City of Exiles (9781101607596)

by Nevala-lee, Alec

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Wolfe said, staring at the man’s face. It was Ilya Severin.

  “I’m afraid not,” Powell said, all but vibrating with excitement. “Surveillance was never called off. The order was lost in a pile of action requests. Yesterday afternoon, the team saw our man. The Scythian himself.”

  “Powell has been walking me through his background,” Cornwall said, removing her reading glasses, which hung from her neck by a fine chain. “I want you to be honest with me. Could this be our killer?”

  Wolfe tried to get her head around this. Ilya had been an assassin, yes, but something about this murder seemed out of character. He had never burned the bodies of his victims, and his last few killings had all been motivated, at least in part, by a clear sense of retribution.

  A second later, her doubts were swept away by a thought that rendered all else meaningless. This was the break that she needed. Ilya’s reappearance would shake up the entire division, and she was one of only two officers at the agency who had dealt with him before.

  In the end, Wolfe only nodded, her face perfectly calm. “It’s possible. We know that he was responsible for at least two deaths in the United States. Before that, we believe that he was one of the leading enforcers in London.”

  Cornwall frowned at the photos. “But you were saying that he’s turned on the mob?”

  “That’s my understanding,” Powell said. “Look at his story. A Russian Jew and model student, but convicted at eighteen of dealing on the black market. He was sent to prison in Moscow, where he fell in with Grigory Vasylenko—”

  “A piece of bad news,” Cornwall said. “Leave it to the Russians to put a boy like that in the same room as a vor. What then?”

  “We believe that both were freed in Primakov’s general amnesty, although the details aren’t clear. When Vasylenko came to London, he brought Ilya with him. Ilya became a major asset, until he was betrayed after an assignment in New York. He’s been on the run ever since.”

  “But not without doing some damage first,” Wolfe said. “We know he went after the men who double-crossed him. One died; another lost an eye. And we think he was the one who killed Alexey Lermontov.”

  “Lermontov,” Cornwall said. “The man you thought was in charge of the art trade?”

  Powell’s face darkened. “We know he was in charge of it, but never had the chance to make our case. A year ago, we found him in Fulham, shot once through the head. Someone texted the police with the location of the body. Ballistics linked it to a revolver that Ilya had used in the past. We know for a fact that he had it when he disappeared. It was a message.”

  Wolfe could understand the bitterness in his voice. Lermontov, who had financed intelligence operations using art transported by the mob, had been their best proof of a link between the Russian secret services and organized crime, but his death had left them unable to prove it. Vasylenko, his leading contact among the vory, or brotherhood of thieves, had been arrested and sentenced to twenty years on a range of weapons and conspiracy charges, but at the trial, there had been no mention of Russian intelligence.

  Cornwall was looking out the window, taking in the gray block of the office park. “A dangerous man. But why would he go after this armorer? Is there a connection here I’m not seeing?”

  “Given the nature of the underworld in London, it wouldn’t surprise me if their paths had crossed,” Powell said. “It’s even possible that Ilya sees it as an extension of his mission.”

  Cornwall turned away from the cheerless view. “And what sort of mission is that?”

  Wolfe saw that the question was directed at her. “Ilya was betrayed by the intelligence services. Killing Lermontov and destroying the art trade was his way of striking a blow in return. So if we’re right, and Russian intelligence is involved with the arms trade as well—”

  “—then your man will want to bring it down before we can,” Cornwall finished. She fell silent, as if considering her options. Finally, she said, “All right. I’m postponing the raid until we can take this new factor into account. Until we know more, the details stay in this room. What else?”

  Wolfe did her best to hide her sense of triumph. “I can request Ilya’s file from the Bureau. If we cross-check it with his record here, we can get a sense of his haunts, his associates, the places he might visit—”

  Even as she spoke, she saw that Powell was staring at the Anacapa chart on the wall. Following his gaze, she realized that he was looking at one particular photo, and as he turned back, his eyes bright, she knew at once what he was going to say: “And we need to see Vasylenko.”

  7

  In Finsbury Park, beneath the overcast sky, a row of adjoining townhouses stood below the railway tracks. A construction worker in a hard hat and vest was strolling along the sidewalk, a canvas satchel at his side. Anyone watching from the bus stop on the corner would have seen him go without pausing past the house with the iron fence, but as he went by, he glanced over once without turning his head, taking in its reinforced door and windows.

  Continuing onward, he approached another building six houses away, closer to the end of the block. This second townhouse was under renovation and apparently vacant, a scaffolding of plywood laid across its face like a cruel orthodontic device. It was separated from the sidewalk by a low brick wall the height of a man’s waist. The worker stepped over it easily, then went to fetch the wooden ladder that was leaning against the side of the house.

  Setting the ladder against the lowest platform of the scaffold, which was eight feet off the ground, he climbed up. He had been watching this house for several days. According to public documents, it was unoccupied, and although weeks had passed since any work had been done, he was fairly sure that the sight of a construction worker would not attract undue attention.

  When he reached the final level of the scaffold, he climbed onto the flat roof, which was lined with crinkling tar paper, with a raised ledge on all four sides. He looked at the area behind the building. Past the overgrown rear yard stood a tumbledown of dead branches and leafless trees, followed by a strip of muddy grass. Beyond that, there was a wire fence, and finally the train tracks themselves.

  Lowering himself to a seated position, Lasse Karvonen settled down on the roof, his back to the ledge. From here, he could not be seen from the street. He removed his hard hat and vest, laying them on the rooftop. Under the vest, he was wearing a black sweater and dark jeans.

  From his pocket, he removed a single yellow apple, then took the puukko knife from the satchel at his side. It was a beautiful sheath knife with a birch handle and steel blade, the back of the knife flat so that one could push a thumb against it while carving wood, the tip curved upward for skinning.

  Using the knife, he cut up and ate the apple, listening to the National Rail trains rolling by every few minutes as he waited for the sun to go down. The knife had belonged to his grandfather. Karvonen had brought it with him to the army, where it had been the only civilian item allowed in his paratrooper’s kit. Other soldiers had often asked to see it. They knew, of course, who its owner had been.

  Karvonen had been eight years old when his grandfather died. During the war, the old man had taken a Soviet bullet through the cheek, shattering his jaw, so his face was oddly misshapen, a large lump protruding from one side. With his goblin ears and eyes, he had been a frightening figure, but Karvonen had always inched closer, prompted by his parents, whenever his grandfather spoke about the war.

  “Suomussalmi.” All the stories began with this one word, a kind of invocation, as if to summon back the ghosts of the north: “You can picture it, the men on skis, dressed all in white, coming down to destroy the Russians section by section. When the snow fell, it covered dead and wounded alike. Men would lie bleeding on the ground, but even if the blood stopped, they froze to death. You see?”

  Karvonen, s
till his mother’s favorite child, had nodded rapidly. His grandfather had sucked back the spit from his gums and smiled, saying, “We could hear the Russians over the radio. The Swedes had broken their codes. They would beg for food, saying that they were starving, or that they had shot their last horse for meat. Once, over the radio, they said that they would set up a triangle of fires near their camp, so that the air force could drop food and bullets. We made our own triangle a mile away and watched as the airdrop was lost in the snow—”

  Years later, long after his grandfather was dead, Karvonen would learn that because of the Winter War, Stalin had resolved never to invade Finland again, knowing that the result would be a bloodbath. It had kept their country safe for generations. Yet there was one figure who was strangely absent from the old man’s stories, and for the full account, Karvonen had been obliged to ask his parents, who had finally told him what his grandfather had done.

  Using iron sights that would not fog up in the cold, keeping snow in his mouth so the vapor of his breath would not give him away, his grandfather had racked up four hundred kills as a sniper, the second highest total of the war. The kills had taken place over the course of a long year, but when Karvonen pictured the men his grandfather had slain, it was always as a single mountain of bodies, lying there in the snow, ready to be consumed in a funeral pyre.

  After his grandfather died, leaving him his puukko knife, Karvonen had begun to hunt on his own. In the woods behind their house, one could find hares, squirrels, sometimes even deer. He had not used a rifle. Instead, he would set snares and wait beside them for hours. Sometimes, depending on his mood, he would torture the animals as well. Regardless of what he did, he would always burn the bodies afterward, clearing a circle of dirt for a small bonfire.

  Looking into the flames, a boy of eight already becoming something that his parents could not understand, Karvonen had seen that he would never be as great a sniper as his grandfather. Better, he had thought, to go in close with a pistol, or even a knife, as the ghosts of the north had done with the Russians, creeping up through the snow and cutting their throats. Hunting, he had found, was the only time he truly felt alive. It also silenced the voices in his head.

  He suspected that his grandfather had heard those voices, too. One morning, he had gone into the bathroom, loaded a shotgun with his trembling hands, and blown off the top of his skull. He had been eighty years old. Some time afterward, Karvonen’s father, a children’s photographer, had done the same, but with a noose instead of a gun. In those days the suicide rate in Finland had been the highest in the world, four times higher than that of Britain, caused by some indefinable combination of darkness, drink, and the dead whiteness of the sky.

  Thinking of these things now, still on the roof, Karvonen saw that the sun had gone down. He had been waiting for almost three hours. Taking his hard hat and vest, he wadded them up, then went over to the edge of the roof and tossed them into the tumbledown. The apple core he flung into the darkness.

  Slinging his canvas bag over his shoulders, he crouched out of sight again, waiting for the next train to come. Less than a minute later, exactly on schedule, it passed by. As the train thundered along the row of houses, drowning out all other sounds, he began to creep silently across the adjoining rooftops, slipping over the ledge from one house to another, counting the chimneys as he went. As the sound of the train faded, he halted. The roof he wanted was six houses away.

  Karvonen waited in the darkness for the next train. When it came, he repeated the process, allowing the noise to conceal the sounds he made. After the train passed, he paused again. Working this way, moving only with the trains, it took him forty minutes to cover the distance. At last, however, he reached the final house, the one he had passed earlier that evening.

  Crouching down on the last rooftop, he settled in to wait as the sky grew gradually darker. Finally, at close to eleven, his watch told him that it was time to move. As soon as he heard the next train coming, he lowered himself silently from the rear ledge of the rooftop, hanging from the edge by his fingertips. Two feet below him was the flat roof of an extension, which thrust itself into the rear yard. Next to it, he knew, was a window. As the train was passing, he waited until the noise had reached its height, and then, carefully, he let go.

  He dropped two feet and landed softly on the second roof, next to the window at the rear of the house. Pressing himself against the outside wall, he listened. All was silent. When he was sure that he had not been overheard, he set to work, knowing that ten minutes were left until the next train.

  Karvonen examined the window. As he had expected, it was held shut with a flimsy catch. From his canvas satchel, he took a short pry bar and wedged it noiselessly between the frame and sill. He tested it gently, gauging the pressure on the latch, and saw that it was ready to give.

  For nine minutes, he waited, one gloved hand motionless on the pry bar, until he heard the approach of the train. He held back until it was almost upon him, the rumble of the wheels building to a roar, and then put all his weight onto the bar.

  The latch broke. Karvonen raised the window, moving quickly now, the pry bar falling to the yard below as the train thundered along the tracks. Drawing his pistol, he went into the house.

  Outside, the noise of the train rose in a trembling wave of sound, then began to fade. Just before it ceased entirely, there was a scream and two muted gunshots. A second later, the train was gone, and across the rows of slumbering houses, nothing remained but silence.

  8

  “Vasylenko isn’t a man you want to underestimate,” Powell said, locking up the sedan. “A vor doesn’t survive for long if he isn’t intelligent. He’ll be cautious, and he’ll have his solicitor there. And he doesn’t like women, especially Americans, although I think we can make use of that.”

  Wolfe, the case file in hand, matched him stride for stride as they walked along the car park. “What about you?”

  Powell looked ahead at the hulk of Belmarsh Prison. “He doesn’t like me, either.”

  Crossing the road, he glanced over at Wolfe. She was dressed as severely as usual, an attractive young woman determined to be taken seriously, which implied that she didn’t know that she was taken very seriously indeed. He had hoped that her talents would find a more suitable outlet in London, and he was angry with himself at having failed to provide it.

  As they approached the prison, he took cold comfort in the fact that it wasn’t entirely his fault. SOCA had always been a troubled organization, founded as an uneasy hybrid of five different agencies, but over the past year, it had grown even more dysfunctional. A series of failed operations, as well as the recent change of government, had left everyone scrambling for funds, and a proposal to reorganize the entire agency under a new name had only made things worse. As a result, Powell had been forced to play a political game that, as a rational creature, he deeply disliked.

  All the same, if the timing had been bad for him, it had been even worse for Wolfe. After falling out of touch for almost a year, he had impulsively proposed her for the liaison role, based on little more than a memory of certain qualities she had shown in New York. Now, after months of budget cuts and infighting, they had finally been granted an opening, so it was easy to understand the intensity he saw in her face. “What about the solicitor?”

  “You’ve read the transcripts,” Powell said. “He’s young, but smart. At Vasylenko’s trial, he managed to exclude all testimony about the intelligence connection. So he’s very good at what he does. And he won’t let Vasylenko talk unless he thinks we have something to offer him.”

  They ascended the curb on the other side, approaching the prison entrance, an orange brick building guarded by a row of short metal posts. “But we don’t have anything to offer.”

  Powell nodded grimly as they passed through the doors to Belmarsh. “Yes, I know.”

  They went under the
coat of arms and entered a reception area. Inside, Owen Dancy, Vasylenko’s solicitor, was signing in with the guard. Dancy was not yet forty, but at the top of his profession, and very fat. When they shook hands, however, his palms were dry, and there was something in the plump cushion of his fingers that radiated confidence. “Good to see you, Powell. And you must be—”

  Wolfe shook his hand. “Rachel Wolfe. I’m a liaison officer with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “I see.” Dancy’s smile pushed up the rolls of flesh around his eyes. “A bit out of your way, aren’t you?”

  “Lucky for me you have such interesting clients,” Wolfe said. The guard, who had already searched the solicitor’s briefcase, examined her purse and flipped carefully through the file folder for contraband. He was a bulky man with a shaved head, wearing the usual blue jacket, white shirt, and black tie. Powell knew that the guard’s tie was a clip-on, to keep prisoners from strangling him with it.

  After the search, they were escorted by a second guard into a deserted concrete courtyard. At this hour of the morning, the prison was quiet, except for the barks of patrolling Alsatians in the distance.

  They headed into the nearest of the four housing blocks. Each block was in the shape of a cross, with a common central area surrounded by four spurs. Going inside, they went down a corridor of lavender brick until they reached a pair of metal gates. The guard took a key from his belt, unlocked the first gate, pulled it heavily aside, and ushered them in. Once they were through, he shut the first gate and opened the second with a different key. Then they continued onward.

  Now the walls were green, indicating that they had entered a secure area. Every few yards, they passed through another set of gates, repeating the same process as before. As they went on, the smell of the prison, which had been faint at first, gradually grew riper, a thunderous mingling of body odor and unwashed laundry. Powell saw that Wolfe noticed it, too.