Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Over and out, buddy.’

  I signalled to Baaz and he cut the connection.

  ‘Who was that?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s just say it was a friend of mine. He helped me out on a job last year. He’s going to send a plane. Tomorrow. I need to message him with a pick-up point.’

  ‘A plane? What, you mean like a private jet?’ he said excitedly. ‘He’s going to send a private jet for us?’ As soon as he’d said it, he regretted it, and he looked down, blushing.

  ‘No, Baaz. He’s sending a private jet for me.’

  ‘But …’ He looked up, crestfallen, through the black wells of his eyes. ‘But we’re in this together, right? You helped me and I helped you.’ He looked at the screens, and around the room. ‘Am helping you. Max and Baaz. Sounds good, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, Baaz. It doesn’t. I know everything feels OK now, safe and warm up here – no one fucking with us, no one trying to kick the door in. No one trying to kill us. Last night already seems like a crazy dream, right? A great story to tell your mates about one day.’

  His shoulders sagged again. There was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on. It was the same feeling I’d had in the catacombs, something not quite right about him. His responses weren’t … normal. No one rational survives a firefight only to turn around once it’s over and beg to get stuck in again – no one except the Paras and the legally sane psychos that swelled the ranks of Special Forces. And he was neither a red beret nor a psychopath, of that much I was sure.

  ‘But it’s not some story,’ I continued. ‘It’s really fucking serious. We got out of those tunnels by the skin of our teeth. Believe me, I’ve been in the shit before. Deep in it. But no matter how bad it gets, it can always get worse.’

  My voice had got louder, imploring him to listen. But I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. Young men infected with romantic notions about adventure can do wildly dangerous things. I knew. I’d been one myself. We were both standing up now. He looked away, struggling to find the words he wanted.

  ‘I don’t want to tell my mates,’ he said quietly, staring first at the ceiling and then at the floor. ‘I don’t have any mates to tell, anyway. I am twenty-two years old. My father is in prison in Chandigarh, and my mother never leaves the house – which is worse than being in bloody prison. My cousins think I’m a freak because I can do maths, and my brothers think I’m …’ he summoned the word with difficulty, ‘a traitor because I’m not interested in any of their nationalist Khalistan nonsense. I’m supposed to be doing this bloody master’s degree, but my professor is actually retarded, I can hardly speak enough French to order a meal, never mind get laid, and the only person I’ve had to stay is a bloody Irish spook, or whatever the hell you are.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. It was hard not to smile. ‘You’ve been very brave, and I’m very grateful, but …’

  ‘But I thought we were friends,’ he cut in. The fingers on both his hands were drumming the air now, as if typing reams of unseen digits on an invisible keyboard. ‘We are friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We are. And friends look out for each other, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We looked out for each other in the tunnels. And you’ve looked after me up here. But I can’t look out for you where I’m going … Man, I don’t even know where I’m going, never mind what I’m going to do when I get there. But you have to get away. Lie low, have a holiday. Right now, no one knows you’re involved in any of this. And believe me, that’s a really, really good thing.’

  ‘How much is it?’ he said, still refusing to look me in the eye. Even though we were standing a foot apart, I wasn’t sure he’d heard a word I’d said.

  ‘How much is what?’

  ‘The jet. How much does it cost? Expensive, I bet.’

  ‘Yes. It’s expensive. Where are you going with this?’

  ‘How much? Ten thousand dollars? Twenty?’

  ‘Sixty,’ I admitted. ‘It will cost sixty grand.’

  Under the circumstances that was both exorbitant – I had no way of getting the fare that didn’t involve robbery – and supremely reasonable: how much is anyone prepared to pay for their freedom? In my case, right then, right there, the answer was, Everything.

  ‘OK. So, Mr Max, how are you going to pay your Israeli friend sixty thousand dollars when you have …’ he glanced at the money spread out on the table, ‘2,245 euros, and, ah, 100 dollars?’ He looked me straight in the eye then. ‘Tricky, huna?’

  He bent down and leaned across me and opened a secure web browser on one of the laptops between us. Left-handed, he typed in a few strokes and turned the screen towards me, angling it back so I could read it standing up. It was an Ethereum cryptocurrency trading account. His holdings showed as 1,225.5 coins.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I can pay for your flight. Our flight.’

  I felt my estimation of his mental stability slipping. I needed to appease him. Carefully. As much as he could be a risk to himself, his fantasies posed a threat to me, too. But I also needed to find a way of financing the flight. Ezra wouldn’t press me for the money, but eventually the debt would have to be settled. And this time I couldn’t rely on Her Majesty’s Government to pick up the tab.

  ‘But,’ I said, pointing at the screen, ‘you only have twelve hundred coins.’ He grinned. And then it dawned on me. ‘Baaz … how many dollars are there to one of these Ethereum coins?’

  ‘Today, 1,389 dollars and 18 cents. Yesterday, 1,377 dollars and 72 cents.’ He closed the browser. ‘While we were sleeping, I made 14,044 dollars and 23 cents.’

  ‘What? But … twelve hundred and …’ I struggled with the multiplication.

  ‘OK, 1,225.5 coins are worth 1,702,440 US dollars and 9 cents.’ I opened my mouth, goldfish-like, but Baaz ploughed on. ‘On the second of January last year I invested 10,000 dollars in Ether. One Ether was worth 8 dollars and 16 cents then.’

  ‘I … I don’t know where to begin. I mean, for a start, where on earth did you get 10,000 dollars from?’

  ‘From my auntie. “Living expenses”, huna?’

  ‘Wow, that’s …’ I started to laugh. ‘That’s crazy.’ Baaz started to laugh, too. ‘You’re a millionaire. And your auntie … she has no idea, does she?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I think today would be a good day to cash in, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I think it would.’

  The Challenger 300 banked hard to the south-east. The dark lines of the boulevards cut the city into what looked like slabs of stone, paving the Île-de-France white in the weak morning sun. The little streets I’d raced along two days before merged into a web of fine black lines between them, knitting the capital together. Of the underworld that stretched out south of the Seine, there was no sign: no ripple in the lanes and highways, no hint of what lay beneath. Not even from that unique perspective hundreds of feet above the ground, it seemed, could the whole of the city be seen. The big, bright, imperial capital was as lost to the catacombs as the dead they concealed were lost to the world above.

  But as we climbed higher and the buildings shrank, the Arc de Triomphe began to look like the sepulchres in Montparnasse, the Champs-Élysées and the wheel of the avenues spinning away from it like walkways for the curious and the bereaved to meander among the graves. The picture warped and juddered in the slipstream, and for a moment it looked as if the city was consuming itself in the haze. And then a blanket of grey spread beneath the winking green eye of the starboard wingtip and Paris was buried under the clouds.

  I adjusted the Grach in the waistband of my jeans and stretched out in the beige leather seat. The flight attendant who’d brought me a double Johnnie Walker Black before take-off returned with an ashtray. I unwrapped the packet of Gauloises I’d lifted from Lukov’s corpse and lit the tobacco. The smoke was cool and soothing and I dragged it down deep in
to my lungs, holding it there for a long moment before exhaling and blurring the cabin with a blue-grey fog. That was the great thing about private jets: no security, and no no-smoking signs.

  The other seven seats were empty. It took a day and a night of reasoning and bargaining, but in the end Baaz saw sense. Or at least he said he saw sense. At first I reminded him that Indians couldn’t travel to Israel without a visa: a plausible argument, until he produced a British passport. Then I put the frighteners on: to which his only response was to make more tea. In the end I tried the oldest trick in the espionage handbook: flattery. I convinced him that he was more use to ‘the operation’ in Paris than he was in Tel Aviv – a secret, secure comms base that I could call on if the going got rough. What he got from me was the promise of teamwork – in spirit, if not in person. He sulked for a while, and then grudgingly accepted the wisdom of it. I knew the sting of disappointment would fade faster than that of a 9mm round.

  What he didn’t get was a guaranteed repayment plan. But like he said himself, while I waited for Ezra to send the car to the Best Western hotel at the southern end of Rue du Texel, ‘It’s all just Monopoly money, anyway.’ He converted his ‘winnings’ – as he called them – into fiat: actual dollars, in an actual, numbered Swiss account, which he could spend as he liked. I asked him if a withdrawal could give away his identity to anyone inclined to investigate. He drummed the fingertips of his left and right hands together, frenetically. It wasn’t where you banked that compromised your anonymity, he said, so much as where you were from.

  ‘If you’re American and you bank in Zurich,’ he summed up, ‘you’re fucked. If you’re Indian, you’re sound.’

  I was banking on a long shot: that when I found Rachel, she would believe me; believe in me. The thread that connected us as kids had unravelled across a lifetime of secrets and lies. I hoped it had not yet snapped. When I stripped away the uncertainties of the lethal money-go-round, all my mission amounted to was convincing Rachel that I hadn’t killed Doc – and that whoever had might be after her next. At best, I was one day ahead of an enemy as tangible as a ghost.

  I stubbed out the cigarette and closed my eyes and tried to calculate the size of the void in my knowledge that yawned in front of me. Colonel Ellard had trained us to measure the dimensions of the things we didn’t know with reconnaissance and intelligence – narrowing the parameters of any operation as far as we could, remembering always that spooks could set you up and your eyes could deceive. But however much he tried to make us soldiers, he tried harder to make us gamblers – to accept that we would not, could not, ever know everything. ‘In the end,’ he told us, ‘you will always roll the dice.’ And no one – but no one – knew when they would throw a seven.

  I surrendered to the rhythm of the engines and the Scotch worked its magic. I closed my eyes and felt myself slipping into sleep. But the darkness was confounded by a thousand fragments of wars gone by; of Frank leaving Doherty’s pub in Ballina; and of my mother, sinking, as the faintest trace of a smile played about her lips.

  As I went under, the Challenger reached cruising altitude, steady on a course set first towards the Alps, then over the heads of the bankers handling Baaz’s profits – and then beyond, across the Balkans and the Aegean, above the eastern Mediterranean and onwards, until its tyres left a little rubber on the landing strip of the Promised Land.

  20

  The flight landed at half-past three in the afternoon, local time. Ezra’s man was waiting for me airside: a security statue in dark glasses, suited and booted, arms folded across a barrel chest, standing stock-still on the apron. He took my passport, led me through security and drove me to the Hilton – a modern concrete block that loomed above the seafront, forty-five minutes’ walk south-west of the main university campus. I checked in, went briefly up to the room – a well-appointed business box on the fifth floor paid for by Ezra’s company – unmade the bed, dropped a towel on the bathroom floor and left immediately, hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the door handle.

  Then I walked north along the promenade – a narrow walkway sandwiched between the reddening sea and the winter-shabby dun of Independence Park. At least I knew my way around. I’d been in and out of Tel Aviv a dozen times or more over the last decade. I liked being there, the feeling that anything might happen – and that, when it did, it was never quite as advertised. It was an edgy but oddly relaxing place – foreign in almost every respect and yet, somehow, it always reminded me of Dublin: great bars and pretty girls and every shade of weapons-grade nutter on God’s green earth.

  I stopped for a moment and looked out across Metsitsim Beach. The sun was sinking like a fireship, setting the pale blue sky ablaze, lengthening the shadows of a gaggle of children jostling past me. A couple of surfers in wetsuits dragged themselves out of the waves and on to the darkening sand. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon, nearly twenty degrees; after the steel-grey cold of northern Europe it was good to feel the heat of the sun before it slid completely beneath the horizon.

  Seventeen hundred.

  I pressed on, and after a few minutes arrived at The Lemon Tree – a boutique four-star joint set back slightly from the sea, between the beach and the old port area. I paid for three nights in cash, in advance, and told the desk clerk I was not, under any circumstances, to receive visitors. Once in the room I checked the door and window locks – none of which would have stopped even the most inept of housebreakers – and plucked a sanitary bag from the dispenser in the bathroom. I untucked the Grach from the back of my jeans, dropped the magazine, ejected the round in the breech and checked and rechecked the mechanism. Thanks to a sticky can of 3-en-Un machine oil under Baaz’s kitchen sink, the slide was smooth, the metalwork gleaming.

  The Grach MP-443 was a good pistol – reliable and rugged enough to withstand the Russian military’s most extreme postings. It wouldn’t stand up to a SIG on the fifty-metre range. But I wasn’t planning on target shooting. I wasn’t planning on doing any shooting. I put the Grach’s magazine back on, chambered a round and reset the hammer. Then I put the pistol into the sanitary bag, which I tied shut. I removed the top of the lavatory cistern and dropped the plastic-wrapped bundle into the water reservoir.

  Walking around Tel Aviv with an unlicensed pistol was asking for trouble. Shopping centres, cafés, bars – not to mention official buildings – could all be protected by metal detectors. Avoiding them would hamstring my movements more than they were already. Bribery wouldn’t help, either. The private security guards who operated the scanners and bag searches had skin and not just salary in the game: the first to get hit in an attack, they were the last people in whose interest it was not to do a thorough job. If I was found with a weapon and no licence I would be in a world of pain. Getting out of Paris after a firefight would look like a walk in the Champ de Mars compared to trying to flee Israel. I’d narrowly survived the attentions of the French Foreign Legion. I fancied my chances with the Israel Defence Forces even less.

  Maintaining a low profile was a priority. I had no idea how widely circulated my photograph had been at an official level, or if I was publicly associated, visually, with the ambush in La Fée Verte. There was, though, one thing to take comfort from: unlike in Paris and London, CCTV coverage in Tel Aviv was at best patchy. Before I’d left France, Baaz had gone on his own special mission to replace my wardrobe. The ripped black kit I’d assembled before the dive into the tunnels had been replaced with new black jeans, black sneakers and a short black leather jacket. Baaz liked black. I liked Baaz.

  I stuck my arm out, and hailed a cab to the university.

  ‘Ken, ma bishvilkha?’

  ‘Shalom,’ I replied, trying not to sound annoyed. I’d been standing in the doorway, clearing my throat and tapping my foot, while the woman who I assumed was the faculty secretary finished a convoluted and – as far as my shaky Hebrew could make out – entirely personal phone call. ‘I’m here to see Professor Levy.’

  ‘Rachel?’ I nodded.
‘She isn’t …’ She stopped herself abruptly and sized me up. ‘What is your name, please?’ She spoke in careful American-accented English.

  ‘Lazarus,’ I replied. ‘John Lazarus.’ She looked at me, waiting for me to continue. ‘From MIT,’ I added – as if that explained everything. She pursed her lips and raised her finely plucked eyebrows.

  ‘And did you, do you, have an appointment, Mr …’

  ‘Doctor,’ I corrected her.

  ‘… Doctor Lazarus?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I do.’ I checked my watch ostentatiously. ‘In five minutes, to be precise.’ I gave her a quick smile. It wasn’t reciprocated.

  ‘I see.’ She pivoted in her office chair, turning her back fully on the computer screen she’d been facing when I walked in. ‘There is nothing in her diary,’ she said. ‘And your appointment is here, in the faculty?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My assistant called last week. I leave for Boston tomorrow.’

  She turned around again and looked at me closely, as if making her mind up about something.

  ‘Please wait.’

  I didn’t doubt she meant it. I looked around and saw an empty chair behind the door. I sat down. The secretary returned to her screen and tapped away at the keyboard before lifting the receiver on the office phone next to her. She spoke quickly, quietly, and the only words I could make out with any certainty were my assumed name and ‘Rachel Levy’.

  The Kolymsky School of Computer Sciences – part of the Faculty of Exact Sciences – was based in a low-rise four-storey building at the heart of the university campus. It was the kind of place that should have inspired reverence and hushed tones, awe at the seemingly impossible problems being solved behind closed doors. All it inspired in me was an uncomfortable mixture of irritation and nervous expectation.

  A young man stuck his head around the door, looked first at me and then at the secretary – who was deep in an interminable phone conversation that seemed mostly about shakshouka, and how not to cook it. He went to speak and then thought better of it, smiling at me conspiratorially as he backed out into the corridor. A student, most likely. I guessed she had cultivated a reputation that kept all but the most persistent enquirers at bay.