Eternal Empire

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  First, however, it was necessary to determine what she knew. Reaching out with one hand, Asthana switched the radio to a news station, but she kept the volume turned down. “The reports are saying it was a drone attack, but they can’t seem to agree on the details. Did you see it?”

  Maddy closed her eyes. “Yes. It knocked me out. I didn’t see the crash. By the time I woke up, we were already evacuating.” She opened her eyes again. “Has there been any word on Tarkovsky?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” Asthana said. “You didn’t see him?”

  “Not since I left the party. I don’t know what happened next. He wasn’t on the first or second lifeboats.” Maddy turned back to the view from the window. “Have they said who was behind the attack?”

  “Only rumors. Sochi is on the front lines of two different conflict zones. Abkhazia is twenty miles south, and you’ve got the usual rebels in the Caucasus. A hell of a place to host the Olympics. The lines are so tangled that there’s no telling who did what. At least not until we can conduct a proper investigation.”

  Something in this last statement seemed to catch Maddy’s attention. “Why was Wolfe worried about me?”

  Asthana had been expecting the question. “I’m not sure. But she told me a few things. That you were working for Alan Powell, for one—”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Maddy start. “How did she know that?”

  “Powell must have told her. She didn’t say much, but I could tell she wasn’t happy. I think she was afraid it would come out sooner or later, and it would raise questions, especially after the attack. Everyone on that yacht will be scrutinized. It’s better if we deal with it from London.” She paused. “It’s hard. I know. But once this is over, you can resume your life as before.”

  Maddy only glanced away again, looking out the window at the night beyond.

  As they continued north, Maddy rested her head against the glass, as if tired, and did not speak again for a long time. Inside, however, her mind was racing, and she was afraid that the beating of her heart would give her away.

  We need you to perform a service for us. Once this task is concluded, you will never hear from us again. You can resume your life as before—

  Maddy turned to look at the woman behind the wheel, whose face passed through alternating bands of light and dark. It occurred to her that Wolfe had left her original message hours before the attack, which meant that if the officer had been afraid for her safety, it could only have been about something else. “Do you have a phone? I should let Wolfe know I’m okay.”

  “We can do that back at the house,” Asthana said, keeping her eyes on the road. “It’s just a few minutes from here.”

  Maddy only nodded. As she turned back to the window, she casually put her hands into the pockets of the jacket that Asthana had given her. Both pockets were empty. A second later, as Asthana glanced away to make a left turn, Maddy reached out and unlocked the door on her side of the car as quietly as she could, resting her fingers on the handle.

  She looked through the windshield at the featureless street. They had been on the road for fifteen minutes. To her right, she could make out a line of trees, while to her left, past the dark blocks of apartment buildings and hotels, stood the water. They were heading north, away from the city center, toward the resort areas that ran along the edge of the sea.

  At last, leaving the road, the car began to slow. Looking ahead, Maddy saw a long driveway with a steel fence. A man was standing next to the gate with what looked like a shotgun in his hands.

  As they came to a stop, Maddy tightened her grip on the door handle, seeing that a few yards of open ground stood between her and the trees. If she was going to run, it had to be now. Through the windshield, she watched as the guard turned to open the gate. She reached for her safety belt. And then she paused.

  If she ran, Maddy thought, she would not get far. Not with an armed guard nearby. And if they had been willing to let her die on the yacht, they would not hesitate to kill her now if she forced their hand.

  But if they had brought her here, it meant that they had reason enough to keep her alive, if only to find out what she knew. And if that were true, she had one advantage. She knew that Ilya had not killed Tarkovsky. And there was a chance both men might still be alive.

  With this thought echoing in her mind, Maddy let go of the door handle, which had grown slick beneath her fingers. No more running, she thought. Not if this was how it was meant to end.

  As the guard opened the gate, Asthana eased the car forward until they were moving along the gravel driveway. In their headlights, Maddy could see the dark outline of a dacha.

  She was surprised by the sound of her own voice. “So there’s no hood this time?”

  Behind the wheel, Asthana stiffened. For a second, Maddy caught a glimpse of the other woman’s true face, the one lurking behind the mask that she had so carefully worn. Then, strangely, she smiled.

  “No,” Asthana said at last, turning back to the house up ahead. “Not tonight.”

  56

  Shortly after midnight, the shadow boat exploded. The incident commander in Sochi had concluded that there was no way to fight the fire safely, given the risk from the hundred thousand gallons of diesel fuel. As a result, after the surviving members of the crew had been evacuated, rescue launches had maintained a respectful distance as the ship smoldered quietly and drifted out to sea.

  Finally, the fire crept forward far enough to reach the tanks, rewarding the news cameras with a satisfying burst of flame. As the fireboats went in, the burning ship was visible for miles, a sooty candle kindled in the darkness around the city. The resulting footage was shown repeatedly on all stations, along with images of the sinking yacht, which continued to list in the direction of greatest damage.

  At the port itself, crews from state television had been allowed to film the rescue from designated points near the water. One of these crews happened to be nearby when a third lifeboat approached the harbor shortly after the explosion. Instead of the enclosed boats that had been observed earlier, the latest arrival was an inflatable raft with a trolling motor, evidently pressed into service after the angle of the yacht had rendered the remaining boats unusable.

  In the lights of the cameras, eight men and women could be seen as the raft tied up at the quay. Most were in life jackets, with several dressed in survival suits of orange neoprene, which had black face seals that left only the eyes and nose visible. The cameras caught them climbing out of the raft one by one, with most of the attention directed to a photogenic female who turned out to be the ship’s purser. In her life vest and culottes, she cut an attractive figure, and at the approach of the reporters, she agreed to be interviewed for Channel One.

  Only the most alert of the newscast’s viewers would have noticed the man in the life jacket caught briefly in the background of the camera frame, moving away from the water. Declining the offer of a blanket, he pulled off his life vest and left it on the dock, continuing along the quay until he was at a safe remove from the cameras. At the moment, most of the rescue crews and volunteers were clustered at the southern end of the port, so he headed in the other direction.

  Orlov rounded the corner and entered a region of shadow, sheltered from the rest of the scene, where a line of smaller boats stood at a separate marina. Only then did the security chief turn to face the two figures, both of whom had also emerged from the raft, who had detached themselves from the others to follow a few steps behind, dressed from head to toe in immersion suits.

  Once they were alone, one of the men pulled off his hood. It was Ilya. He breathed in deeply, grateful for the air on his face after the suit’s stifling confines. Before he could take the rest of it off, however, he heard a voice from behind him: “Stay where you are, please.”

  Ilya turned and saw that Orlov had drawn the pistol he had taken from the b
osun on the bridge. He was not aiming it yet, not exactly, but there could be no question about his intentions. “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t let you go,” Orlov said, still holding the gun by his side. “You know this as well as I do.”

  Ilya had no trouble reading the meaning in the security chief’s eyes. “I’ve told you all I can. I did not know the attack was coming. If these men are still in the city, I will find them. You need to give me that chance.”

  For one tense moment, they stood eye to eye. Then the third man, the one who had not yet removed his hood, spoke up for the first time. “That’s enough. Help me get this off.”

  Orlov looked over at Tarkovsky, who had pulled the hood away. At last, he slid the gun into his waistband and went to assist the oligarch. Ilya watched them for a second, then quickly removed the rest of his suit, keeping an eye on the others. Tarkovsky, for his part, continued to look out at his yacht, the shadow boat burning beyond it, with no trace of emotion on his face.

  It was not difficult to guess what he might be thinking. Shortly after their final meeting, Tarkovsky had gone to the library on the bridge deck. If he had been in his suite when the drone struck the yacht, or if the ship had not been more solidly built than its attackers had expected, he would have been killed. And as Ilya considered what he must be feeling now, he saw a way to use it.

  He also understood how blind he had been. This assault would have required years of preparation, which explained why Vasylenko had been allowed to remain in prison for so long. After the war in South Ossetia, he knew, Georgian arms had appeared on the black market in great quantities, including parts of drones shot down over Abkhazia. The remaining components would not have been difficult to acquire. All that was needed was a man with the ability to deploy them, which was why Bogdan, with his military training, had been included in a project that had otherwise drawn most of its resources from the civilian side.

  Once his immersion suit was lying on the ground, Tarkovsky turned toward the line of survivors at the far end of the quay, his wife and daughter among them. “I want to see Ludmilla.”

  “Not yet,” Orlov said. “You need to wait until we know more about the situation.”

  Tarkovsky sighed. Beneath the suit, he was still wearing his tuxedo shirt from the party, now rumpled and damp with perspiration. “And what exactly do we think the situation is?”

  These words were directed at Ilya, who was standing to one side. He seized the opening. “It would not be safe for them to leave yet. If they’re in a secure location, they would wait until morning.”

  Tarkovsky began rolling back his shirtsleeves. “But you don’t know where.”

  “No,” Ilya said. “But I have an idea. It would be secluded, a place where four armed men would not attract attention. In the old days, they could fall back on Vasylenko’s connections, but not now. Sochi has cleaned house in advance of the games. The networks are no longer there. Am I right?”

  Orlov had been listening closely. “Perhaps. Minalyan, who ran most of the old gangs, was killed two years ago in Moscow. They would not have been able to rebuild so quickly. So where would they go?”

  “Inside the system. State security must have a presence here. And if I were them, I’d want to keep an eye on Vasylenko.”

  “A safe house, then.” Tarkovsky looked out at the wreck on the water. “But where?”

  Ilya turned to Orlov. “You must have contacts. Someone who would know where the safe houses would be—”

  Orlov shook his head. “No. That information is closely held. And the two sides don’t share their toys.”

  Ilya wanted to push back, but he fell silent instead. For the first time in years, he felt tired, the energy he had stored up for so long draining inexorably away. He also knew that what the security chief said was true. Any contacts that Orlov retained would be on the military side, a world apart from civilian intelligence. To find Vasylenko, he needed information from within the same agencies that had carried out the attack, which meant that all was lost. Unless—

  Out of the depths of his exhaustion, Ilya felt an idea flicker into flame, and before it could fade, he turned to Tarkovsky, remembering something that Maddy had said in their long conversation the night before. “You have one connection there. The man who told you about Lermontov.”

  Even in the shadows, Ilya could see Tarkovsky’s face grow dark. “What do you know about this?”

  “I know enough,” Ilya said, aware that he was playing his last card. “I know you had a contact who said civilian intelligence was funding its operations with stolen art. Only a man at the highest ranks of state security would have known this. He must have been sympathetic to your cause. If he isn’t dead or in prison, he can tell us where these men would have gone.”

  Tarkovsky’s eyes remained fixed on his. After a long moment, he said, “I have nothing more to offer you. My men have their hands full here. If you go after Vasylenko, you go alone.”

  “I understand,” Ilya said. “I ask for nothing else. All I need is a car and a gun.”

  For a moment, the three men stood in silence. Ilya sensed in his bones that Vasylenko and the others were still in the city, but he also knew that they would not remain there for long.

  When Tarkovsky spoke again, facing the water, his voice was as quiet as death. In his eyes, Ilya could see two pinpoints of light from the distant fire. “All right. I’ll make the call.”

  57

  As promised, there was no hood this time. When Maddy entered the sitting room at the dacha, she looked at the men around her and saw them looking back. Vasylenko she recognized from his pictures. She had never seen the guard at the door or the man at the laptop. All the same, she knew that if any of them were allowing her to see their faces now, there was no way they meant for her to leave here alive.

  Behind her, Asthana said something in Russian to the guard who had let them in, who withdrew. Taking a chair from the corner, she brought it over to the center of the room. “Sit down.”

  Maddy complied, not taking her eyes from Vasylenko, who was seated on the sofa by the fireplace. In person, he was smaller than she had expected, but he did not seem fragile or tired. Instead, he had visibly drawn into himself, like a fist, as if the passage of time had left him all the more determined to stay alive. And she understood at once that all she had done for the last three years had only been to avoid finding herself in the same room as this man.

  The man with the laptop was packing up an assortment of electronic gear. He spoke angrily to Asthana. “What is the girl doing here?”

  “Insurance,” Asthana said, sliding a second chair across the floor until it was facing Maddy. “If Ilya made it off that yacht, he’ll be coming for us. With the girl here, he may have second thoughts. We can keep her alive until we’re safely away. Then we can let her go.”

  As Maddy listened, she wondered why they were speaking in English instead of Russian, then realized that this conversation was meant for her ears. They had no real intention of letting her walk away. And if she wanted to make them see otherwise, her window for doing so was closing already.

  Throughout this last exchange, Vasylenko had said nothing. Finally, he gave a nod to the man in the corner, who tucked his laptop under his arm and stood. He did not look at either woman as he left the room.

  Asthana drew the curtains of the sliding glass door. Watching her, Maddy could sense the tension in the air. Although Vasylenko had remained silent, she thought she knew something about men like this, and that he would not be pleased to be taking orders from Asthana.

  Once the curtains had been drawn, Asthana went to the chair she had set across from Maddy and took a seat, almost close enough for the two of them to touch. She got down to business at once. “Is Ilya alive?”

  When Maddy said nothing, Asthana smiled reasonably, as if she were conducting a job interview. “Let me explain how this
works. The more information we have, the better we can plan our response, which works to your benefit as well. I know a lot about you. You’ve always put your own interests first. And if you refuse to talk, we can find out in other ways.”

  Glancing over at Vasylenko, who was still seated in silence, Maddy pretended to consider this point. She responded slowly, as if the words were being drawn out against her will. “I don’t know if Ilya is alive. All I did was get him on board. Did he kill Tarkovsky?”

  “That isn’t really your concern,” Asthana said. “You knew all along what our intentions had to be, and you performed more than capably. If it matters, I can tell you that the situation was resolved as intended.”

  “I know,” Maddy said, speaking more quickly. “I was there when the rockets hit. And I would have been killed if I had been on the lower deck, or if the yacht hadn’t been built so well. But it’s all the same. You’ve still won. Even if not everyone gets to share in the spoils.”

  Maddy looked over at Vasylenko, addressing him directly for the first time. “I’m curious about you. I know why you agreed to fight for this cause, but I wonder if your men really know who they’re working for. I’ve been told that collaboration used to mean death, at least among true thieves—”

  Without a word, Asthana came forward from her chair and drove a fist into Maddy’s stomach. Maddy doubled over, gasping, the weave of the carpet going in and out of focus as Asthana spoke in a low voice. “That was a warning. Don’t think you know who we are just because you read it in books.”

  “I know enough,” Maddy managed, feeling new dispatches of pain with every word, her hair hanging in her face. “I know Tarkovsky was standing in your way. The state controls almost all the oil in Russia, but you wanted the rest. And you couldn’t just kill him like you’ve done with others.”