Her best photography had always been done in solitude. A camera, as everyone knew, was a sublimated gun, and the purest emblem of her art was that of the photographer as a hunter, alone against the world. With a staff of assistants, though, this element was diminished. Retouching took uncertainty out of the equation, but there was also a loss of resourcefulness. And perhaps she would have kept control of her life, she thought, if she had gone out on her own more often.
She noticed that her memory card, which also held pictures from the Dior shoot, was nearly full. Sliding it out, she replaced it with one from the pouch hooked to her belt, saying, “Listen, maybe you could get away from the desk? The light will be better on the other side of the room.”
Morley tapped a key, closing the chart on-screen, then turned away from the monitor. Rising from behind his desk, he went over to the table with the chessboard in the corner. “Here?”
“Yes, perfect.” Coming up behind him, Renata saw that the new location gave her a chance to put the pop art painting in the background. “Quite the portrait you’ve got there. You’re like Dorian Gray—”
Morley smiled. “My story isn’t quite as interesting. The artist has a nice little scam going. He’ll paint a portrait for anyone who donates twenty thousand pounds to a given charity, meaning that his assistants silkscreen your face on a canvas and he splashes some paint around—”
“A good business model.” She lowered herself to one knee. “Mind fixing your tie?”
Glancing down, Morley complied. “Later, when you pick up the canvas, you find that he’s done four portraits, arranged in panels so they all bleed together. He’d be glad to sell you only one, he says, but it would be a shame to break up the composition. Invariably, you agree to fork over another sixty thousand. The original twenty goes to charity, as agreed, and he simply pockets the rest.”
“That’s quite wicked,” Renata said, although, as she continued to take shots, she found herself wondering if she could do something similar. “How did you end up with just the one?”
“A year ago, he tried to extend his scam by painting traders for a Russian investment journal. But it’s a mistake to try and outfox men like us. We don’t like being cheated, whether it’s by Putin or someone else. Only five portraits out of sixty were sold. Nobody paid full price. I bought one for a thousand pounds, nine hundred more than it was worth. But I wanted it, you see.”
Renata lowered her camera. What he was describing, she realized, was almost exactly what she had in mind for her own project. “But why?”
“So I could tell you this story,” Morley said. “You don’t invest in Russia without iron in your heart. You’re staring down thieves who would gladly cut your throat, so you won’t be bullied by some artist. Besides, most traders don’t want themselves painted. You don’t flaunt your wealth. Not now—”
“Fair enough,” Renata said, her face burning. “So why let me take your picture, if it’s such a bad idea?”
He seemed to consider the question. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because the world is changing. I want something to remember this moment in my life, before it’s gone for good.” Morley glanced at his watch. “In any case, I’m afraid that’s all the time I have. I hope you got what you needed.”
Renata stood slowly. “I should be able to pull something out of it. As for the rest—”
“My assistant will contact you about payment.” Morley rose as well, then watched as she packed up her gear. “All the same, I wouldn’t count on many others saying yes. You should have tried it a few years ago. Still, it was good seeing you again. Perhaps we could have dinner sometime?”
Renata forced herself to smile at this. Then she turned and fled as Morley sat down at his desk again, immersing himself in the more lucrative world that her desperation had only briefly interrupted.
Outside the office, the security guard was nowhere to be seen. Renata walked quickly past the receptionist, who looked up as she walked by. “Excuse me, but if you could wait a moment—”
Renata ignored her. She took the elevator down, a pulse ticking on her forehead. For a moment, looking down at her camera bag, she had the urge to erase all the photos she had taken. It had been stupid to come here, stupid to tell him what she had in mind, stupid to pretend that this was a way out.
She arrived at the lobby, then marched blindly into the square, bags banging against her side. It wasn’t even noon, but she needed a drink. Or something more. Because in the light of day, it came to her why Morley had asked her out to dinner. He was a vulture. He invested in the bankrupt and undervalued. And he knew a distressed asset, like her, when he saw one.
12
Powell’s ankles were swallowed up by the grass as he crossed the garden. As he approached the figure in the wooden chair, he noticed that the lawn was turning brown and dry. The last gardener, he recalled, had been fired, and he reminded himself to hire someone to take care of the house and grounds.
He reached the man in the chair, who was facing away from him. As he came around for a better look, he was surprised to see that the old man’s eyes were open. He spoke quietly. “Hello, Dad.”
His father looked up. At that first unfocused instant, his eyes seemed wild, like those of an animal startled out of sleep. “Eh?”
Powell crouched down beside his father’s chair. “Dad, do you know who I am?”
A second later, some of the wildness departed, and his father’s face grew more organized, as if he was gathering his wits by an effort of will. He glanced away, as if embarrassed. “Yes, yes, hello—”
Powell studied his father. He was bundled up in an ancient overcoat, the collar of his sweater askew. His face, which had once been angular and severe, had grown fat, almost leonine, the result of years of childlike nibbling on sweets and chocolate. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine, perfectly fine,” his father said irritably. He looked down at his knee, where his right hand was pawing nervously against the fabric. “They’ve been watching both of us, you know. They aren’t going to let you go.”
“Who?” Powell asked, although he had grown used to these bouts of paranoia. “Who is watching us?”
A vacant look stole into his father’s eyes. He made a vague gesture, then turned to the trees, as if the conversation were no longer worth the effort. Decades ago, this garden had been planted with fruit trees, where the birds still made their nests, but these days the apples were left on the ground to rot.
Powell rose, then put a gentle hand on his father’s shoulder. “Dad, is it all right if I go into the study?”
After a beat, his father gave him a quick nod. Powell stood there for a moment longer, wondering whether the old man would speak again, then headed back toward the house where he had been born.
The house was in Canterbury, a few miles from the cathedral. Whenever he returned, he was surprised to find that the house was not actually in the cathedral’s shadow, which was how he remembered it. Having seen his father’s personality depart completely, he no longer believed in a soul, but this had not led to a crisis of faith. Indeed, the soul’s absence was almost a relief, although he still dreaded the day, which he was secretly sure would arrive, when his own mind would start to fade.
Powell went onto the porch, slid open the latticework door, and entered the house. Inside, it was dark but fairly clean, with a lingering odor of pipe smoke, although his father hadn’t smoked in a long time.
Leona, the nurse, was in the kitchen, looking out the window at the garden. In her powder blue uniform and white trainers, she radiated competence, and Powell liked her, even as he felt guilty for not visiting more often. As he went into the kitchen, she gave him a bright smile. “How did it go?”
“Well enough,” Powell said, taking the glass of water she offered. “He seems to be doing better these days.”
Leona turned back to the w
indow, through which his father’s hunched form was visible. “He likes it best in the garden. It’s the only place where he can sit still. He must have loved it before—”
“Yes, I suppose.” As Powell drained the glass, it occurred to him that he had never seen his father in the garden before his illness. These days, it had become a place of refuge, or exile, allowing his father to retreat from the house, with its shelves of books that he could no longer read. “And he’s been sleeping?”
“Only during the day,” Leona said. “He’s always dozing or napping. But he wanders at night. Looking through drawers and cupboards. I try to make sure he doesn’t turn on the stove, or leave the refrigerator open—”
“I know how he can be.” Powell set down the glass. “I’m going to be in the study. Just knock if you need anything.”
“Oh, we should be all right.” Leona indicated a sandwich on the counter. “This is for you, if you like.”
“Thank you—that’s very kind.” Powell picked up the plate and left the kitchen. Passing down the corridor, he approached the closed door of the study. Going inside, he set the plate on the desk, then shut the door behind him.
The first thing that struck him was the smell of old books, which brought him back to his childhood at once. As a boy, Powell had been thrilled by the sight of Cyrillic characters on the leather spines, with their air of sinister mystery, and even today, he wouldn’t have dared to enter this place without permission.
He scanned the shelves, which lined three of the four walls. Many of the volumes were in Russian. Glancing over the bookcases, he saw some of his father’s most treasured possessions, like the unfinished Russian translation of the Encyclopédie, which had been canceled before it was halfway done, and the Soviet encyclopedia whose subscribers had been instructed to remove the article on Beria with a razor blade, replacing it with one for the Bering Strait.
The fourth wall was the one he needed. It was occupied by a set of filing cabinets, the drawers carefully labeled and classified, containing what seemed like thousands of documents. Powell was daunted by the amount of material, but knew that he had no choice but to plunge in. Taking a bite of his sandwich, he opened the nearest drawer and began to flip through the files.
An hour later, his eyes aching and sandwich gone, he emerged with a stack of folders ten inches high. The oldest files, he had found, were the most organized. As you neared the end of the archives, they grew more and more chaotic, until, by the final drawer, they were essentially random. The last few folders contained a great deal of peculiar detritus, including unopened mail from three years back, and, in one case, the empty, flattened bag from a packet of crisps.
Powell brought the selected files back to the desk, where he sat down. The desk, he knew, had never been touched, leaving a snapshot of his father’s life from three years ago. Next to the lamp was a slip of paper. Looking at it, Powell saw his own name in his father’s unsteady hand, and next to it, what seemed like a guess at his birthday. The date on the page was wrong.
He switched on the lamp. Beside it stood a bronze sculpture of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first director of the Cheka. A larger version of this statue had stood in Lubyanka Square, its fate reflecting that of the nation itself. Twenty years ago, after the fall of the old regime, it had been toppled with a noose around its neck, then left in a park to be stained with urine. More recently, in a fit of nostalgia, it had been raised again. And a similar sculpture sat on the desk of Vladimir Putin.
Considering the statuette now, Powell saw it as an emblem of how nothing in Russia ever really changed. The files were another reminder. His father had spent years building these dossiers on Russian intelligence activity, the files bulging with newspaper and magazine clippings, his own notes, and original case files, most of them heavily redacted. And even after his retirement from Thames House, he had continued to compile this material, persisting in his belief in Russia’s dark destiny.
Powell opened the topmost folder and laid the pages out on the desk. As he began to sort through the material, he reminded himself of what his father had taught him. You had to approach things systematically. Reason alone wouldn’t solve every problem, but until you had exhausted its possibilities, there was no excuse for failing to apply it carefully, even if it led to more questions than answers.
What he had, on the most basic level, were two bodies. One was a Yardie armorer, the other an unemployed Algerian engineer. The victims seemed to have nothing in common aside from the method by which they had been killed. So it was with method that he had to begin.
The folders that he had extracted from his father’s files contained information on assassinations, successful or otherwise, conducted by Russian intelligence outside its own borders. Ilya Severin had been brought up in this tradition, even if he had not been aware of it. In his killings, Powell could see signs of his training, much as a connoisseur could recognize the hand of a particular artistic school.
And yet something about the recent deaths continued to bother him. When you got right down to it, the secret services weren’t very good at assassinations in foreign countries. At home, they held the power of life and death, but overseas, they were less capable. Their only successful killings tended to be public poisonings, like those of Markov and Litvinenko. It was very hard to kill a careful man in his own house. Which was why these last two murders were so unusual.
But there was at least one recent assassination where the victim had been poisoned at home. Anzor Archvadze had been one of the most carefully guarded men in the world, and yet, two years ago, Ilya and an accomplice had managed to slip into his mansion and expose him to a binary poison, leading to his death the following week. Powell still remembered his first glimpse of the oligarch in the hospital, his skin peeling away, a shell of a man occupied by dementia and paranoia.
Clearly, then, Ilya was more than capable of taking out a target at home. In the case of Archvadze, though, there had been a good reason. He had gone to the house to retrieve something, a painting that he had been ordered to recover. But in the cases of Campbell and Akoun—
Powell sat up in his chair. For a moment, he sensed an insight lurking just outside his field of vision, ready to be grasped if he could only pin it down. Then, at once, he saw it clearly, and knew why these men had been killed.
He stood, his pulse suddenly high. His first inclination, oddly, was to tell his father, who once had been the only audience that mattered. These days, though, if he shared the news, the old man wouldn’t remember it for long.
In any case, he thought, there was someone else who deserved to hear it first. Taking the phone from his pocket, Powell retrieved a number from the list of recent calls. Then he dialed Wolfe.
13
“I forgot to mention that we saw Jane at dinner,” Wolfe’s mother said over the phone. “You wouldn’t believe how enormous she is. And for such a tiny thing! But she was positively glowing—”
“I’ll bet,” Wolfe said absently. She was behind the wheel, on the road to Rainham, her cell phone’s headpiece in one ear. At the moment, she was feeling tired and irritable from spending the past three nights staking out a Hebrew bookstore in Golders Green, following a hunch that she had yet to share with anyone at the office. And now, on top of everything else, she was lost.
At some point in the past few minutes, it had begun to rain. To one side of the road, there was a weedy field; on the other, rows of flat metal roofs. She had borrowed the Peugeot, which smelled strongly of perfume, from Asthana, who had been glad to get the mileage reimbursement. By now, she should have arrived at her destination, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that she had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the last mile or so.
As her mother continued to prattle on about Jane, her youngest brother’s saintly wife, Wolfe turned into an office parking lot that had conveniently appeared on her right. Pulling into a space, she put the car int
o park and took the road atlas from the glove compartment.
Looking at the jumble of roads on the map, Wolfe saw that she had, in fact, gone the wrong way at the last roundabout. She also realized that her mother had switched to one of her favorite topics: “—and we’d be so happy if you found someone. No pressure, of course, but your father and I have been talking, and—”
Wolfe slid the atlas back into the glove box. “Mom, I have some bad news. As far as I can tell, there are no single Mormon males in the entire city of London. They’re all gone. The sex-in-chains case scared them away. And I’m not going to Newcastle to see what I can round up among the missionaries.”
Her mother gave a brittle laugh. “Ha, ha, yes, of course. But, you know, I’m serious. This isn’t just about finding a boyfriend. Remember, dear, the highest calling of all is family—”
“Mom, stop it,” Wolfe said. Looking out the windshield at the dirty rain, she heard herself blurt out these words: “The reason I’m not going to the temple is that I’m leaving the Church.”
There was an ominous pause. Then, mortifyingly, her mother began to cry. “Don’t say that,” she said between sobs. “I know you’ve had a rough time in London, but if you want to stick a knife in your father’s heart—”
“Mom, you’re breaking up,” Wolfe said quickly. “I’ll call you back later. Love you.”
She hung up. Then, for good measure, she removed her headpiece, turned off her cell phone, and set it on the dashboard, regarding it warily, as if it might somehow find a way to ring again.
“Shit,” Wolfe said aloud, swearing for the first time in the better part of a year. It felt good. A second later, catching sight of herself in the rearview mirror, she felt compelled to ask herself whether her mother might be right. She was almost thirty years old, single, still a virgin, and, for some reason, seated in a borrowed car in a parking lot in Rainham, not even sure what she was doing here at all.
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