Christopher Jones - The Silent Oligarch

“Mr. Lock?”

“Yes.”

“Excuse my calling so late, Mr. Lock. This is Benedict Webster. From Ikertu.” He paused. “I was hoping we could talk.”

Webster heard only silence. He couldn’t even hear breathing. He wondered whether Lock still had the phone by his ear or had let it drop to his side.

Eventually Lock spoke, not whispering but quietly. “How do you know where I am?”

“I’m an investigator. I called the big hotels.”

“How do you know I’m in London?”

“I guessed you’d be here after Cayman.”

Silence again. “Does Tourna know you’re talking to me?”

“No one does. Just my boss.”

“What do you want? It’s late.”

“I think our interests might be more aligned than you think.” A couple passed Webster and he glanced at them, the man slightly ahead, neither talking. Lock took his time. Onder was right, he was in thinking mode. Before he could think too much Webster said, “I’m downstairs. We could meet now.” Again a pause. “If your bodyguard is a problem I could tell you how to lose him.”

That was too much. “We have nothing to discuss,” said Lock, louder now and stiffer than before. “Unless it’s a settlement.”

“Please understand, Mr. Lock. Our interest is in Konstantin Malin, not in you.”

“I have nothing to say. Mr. Malin is a friend. You have harassed my associates all around the world and dredged up muck where there is none. Now you are harassing me. Good night. If you call again I’ll call the police.” He put down the phone.

Webster put the receiver back in its cradle and thought for a moment. This was promising. He found the nearest lift and took it to the fourth floor. He walked down one broad corridor, then another, then a third. Outside a room that must have been directly above Lock’s there was a large trolley laden with towels, toilet rolls, notepaper, soaps, bottles of shampoo. The door to the room was open and Webster waited a few yards away for the maid to come out. She was young and thickset, with fair hair tied back in a bun. She closed the door behind her.

“Evening,” Webster said, walking up to her. The maid turned around. “I was wondering whether I could ask a favor?”

From an inside pocket he brought out a pen and one of his cards and wrote something on its blank side. Then he took an envelope from the trolley, put the card inside, and gave the maid two twenty-pound notes.

“Here. Would you give this to the man inside room 324? It’s very important the man outside doesn’t see it. Take it in some towels or something.”

The maid looked at him doubtfully.

“It’s OK. There’s nothing else in there. Could you do it now?”

She moved the trolley away from the door of the room and parked it carefully against a wall. Then she walked toward the back stairs. Webster followed her, along the corridor, across the landing and down one flight of stairs. He watched her turn a corner toward Lock’s room and then proceeded on down to the lobby, out of the hotel and home to wait.

NOW THEY WERE PHONING HIM. Ikertu knew where he was, they knew where he’d been, and now they were calling him. Perhaps they could tell him what was going to happen to him. He wanted badly to know. What a strange business Webster’s was. The Cayman police he could understand. They had a purpose. But what sort of a person did the bidding of a man like Tourna?

Lock was half undressed. On his return from dinner with Onder he had taken off his jacket, shoes and trousers and poured himself a Scotch; the gin wasn’t quite working this evening. When Webster had phoned he was sitting on his bed, trying to find a film to watch on television. His body was confused: half of him was four hours east of here, the other half ten hours west, and he had no idea whether he was tired or not. He didn’t want to sleep, though. He needed something to occupy his mind.

He flicked through the hotel’s on-demand service. No heist films, he thought; no romances, comic or otherwise; no drama either. Mindless action was all he could take.

Lock looked at the phone in its cradle. What had Webster wanted, really? To confirm he was in his room? To make him nervous probably. How funny that Ikertu now felt like an irritant; how funny that just a day ago he had still been in Cayman and daring to think that life was not all bad. He would have stayed there, given any chance. Of all the islands in his offshore world Lock had always liked Cayman. It was tiny, a small town; nothing happened there; the weather was always the same. It had a beach that was seven miles long.

Many years before, Lock had taken Marina to Grand Cayman. He wanted her to see what he saw when he went away, to know how generous the world could be. They stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, a newly built palace by the sea, in a vast suite that overlooked the seven-mile beach. It had two bathrooms and a kitchen that they never used. The walls were a tasteful yellow that sometimes looked like cream, and the French windows, all three of them, had pelmets pleated from some deep red, faintly rustic fabric. On their first morning, awake early with jet lag, they went down to the sea to swim before dawn. As they stepped onto the sand an old man in shorts and a baseball cap ran past; otherwise they saw no one. By the sea’s quiet edge they kicked off their plastic hotel sandals and let their white robes drop to the sand and ran in together, Lock diving as the water reached his knees, Marina screaming with surprise at its warmth. On the eastern horizon the dawn was a slim line of bronze behind black cloud.

They spent a week in Cayman, and most of it in the hotel. Every morning they ate breakfast on the terrace—papayas and mangoes, eggs with broiled ham, a basket of bread and cakes that they always left—and then lay on the beach, read, swam in the luminous sea. Marina kept to the shade. She was reading Middlemarch, he remembered, a book he had never finished. He ran in the evenings along the beach, the fine sand making heavy work for his bare feet. At night he could feel the charge between his tanned, dry skin and her cool, pale body, untouched by the sun.

After three days Marina wanted to get out of the hotel and explore. They hired mopeds and rode along the coast road around three-quarters of the island; on their left in among the scrub and the thickets of red birch were hotels and golf courses, on their right only the sea. At Rum Point they stopped at a bar and had sandwiches and cold beer in a low cabin on the white sand. Marina had wanted to carry on and Lock had had to explain to her that the road went no farther. That was it. That was the island.

That afternoon he went snorkeling with a guide and Marina stayed at the hotel. She was bored. It took him a while to realize it, but she was. At the time he told himself that this was because he worked hard in a stressful job and needed to switch off, completely—had earned the right to, in fact—whereas she had space left in her head. Marina seemed to think the same. For the rest of their stay they were happy with each other but somehow this was his holiday now, not hers.

And ten years later here he was, back at the Ritz-Carlton, in a smaller room, preparing for his interview with the Cayman police. This time, instead of his beautiful wife, he had with him Lawrence Griffin and two immense Russian men. Still, he was happy to arrive. After checking in he stood by the window in his room, unable to concentrate; he was meant to be going through long lists of companies and transactions that he had drawn up for the following day. Looking down on the beach he could only think of Marina. The reason she didn’t like it here, he finally understood, was that she needed to remain engaged with the world. Always. Escape made no sense to her because she had nothing to escape from.