by Steven Gore
Gage scanned the news rack and grabbed a London map. Mickey paid for it while Gage headed toward the door and adopted the puzzled but earnest expression of a tourist. He walked toward the next intersection, while Mickey strolled back the way they came.
They met at the cab five minutes later.
“Cheap suit,” Mickey said, pointing at the Mercedes and settling into the backseat next to Gage. “Foreign.”
“The suit?” Gage asked.
“No, the biceps. Quite expansive. The fellow is an absolute giant. Like one of these Greco-Roman wrestlers in the Olympics. Probably Eastern or Central European.”
Hixon One wrote down the plate numbers, then dialed his cell phone and passed them on. After listening for a moment, he disconnected and looked back at Gage. “They’re both registered to something called UES Holdings Limited on West Cromwell Road.”
Gage called Alex Z. “Sorry to wake you up, but I need you to run something.”
“No problem. I was lying awake and thinking about how I’d feel if my father had been shot down like Mr. Burch. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll meet my dad for breakfast.”
“That’s a good idea. You’re lucky to have him.”
“I’ve been realizing that more and more every day,” Alex Z said. “What do you need?”
“Find out everything you can about UES Holdings Limited in London.”
Twenty minutes later Alex Z called back.
“I ran a registration search on the UK Companies House Web site. UES has the same address as Fitzhugh. Looks like there are a hundred offices in the building, mostly lawyers and accountants.”
“E-mail me everything you downloaded, then run a newspaper search on Fitzhugh. He was murdered last week.”
“Jeez. Be careful, boss.”
Just then Matson stomped out of the Ax Man. He started to hail a cab, but dropped his arm and marched up Kensington High Street, hands jammed into his coat pockets.
“Mickey,” Gage said, “follow him on foot. I’ll stay here and take photos. Have Hixon Two pick you up if he grabs a cab. We’ll meet at my room when you think he’s in for the night.”
CHAPTER 29
H ixon One, parked down the block from Matson’s flat, gave himself a discreet scratch, then settled in for the evening. Alla emerged a half hour later dressed in a blue Marks amp; Spencer running suit. She stretched for a few minutes against the black wrought-iron fence surrounding the property, then ran off, her long legs beating a practiced rhythm.
Gage had just disconnected from Hixon One’s update when Mickey and Hixon Two arrived at his room. He directed them to the couch and again sat in the wing chair.
“Is Two what people really call you?” Gage asked.
“Family and friends,” she said. “My mother died when I was four. Since then it’s been Pop and me, One and Two.”
She looked even younger up close, but her eyes had a mature depth of experience.
“How long have you been in the service?”
“Almost five years. Three in regular army and two in Reconnaissance and Surveillance. I joined after college. It was Uncle Mickey’s idea.”
“Where’d they send you?”
Hixon Two grinned. “Around.”
“Good answer.” Gage leaned forward. “So, tell me what happened inside the Ax Man.”
She straightened up, as if preparing to report to a superior.
“Matson met Russians. Or at least Central Europeans who spoke Russian to each other. Mostly friendly. At one point it got tense, then it lightened up. But I’m not sure the meeting ended well.”
“That was our impression, too.” Gage reached over and opened his laptop to display the digital photos he snapped outside the Ax Man after Matson stormed out. He’d numbered them one through thirty-seven. He turned the computer toward her.
Hixon Two studied the first fifteen spread across the screen. “Number three, six, and eleven were the ones who met with Matson.”
She pressed the page-down button, then worked her finger across along the images.
“Sixteen is the bodyguard. A giant. He came in just for a minute, otherwise he was in a Mercedes outside. Number three did almost all the talking.” She looked up at Gage. “I don’t recognize anyone else.”
“Could you hear what they were saying?”
“I played girly-girl at the bar in order not to be too obvious, so I didn’t catch much of the conversation. I went to the WC twice so I could walk by the table. All I caught was ‘leave him out of it’ and ‘when the time comes.’ At one point Matson raised his voice a little and said ‘arranger’ or ‘ranger’ or some word like that a couple of times.”
“Could it be Granger?”
“Yes, I think that could be it. At one point number three took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. I saw a tattoo on his arm.” She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a bar napkin that bore a detailed drawing. “It was like this.” She handed it to Gage. “But I don’t know what it means. It’s not the kind Russian soldiers get.”
“It means number three is a thief-in-the-law,” Gage said, “a vory-v-zakone. Each point represents a year in prison. There are only a few hundred vorys in the world. If they were Italian mafia, we’d call them made men. But these are Russians and Ukrainians and it’s a lot tougher to get made. Even a guy like John Gotti wouldn’t have made it past gofer.”
“Shouldn’t they be called thieves outside the law?” Hixon Two asked.
“It’s law in the sense of a thief’s code.”
“Like a no snitching rule?”
“Exactly.” Gage closed his laptop. The click echoed in the now silent room. He looked back and forth between her and Mickey. “How about I take you two out for dinner and we can make plans for tomorrow?”
Heads nodded.
“How about Indian?” Mickey said, smiling. “A little chicken tikka, a little tandoori, a few chapattis. Food in London is wonderful. It’s the only surviving benefit of imperialism. Anytime we want, we get to eat food from all the colonies we’ve been thrown out of.”
Gage sent them home after dinner, then returned to his hotel room to check his e-mails. One from Faith was waiting. She’d sent it just after meeting Courtney at the hospital: Burch’s doctors had reported that his condition remained unchanged.
After logging off, Gage rose and looked out of his seventeenth floor window at the city lights, the traffic sounds muffled by glass and elevation. He imagined Burch lying in his bed, insulated from life by his coma. For a moment, he wished that Burch could remain there, suspended in time and space, at least long enough for Gage to construct a seawall around him; for if Burch regained consciousness now, it would be only to see a wave cresting above him.
A whelping ambulance siren passing on the street below shook Gage’s mind free of the fantasy. Whatever the doctors’ intent may have been in saying it, the notion that Burch’s condition could be unchanged was at best an evasion to comfort Courtney, and at worst a delusion. The truth was that each day he would get weaker and his body would become less able to fight toward daylight.
CHAPTER 30
P lump little Totie Fitzhugh had spent the week after her husband’s murder sorting through his papers-at least the ones the police and Agent Zink hadn’t taken, and the ones hidden in the pantry. As she was the only employee, she was not unfamiliar with the companies her husband managed, and where he secreted what he called his Special Project files.
Agent Zink had seemed pleased when he left and said he’d covered all the bases, an American idiom she didn’t at all understand. He also invited her to San Francisco to testify at a grand jury two weeks later. Expenses paid. She’d never visited San Francisco, so she gladly accepted. One never knew, perhaps she might find a stash of her husband’s money there.
As Alla drove them toward the Fitzhughs’ detached cottage west of London, Matson didn’t know how Totie would greet him. Calling her Isabella, the name of Fitzhugh’s Lugano girlfriend, the first time they
met hadn’t been a good beginning. Matson wondered whether this was the reason she hadn’t returned his increasingly urgent calls since he’d arrived in London.
Mickey, trying to stay with Alla through the morning commute traffic, nearly croqueted a Mini into the rear of her Jaguar when she sped up unexpectedly, then abruptly slowed. For the first mile, Gage thought she was engaged in rather daring countersurveillance, but then concluded that it was rather daring for her to be driving at all.
Jet lag hadn’t ceased making occasional visits to Gage, so over Mickey’s small objection, he opened the passenger window of the boxy white Volvo sedan. The chilly mid-November air buffeted the interior and cleared his head as they drove into the countryside. The image of Fitzhugh as a black hole returned, but with the sense that, at least for the moment, he remained the gravitational center of the SatTek’s offshore money flow.
Alla turned from a narrow lane into a hedge-lined driveway. The stucco and timber Tudor cottage sat toward the back of the large, wooded lot. She parked near the front door.
Mickey pointed at the house number, “It’s Fitzhugh’s.” He then pulled to a stop across the lane in a spot offering just a glimpse of Matson and Alla as they stood knocking, Alla in a waist-length fur jacket and gray slacks, Matson in a black wool overcoat.
“Bli-mey,” Mickey said. “Look at those legs.”
Gage watched Matson knock, first lightly, then vigorously. Alla pinched her nose and brushed away a bug buzzing around Matson’s face, then swiped at one near her ear and scurried back into the Jaguar. Matson knocked a few more times, then also returned to the car. The two of them sat looking at the unanswered door as if deciding whether to wait or come back later when the occupant returned. After a few minutes they drove off.
“I think we better go in,” Gage said, “before the police do. It may be the only chance we’ll ever have.”
“I was thinking the same thing. I’ll ring up Hixon One and ask him to catch on to Matson when they return to the flat.”
Five minutes after the Jaguar pulled away, Mickey drove to the front of the cottage. Neither he nor Gage bothered to knock on the front door. Gage walked down the left side of the house peering into the windows. Mickey took the right. They met at the rear.
“She’s in the dining room,” Gage said.
Since he was the younger by nearly twenty years, it fell to Gage to kick in the back door. Impatient house-flies pursuing decaying flesh raced in with them.
An hour and a half later Chief Inspector Devlin and Homicide Inspector Rees arrived to assume control over the crime scene from the local branch of the Metropolitan Police.
“Superintendent Ransford,” Devlin said, reaching out his hand. “I never expected to find you in a place like this again.”
“Well, Eamonn, if it weren’t for my friend Mr. Gage here, I wouldn’t be.” Mickey pointed first to his left, then to his right. “Mr. Gage, Chief Inspector Devlin. By the way Eamonn, I’m now officially Mickey.”
“So…Mickey. What do we have here and how did you end up in the middle of it?”
“I’ll let Mr. Gage fill you in.”
“Apparently, you failed to mention to Devlin that we followed Matson out to the Fitzhugh cottage,” Mickey said, as he and Gage sat in a borrowed blue Fiat parked just west of Matson’s flat late in the afternoon.
“There were so many details to remember, it could’ve slipped my mind. How about I’ll drop him a line when I get back to the States?”
“Excellent.” Mickey’s eyes lit up. “And equally excellent is the timely emergence of the lovely Alla, as if a butterfly from a cocoon. Unfortunately, the water beetle is with her.”
Mickey fell in behind Alla’s Jaguar as she led them haltingly from Knightsbridge, through Kensington toward Notting Hill Gate, then pulled into a space near Holland Park. Mickey found a spot near the squash courts and crawled out of the Fiat to follow Matson and Alla on foot. He returned fifteen minutes later, mixed in among the aging pigeon feeders while he checked for countersurveillance, then drifted away and called Gage.
“They both went into the Ukrainian consulate. She presented a packet of papers to a clerk. I couldn’t tell what it was. But I saw Matson reach for something in his coat pocket and pull out airline tickets to get to it. The ticket jackets were for Aurigny Airlines. Bright red and yellow. Aurigny flies to Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney in the Channel Islands.”
Gage thought for a moment. “There’s a company in Guernsey that’s connected to SatTek, Cobalt Partners. Find out what Hixon Two is doing for the next few days.”
“You don’t want to do it?”
“No. I’ve got something else to take care of.”
Matson and Alla returned to their car and drove directly back to the flat. After Gage was certain that they were in for the night, he returned to the hotel to start his something else.
CHAPTER 31
A llo,” the heavy voice spoke into the phone.
“ Dobredin, Slava, this is Graham Gage.”
“What can I say? Little misunderstanding. We friends again. Right?” Slava didn’t wait for a response. “Your little interpreter from America. What’s his name?”
“Pavel.”
“ Da, Pavel.” Slava laughed. “Saved your fucking life and he can’t tell nobody how.”
Pavel did it by losing bladder control when he thought the leader of Russia’s largest organized crime group was about to blow Gage’s brains down a Moscow street just weeks earlier. Gage smiled to himself as he remembered Slava’s shadowed face transforming from fury to puzzlement as he watched a puddle form on the sidewalk around Pavel’s shoes.
Slava laughed until he erupted in choking, wheezing coughs.
“Those cigars will kill you,” Gage said, after Slava’s coughing died down.
“No, other vory-v-zakone kill me, I just be smoking at time.”
“I read about that car bomb in Tbilisi in the Herald Tribune. Helluva close call. I didn’t even know you worked in Georgia.”
“I went hunting.”
“For whom?”
“For what. Wild boars.”
“Somehow I can’t imagine you hiking through the woods trying to sneak up on pigs.”
“ Nyet. Like farm. You sit in wood hut with bottle vodka, little fish satsivi, and rifle. After time, they come walking, and boom.”
“Speaking of boom…”
“I all sorry I…” Slava paused as if he knew he hadn’t gotten the phrasing quite right. “That how you say it?”
“Close enough.”
“That guy, you know who I mean, I can’t say name on phone, tricked me to think you set me up for hit. I not realize you just want to talk about natural gas deal. It broke my heart, you know, I thinking I have to kill you.”
“You didn’t look sorry.”
“I cry on inside, really.”
Gage didn’t believe it. He found it hard to imagine that Slava ever cried, even as a baby. He let it go.
“You’re almost forgiven.”
“ Spaseeba.”
“And you’re almost welcome.”
Gage heard Slava draw on his cigar, then clear his throat. “I know you not call to talk old times,” Slava said. “What you need?”
“To see you. Just an hour or so.”
“Sure. I owe you.”
“How about tomorrow in the city by the big lake?”
“Why not?” Slava once again erupted into hacking, followed by an explosive spit. “I want to visit my money anyway.”
By eleven o’clock on the following morning, Hixons One and Two had followed Matson and Alla to Victoria Station, then to Gatwick Airport, where Two followed them onto an Aurigny Airlines flight to Guernsey.
By 2:15 Gage was walking down the long neoclassical hallway from the reception area to the restaurant in the Metropole Hotel across a wide boulevard from Lake Geneva. As he crossed the threshold, he felt the enormous presence of Viacheslav Gregorovich Akimov, aka Slava. Gage’s eyes were drawn to
his right as if by gravitation. He spotted Slava sitting at a corner table with a bodyguard who carried Slava’s same weight but on a frame that was a foot taller. Slava struggled to his feet as Gage approached. He was wearing his usual black wool suit and matching turtleneck, both in enormous sizes. He stuck out a hand and Gage shook as much of it as he could, then sat down. Slava introduced his bodyguard as Ivan Ivanovich, the Russian version of John Smith.
“You want little something?” Slava asked, signaling to the black-tied waiter, who approached with a menu.
Gage glanced at the first page, then handed it back. “Just smoked salmon and artichoke soup. What are you having?”
“Page two,” Slava said, then stuffed most of a dinner roll into his mouth.
“Just one bodyguard?” Gage asked when the waiter was out of earshot.
“Here. Neutral. Meeting back in ’92. Miami. Agreement. No hits in Switzerland.” Slava laughed. “Bad to bleed on money.”
Slava sniffed a half-filled glass of fifteen-year-old Bordeaux and smacked his lips. “Ah! Only good thing about France.”
Gage watched Slava take a sip, then close his eyes and slosh the wine around in his mouth; his ruthless criminality redeemed for a few seconds-but only for a few-in his willingness to suspend himself in the pleasure of the moment.
Slava opened his eyes, then nodded. “Sveta would like this.”
“How is she?”
“Good. Good. At spa in Montreux. Keep her relaxed. Thank God.” Slava looked heavenward, then sighed. He picked up a piece of dried Grisons beef and shoved it into his mouth just ahead of a much more aggressive draw on the Bordeaux.
“Hey, I got something for your wife.” Slava wiped his hands on the white tablecloth, then reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a satin pouch. He poured a ruby onto the white tablecloth.
“Is this hot?” Gage asked, picking it up and examining it.
“Stolen?” Slava stretched out his hands, palms up. “I not give you nothing stolen. I paid. Myself. Out my own pocket.”
“And the money?”