Nicholas Marten 01 - The Exile

by Folsom, Allan

  Much later he woke to sunshine in a large and entirely unfamiliar apartment. The boy and girl helped him up to a window to look out on a brilliantly clear late winter day. Outside he saw a large shipping canal with seagoing boats and people and traffic on the streets alongside it.

  “Rotterdam,” the girl said in English. “Rotterdam.”

  “What day is this?” he asked.

  The girl looked at him blankly. So did the boy.

  “Day. You know. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.”

  “Rotterdam,” the girl said again. “Rotterdam.”

  10

  Marten had little more than a moment to reflect on what had happened to him and where he had been brought, let alone think of what to do next, when the door behind him opened and two men wearing balaclavas came in. One walked quickly past and pulled the curtains over the window. The other shooed the children out of the room to someone who waited in the hallway.

  “Who are you?” Marten asked.

  “Come,” the throaty voice of the first balaclava answered, and suddenly the second balaclava was pulling a scarf over Marten’s eyes and tying it tightly, then quickly binding his hands behind him with some kind of strap.

  “Come,” the first balaclava said again, and Marten was led out of the room and up one steep flight of stairs and then another. His ribs, his wounds, the effort made everything hurt. He could see nothing.

  Next was a short walk down a hallway.

  “Sit,” the throaty voice said with a heavy accent Marten couldn’t place. A heartbeat later he heard the sound of a door being closed.

  “Sit,” the voice commanded a second time. Slowly he lowered himself until he felt the hardness of a chair beneath him.

  “You are American,” the throaty voice said, and Marten could smell tobacco on his breath.

  “Yes.”

  “Your name is Nicholas Marten.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your profession?”

  “Student.”

  What felt like an open hand suddenly hit him hard across the face. He recoiled and nearly fell off the chair. A strong hand pulled him back and he groaned out loud as pain shot through the wound in his side.

  “What is your profession?” The voice repeated.

  Marten had no idea who these people were or what they wanted, but he knew he had better keep his composure and not try to fight back, at least not now. “You know my name, so you must have my wallet,” he said quietly. “You will already have looked at my papers and will know I am a student of landscape design at the University of Manchester in England.”

  “You work for the CIA.”

  “That’s not true,” Marten said evenly. He was trying to get some sense of who they were. From the questions they were asking and the way they were going about it he sensed they were either terrorists or drug smugglers, or maybe some combination of both. Whoever they were, they seemed to think that he was a prize, a large fish that had somehow been caught up in their net.

  “Why were you in Davos?”

  “I—” Marten hesitated, not sure what to say, then decided to tell the truth. “I was invited to a dinner party.”

  “What kind of dinner party?”

  “Just a dinner party.”

  “It was not ‘just a dinner party,’ Mr. Marten.” The voice suddenly filled with anger. “It was an event to announce the reinstatement of the Tsar of Russia. The Russian president himself attended. There was an envelope in your clothing. Inside it was a very formal card confirming the proclamation. A “souvenir” I think you would call it.”

  “Envelope?”

  “Yes.”

  For the briefest instant Marten remembered an elegantly dressed maître d’ in the villa’s ballroom handing him a small plastic-covered packet, which he had simply put in his jacket pocket without looking at shortly before he’d gone out on the trail with Alexander. It had to have been an official remembrance of the affair given to all guests and, like his wallet, must have survived his trip down the mountain river.

  “You say you are a student, yet you are invited to this kind of gathering?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  The last thing Marten wanted to tell them about was Rebecca. God only knew what they would do if they discovered he was the brother of the woman who was to become wife to the new Tsar; that would make him a pawn of the highest order salable to any of a dozen terrorist organizations in the world to use in any way they wanted. What he needed was a plausible answer and quickly.

  “I was a guest of a professor friend from the university. Her father is a prominent member of the British parliament who was also a guest.”

  “What is his name?”

  Marten hesitated. He hated to give them any information at all, especially naming Clem or her father. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t take a great deal of checking to get the list of the dinner guests that night. For all he knew, it, like most things, would be available on somebody’s Web site or perhaps by now even in the press, which might well have been how they knew the Russian president had been there.

  “His name is Sir Robert Rhodes Simpson. He is a member of the House of Lords.”

  For a moment there was no response; then he heard the click of a lighter and heard his man inhale. His interrogator had just lighted a cigarette. A half second later the raspy voice continued, “You were correct when you said we recovered your wallet. In it is a photograph of an attractive young lady pictured in front of a lake. Who is she?”

  Marten started. It was Rebecca. The photo was a snapshot he taken shortly after her arrival at Jura. It showed her in health and full of hope and joy. He had liked it enormously and kept it tucked in the back of his wallet.

  “I asked you who she is.”

  Marten swore to himself. He damned the photo. Damned himself for keeping it. Now they had something to tie him to Rebecca. But he couldn’t let them find out what the connection was. “A girlfriend.”

  A vicious slap to the side of his head knocked Marten off the chair and onto the floor. Searing pain shot through the wound in his side. He cried out as rough hands dragged him up and shoved him back onto the chair. A moment later there was a hard tug at his eyes as someone tightened his blindfold.

  “Who is she?” the voice repeated.

  “I told you, a girlfriend.”

  “No, she is a fellow asset.”

  “Asset?” Marten was suddenly puzzled. Asset was military or espionage nomenclature. What did he mean? Where was he going with this?

  “If you were a guest as you say, then why were you cut with a knife and thrown into the mountain river to die? You work for the CIA and someone found out, the Russians maybe. The trouble for you is”—the voice suddenly became quieter and more threatening—“that you lived.”

  So that was it. They thought he was an American intelligence operative who had penetrated the inner circle of top-level Russian politics and were guessing that in some way Rebecca was a collaborator.

  “I ask you once again, Mr. Marten—who is the girl? What is her name?”

  “Her name is Rebecca,” Marten said matter-of-factly. He had given them that much and it was all he was going to give. “I do not work for the CIA or any other organization. I am a student at the University of Manchester. I was invited to the dinner in Davos by a professor friend whose father is Sir Robert Rhodes Simpson. I went for a walk in the snow and slipped and fell from a mountain bridge into a fast-running stream and was swept away by the current. My cut came from a sharp rock or stick that was submerged in the water. At some point I dragged myself out of the water and passed out. That was where someone of the family I was with found me, the girl, I think.” Marten paused, then finished. “You can believe what you want, but what I’ve said is the truth.”

  For a long moment there was silence. Marten could hear rustling as several men changed positions in the room. Then Marten felt his interrogator lean forward. The smell of tobacco on his breath became stronger a
s he did.

  “Please ask yourself this, Mr. Marten,” the throaty voice said evenly. “Is continuing to tell falsehoods worth my life? Am I willing to die for these lies I am telling?”

  Again there was silence, and Marten had no idea what they were going to do next. Then suddenly the strap binding his hands was pulled from his wrists. He heard the retreat of footsteps and the sound of a door being opened and then closed and locked behind him. Immediately he untied the scarf that blindfolded him. It made little difference; the place where they had brought him was as dark as night.

  He got up uncertainly and tried to find the door. His hands moved over one wall and then another, and then another. Finally he felt the door’s wood panels. His hands fumbled until he found the knob. It turned but did not open. He pulled hard; nothing happened. He felt across for the hinges and found them, but they were secured tightly. He would need a hammer and chisel or screwdriver to remove them.

  He went back across the room, nearly fell over the chair, then sat down. He was in a large closet or inner storeroom of some kind. Occasionally he could hear sounds of the city, a horn or a siren, but that was all. What he had was a chair and darkness and nothing else but the clothes he wore—the same clothes he had worn when he left the ballroom of Villa Enkratzer, the tuxedo Alexander Cabrera had provided, now torn and wrinkled. He reached up and touched his face. What he felt was more than stubble. A full beard had begun to grow.

  11

  There was a sound and the door opened. He thought he saw three men silhouetted in the dim light of the hallway outside.

  “Come.” It was the same raspy, accented voice as before.

  “What day is this? What month?” Marten demanded, trying at least to get that much.

  “Keep quiet!”

  Suddenly two men came forward, took hold of him, and led him to the door. For an instant he glimpsed two more balaclava-covered heads waiting in the hallway outside. Again came the blindfold. Then he was taken forward. Then there were the stairs again. This time going down. Three flights. And along a hallway and then a door. Suddenly cold fresh air hit him and he breathed it in deeply.

  “Urinate,” a voice commanded, “urinate.” Hands pushed him against a wall. He fumbled with his fly and took out his penis. He was glad. Before, he had thought he would burst, had pounded on the door and yelled for someone to take him to a toilet, but no one had come, and he had nearly done it on the floor of the room. It was then that the door had opened and they had come in to take him to where he was now, and where he gratefully relieved himself.

  The instant he finished and was zipped up, strong arms led him over cobblestones. Then the same arms lifted him, and he felt more hands take him from there. He heard the sound of an overhead door being rolled down. Suddenly whatever he was in lurched forward and he nearly lost his balance. Once again his wrists were bound and then hands took him and forced him facedown on the floor. The smell was musty, and he knew he was in the back of a truck and on a carpet of some kind. There was another lurch as the vehicle picked up speed. Suddenly he felt the carpet pulled up against his shoulders, and then he was rolled over, and then over again, and again.

  “My God,” he thought, “they’re rolling me inside a carpet.”

  Then the rolling stopped. Everything was silent except for the sound of the truck as the driver shifted once more, and then they were on a smooth road traveling at highway speed.

  12

  MOSCOW. THURSDAY, JANUARY 30. 6:20 P.M.

  Thirteen days after Zurich Kantonspolizei Inspector Beelr had mailed it, the envelope arrived and was waiting on the side table in the hallway when Kovalenko came in.

  “Papa.” His daughter, nine-year-old Yelena, ran down the hallway. “Guess what I did in school, Papa?”

  “I don’t know, what did you do?” Kovalenko picked up the envelope.

  “Guess.”

  “Guess what? You do a hundred things.”

  “Guess anyway.”

  “You did a painting.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I guessed.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned the envelope over in his hands, unsure what to do with it. Chief Inspector Irina Malikova had told him to bring the disk directly to her the moment he got it, day or night. Why, when barely a heartbeat earlier she had told him “it should be more than apparent the first Tsarevich of All Russia since the revolution cannot also be a common criminal. A murderer.” So once she had the disk, what did she intend to do with it?

  On the other hand—with Alexander Cabrera, and Marten’s sister, a sister by adoption, the media was reminded, suddenly found to be a member of European royalty, the toast not only of Russia but the world—what would he do with it? He had been ordered to turn the disk over the minute he got it. Who knew if he was being watched by his own department to make certain he did, or if the Postal Security Service had been instructed to look for mail coming to him from Europe and report it immediately upon delivery. So what was his alternative? Take a chance and make a copy of the disk, then work on his own to get the Tsarevich’s fingerprints so that he could prove to the world their beloved Alexander Romanov was really the crazed killer Raymond Oliver Thorne?

  Maybe, just maybe, if Marten were alive, he might have made a copy and risked losing his job or even serving time in prison so they could have done something together. But maybe was not a viable concept because Marten was dead and he had been called back to Moscow, which essentially took him off the case. Chief Inspector Malikova was waiting for him to deliver the goods when he got them. Now he held them in his hand.

  “Papa,” Yelena asked impatiently, “what are you doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  “About my picture?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “A horse.”

  “No, a person.”

  “I suppose you want me to guess what person too.”

  “No, silly,” Yelena giggled, then took him by the hand and led him down the hallway to the kitchen. Tatyana was standing at the stove, her back to him. Sons Oleg and Konstantin were already at the table, waiting to eat. Yelena picked a drawing from a side table and held it behind her back, grinning impishly at her father. “It’s a portrait. Somebody you know.”

  “Your Mamma.”

  “No.”

  “Oleg.”

  “No.”

  “Konstantin.”

  “No.”

  “Yelena, I cannot guess everyone in the world.”

  “Try one more time.”

  “Just tell me who.”

  “You!” With a beaming cry Yelena held up a perfect caricature of Kovalenko. Big eyes in a wide face covered with a big beard, over a big belly.

  “Is that what I look like?”

  “Yes, Papa. I love you.”

  Kovalenko grinned and for the moment let the idea of the disk and everything that went with it go out of his mind.

  “I love you, too, Yelena.” Bending down, he picked up his daughter and put his head against hers, as if she and nothing else were all that mattered in the world.

  13

  MINISTRY OF JUSTICE. 9:30 P.M.

  Click.

  Raymond Oliver Thorne’s LAPD booking photograph appeared on Chief Inspector Irina Malikova’s seventeen-inch computer screen. Two photographs, full front, and then profile.

  Her hand touched the mouse.

  Click.

  Raymond Oliver Thorne’s fingerprints. Clear, perfectly readable.

  Malikova looked at Kovalenko. “There are no other copies?”

  “As I said before, there are none that I know of. The hard files and numerous data banks containing Thorne’s records are gone, either simply stolen or hacked into and deleted. The same way people who helped Thorne escape from the L.A. hospital or were involved in transferring a ‘John Doe’ body from the morgue to the crematorium in his place have either vanished or are dead. The plastic surgeon
who went to Argentina to rebuild Cabrera’s face and body after his ‘hunting accident’ is also dead, caught in a building fire that not only killed him but destroyed all of his records.”

  “And these?” Irina Malikova looked at the rest of the contents of the envelope Kovalenko had brought: a plane ticket in the name of James Halliday from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires—and a page torn from Halliday’s appointment book noting the trail of a plastic surgeon named Hermann Gray whom Halliday had followed from Los Angeles to Costa Rica to Argentina.

  “I thought you should have everything,” Kovalenko said quietly. He had told Marten he had given Inspector Beelr an envelope with the computer disk and Halliday’s airline ticket in it to mail to his wife. He had said nothing about including a page from Halliday’s book. There had been no reason.

  “No one else knows of these?”

  “No.”

  “Not the French?”

  “No.”

  “The FSO?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you, Inspector.”

  Kovalenko hesitated. “What do you intend to do with them?”

  “Do with what?”

  “The material, Chief Inspector.”

  “What material, Inspector Kovalenko?”

  Kovalenko stared at her for a moment. “I see,” he said and stood. “Good night, Chief Inspector.”

  “Good night, Inspector Kovalenko.”

  Kovalenko felt her eyes follow him as he crossed the cubicle and walked out the door.

  There was no material. No computer disk, no plane ticket, no page from an appointment book. What Halliday had died for, what he and Marten had so carefully kept from Lenard, what he had given her, simply did not exist. And never had.

  14

  “You work for the CIA.”

  “No, I am a student.”

  “How did you penetrate the Russian inner circle?”

  “I am a student.”

  “Who is Rebecca?”

  “A girlfriend.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know.”