City of Exiles (9781101607596)

by Nevala-lee, Alec

  Ilya looked evenly at Powell. He saw the depth of intellect there, but also a man who had too much confidence in the system, and wondered whether Powell realized how little power he really had. “You speak Russian?”

  Powell glanced at Wolfe. “Not very well, I’m afraid. But I know enough to get by.”

  Ilya saw that he was downplaying his expertise, but decided to let it pass. “You know the netovtsy?”

  “Yes,” Powell said. “A schismatic movement in the seventeenth century. They gave up all worldly speech except for the word no.”

  “Very good,” Ilya replied. “Then you already know what my answer will be.”

  Powell looked at him for another moment. Then he rose, scooping up the case file. Heading for the door, he signaled to the guard, who had remained outside. “We’re done. Wolfe, let’s go.”

  He left the room. For a moment, as Wolfe turned away, Ilya sensed that she wanted to say something else, but in the end, she only followed Powell into the corridor. As soon as she was gone, the door of the cell clanged shut, and Ilya was alone once more with his thoughts.

  A few minutes later, the door opened again. The guard grinned at him. “It’s time.”

  Rising from his chair, Ilya went into the hall, where he was handcuffed to a second guard and led outside to a prison van. It had ten windows, all opaque, so that it was impossible to see inside.

  Climbing into the van, he was uncuffed from the guard and locked into a separate cubicle. Next to him, in the adjacent sweatbox, a tattooed man in a donkey jacket was muttering to himself in an unintelligible stream, which only rose in intensity when, a minute later, the van lurched forward and trundled clumsily out of the courtyard.

  It was forty minutes to Belmarsh. During the trip, Ilya did not look out the window once. Instead he scrutinized the faces of the men around him, only one of which really caught his attention. This was a prisoner close to his own age, his hair long and stringy, who seemed to be sleeping, his head leaning against the window of his cubicle. Every now and then, however, there was a faint flash of white between his lids, like the visible slit of a reptile’s eyes.

  At last, the van slowed. Turning to the view outside, Ilya saw a gate open to let them in, then close heavily behind them. After passing through a second gate, the van entered a concrete courtyard, where it halted, engine idling. Then the prisoners were led out one at a time.

  Ilya was one of the last to disembark. As he descended the steps of the van, he took a moment to survey his surroundings. The courtyard was girded by a brick wall, thirty feet high, topped with razor wire. Overhead stretched a flat white sky. From the line of prisoners to his side, he heard a short bark of laughter.

  They filed into the receiving spur, where their first stop was a kind of transparent cell with walls of thick glass. Ilya sat down, ignored by the others. The man he had seen earlier on the van, pretending to sleep, was standing apart from the rest, who were pointedly not looking in his direction.

  A second later, his name was called. Ilya went into the reception area, where he was told to complete a form by a guard seated behind the counter, who asked him for his name, age, and weight in stone. The guard noted his answers, then inquired after his religion. When Ilya replied, the guard wrote it down, saying, “Don’t see many Jews, now, do we?”

  From there, he passed into the next room, where an arc lamp hung from the ceiling. Ilya stood in the white circle, feeling the heat on his shoulders, and was ordered to strip. He complied, handing his clothes to the guard at his side, aware at all times of the video camera on the wall.

  The guard looked him over, taking note of the pale scars that tattoos, now erased, had left behind. Then, after declining the option of keeping his own clothes while on remand, Ilya was brought into the next room, where he was given a blue striped shirt, jeans, a gray pullover, and a black donkey jacket.

  Ilya dressed, then went to a nearby room for a medical interview, at the end of which he was informed that he would be spending his first night in the hospital wing. He knew that this was standard procedure for prisoners on remand, and that it meant he would be kept on suicide watch.

  Carrying his bedding in his arms, Ilya followed another guard upstairs, climbing three flights to a long corridor. This guard, a heavyset man with glasses, was less careful than the others, and he did not glance back as he unbolted two doors and led Ilya into the hospital ward: “Here we are, then—”

  Ilya went inside. Around him, gradually rising in volume as he neared the heart of the ward, there were stifled screams, shouts, the sound of weeping. He saw pale faces, skinny legs, the eyes of countless exiles.

  As he and the guard approached the door of his cell, Ilya became aware of two things at once. The first was that he could feel Vasylenko’s presence. Vasylenko, he suspected, could sense him as well. Sooner or later, the old man would come for him. It was only a matter of time.

  His other realization, as his cell door was unlocked, was that while he was here, a man on the outside was readying something in perfect freedom. And with every passing second, Ilya sensed, the plan that he had failed to prevent was drawing ever closer to completion.

  26

  An hour earlier, a ticket agent at the Eurostar desk at St. Pancras had looked up as a set of footsteps came to a halt at her counter. Standing before her was an attractive man with short dark hair and a pronounced widow’s peak. He gave her a nod. “Good morning. I’d like to buy a ticket to Brussels. One way, please.”

  The agent glanced him over appreciatively, then looked down at her terminal, typing with her lacquered nails. She was South Asian and twenty, with a manner poised between brisk and flirtatious. “And when will you be leaving?”

  Unslinging the bag he was carrying on his shoulder, the traveler set it on the floor. “The next available train, please.”

  “Let’s see what we have, then.” The ticket agent studied her computer screen. “You’re in luck. The next train will be departing in forty minutes. I can get you a good seat for sixty-four pounds.”

  “That sounds fine.” As the traveler smiled, the agent saw that the only flaw in his otherwise faultless looks was his teeth, which were crooked and pronounced. British smiles, she thought, could be so unfortunate.

  He handed her his credit card, which the agent swiped through the reader on her terminal. DALE STERN, it said. As the transaction went through, she took a brochure from her desk. “Check in straight to your left here, all the way down the hall. You have about ten minutes before boarding starts.” She took the ticket from the printer and set it on the counter, circling the relevant information in ballpoint pen. “Here you are, then. St. Pancras to Brussels Midi, one way only.”

  The traveler smiled again as he accepted the ticket. “Thank you very much.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” the agent said. She kept her eye on him as he turned away, passing through the glass doors into the station beyond. Then she went resignedly back to work.

  Outside, on the main floor of the station, Karvonen headed for the platform, his paper ticket in hand. At the entrance, he fed the ticket into a slot, which spat it out again as the gates opened to let him through. Up ahead, a sliding door of frosted glass led to the security line.

  At the front of the queue, which had only a handful of other travelers, he put his bag on a conveyer belt, watching as it disappeared through the curtain of the scanner. As he placed his wallet and other personal items into a plastic bin, a guard politely asked him to remove his jacket, although he was allowed to retain his thick sweater. Underneath his shirt, the canisters were secured between his shoulder blades with a cross of medical adhesive tape.

  Karvonen passed through the metal detector. It did not register the canisters, which were ceramic, with only a few small metal components. He picked up his bag at the other end. As he did, he passed a young woman, also coming out of se
curity, who was gathering her things while talking into a mobile phone: “Hold on. I’m just going to put my bits away—”

  Beyond security, there was a second line at passport control, where two French border agents in identical blue uniforms were stationed in a glass cube. Karvonen pushed his passport through the opening in the window. The nearest agent picked it up, glanced at it briefly, then stamped and returned it. Karvonen thanked him, then headed for the departure lounge.

  His passport had not been scanned into the larger border control system, but even if it had, it would not have presented a problem. The passport was real. Karvonen had picked it up from his handler the day before, along with other items in the name of Dale Stern. He had not asked where this identity came from. Nor had his handler volunteered the information.

  Karvonen entered the departure lounge. In the old days, he knew, the city had been full of documentation agents, their only function to obtain birth certificates and passports to support legends for illegals. In a pinch, documents could also be bought from various undesirables, such as addicts looking to score money for a fix, although the Yardies had cornered that market these days.

  Once you had obtained the essential pieces of paperwork, you could begin to construct the legend. Some were quite elaborate, with flat rentals and pay stubs meticulously documenting an entire fictional life. Others consisted of little more than a driver’s license, a passport, and a credit card with occasional purchases. Dale Stern was of the latter kind. The legend would not hold up to sustained scrutiny, but it was more than enough for his present needs.

  At the news kiosk in the departure lounge, Karvonen bought a copy of that morning’s paper, noticing that the seller’s eyes strayed down to his bad teeth. He still wasn’t used to his new face. Because the legend had been obtained at the last minute, it had forced him to change his appearance more than he would have liked, although it was nothing that could not be reversed.

  Yesterday, after arriving at the meeting with his handler, he had been understandably reluctant to get into the barber’s chair, especially with a man holding a razor nearby. His handler’s response had been curt but reasonable: “If we wanted to kill you, you would be dead already.”

  Karvonen had granted the wisdom of this observation. He was also reassured by the fact that he had hidden the canisters beforehand. With that, he had climbed into the chair, where his hair had been cut and tinted, and his hairline and eyebrows reshaped with electrolysis. A dental plate and colored contact lenses had completed the picture. The result was far from perfect, but it would do.

  As he tucked the newspaper under his arm, he saw that the departure platform for his train had been posted. He followed a stream of families and schoolgirls with rolling suitcases up an escalator ramp, which was walled in with glass. Arriving at the next level, he moved down the platform until he reached the carriage whose number was printed on his ticket. He found his seat and put his bag in the overhead rack. Then, sitting down, he unfolded the paper and began to read.

  On the front page, there was an article about the killings at the tournament, which had shocked the entire city. There was also a picture, not very good, of Karvonen’s face. He was more interested in the inside article about the discovery of Renata’s body. So far, the press had failed to connect the two incidents, although he knew that this was simply a matter of time. He read both articles with care and looked up only as the train began to glide smoothly out of the station.

  Outside, it was overcast, and the sides of the track were heaped with pink gravel. After pausing at another station, the train began to pick up speed, and before long, it was barreling serenely through pastureland, with dots of cows cropping the grass beneath the white sky. It reminded him, faintly, of a journey he had taken many years ago. At the time, it had not seemed especially important, but when he looked back now, he saw that it had determined nothing less than the course of his life.

  It had, of course, been a trip to Russia. Karvonen had booked the ticket with a pack of his college friends, the train taking them from Helsinki to a faraway city whose name he had not heard before or since. For his friends, as for many young men, the trip had been an excuse to get drunk as the snowy landscape unspooled outside the window. Karvonen, meanwhile, had found himself changed forever.

  For the first time in his life, looking at the expanse of this country pressing against the borders of his own, he had glimpsed the destiny inherent in geography. Land had its own inexorable power. Russia, with its sheer massiveness, could hardly be other than central to the future of the world. By comparison, Finland, its icy appendage, seemed like a nation of mist and shadows.

  Until that moment, Karvonen had not known what kind of man he would be. Taking picture after picture through the window, he had seen how constrained he had been by his homeland. Finland was too complacent, too marginal, and even if it produced great assassins, their names would remain unknown.

  Karvonen, instinctively, had wanted the greatest possible stage for his talents, and the view from the train had told him exactly what that stage should be. Russia was his country’s oldest enemy, and he had been raised from the cradle to see it as such, but it also defined its neighbors by its gravitational pull. There were also times, like it or not, when your enemy was the one you wanted to impress.

  In the end, then, he had approached them with his services. His audition, which he had planned carefully, had been the murder of a business chief for a Russian news agency. After stabbing the reporter to death at home, using his grandfather’s knife, he had gone to the intelligence services with proof of the killing, obtaining an introduction from a military contact. Their own ranks, as he would soon find, contained surprisingly few true killers, so they had gladly taken him on.

  Even then, however, they had not fully understood his reasons. Like all Finns, Karvonen had loved his country deeply, in some ways more than his own life. Yet it was impossible, looking across the border, not to feel that his homeland had fallen short, or had never been given a fair chance at all. More than anything else, he had wanted to prove to his handlers that, left to his own devices, he could play this game better than any Russian. Which was exactly what he had done.

  Then, two years ago, after he had notched up a number of successes, his handler had come to him with a new assignment. The situation was shifting rapidly within the intelligence services, his handler had explained, so he was being given the chance, if he wanted it, to keep up with the changing times.

  Now, at last, the project was reaching completion. He had done well. And throughout it all, he had operated under one condition. He had never spilled a drop of Finnish blood. And he never would.

  As the train entered the tunnel that led underwater to the continent beyond, Karvonen settled back into his seat. Although he was glad to be leaving the city, he still felt the absence of his tools. Foolishly, and inexcusably, he had left his grandfather’s knife behind, a loss that stung painfully whenever he thought of it. He had been forced to give up his gun as well. But both, he expected, would soon be replaced. Brussels, after all, was only two hours away.

  27

  “We believe that Karvonen has left the city,” Wolfe said, standing before a packed conference room in Vauxhall. “We’ve asked for all transit out of London to be kept under high alert. Police forces in other countries have also been notified, although the suspect seems to have a substantial support network already in place, possibly aided by Russian intelligence.”

  “A serious allegation,” Cornwall said. She was seated at the head of the table, with Asthana and Garber stationed to either side. Ten other officers had squeezed themselves into the room, listening intently to updates on what was already the most important manhunt in the history of the agency. “Before I bring this to the Home Office, I’ll need something more.”

  Powell, who was standing at Wolfe’s side, took up the briefing. “An intelligence connection
is consistent with Karvonen’s background. There’s a long history of illegals posing as artists. It’s easier to create a cover story within an artistic community than to find a more conventional job.”

  “But he murdered his employer, possibly because she found out too much,” Wolfe continued. “He was also able to clean out his apartment, so it’s possible he received advance warning from the inside—”

  Garber broke in irritably. “Listen, we don’t know that. And the intelligence angle is pure speculation. We need to focus on what we can prove. There’s more than enough to connect him to Campbell and Akoun, as well as the tournament killings. What more do we need?”

  Cornwall removed her glasses. “That may be enough for you, but at the moment, the press isn’t asking about two bodies in Stoke Newington and Finsbury Park. They want to know how one of the city’s most prominent businessmen was gunned down thirty yards away from a major police operation. It’s a bloody embarrassment. What else do we have on Morley?”

  “I’m speaking with Howard Archer, the founder of the fund, tomorrow,” Powell said. “He might be able to shed some light on Morley’s activities. I also plan to ask him about Boris Levchenko, the bodyguard. I can’t be sure yet, but he looks like Dignity and Honor to me.”

  Cornwall nodded, evidently recognizing the name of an association of former Russian intelligence officers. “And Ilya Severin?”

  “We’re trying to transfer him from Belmarsh,” Wolfe said. “Vasylenko will be out for blood. They’re in separate blocks, but he’s still at risk. We’ve tried using the situation to convince him to talk, but—”

  “It’s a dead end,” Powell finished flatly. “Ilya Severin is not going to cooperate.”