She picked him up from the airport in her rattling Skoda Garde and took him to the Tsvet Nochi Club, once Paul’s favourite nightspot, where without even asking she ordered him beef stroganoff.
‘You look as lousy as you sounded on the phone,’ she said a bit harshly. ‘You should start eating your greens.’
Nothing had changed: her dark, boyish haircut and that devious glance she gave him, as if he’d come back to Moscow for her.
‘Johannesburg, Amsterdam, Moscow. And all because of one Afghan boy. How did you actually make all these connections?’
‘A colleague of mine discovered the links. My former boss wants me to help her.’
‘If you already have her, why do you need me?’
‘She’s a rookie and she doesn’t know Russia.’
‘If she’s so inexperienced, why is she on the case?’
‘Right from the start she got very involved with the Afghan boy. A combination of circumstances led her to the connection with Lavrov.’
‘Clever for such an inexperienced person. What’s her name?’
‘Farah Hafez.’
‘Sounds like the name of an exotic princess.’
‘She’s Afghan.’
‘But she isn’t with you now?’
‘She flew in earlier. And why are you so interested in her?’
‘I’m interested in how the two of you are going to approach this, is that so strange?’
Paul took a piece of his beef stroganoff and chewed it thoroughly. Anya gave him a patronizing smile.
‘You don’t have a clue how you’re going to go about this, right? No idea?’
With a sigh he placed his knife and fork beside his plate and took a sip of red wine. ‘First explain to me how AtlasNet managed to grow from a small enterprise into an international conglomerate in such a relatively short time.’
‘If you give me a bite,’ Anya said, teasing him. Paul pushed the plate towards her. Everything had a price for Anya, and it was usually much higher than she first let on. After stuffing her face with three forkfuls of his stew, she slid Paul’s plate back to him like it was a grand gesture.
‘It started three years ago, right after you left without warning. Potanin locked up Aleksandr Zyuganov, the owner of the NovaMost energy company, for fraud,’ she said, washing down his stroganoff with a big gulp of wine. ‘But of course the real reason was that Zyuganov had plans to run in the next year’s presidential election. Zyuganov’s pockets were lined with roubles and this would’ve allowed him to buy a lot of power. So a mock trial was organized and Zyuganov was exiled to Siberia. End of Zyuganov.’
‘And what happened to NovaMost?’
‘All of NovaMost’s shares went to the fledgling company AtlasNet, owned by the then unknown Valentin Lavrov.’
‘Why Lavrov?’
‘It was a public secret that Valentin Lavrov was already the President’s protégé. Rumours at the time suggested that Lavrov only set up AtlasNet because he’d been instructed to do so, if you know what I mean.’
‘So almost overnight, AtlasNet became a major player, thanks to the shares of the exiled Zyuganov.’
‘Exactly. Yet another example of powerful people dividing and conquering with the loser known from the outset.’
‘Did all the shares go to Lavrov?’
She slowly drained her glass of wine, deliberately, as if she was trying to buy time.
‘As CEO, Lavrov obviously held a controlling interest in those shares. However, there was also a shadow shareholder. Except nobody on the financial markets actually knew who it was.’
‘But you found out,’ Paul said.
Anya leaned forward and whispered, ‘It’s explosive.’
‘You’re not saying that the Presi—’ But Paul didn’t get any further. Anya held her hand over his mouth.
‘Didn’t you hear me? It’s explosive,’ she whispered again.
‘How long have you all known?’
‘Not long.’
‘And when are you going to make it public?’
‘The question is whether we’re going to disclose it at all. If we publish what we know, we reveal that we have access to secret matters of state. And with this we’d sign our own death warrants. Two of our journalists have already been killed in the past year. There’s a law that authorizes the President to deploy special units for the liquidation of enemies, or extremists, as they call them, inside of Russia but also abroad. I’m not planning on dying any time soon.’
‘Do you think you can help me, Anya?’
Suddenly she was serious. ‘I can do a lot more than that.’ She grabbed the knife and fork, pulled the plate towards her, wolfed down three more big bites and stood up.
‘Let’s go!’ she said.
Paul knew it was useless to resist.
3
The Skoda Garde beamed bright strips of light through the smoky haze that hung all through the city. ‘Forest fires,’ Anya said with a quick glance at Paul. ‘If we have a north-easterly wind, even briefly, we’re covered in smoke.’ The radio reported an attack on an apartment building in the outskirts of the city. ‘The latest offensive by the Chechens,’ Anya said. ‘They’re bringing the war to our doorsteps.’
They drove on to Yauzskiy Bul’var. Rescue helicopters flew over low and on the other side of the grassy divide fire engines with emergency lights and sirens shrieking raced towards the suburbs.
Moments later they turned on to Ulitsa Pokrovka, where editor-in-chief Roman Jankovski of the Moskva Gazeta had already been awakened by a call from Anya. ‘Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’ he’d mumbled into the phone. Yet he also knew that once Anya got an idea in her head, it simply couldn’t wait. ‘I have the perfect fellow for us,’ she said. More wasn’t needed to convince Roman.
She found a parking spot for the Skoda right across from the old apartment building where Jankovski lived.
‘It must be very important,’ Paul sighed.
‘Believe me,’ said Anya, ‘when Roman Jankovski gets out of bed for you at three a.m. then it’s very important indeed.’
In front of the monumental entrance, Anya was just about to ring the brass doorbell of number 187 when the heavy front door swung open and two men in dark overalls came bolting outside. Anya was thrown off balance by their speed. Paul caught her. The two men ran diagonally across the street to a grey Lada station wagon. A third man came out and collided with Paul. The man took a swing at Paul, but Paul blocked it, got him in an arm lock and jabbed his knee hard into the man’s right side. The guy collapsed with a loud groan. Hearing this, the other two stopped and turned around. One of them pulled a gun. The door hadn’t fallen shut yet, and Anya gave it a shove with her shoulder. She pulled Paul inside and then kicked the door closed with a loud bang.
‘We’re not rid of them yet,’ she said in a loud whisper.
The elevator would take too long, the stairwell galleries were too exposed. They fled into the basement. Behind them they heard the heavy door open again, men’s muffled voices, commands exchanged, footsteps in the entry hall and on the gallery stairwell and the steps to the basement. Anya pushed Paul into a dark alcove which reeked of urine and rubbish. They held their breath as they heard footsteps approaching. In the corridor leading to the basement, they saw the flickering of a flashlight. Something rustled in the alcove. Paul felt a rat brush past his boots. The footsteps in the corridor stopped. The light returned, shot past the alcove. The sound of footsteps disappeared into the distance.
They could hear muffled male voices again coming from the entry hall, brusque and decisive. The door fell shut. Only after the longest time did Anya and Paul dare to move again. On their guard, they left the alcove. Paul grabbed his mobile phone to light the basement corridor and walked towards where he’d heard the footsteps going.
Anya hissed, ‘Come back.’
He pretended not to hear her, walked on and pulled the handle of each basement storage room.
Anya was pissed off. Fear made he
r furious. When she saw Paul go into a storage room, she swore under her breath. She went after him, wanted to punch him, kick him, anything to fight off her fears. He stood motionless just inside the door. Then, in the bluish glow cast by his phone, she saw what he’d discovered.
4
Farah woke up slowly to banging on her door. The traffic noise that came in through the open windows bounced off the walls and there was a veil of smog in the room. On the other side of the door a male voice called her name. With a sheet wrapped around her sweaty body she unlocked the door and found herself staring into Paul Chapelle’s roughed up face.
‘Strange room service they’ve got here,’ she said and yawned.
‘Are you coming?’
‘Where?’
‘The Moskva Gazeta. It’s important.’
‘Give me ten.’
Fifteen minutes later she was downstairs in the lobby shaking hands with a pretty, tomboyish woman with a short bob and piercing grey-blue eyes.
‘Anya Kozlova. And you must be the princess.’
‘Princess?’
‘From the East.’
‘I’m nobody’s princess,’ Farah said curtly, which produced a broad smile on Anya Kozlova’s face.
‘Are we going in that?’ she asked Paul as the three of them walked towards a dented Skoda.
‘I’m sure I’d put on airs and graces too if I were staying at the Hotel National,’ he laughed.
Farah settled in the back seat. ‘What’s on the agenda?’
Paul was about to respond when Anya accelerated unexpectedly, only to join the busy traffic, cursing all the while.
‘Paul told me about some stupid plan to convince Lavrov you’re an art journalist,’ Anya shouted while giving Farah a cynical look in the rear-view mirror.
Weirdly enough, Farah kind of liked her. ‘She’s right, that girlfriend of yours,’ she said to Paul.
‘She’s not my girlfriend.’
‘Whoever she is, she’s right. It’s a hopeless plan. I’m a journalist, not a spy. I may have an exotic name, but that hardly means I should follow in Mata Hari’s footsteps.’
‘Did you tell her about last night?’ Anya asked Paul.
‘Should I be interested?’ Farah said.
Paul nodded seriously. ‘It’s the reason we’re going to their offices.’
Farah was told the story about the planned three a.m. meeting with editor-in-chief Roman Jankovski, the unplanned confrontation with the three men who came running out of the building and the wholly fortuitous discovery of five large bags of RDX in a storage space in the basement. Enough to blow up the whole building.
‘The bags were connected with wires and attached to a detonating device that indicated a remaining time of twenty-three minutes,’ Paul explained calmly. By the time the bomb disposal unit arrived, of those twenty-three minutes there were exactly five left. Thanks to Paul’s description of the man he’d fought with, all three men were traced and brought in for questioning by morning.
‘So why are we going to their editorial offices now?’ Farah wanted to know.
Anya acted like she understood Dutch. ‘They were probably from the FSB,’ she replied.
‘The Russian security services,’ Paul clarified. ‘We reckon they wanted to make it look like a Chechen attack and kill two birds with one stone: sway public opinion even further in favour of a war in Chechnya while blowing the editor-in-chief of Russia’s most critical weekly paper to smithereens.’
‘But what’s that got to do with us?’ Farah asked irritably.
‘They want to share state secrets with us,’ Paul said. ‘They’re going to make us an offer.’
Anya grinned at her in the mirror. ‘An offer you can’t refuse.’
5
The very first moment Joshua Calvino shook Liaison Officer Max Berger’s hand in the stately Dutch embassy on Kalashny Pereulok, he felt an instinctive dislike for the man. With his pseudo-aristocratic appearance and carefully composed sentences, Berger reminded him of an actor in a British TV series about the tragic downfall of an old blue-blooded family. If anyone deserved the term ‘haughty’ then it was Berger. Joshua had to dig deep to hide his aversion to the man. He needed Berger’s help.
‘Quite a delicate matter, to put it mildly,’ Berger said as he escorted Joshua to his office through the attractively lit corridors hung with old Dutch Masters. ‘All the more since we have not received an official request for legal assistance from the Public Prosecutor back home. And, of course, Detective Calvino, you understand that without such a request, it is hopeless to count on any help from the Russian authorities.’ He graciously offered Joshua the black leather chair facing his polished desk.
‘The Public Prosecutor’s office is working on it,’ Joshua said as he sat down. ‘They were the ones who advised me to touch base with you in advance, so we can take immediate action once the official request for legal assistance arrives.’
‘Let me reiterate, Detective Calvino,’ Berger emphasized, ‘we have not received an official request.’ Joshua was not going to let himself be brushed off by a man wearing a cravat and a silk shirt. He gave Berger a determined look.
‘The Public Prosecutor has insisted that while we’re waiting for the wheels to be set in motion, everything must be done to unofficially notify the Russian authorities of the impending arrest, along with an express request to cooperate.’
‘Well, well,’ said Berger. He seemed somewhat amused by Joshua’s grandstanding. ‘Are those the instructions the Public Prosecutor gave you?’
‘Or perhaps you think I’m here without official orders, without a solid plan?’
Berger raised his hand imploringly while pressing the telephone to his ear. ‘Marianne? Could you please check if in the last hour the Public Prosecutor has blessed us with a request for legal assistance?’
Awaiting Marianne’s answer, Joshua absently gazed at the photo of the Dutch queen just above Berger’s head. He knew that the matter was actually somewhat different than he’d just portrayed it. Despite Tomasoa’s insistence, the Public Prosecutor wasn’t prepared to move on this quickly. Joshua and Tomasoa had discussed the matter at length. The term ‘class justice’ had come up. Once the intention to arrest Lombard became common knowledge among the ranks of the trade delegation – which wouldn’t take long among that tight-knit clique – then Lombard and his associates would do everything in their power to avert disaster.
Even though Tomasoa admitted he was powerless to do more, Joshua wasn’t prepared to wait for anything official. He’d taken it on himself to book a round-trip flight Amsterdam–Moscow, hoping that with the necessary bluffing he could convince Berger to take action. But from the very start in the embassy’s foyer, Berger behaved so uncooperatively that Joshua feared his trip to the Russian capital might be pointless.
‘No?’ Berger cried theatrically into the phone. ‘Are you quite sure, Marianne? Well, thank you.’ He hung up the receiver as if it were a costly relic.
‘There has been no call for assistance,’ Berger said, as if he were reciting the closing line of a Greek tragedy. He got up, walked over to an antique-looking cabinet and opened a hatch door to reveal a collection of colourful bottles. Joshua had the fleeting thought that he’d just landed in a lavish cocktail bar.
‘What’ll it be, detective?’ Berger asked.
‘Water, please,’ Joshua said.
‘Permit me to be candid, detective,’ Berger said moments later when he placed a glass of Perrier in front of Joshua, ‘is this your first “mission” abroad?’
‘What do you mean?’ Joshua gulped back the sparkling water. The walk to the embassy in the heavy smog had made his throat feel like he’d smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. A miserable feeling for a non-smoker.
‘Let me explain: the field of diplomacy is an extremely sensitive one,’ Berger said as he slowly took the seat behind his desk again. ‘It is often a matter of walking on eggshells, operating with immense tact, choosing the right word
s, slowly manoeuvring and then closing in when you want to score a point. And you, detective, just barged in with a bomb in your hands. If you understand what I’m saying.’
‘I do,’ Joshua calmly replied, ‘Then again, it’s not every day that we expose a Dutch minister as a paedophile.’
‘You also understand that the Russian authorities will do everything possible to protect their good relations with the Netherlands by not rushing into anything,’ Berger replied in a condescending tone. ‘And even when the Public Prosecutor submits an official request, then there’s another reason the Russian authorities will not be eager to arrest a Dutch minister here in Moscow: economic motives. With import figures of around fourteen billion euros, the Netherlands is the largest destination for Russian goods and produce. Need I say more?’
‘So you’re telling me that economic motives sometimes outweigh the law?’ Joshua heard how sharply the words rolled off his tongue. He saw the icy look in Berger’s eyes. Joshua now knew one thing for certain: he wasn’t cut out for diplomacy. He wondered if there was even the slightest chance of still convincing Berger to help him.
‘What I am saying, Detective Calvino, is that even with a formal request from the Public Prosecutor, we would have to move heaven and earth to get the Russians to initiate an arrest. But nothing is impossible. In your opinion, how conclusive is the evidence against Lombard?’
‘We have a full confession from Lombard’s driver, complete with dates, locations and the names of others involved. And we found extremely damaging material on Lombard’s computer. I don’t want to boast, but I think it’s a watertight case. For all intents and purposes.’ Joshua had never used this expression. For all intents and purposes. He had to laugh. Apparently Berger’s pretentiousness was starting to wear off on him.
‘And you are certain this material was obtained lawfully?’ Berger asked with a mouth as narrow as the stripes of his shirt.
‘We had a search warrant from the Public Prosecutor to enter his lodgings and we confiscated his computer once we found the incriminating files. Could it be any more legitimate in your opinion?’
Butterfly on the Storm Page 42