Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  ‘Kneel down.’

  He was trembling, sweat glossed his face. Close up, in the brighter light of his office, I could see him clearly for what he was: a mid-fifties, art-dealing, mafioso arsehole. I turned my head.

  ‘You too.’

  The skinny brunette standing next to him got on her knees as well, high heels splayed out behind her, miniskirt halfway up her waist. She’d been bent over when we walked in, snorting a line of white powder off the desk. Now she was sobbing, eyes red and wet, begging me in hoarse, tear-soaked Russian whispers not to hurt her. She was pretty and still in her teens, and as high as a kite.

  ‘Listen,’ he pleaded in Russian. ‘You’re not the Shabak, so who are you? We can cut a deal. Is it money? I’ve got money. You can have money. My name is Avi, OK? Avi Landau. Everyone knows I have money. Sveta, show him where the safe is, honey. Give him the money.’

  Sveta looked at me. I looked at Sveta and then behind her at what I guessed was a door to a walk-in closet.

  ‘Is the safe in there?’

  She nodded. More sobbing. She buried her face in her hands, gagging on the phlegm clogging her nose and throat.

  ‘OK, get up and get in and lock the door. Don’t come out till the police tell you to.’ She looked at Avi for permission. ‘Move!’

  She stood and then lurched forward, grabbing at the desk to steady herself. Keeping her back to me, she ran her fingers across the remnants of the powder, rubbing it into her gums, before stepping through the doorway. I turned back to Avi.

  ‘I got your number from a mutual friend. I’d like to do some business.’ His eyes widened. ‘I’ve got one hundred dollars,’ I continued in Russian. ‘It’s an unusual bill. A very sought-after issue. I’d like to know what I can buy with it.’

  He dropped his hands slightly and held them out towards me, palms up.

  ‘OK, man, I don’t know who your friend is, but you got the wrong guy. You understand? If you want money, or a painting, we can talk, but …’

  I cut him off with a round through the left hand. His thumb, forefinger detached. Blood splattered his face. Sveta screamed through the door. He doubled over, groaning through gritted teeth, forehead scraping the floor. Outside, the music throbbed and pulsed, louder and louder.

  ‘What can I buy with my hundred dollars, Avi?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘fuck you.’ I swept my left leg around, catching him on the left ear with my foot. He fell sideways, and looked up at me.

  ‘Do you know who the fuck I am?’

  Right foot thrust kick to the ribcage.

  I felt bone crack under the force of the blow. Old-school punishment beating: underrated and surprisingly effective. PIRA had taught us a trick or two. Avi balled up on his side, the remains of his bloodied hand clamped over his shattered ribs, knees drawn up to his chest. Saliva pooled on the floor beneath his cheek. I kicked him again in the same spot and felt more bones snap. He was in trouble now. Blood bubbled around his mouth; his breathing had become shallow and fast. In all likelihood I’d punctured his lung. I squatted down and pushed the tip of the Jericho into the back of his left knee.

  ‘Tell me about the money.’

  ‘I swear I …’

  I shot out his kneecap.

  Avi roared a deep, tearing scream. He writhed and begged and brought both his hands down to the wound. The knee had imploded; lead, bone and shredded clothing blown out through the joint. I kicked his hands away and put the muzzle of the pistol against the back of his right knee. Sveta stopped screaming. I took out the hundred-dollar bill and held it in front of his face.

  ‘What,’ I said, ‘does this money buy?’

  ‘Please God, no. Please. Please.’

  ‘What did it buy Rachel?’ I pushed the barrel of the Jericho deep into the soft flesh below his thigh.

  ‘Arkhangel,’ he hissed through gritted teeth.

  ‘What the fuck is Arkhangel?’

  ‘Her work, man. Her project. The money paid for everything. Understand? Everything. Please, help me now. Please.’

  ‘Who sends it?’

  He was crying wildly now, the pain crushing the sense out of him. The main door to the office swung open. The doorman from downstairs had replaced his metal detector with a Mossberg pump-action. As he raised the barrel, I put two rounds in his chest. He collapsed backwards into the corridor. I walked over to him. There was no one else in sight – just the illuminated emergency exit sign at the far end of the corridor. And then the music stopped.

  Screaming. Heels clicking on stone.

  Motorcycle cops would arrive within seconds of the barman’s body being dialled in. I dragged the bouncer into the office by his ankle and closed the door. Breath rattled in his chest. I shot him again, and then turned the pistol on Avi.

  ‘This is it, Avi. This is what all their money gets you. Shit paintings and a bullet to the head.’ He crossed himself right to left, the Orthodox way. ‘Who sends it?’ I asked again.

  ‘Moskva,’ he gurgled through the blood and pain. ‘The Akvarium.’

  29

  ‘You killed Landau, didn’t you?’

  I found Baaz slumped on the beach where we’d agreed to meet, just south of the marina. He was balled up against the cold, shivering. Leaving the bar immediately the fight broke out, he’d swapped the crimson turban for a plain, black wrap. I hoped he’d walked the long way around. It was quiet, just a couple of kids drinking beer and making out by the promenade. Further off, a string of joggers pounded along by the sea.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, squatting down beside him. ‘What’s done is done.’

  It had taken me well over an hour to get to him, ducking down side streets and back alleys. It was a relief to escape the blue light shed by the police cars. The cops had made it into the bar while I was still upstairs. I’d forced a window and scaled a drainpipe, before taking off over the roofs and dropping down into a private garden. The Shabak would put two and two together almost immediately – if it hadn’t had someone in place in the joint all along. I hoped Sveta had stayed put until the cops covered the bodies. To them it would just look like a gangland shootout.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I messed up.’ His voice cracked. Tears fell on to the already wet sand between his bent knees. He was shaking – though whether from nerves or the cold I couldn’t tell. ‘If I’d done like you said and hidden the gun, you wouldn’t have had to kill the barman.’ His shoulders heaved. A light breeze from inland carried his sobs off over the sea. ‘I knew how important it was. I know how much trouble we’re in. And now it’s my fault he’s dead.’

  ‘Hey …’ I put my hand on his shoulder. We were too exposed. The city was no longer safe – if it ever had been. ‘It’s OK. I asked too much of you, that’s all. It wasn’t your fault. If he hadn’t drawn on me, he’d be mixing Moscow mules right now.’ I could see how he was pinned. I’d been hanging from the same hook for days. I wanted to tell him that at least the barman hadn’t been his oldest, only friend. ‘We create our own Angel of Death, Baaz. He made his. That’s all there is to it.’

  He wiped the snot out of his moustache with the back of his sleeve.

  ‘And I’ve made mine by coming here, haven’t I?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you anything that isn’t true. This is dirty work and we’re up against it, that’s for sure. All hell’s going to break loose in the morning. Let’s hope Ezra was right about Talia keeping us alive.’

  ‘Yeah, but which Talia?’ He managed a weak laugh at his own joke.

  ‘Best to stand up, shake it off. We’ll look less conspicuous if we’re walking.’

  I hauled him to his feet and then washed my hands and face in the sticky salt water lapping the sand by his feet. My clothes were still fouled with blood, but the black fabric hid most of the gore. We headed north, keeping the sea to our left.

  ‘Listen, Baaz. I need to ask you something. You have to concentrate, all right?’ I took his silence for agree
ment and pressed on. ‘The Azriel Jacobs fellowship. Have you ever heard of it?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Azriel Jacobs research fellowship at the Kolymsky School of Computer Sciences. Here in Tel Aviv. Had you heard of it? Before we met, I mean.’

  ‘No, I hadn’t. Are we going back to the hotel? I’m freezing.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We are. But right now I need you to think hard. Are you sure? It didn’t mean anything to you, nothing at all?’

  ‘I don’t …’ He looked around, eyes wide, hands shaking. ‘When I read it in the paper online. In Haaretz. That’s the first time I saw it.’

  ‘OK. You’re sure? When you were researching where to study, applying to university, looking for funding: you never heard it mentioned anywhere else?’

  ‘No,’ he said, wrinkling his brow. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Think about it,’ I said, quickening the pace. ‘Azriel. Azrael. It’s the same name. Azriel pays her. She looked upon the face of her paymaster and her paymaster is the Destroyer.’ Baaz looked at me, dumbfounded. ‘And it terrified her. Moshe said she was scared, that the money came from bad people.’

  ‘So, what?’ he stopped abruptly. ‘She’s being paid by the Devil?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘She is. Was. Avi Landau, the guy whose number is in this book of matches’ – I took them out of my pocket and lit a cigarette – ‘he didn’t just run the gallery. He ran cash to her. He said it paid for Rachel’s work, her project.’ I looked around. We were completely alone now. ‘Her programme is called Arkhangel. It’s the third variable.’

  ‘Follow the money, right?’ Baaz’s fingers began to dance in the air in front of him.

  Follow the money. Everyone else certainly was, Frank included. Round and round the money goes, but where it starts only a Russian knows. Except now I did, too.

  ‘It comes from the Akvarium,’ I said. ‘In Moscow.’

  ‘Now you’re speaking Punjabi. What even is “the Akvarium”?’

  I took a long drag on my cigarette.

  ‘It’s the headquarters of the GRU,’ I said. ‘Russian military intelligence.’

  We continued towards the hotel in silence. I tried to ignore the chill in the air, struggling to work out what all the slaughter amounted to. Baaz’s fingers drummed the air beside him as he walked. Whatever was going through his mind didn’t make it to his lips. Speaking slowed him down. Numbers energized him. I made my own calculations, too.

  Whatever Rachel was working on was being underwritten by the GRU, lubricated with a slick of untraceable filthy lucre.

  The visit to Gallery 7 answered the question I’d asked Moshe: I now knew which Russians were supplying the cash. But if Rachel hadn’t simply absconded, Moscow could still have been responsible for her disappearance. Just because the doctor and his goons were behind the curve didn’t mean the Russians were out of the picture. If Leonid Avilov had exceeded his orders as far as I’d exceeded mine, he could be a long way off-piste – and as out in the cold as I was.

  I considered that carefully. It was a real possibility: my father – every inch the Ministry of Defence loyalist as well as a brilliant scientist – had once told me that ‘London is not a monolith’. Thames House competed with, and loathed, Vauxhall Cross; MI5 and MI6 agents outplayed each other for grace and favour, ego and advancement; government undermined the military; the Foreign Office undermined everyone else. They all played their own games for their own ends – ends which sometimes, but not always, excused the means. There was no reason to expect that Moscow was any different, and every reason to suspect it wasn’t.

  In the catacombs Avilov had told me that I was a hard man to help. Maybe he wasn’t the enemy. Or maybe that was the point: there were no enemies, because there were no friends. Whoever held the banknote held the cards. Perhaps Rachel knew she’d been dealt a dead man’s hand and folded. The more I looked at it, the more that hundred-dollar bill looked like aces backed with eights – with the queen of hearts in the hole. I thought of Doc’s last words to me: She’tamut. To death. It was a game that had already seen the end of a better gambler than me.

  The closer we got to the hotel, the clearer it became: there was only one way to protect Baaz. Rachel had unburdened herself. It was suddenly inevitable I’d have to do the same. We drew up alongside Independence Park, deserted in the winter night.

  ‘Stop a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ve something for you. Give me your hand.’

  Baaz hesitated and then stretched out his palm, his fingers finally stilled. On to it I pressed the folded banknote.

  ‘Don’t you need it?’

  ‘No. I’ve memorized the numbers.’ Baaz raised his eyebrows as he pocketed the bill. ‘I’ll never work out what they mean, though – assuming there is anything to work out.’ We stood close, barely more than a foot apart. ‘You have my pistol, at the hotel. Leave it there. And don’t, under any circumstances, fuck with Talia.’ We both smiled.

  ‘Why are you giving me this? We’re a team, right?’

  ‘Right. And that’s why I’m trusting you. It’s why I told you everything. I doubt very much I’m going to make it up the steps to the hotel, which is why you’re going to turn around now and keep clear till dawn. Photograph both sides of the note, and then hide it. Send it to yourself encrypted, and then throw your phone in the sea. Once the Shabak has picked me up, Talia will find you and interrogate you. If you’re clean, she’ll probably just deport you.’

  The alternatives to not being deported didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘Well then, don’t walk up the bloody hotel steps. Problem solved.’

  ‘Trust me, Baaz. There’s no other way.’

  I was expecting an argument. This time I held out my hand. He hesitated and then took it with a force that surprised me. His eyes had filled with tears.

  ‘How will I find you if I work out what the numbers mean? You don’t even have a phone.’

  ‘I’ll check in with our mutual friend in Sierra Leone. If you leave a message with him, I’ll get it. Eventually.’

  ‘Kushkismat,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

  I turned around to take a last look at him as he was walking away. After a few paces he stopped and turned, too.

  ‘Max,’ he said, cheeks wet, but with a strong voice, ‘I have to know. In the hotel … if you hadn’t, you know, seen the numbers. Would you have killed me?’

  My shoulders slumped and I squinted at him through the gloom. I knew then that he’d be OK. He was a smart kid, canny. And though he had the frame of a boy, he was wiry and lean: a man, no mistake – however unlike me in the making. I’d trusted him with everything else. There was no point lying now.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, pulling my jacket tight to my chest. ‘I would have.’

  He held my gaze for an instant and then set off, head down, towards the city. That was the trouble with the truth: once it starts, it’s hard to stop.

  There was no police car waiting for me, no snatch squad; and if there was a sniper watching, he was sitting tight. I made it up the stairs and pushed open the doors to the hotel, treading carefully across the marble floor. Only the night manager’s lamp lit the lobby. He was asleep in his chair, neck crooked at an impossible angle. I looked at his thorax. Breathing. I cleared my throat and he roused himself, tightening the tie under his creased white collar.

  ‘Shalom,’ I said. And then in English: ‘Room 101, please. Has anyone asked after me?’

  He composed himself and leaned forward, looking at me, through me. His mouth opened, but the reply came from behind.

  ‘No, they haven’t.’ The harsh syllables rang with a seductive edge. I splayed my fingers out, hands wide of my sides, and turned: black hair, pale face, cheekbones like knives.

  ‘Hello, Talia.’

  ‘Good morning, Mr McLean. Quite the holiday you’re having.’

  ‘It’s been enlightening, shall we say.’ She stood staring at me, right hand in her coat pocket. Left hand holding a cell phone. ‘
Nine millimetre,’ I said, ‘in the back of my jeans. Just so there are no misunderstandings.’

  She nodded and I extracted the Jericho with my thumb and forefinger from my Levi’s. I crouched and put it on the floor at arm’s length and then stood up straight again. The night manager circled around me, Glock 19 at the ready. They had the place locked down. She told me to kick the Jericho to him and I did. He picked it up and moved behind me again, out of sight.

  ‘I guess it’s over between us, then.’

  Her lips lifted into a half-smile. ‘On the contrary. It’s not me I’m worried about getting shot. This is just – how shall we say – an insurance policy.’

  ‘Sure. How is Moshe, by the way?’

  ‘Dead. We found him this afternoon. Shot through the heart with a police pistol.’

  She turned and held the street door open for me. That he’d been killed was not surprising; how he’d been killed was profoundly alarming.

  ‘I see,’ I said, trying not to take the bait. ‘Tell me, why “the Traitor”? He served you well in Lebanon.’

  ‘Why? I will tell you why. The Palestinians. The Iranians. Even the Russians. They are our enemies.’ She stood close to me. I could feel her breath on my lips, smell the musk of a long day clinging to her clothes. ‘They want Israel to fall. All this,’ she looked around the lobby as if it encompassed the extent of her aspirations, ‘gone.’ She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. ‘But an enemy is just an enemy. A traitor was once a friend. Even so, don’t blame us, Mr McLean. Moshe Mendel Katz had many enemies of his own.’

  I brushed past her on to the steps outside. A black Chevrolet Suburban pulled up – tinted windows, diplomatic plates, off-road tyres.

  ‘It’s no longer safe for you to stay in Israel, Mr McLean. I made a promise to our mutual friend. But questions are being asked. Questions I cannot avoid any longer. No one will miss Avraham Landau. But the girl, Sveta? That was, uh, unfortunate.’ The rear nearside passenger door opened.