The Isis Covenant (36 page)

Irina was sitting at a desk beside a tall bearded man studying a document. The man explained something and tried desperately to avoid any semblance of physical contact. It was always this way with occasional visitors. Oleg Samsonov’s power didn’t just make outsiders wary, it induced fear, and Dornberger’s knowledge of the darker elements of the Russian’s business interests convinced him that fear was well justified. Eventually the bearded man stood up, and Irina Samsonov rose with a formal smile. ‘Thank you, Mr Rudge. Next week at the same time?’

Rudge bowed as if she was a duchess and backed away. Paul Dornberger gave a quiet cough. Irina looked round and smiled when she recognized him. Belatedly she realized she was wearing her spectacles and removed them with a single smooth movement and without a change of expression. In many ways she was as vain as her husband and just as formidable.

‘Paul, this is a surprise; what can I do for you?’

He handed her the invoice. ‘The bill for the party we gave for the African delegation?’

‘Yes, it’s dated last week, but it must have got stuck in the post. I need your signature to pay this one
because
of the amount, which you’ll see is above the authorized figure.’

She pursed her lips, gave a rueful smile and signed the back of the paper. ‘They do like their gifts. Crystal eggs in the style of Fabergé and every one with a Cartier watch and a set of Ferrari keys. Sometimes, when I’m hosting, I feel like Marie Antoinette.’

He thanked her and turned to leave, but she called him back.

‘I promised I would show you Oleg’s latest acquisition.’ She waved him across towards the panic room. ‘Now, we must follow security instructions.’ She smiled to show there was no offence intended. ‘So I must ask you to turn away while I open the gallery.’

The gallery? It was an odd reference and one that showed the conflicting attitudes of Oleg Samsonov and his wife to the house they shared. For Oleg it was a fortress; an ultra-secure headquarters from which he could rule his vast worldwide empire with the added attraction that it was in the centre of a cosmopolitan, cultured city. A city where the inhabitants tended not to work out their differences with rocket launchers or car bombs, and where a man with money and influence was guaranteed access at the highest levels. Irina, on the other hand, had never shared her husband’s insecurity as he gathered his wealth and attempted to consolidate it with hungry jackals barking at him from every side. She understood and sympathized with the dreams that sometimes made him call out in the night, but she could
never
think of her home as a bomb-proof citadel. She knew that their wealth made them targets, and welcomed the protection it afforded, particularly to little Dimi, but there were no images in her subconscious of machine-gun-carrying hordes of Kazakhs or Chechens swarming across the security wall to avenge a hundred intended and unintended slights. So the barriers were an irritant and the guards a necessary, but unwanted, intrusion into her life, and the panic room became the gallery. And within the house she could trust who she chose. Even Oleg had agreed that Paul was safe.

‘You can turn now.’ She said it with a complacent smile that sought, no, demanded, his appreciation. And he gave it.

‘Incredible.’ He stepped forward, but she touched his arm and shook her head.

‘It’s protected so that an alarm sounds and the whole building goes into lockdown if someone other than a family member enters. You must only look.’

‘Of course.’ He smiled. For a moment he forgot everything as he basked in the golden aura of true genius, an aura that had at its centre a triple sunburst of yellow flowers. The application was almost crude, the brushstrokes confident in their own certainty. A rough vase in glazed green, against a jade background and set upon a mottled wooden surface. Yet the eye barely registered the surroundings, it was the sunflowers that drew it like the flash of an oriole’s wing. From deep
within
their hiding place they seemed to fill the entire room with their glow.

‘This is the only one of the series not in a museum,’ Irina explained. ‘Oleg intends to display it on special occasions, but for the moment it is his personal prize.’

‘Then I am doubly honoured.’ He found he could barely breathe. ‘He must have wanted it very much.’

‘Yes, and my Oleg is not deterred by refusal.’ She laughed lightly and he knew she was remembering when Samsonov had pursued her around the globe showering her with gifts until she had agreed to abandon her American football star boyfriend. ‘Even for him this was an expensive purchase.’

He stepped back to allow her to close the door. The painting stood on an easel in the centre of the room, but his eye was caught by an unusual shape against the far wall close to the door that must lead to the stairs connecting the three floors of the safe haven. She saw his look, and shook her head at her husband’s mania for security. Who would put a safe inside a safe room? ‘Even I must not look there.’ She smiled. ‘A family heirloom. Perhaps it is the crown of the Tsars?’

He laughed obediently, but he’d seen everything he needed to see.

Suddenly her face lit the room in the same way the sunflowers had earlier.

‘Mummy.’ A dark flash flew past Dornberger as Dmitri launched himself into his mother’s arms.

‘Dimi.’ His mother picked him up and whirled him
around
. ‘Foof!’ she said. ‘You are getting too big for this. Time you had a little brother or sister, huh?’

‘Me. Me. Me,’ Dmitri laughed. ‘Me. Me. Me.’

Paul Dornberger kept the mask in place as he stepped back to watch the perfectly natural interaction between mother and son. Inside, he felt as if he was being sucked into a whirlpool. Something she had said … What was it that had scored the inside of his brain like a red-hot blade? His mind spun as he tried to find something of his own childhood. A mother. A moment of pleasure. He could remember neither. The cold shock of the truth froze the smile on his face. He had been robbed of all this. And what else? It was there, buried deep; a moment of warmth that he had to find if he was to maintain his sanity. He made a grab for it, but it was like a freshly caught fish slipping through his hands. A fleeting moment of contact and then gone. Panic gripped him and he saw concern on Irina Samsonov’s face.

‘Paul, are you unwell?’

Somehow he pulled himself together and shook his head, but his shirt was soaked with sweat and his whole body felt as if it was a bundle of flickering nerve ends.

‘You are very pale. You look like death, poor man. Come, have a seat here.’ She abandoned Dmitri and drew him across to a kudu leather couch. ‘Stay with Paul, Dimi. Look after him.’

Dornberger went rigid as the boy sat at his side and put his slim arms around him, so he could feel their
warmth
. The panic grew. It was not supposed to be like this. Dmitri looked up at him with wide, worried eyes and Dornberger could only stare back dumbly until Irina returned to the room with a damp cloth. She placed it across his forehead and put her hand to his cheek, tutting as she felt the heat of it. The cloth moved to his face, dabbing gently and cooling the fire that burned his skin. An unexpected liquid feeling flooded through him and he could have cried out with the desperate need for human contact. This was what a family must feel like. Without thinking, he reached for her hand and took it.

Irina went rigid. ‘Paul, please!’ The outrage in her voice shocked him and his fingers reflexively tightened. ‘Paul!’ She pulled herself free and stood up, taking the boy with her and leaving Dornberger alone on the couch, blinking in bemusement. What had he done? He was appalled at his own weakness. He had allowed the mask to slip and now twenty years of effort and investment was threatening to disintegrate. If he lost his job it would take years to rebuild the network he had created within the Samsonov organization. His first instinct, the instinct he had been bred for, was to wipe away any trace of his failure. He stood up and saw the alarm in Irina’s eyes as the height and muscularity that had made her feel safe now appeared so threatening and full of menace. But Irina Samsonov was the daughter of Cossacks; her high cheeks flared with colour and her eyes flashed with suppressed fury. When she opened
her
mouth he knew she was going to fire him on the spot. He moved before she could speak.

‘I apologize for my lapse,’ he said humbly, bowing his head. ‘You are right; I have been unwell for some time. My father … when he is gone there will be no one.’

He waited and knew she was searching him for the lie like some steppe shaman; a queen deciding on the fate of her subject. He recognized the moment of decision in the relaxation of her body.

‘We will say no more of this for now, Paul. You must take the rest of the day off and we will speak of it again when my husband returns.’

Paul turned away, but not before he had seen the flash of concern in the eyes of the little boy hiding behind his mother’s denim-clad legs.

His whole world spun as he returned to the office suite. It could only be minutes since he had climbed these stairs, but it might as well have been a lifetime. It didn’t seem possible. All these years he had played this game and now, in a single moment of stupidity, he had jeopardized everything.

He realized he’d left his mobile phone on his desk, and when he walked into the office it was buzzing urgently. When he picked it up his hands were shaking.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘He’s back.’

XL

THEY MADE THEIR
headquarters in Danny’s hotel room and Jamie laid it out as if for a military operation, pulling tables together so they could work side by side with their laptops. He borrowed a flip chart from the conference suite and set it up by the window. On it, he wrote the names of the one hundred billionaires on Russia’s Rich List in
Forbes
magazine.

‘I think we can discount all those who aren’t old enough to have had fathers who fought in the Great Patriotic War,’ he suggested, ‘which should narrow it down a bit. Also, Leon Rosenthal showed us that particular newspaper for a purpose. The picture was of Roman Abramovich, who owns Chelsea Football Club, getting onto his yacht in Antibes. Abramovich is among the richest of the rich. That means our man is likely to be too. So we start at the top.’

‘From what I read here,’ Danny looked up from her laptop, ‘he’s also one of the most flamboyant. His yacht
cost
something like a billion pounds and is just one of three. He uses them to ferry his family – he has six kids – around the Mediterranean, and when he’s not on it, he lends it to his rich friends. Jesus,’ she blinked, ‘did you know this guy started off selling plastic ducks? Now he’s worth ten billion dollars.’

‘There’s hope for me yet,’ Jamie laughed. ‘But forget Abramovich. For two reasons: firstly, according to his profile, his father was a construction worker who died in an accident in the Sixties, and second, Leon Rosenthal specifically said he gave rich men a bad name, while the man he met in Russia was the opposite. We’re looking for a billionaire with a low profile.’

Danny looked up at the flip chart, which contained many names she didn’t recognize, and rubbed her eyes. ‘There must be dozens of them here.’

‘Well,’ he said cheerfully, ‘we have to start somewhere. Odds or evens.’

‘I’ll take odds. So,’ she took a deep breath, ‘first on the list is Vladimir Lisin, chairman of Novolipetsk Steel. Net worth: twenty-four billion dollars. Born nineteen fifty-six, which puts him in the right age range, but it says here he followed his pop into the Tulachermet steel works, which I guess rules him out?’

‘Let’s not be too hasty. Put him down as a possible.’

They worked their way from the top of the list, discounting on the grounds of age, background or father’s job history, and retaining a few possibles, which Jamie admitted to himself were long shots at best. ‘Let’s stop
for
a coffee,’ he suggested after an hour. ‘What do you think so far?’

‘I think that if some of these guys weren’t on the rich list, they’d be on the most wanted list. You?’

‘To be honest, I’m surprised there are so few dodgy characters, given the kind of murky stuff that was going on after the communists were kicked out. Mind you, there was a kind of natural selection. The weak were either disposed of or forced to go bust, and the real bad guys either are in jail or are Mafia bosses who’d rather not have their name in the paper and keep their wealth secret. There may be a few skeletons in the cupboard among the people on the list, but you could say that about any rich and powerful man anywhere.’

‘What I also think is that we aren’t getting anywhere.’

‘Not yet,’ he admitted. ‘But maybe that’s not a bad thing. He’s here somewhere, I’m certain of it. The fact that so few people fit the profile means that when we do find him it will be obvious.’

So obvious that by the time they reached the end of the list they had fifteen possibles and zero probables.

‘He has to be here,’ Jamie repeated.

‘Sure,’ Danny said soothingly. ‘The essence of all detective work. If at first you don’t succeed …’

‘Go through the possibles again. We said Lisin was unlikely, why?’

‘Because his father was a foreman in a steelworks and I can’t see an NKVD war hero ending up in a steelworks in Kazakhstan. From what you’ve told me, that’s not the
way
the system worked, especially while Stalin was still alive. You kept your nose clean and were lucky, you rose through the ranks. If you didn’t, it was Siberia, or more likely the Lubyanka and a bullet in the back of the neck.’

‘Okay, who’s next?’

‘Vekselberg, Viktor, head of the Renova Group and worth a cool thirteen billion. Around the right age, but we have no information about his parents.’

Jamie read the
Forbes
biography and clicked through the pages on his laptop screen. He shook his head. ‘My gut says no. This bloke had to work to make his money and it was his contacts with the Yeltsin administration that made him rich.’

By the time they had gone through the list for a second time, they were left with just five possible candidates. Jamie ripped the sheet from the flip chart and tore the surviving names off in strips before placing them face up on the bed. He frowned over them for so long that Danny eventually said: ‘Do you think he’s going to jump up and introduce himself, Saintclair?’