Final Offer

by Eva Hudson

  “It got damaged,” Marshall said.

  “Really?” Usher said. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

  Ingrid wanted to stamp on Marshall’s foot so bad. “It was a minor ding.”

  “It’s a two-hundred-million-dollar painting,” Demir said. “Even minor is six figures.”

  “Seriously, it’s just a chip to the frame, which isn’t the original one anyway.”

  “That really isn’t the problem—”

  “Where is it now?” Usher asked.

  Was she ever going to be allowed to make her point? “In the embassy storage facility.”

  “We have insurance for that?”

  “The embassy has one of London’s finest art collections. It’s covered,” Ingrid said emphatically. “Now, if I may…” She pressed her lips together and inhaled sharply. “The problem we have is that Vitali Shevchenko has not reported the Picasso as stolen. And until he does, it will be hard to convince Igor Rybkin it is for sale.”

  Frank Usher sighed so heavily it vibrated his microphone. “What’s the latest on the police operation?”

  They all looked to Ingrid.

  “You mean the cops who attended on the night of the break-in?”

  Their silence meant they expected her to continue.

  “It was nothing. A resident who didn’t realize they were filming called nine nine nine to report gunshots. An ambulance was dispatched as a precaution.” She was hating this. “Of course there were real gunshots, but I’m almost certain the police don’t know about them.”

  “Explain,” Usher said, his face slack with weariness.

  “Jones fired them from the garden to break a window on the second floor, or rather the third story. While everyone else was at the front of the house looking at the filming, Jones diverted the skeleton security team to the room with the broken pane, allowing him to sneak in unnoticed.”

  Usher blinked hard. “You seem to be telling us that, contrary to our assessment, Operation Dovetail went according to plan.”

  “Operation Dovetail?” Ingrid asked.

  Ingrid looked at a wall of granite faces.

  “It’s the codename for the investigation,” Marshall said with teenage sarcasm.

  Well, thanks for telling me, guys. Embarrassment reddened her skin.

  “Yet, despite everything going to plan,” Usher said, using air quotes, “Mr Shevchenko has not reported the theft. And until it is reported stolen, your alter ego cannot offer it for sale. So—” he looked straight into the camera “—what do we do now, people, because I can’t tell you how much I want to walk into Director Leery’s office and tell him we have Rybkin. You get me Rybkin, I get you a posting to the Caribbean. The Seychelles. You name it.”

  No one said anything.

  “We any closer to bringing him in?” Usher sounded impatient.

  Yet again, everyone turned to Ingrid. She felt like a performing seal. She flexed her fingers and held her breath. “In my assessment,” she began, “there are a couple of explanations why Shevchenko hasn’t reported the break-in—”

  “Because until he does, the Picasso can’t be offered for sale,” Marshall said.

  Thank you, Captain Obvious.

  Ingrid counted to five before she spoke again. “The first is that losing a two hundred-million-dollar painting is less painful to him than admitting his security has been breached. He has hundreds and hundreds of millions worth of valuables in that house, not to mention family members who are kidnap targets. If word gets out 26 Bolton Square is not an impregnable fortress, he becomes a target for every branch of the criminal fraternity.”

  Ingrid reached into the middle of the table for a bottle of mineral water and poured herself a glass. She met Rennie’s eye, but he looked away quickly. He hadn’t said a thing since she’d stepped into the room. Something was up.

  “And the other obvious reason he’s not reported the robbery to the police is that he assumes he knows who is behind it. It’s my opinion that there must be two primary candidates in his mind. The first has got to be me, or rather Natalya Vesnina—”

  “Really?”

  Ingrid wondered if Marshall interrupted male colleagues so frequently.

  “Think about it. I was the one who persuaded him to move it just last week.”

  “You need added protection?” Usher asked.

  “I’ve not noticed anything suspicious,” Ingrid said, “but thanks. I’m not worried because I think he suspects someone else and is currently meting out his own form of justice, the kind where we won’t find the body for several weeks. If at all.”

  “And who’s that suspect?” Usher asked.

  “Igor Rybkin, of course.”

  There was a collective ‘ah’ as the penny dropped.

  “He knows Rybkin has always wanted it, and he’ll also know Rybkin would take great pleasure in stealing it from him. Maybe he even thinks I, Natalya, was Rybkin’s stooge. I think his silence in the past week means there’s a very good chance Shevchenko will lead us straight to Rybkin in the next few weeks. He’ll have all sorts of tabs on the man we could only dream of having.”

  Rennie bit the inside of his lip and nodded slowly.

  “Or there’s another possibility, my love,” Demir said.

  Ingrid bristled. “What’s that?”

  “He hasn’t even noticed it’s missing. He’s so rich, maybe it’s no different from losing a few million bucks on the Dow.”

  He had a point.

  “The problem with Agent Skyberg’s plan,” Marshall said slowly, deliberately, “is that Shevchenko, if he does suspect Rybkin, might not seek revenge any time soon. He could wait years, couldn’t he? He’ll wait for the moment of maximum humiliation.”

  Trust Marshall to say the one thing Ingrid hoped no one would. The five of them sat in silence for several seconds.

  “Claybourne’s right,” Usher said. “We can’t hang around and wait for Shevchenko to make a move. We need to make this happen without him. I mean, we do not want to be holding onto a two-hundred-million-dollar painting a day longer than we have to. We need to shake this up.” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “What have you got?”

  Ingrid’s heart imploded. She knew what was coming next. She remembered Rennie’s speech about risk and reward. They were going to throw Natalya under the bus.

  “Best way you can do that,” Demir said from New York, “is offer it for sale anyway.”

  Ingrid felt her bottom lip tremble, so bit it hard. “If Natalya does that… If I do that, I am saying to every art collector in London ‘employ me and I’ll steal your paintings, then sell them on the black market.’” She sighed deeply. “It’s the end of Natalya. It’s the end of a two-year undercover operation.” She looked at Marshall. He wasn’t going to back her up. She looked straight into the camera, hoping Frank Usher would feel the weight of her stare.

  “Unless you’ve got another plan to flush Rybkin out of hiding, I don’t think we’ve got a choice.” He looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, Agent Skyberg, but we need Rybkin, and this damned Picasso is still the best way of getting him quickly.”

  Anger fermented under her tongue. It fizzed and burned. She daren’t speak. Tears stung the corners of her eyes, but she was damned if she was going to cry. You fuckers, she thought. You dumb-ass, shortsighted, career-obsessed fuckers. “Well, okay then.”

  25

  Ingrid followed David Rennie out of the meeting. His shoulders were slumped and his pace was sluggish.

  “Well, thanks for nothing,” she said.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Your risk-reward analysis was right on the money.”

  He briefly made eye contact as she pulled level. “Sorry about that,” he said quietly before turning his head away. Something was up.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t believe you for one second.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m buying you a coffee. If it was later in the day, I’d insist we go to
the pub. Lord knows I could use a good slug of something right now.”

  Downstairs in the near-empty basement canteen, she placed a caffé latte and a double espresso in front of him. She wondered if, when the embassy finally moved to its new building, they would modernize the coffee menu to include flat whites and long blacks. He nodded his thanks for his latte and took a sip.

  “I really am sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to be right.”

  Ingrid pressed her tongue into the roof of her mouth. “Well, thanks for saying so. No one else in that meeting was going to apologize.” She studied the reflection of the ceiling lights in her coffee. The idea that a foreign power had the means to both nominate and elect a president of their choosing meant US democracy was on the same footing as Zimbabwe. It chilled her. She wanted to find Rybkin more than she wanted to work as Natalya. “Though I guess if I wasn’t prepared to offer the Picasso for sale, you could go home.”

  He ran his fingers through his beard. “Actually, no. That email address, the one that took us out to that place in… what was it called?”

  “Burnham-on-Crouch.”

  “It got used again.” He checked his watch. “About eight this morning, logging into the wifi at a branch of Starbucks. Somewhere called Spitalfields.”

  Ingrid put down her coffee. “Well, well, well.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He must know that hotmail address is being traced, mustn’t he? Or he must guess at least.”

  “Or it’s just so damn old he’s figured we can’t possibly know about it.” He managed a half smile. “Slow, patient police work.”

  They clinked mugs.

  “Sometimes it pays dividends.”

  Jen appeared with a couple of friends from the bull pen. Ingrid gave her a wave and got a smile in return. “Good thing about Starbucks is we’ll get the ISP logs quickly. I’m assuming you already put in the request?”

  “Yup.”

  “You going over there? It’s in London. Close to where you got the train that time.”

  “Tomorrow morning, get the early shift, see the same people who were there today. No point going now.”

  Ingrid was concerned about Rennie’s lack of eagerness. Here was a big fat juicy lead that could take him significantly closer to finding Rybkin, yet he had all the enthusiasm of a teenager being asked to unload the dishwasher.

  “Will you please tell me what’s up?”

  “That obvious?”

  “You didn’t say a word the whole meeting. What’s going on?”

  Rennie shook his head slowly but didn’t answer. In the distance, Jen and her friends scraped chairs over the linoleum flooring. The coffee machine spluttered and steamed.

  “Look at me,” Ingrid said.

  His eyes stayed fixed on his coffee.

  “Look at me. You don’t tell me what’s up, I’ve got two choices. One is to think I’ve done something wrong, and the other is to report you as unfit for duty.” She paused. “I don’t like either of them.”

  He inhaled deeply, his chest expanding to stretch his plaid shirt. “Neither do I. It’s not that big a deal, honest.”

  Ingrid adopted what she hoped was her sympathetic face. “Try me.”

  He scratched his ear and looked away. “It’s just this morning, on the subway, the Tube, I… this guy got pushed…”

  When it became clear he could not finish his sentence, Ingrid formed a response. “Under a train?”

  He nodded.

  “Dead?”

  Rennie nodded again. “He was directly in front of me.” He winced.

  Ingrid reached out across the table and placed a hand on his. “Oh, I… I can’t imagine. I don’t want to. That’s just awful. Terrible.” She made herself stop the platitudes as her brain played a slideshow of horrors.

  He buried his head in his hands. “It’s the sounds I can’t… can’t get over.”

  Ingrid imagined the bones against the metal, the gasp of realization, the screams of onlookers, the rasp of the brakes.

  “Did you… did you see who did it?”

  He nodded. “A couple of us grabbed him, pulled him down.”

  “The police came?”

  He bit the inside of his lip. “Eventually.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “All the shouting, you know, just so much noise.”

  Ingrid pictured the commuters complaining that their journey had been delayed.

  “Thing was, it was so random, and so deliberate. One moment this guy is waiting to go to work, and at the same moment this other guy decides to kill someone. And he chooses him…”

  She wanted to give him time to talk, but she had questions. “Was he mentally unstable, the guy you held down?”

  He looked up at her. “I think that’s what’s making it worse,” he said, tears forming in the corner of his eyes. “He was absolutely cold, didn’t say a word. Didn’t try to run.”

  “Senseless,” she said, feeling useless.

  He inhaled and jerked his head quickly, as if to shake his thoughts. “Mind if we change the subject?”

  “Sure.” Ingrid took a sip and tried to think of something to say. “I spoke to Cath, I mean to the Metropolitan Police, this morning.”

  Rennie tried to appear engaged, but it was clear his focus was elsewhere.

  “They charged Tarlev with the murder of the lawyer. He still isn’t saying anything about why he killed him, or who paid him to do it.” She drained her coffee cup. “It’s always nice to put a killer behind bars, but it’s frustrating we don’t know why he did it.”

  “They don’t plea bargain here, do they?” he asked.

  “Not in the same way, but there’s a possibility they’ll get him to talk with the promise of a reduced sentence.”

  It was the kind of collar no one liked.

  “They still have absolutely nothing on the woman who performed Yelena Rybkina’s pedicure,” Ingrid said, papering over the need for conversation. “Seems all the details she gave the nail bar were false. They gave a detailed description, but it means nothing when you can take off your wig, scrub away your spray tan and change the color of your contact lenses.”

  “Guess it’s a business where people get paid cash.”

  “And everyone’s from somewhere else. They really don’t care if you’ve got a work permit.”

  It all felt hopeless. They had every reason to suspect whoever had paid to kill Rybkina was also responsible for the murder of her lawyer, but they had no way of proving it.

  “Unless we find her,” she said, “and unless she leads us to Rybkin, the Picasso is the best shot of getting him.”

  He searched her face. “Are you sure?”

  She sighed. “I mean, maybe we’ll get one of the hackers from Starbuck’s ISP logs, but that still doesn’t get us to Rybkin.”

  He ruffled his shoulders.

  “What’s more important?” She pressed her lips together. “My career or American democracy?”

  “You put it like that…” He managed a half smile. “You might not have a job next week, but you will always have my respect, Agent Skyberg. It’s a ballsy move.”

  It was. Ingrid knew it. She finished her espresso. “I’d better go, then. Get the ball rolling. I can’t make the calls from here. I need to go to Natalya’s apartment. I need to be wearing the heels and the nails.”

  “What are you going to say to people?”

  Ingrid puffed her cheeks out. “I think the best angle is to say I’ve been approached by someone who’s selling and they’re inviting me to find a buyer. I can’t say ‘I have it, do you want it?’”

  He nodded. “Maybe it won’t blow things apart as bad as you fear.”

  She pushed her chair back and stood up. Rennie still looked awful. “Maybe I can buy you a drink later?”

  “Thanks, but I think I’d rather be on my own. Not much company right now.”

  She didn’t like leaving him so low. “You want me to come with you in the morning? To Starbucks?�
��

  “It’s okay, I’m on it.”

  Ingrid passed Jen on her way out of the canteen. The girl was deep in conversation about her impending wedding, and she got the impression Jen might miss her friends at the Bureau just as much as the FBI was going to miss her. Ingrid was so distracted she forgot to take the stairs and found herself in the elevator, riding to the fifth floor.

  The moment the doors opened, her phone rang. Right pocket. Safe to answer. Unknown number.

  “Ingrid Skyberg,” she said.

  “Special Agent.” The voice was familiar, deep and croaky—sixty-a-day croaky.

  “Sol?” Why was her old boss calling? She hadn’t heard from Sol Franklin since he’d retired. “That really you?”

  “Can you talk?” He sounded serious.

  “For you, of course I can.”

  “No, I mean are you alone?” This was getting a bit weird.

  “I’m at work, but no one’s with me. What is it? You’re worrying me.”

  “It’s not me you need to worry about.”

  Ingrid stopped walking and leaned against the wall. His tone made it clear it wasn’t a social call. “Sol, you’re scaring me.”

  “Good. Listen to me, Ingrid. I might have stopped work, but I still speak to people, still hear things.”

  She nervously scratched her neck. Had she said something stupid in the meeting with Usher?

  “What is it?”

  He inhaled audibly.

  “Sol!”

  “This Russian thing. Just be careful, is all. It stinks worse than a Kentucky farmyard, and someone’s going to get the blame for it. You need to make sure it’s not you.”

  Right at that moment, Marshall appeared at the end of the corridor.

  “Can I have a word,” he said.

  26

  “Where the hell are you, honey?” Aslan Demir asked.

  Somewhere in west London you won’t have heard of, dickbrain. “On my bike.” Ingrid filtered to the front of a chain of cars stuck at traffic lights. “The helmet Bluetooth isn’t great, but you can hear me, right?”