by T. M. Parris
“Are you implying something, Rose?”
“The video we have of Kamila, recorded later on that same night. We never see who her lover is.”
Peter’s eyes widened. “You think it was Fairchild?”
“He was there on a job, Peter. We know that now. He could have had the same idea as us, to get into Alexei’s business through his wife. Only in a more direct way.”
“Zack didn’t give anything away about this?”
“We didn’t get into that much detail. But we probably will, if we’re working together.”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it past Fairchild to do a thing like that. No one could describe him as risk-averse. He doesn’t have a reputation as a womaniser, though.”
Peter’s laid-back response bugged her just a little. “But can we be sure what he’s really up to? Don’t you think it’s odd that it was only after St Petersburg that he found out where this Russian is, that he was looking for? When he told me about it in Kathmandu, that was months ago. Zack may think Fairchild is working for him, but maybe it’s the other way round, Fairchild taking the opportunity to get something he needs from the Morozovs.”
Peter looked nonplussed. “It’s worth bearing in mind. But if he brings us something new, maybe it doesn’t matter if he took the opportunity to get something for himself as well. He’s open about being a free agent, a mercenary of our world if you like.”
“I just don’t trust him.”
“Fair enough. We keep him at arm’s length. Heard back from the analysts?”
“It’s on its way to you. Everything on Kamila’s drive points to what I said before, that the Kremlin is using Morozov’s logistics network to get weapons and supplies into eastern Ukraine. They’re secretly building up stocks this side of the border and they’re arming God knows who within Ukraine itself.”
Peter looked doubtful. “If that were happening, you’d have thought our drone and satellite surveillance would have picked up on it. Or social media chatter.”
“A lot of the movement’s been attributed to military exercises we already knew were going on in the south and west.”
“Well, in that case we need to consider the idea that the exercises were deliberately set up to conceal an actual invasion. Any idea when?”
“Soon, according to the data. We’re still working on it.”
“That doesn’t give us much time to verify it. Good work, Rose. Kamila’s been useful already.”
“Yes.”
Peter responded to the flatness in her voice. “You have doubts about her?”
“Perhaps a little too useful this soon, don’t you think? I mean, she had no problem finding what we were looking for and putting it all on the drive. Pretty competent for someone who doesn’t give an impression of being business or IT savvy.”
“You think she’s playing us?”
“Maybe. She didn’t mind telling me what she really thinks of Alexei. Not favourable.”
“Well, rich men marrying prostitutes might make a true love story in Hollywood, but elsewhere motives tend to be a bit more venal. You think she wanted to betray him?”
“She seemed embarrassed about the tape. But she’s come round to the idea of helping us pretty quickly.”
“The background researchers didn’t find anything on her?”
“No. But there wasn’t much from before she came to Moscow. It might be worth doing a bit more digging. Her being Chechen is interesting.”
“Okay. Research down there is tricky, though. Place is a mess. And we need verification on the double. All teams, all sources. We need to squeeze all our agents and find out if this is genuine or not. And the sooner we can compare notes with our cousins, the better.”
“How do we frame this? We’ve got to pass it on, haven’t we?”
For the first time in the months they’d been working together, Peter allowed himself to look slightly perturbed. “If the Russians launch a surprise invasion and we’re not ready because we didn’t pass on intelligence, that’ll be bad. But if we pre-empt an attack on the back of false reports, we and our NATO allies could be painted as aggressors. There’s a lot that could go wrong here, Rose. Make sure you stay on top of it.”
20
Fairchild rang the buzzer first. No answer, so he went round the back to try the windows. It was one o’clock in the morning, after all.
He’d struggled to sleep since getting back to Moscow. He was staying in a hotel in the outskirts, the kind that didn’t ask for ID. Plenty of his contacts would have offered him a bed, but no need to endanger them by bringing the FSB to their door. He’d stay in the wind as long as possible, but how long could anyone hide in Moscow from one of the most active internal security forces in the world? Moscow was saturated with agents; it was only a matter of time before his survival would be discovered. And then? Whatever happened then, it wouldn’t be pleasant.
He’d gone out straight away to meet Zack, feeling the need to embark on a half-day tour of Moscow to ensure discretion. It suited his restlessness in any case, his desire not to exist, not to be anywhere. He’d equipped himself for the journey; en route, a red woolly hat became a grey fleece beanie, a leather jacket was obscured by a long dark greatcoat, as he slipped from persona to persona. It was Zack who’d sent him to where he was now.
The Morozov Moscow office was not in a fancy part of town. Just like any local office of any regular import-export business. The place had the smell of Roman about it. Alexei would have wanted something showier, more central. Old Arbat, New Arbat. Painted period charm or glass-fronted commercial modernity. Not a grey square on a featureless street opposite a vacant lot hosting tired, grimy lorries. The real Moscow, Roman would say. Fairchild got the edge of a lever under the window frame and tensed. No give.
Get ahead of the game, was Zack’s instruction. When I talk to the Brits, he said, I want something to bring to the table. Going to St Petersburg to get as far as a front door then legging it, only to disappear for two weeks, makes us look kind of unfocused, no? So get over to the House of Morozov and make up for lost time. What about Pops? Renew your acquaintance? Fairchild had put the call out, to discover to his surprise that Roman was already in Moscow. They’d be meeting tomorrow, which left a night and a day to discover what he could and make Zack look focused in front of the Brits. He heaved at the lever again. A piece of window frame splintered off, ramming the back of his hand into the stonework. The graze smarted and oozed blood. The window remained solid. Fairchild swore and missed Olga’s stove.
He moved to the next window. Zack had been unimpressed with his news from out east.
“I guess that’s the end of the trail for your folks, then,” he’d said, displaying his maximum capacity for empathy. In front of him was a can of beer on a plastic tray. They’d met in a fast-food restaurant squeezed between discount stores in a subway off the Metro. Fairchild was sipping substandard tea out of a brown plastic cup.
“Yes,” he said, “and for the guy who told me about it.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was nailed to the floor in front of a shrine.”
“Alive?”
“At the time. Not when I got there.”
“By who?”
“Some guys in an SUV. They must have tracked me out there.”
“You didn’t see anything?”
“I wasn’t looking. No one even knew I was going there.”
“Someone did. Government people?”
“Must be. The guys who came for me on the train were FSB.”
“Why would the Russian government be concerned about this?”
“Because this man Dimitri described is still out there, Zack. This ‘Grom’ character. He’s still active.”
“No way! That was thirty years ago. He’ll be long gone, or living out a restful retirement somewhere. And what’s with the gangster nickname? Mister Thunder! Sounds like a comic book superhero.”
“I’m sure he has a real name, but Dimitri didn’t giv
e it. He seemed to think he was still around, though.”
“And he’s got his ear on the ground, has he, this monk who lives in this place that’s a three-hour walk from the nearest road?”
“Lived. Not lives. Well, someone didn’t like that he’d spoken to me. Or maybe they wanted to know what he told me. And the gentlemen on the train seemed keen to stop me getting back to Moscow. If all of that was about a dead man, why does it matter so much?”
Zack conceded with a nod and finished his beer. “So what are you going to do?”
“Find him. Find Grom.”
“Find a man who wants you dead?”
“It beats sitting around waiting for him to find me. And you’re going to help.”
“I am?”
“Well, you want me to help you, don’t you? Ask around. Do some digging.”
Zack grumbled, but he’d agreed to it. Probably more than anyone else, Zack knew that the reason Fairchild was in this business was to stay close to the intelligence community. Fairchild didn’t really care about the work he did. But it was only through insider contacts like Zack – and the many others – that Fairchild had a chance of standing up to the conspiracy of silence that was MI6, and getting to the bottom of what really happened. That was always what he’d thought, anyway.
The second window had some give in it. After Fairchild strained for a few seconds, the latch ripped through the frame with a crunch and the window sprung open. Fairchild paused, waiting for the scream of a burglar alarm. Nothing. He lifted himself up onto the sill, his feet getting some purchase on the rough stone wall. One knee up and he paused, half in, half out. Silence. He dropped inside and pulled the window to. A small handheld torch held low gave him a sweep of the room.
It was a messy little back office, metal box files on shelves, a desk piled with papers and an open laptop perched on top. He pressed the space bar and the screen lit up with a password prompt. The keyboard was Russian. That might take some time. Fairchild switched off the torch and gently opened the door a crack. Again he listened. Again silence. He stepped out. A corridor led to the front door he’d buzzed on earlier, with a couple of doors off to the right and stairs up to his left. Faint light from the streetlights outside filtered through the glass panel above the front door.
He went back into the office. Alexei had made his mark here, the careless chaos replacing what before would have been organised neatness. He sat at the desk and tried a couple of obvious passwords on the laptop. No joy. He moved it aside and started going through the papers underneath. General business bureaucracy: invoices, receipts. Nothing obvious to suggest that Morozov was anything other than a standard logistics operator. Fairchild glanced around the room, at the boxes of files. It would take hours to go through all of this.
Something drew his eye back. Tear-off notes, several of them scrawled with large messy writing, were strewn over the desk. Names, phone numbers, dates and times. Some just one word: Stavropol, said one. A reminder to do something? His hand hovered over one of them. It said: Manifest copy to Grom. He read it again. He’d made no mistake with the Cyrillic. That was what it said.
He sat back and contemplated the ceiling. He’d been accused, by Zack, by Walter, and others, of seeing patterns where there weren’t any, connecting random things to try and find the answers he needed. It was the way he’d been brought up. His parents’ crazy games, the cryptic tests they set for him, the way they flitted from language to language as if everything in the world were part of a code that needed to be cracked. When he finally realised that this was not normal parenting, he’d put it down to eccentricity, a kind of intellectual high spirits, two great minds enjoying each other’s company. It was only later, looking back, that he’d started to wonder if there’d been a purpose to it, some kind of training that should have equipped him to solve the biggest puzzle of them all, that of their own disappearance.
But what purpose could there have been? They were dead. They’d been dead for decades, for most of his life, he now knew. The very idea that their game-playing served a purpose was itself a consequence of their interminable mind-gymnastics. What fools they were! And so was he. They’d turned him into a brooding, obsessed boy who’d grown into a brooding, obsessed man, his life entirely shaped by a hunt for something that didn’t exist. And even now here he was, drawing lines in his head, imagining that everything that happened in the world was in some way connected to him and his story. Stupid conceit, the whole thing! He screwed up the note and threw it on the floor.
That was when he noticed the safe, squatting in the corner of the room. A large one, as solid and heavy as they came. Of course there was a safe. Invoices and receipts and manifests were fair enough for legitimate operations, but any syndicate like Morozov also dealt in cash. Cash was the lifeblood, always the easiest and most direct way of extracting value from off-books activity, whatever its nature. And people would know that. Which made it strange – inconceivable – that a ground floor office like this had no security, no alarm system at all.
He got up and went into the corridor. He opened one of the doors. Behind it was a standard office: three desks, computer screens, boxes piled up. Then he opened the door closest to the front entrance. This was slightly grander, the room for receiving visitors. A large wooden desk with nothing much on it sat in front of a leather-backed office chair. Sofas and armchairs formed an arc in front of the window. Pictures on the walls. Carpet on the floor. And on that carpet, in the middle of the room, a body.
Fairchild crouched close to the face which was on its side, one cheek pressed into the floor, a tidy bullet hole in the forehead, its exit wound staining blond hair.
It was Alexei Morozov.
21
There were four of them in the secret room this time: Peter, Rose, Zack, and Nick, a messy-haired bespectacled analyst who’d reviewed the contents of Kamila’s zip drive. Zack was updating them.
“He was shot in the head. Single bullet. Whoever did it didn’t break in. Alexei must have let them in himself. Which kinda suggests that it wasn’t a rival gang.”
“Could he have shot himself?” asked Nick.
“Why would he do that? He’d just been gifted a multi-million-dollar enterprise from his pa. He was having a whale of a time. Besides, no gun at the scene, according to – my operative.”
Peter’s rules: don’t even mention Fairchild’s name in our discussion. Another way of keeping him deniable. Rose had had to convey this to Zack in advance. “Figures,” was his response. Zack hadn’t offered any information about Fairchild’s disappearance and reappearance in Moscow, but then Rose hadn’t asked.
“What else did your operative say?” asked Peter. “Any signs the place had been searched or vandalised?”
“Nope. There was kit lying about. Doesn’t sound like a burglary.” Zack looked uncomfortable, only just managing to squeeze his mass into a round-backed armchair. At least he’d ditched the shades for the occasion.
“What kind of kit?” asked Rose.
“A laptop. Some burner phones in a drawer. Normal office computer stuff, monitors, printers. Worth something, though.”
“The police are presumably working the scene,” said Peter.
Nick came in. “According to our police contact, they discovered the body this morning. They’ll be working through all of the IT stuff.”
“Not the laptop,” said Zack. “My operative swiped it. Police won’t even know it was there. It’s with our technical team right now. We’ll share anything interesting, of course.”
“That would be greatly appreciated, Zack,” said Peter. “The question is, who would do this and why? Clearly it impacts on the whole political exercise that Alexei was involved in.”
“Makes no sense for the FSB to get rid of Alexei,” said Zack. “He’s the one who just handed over the Morozov supply lines. He’s their favourite guy.” Zack and his colleagues had already been filled in on what was on the zip drive.
“What will happen to the syndicate now
?” asked Rose. “There’s no obvious successor. It may end up falling apart.”
“Roman might come in and babysit,” said Zack. “Not what he wanted, as he gave it to his son so’s he could retire back home. But he could step in. He’s in Moscow right now, so I’m told. My operative is seeing him. They’ve got some glitzy dacha out by Krylatskoye.”
“That might change things,” said Peter. “Roman has an old-style vory criminal code attitude to co-operating with the government. Once he gets wind of what Alexei’s been up to, he could close down the whole arrangement.”
“That’s good for us,” said Rose.
“Except that it’s probably too late,” said Nick. “If the zip drive information is good, the amount of stuff they’ve already got in the area is plenty for a major offensive.”
“If the government has already got what they wanted out of Morozov, maybe they got rid of Alexei to close it off,” said Rose. “I mean, the guy has ‘liability’ practically tattooed on his forehead. Or maybe he asked for too much, called their bluff, pissed someone off.”
Peter looked dubious. “Possibly. I’d expect them to want to stick with it, grow the relationship. There are plenty of other ways the Morozov network could be used to further Russia’s interests. Their other supply lines, their profits, their assets. Alexei’s no real danger to them, surely.”
“He could have squealed. Or threatened to,” said Zack.
“Who to?” said Peter. “No Russian law enforcement will take action against the Kremlin in defence of a mafia group. He could have come to us, I suppose, or yourselves. But why?”
“He seemed to be doing very well personally out of the set-up he had with the FSB,” said Nick.
“What about Kamila?” asked Rose.
“What about her?” That was Zack.
“Maybe they argued. Alexei was pretty open about his infidelities. Publicly she let it wash over her, but maybe behind closed doors it was a different matter. She really didn’t like the guy very much.”