The Silent Oligarch: A Novel

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  “Probably.”

  “Probably? If it isn’t that what on earth is it?”

  “It’s the case.”

  “Right. And now they know where our children live. And they’re telling me, their mother, in an e-mail.” She paused. It occurred to Webster that that was the cleverest aspect of it. “Tell me this doesn’t scare you.”

  “It doesn’t. I’ve had these things before. They’re unnerving.”

  “Unnerving? That’s good. Well listen. I am unnerved. Distinctly unnerved. I don’t let my work intrude on our lives and I don’t think you should either.”

  “Baby, look. You really shouldn’t worry. It’s a warning to the curious. They want me to stop work.”

  “Then maybe you should.”

  In his office Webster looked at the e-mail and shook his head. Instinctively he thought it through. If Malin was doing this it meant that he was rattled, and that could only be good.

  “No. Not now. This doesn’t mean anything. It’s nothing.”

  Elsa was silent on the other end of the line.

  “Listen. If someone wants to hurt you they don’t tell you they’re going to do it.”

  “But there’s no rule against it, is there?”

  No. There was no rule.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS the e-mail hovered on the edge of Webster’s thoughts, tugging insistently, the abuse of Inessa’s memory a constant barb. Elsa was tense. He tried to reassure her but his arguments, at once perfectly logical and somehow irrelevant, sounded hollow in his ear. The simple truth was that his pride wouldn’t allow such an ugly and simple device to have its effect. It was too base, too easy. If anything he felt newly galvanized.

  That weekend the Websters left London for the south coast. They stayed in a cottage in Winchelsea, on a cliff a mile from the sea. They walked on the great beach at Camber Sands in the rain, with not a soul in sight; ate fish and chips in Rye; were chased by a herd of friendly bullocks on a farm. London and Moscow began to feel far away.

  On the Saturday evening, Webster was reading to Daniel when his phone started buzzing in his pocket. He ignored it, finished the story, kissed him good night and went downstairs to the kitchen.

  There was no message, and the call was from a Russian number he didn’t recognize. He dialed it, cradling the phone against his neck and taking a glass down from a shelf.

  “Hello, this is Ben Webster. You just called me.”

  “Ben. This is Leonard. Cahill. In Moscow.”

  “Leonard. Good to hear from you. How are you?” He reached for a bottle of whisky and poured himself an inch, then a dash of water from the jug. He could hear Elsa walking around upstairs.

  “Ben, have you heard from Alan? In the last few days.”

  “He left me a voice mail last week.”

  “When was that?”

  “I was at Heathrow, so Thursday. Late afternoon.”

  “Nothing since?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “He’s gone missing.”

  Webster took a drink and put his glass down. “What sort of missing?”

  “He was in Tyumen at the weekend. Then he had a story for us in Sakhalin. He never showed up. His wife saw him off on Monday morning and hasn’t heard from him since.”

  “What was he working on?” Elsa came into the kitchen. She took a bottle of wine from the fridge and poured herself a glass. He mouthed “sorry” to her and stepped out into the hall.

  “A piece about Sakhalin II. A puff piece. Nothing exciting. I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “He hasn’t done any work for me for six months.” This, of course, was strictly true.

  “You don’t know what he was working on?”

  “No. We talked about something but it never happened.”

  “Fuck. His wife’s beside herself. Says he’s never done this before. Had he told you about his problems?”

  “He mentioned something about the tax police.”

  “I hope he hasn’t done anything stupid.”

  “I can’t see it. Not Alan.” Christ. I hope no one has done it for him. “Have you told the police?”

  “The Tyumen police aren’t big on missing persons.”

  “But you’ve told them.”

  “I’ve notified them.”

  “And you don’t know whether he took a flight?”

  “No. We know nothing. He left his house at eight on Monday and that’s it. He booked the flights. Hasn’t phoned anyone. His phone’s off, needless to say. Car’s still at home.”

  “Have you tried his Turkish phone?”

  “I didn’t know he had a Turkish phone.”

  Webster sat down on the stairs. The different possibilities cycled through his mind. “Look, Leonard. Maybe I can do something. I’ll have a look at his flights and see if anyone’s been using his phone. Get Irina to send me his credit card details, all his cards. Any phone numbers I might not have. I’ll have a look.”

  “Thanks, Ben. This isn’t like him.”

  “Tell me if anything happens.”

  “I will.”

  Webster hung up. He found the Turkish number for Knight and dialed it. It went straight to voice mail. Where was he? Perhaps he had bolted; gone to Turkey while things calmed down. Perhaps his home life wasn’t as solid as it seemed. Perhaps he was in debt.

  In the kitchen he picked up his glass and took a good swallow. None of these was convincing.

  “What was that?” Elsa was chopping an onion, her face half turned away from the fumes.

  “Nothing. A case.”

  “You look worried.”

  “It’s nothing. Just a wayward source.”

  WEBSTER DID WHAT HE COULD to track down Knight. His travel-agent source found out that he had been booked on the 10:35 from Tyumen to Vladivostok; he never checked in, not to that flight or to any other that had left Tyumen that week—or any Russian airport, for that matter. With Mrs. Knight’s permission Webster spoke to the phone company as Knight and reported his phone missing; no calls had been made since Monday morning when he had rung for a taxi to take him to the airport. His wife had seen him leave in the car, and the taxi controller told Webster that they had dropped him off at around eight in the morning. He had paid the driver in cash, but in the airport made one purchase on his credit card, for three hundred rubles, from a café. That was the last trace he had left. It would take about a week to discover whether he had taken any money from his offshore account, but somehow it seemed unlikely; he had withdrawn no money from the joint account he held with his wife.

  Alan Knight was definitely gone. If he had decided to make himself disappear he had done a very good job of it. He was clever enough for that. And the alternative, while it seemed so much more likely, simply didn’t make sense. Why abduct him? Why not have him die in a car crash or a hit and run? Why not arrest him on some absurd charge and ship him off to a distant prison? He was a Russian citizen. They could do what they liked to him. But what Webster really couldn’t accept was that whatever was happening to Alan had anything to do with a conversation they had had two months ago about not very much. It seemed so disproportionate. And if they were sending him messages, surely Alan’s disappearance would come with some sort of message attached; if this was meant to frighten off Ikertu, why leave it ambiguous?

  It was while he was dwelling on these questions, wondering whether he should wait for answers before finally conceding that this case was no longer worth the prize, that he received a call from his friend at the travel agency. The news was not about Knight but about Lock: he was booked on flights to Cayman through London, leaving Moscow on Wednesday and stopping in London for two nights on his way back.

  SURVEILLANCE CONSUMED EVERYTHING: time, money, attention. Webster never relished it. While he had an operati
on running it was impossible for him to concentrate on anything else, and the returns were often meager: it never told you quite as much as you wanted.

  Today, for now, everything was running smoothly enough. The team had picked up Lock at Heathrow. He had flown in from Cayman with two bodyguards and what looked like a lawyer, probably a Bryson Joyce man, who had said good-bye after Customs and taken the train into town. One of Lock’s men had hired a car; there was some argument with the hire company, and Lock had become agitated by the delay, but eventually a silver Volvo sedan had arrived outside Arrivals and taken him and the remaining bodyguard into London. One of the first text messages Webster received from his team that morning read, in a familiar, flat tone, “Inquiries with the Hertz desk established that the gentleman was disappointed not to receive the Mercedes that he believed he had booked.”

  George Black, purveyor of first-rate surveillance and countersurveillance, had listened to what Webster needed and arranged a team of six: four in a car and two on a motorbike. One woman in the car, one on the back of the bike—a good woman, George had told Webster many times, being an essential part of any successful operation. Black himself was in the car, managing the operation and sending text message after text message to Webster. He was a soldier, or had been, with a career that had straddled special forces and military intelligence. He said little about his past, but what he did say you knew was true, and he had followed many people trickier and nastier than Lock. He was direct, efficient, wholly committed to the job, and better than anyone else Webster had ever tried. But even he lost people now and then.

  Today that didn’t matter, not terribly. Later on Lock would be having dinner with Onder (the hardest part of the operation to set up—Webster had eventually had to blackmail Onder with visions of Lock’s imminent demise to persuade him to come to London) and through him they knew where he would be staying—Claridge’s, in Mayfair. There was no critical meeting that they had to catch, and that made the whole operation less nervy than it might have been.

  Webster’s brief to George was unusual: report how Lock behaves. Is he relaxed or busy? Is he smiling, rushing, hiding? Is he doing Malin’s business or his own?

  The text messages came every ten to fifteen minutes. “Subject proceeding east on M4.” . . . “Subject proceeding east on A4.” . . . “Subject approaching Claridge’s along Upper Brook Street.” Black never abbreviated. Webster tried to deal with his e-mail but was getting little done. In the end he left his office and went for a walk.

  It was the middle of the morning, raining still, and the people of Chancery Lane, having picked up their breakfasts and not yet gone for lunch, were working. Webster could sense the industry around him, in new glass buildings and older concrete blocks, in the offices where the lawyers opined and the accountants added up. No one made anything here. No one sold anything either, except for sandwiches and ties and birthday cards. They calculated, they assessed risk, they checked, they analyzed; they disputed, and resolved, and testified; they reported, and then they invoiced. They helped their clients to make money, to avoid losing it, to sidestep drudgery. They did what Webster did, in short. And Lock, he thought. We help others do.

  What was it like to be Lock at the moment? Until the summer he must have felt so comfortable. Hammer was right: as Malin’s shield, if that’s what he was, he had had no real shielding to do until now. His path had been easy. He was used to the Russians, knew the companies and the tax treaties by heart, had his regiment of advisers out there to do his bidding. Hammer’s man in the FBI had hinted that Lock had been answering formal questions in Cayman; if that was true, then for him to be sitting across from a policeman—there of all places, where he must have felt most safe, a sanctuary made for him and his type—that must have felt like the end of his world. He must be ready. Surely.

  Webster wandered west into Covent Garden through the insistent rain, his trousers left damp by the short coat he kept hunched about him. His phone buzzed: Lock had checked in to the hotel. He bought a paper and sat in a café with a cup of tea waiting for new alerts. For an hour or so, there was no movement. One of George’s team discovered through some sleight of hand that Lock was staying in room 324, a junior suite. Then shortly after noon, a message: “Subject leaving in silver Volvo, east on Brook Street.” Immediately after it came another: “Have reason to believe others interested in subject. Please call.”

  Black had been thorough. His people had checked the area around Claridge’s before Lock’s arrival and had noticed an anonymous dark gray Ford with three men in it parked in a mews behind the hotel. The same car was now following Lock east across the city. Black asked Webster whether he wanted to switch to countersurveillance, which, in the jargon, meant to start following the car following Lock. Webster thought about it. Stick with Lock, he decided, and Black did just that.

  Webster sat with his tea for a long time, then bought another. People began to come in to order their lunch. Lock entered Bryson’s offices in the City at 12:32. The team settled down to wait for him to reappear, but Webster was sure that Lock would be in with the lawyers for at least a couple of hours and would then go back to his hotel.

  That was what happened. Lock returned to Claridge’s in the middle of the afternoon, and didn’t emerge again until the evening, when he left for his dinner with Onder. Webster spent the afternoon writing a report he had been delaying, picking up the odd message from Black and waiting for news of Alan Knight. He would stay in the office for this evening’s program because he wanted to be close.

  ONDER HAD PICKED THE PLACE, an Italian restaurant near Sloane Square where the waiters knew half the customers by name. He had wanted to know if he should wear a wire and Webster told him it wasn’t that sort of a meeting. Lock was there early, a little before eight, with his unseen caravan close behind him. His bodyguards waited outside in the car.

  Onder was there shortly afterward. Webster found it impossible to concentrate: if Lock was going to leave it would be in the first half an hour. When it became clear that they were going to finish dinner he began to relax, and after a further hour was rather wishing that the two of them would hurry up. He heard nothing until a little after ten, when George let him know that both individuals had left the premises. Onder called two minutes after that, a little breathless on the line, evidently walking back to his Mayfair house. Webster had been in his office for hours now and his eyes were dry from the blueish fluorescent light. Still no news of Knight. Pizza crusts sat in a box on the floor beside his desk.

  “I think I did well,” said Onder. “I like this spying game.”

  Webster laughed but was too tense to be amused. “How did it go?”

  “Well, I think. Not for him, but for you? Very well. He is a scared man.”

  “What’s he scared of?”

  “You. Malin. The FBI.”

  “The FBI?” That seemed premature. Unless Hammer had been nudging things along again.

  “He said that Cayman was OK, not too serious, but they mentioned the FBI.”

  “OK. We’re in good company. What did they say?”

  “All he said was, Now I’ve got to deal with the fucking FBI. I’m quoting.”

  “What did he say about Malin?”

  “That they do not see eye to eye. He wants Malin to settle but Malin will not. He feels that all Malin wants him for these days is his name. The rest of him is a liability. He did not open up, though. He cannot quite bring himself to say that Malin has him by the balls.”

  “What about Gerstman?”

  “I mentioned Gerstman. He went quiet. Said he had been a dear friend.”

  “And did you talk about us?”

  “He did. He said you have been calling everyone he knows and then they call him. He blames you for the press.”

  “That’s good. Probably.”

  “I said I knew you. Not you by name, but Ikertu. I said you
were good guys, that I had used you.”

  “Did you talk about an introduction?”

  “No. I didn’t. He’s still proud. He wants me to think that he’s a big man. Big men don’t run to people like you.”

  “So what did he say?”

  “About you? Nothing. He just sat. I left a silence. He was thinking about it. Thinking hard I would say.”

  Webster too was quiet for a moment. He knew what he needed to know.

  “How did you leave it with him?”

  “I told him to come to Istanbul and I would take his mind off it. Have some fun. He said he would need an excuse. He looked like he didn’t want fun. He was drinking a lot.”

  “Thank you, Savas. That’s good. Thank you. Send me your expenses.”

  Onder laughed, a jolly laugh. “That’s all right, Ben. Let us keep it clean between us. I enjoyed it. When Konstantin is begging on the street, send me a picture.” He hung up.

  Webster had another text from George: Lock was on his way back to the hotel. He looked at his watch. He could be at Claridge’s by half past ten. Why leave it until tomorrow? Lock was tired. He would be dwelling on his conversation at dinner. Probably he was not looking forward to whatever he had to do tomorrow. This was the moment.

  Webster looked out the window, saw that it was still raining, and took his coat off the back of his chair. He left his office, skipped down the stairs, and walked briskly from the building, looking behind him from time to time for a taxi. He found one on Chancery Lane, and it took him through Lincoln’s Inn and along New Oxford Street, the pavements shining yellow in the rain. London was quiet. People walked in twos and threes, heads down. A girl ran across the road with her coat pulled up over her head, her heels skittering in the wet. Webster watched and shivered. Now was the time for him to perform. It was cold but he kept the window open an inch.

  At Claridge’s a doorman in a top hat opened the taxi door for him. Past the black revolving doors the hotel was alight with yellows and pale greens, reflected and absorbed by the white and black check of the marble floor. A fire burned in a grand hearth by empty leather chairs and in the room beyond white roses and lilies in giant vases bloomed. In this impeccable world Webster felt conspicuous, and his mission shabby. He took off his coat, still cold and heavy with rain, and went downstairs to wash his hands. As he did so he looked up at himself in the mirror. That same deceptively honest face. Had Gerstman seen in it any hint of his undoing? More troubling, should Lock?