Final Offer

by Eva Hudson

  Her teeth clenched together.

  “Damn you, Nick Angelis.”

  “Everything okay?” the cabbie asked.

  Ingrid pulled a face that said ‘are you kidding?’

  She needed to think quick, she needed to do something. One thing was sure, she couldn’t go to her meeting at the Connaught. That could never happen. Not now, not ever.

  “Change of plan,” she said a little more breathlessly than she would have liked. “Take me to Cadogan Mansions.”

  “Okay, love.”

  Ingrid slumped back against the seat and grimaced. She couldn’t stop shaking her head.

  If Nick Angelis knew she was Natalya Vesnina and where to find her, then the game was up. The Rybkin sting was finished. Over. Natalya Vesnina had to go into hiding. Immediately.

  28

  Ingrid unlocked the door to Natalya’s apartment for the last time. Once inside, she slid the bolt across and stepped out of the four-inch heels. She rushed to the bedroom but stopped in the doorway, unsure what to do first.

  There wasn’t time to think. She had to pack up the essentials and get out quickly. Protocol meant the Bureau would send in a deep-clean team to remove any trace of Natalya Vesnina, but that might not be for days. Right now she needed to think smart, take anything necessary for ongoing investigations, and get out.

  She pulled the drapes shut—she could no longer be sure there wasn’t a long lens pointing her way from an apartment opposite—and started opening the drawers and closet doors.

  Three pairs of shoes, five designer dresses, a lightweight coat and a selection of designer underwear. She opened the safe and pulled out her jeans, jacket and boots. She unzipped the Donna Karan she was wearing and hung it in the closet. She pulled off the eyelashes and the nails, then undressed completely before running a shower.

  The water washed away the scents of Natalya—the perfume, the hairspray, the starched freshness of her dry cleaner’s choice of chemicals—and Ingrid began to shake.

  It’s just adrenalin. It’s natural.

  But the sensation she had screwed up was so visceral it fizzed inside her. Acid formed in her mouth. She wanted to punch Nick Angelis for identifying Natalya, she wanted to kick the tiled enclosure with rage, but by the time the shampoo rinsed from her hair and was slipping over her skin, she knew she should be thanking Nick. She didn’t want to admit it, but it was far, far better he had been the one to let her know than a guest at an oligarch’s reception or, worse, one of Shevchenko’s private army.

  She let out a desperate, guttural sound. Rage and despair coiled around assonant vowels. She had been a bitch to him. Nick had been so frail, and delivering the message in person must have drained someone so ill. He had demonstrated, after two years of silence, that he cared for her after all. She would have to find a way of thanking him, and apologize for being so mean.

  Ingrid rinsed the shower cubicle, flushing every stray hair down the drain, like an assailant after a crime. It was only when she was pulling on her own faded jeans she questioned why she’d bothered: the kind of people who might be after Natalya wouldn’t require forensics to find her guilty.

  She opened the bathroom cabinet. Expensive moisturizers, mud masks and exfoliating mitts. Russian-branded painkillers and a packet of Durex. She would miss the fluffy laundered towels, but there was nothing in the bathroom she needed.

  A phone buzzed on the bed. It was Natalya’s. She didn’t even check who was calling. Too risky to answer.

  Dressed, she went into the kitchen. The cupboards had barely been opened in the eighteen months she’d used the apartment. A sealed packet of granola but no milk in the fridge. She remembered the vodka in the freezer compartment and took a swig from the bottle. Her phone buzzed again in the bedroom.

  Rushing now, she pulled down the window shade in the living room and sat at Natalya’s desk. She pulled notebooks out of drawers, carefully annotated gallery catalogs off shelves and took the memory card out of Natalya’s professional Canon EOS camera. She made a pile of everything she had to take with her in the middle of the floor.

  Now what?

  Her lip curled with resentment when she realized what she had to do. She just had to suck it up. No time to gripe about it. Just do it. She reached for her phone, which was lying on the bed next to Natalya’s. They both started buzzing at the same time. The number on Natalya’s phone was international. The one on her own phone was Cath Murray. She waited for it to go to voicemail then dialed the embassy.

  “Assistant Deputy Director Claybourne.” Who answered the phone by announcing their title?

  “It’s me.”

  “Ingrid?”

  “There’s not time to explain, but you have to come here right away.” She emphasized the last two words.

  “Where’s here?”

  “Natalya’s apartment. Cadogan Mansions.”

  She heard him take a sharp breath. He had immediately calculated the implications. “Really?”

  “Yep. We’ll need a deep clean, but right now I need someone I can trust. It’s a ten-minute walk. Five if you run.”

  “On my way.”

  She was grateful for the lack of small talk. There would be a debrief. There would be meetings. There would be hot coals and a hauling, but Marshall was good enough at his job to know this wasn’t the time.

  Ingrid tipped the contents of Natalya’s Stella McCartney bag onto the carpet and transferred everything, including Nick’s USB stick, into her own backpack. She found some plastic bags under the sink and filled them with the essentials she’d piled up on the living room floor.

  What else was there? Think.

  The CCTV. She puffed out her cheeks with relief. Thank Christ she’d remembered that. The hard drive was in a cupboard in the entryway, and she pressed the code that would wipe the memory before switching it off.

  The buzzing of her phone drew her back into the bedroom. It was Cath Murray again. She picked up.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Bad time?”

  “Could say that.”

  “Want me to call back?”

  Ingrid scanned the room, mentally listing the things she needed to take. “No, you’re all right.”

  “Okay,” Cath sounded weary. “It can wait, you know.”

  “S’okay.” Ingrid knew she sounded tetchy.

  “Well, all right then. Two things. One, will you be at training tonight?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “You okay, mate? You sound terrible.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “Ah yes. Remember Rybkin’s brother, the one who lives in Berlin?”

  “Sure.”

  “He’s just been shot. Assassinated.”

  Now she had Ingrid’s attention. “Really? Where?”

  “And when I say ‘just,’ I mean it. It’s still coming through on the wires. Automatic weapon from a pillion rider on a moped outside… Sorry, just waiting for it to come up on my screen… Outside the offices of Sirius Holdings GmbH. Outskirts of Berlin. Near the airport. Police on the scene, suspects are at large.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Um… less than ten minutes.”

  “You sending someone out there?”

  “I imagine there’ll be some kind of liaison.”

  “You think it’s related to Rybkina and her lawyer?”

  “Dunno. After the yacht sinking? What do you think?” Cath asked.

  “Have you had confirmation if Igor Rybkin was on board yet?”

  “Several of the survivors say he wasn’t.”

  “You think he’s behind the sinking?”

  Cath said nothing.

  “And the murder of his brother?” Ingrid was pacing back and forth.

  Again, no answer.

  “Cath?”

  “Yep?”

  “I gotta go.” Ingrid didn’t even say goodbye, just hung up. The assassination of Aleks Rybkin wasn’t something she could process. Her head was swarming wit
h more immediate concerns. She picked up Natalya’s phone from the bed, but as she threw it in her backpack, she accidentally illuminated the screen. The international number had a German area code.

  The air around her pressed in, cooled, hardened. It was a coincidence, right? She couldn’t remember the last time Natalya had received a call from Germany. She hit the voicemail button.

  “Natalya Vesnina, my name is Aleks Rybkin. I believe you are selling something I might be interested in, please contact me on…” Ingrid dropped the phone onto the covers and sank down on to the bed. Her mouth was dry, her throat sore, her breaths rapid and shallow. A tinny voice she could barely make out asked her to press one to save, two to repeat and three to delete. She swiped the phone up and quickly pressed two. She listened again.

  She had never spoken to Igor Rybkin’s brother, but the call seemed genuine. It sounded like a Russian man in his fifties. He sounded like a man who had been contacted through an intermediary about something that might be of interest to his brother. It didn’t sound like someone who thought he was about to be killed.

  What if it was the last call he made? Natalya Vesnina would be contacted by the German police. But Natalya Vesnina was about to disappear for good.

  The doorbell rang. Ingrid stood up slowly and walked over to the intercom panel.

  “Hello,” she said in Russian.

  “It’s me.”

  She pressed a button to let Marshall into the building.

  Ingrid took a final look round the apartment, at the gold brocaded furniture and marble detailing. She should have spent more time there. Made the most of the cable TV and the underfloor heating. It was far superior to her own apartment. She slung her backpack over one shoulder.

  Marshall knocked at the door.

  “What the heck happened?” He was breathless from his run.

  “I’ll explain later, but right now you need to take those plastic bags to the embassy.”

  He looked unsure. “Okay,” he said, still catching his breath.

  “And then this place needs a deep clean.”

  “What’s going on, Ingrid?”

  “Then get an embassy car to pick you up from the back entrance. Don’t leave till it’s right outside,” she said.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked. He was too confused to be angry.

  Ingrid grabbed her helmet from the bedroom. “Make my getaway. I’ll contact you when it’s safe to do so.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She zipped up her jacket and struggled to get her other arm through the backpack straps. “Not entirely sure.” She flipped down the visor and stepped into the hallway.

  Two minutes later the garage doors rattled upwards and Ingrid Skyberg kicked her bike into gear. She roared out onto the streets of Mayfair.

  29

  Ingrid closed the door behind her. It signaled to everyone in the bull pen she was about to get a dressing-down from the assistant deputy director, but she would rather they didn’t overhear too much of what Marshall was about to say.

  “Take a seat.”

  Sometimes things were so formal between them it was weird.

  “I’ve discussed your situation with Frank Usher,” he said, “and we have a problem.”

  Ingrid kept her hands in her lap and her face neutral.

  “I also spoke to Fortnum Security, asked for a meeting with your contact Nick Angelis, and they told me he’s been on sick leave for six months. So, you want to tell me again how he worked out Natalya’s identity?”

  Inhale.

  “I really have no idea. I didn’t get a chance to ask him. I tried calling him last night, but all the numbers I have for him end in voicemail.”

  “So we can’t even ask him who else knows?”

  Ingrid shook her head.

  “Then Natalya Vesnina has got to retire. Immediately. Usher suggested she might go work for a Saudi prince, and there are so many of them, nobody could disprove it.” He couldn’t quite hide the trace of racism from his tone. “So now we just need to check all your ties to Vesnina are thoroughly severed.”

  Ingrid tried to get a word in, but Marshall ignored her.

  “First things first, the deep-clean team is going into Cadogan Mansions later. What about the bike?”

  Ingrid had been hiring a succession of different motorbikes so she didn’t always arrive and leave on the same vehicle. “I rode it around till I was sure no one was following me, left it in some suburban street out in Zone 6 and got a taxi back into town. I paid cash.”

  “And your apartment?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing to report. Agent Rennie came round last night—”

  “He did?”

  “Not like that, Marshall. He’s got scanners and bug detectors. We swept my place and there was nothing. No listening devices, no hidden cameras. Nothing of note.”

  She remembered finding forger Flossie Reynolds’s business card in her apartment, and a chill passed through her.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I stayed there last night—alone, in case your mind is in the gutter—and didn’t notice anything unusual. I’m fine there.”

  “We should arrange a safe house.”

  “If we were going to do that, we should have done it yesterday.”

  He sucked in his cheeks, trying not to respond to her criticism, and lined up a pen with the side of his notepad. “We’ll see about that.”

  “Well, before you do, I’ve got something to tell you.”

  He looked surprised.

  “There’s a rather large flaw in your plan to retire Natalya.”

  Marshall was annoyed. “What?”

  “You are aware that Aleks Rybkin was killed yesterday?”

  His face was vacant.

  “The brother?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

  “Assassinated outside his headquarters in Berlin, and the thing is—and I haven’t told anyone this yet—Natalya Vesnina was one of the last people he called.”

  Marshall’s mouth fell open. “Well.”

  “I’d been putting feelers out, letting people know I could put them in touch with a bargain-basement Picasso. And somehow my message in a bottle washed up on his shore. He called me at fifteen ten, Berlin time, and he was dead by twenty past.”

  Marshall said nothing at first. “Do we know who killed him?”

  Ingrid shook her head. “I spoke to my contact at the Met, the one investigating the murder of Yelena Rybkina and her lawyer. She has been liaising with forces in Germany and Tunisia—”

  “Tunisia?”

  “Where Igor Rybkin’s $300 million yacht was sunk the day before yesterday.”

  “The one with the golf hole?” Trust Marshall to remember that.

  “Correct. Three bodies recovered—none of them Igor Rybkin—but they’re treating it as an assassination attempt, which is interesting given we’ve assumed he’s the one killing everyone else. All I know is the Met, the Bundespolizei and the Tunisian security forces are sharing intel, and the team in London have got counterterrorism and MI5 all over them, so I’d say they are definitely linking all the murders. To be honest, it would be statistically unlikely if they weren’t related.”

  He adjusted his keyboard to be in line with the edge of his desk. “You know who’s behind the killings?”

  She steepled her fingers. “There’s a fifty percent chance it’s the Kremlin, and maybe a thirty percent chance it’s Igor Rybkin himself.”

  “Why would he sink his own yacht?”

  Ingrid grimaced. “Insurance? Destroying evidence?”

  “And the other twenty percent?”

  Ingrid thought for a second. “Shevchenko’s got to be on the list, and I’ll give you a couple of points each for Mossad, MI6, the CIA, a disgruntled employee or a long-lost relative. Take your pick. So the thing is,” Ingrid continued, pleased to be telling Marshall what was about to happen, “Natalya can’t swan off to Dubai or wherever becau
se (a) the German police are going to call her, and if she disappears, she will be linked to Aleks Rybkin’s murder, and (b) she’s obviously gotten close to Igor Rybkin.”

  Marshall didn’t respond. Frustrated, Ingrid continued.

  “You realize what that means, Marshall? One of my contacts worked. Someone I reached out to got a message to Aleks Rybkin. And that means someone I know, or rather Natalya knows, can likely reach Igor Rybkin too.”

  His face was almost placid, as if he was refusing to register her success.

  “Somehow—God knows how—this crazy-ass plan to steal a painting has almost damn well worked, and I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the undercover alias.”

  Marshall stood and moved over to look out his window. He plunged a hand into his pants pocket, pulling his shirt tighter against his torso. Ingrid hated noticing he still worked out. He was so competitive he probably did five hundred crunches a day.

  “Aleks Rybkin would have asked around before he called Natalya. He would have checked she was legit, got people to vouch for her. If the Bureau still wants to snare his brother, then I’m the agent who’s got closest to him. You can’t retire Natalya, not yet.” She was pleading for her job.

  Marshall rolled up his shirtsleeves. He didn’t push them up: he meticulously, evenly, deliberately rolled them up. His nickname at Quantico had been Ken Doll because he was so immaculately turned out. Ingrid waited patiently for his reply. Natalya had been two years of work, two years of rewarding, A-grade police work, and she wasn’t going to throw her alter ego away without a fight.

  “The Bureau needs a win. Everyone from the Santa Fe Bugle to the New York Times is questioning our integrity. We need to show we are not interfering in the electoral process, but that we are upholding it.” She sounded like someone hustling for a seat on a city council, but she meant it. She was the agent who could give the Bureau the headline it desperately needed. She was the one who could hand them Rybkin, the guy who tried to buy the presidency, and then they could string him up from coast to coast, one front page to another, like patriotic bunting. “People need to understand America is not for sale.”

  “I hear you, I do, but I have to give this some consideration,” Marshall said. “In the meantime, you do not answer Natalya’s phone, you do not reply to her emails, you do not update her Facebook page. Nothing.”