whispered, to leave now, while it was still possible, and bury himself in his books.
But there was another voice, a stronger one, that told him that he had been brought to this place for a reason. The more he considered it, the more it seemed to him that the timing of this murder, coming so soon after the attack in Marbella, could not be due entirely to chance.
As Ilya turned away from the garage, he found himself thinking of the image, so dear to the cabalists, of scripture as a mansion with many locked passages. In front of each door was a key, but the key did not open the door next to which it was placed. It was the task of the scholar, working diligently, to find the key for the door he wanted. And when he reflected now on his current problem, it occurred to him that he knew of at least one place where such a key might be found.
A moment later, Ilya noticed that the patter of drops above his head had fallen silent. Glancing up, he saw that the rain had ceased. And as he passed the restaurant on the corner, he closed the umbrella, allowing the unseen camera in the upstairs window to get a good shot of his face.
6
“Activity is the genius of this church,” Wolfe’s mother said, the brightness of her voice undiminished by five thousand miles. “If a missionary works, she gets the Holy Spirit. Which is the case with most other things in life.”
“How true,” Wolfe said, the telephone receiver wedged between her shoulder and left ear. She was seated at her desk in Vauxhall, eyes aching from staring at her computer for the past three hours. On the cubicle wall above the monitor, she had posted photos of the guns from the armorer’s garage. Next to her keyboard was a copy of the ballistics report from Lambeth, which said that the serial numbers on each gun had been erased, and none had ever been linked to a crime.
“I was just talking to Sister Beth about this,” her mother continued, speaking rapidly as always, her words tumbling out in a nonstop stream. “She asked if you’d had a chance to visit the temple in Newcastle.”
“It’s at the top of my list. And my friends are dying to see it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a car.” As she spoke, Wolfe studied the website on her screen, where dealers could sell deactivated weapons to local collectors, the guns rendered useless by the removal of crucial components. For most citizens in the United Kingdom, these were the only kinds of firearms that could be legally purchased.
The problem, Wolfe knew, was that such weapons did not always remain deactivated. Guns that operated on the blowback principle, like Uzis, Stens, or various crude automatics from Eastern Europe, could be restored to working order by any machinist with a minimum of skill. And although the guns at the garage had been carefully erased of any sign of their provenance, it might still be possible to determine who could have sold similar guns in the past.
All the same, it was a long shot, and at a time when she had expected to be closing a major case, it felt stingingly like grasping at straws. Wolfe realized that she had missed her mother’s last sentence. “What was that?”
“I said you need to be careful. I know it’s exciting to be away from home, but you can’t get distracted by work, at least not without a higher purpose. As your grandmother might say, it can be dangerous there in Babylon.”
This last statement was punctuated by a quick laugh, as if her mother was lightly mocking her own sentiments, but Wolfe knew that she really wasn’t joking at all. She noticed that Asthana, who was seated at the next desk, was looking over at her curiously. “Funny, but they don’t call it Babylon here. It’s London. Like how they call an elevator a lift—”
Clicking onto a new page, she broke off. The image here was that of a submachine gun set against a gray background. It was a deactivated Skorpion, the same model, as far as she could tell, that had been found in the armorer’s garage. And looking at the description, she saw that it was being offered, promisingly, by a dealer based in Islington, not far from Campbell’s neighborhood.
“Well, I’m just glad you’ll be coming home soon,” her mother said. “Anyway, I know you’re super busy, so I’ll let you go. You know that your dad and I will always be proud of you—”
“Thanks, Mom. I know.” After saying goodbye, Wolfe hung up, then wrote down the dealer’s information. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Asthana looking at her. “Don’t say anything.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Asthana said, typing away at her terminal. “You should talk to my mother sometime. We’ve barely spoken since I told her that I wasn’t going to get married in Lucknow. When I told her I wanted a green wedding, she thought it meant I’d be wearing an emerald sari.”
Wolfe smiled. “She’ll forgive you in the end, even if it kills both of you first.”
“Yes, I know.” Asthana spun around in her chair. “Which reminds me. You’re leaving in two months, and you still haven’t met Devon. We’re having a drink with some friends at the Lavender Pub on Friday. Garber will be coming, and maybe a few others. Interested?”
“I’d love to, but I have a lot going on,” Wolfe said evasively. In fact, she had been dodging Asthana’s invitations for months, having never come to terms with this city’s pub culture, where it seemed that everyone was constantly drinking. “I’ve got a hot date with some reactivated guns.”
“Oh, but you need a break.” Asthana’s face took on a sly expression. “I’ve even asked Lester Lewis to join us.”
Wolfe closed her web browser and rose from the desk, notebook in hand. “Who?”
“You know who. Lewis. The Home Office pathologist you fancied at the garage—”
Wol
fe, feeling a hot blush spread across her face, hoped that Asthana didn’t see it. “I don’t recall saying those words.”
“You said you thought he was handsome. Well, it turns out that he’s single. Devon knows him from work. Apparently he’s a real rising star at the Home Office. So are you coming?”
Opening her mouth to decline the invitation, Wolfe heard herself saying the opposite. “All right. But only to meet this man of yours.”
“I knew you’d say yes.” As Asthana turned back to her computer, smiling, Wolfe decided to make her retreat. Heading across the floor, it occurred to her that it might be a good thing to go out with her fellow officers, just this once. Maybe, she thought wildly, she would even have a beer.
Powell’s office stood at the far end of the floor. When she poked her head inside, she saw only a mountain of papers in the vague shape of a desk. Turning away, she was about to head back to her cubicle when she ran into Arnold Garber, who was carrying a stack of files that reached to his stubbly chin. “Any sign of Powell?”
“Cornwall’s office,” Garber said, not slowing down. “I think they wanted to see you.”
“Thanks,” Wolfe said to his retreating back. She walked across the floor to the deputy director’s office, which occupied most of the southwest corner. When she got to the door, she saw a paper sign on the knob: DO NOT DISTURB. She considered it for a moment, then knocked. A second later, a voice told her to enter.
Inside, the deputy director’s desk stood under the window, which looked out onto the nearby office park, with half the remaining space in the room given over to a conference table. On the wall behind the table was an Anacapa chart, a family tree of relationships between various parts of the arms trade.
Cornwall was seated at her desk, along with Powell, studying what appeared to be some surveillance photos. Going closer, Wolfe saw that there were three shots in all, evidently taken from the post across from the garage. Then she realized that she had seen the man in the pictures before.
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