Fox Hunter

by Zoe Sharp

  I sat and sipped my coffee while Madeleine and Hamilton arranged the details, then the American signed off and the flat-screen went blank.

  Madeleine regained her seat on the sofa and picked up her coffee. “Good work,” she said to Dawson. “I’m impressed with how much you got done in the time it took us to drive south.”

  “Thanks, boss. Would have been better if I’d been able to identify Venko myself, though.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” I said. “I haven’t seen him for years, but I know he was fairly camera-shy even back then.”

  She rose, gave us a slightly lopsided smile, and gestured to the folder. “Do you want me to stick with this or move onto something else?”

  “Put it aside for now,” Madeleine said. “Go back to the logistics on the assignment in Bahrain next month and let’s see what our American cousins can come up with, shall we?”

  Dawson nodded and went out, leaving Madeleine and me alone with our coffee.

  We drank in silence for a few moments, then she said, “Do you think Hamilton will actually share whatever she finds out? Because, if not, I’ll keep Luisa digging. The way Donalson brought Parris’s name up . . . I can’t help but feel Sean’s gone after him.”

  “Yeah, I know. And, to be honest, if there was more to what happened back in the army than we realized—and Parris knows about it—I wouldn’t mind having a few words with him myself.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER, I FLEW INTO SOFIA AIRPORT, MY WALLET stuffed with Bulgarian leva and my luggage with hastily obtained snow gear.

  Despite my protests, Madeleine and Dawson were with me.

  They argued that to all intents and purposes we’d look like we were on a group girlie skiing holiday. I pointed out that I could just as easily have been on a single girlie skiing holiday, but it didn’t cut much ice.

  Besides, it was no bad thing to have people I knew I could trust on site as backup.

  Once again, there was someone waiting with a sign in the Arrivals hall. This time the clipboard read HAMILTON PARTY rather than individual names.

  That would have been no bad thing, either, had the person holding the clipboard not been Woźniak.

  As the three of us approached, Madeleine was the only one who smiled in greeting. Then she turned, caught a glimpse of our scowling faces.

  “Ah, I see you’ve all met before.”

  Woźniak seemed quickly charmed by her, which did not improve my mood.

  He hustled us outside into the early afternoon sunshine. It was not as cold as I’d been expecting, and a welcome relief from the baking heat of the Middle East.

  We loaded our bags into the back of a Mercedes minivan waiting with another of Woźniak’s men behind the wheel. He hopped in the front and we spread out in the back. There was seating for six back there, so we had plenty of room.

  “How long is the journey?” Madeleine asked.

  Woźniak glanced over his shoulder. “An hour twenty, maybe an hour thirty,” he said. “Colder, too. Borovets is around four and a half thousand feet above sea level.”

  “And Sofia?”

  “Eighteen hundred. Hope you brought plenty of winter clothing.” He was positively chatty.

  Madeleine smiled at him. “Of course. Will Aubrey be joining us?”

  “Ms. Hamilton is already at the resort, ma’am.”

  The snow was patchy in the city, huddled into dirty heaps on the shoulders of the road. Much of the scenery was unremarkable until we started to climb into the mountains, where the covering was thicker.

  The road followed a river, then passed the hydroelectric dam at Pasarel and hugged the big reservoir at Iskar. The snow-shrouded mountains were permanently in view above the trees now, distant and dominating in the sharp, cool light. The trees themselves each wore a snow shroud. It was hard not to feel the thrill of a kid at the white Christmas scenery.

  “How much skiing have you actually done?” Dawson asked.

  “A fair amount,” I said. “These days there are always people who want someone looking after them on the slopes, so I’ve had quite a bit of practice over the last few years. You?”

  “Learned in the army, but I haven’t done any since.” She pulled a face. “I hope to hell I don’t fall on my arse on the first day and wreck this shoulder—just when it’s beginning to mend.”

  Dawson cocked an eyebrow at Madeleine, who gave a faint smile. “I learned as a child, then trips with school and later holidays,” she said. “I’m a little rusty, too, but I daresay it will come back to me.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, “your family always took their winter break in St. Moritz.”

  She looked surprised. “Yes, how did you know?”

  I suppressed a groan. “Just a lucky guess . . .”

  I stared out the window after that, letting the conversation in the car float over me. I wondered where Sean was, how he was. Was he really planning to go after Parris, or was he still somewhere in Jordan or Iraq? If he wasn’t on his way here, then I was in utterly the wrong place, and even further behind than before. I approached our imminent arrival with both impatience and a sense of dread. Once we got there, I would find out what I didn’t altogether want to know.

  As it was, we made good time to Borovets itself, which seemed to be entirely devoted to skiing, snowboarding, and anything else that involved sliding down an icy mountain in a semi-out-of-control state. The small town was packed with hotels, bars, and restaurants catering to tourists, or stores selling the associated paraphernalia of winter sports.

  As we drove past the town center and the main ski lift, I saw a family riding in a sleigh drawn by two shaggy ponies, just passing a wooden shack with blacked-out windows and unfeasibly well-endowed Playboy bunnies on the posters outside. Something for everyone, then.

  Our driver turned off the main drag, slowing for people in awkward boots and lurid jackets traipsing across the road in front of us with their skis shouldered.

  We reached a sign for ski-in ski-out apartments and drove in, which gave me a moment’s uneasy feeling. The last time I’d stayed in a resort like this, it had not ended well—for me or my principal.

  “You OK?” Madeleine asked, frowning, and I saw she was watching me minutely.

  “I’m fine,” I said, forcing myself to relax.

  She did not look convinced.

  We pulled up in one of the spaces that had been cleared in front of a wooden chalet with picturesque shutters and a carved wooden balcony around the upper floor. As soon as I climbed out, the cold knifed straight to the bone. When I exhaled, my breath formed a cloud.

  “Wow, you were right about the change in temperature,” Madeleine said to Woźniak. She threw up the hood on her belted jacket and instantly looked chic.

  “You’re in here, ma’am,” Woźniak said, nodding to the nearest chalet as he opened the rear of the Merc. He and the silent driver grabbed all our bags and carried them into the covered porchway. By the time we’d all made our way carefully over the ice, the front door was open and Aubrey Hamilton was waiting for us.

  “Coffee’s on. There’s soup and bread in the kitchen,” she said by way of greeting. “Bring your gear up and grab something to eat. Briefing in ten.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  IN THEORY THE CHALET COULD SLEEP SIX, DEPENDING ON HOW good friends everyone was. There were three bedrooms containing a total of two double beds and two singles, decorated in a compromise between cost and style, in which style had come out marginally the loser.

  Hamilton had already called dibs on one of the doubles, and Madeleine pulled rank for the second, so that left Dawson and me sharing the room with the singles. Funny how those furthest down the food chain are also usually those closest to the sharp end.

  I dumped my bag on the bed nearest the door and took my wash kit into the tiny en suite shower room to brighten myself up. Feeling mildly more human with a clean face and brushed teeth, I followed the sound of voices up to the open-plan liv
ing area. There was an open log fire and French doors leading out onto the full-length balcony. I could tell nobody had ventured out there yet by the snow settled almost half a meter up the glass.

  Madeleine was at the dining table, tucking into a bowl of soup that looked thick enough to eat with a fork rather than a spoon. She flashed me a smile. Hamilton was drinking coffee and reading a file that lay open across her knees. She didn’t look up when I entered, or when Dawson followed me in a few minutes later.

  By unspoken agreement, I dished out two bowlfuls of soup while Dawson poured coffees. The soup was a generic orange color and smelled like winter vegetable—some kind of squash if I had to guess. As we took our seats across from Madeleine, Hamilton finally came to life.

  “OK, I’m guessing that because you’re all female you can eat, drink, and listen without having someone else push your chests in and out,” she said with the glimmer of a smile, “so I’ll get right into it.”

  She laid printed-out pictures on the table next to us so we didn’t have to stop feeding to take them. Clearly she’d spent a lot of time working with squaddies—never get between them and their grub if you want to keep all your fingers.

  The first image was of a grandiose building that looked more like a hotel than a private home. It was mainly white, dotted with timbering, turrets, and towers, around a courtyard leveled with snow. Parked to the left of the shot were a couple of snowmobiles and some kind of large tracked vehicle, like an SUV on stilts.

  “This is Gregor Venko’s stronghold. Used to be a tsarist palace, although I understand they referred to it as a ‘royal hunting lodge’ back in the good old days. Makes you wonder what it took to really impress those guys.”

  “Where is it?” Dawson asked. “How far from here, I mean.”

  “Only a mile or so to the base of the mountain, but then you gotta climb another couple thousand feet. In the summer you can drive up. In the winter, you’d need one of those.” She stabbed a finger at the vehicles pictured.

  “Looks like you’d need a lot of people to run a place that big,” I said. “How many staff? And how many of them class as civilians?”

  “Good question. As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, there are eight full-time domestic staff with no military background or training.”

  “And those who do have it?”

  “Maybe a dozen, working a rotating shift pattern, plus Parris. Good electronic security and camera coverage, from what we can see, and they’ve got location on their side. Always a major pain in the ass to storm a fortress on top of a mountain.”

  “How many men do you have here?”

  Hamilton regarded me for a moment as if debating whether she wanted to answer or not. “Four—they’re in the cabin next door.”

  “I hate to say this, but you won’t be doing much storming without more troops.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll just have to work with what I got. This is not the only iron in the fire for my department.”

  “Who else lives up there?” Madeleine asked, as if to forestall an argument I wasn’t about to start. “What about Venko’s family?”

  “Nobody knows what happened to Mrs. Venko. She was last seen in a sanatorium somewhere in the Ukraine, but that was years ago. But Gregor’s son, Ivan—who seems to be following in Daddy’s footsteps—also lives at the hunting lodge-slash-fortress.”

  “How about we just call it his lair and have done with it?” Dawson suggested.

  “Ivan’s still with him?” I murmured, more to myself than to the room at large. “I would have thought he’d got tired of being under Daddy’s watchful thumb a long time ago.”

  I’d had one brief encounter with Ivan Venko—and not in the sense of a love story filmed in black-and-white and set in a railway station café back in the age of steam. I’d very likely saved his life, yes, but I did not expect him to remember or appreciate that fact next time we met. How his father might react to me could go either way.

  “Rumor has it that Venko’s been legitimizing his empire over the last few years and grooming Ivan to take over. Not much on the son besides hearsay and a couple of minor public order offenses, which Daddy’s team of lawyers made all but disappear.”

  “Unless he’s had some serious therapy in the last few years, Ivan’s the one to worry about,” I said, and Madeleine nodded. She’d been involved in the operation in Germany—the first step along the road to close protection for me. My first job for Sean.

  “Well, Venko Senior has certainly been throttling back the past couple of years. Another reason we’re here is that he’s become a noted collector of artifacts from ancient Sumeria and Persia. But the guy’s almost a recluse—hardly ever seen in public, and when he does venture out, he’s always well guarded.”

  “By Parris, or the Russians?”

  She passed me another shrewd glance and dug out more pictures, taken sometimes through foliage or crowds, with long lenses. They showed a heavily swathed Gregor; Gregor in a business suit; Gregor in shirtsleeves and sunglasses. He was always surrounded by at least four men, although not always the same men. I recognized some of the Russians, including, I thought, the late Comrade Kuznetsov. Parris himself was often present in the shots, within the protective formation rather than outside it.

  “Parris is head of security but tends to tag along if father or son are off the property separately. Hard to say which of them is his top priority.” She shrugged. “If we had more time for surveillance . . .”

  “How long has Parris been with them?”

  “Since his discharge from the military—which was honorable, or whatever the Brit Army equivalent of that might be. Walked straight into the job.”

  “Which means he and Venko probably knew each other from before.”

  Hamilton nodded. “Anything significant in that, d’you think?”

  My turn to shrug. “Parris served in the Balkans, performing one role or another. There’s a faint chance they could have met then.”

  Hamilton nodded. “So he’s more likely to be Gregor’s choice than Ivan’s.”

  She gathered up the papers, tapped them upright on the table to line them up, and shoved them away into the folder.

  “We’ve managed to uncover a network of holding companies owned by Venko, leading to auction houses which have been buying and selling on the antiquities market,” she said. “If the quantities are anything to go by, it’s the tip of the iceberg. We need more intel, and surveillance is not going to be easy. They can see anyone coming a mile away up there.”

  I finished the last of my soup and sat back, warming my hands around the coffee mug. “I presume all Woźniak’s guys ski?”

  “Sure—like pros,” Hamilton said. “Not much point in bringing ’em, otherwise.”

  “And you yourself?”

  A sneaky smile was hovering around the edge of Hamilton’s mouth, because she knew I had a purpose for asking, and I think she was hoping it was one she hadn’t thought of. “My mother keeps a winter house in Vail.”

  “Ah, of course she does.” I finished the coffee, which had been lukewarm to start with, and set the mug down. “Well, that’s a pity, because the first thing I think we should do tomorrow morning is hire a load of cheap skis and an instructor.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  OUR INSTRUCTOR’S NAME WAS RADKO. HE WAS A NATIVE OF BOROVETS, he told us, who taught skiing here at the resort during the winter and spent his summers picking fruit in the UK. What he planned to do next summer, though, he said gloomily, he did not yet know.

  We let the rental place fit us out with basic boots, helmets, skis, and poles, which were somewhat battered and unmistakably ski-school uniform in style and color. Woźniak’s guys hated it. They’d all brought their own latest-spec gear, lovingly waxed and honed and prepped.

  They had been first dismissive and then aggressive when my idea was explained to them. This had now settled into the uncooperative stage—much scowling and communicating in grunts.

  But as we waited in l
ine for the first lift up the mountain, Woźniak looked around at his guys, standing in apparent couples with the rest of us, and gave me a single brief nod.

  “OK, I’ll give you that one,” he muttered, as though I’d had to extract his fingernails with pliers to get him to admit it. “Never thought it would take sticking out like a bunch of sore thumbs to blend in, but you nailed it, Fox.”

  “As long as they remember to tone down their skiing, we’ll be fine,” I said. “Mind you, I think most of them will trip over their egos at least a couple of times on the first run.”

  He made a noise that might have doubled as a short laugh or could simply have been indigestion, then shuffled through the barrier in time for the next chairlift to whack into the back of his legs before scooping him up, the way chairlifts always do.

  The ride up the mountain was crystal cold, the trees below dusted with icing sugar, sparkling in the sun. The view was stunning and made half freezing to death on the way up a small price to pay. Everyone mentions the end of their nose, but I found that by the time we reached the top, it was my chin I could barely feel, despite burying it into the scarf wrapped around my neck.

  Radko assembled his class and gave us all the standard pep talk. He said he would watch us on the first run to see how we went, adding, “And now we ski with good style!” and set off into the first sweeping loop.

  I was a reasonable skier rather than outstanding, so I didn’t make any particular effort to perform badly. The guys overdid it, until Hamilton whizzed past them, with plenty of Radko’s requested style, and growled at them to behave.