Christopher Jones - The Silent Oligarch

“So who did it?” he said.

Webster sighed. “The next man up. Someone in the Kremlin. A faction in the Kremlin. It’s Russia. We’ll never know.”

Hammer grunted. “They were there already.”

“The Russians?”

He nodded. “Those two guys on the plane? They had nothing to do with it.”

“How do you know?”

“They spent a night in the Holiday Inn at the airport. Then I couldn’t see them anywhere. They vanished. In the end I found a hotel in Hannover. They were there for two nights, then Dortmund for two nights. They’re salesmen. They sell fertilizer.”

“How far is Hannover from Berlin?”

“They couldn’t have done it. You said it. This wasn’t Malin.”

Webster nodded. “The Germans weren’t interested either way.” He looked down at his hands. “I should have listened to Alan Knight. He tried to tell me this was different. I thought he was being paranoid. I think he had reason to be.”

“Never underestimate the power of your opponent,” said Hammer, as if repeating a familiar refrain. Webster nodded, still looking down. “If you know who your opponent is.”

“No news of Alan?”

Hammer shook his head. They were silent for a while.

“Sorry about the press,” said Webster.

Hammer snorted. “God, don’t worry about that. I’m afraid that will do us no harm. Especially once Tourna starts blabbing about it.”

“Christ. How is the client?” He had all but forgotten Tourna.

“Happy as a clam. He thinks you’re wonderful.”

“You’re not serious?”

“I am. He wants to hire you.”

“He didn’t mind the cost?”

“He told me he’d have paid it twice.”

“He’s grotesque.”

“Oh yes. I called him on Monday evening to tell him what had happened and warn him there’d be some press. On Tuesday he called me to congratulate me. He knows there’s no way Malin will survive this.”

“I wish I felt better about that.”

Hammer said nothing.

“Did he mention Lock?” said Webster.

“Not a word.”

Webster shook his head and gave a silent sigh.

Hammer watched him for a moment. “You should go home.”

“Nothing happened at my house?”

“Nothing.”

“Thanks.” Webster made to stand up, then stopped himself, as if he had something to say. They looked at each other for a moment. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

“Take your time.”

“I’m not sure I will be back.”

Hammer simply watched him with mild eyes. His hand pulled at his chin, his fingers closed over his mouth.

“I just came from Marina Lock. I had to pass on his last words.”

Still Hammer said nothing.

“I should have given them to his daughter, because they were for her. But she wasn’t there. All week I’ve been imagining meeting that little girl—Christ, I don’t even know how old she is.” He shook his head. The words were fast, his tone harsh. “All week I’ve been imagining telling her and dreading her asking me who I am. Terrified. Who am I? I’m the man who finished off your father. The man who made him pay for his frankly banal mistakes. But that’s OK, because this other man you may have met but probably don’t remember, he’s finished too.” He stopped, collected himself. “I was relieved. I didn’t even ask where she was. Better for her that I didn’t.”

Hammer held Webster’s eye and nodded gently, bringing his hand away from his mouth.

“How do you feel now about Gerstman?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you still feel responsible?”

“Yes. I think I set things off. Primed the mechanism.”

“But you went on with the case.”

Webster frowned slightly, looking closely at Hammer for a hint of his meaning.

“I did.”

“I’m not criticizing you. But we go on. It’s who we are. We weren’t made to leave things alone.”

“That’s just it. I want to leave things alone. I want to leave them exactly as they are. It doesn’t matter whether that’s me or not.”

Hammer nodded. “I’m not saying that in time you’ll feel better. You won’t. I had a source hang himself once. Years ago, before Ikertu. To this day I don’t know why he did it and to this day it makes me feel sick. You won’t feel better. But you will see better.”

“See what?”

“What we do. Why we do it. That on balance we do some good.”

Not for Gerstman. Not for poor Lock. And for Inessa, he would never know.

He looked away. From the light on the bare trees outside he could tell that the day would be gone in an hour or so.

“Take some time,” said Hammer. “Come back in a month. Two. But come back.”

Webster looked down at the floor and nodded once, the merest inclination of his head.

“Thanks, Ike. We’ll see.”

WEBSTER WALKED EAST ACROSS the Heath. The sun shone low through an avenue of bare limes and picked out in crazed patterns the dead leaves on the ground. It was half past two and Nancy and Daniel would be out of school in an hour. The park was quiet: some runners running, some mothers pushing prams. At the top of a hill he came into the light and there was London beneath him in a bright, cold haze. He walked along a wall of deep green holly and then down the shaded passageway to the pond. Two old men were drying themselves with white towels on the wooden deck. In the changing room he took off his coat, his shoes, his suit, his shirt and his socks, and stepped outside in his shorts. The air pinched his skin. At the end of the diving board he stopped, looked up at the sky above him, a perfect ultramarine, looked down at the green-black water below, and dived, the cold embracing his hands, his head, his tired body, shocking him awake.

“From Chris Morgan Jones, an absolutely terrific novel. It’s about international intrigue—but the real deal. The Silent Oligarch is beautifully written, clean and terse, but you won’t notice, because you’ll be reading just as fast as you can. Very highly recommended, and you’ll want more.”

“A beautifully written thriller about how the power of money has been replacing the power of the state in the former Soviet Union, and how the West is no closer to understanding the way things work there than we ever were… The Silent Oligarch is a smashing debut that will leave most readers anxious to follow Webster on his next assignment.”

“An understated debut that carries a special resonance in the wake of Putin’s bare-knuckled presidential victory. The plot hinges on three men—one bad, one good and one gutless—whose work revolves around the billions of dollars and other assets that slither in and out of opaque jurisdictions stretching from the Cayman Islands to Vanuatu. Like the spies in a John le Carre novel, they are surprisingly plausible… Jones handles the large cast of characters and shifting venues with grace.”

“This is a happy partner to the work of Deighton, Archer, and le Carré. Mysterious men, cryptic of speech and beautifully tailored, move through glittery settings—seacoasts, grand hotels, swank neighborhoods—carried on craftily understated prose that approaches cold poetry… Men are betrayed. Drugged. Kidnapped. Tossed off buildings. Downed by snipers. If the good guys win, it’s at such a cost they’re left wondering if they accomplished anything. They did. They were part of a first-class novel.”

“Like the icy eastern winter that seeps through the pages of his novel, Jones’s prose is clean and cold, crisp and ominous. In its intelligence, its crispness, its refusal to recognise anything other than shades of grey, there are undoubtedly resonances of Le Carré here. But [ The Silent Oligarch ] is too good to need the publishing shorthand for ‘classy thriller’: this is a debut that definitely stands on its own merits.”