“You guys go on to the pub. I’ll meet up with you there.”
There was a squall of protest, and they closed ranks around her.
“Soph, he could be anyone! I don’t trust him.”
“I really don’t think you should go alone. Let me come with you!”
“Oh, and what are you going to do, exactly? We’ll all come, Soph! It’s safest that way.”
She weathered the storm with her eyes closed, eventually raising her hands for quiet.
“It will be fine. I’ll be fine. Just go, all of you. Go on! Really—I mean it.”
They lingered, hurt and uncertain, but she stared them down. Eventually she turned back to Arkady.
“Come on,” she said in Russian. “Let’s just go.”
He titled his head in acknowledgement, and held out his arm to usher her towards the towpath.
The others stared after them and fell to muttering amongst themselves.
“I’m sorry about that,” said Sophia in English, then repeated it in Russian. “They’re just trying to look out for me. They can be a bit…dramatic sometimes.”
Arkady nodded sympathetically. “I’m sure they only want what’s best for you,” he said.
The girl shrugged. “Most people are more interested in my father’s fortune than they are in me. What are you here to ask me for? Money for an orphanage? Funds for some religious mission, maybe? An exciting investment opportunity of some kind?”
Arkady smiled and shook his head. “No. No, nothing like that. I’m not going to ask you for money.”
“Really? Well, I’ll remind you of that when you do. Everyone does…”
They stepped apart to allow a pair of panting joggers to pass between them, then proceeded upstream, skirting behind a squat, glass-fronted pub, which blocked the riverside path like a tank trap.
“I should introduce myself,” said Arkady. “My name is Arkady. I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but you have inherited your mother’s looks.”
She gave him a sad, grateful smile. “Thank you. I’m flattered. She was very beautiful. My father used to say Tatar women are the most beautiful in the world.”
Arkady nodded in agreement. “I meant no flattery—but I expect he was right.”
“Well…he was biased. He loved her very much.”
She fell quiet, and he could feel the pain behind her silence. He’d expected to encounter a spoiled brat: someone who’d been allowed to run wild and grown up selfish. Instead, she just seemed lonely, and old beyond her years. He knew she was a student, but she didn’t live with other students, isolated behind a barrier of wealth and privilege. Her clothes were a mixture of designer labels, of the kind exclusive enough to keep their logos on the inside, and items he suspected she had made herself: a hand-stitched velvet jacket, a home-dyed scarf, a brooch of painstaking-but-uneven filigree.
Her phone beeped several times and lit up her pocket. She took it out and read the messages, then put it away again.
“Sorry,” she said. “That’s just my friends. They seem convinced you’re going to drown me in the Thames or something.”
“It’s good they’re concerned for you,” suggested Arkady. “I am sorry to be interrupting your evening.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I wanted to see the exhibition, but I’m quite glad to have an excuse to go home now. I don’t really like drinking, and they’re always trying to get me drunk.”
“Oh!”
She looked at him and raised an immaculately-threaded eyebrow. “What?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “I’m just starting to doubt you’re really Russian.”
She giggled at that, a modest, embarrassed snigger, and he couldn’t help but smile. He could understand why the boys were so keen to amuse her. “I do get it,” he said as she quickly recovered her composure. “You worry about losing control. Is that it?”
She nodded, slowly. “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, it’s something like that.” There was a slight frown on her face as she looked at him, and he could tell he was being re-evaluated. “Do you have children, Mr…Arkady?”
“No. No children. You are a student here, I believe.”
“Yes, at Goldsmiths. My father was a zealot for education. He gave millions of rubles to help school poor children in Russia. No one ever mentions that about him, but it’s true. Once, he threw away all my toys because I got in trouble with a teacher. He was so angry!”
“I am sure he would be very proud to know you are at university now, as he would have wished.”
Sophia blew a skeptical sigh from the corner of her mouth. “I wouldn’t be so sure. I’m reading Art, Fashion, and Visual Practice. He always said I should become a lawyer.”
“If it makes you happy, he would understand.”
They had passed the Oxo Tower now, strolling towards the BFI and South Bank Centre. Overhead, the plane trees’ bare branches were studded with lights, brilliant clusters of blue and white LEDs, which made the waterfront walk feel like a planetarium tour. The smell of food from nearby restaurants carried on the air. Trains rumbled over distant bridges, and the sluggish river splashed feebly against the shore.
Ana would have enjoyed this. The thought was sudden and sad. Aside from a couple of foreign trips in their later years, she had spent her whole life in Russia. Arkady wished he could have shown her more of the world. He had always meant to; they had just run out of time and youth.
“Well,” sighed the girl at his side. “This is all very nice, but if you’re not after money, perhaps you should tell me why you’re here. How did you find me, anyway? Are there still computers in Moscow tracking my every move? Maxim is always telling me there are, but I thought he was being silly. And yet, here you are.”
“Maxim may well be right,” said Arkady, “but that isn’t how I found you. Maxim was a friend of your father?”
“Of my mother,” she corrected him. “He looks after my money. He was the one who brought me to London and managed to salvage a few hundred millions-worth of my father’s assets. He’s the only person here I really trust. Of course, everyone always wants me to trust them, but…”
“But it isn’t easy,” offered Arkady.
“Exactly. It isn’t easy. I expect you’re going to ask me to trust you, as well.”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“Is there any reason I should?”
Arkady wondered whether there was. “At my age, I have very little reason to lie anymore,” he lied. “I only want what is best for Russia and its people. You are one of those people, for all you have been made to feel you aren’t. I won’t harm you.”
The girl pushed her lower lip forward, clearly unconvinced. “You work for the government, don’t you,” she said.
“I do.”
“You travel to London and approach me unannounced…you’re a spy.”
Arkady demurred. “I work for the Federal Security Service,” he admitted, “but really I am the man who spies on the spies. I am attached to the Investigations Directorate. It’s my job to defend against corruption and abuse of power.”
“Oh, is it? Well, I must say, you’re doing a bang-up job.”
He winced, conceding the point. “There are challenges,” he admitted.
They had reached the Undercroft now, a graffiti-daubed vault of shuttered concrete that echoed to the continuous rumble and clatter of skateboarders practicing their ollies and flips. By common consent, they stopped walking to take in the scene.
Above them, lurid, indigo floodlights tried—and failed—to soften the Brutalist geometry of Queen Elizabeth Hall. Further upriver, the preposterous London Eye loomed over trees and bridges, glowing hellish crimson in the drizzle. It was sponsored by a cola company now, Arkady had read, and lit up like a brothel in their trademark hue.
They stood in silence for a minute, still getting used to one another’s company. Arkady took note of a couple of passers-by filming the skaters on their mobile phones. They seemed to have eyes only for the action though,
and none of the lenses turned in his direction. The constant roar of polyurethane wheels would make it almost impossible for anyone to overhear his conversation with the girl, even if there was a directional mic pointed at them. It was time for him to make his pitch.
Sophia gave a sharp, sympathetic gasp as one of the skaters stumbled from her board and sprawled headlong on the cement. After lying still for a second, taking stock, she was helped to her feet and rode off once more, none the worse. Keeping his eyes on the activity in front of them, Arkady made his play.
“I’m here because of your father.”
She glanced at him sidelong, communicating her total lack of surprise.
“My father’s dead.”
A teenager on a BMX caught some air off a short, improvised ramp in front of them, executing a smart tailwhip and landing with a screech of tyres. There was a smattering of applause as he wobbled off and circled around to try it again.
Arkady hesitated, recognising the testiness in the girl’s voice, aware he was straying into uncomfortable territory. Well, it couldn’t be helped. He steeled himself for her reaction and tried again.
“Not necessarily…”
*
“What do you mean, ‘she wants to be there’? She can’t be there! God damn it, Arkady, you’ve really fucked this up!”
“She wants to be there when we wake him up.”
“Why did you even go to see her anyway? We could have forged her consent for the procedure, or done without it. Now, thanks to you, there’s some loose-lipped civilian running around London—London of all places!—telling all Maslok’s friends there about your plan! What the hell were you thinking?”
Zolin was predictably livid. Arkady had just finished describing his trip to London and his conversation with Sophia Molchanov. He had gone without the Section Director’s knowledge or approval, insulating him as much as possible should anything go wrong.
It was lunchtime, and they were walking in the snowbound woods behind Chernaya Dacha, beneath a pale and struggling sun. Valentina Zolin had made a fuss of Arkady when he arrived, serving him hot soup and black bread while her husband concluded a teleconference in his office. Once he had eaten, Zolin appeared and suggested they talk outside, away from any potential eavesdroppers.
They were following a path that meandered downhill between the skeletal, white birch trees. The sky was clear, and the day bleakly bright, but water dripped around them, and white powder drifted down when branches shivered in the breeze. Zolin strode purposefully in stout, waterproof boots, while Arkady slithered in his leather office shoes and struggled to keep up.
“I think it would be good to have her there,” appealed Arkady. “I think it would be helpful.”
Zolin snorted. “Helpful? Really? Arkady, I remain your friend, but I think you might have taken leave of your senses!”
“If this works,” Arkady persisted, “if we wake up Molchanov, and he is more than just a vegetable, what makes you think he will talk to us? Time will be of the essence. The doctors may not be able to sustain him for long, if they can resuscitate him at all, and he will not recognise me or any of us. When he learns we are FSB, what is the likelihood he will trust us?”
Zolin said nothing; just kept walking, head down, his silence an invitation to continue.
“His daughter, though…if he’s in any fit state to recognise her, he’ll talk to her. He may not acknowledge us, but he’ll be desperate to acknowledge her.”
“If he can.”
“Well, yes—if he can. But it was always a case of ‘if he can.’”
Zolin grudgingly conceded the point. “Of course, it’s been so long that we could have just got someone else to pretend to be her,” he grumbled. “He likely wouldn’t even know.”
“True,” allowed Arkady. “But she’s also rich. Rich, and willing to help us fund the project.”
“Really?” Zolin’s eyes widened, finally free of skepticism. “That actually is useful. How much are we talking about?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t get into specifics. But I imagine her budget is bigger than ours. It might be easier, and more discreet, than trying to siphon it from other operations.”
“Undoubtedly. What did you make of the girl, anyway?”
Arkady thought about it. “For the exiled orphan of a murdered billionaire, I would say she’s turned out remarkably well. A little insecure, and a little fragile, but surprisingly well-adjusted.”
“It sounds as though you rather liked her, Comrade.”
“I feel bad for her. She deserves better.”
They trudged on. Zolin’s mood was less foul now, cheeriness breaking through like sunshine after a storm. He seemed satisfied by what he’d heard.
The track veered left around a copse of blackthorn, and narrowed, forcing them to walk in single file.
“I’ve found you a facility,” Zolin announced, holding back a branch to prevent it from whipping into Arkady’s face. “It’s a mothballed tuberculosis clinic, up in the mountains. A very picturesque place, I’m told.”
“TB? Are you sure it’s safe?”
“Oh, it’s safe enough,” his boss assured him. “It’s one of the old sanatoria—probably hasn’t had a TB patient since the invention of penicillin. It was a workers’ resort for decades, back in our day. Post-glasnost it was reinvented as a high-altitude clinic for people with HIV and other such things, and most recently it has been a training centre for sportsmen. Not enough of them to pay the bills though, so we’ve leased it until May. Officially, we’re using it as a recuperation centre for traumatised operatives. That’s you, should anyone ask.”
“I see. Where is this place?”
“About seven hundred kilometres from Novosibirsk. It’s remote, but it has all the utilities you’d expect, and it has a small medical unit your scientist can adapt to his needs. There are no nearby neighbours to worry about.”
“It will still need a security team.”
“Yes, of course. A small one though; I don’t want any more people involved than are necessary. I will be sending you four guards. That should be enough.”
“Who?” Arkady wanted to know. “Our people?”
“Ha, no! No, they gossip too much, and we can’t spare the manpower. Questions would be asked. They will come from the Clandestine group.”
Arkady frowned.
Clandestine was ostensibly a private security agency, staffed by ex-Special Forces types. It was also one of many interfaces between the FSB and the criminal underworld, doing favours for both sides and acting as a conduit for illegal payments. Frequently implicated in crimes ranging from drug smuggling and human trafficking to gun-running and murder-for-hire, its contacts in assorted federal agencies ensured it remained unmolested, so long as profits continued to flow.
“Do we really want to resort to that? They aren’t exactly the most trustworthy people. I won’t be able to keep an eye on them all the time.”
“You won’t have to,” Zolin assured him. “I’m sending you Igor Votyakov to keep a watch over them and give them their orders. He’ll keep them out of your way.”
“Votyakov? I don’t know him.”
“Yes, you do, from Lefortovo, back in the old days. They used to call him ‘the Ogre.’”
It was a moment before Arkady’s brain made the association. He stopped walking, flesh crawling as rumours and half-remembered fragments of gossip jostled to the front of his mind.
“The Ogre? You can’t be serious. He’s still alive?”
“Oh, very much so. He is no older than you are, my friend. He was paid a handsome stipend to go away and keep his mouth shut—but he gets bored, so occasionally I give him something to do. Age has softened him, as it has all of us. Besides, he was never so fearsome as his reputation would suggest.”
“His reputation is all I remember,” admitted Arkady as he resumed walking. “I only saw him a few times, in the canteen or wherever. People used to point him out to me. I heard the stories though.”
“Bad things used to happen in that place all the time,” said Zolin, swinging his walking stick at a clump of snowdrops. “He sometimes had a hand in them, it’s true, but he will follow your instructions. You do not need to worry.”
Arkady was not convinced, but had little choice other than to take his boss at his word. He had seldom visited Lefortovo prison himself, going there only on odd occasions to interview captives. He remembered the Ogre, though; a towering, heavy-browed ape of a man, surly and uncommunicative, whose face always wore an expression of barely-constrained malice. He was the man they used to bring in when beatings or chemical interrogation failed to yield results: a specialist, of sorts. The prisoners handed over to him invariably died, but they always confessed first.
His nickname had grown from one of the many dark rumours surrounding Lefortovo. It was said that, during the Cold War, the prison basement housed a gigantic industrial grinding machine, specially imported from the US. According to the stories, the carcasses of dead prisoners were fed into it, emerging as a slurry which was easily sluiced into the prison’s sewers. Reputedly, the Ogre was the man responsible for these disposals—but it was whispered that not everyone he put through the machine was quite dead…
Arkady repressed a shudder and changed the subject.
“We also need a surgeon to perform the heart transplant on Molchanov. Zapad wants us to use his stepsister. I’ve checked her records. She lost her job last year after being caught stealing opiates. It seems she had a habit. He assures me she’s clean now, but I imagine she has difficulty finding work.”
Zolin grunted. “A good surgeon is a good surgeon. I suppose it makes sense to keep it in the family—keeps things close-knit. And personally, I find compromised individuals to be much less of a security worry. She has performed such operations before, I suppose?”
“I assume so. She was a cardiothoracic surgeon at that big private hospital by Pushkinskaya. I asked Zapad if she would need a team with her, but he doesn’t seem to think it necessary. After all, the patient will still be—well, he won’t be breathing or depending on his heart when the surgery happens. Her name’s Yelagin: Galina Yelagin.”
Exoteric Page 5