Angel in the Shadows Page 2

  She didn’t know where she was. It was far too dark. She broke out in a cold sweat and crawled out of bed. Floorboards creaked beneath her feet. By groping around, she managed to locate a door. On the other side of it was a corridor, and at the end of that a crack admitting a flickering light.

  Steadying herself against the wall, she teetered towards the light, to the muffled sound of agitated voices. The corridor was no more than five metres long, she estimated, but navigating it felt like running a half-marathon. By the time she reached the door, she was out of breath. As she peered through the crack, she saw two figures, staring wide-eyed into the glare of a television.

  She pushed the door open and heard herself speak. The words didn’t come from her own mouth, but from her likeness on the screen. From the terrorist she now was to the outside world.

  ‘I, Farah Hafez …’

  Then her knees gave way and she slowly crumpled to the floor. The voices receded, and the light was swallowed by darkness.

  She opened her eyes again when Anya covered her with a soft blanket and asked, ‘Do you know where you are?’

  She didn’t know the answer.

  ‘You’re at my place,’ Anya said. ‘And you’d better forget this as quickly as possible.’

  Anya vanished through a brightly coloured beaded curtain. As Paul placed an extra cushion under her head and smoothed her hair, she tried to smile at him. He asked her what she remembered.

  ‘Everything,’ she said. ‘I remember everything.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘No, it’s not. I wish I could forget it all.’

  ‘No way. We want to know every last detail.’

  She let her head fall back against the cushions. All she wanted was sleep. The sweet sleep of oblivion. But her eyes remained wide open, and the shadows cast by the television crept along the walls and up to the ceiling.

  Anya came back in with a big bowl of soup in her hands. ‘I made a large panful,’ she said. ‘You need to get your strength back.’

  Pieces of potato, beetroot and red pepper floated in the hot beef broth. No sooner had Farah eaten her first spoonful than she realized just how hungry she was. In no time at all, she emptied the bowl and held it up like a trophy. When Anya returned to the kitchen, Paul asked, ‘Why did we do this again? It was a crazy plan.’

  ‘It wasn’t even a plan,’ said Anya, re-emerging from behind the beaded curtain with a second steaming bowl. ‘It was just insane.’

  With her eyes closed, Farah slurped up the second bowl of soup and thought back to how it had all started: to the night she’d seen Sekandar in the Emergency Department, a child made up to look like a woman, wearing cheap jewellery with little bells around his arms and legs. His injured body was covered in rags that might have passed for exotic and seductive earlier that evening, but that were by then smeared with mud and blood. She’d known it at once: he was Bacha Bazi, a ‘boy to be played with’, the way rich Afghan men had been doing for centuries in her native country. He’d been left for dead somewhere along a deserted woodland road, just outside Amsterdam, and she intended – no, she was determined – to find out who was responsible for it. After ten years with the Algemeen Nederlands Dagblad, she’d finally begun to make something of a national name for herself with articles about the way the Dutch government treated Afghan refugees. And now, through the hit-and-run, she’d discovered a shady connection between the Dutch Finance Minister, Ewald Lombard, and the CEO of the Russian energy conglomerate AtlasNet, Valentin Lavrov.

  Lavrov was known the world over as an art collector who made extravagant purchases. The idea that her Editor-in-Chief, Edward Vallent, had come up with was ingenious and naive in equal measure: securing Lavrov as the guest editor of a special AND art supplement would be a quick and efficient way of getting close to the fire.

  Lavrov agreed to take on the role and Farah joined him in Moscow.

  And now here she was: clutching a bowl of soup with trembling hands in an unfamiliar Moscow apartment, caught up in a network of elusive figures that operated in the shadows, and wanted as an accomplice in the hostage-taking of innocent students.

  She, an inexperienced journalist with a hidden agenda, had approached a Russian oligarch, who’d obviously carried out a thorough background check on her. It brought to mind the warning words of the Editor-in-Chief of Moskva Gazeta, Roman Jankovski, when they first met: ‘When dealing with Lavrov, you could hope for the best, but you’d better be prepared for the worst.’

  Paul held the digital screen of the Nikon up to her eyes. She saw herself standing beside Valentin Lavrov on the large patio of a glass house on the edge of a lake.

  ‘We followed you,’ Paul said.

  She gasped and relived the moment she looked into Lavrov’s grey-green eyes, set in his chiselled face with its broad jaw and narrow lips. She could smell his aromatic scent again – a combination of mint, lavender and bergamot.

  Agonizingly slowly, Lavrov’s words came back to her. She heard him say, ‘Come and work for me,’ while holding out a glass of champagne. ‘Better than writing phony art supplements about naughty oligarchs, right?’ And then that complete composure with which he issued his threat while staring out across the lake, ‘I’m throwing you a lifeline, Farah, do you understand?’

  She looked at Paul.

  ‘He knew,’ she said. ‘He knew … right from the start.’

  6

  The forests surrounding Moscow had been on fire for almost a week now. A thick layer of smoke crept through the suburbs, deeper and deeper into the city. The concentration of toxins in the air was seven times higher than levels considered safe by the authorities. Yet that didn’t stop thousands of illegal Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Kyrgyzs, Uzbeks and Kazakhs, crammed into dilapidated vans, from making the trip to the north-east of Moscow, as they did every day. They sold their contraband to the equally illegal stall-holders of Cherkizovsky Market, which was spread across an area three times the size of the Kremlin. In spite of the heat and smog today, hundreds of thousands of Muscovites and tourists would come to buy Caspian salmon, black caviar, spices, carpets and electronics of dubious quality, as always.

  It was six o’clock in the morning. Besides the normal nervous energy of setting up the market stalls, another sort of tension hung in the air – caused by the whirr of rotor blades. As a military helicopter circled menacingly above, Paul and Anya made their way through the maze of thousands of stands to reach the heart of the market as quickly as they could.

  They’d managed to hide Farah in such an obvious place that the authorities wouldn’t ever begin by looking there: Anya’s apartment. Still, Farah couldn’t stay for very long. Where would she actually be safe? Not in Russia, given she was still accused of being a terrorist by the media. Not in the Netherlands, which was now closely cooperating with Russia because of Farah’s alleged role in the hostage-taking and because there were Dutch students among the victims.

  Thanks to Interpol, nowhere in Europe was safe.

  She had to get much further away; needed a new look, a new identity.

  That’s why Anya and Paul had come to this autonomous enclave with its wheeling and dealing, even its own infrastructure: security, hotels and brothels, and an entire underground industry for false travel documents. This trade had already helped hundreds of thousands of Chinese, South-East Asians and other illegals to escape to the West via Russia and the Baltic States.

  Right here, in Cherkizovsky Market, lay Farah’s best chance of disappearing without a trace.

  But time was running out.

  Arriving at a bastion of steel-plated containers, they were stopped by two men, their dark Ray-Bans tightly hugging their tanned Caucasian heads, their Nagant revolvers visible in the holsters under their black leather jackets.

  ‘Mr Dadashov is expecting us,’ Anya said.

  ‘Not today.’

  The helicopter made a low flyover. They instinctively ducked.

  ‘It’s important,’ Anya insisted. �
��He knows me. It won’t take long.’

  The men quietly consulted. One of them walked away. Only then did Paul notice they were being watched from several vantage points by men in the same leather gear. All members of the private security force of the man who ruled over Cherkizovsky Market from a network of containers, like an emperor ruling over his realm from a throne. The son of a poor cobbler from Azerbaijan, Azim Dadashov had run a sophisticated smuggling operation for years, building his rogue empire into what it was today: a thriving hotbed of mainly illegals from Central Asia. But his days were numbered. The Russian President had recently enacted a law restricting the right to operate stalls in the market to Russian citizens only. A major purge hung in the air, and it had the whirring sound of helicopter blades.

  Anya was afraid they were too late. She saw it in the men lugging heavy boxes and computers from the containers to a large waiting van. She saw it in the eyes of the surly bodyguard when he returned.

  ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ he said, much to her surprise.

  After checking their IDs and thoroughly patting them down, he led them into an inner ring of containers. Via an antechamber, they entered an air-conditioned space, strewn with Persian rugs. One wall was covered in monitors. They were in the security control room. Three men kept watch over the shadowy contours of the Mi-24 combat helicopter, which was being observed via security cameras positioned at different vantage points in the market. The man in the middle turned around. His large, gleaming, bald head seemed to sit straight on the shoulders of his gigantic body, which was stiff with tension. In his shiny suit and red silk waistcoat he looked like a wrestler posing as the Maharaja of Jaipur. The moment Azim Dadashov made eye contact with Anya, a quizzical smile appeared on his troubled face.

  She never stopped amazing Paul. Just a few days ago, she’d embraced a Chechen terrorist leader. And now it was the turn of a mafia boss from the Caucasus. But the two men had something in common. Both hated Potanin’s guts.

  ‘It’s the final countdown, my dove,’ Dadashov whispered to Anya after he’d given Paul a crushing handshake. ‘That helicopter is a sign that a major raid is about to take place. The National Guard is already on its way. They’ll surround the market. So I don’t have as much time as I usually do for you. Unless you care to run away with me?’

  ‘Perhaps another time, Azim.’

  ‘I’ll keep hoping, sugar-pie. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I need a passport, Azim. And an exit visa.’

  ‘Sorry, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Our entire operation is being dismantled as we speak.’

  ‘If it wasn’t a matter of life and death, I wouldn’t be here, Azim. You’re the only one who can help us. A friend of ours is in trouble. Serious trouble. She’s a journalist. If you’ve followed the news about the hostage-taking, you’ll have seen her message on TV. She walked into a trap. The recording is a fake. They forced her.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The whole hostage-taking was probably bogus. Potanin is looking for an excuse to invade Chechnya again. We’re fighting the same enemy, Azim. The man everybody is afraid of. Except you and me.’

  ‘Wait,’ Dadashov said resolutely. He turned around, briefly consulted with two other men and motioned for Paul and Anya to follow him.

  ‘Does she know where she wants to go, our heroine? Scandinavia, England, America?’

  ‘The other direction,’ Paul said. ‘Indonesia.’

  He thought back to that moment when Farah had come up with the idea.

  They’d seen Valentin Lavrov on the television. He was giving a press conference in the Russian Embassy’s grand hall in Jakarta. Amid the flashes of the intrusive photographers, he announced that in the foreseeable future AtlasNet would sign a ‘historic deal’ with the Indonesian government: the construction of twenty-seven floating nuclear power stations in the Indonesian archipelago. Admittedly the plan still needed the approval of the 560 members of the People’s Consultative Assembly, but Lavrov smiled into the camera as if he’d already sealed the deal.

  ‘Saya pergi ke Jakarta,’ Farah had said. ‘I’m going to Jakarta.’

  She’d been to Indonesia. Years before. She’d taken part in an intensive Pencak Silat training session in Bandung. She’d learned enough Bahasa to understand basic phrases and have a simple conversation. Jakarta was a city of millions. The perfect anonymous arena in which to find out how Lavrov had managed to get such a project off the ground. She’d suggested they each investigate the activities of AtlasNet from a different part of the world: Anya from Moscow, Paul from Amsterdam and she from Jakarta.

  It was an insane plan. ‘But,’ he said to her, ‘the most courageous thing you could have come up with. Like three horsemen of the Apocalypse, we’ll bring down Lavrov’s empire.’

  Paul and Anya followed Dadashov through a passageway that ended inside another container: a workstation, lit by glaring fluorescent tubes, in the process of being dismantled. Computer screens were turned off, documents hastily packed. Stacks of passports, undoubtedly false, disappeared into boxes. Dadashov shouted to a little man with an Asian appearance, snapped some orders and pushed him in Paul and Anya’s direction.

  ‘Tell him what you need and he’ll do it. But make it fast, very fast.’

  ‘I have everything with me,’ Anya said. She stroked Dadashov’s fleshy cheek. ‘Thank you, Azim.’

  ‘Anything for you, tough cookie,’ he said. The smile on his face was gone before he’d left the room.

  The Asian sat down behind a computer screen and motioned, almost frenetically, for Anya to hand over the necessary info. She was well prepared. She’d hacked the Myspace account of a Russian woman who resembled Farah in age and appearance. The details, combined with the MRZ information, were fed into the data system. Everything happened very quickly. The printer spat out pages of a special, thick paper displaying a watermark. The Asian ran to a workbench, where he cut, stapled and placed the pages in a cover. Anya handed over the photograph of Farah, which she’d taken the evening before. The Asian added fake stamps and pasted in phony visas. The hectic activity in the container increased. The security guards in their black jackets shouted for everyone to evacuate the premises. The Asian shoved the passport into Anya’s hands, grabbed the laptop and quickly disappeared. They heard an explosion. The container shook. They ran in the direction of Lokomotiv Stadium, about two hundred metres away, to the nearest metro station.

  They heard the cracking sound of breaking wood. Behind them bulldozers rammed stalls still filled with goods into a heap of wreckage. Desperate stall-holders tried to escape with their most valuable wares. Whoever was run down in the chaos fell prey to the security forces, who were beating people indiscriminately with rubber batons.

  In the mêlée of collapsing stalls and fleeing people, Paul and Anya were able to reach the station, where they ran into the entryway and then descended on the long escalator. There they blended into the mob of people on the overcrowded platform.

  It was well over thirty degrees in the metro. No air-con here. A uniformed man rolled around the car on a wooden board, holding out his hand. A Chechen veteran who’d lost his legs during the war. Anya gave him a clap on the shoulder and handed him some rouble notes. They sped under the centre of Moscow in possession of a new identity for Farah.

  7

  With Moscow’s dismal suburbs flashing past, Farah closed the curtains on the sliding doors of her compartment and pulled down the outside window screen.

  She stared at the passport that featured her new likeness and the false name Valentina Nikolayeva. It would take some getting used to.

  Moments earlier, under the glass roof of Platform 10 at Moskva Kiyevskaya Station, she’d stood opposite Paul. Without makeup, but with cropped chestnut-brown hair and dark lenses to mask her bright blue eyes, she was barely recognizable. She was wearing a faded pair of cords with a dark-grey T-shirt, and her small rucksack was filled with some underwear, a supply of nuts and dried fruit, a well-thumbed b
ook called Bahasa for Beginners, a handful of roubles, her false passport and her laptop. On Anya’s instructions, she’d wrapped up her real passport and left it in a locker at the station, along with Raylan Chappelle’s letters to her mother.

  In spite of everything, she had to laugh at the fact that, even in this heat, Paul was still wearing his leather jacket. With his Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, his loose-fitting, faded jeans and grimy cowboy boots, he looked like he was busy with a DIY project that would never see completion.

  ‘Are you sure you want this?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Positive.’

  She’d pushed the visor of his baseball cap aside, given him a quick peck on the cheek and then boarded the train without looking back.

  As she reached for her laptop and opened it, she could feel her heart racing. Her head wasn’t nearly clear enough to retain all the instructions Anya had given her last night. She was afraid she’d already forgotten most of it.

  Her memory was like a sieve.

  She raised her right wrist and turned it a few times this way and that to look at the charm bracelet Anya had given her as a parting gift. The charms included an orange-red heart, a butterfly, a flower and two small, book-shaped rectangles – one black, the other white. She gripped the white book between her thumb and index finger, the way she’d practised the previous evening. She squeezed and pulled a mini USB stick from its white case and inserted it into her laptop.

  As she watched a seemingly endless sequence of code flash past on the black screen, she thought about what Anya had impressed upon her.

  ‘Even in Jakarta, disappearing in the masses will be difficult. The moment you phone me or Paul, use a search engine on your laptop or send one of us an email, you’ll be leaving traces. If we’re going to exchange sensitive data across large distances without being detected, and communicate without leaving a digital trail, we need to take strict precautions.’