Christopher Jones - The Silent Oligarch

He was not a master criminal. After three large gin and tonics on a morning flight it was important to remember that.

He circled around the problem for a while, discounting ideas as too timid or too reckless. Chekhanov, though, wouldn’t go away. He was the weak spot. Well, the only spot that felt weak at all. There had been a time, years before, when he and Lock had had offices next to each other in a building just off Novy Arbat until Malin had decided that this gave the wrong impression and separated them. But even now he was in Alexei’s office regularly. If he could only have twenty minutes in there alone. There were what, five or six filing cabinets in there?

Every Tuesday at seven, an hour before Lock, Chekhanov met with Malin, and every two or three weeks he and Lock would see each other beforehand to prepare for their respective sessions. Invariably Chekhanov ran out of these meetings in a rush, apologizing to Lock and leaving him to see himself out. All Lock had to do was arrange their meeting for next Tuesday and arrive a little late with a full agenda. Better still, what if his phone rang as Chekhanov was leaving? He could take it, make some grave noises, and ask Alexei whether he could stay to finish it. The scene played out neatly in his mind.

LOCK SLEPT for the last part of the flight, a heavy sleep that left him feeling slow and thick; he woke as the plane bounced gently off the runway at Sheremetyevo. Moscow looked flat and gray, beset by low cloud, already almost dark. Aching across his shoulders and down his back, Lock unclicked his seat belt, stood up to retrieve his suitcase, and stretched in the aisle. It was a quiet flight. At least that was something; no London flight was ever like this. With luck he would be near the front of the passport queue and be through the airport without that awful shuffling wait.

An hour and fifteen minutes, in the end: two planes’ worth of Koreans and Bulgarians had arrived just before him. He had had worse. Wheeling his bag behind him he strolled through Customs, handing his declaration to an officer, and then out into Russia proper to search for Andrei and his car. Usually he waited by the Hertz desk, but today he wasn’t there. Lock stopped and looked down the length of the hall in each direction. No sign. He set his bag straight and took out his Russian phone. As he was finding the number he felt a hand on his upper arm.

“Mr. Lock.” A deep, flat voice, Russian. Lock looked around to his right and then up. The man talking to him was tall, perhaps six three, and broad. He had fine, fair hair cropped so short that Lock could see the white scalp beneath.

“Yes.”

“Can you come with us please? We will take you into the city.”

Lock turned to his left. Another man, similar in build, a little shorter, with gray hair and a broken nose stood there with his hands clasped respectfully in front of him. Both were wearing impenetrable black winter jackets and jeans.

“Where’s Andrei?”

“We are standing in for Andrei today.”

Lock was awake now. He had no idea what this meant. Fear flickered through him.

“Who sent you?”

“We’re from the ministry.”

The gray-haired man took Lock’s bag and started wheeling it across the concourse. His colleague let go of Lock’s arm.

“Come. Please.”

Lock followed. He became conscious of his briefcase. Why had he written those stupid notes? He should tell them that he needed to go to the bathroom, then tear out the page and flush it away. What if they took the briefcase off him while he went? God, he was hopeless at this. They hadn’t taken it, he reasoned; if they had wanted to, they would have.

Down below in the mess of smoking cars parking and waiting a black BMW flashed its lights and the three of them got in, Lock in the back, his reception party bulky in the front. It was dark now, and the gray-haired man drove at speed through the lumbering traffic like someone used to immunity. Lock didn’t talk. He knew that he wouldn’t get answers from these two. They looked like special forces. Not that he really knew about such things, but they were clearly a different breed from Andrei.

Slowly the tower blocks and the billboards became denser and from the dark Moscow began to coalesce into a city. They passed Dynamo Stadium and carried on down Leningradsky Prospect toward the ministry. But at Mayakovskaya they turned east onto the Garden Ring. That didn’t make sense. Lock felt, like a shock, a new fear: what if these men had nothing to do with Malin at all? What if they were FSB? Or worse, someone else’s people, which would mean—what? That Malin had fallen from grace?

They were off the Ring now and into the messy heart of the city. The BMW swept through a tangle of small streets, the stuccoed buildings low around them and a dull orange in the street light. Lock knew this route. It would take him close to his flat. The car turned left into Maly Zlatoustinsky pereulok, his street, and pulled up outside his building. The blond man got out of the car and opened Lock’s door for him. Lock, wary, lifted himself slowly out of the car while the blond man fetched his suitcase.

“What are we doing?” Lock asked.

“We’re taking you home. That is all.”

Lock walked up to the building, found his keys and opened the front door. In the lobby he called the lift. The blond man stood next to him as they waited, looking straight ahead at the lift door.

Lock’s apartment was on the fifth floor. He took his keys, opened the three deadlocks, and went in. The blond man followed, setting the case down in the hall.

“Thank you,” said Lock.

The blond man said nothing and left.

Lock took off his coat, threw it over a chair and went into the kitchen. He had gin, but no tonic. There was vodka in the freezer and he poured himself two inches into a water glass and drank it in one slack swallow. It felt like light, cool and warm in his throat.

He closed his eyes for a moment and gave a small shudder. He had no idea what was going on. Was Andrei simply sick? Of all the outlandish possibilities flying around his head this, absurdly, was one of the more plausible. He walked into his sitting room, which ran the length of the apartment at the front, and looked out the window. The BMW was still there, parked right outside. Presumably it would wait to take him to the ministry in an hour or so. As far as Lock could tell only the driver’s seat was occupied. He watched for a while. The army veteran in winter camouflage who looked after parking for this building left the car alone. Two or three minutes passed.

Then an icy thought took Lock. He went to his front door and looked through the spyhole. It was clear. He opened the door to scan the corridor, and there, standing to the right with his arms crossed and his back straight against the wall, was the blond man. Now Lock understood.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Waiting for you.”

He didn’t need to ask anything more. He closed the door, went to pour himself another drink, and sat at the kitchen table. He was under house arrest.

That was the logical assumption. If they had wanted to shoot him they would have done it by now.

There were different kinds of house arrest. Sometimes you were allowed out under close watch; sometimes you weren’t allowed out at all. Sometimes it ran and ran; sometimes it came to a most definite end. How long had the Romanovs had? A year? A little more?

For twenty minutes he sat and thought and drank. Then his doorbell rang. Again he walked to the spyhole. A large man in a suit was there, rounder than usual in the distorting lens. Malin had never been to his apartment before. Lock opened the door.

“Richard.”

“Konstantin.”

“May I come in?”

“Of course, of course.”