An Agent of Deceit

by Chris Morgan Jones

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I would like to thank you all for being here. Today we celebrate the birthday of a very special young lady,’ much applause and cheering, ‘who is now six years old. I can hardly believe it. Maria Sergeevna, as beautiful as a princess in her birthday dress, is six years old today.’ Galinin waited for a second burst of applause. ‘On her behalf I would like to invite you to enjoy our party here. I think maybe it is the best tea party ever thrown in Moscow!’ Another pause, and much clapping. ‘We have tea – of different strengths! – we have cakes, we have music and entertainment. In a moment I shall leave you to enjoy yourselves but first of all I have one very important duty to perform: to give Maria Sergeevna her birthday present.’ At this he ruffled his daughter’s hair, slightly dislodging her tiara. People at the back of the crowd craned for a look at her expectant face.

  In the wall behind the stage, a door opened, and through it stepped a man wearing the costume of a circus ringmaster. He held a thick rope in his right hand and at the other end of it, slowly emerging in the doorway, was a crocodile, perhaps seven feet long, lumbering forward deliberately on its angular legs. A gasp went up in the front rows and several people took an unconscious step backwards. Lock watched as the ringmaster and the crocodile mounted the stage and the ringmaster passed the rope to Galinin.

  ‘From Asia, a beast for my beautiful girl!’ shouted Galinin to the crowd, eschewing the microphone. ‘His name is Gena! What do you think of him, my darling?’ Maria looked at the animal with something between fear and delight. ‘Do not worry. He will not hurt you. He is only young.’ He offered Maria the rope but she hesitated, looking up into his eyes for reassurance; then she turned abruptly away and pressed her face into her mother’s skirt. Guests laughed, and so did Galinin, who took up the microphone again. ‘It is right for the princess to be afraid of her beast. Do not worry, my dear – he will live with us and you will come to know him. Now, is there any man here brave enough to wrestle Gena?’ He laughed, and his guests nervously followed. ‘Sorry, Gena, no takers today. Thank you anyway. Say goodbye to your friends.’ To new applause the ringmaster took the crocodile down the steps and away.

  ‘Now!’ said Galinin, clapping his hands together, ‘let the party begin! Enjoy yourselves, please!’ As the applause rose once more he knelt by Maria, took her by the arms and gave her an emphatic kiss on each cheek. As the audience dispersed Lock saw the little girl, her eyes red but not crying, hugging her father and being coaxed into a laugh.

  ‘Thirty minutes,’ he said to Oksana, ‘at most. Just let me congratulate Sergei.’

  ‘Is she their only child?’ said Oksana, still watching the stage.

  ‘I think so, yes. Why?’

  ‘I wonder what they will give her next year. I’m going to find some food.’

  Lock watched her go. There was now a press of people round Galinin. He found a drink and stood on the edge of the group, as if waiting in line.

  One day he would give a speech for Vika, at her eighteenth birthday, perhaps her wedding: a short, perfect speech that would let her know how proud he was and how much he loved her. At her last birthday party – no, the one before: the last one he had managed to attend – he had stood in a room full of screaming girls in party dresses and felt stiff and remote, making stilted conversation with other parents while Vika, alight with excitement, watched a magician conjure doves from a velvet bag. She was seven that day, and Lock had brought her a beautiful winter coat that Marina had said she would adore. In the end it was spring before he was in London again, and he never saw her wear it.

  Someone touched his arm and asked him whether Konstantin was at the party. No, said Lock; urgent business at the ministry. The truth was that Malin didn’t like parties, still less the parties of not wholly important people, and preferred to keep his distance from his commercial partners in public. This was why Lock was here, to pay respect on his behalf. He and this man, an oil company executive, a Russian, talked for some time about the industry, Lock keeping a distracted eye on his target. But no matter how swift Galinin was with each guest, the queue never seemed to shorten as important Russians, and brazen ones, simply went straight up to him and shook his hand. Lock’s acquaintance left to talk to someone else and Lock was left alone, not for the first time regretting his reserve. He could see Oksana halfway across the room talking to Galinin’s right-hand man, who was improbably young and clean-cut.

  He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He took it out and saw that it was a London number calling.

  ‘Hello?’ he said, moving away from Galinin’s little congregation. ‘Hold on, it’s very loud in here. Let me step out. Hold on.’ He walked quickly across the room and out into the lobby.

  ‘OK. Sorry about that. Go ahead.’

  ‘Richard Lock?’

  ‘Yes, speaking.’

  ‘This is Gavin Hewson of The Times in London, Mr Lock. I was wondering whether you’d like to make a comment on the lawsuit that’s been brought against you in New York. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’

  Lock hesitated. He was terrified of talking to the press. Journalists, he believed, had only one intention, to expose him to public shame and humiliation. His PR people had given him some advice about how to deal with them: be relaxed, be polite, and give them something that they want, not everything but something. Polite perhaps he could manage.

  ‘To be honest this isn’t a very good time. I’m at a social gathering.’ A social gathering? Lock wondered as he said it whether he could sound less relaxed. ‘And it’s getting late in Moscow. Could I call you after the weekend?’

  ‘I’d rather speak now if we could,’ said Hewson. ‘ We have a piece appearing in tomorrow’s paper and I was hoping for a comment.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Fuck, thought Lock. Fuck. Malin hated surprises like this. ‘In London?’ Christ. Where else would it be published?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look, is there any chance you could set it back a day or two? I’d love to make a comment but I should speak to my PR people first. You understand.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. It’s all blocked out. Can you tell me for a start what you make of Mr Tourna’s allegation that Faringdon Holdings is a money-laundering operation?’

  Lock had been pacing the hotel lobby but at this question he made his way to the entrance and went out into the cold. What do I make of the allegation? he thought. Well, it’s completely true, of course. How could it be anything but? I’m amazed no one has ever challenged it before.

  ‘You’re going to have to speak to my PR people. I’ll have them call you.’

  ‘So you’re not prepared to make a comment yourself?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘So just no comment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who does your PR?’

  ‘Aylward Associates.’

  ‘Who? Martin Cassidy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll give him a call.’ Hewson hung up.

  Lock put his phone back in his pocket and sat down on the steps of an old office building opposite the hotel. He was going to have to get much better at answering these questions. On an impulse he stood up, walked back into the hotel, went to the concierge’s desk and asked him where he could buy cigarettes. At the bar on the top floor he bought twenty Marlboro Reds and some matches, stepped out onto the hotel’s roof terrace, tapped a cigarette from its soft pack and lit it, leaning on a railing and looking out over Moscow.

  This was his first cigarette in eight years – since Vika was born. In a moment, after one more, he would go and find Oksana, and a little after that, but as late as he could leave it, he would call Malin about The Times. The smoke was heavy in his lungs.

  He felt ill. Whenever he was in Moscow now he felt ill. Almost immediately on his return his breathing would become tight and his throat sore, his bones would ache, and his back could leave him shuffling like an old man. He wondered sometimes whether this was divine redress for the time he spe
nt avoiding responsibility and tax in the paradises of the world: St Nevis, Vanuatu, Grand Cayman, Mauritius – the scattered archipelago of his evasive half-life. Or perhaps it was just contrast. Even now on a brisk October evening Moscow seemed cold, its air somehow thin and thick at once, lit through the cloud with a yellow grey light that looked to Lock like the colour of contagion. Drizzle fell, and it occurred to him at last that this was how Moscow should feel – uncomfortable, oppressive. This was how most people experienced it. The scene in the ballroom below, he would do well to remember, was not typical, and did not include him. Squeezed. Beresford was right. He was beginning to feel it.

  The weekend was bright and warm, a throwback to September, but Lock spent much of it in his apartment. The article appeared in The Times on Saturday, as Hewson had said it would. Lock and Oksana had left the Galinins’ party and gone on for dinner, during which Lock was preoccupied, despite his best efforts to be light, and Oksana had told him at length why smoking was foul and wouldn’t endear him to her at all. They had gone back to his apartment a little before midnight, and on the way Lock had called Malin and told him to expect an article the next day. Malin had merely thanked him, reminded him that it would be useful to have something from the investigators soon, and hung up. Oksana had gone silently to bed; Lock had stayed up in his study with his laptop and stared for hours at The Times website waiting for his story to appear. Marina would see it, for sure. He wondered who else. His father perhaps, though only if the Dutch papers picked it up.

  At about three in the morning he refreshed the page again and there it was: ‘Russian Energy Tsar Accused of Corruption’, prominently displayed in the business section. It concerned itself almost entirely with the lawsuit, reporting Tourna’s complaint in some detail, but also gave sketches of the principal characters. Malin was a ‘shadowy but powerful presence in the Ministry of Industry and Energy’ amongst other things; Lock was ‘an Anglo-Dutch lawyer who has worked in Moscow since the early 1990s and . . . is connected with Faringdon Holdings Ltd, an Irish company that owns sizeable shareholdings in energy companies in Russia.’ Malin, it reported, had not been available for comment, while Lock had ‘declined to comment last night’. Tourna, unsurprisingly, had been loquacious. For an instant, before he began to imagine what it would entail, Lock wondered whether they might have a libel case against him.

  He read it through three times. There was no original reporting here: Hewson had described the New York complaint and allowed Tourna some ripe remarks. He hadn’t even mentioned the Paris arbitration, and there was no analysis of Faringdon’s various assets – no indication at all, in fact, of whether Tourna had a case. But what worried Lock was precisely that it seemed to say so little. Why print it if there wasn’t more to come? The PR people, Lock supposed, would no doubt tell him that the trick now was to ensure that Hewson got bored and didn’t try to write any more stories – a highly desirable trick, if they could pull it off. It was possible there would be no more – after all, this wasn’t the first time that stories of Russian corruption had broken in the UK press only to die quietly away. Corruption in Russia was hardly news. He went to bed, not wholly reassured.

  When he woke in the late morning Oksana had gone, leaving him a note that simply read: ‘Please stop worrying. It’s not good for you and I like you more when you don’t.’ He smiled as he read it. He made coffee, and toast from a square, dry loaf and went back to his computer. The article was still there. He read it again a few times, found that it caused him no fresh alarm, and searched The Times website to make sure that there was nothing else there about him. He found an article from two years earlier, all of a hundred and fifty words, reporting that Faringdon had increased its stake in the Romanian company Romgaz and would soon force a takeover offer to all shareholders. Otherwise nothing.

  The next thing to do was call Colonel Bazhaev, but Lock was nervous of the colonel and preferred to keep their encounters to a minimum. On his return from London they had met and Bazhaev had said that he would need fifty thousand dollars to find everything there was to be found on Tourna. Lock had meekly agreed and left the colonel’s sinister, fluorescent-lit office as quickly as he could.

  Years ago he had been given Bazhaev’s name by Malin, who didn’t trouble his own security team, large and powerful though it was, with matters concerning his private business outside Russia. Lock had never fully understood this. Malin’s security people sat outside the ministry – its head, another former FSB colonel called Horkov, was not a state employee – but appeared to have authority equivalent to a state organization. They could put people under surveillance, listen to their telephone calls, follow their movements in and out of Moscow, and gain access to the files of the security services and the police. Lock had seen them collaborate with the FSB when recalcitrant management refused to vacate a company that Malin had taken over. They worked on all manner of problems for Malin, some relating to his business, some to his role in the ministry. Lock used to wonder who paid for them, but had come to realize that the question wasn’t important.

  Horkov, Lock thought, was probably marginally more frightening than Bazhaev, but there wasn’t much in it. Physically they didn’t resemble each other – Bazhaev was solid and grey, Horkov tall, angular and quick – but they were of the same generation that had become senior in the KGB just as it had ceased to exist, and time in their company felt much the same. These were men who were practised in making decisions about people’s lives without recourse to conscience; they were not necessarily cruel, but they had no need for delicacy, and they had never known regret. Lock was always conscious that under other circumstances they, and many like them, could have made his life painful and difficult. He was lucky, he now thought, to have them on his side.

  He put off calling Bazhaev and instead called Paul Scott at InvestSol in London. He sounded a little surprised to be called on a Saturday. He told Lock that they were making good progress, finding some interesting stuff, very interesting lines of enquiry emerging, but that he couldn’t discuss specific findings over the telephone because of who might be listening. Was there anything Scott was prepared to say that might be useful to his client now? No, sadly it was all too delicate. Lock, cursing investigators everywhere, told him that he would see him in London in two weeks’ time, and that he was expecting great things.

  At last, having made himself more coffee and smoked a cigarette, noting with something like shame how immediately and precisely this made his apartment smell like all his old apartments had smelt, he phoned Bazhaev, who answered before a single ring and without allowing Lock to speak told him that he would visit his offices on Wednesday at eleven in the morning – and hung up. This meant that Lock had nothing to tell Malin when they met for their regular Tuesday evening meeting. He hated having nothing to tell Malin.

  His chores done, Lock sat with his coffee and wondered what to do with his day. Oksana was busy this evening, she had told him; she needed to work on her thesis. This, Lock reflected, was probably true, but even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t jealous of her, mainly, he supposed, because he had only ever had her on loan. When she finished her PhD she would no longer need his support, and she would go. It was a civilized arrangement, and he had never felt the need to make it uncivilized by claiming more than they had tacitly agreed.

  So he wouldn’t see her now for two or three days, and weekends in Moscow without Oksana were difficult. He could go to Izmailovsky for a walk, or to the baths, or to Starlite for a long lunch with other lonely Englishmen and Americans, stretching into dinner and a drunken, staggering visit to whichever nightclub had been decreed shinier than its peers this week.

  In the end he sat in his apartment and read every mention of himself he could find on the Internet, nervous that he would find something he didn’t know was there. Twelve thousand hits. He was surprised to see so many. Some were about him, repetitive mentions of deals, acquisitions, transactions. Some were about Richard Lock the social entrepreneur,
some about Richard Lock the singer-songwriter from Montana. Even when he was fairly certain that he had seen every pertinent, original mention of his name he carried on looking, morbidly expecting that he would finally find the article that showed him to be a fraud, a stooge, a money-launderer. When he finished, it was dark outside and he felt relieved but still anxious, as if he had been given a health check that addressed only symptoms and not causes.

  That evening he sent out for pizza and drank Scotch in front of the television, finishing his last cigarette around eleven.

  On Sunday morning he checked the newspapers. Reuters had taken the story up, and he found small pieces in the Globe and Mail, the Observer and, bizarrely, the Hong Kong Standard. There was nothing new in any of them. He should let his various colleagues around the world know, he thought, so that they hear it from me and not somebody else. Later. He could do that tomorrow.

  He went to the gym, cursed the tightness in his lungs, and managed a short, stiff run and twenty minutes on an exercise bike before capitulating and making his way to the sauna. Afterwards he went to the Radisson on Tverskaya for lunch, where expats tended to congregate, breaking away from the group at around four and making his way home, wondering when it was that his appetite for days like this had died.

  At one on Monday Lock had an appointment with Mikkel Friis, his partner in the restaurant project. Lock had long wanted to have a restaurant in Moscow. He thought that it would confer on him a visible glory that his everyday role could not. It was his idea, inspired by a trip to Istanbul with Oksana, and was set to be the city’s finest Turkish restaurant, rich and dark and exclusive, sumptuously Ottoman. The refurbishment had begun, they had their chef, they had sourced rugs and furniture from Turkey itself, and they had a name, Dolmabahce, that Lock liked. Today he and Friis, a young Dane who had made a premature fortune in private equity, were eating at the current holder of the zeitgeist crown, a supremely sleek modern place with a menu ‘fused’ from the cuisines of a dozen countries, to see what they could learn.