Final Offer

by Eva Hudson

  “Welcome to the hermitage, Ingrid.” He unlocked a drawer. “Now, if you are staying with us for the night, I must take some details from you.” He handed her a piece of paper.

  She scanned the questions as he passed her a pen. He’d seen her bank card, so she couldn’t use a false name. She filled it in as minimally as possible, her cold fingers struggling to keep hold of the pen.

  “Thank you,” he said when she gave it back. “I also need your phone.”

  Something twitched in her throat. “My phone?”

  He nodded.

  “But I need it. For work.”

  “Trust me,” he said, “you will gain so much more from your experience here if you hand it over.” He outstretched his fingers. “Trust me.”

  Never trust anyone who says ‘trust me.’ Ingrid reached into the inside pocket of her coat and checked her messages to see if Carolyn had made contact. She hadn’t: that was a good sign. It meant she was coping and Marshall’s condition hadn’t deteriorated.

  Viktor snatched the phone out of her hand.

  “Hey—”

  “I am sorry,” he said, locking it in a drawer, “but there is not time.”

  “For what?”

  “Vespers starts in five minutes.”

  “Vespers?”

  “And I will need your car key.” He waggled his grasping fingers toward her.

  “Why?” It was feeling too much like a trap.

  “In case we have to move it. Also, we have periods of total silence when it is not permitted to run an engine or use electricity.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your key, please.”

  Ingrid dipped into her pants pocket. “I feel really uncomfortable about this,” she said, stalling for time. She had promised Carolyn she would keep her phone with her. “When will I get it back?”

  “All you have to do is ask.” He leered rather than smiled before locking the key in a different, lower drawer. “Come with me. I will take you to the chapel.”

  Ingrid reminded herself to keep her fear in proportion: she could overpower most people and outrun everyone she’d ever met. Even without a weapon, she would be fine. Viktor ushered her out into the hallway and locked the office door behind him. The aroma of stewed meat still lingered.

  “Is there somewhere I can dry off?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid there is not time.”

  He led her through into a candlelit drawing room, where cheap IKEA throws covered dirty old couches, and mismatched shelving units offered a sparse selection of secondhand books. It was like a hostel common room. The house itself had once been very grand, but the cornicing was now chipped, and the dated wallpaper was peeling.

  “How many people live here?” Ingrid asked from five paces behind.

  “At any one time there are between twenty and fifty of us,” he said. From his accent, she guessed Viktor was from somewhere near the Black Sea. He opened a door onto another hallway. “This is the quickest way.”

  To what? The temperature dropped dramatically in the second hallway. There was just one door at the end. He marched briskly.

  “And right now? How many people?”

  “Twenty-seven, including the Father.”

  She had only seen two other people. Ingrid skipped a little to catch up. “And you all live in this house?”

  “Some. Others live in the fields. We all have our jobs.”

  Ingrid recalled the domes she’d seen from the car. Was that where she would be sleeping? Viktor opened the door, and cold night air rushed in. Once outside, he showed her down a few steps and along a pathway through what looked like a kitchen garden. The rain had eased, but the winds had picked up, and each drop stung her face.

  She could hear voices, other footsteps, but couldn’t tell where they were coming from. They hurried down a brick-paved path toward a gap in a tall privet hedge. On the other side, Ingrid saw a large glasshouse. There were people gathered outside it, huddled under an awning.

  The glasshouse reminded her of something in a botanical garden. Brick up to waist height, with large glass panels above inside a Victorian fretwork that reached up to an apex. Lights were on inside: it was like an angular space ship glowing in the dark.

  “Quickly,” Viktor said.

  Ingrid joined him under the awning as a gong sounded. The chatter ceased and Viktor raised a finger to his lips.

  Ingrid smiled at the other people and a few smiled back. There were twelve of them ranging in age from late teens to early sixties. Seven women, five men, all white. A few appeared unwell while others looked wiry and intense, like marathon runners. What they all shared, she noticed, was a certain style. They all wore their hair off their faces: buns, top knots, barrettes, Alice bands. Their clothes were all ill-fitting, as if they had all dressed themselves in items someone else had dropped on the floor the night before. They all seemed what her British friends would dubiously call ‘nice.’ Timid, even. There was something about the group that made her think of an old folks’ home: they weren’t quite all there.

  The glasshouse door opened from the inside, and warm air rushed out to greet them. They filed in and were engulfed in the perfume of incense and the ululations of a dirge. Ingrid followed a brick path between flower beds bursting with foliage. Huge fronded plants bounced over their heads, and a stand of orange trees ahead of them was illuminated by burning torches. Beyond the orange trees, the hothouse widened, and a series of pews faced each other in front of an altar. They had created a church inside a greenhouse, and it was staggeringly beautiful.

  She was seated on a pew alongside everyone else. They listened to a lone male voice singing a dissonant plainsong. She couldn’t see the singer, but the sound was coming from beyond the altar where the foliage faded into unlit recesses.

  A drum started beating, steady and slow, and the singing got louder. An air of anticipation descended. Ingrid, finally, had warmed up enough to unzip her jacket. She turned her head toward the shuffling sound of footsteps and saw ten men in white, hooded robes approach the altar. They walked in formation, two lines of five, reminding her of KKK rallies she’d patrolled when she first joined the Bureau. The ten men came to a halt in front of the pews and kneeled down as if attending a yoga class. The drumming stopped and they lifted their heads before removing their hoods.

  They uttered a prayer that summoned a priest to the altar. A sense of dread slithered over Ingrid’s skin: it was the man from the CCTV photos.

  “Brothers and sisters,” the priest began, “we gather here under the blessing of Father Silouan to offer ourselves to his mission.”

  “We are blessed,” the congregation chanted.

  “Brothers and sisters, the blessings of Father Silouan are manifold, and we come together to supplicate ourselves to his wisdom.”

  “We are so blessed,” came the rejoinder.

  The call and response between priest and congregation settled into a rhythm that allowed Ingrid to join in. Then he began his sermon. The world was in chaos, he said, and chaos was to be embraced because chaos creates destruction that only the strong survive. “You are not to fear the chaos that is to come, you are to welcome it.” It was the language of a doomsday cult. His tiny congregation were surprisingly placid, receiving his predictions with a medicated calm.

  After the sermon, he called them to silent prayer. For ten minutes, the priest invited them to share in each other’s hopes and fears in wordless communion. Some sat with their eyes closed, others stared blankly ahead. Ingrid counted the assembled, twelve worshippers, ten monks, the priest and Viktor. That was twenty-four people: Viktor had said twenty-seven people lived at the farm. Even if she allowed for the hermit himself to be absent, that meant there were still two people excused from the Vespers ceremony.

  Ingrid scrutinized the faces, looking to see if the androgynous person who had answered the door was there, or if the man she’d first encountered at the stable block was present. Her eyes rested on one of the kneeling monks. There was some
thing about him that seized her. He was older, in his sixties, with a sad, hound-like expression. She was looking at him almost in profile and couldn’t stop staring at his prominent nose.

  She gasped, then swallowed hard. She looked at him again, checking she wasn’t being watched herself. The hook of the nose was unmistakable.

  It was him, wasn’t it? Older and much, much thinner, but she was sure. It was Igor Rybkin.

  59

  After Vespers, the congregation walked—silently—through the garden, back to the main house, and took their places at one of six trestle tables in the dining room. Ingrid was positioned on the same side of a table as Rybkin, with four people sitting in between them. The androgynous person and a short, pale-faced woman brought in two steaming pots and placed them on a serving table.

  One by one, each of them filed up and spooned food into bowls. As Rybkin walked past, she got a better look and satisfied herself it really was him. He looked vacant; brainwashed, if not brain dead. They all did.

  When everyone had a meal in front of them, the priest said grace. Ingrid was ravenous but found the pork stew and rice hard going. Listening to a room of people slurping and chewing threatened to gross her out. Opposite her was a woman with a face stretched and wrecked by cosmetic surgery. Without the makeup, hairstyling and clothing normally sported by women who have gone under the surgeon’s knife, she looked disfigured. Ingrid wondered if she was familiar. She was definitely Russian, and the surgery suggested she was wealthy.

  Every head turned when the door opened. The man she’d seen in the stable block stood in the aperture. His mouth narrowed when he spotted Ingrid. He signaled to Viktor, who got up, and the two men disappeared into the corridor beyond.

  Ingrid returned to her stew, leaning forward over the bowl to sneak another look at Rybkin. It was hard to stop looking at him. The man was worth billions, more relevantly the man had made billions, he’d commissioned yachts and bought art. He had carved his initials in the bark of history, but here he was: meek, mute and morose. Just like everyone else around the table.

  The best thing, she decided, was to leave. She needed to tell Viktor she had somewhere else to be, make up a plausible excuse for the change of heart, collect her phone and car key and get out of there. She had no powers of arrest in the UK, Operation Dovetail was on ice, and without backup the only sensible course of action was retreat. In time, the operation would be reopened and that was when she would put the compound under surveillance and do things properly.

  Ingrid had lifted another spoonful to her mouth when a hand was placed on her shoulder. She looked round to see Viktor. He indicated she should come with him. She picked up her waterproof jacket from the back of the chair and followed him out into the dim hallway. It occurred to her the only place she had seen electric light was in the tiny windowless office he was leading her back to.

  But instead of opening the door to the office, he took her into an unlit side room. The man from the stables was sitting at a long mahogany table. Her phone and the car key were laid out in front of him. This was not good. When Viktor closed and locked the door behind them, Ingrid flinched: the priest stood in the shadows.

  “You will be leaving now.” The priest was speaking in English.

  “Have I done something wrong?”

  He pursed his lips. “You are not welcome here.”

  Her heart was revving like an engine. “I only want to see the hermit.”

  “We all know that is not true,” Viktor said.

  She turned to him. “What have I done?”

  The man from the stables stood up. “Please.” He handed over her possessions and gestured toward the door with an open palm. “Viktor will escort you, won’t you, Viktor?”

  Ingrid pressed the button on her phone. Either they had broken it or switched it off. They might even have removed the battery. She looked at the man in the glasses for an explanation, and then to the priest, who merely pointed at the door. Every mouthful of the meal she’d just eaten swam in her stomach.

  “The truth is we have been expecting someone like you, and we have been preparing for you.” The priest leaned closer, and in the faint light she could see he was surprisingly young. Then she remembered something from training: the median age of cult leaders was thirty-three. She could also see he was trembling.

  Viktor put a key in the lock and she turned. Poking out of the top of his waistband was a semiautomatic pistol. Ingrid closed her eyes to stop the room from spinning.

  “This way,” Viktor said, in Russian.

  The other man bent down and picked up a long case. Ingrid knew damn well it wasn’t a fishing rod. “Please,” he said.

  He followed her out of the room. She felt like a criminal being marched to the cells following conviction. Viktor led her to the front door and opened it, and she saw for the first time that the embassy’s Subaru had a diplomatic plate. That was how they’d known she wasn’t a pilgrim. Her head felt like it was in a vice, her vision brightened at the edges, some neural anomaly she put down to fear.

  “Get in,” Viktor said.

  Ingrid fumbled with the key and dropped it. She crouched down and looked up at the man in the glasses. His expression was of deep concentration. He was disassociating himself ahead of his crime. It was an expression she recognized from her father before he put a farm animal to sleep. The manner in which the man held the case left her in no doubt it contained a shotgun.

  Two armed men. A remote location. No one who knew to search for her. Ingrid’s only option was compliance. She stepped out into the drizzle, slowly planting her feet in the gravel, trying to make as much noise as possible. She bleeped the car open and got behind the steering wheel. Viktor climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Drive,” he said. He did not have a coat. He was only wearing a shirt and a thin pullover. Wherever they were going, he was not planning on being outside.

  She put the car into reverse. She checked her mirrors: the other man was climbing into a Range Rover. She swung the car round, and the Range Rover flicked on its headlights. He would follow.

  “Where?” she asked in Russian.

  “Out,” Viktor said.

  She steered the Subaru back onto the track and switched on the high beams, hoping it would attract someone’s attention. The Range Rover followed at close range.

  “Viktor?” she said, maneuvering the car slowly over a rut. “What have I done?”

  “Drive,” he said.

  “Is it the car? The registration plate?”

  “Yes. Keep driving.”

  Ingrid made it to the small clutch of buildings where she had first encountered the man driving the Range Rover. She expected to be told to stop, to get out and face a firing squad, but she received no such instructions and continued down to Holymeoak Lane.

  Viktor’s body was angled toward her, but he was looking forward. The pistol was still in his waistband and not in either hand.

  Ingrid tried to work out why she had freaked them out so badly. Shotgun man must have clocked the license plate and got suspicious. Viktor had her name from her bank card. She’d told them she had come up from London. That she was American.

  Oh, shit. They’d googled her, hadn’t they?

  They’d typed in her name and found Angela Tate’s profile in the Evening News. That meant they didn’t just know she was from the embassy: they knew she was FBI. Her throat tightened.

  They reached the road. “Which way?” she asked.

  “Left.”

  Igor Rybkin might not know his wife was dead, or that his yacht had been sunk and his brother had been murdered, but the priest did. The ISP logs had shown he’d searched for information about Yelena Rybkina’s death. The congregation lived by candlelight, but the priest had access to the world. She thought about the enormous satellite dish and the banks of desks in the stables. What was going on at the compound? Don’t get distracted. Stay focused.

  The phone box and the fingerpost came into view, and without asking
, she turned back toward Burnham. If he was going to kill her in the car, he would have done it by now. Her best guess was they wanted to get the car to somewhere neutral, then transfer her to the Range Rover. Whether she would be dead or alive when that happened, she didn’t know.

  “Viktor?”

  “Yes?”

  “What is going to happen?”

  “Drive.”

  There was street lighting up ahead. The Current Bun couldn’t be too far away. She knew one thing about the junction outside the café: there was a traffic camera. She slowed her pace, determined to make sure she got caught at a red light.

  Ingrid approached the intersection. The lights were green. She reduced her speed further. The lights weren’t going to change. She checked the rearview: the Range Rover was only yards behind. So long as she drove slowly enough, the camera should get a good shot of the car, maybe also of the driver. She was going to give investigators every chance of solving her murder.

  They came to the center of the village. A few commuters were walking home from the station. It wasn’t late. The clock said it was eight fifty-five. She looked at them, but in the drizzle and cold they all had their heads down, eager to get home and dry.

  Home and dry.

  Pull yourself together. You’ve got to do something.

  Ingrid scanned the dash. Twin airbags: crashing the car was not an option. Soon they would be back on unlit roads, stretching away from witnesses, from civilization. The petrol gauge was over half full. She couldn’t use running out of fuel as an excuse. But there was a trick she could try. If she dared.

  They neared the end of the village, and up ahead was a pub, the last building before the streetlights faded into the blackness beyond. Ingrid inhaled sharply then went to change gear. Only she didn’t engage the clutch. The gears screeched. She tried again, this time getting the car into neutral. The car began to slow.

  “What is happening?” Viktor said.

  She faked trying to get into gear again, and the gear box growled with resistance. They continued to slow. “I, I don’t understand. I—”

  Ingrid faked it one more time. The car had slowed to ten miles per hour. She’d jumped from a moving vehicle before, but she was strapped into this one. In the time it would take her to unbuckle the safety belt, he would put a bullet through her head.