Nicholas Marten 01 - The Exile

by Folsom, Allan

  “Kovalenko, don’t!” he heard Marten scream behind him.

  It was too late. The Russian policeman was right next to him.

  “No! No! Don’t!” he heard Marten scream again.

  Then he saw the Russian policeman’s eyes harden and felt the push of the Makarov against his head. His finger tightened on the trigger. A thundering boom was cut short by a terrible onrush of searing white light. It washed over everything like a ferocious tide. Becoming brighter and brighter and brighter. And then. Finally.

  It went out.

  52

  THE GULF OF FINLAND. SAME TIME.

  Rebecca and Lady Clem stood outside the wheelhouse of the sixty-foot herring trawler number 67730, looking back at St. Petersburg awash in a golden hue. The ship was twenty minutes out of the harbor and traveling at eight knots through a gentle swell dotted with intermittent patches of ice. The golden light held for a few moments longer and then, as if a curtain had been abruptly lowered, vanished as the sun sank beneath the clouds on the horizon.

  Darkness settled, and, as if drawn by the same force that had brought the radiant light to St. Petersburg, the women turned to each other.

  “Time will pass and it will become a little more bearable,” Clem said quietly, “and in more time, less and less on your mind. It’s something we will work toward, the two of us, you and I. We will, I promise you.”

  Rebecca studied her for a moment, trying to believe her, wanting to believe. Finally she closed her eyes and, with a monstrous sob, the tears came.

  Lady Clem put her arms around Rebecca and held her, silently crying with her, the sorrow of it, perhaps, most painful of all. After minutes, or hours, who knew, and feeling the roll of the sea beneath them, Clem glanced back toward St. Petersburg and led Rebecca inside, into the light and warmth of the wheelhouse.

  ST. PETERSBURG. STILL SATURDAY, APRIL 5. 7:40 P.M.

  Kovalenko accelerated through Sennaya Square in the darkness, taking them quickly away from the bridge and the canal, away from Nevsky Prospekt.

  “He was down. His gun was out of reach. There was no reason to kill him.” Marten was furious.

  “Tovarich.” Kovalenko kept his eyes on the traffic in front of them. “I save your life and this is how you respond?”

  “He was harmless.”

  “There was always the knife, maybe another gun. Who knew what? A man like that is never harmless until he is dead.”

  “You didn’t have to execute him.”

  “How would you like to meet your ladies for breakfast?” Kovalenko turned the Ford down Moskovsky Prospekt and accelerated once more, heading toward Pulkovo Airport. “There is a flight out for Helsinki in little more than an hour.”

  Marten glared at him, then abruptly stared off, the lights of oncoming traffic illuminating his face, changing it from light to dark and back again.

  “You carefully work to build a trust, even a friendship between us.” Marten’s voice was filled with bitterness. “And in the meantime you search for a way to find out who I am. You ask questions trying to trip me up, and when you finally figure it out, you start to play on my guilt—for what happened to the squad, for all the people that Raymond killed in L.A. and later in Paris—and on my love for my sister. You provide a passport and a visa, even a cell phone. And then when the time is right you give me a gun and send me in to do the dirty work. And I did, for all the reasons you preyed on and more. And then I got him and he was down and out. You could have arrested him, but you killed him instead.” Marten’s eyes swung to Kovalenko. “It was an assassination, wasn’t it?”

  Kovalenko watched the road as the Ford’s headlights alternately illuminated the entrances to potato farms and thick stands of still-leafless birch and maple trees, and, in between, even thicker forests of lighted billboards advertising Fords and Hondas, Volvos and Toyotas.

  “This is what will happen, tovarich.” Kovalenko looked to Marten and then back to the road. “By now they will have found his body. They will be horrified when they discover who he is. For a while they won’t realize what really happened at the Hermitage. And then they will, especially when they put it together with the knife still in his jacket pocket.

  “Shortly afterward official word will come from Moscow that the Tsarevich is dead, murdered while trying to apprehend the killers of the Baroness and his FSO chief Colonel Murzin at the Hermitage. The three people he killed along the way will be identified as conspirators, and an all-out search will be made for his killer or killers. In all probability the blame will fall on some Communist faction because the democrats are still at war with the Communists. Eventually, to protect the integrity of law enforcement, there may even be an arrest and a trial.

  “Your sister, the Tsarina, beloved by the Tsarevich who was murdered before he could be crowned, beloved by the Russian people, will be out of contact, sent away for a period of bereavement with her good friend and confidant, the daughter of the Earl of Prestbury, Lady Clementine Simpson.

  “Next will come several days of public mourning. Alexander’s body will lie in state at the Kremlin, and he will be acclaimed as a national hero. After that will be a state funeral, and he will be buried alongside his father and the other Russian emperors in the crypt of the St. Catherine Chapel of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Your sister will be expected to attend, and no doubt you as well.”

  “That doesn’t answer—”

  “Why I killed him? He was a madman, and Russia could not very well have a Tsar who was a madman.”

  Marten was still angry. “What you’re saying is that if this madman was alive and under arrest, you would have had to put him on trial and in the end be forced to either put him in prison for life or execute him. It’s not the kind of thing the Russian government would have wanted. So you took care of it yourself.”

  Kovalenko smiled just a little. “That’s part of it.”

  “What’s the rest?”

  “As I suggested, there was always the possibility of the knife or another gun. What if, when you came up on him, he tried to kill you? We know his work all too well. His move would have been quick, and you would have had no choice but to kill him or die yourself. Yes?”

  “Maybe.”

  Kovalenko’s eyes narrowed and he looked at Marten. “No, tovarich, not maybe, certainly.” He stared for a moment longer, letting his point sink in, then looked back to the road. “First I will say it is true I had you marked by the time we left Paris, and yes, I sent you into the museum to kill Alexander because I knew you were capable of doing it and had a reason and because I didn’t have to include anyone else.

  “But when I was waiting for you outside I remembered what had happened when you and your sister were reunited, how she reacted to seeing you, and to what you told her. I realized my decision had been wrong. If you had been the one to kill the Tsarevich, you could never again look at her without the fear that she would see the truth of what you had done in your eyes, and you would have had to live the rest of your life like that, knowing you had killed the man she loved more than life itself, even if he was what he was.

  “And then, tovarich, there is something else, and it is a basic truth. Some men, no matter how skillful or dedicated they are, or force themselves to be, are not meant to be policemen. The sometimes necessary cruelty of it, killing without remorse and in disregard for the law they have sworn to uphold when the circumstance requires it, is not in their blood.” Kovalenko looked over and smiled gently. “You are such a man, tovarich. You are still young. Go back to your English gardens. It is a much better life.”

  EPILOGUE

  KAUAI, HAWAII. FOUR MONTHS LATER.

  The sea was brilliant turquoise and the white sand blazing hot. Away from the sand and beneath the ocean’s surface were colors unimaginable. Unearthly whites, stripes of radiant coral and dazzling magenta, oranges never seen on land, hues of black not on any chart, all in the magic of tropical fish that reached out to nibble the sea-damp crumbs of bread Mar
ten took from his small plastic bag to feed them while he swam, watching this world through his mask as he took in fresh air through his snorkel.

  Later, toward sundown, he left his snorkeling gear in the trunk of his rental car and walked along the deserted beach at Kekaha.

  The sale of a short article on the use of fieldstone in the design of private gardens to an international house-and-garden magazine had brought him an advance contract to provide a series of similar pieces monthly. The sum, while by no means large, allowed him to pay off his credit card debt for the rental of the trawler, with enough left over to indulge his sanity, or what little there was left of it, without tapping into his savings. He had come here to Kauai seven days ago, some seven thousand miles from England, his long-overdue paper, like his semester’s studies, finally completed, his examinations taken and passed with honors.

  Thin and sunburned with a five-day growth of beard and dressed in only faded shorts and an equally washed-out University of Manchester T-shirt, he could easily have been taken for a world-hopping beach bum.

  Kekaha was the same beach he and Rebecca had come to every few years as children with their mother and father. It was a place he knew well and remembered fondly. That was why he had come to it now, alone, to drift and think, and to try to get some reasonable perspective on what had happened. And maybe, finally, some tiny morsel of peace of mind. But it was a goal that was difficult, even elusive. Its context was as raw and obscene as ever, its reality, the stuff not of dreams but nightmares.

  Alexander Nikolaevich Romanov, Tsarevich of All Russia, had been buried five days after his death, as Kovalenko had predicted, a national hero. Rebecca and Clem had gone to St. Petersburg; so had he—officially invited as a member of Rebecca’s family—to support her emotionally. He had stood in the great crypt of the Peter and Paul Cathedral alongside Rebecca’s birth parents and the presidents of Russia and the United States and the prime ministers of a dozen countries.

  The massive presence of foreign dignitaries and the media coverage accompanying it was exceeded only by the enormous outpouring of sympathy from people around the world. The Kremlin alone received tens of thousands of cards of condolence and twice that many e-mails. Even though the wedding between Alexander and Rebecca had never taken place, twenty thousand handwritten notes addressed to the Tsarina were delivered to the Kremlin’s central post office. Hundreds of bouquets of flowers had been left on the footbridge over the Ekaterininsky Canal where Alexander had been slain. People in tears lit candles and left flowers and photographs of him in front of Russian embassies on every continent.

  All of it had eaten at Marten’s soul, twisting him in rage at its terrible irony. How could the world know, or begin to comprehend if it did, that the tearful, solemn state pageantry honoring the romantic, charismatic figure who would have been the first Tsar of Russia in modern times was really nothing more than a grand funeral for the heinous multiple murderer Raymond Oliver Thorne?

  A small package arriving in Manchester some five weeks after the funeral in St. Petersburg helped Marten realize that, upset as he was, he was not alone in his feelings.

  The package, mixed in with his regular mail, had no return address but was postmarked Moscow. Inside it he’d found a lone sheet of paper, typed single-spaced and folded in quarters. With it had been two five-by-seven black-and-white photographs. One had carried an LAPD date/time code; the other had a handwritten designation, State Morgue, Moscow. The photographs were digital reproductions of fingerprints. The first, he knew, were Raymond’s LAPD booking prints. The second, he didn’t know but guessed, had been taken during Alexander’s autopsy. The prints, like those matching Dan Ford’s killer with Raymond, were identical.

  The typed sheet had the following:

  (1) FSO Colonel Murzin: Former Spetsnaz soldier. Two years prior to Moscow assignment spent eight months sick leave recovering from injuries sustained in a special training exercise. Seven of those eight months spent out of country. Destination country, Argentina.

  (2) FSO Colonel Murzin: Personal account at Credit Suisse bank, Luxembourg. $10,000 U.S. dollars deposited monthly for past three years. Deposits were from payroll account of CKK, AG, personal security firm, Frankfurt, FRG. CKK legal affairs handled by Zurich-based attorney, Jacques Bertrand.

  (3) J. Bertrand placed the printing order for the Davos menu with deceased Zurich printer, H. Lossberg.

  (4) J. Bertrand was personal attorney for Baroness de Vienne.

  (5) Former Spetsnaz soldier, I. Maltsev. Employed as chief security officer at Alexander Cabrera’s ranch in Argentina for past ten years. Member of hunting party concurrent with Cabrera’s shooting accident. In Spetsnaz, specialist in firearms and hand-to-hand combat training, special proficiency, knife fighting; also expert in explosives and sabotage. Arrived in U.K. three days before Kitner automobile blast. Current whereabouts unknown.

  (6) Banque Privée, 17 Bis Avenue Robert Schuman, Marseilles, France. Safe deposit box #8989 visited by Alfred Neuss, three hours before he met with Fabien Curtay in Monaco.

  That was it. No cover note, no signature. Just what was there. But obviously Kovalenko had sent it. Marten had never told him of I. M. or of the safe deposit keys, but the information was there anyway. I. Maltsev was obviously the I. M. Raymond/Alexander was to have met at Penrith’s Bar in London. Maltsev’s lethal specialties made it very clear that the original plan developed by the Baroness and Alexander, a year earlier, had been to have Maltsev kill Kitner and his family very soon after he had been formally presented to the Romanov family and then forced to abdicate, thereby permanently ending any challenge or reversal of thought that might possibly have come later.

  Even without an identifying note, Kovalenko had revealed himself as a man who was thorough and caring. It was his way of tying things up and giving documentary credence to what they had been through together. How he had managed to get the LAPD fingerprint copy there was no way to know, except that it had to have come from Halliday’s disk, which Kovalenko had been forced to hand over to his superior. The probability was that he had thought something like that might happen and so had prepared for it by making a copy of the disk beforehand, telling no one, not even Marten.

  The how or when or why of Kovalenko’s actions made no difference. It was the information and his generosity in sharing it that mattered. The result was that Marten had in his possession proof beyond doubt that Alexander Cabrera and Raymond Oliver Thorne were one and the same. Additionally he knew that, in all probability, Alexander had been trained in killing by both Murzin and Maltsev and that Murzin and maybe Maltsev were in the direct employ of the Baroness. That led Marten—and, he was sure, Kovalenko—to believe it had been the Baroness who had ordered the murder of Peter Kitner and his family, to say nothing of directing Alexander to murder Neuss and Curtay and the Romanovs in the Americas.

  What had Marten said to Kovalenko those four months ago when the Russian had seen him through passport control at Pulkovo Airport for his night flight to Helsinki? “There’s one thing I don’t understand. Why did he steal the woman’s purse? Money? How much could he have gotten, and what did he need it for? If he hadn’t done it, just kept going, there’s every chance he would have gotten away.”

  Kovalenko had simply looked at him and replied, “Why did he kill his mother?”

  Those thoughts and questions led to another—and what Kovalenko had said at very nearly the same time. It was about what it takes to be a policeman and the sometimes necessary cruelty of it, killing without remorse and in disregard for the law they have sworn to uphold when the circumstances require it.”

  Kovalenko had spoken about police officers in general. But Marten knew he did not mean it that way. Most cops, the ones he knew and had worked with in Los Angeles, first in patrol cars and then as a detective in Robbery-Homicide, believed as he did, that they were there to enforce the law and not to make their own. In doing so they worked long, hard, and sometimes thankless hours during which they were often
seen by the media and the public as either corrupt or ineffectual, or both. Most were neither. They just had an incredibly difficult and dangerous job to do under an unreasonably cruel spotlight. What Kovalenko had been talking about was something else and was driven by the same kind of thinking that belonged to Red McClatchy. It was deep and complex and very dark. And even though they were separated by thousands of miles and operated in hugely different political spheres, both men dealt with what they saw as the same truth—that there were persons and situations the law and the public and the lawmakers were not prepared to deal with, and so the burden of what to do about it fell to men like them. Men like McClatchy and Polchak and Lee and Valparaiso, and even Halliday, and, of course, Kovalenko, who took on that kind of responsibility for themselves and stepped outside the law to do it. In that, Kovalenko was right when he said Marten was not that kind of policeman. He hadn’t been then and he never would be. It wasn’t who he was.

  That in itself raised a question of its own—who was Kovalenko really, and who did he work for? He doubted he would ever know, and maybe he didn’t want to. He wondered, too, if things hadn’t turned out as they had in St. Petersburg and Alexander hadn’t escaped as he had, if Marten had killed him in the Hermitage as Kovalenko had wished and then come out the side door where Kovalenko was waiting, whether the Russian might not have shot him on the spot, killing the Tsarevich’s assassin as he tried to escape and thereby ending all of it. It was something, he thought now, he would ask him to his face if they ever met again.