Angel in the Shadows Page 16

  ‘Know thy enemy,’ he said. ‘We can’t rehabilitate Farah without going after the bastard himself.’

  Paul looked at a photo of a youthful Valentin, smiling stiffly at the photographer, clearly ill at ease, in a suit he probably didn’t wear every day.

  ‘He must have been eighteen there,’ Edward said. ‘An economics student. He’d only just arrived in Moscow.’

  Paul knew relatively little about Lavrov. Anya had given him material only about the structure and working practices of AtlasNet, so information about the man behind the scenes was more than welcome.

  ‘This,’ Edward said, pointing to another black-and-white photo, ‘is our man when he was twenty years of age and a rising star in the Young Communist League, Komsomol.’

  Paul saw a different Lavrov. The somewhat shy-looking young man had been replaced by a self-assured guy: comfortable among his Communist peers, a cigarette dangling between his fingers.

  Tracing the course of Lavrov’s career, Paul soon realized it wasn’t just well planned; he’d also been given a leg up by those in political power. Economics and politics were inseparable in Russia. Before too long, Lavrov’s economics degree and his connections at Komsomol brought him to the Institute of International Relations in Moscow, an elite school where students were trained for the KGB and government roles. While working at the Ministry of Trade, he and some partners founded the energy company AtlasNet. He was introduced into higher political circles by people who’d later occupy important positions in his company. Lavrov cunningly presented himself as a committed nationalist with a rock-solid faith in the Kremlin’s power. Besides, he was young, ambitious and completely in line with the man rising to power, Potanin, whom he’d befriended.

  ‘This is a unique copy,’ Edward said. ‘I dug it out of the archive of one of our photographers.’

  Paul was looking at a private snap of Potanin celebrating his first presidential election victory with his bosom buddy at his dacha on the Black Sea coast.

  ‘Less than a week after this photo was taken, Potanin’s main rival, oligarch Aleksandr Zyuganov, was locked up in Siberia after a show trial,’ Edward said. ‘On account of so-called tax fraud. Tax fraud, my arse. Zyuganov was the owner of energy company NovaMost, one of the biggest energy firms in the country, and with an international presence too. And what happens? As a reward for his arse-licking, our friend Lavrov is handed three quarters of all NovaMost shares. Overnight, he becomes what he has now been for years: the filthy rich CEO of a global energy consortium.’

  While Paul studied the photos of Lavrov, Edward marched over to his pride and joy, which stood on a sturdy wooden frame in the middle of his office: a handmade bar globe, featuring the continents and oceans in vintage colours.

  ‘I want to be able to prove that AtlasNet is nothing other than a Potanin-led criminal organization that resorts to bribery, intimidation and probably even murder on a worldwide scale,’ Edward said, while snapping open the globe.

  But Paul was momentarily blind to its attractions. In his mind’s eye he was back on the fiftieth floor of the Ponte City tower in Johannesburg, helplessly watching how Lavrov’s henchmen had hurled his battered informant over the edge. The man had been on the verge of giving him information about AtlasNet’s secret payments to the South African authorities. At that moment he could never have foreseen, not even in his wildest fantasies, that only a little later this same Lavrov would be linked to Farah.

  He turned to Edward, who waved his arm like a showman to highlight a collection of American, Japanese and Scottish whiskies, both single malts and blends.

  ‘My phone hasn’t stopped ringing,’ Edward said. ‘Everybody, from the Russian Ambassador in The Hague to the Foreign Secretary, they all want to know why we jobbed out Hafez as a PR lady for a bunch of Chechen terrorists.’

  With a confident gesture, he singled out a particular bottle.

  ‘And, since you’re going to show them they’re all completely wrong, I’ve purchased this Kilchoman especially for the occasion. A solid young whisky, ripened in bourbon casks with plenty of peat smoke.’

  Paul took out his laptop and decrypted the file Anya had sent him. While loading the first photo on to his computer, he heard the generous gurgling sound of Edward filling the glasses. When he looked up, Edward was standing in front of him with a triumphant look on his face.

  ‘Everything, and I mean everything, from growing the barley to the bottling process, is done on one and the same farm. That’s pretty unique in this day and age,’ Edward said, as he handed him a glass. They toasted with their long-standing credo.

  ‘To you, to me …’

  ‘… and to us both,’ Paul finished his sentence.

  As he drank his first sip, Paul could feel this wondrous mixture of peat smoke and herbs flowing over his tongue and down his throat. He knew what would happen next. They’d drink, he and his uncle, until they felt invincible, until the real world had narrowed to the bar globe standing between them, and with each passing hour they’d feel more and more like kings.

  ‘With heartfelt greetings from Rockside Farm,’ Edward joked. After his first generous gulp, he leaned over to look at a photo on the laptop showing a large number of people in a posh gallery full of paintings. ‘I see you had time to take in some culture too.’

  The rain, which was blowing across the River IJ, hammered on the panoramic windows.

  ‘Welcome to the Pushkin Museum,’ Paul said. ‘To mark the official visit of our Prime Minister, Finance Minister Lombard and a trade delegation, a number of Russian artists showed their interpretations of classic Dutch works such as The Night Watch and The Garden of Earthly Delights. And look who’s there.’

  He pointed to Farah, who was standing next to Lavrov in a cocktail dress borrowed from Anya and with a glass of champagne in her right hand. He knew how insecure she’d felt at that moment. She’d told him. But in the photo she looked indomitable, like a woman who was used to rubbing shoulders with the upper classes, politicians, celebrities and oligarchs.

  ‘It was the first time they met after she’d arrived in Moscow. That exhibition was perfect for an opening article in the art supplement. But then all hell broke loose. A dissonant symphony of buzzing mobiles, because everybody had set them to vibrate mode. The news sent shockwaves around the room. A group of Chechens had forced their way into the Mass Media Centre of Moscow State University, where they took some two hundred International Summer School students hostage. It quickly emerged there were Dutch students among the hostages, so the entire opening ceremony fell to pieces. Our Prime Minister and Minister Lombard were ushered out by security agents. Amid that chaos, I saw Farah being whisked away by Lavrov and his bodyguards.’

  Paul remembered the panic in her eyes when he caught a final glimpse of her, just before she disappeared from the gallery, shielded by the bodyguards.

  ‘We’d agreed that she’d never just go off somewhere with him. She’d only meet with Lavrov if we were able to shadow her and intervene if necessary. That was the plan. Then we found ourselves in an unforeseen situation. They drove off in two armoured Falcons, but we didn’t know for sure where Lavrov was headed. Luckily, Anya is well informed and had a hunch where they were taking her. Ultimately, we were able to track them to the grounds of Lavrov’s country estate on the shores of Lake Glubokoe, some thirty kilometres from Moscow.’

  With his index finger Paul tapped the silhouette of the man standing next to Farah on the wide balcony of a futuristic-looking glass structure.

  ‘As you can see, Anya’s camera has a terrific telephoto lens. I was lying on the other side of the lake. Farah later told me what happened, although not exactly: she was still too confused to string together a coherent story. But what it boiled down to was that Lavrov was aware of her true intentions long before their first meeting.’

  Edward’s whisky went down the wrong way. ‘Damn! How come?’

  ‘Does the name Joshua Calvino mean anything to you?’

  �
��Of course. Around here we called him Catwalk Calvino. I’d never seen a detective who looked so much like a runway model. A day after the hit-and-run, he turned up here in my office. Farah was doing her own investigation into the case. She was a step ahead of him, maybe even two. She’d found an earring in the woods and Calvino came here to claim it. They got involved, Hafez and this guy. She’s got rather good taste in men … and I have to admit I tend to fall for the same type.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Edward sighed and drained his glass. ‘You’re far too slow. With the whisky, I mean.’

  ‘Maybe you’re going too fast. This can’t be good for that ticker of yours.’

  ‘That’s for me to decide, and it’s called a heart, by the way. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve got one too.’

  ‘You’re no good to me drunk, Ed. At least, not yet.’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘Farah told me that when she made contact with the man who claimed to have hit the boy, she took him to Calvino.’

  ‘You mean Lombard’s driver?’

  ‘That’s the one, yes. On the strength of his statement, a warrant was issued and Lombard’s home office in The Hague was searched. Apparently they found incriminating material on his computer. Child pornography. At the time, Lombard was in Moscow with a trade delegation. Calvino travelled after him, hoping to get the Dutch Embassy to use their influence to get the Russian authorities to detain him. During his meeting at the embassy he must have spoken in confidence about Farah’s undercover investigation into Lavrov.’

  ‘So Lavrov knows about us.’

  ‘He knows about Farah. He doesn’t know I’m involved too.’

  ‘But what did he want from her?’

  ‘He wanted her to work for him.’

  ‘In what capacity?’

  ‘He’s involved in a large-scale nuclear-energy project. Farah would play a role in it, he said. Getting fellow investors on board, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Playing the whore, you mean,’ Edward muttered.

  ‘His whore. Anyway … As it turns out, he knew everything about her: her real last name, who her father was. She said no to the bastard.’

  ‘Very brave.’

  ‘Do you know what she said about that? Refusing to be someone’s whore isn’t brave.’

  ‘Sounds just like Hafez.’ Paul picked up on a faint tremor in Edward’s voice.

  ‘She thought she was free to leave. That her refusal and everything he’d revealed to her wouldn’t have repercussions.’

  ‘Sounds like Hafez too,’ Edward said. ‘Somehow she manages to be hard as steel and incredibly naive at the same time. There’s still no balance.’

  Paul took a sip and scrolled down to the photos that showed the three men ambushing her once she’d left the house, and pushing her into the Falcon.

  ‘So this happened the minute she walked out.’

  He moved on to another photo. Without a word, Edward looked at Farah, who had a gun held to her head by a bald-headed man, while nearby three men scrambled to their feet.

  ‘She can fight like a tiger, but that counts for nothing when you’re coerced with a weapon.’ Paul pointed to the man with the face of a condor. ‘Arseni Vakurov. Nobody knows whether Arseni is his real name, but his reputation certainly precedes him. A confrontation with Arseni means you’re either scarred for life or your life is about to end. For years, he eliminated anyone who got in his boss’s way. I saw him throw an informant of mine in Johannesburg off the fiftieth floor. Then he had a go at me.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘A couple of days before you phoned and told me about this job.’

  He showed Edward the photo of Vakurov dumping Farah into the boot of the Falcon, handcuffed and with a bag over her head.

  ‘This is how she was taken to the university where the hostage situation was playing out.’

  ‘How were you able to follow them?’

  ‘Visibility was limited because of the forest fires. Ideal circumstances for a slow car to follow a much faster one.’

  Next up, Edward was shown the photo of the Falcon carrying Farah being waved through the cordon.

  ‘You need extremely powerful friends for that,’ Edward said. ‘How else can Vakurov get through a military cordon without having his armoured car inspected?’

  ‘The hostage-taking was almost certainly staged by the Kremlin. This could support that theory. Either way, we’ve also discovered that at least one of the so-called black widows walking around with Kalashnikovs and explosive belts wasn’t Chechen at all, but Estonian.’

  ‘How the hell did you get into the building?’ Edward asked.

  ‘Anya has a whole arsenal of tricks up her sleeve and a network of the strangest bedfellows. Once we were in, it turned out she knew the leader of that merry band of women, Chalim Barchayev. Number one on Russia’s list of most-wanted Chechen terrorists. She’d interviewed him once. I passed myself off as her photographer and the bastard actually let me do my thing. So I walked around taking pictures of everything, of all the hostages, and that’s how I found Farah in the auditorium.’

  He glanced at Edward, who was sitting hunched over with his nose practically up against the screen.

  ‘I suggest you have that second glass now. You’re going to need it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of what I’m about to show you, the way I found her.’

  Edward’s voice sounded calm and determined. ‘I want to see it first.’

  There was something almost aesthetic about the image. The reality, however, had been far grimmer. Farah slouched in a chair, immobile and semi-conscious, with black tape across her mouth and the explosive strapped to her chest.

  ‘The bastards,’ Edward muttered and got to his feet. ‘You were right. I could use a second dram. Do me a favour, finish yours too. Let’s have another one together.’

  ‘Just one?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Dickhead,’ Edward said. He took Paul’s now-empty glass and walked to the bar globe.

  The sight of his colossal uncle standing there over his spherical cabinet – the retro-coloured continents reminiscent of yesterday’s world – made Paul smile. He walked over to the window to stretch his legs, pressed the palms of his hands against the glass and took a few deep breaths. Beyond the reflection of his tired, unshaven face, some hundred metres away, he could see Het Fort, an old shipyard now occupied by squatters. Supported by the local population, they were protesting against the takeover bid by Armin Lazonder, who wanted to turn it into a business hub.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Edward, who came to stand next to Paul and handed him his refilled glass. ‘Lavrov’s a global player. Then one day a Dutch journalist crosses his path. He must have known that she posed no threat to him whatsoever at that point. She didn’t know nearly enough about him. He could have just played along. Could have made a fine art supplement together. It would have been excellent PR for his company.’

  ‘But he does the exact opposite.’

  ‘Exactly. He dumps her. Why?’

  ‘Because he made a mistake – one he couldn’t undo.’

  ‘What kind of mistake?’

  ‘He tried to make a potential opponent his ally.’

  ‘But our girl is not for sale.’

  ‘By then he’d revealed information about himself and his business concerns he should have kept to himself. How do you undo something like that? A woman like Farah can’t simply be eliminated. You’d generate the wrong kind of international publicity.’

  ‘I can picture the newspaper headlines: FOREIGN JOURNALIST MISSING IN MOSCOW.’

  ‘So what does he do? He comes up with a plan that’s as brilliant as it is deadly. With that jihad statement he not only portrayed her as a terrorist, but also obliterated her credibility as a journalist.’

  He took a large sip of his whisky. He felt like downing it in one gulp.

  ‘What happened next?’ Edward sounded hoarse.

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nbsp; ‘I just showed you.’

  ‘You mean the time bomb?’

  He looked at Edward and saw how emotional his uncle was.

  ‘That time bomb fitted seamlessly into the manipulation of the facts. She’d have blown herself up as a black widow, had it not been for …’

  Paul fell silent and thought back to the moment he’d yelled at the leader of the commandos who’d come charging in that Farah was his colleague. He’d only just realized there probably hadn’t been any need for him to do that. Experienced as they were, they’d no doubt figured out that she couldn’t possibly be a terrorist. Someone threatening to detonate a bomb isn’t handcuffed to a chair in a ripped cocktail dress with her mouth taped shut. In his quest for as much evidence as possible that Farah was a victim in all this, he’d totally overlooked an important witness: the leader of the Alpha Spetsnaz commando team. He remembered the man’s words after he’d removed the explosive from Farah.

  You no enemy. You free.

  Paul’s phone rang. He saw Anya’s name on the display. She sounded excited, hysterical almost. For a moment it felt as if they were back in the workshop at the Hammer and Sickle steel factory, from where she was now calling him, among the computer screens, mixing panels and connectors, where Lesha had just managed to hack into the YotaPhone’s damaged SD card.

  ‘He performed digital mouth-to-mouth, or whatever you want to call it. He did it,’ she shouted. ‘He managed to restore parts of the damaged card. Of all the footage our supposed black widow recorded, we’ve only retrieved three fragments, but it’s enough. I’d better warn you, they’re shocking. I’ll send the material to you shortly, encrypted.’

  The connection was broken before he had a chance to respond. Edward was standing with his back against the glass wall, and Paul could see the surprise on his face.