Will Adams: The Eden Legacy

Boris nodded. He’d been Sandro’s head of security until everything had gone to shit, after all. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘Things have grown even worse since our Greek… setback.’

Our Greek setback, thought Boris. Is that what they’re calling it these days? Some two years before, during Ilya Nergadze’s ill-fated run at the presidency of the Republic of Georgia, the campaign team had got a tip that their nation’s greatest lost treasure, the golden fleece, had been rediscovered in Greece. But their efforts to bring it back here and so boost Ilya’s flagging popularity had backfired spectacularly, culminating in the death of Ilya’s grandson Mikhail and the destruction of the family’s business empire and political aspirations. ‘I can imagine.’

‘It’s not merely that we have more enemies now,’ continued Sandro. ‘It’s also that they’ve grown bolder, less respectful. People no longer fear us as they did. We’ve introduced extra security, as you no doubt noticed. We’ve also been compelled to start a programme of active threat monitoring.’

‘Active threat monitoring, sir?’

Sandro gestured towards the French windows, the fine view over treetops down to the Black Sea. ‘It’s the damned Internet,’ he said. ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, these days, for our enemies to learn about us. They download satellite photographs of our estates. They check for our names at public events. They search the archives of local newspapers. They gossip about what cars we drive, what planes and yachts we own. All from the comfort and safety of their living rooms.’ He turned back to face Boris. ‘But it works both ways, particularly if you hire the right people.’

Boris nodded. The Nergadzes had never begrudged spending money on their own safety. ‘As you have, no doubt.’

‘We’ve set up various websites and chat rooms,’ said Sandro. ‘We’ve seeded them with the kind of confidential information that our enemies would dearly love to know. Some of it’s even true. We make these sites hard to find, so that only our more dedicated… followers can find them. Then we monitor them, particularly for return visitors. Mostly these prove to be journalists or business rivals. Nuisances, not menaces.’

‘But not always?’ suggested Boris.

Sandro opened his briefcase, drew out a single folded sheet of paper. ‘One of the most persistent comes from a British marine salvage company calledMGS,’ he said. ‘Quite small. Just fifteen full-time employees, though they add subcontractors for certain projects. They’re scheduled to run a month-long survey of the eastern Black Sea this autumn.’

‘Ah,’ said Boris, glancing towards the French windows.

‘This is a printout of their Who We Are page,’ said Sandro, passing Boris the sheet. ‘Recognise anyone?’

Boris unfolded the page, eight thumbnails of young and middle-aged men, presumably senior staff. But the portraits were too small for him to tell much about them; and the names and job titles meant nothing either. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Bottom row,’ prompted Sandro. ‘Second from right.’

Boris looked again. A man called Matthew Richardson. His photo wasn’t just small, it was blurred, too, as though taken on the move. And now that it had his attention, there was something faintly familiar about him, though he couldn’t at first work out what. But then he realised who Sandro and Ilya thought it was, if only because they’d never have summoned him here otherwise. He flinched from an unpleasant memory like flesh from a flame, shook his head. ‘Daniel Knox is dead,’ he said emphatically. ‘He had kidney failure from the burns he took when he and Mikhail…’ He trailed off, not wanting to finish the thought.

‘That’s what they told us,’ agreed Sandro.

‘Why would they have lied?’ asked Boris. But he realised the answer even as he spoke. They’d have lied to protect Knox from the five million euro bounty that Ilya Nergadze had put on his head in retribution for killing his grandson during the golden fleece fiasco. Boris breathed in deep before he looked again at the photo. There was a superficial resemblance; he couldn’t deny it. And the man in the photo had shaven his scalp and grown a thin beard, much as you’d expect from someone trying to change their look. But he also had higher cheekbones than he remembered Knox having, the bridge of his nose was broader, and he looked darker, older, angrier and altogether more formidable. He shook his head as he looked back up at Sandro. ‘It’s not him,’ he said.

‘Are you certain?’ asked Sandro. ‘Bear in mind you might not be the only one who’s had plastic surgery.’

‘Then how can you possibly expect me to identify him from this?’ protested Boris. ‘I’d need to be able to get up close to him, see how he walks, hear his voice and how…’ He broke off as he realised belatedly where this was going. ‘No way,’ he said flatly. ‘The Europeans have my biometrics. They have my DNA. They’d grab me the moment I landed. I’d never get out this time.’

‘Relax,’ said Sandro. ‘We’re not suggesting you go back to Europe. As you say, it was hard enough for us to get you out last time.’ He allowed a little time to pass, presumably to let Boris reflect on the fact that he’d still be in his Greek hellhole prison if the Nergadzes hadn’t had him sprung. ‘But this man isn’t in England at the moment. Or even in Europe. That’s why we brought you here so urgently. We only learned of it ourselves this morning.’

‘Where, then?’

‘On a salvage project,’ said Sandro, opening his briefcase again, taking out a bulky white envelope that he offered across. ‘Off the west coast of Madagascar.’

The envelope’s flap was tucked inside itself. The edge of the stiff paper cut Boris’s thumb as he released it, coaxing out a thin line of blood that left a series of smudged red partials on the contents as he spread them on the bedside table: ten thousand euros in several bundles of banknotes; a sheaf of press-cuttings about some Chinese shipwreck; a first-class ticket in his new name, flying via Istanbul and Johannesburg to the Madagascan capital Antananarivo; a separate ticket on to some provincial airport he’d never heard of called Morombe. ‘And what do you expect me to do when I get to this place?’

‘We want you to track down this man Richardson,’ replied Sandro. ‘We want you to determine whether or not he is really Daniel Knox.’

‘And if he is?’ asked Boris.

Sandro glanced down at the floor, his discomfort evident. But a noise to Boris’s left startled him. He’d almost forgotten that Ilya was there. The old man clawed his mask down once more so that he could speak; his mouth and eyes were cruel and fierce, though his voice was so weak that Boris had to lean in closer to him to make out the words.

‘I want you to kill him,’ he said.

The tiger shark reappeared while Knox and the rest of his dive-team were at three metres, finishing their decompression. It circled several times, looking unnervingly interested, but then the inflatable arrived to pick them up, and the noise and churn of its outboard seemed to deter it, for it turned and swam away.

The Maritsa was chugging slowly towards them as they surfaced. It usually stayed well clear of the wrecksite, partly from respect for the nearby reefs, made doubly dangerous by the freak waves that sometimes came out of nowhere along this coast, but mostly to make it hard for anyone watching to mark the site of the wreck with a notional X. But the stern crane was the easiest way to recover artefacts the size of the anchor, which meant positioning directly above it.

As an archaeologist, Knox was accustomed to taking plenty of time examining artefacts in their context before recovering them; but that wasn’t possible here. They only had the Maritsa for six weeks, and once they were done they couldn’t lock this site up as they could on land, put a fence around it and hire security guards until the following year. It would be open season for any unscrupulous treasure hunter with some scuba gear or even an industrial dredge, so they needed to recover what they could, while they could.