A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  ‘Yes. We’d better have,’ he murmured.

  Turgenev’s back, by the way,’ Vorontsyev remarked. ‘The social column of Novyy Urengoy Pravda will no doubt inform you of that fact in its next issue. I saw his private jet at the airport when they flew Marfa in.’

  ‘Pyotr Leonidovich Turgenev, the town’s richest man …’

  Dmitri’s face narrowed. ‘Oh, no. Not him, Alexei. He’s out of our league. Even if it is GraingerTurgenev that may be involved, we don’t want anything to do with Turgenev himself.’

  Vorontsyev grinned. ‘Just joking. If Turgenev were involved — ?’ He shrugged. ‘He doesn’t need to be. Even if people like Rawls and Schneider are part of it, they’re just salaried monkeys. Turgenev owns the world — at least, locally. He can make billions just being legitimate.’ He grinned. ‘Forget about Turgenev. We’re not going to have to worry about finding him under one of the stones we turn over ‘

  He turned his head, as if alarmed, at the ringing of the fax machine in a corner of the office. Then the high, singing tone warned of a transmission. Dmitri, too, turned to watch the grey looking paper slide out of the fax machine’s slitted mouth. One page, then a second … the impression of a smeared monochrome photograph. Then the peremptory, whistled announcement that the transmission had ended.

  Vorontsyev tore the sheets from the machine and smoothed them on the desk as Dmitri got up and stood at his shoulder.

  Eventually, Vorontsyev murmured: ‘Clever girl. She was right. This boy’s been everywhere in his short life.’

  The smudgy photograph from an SVR file was of the man who had died in the Mercedes. But his name was not AlJani, as his passport had declared. It was fake like the others he had been carrying. His real name was Vahaji, Mostafa Vahaji.

  ‘Rank of major in Intelligence — Office for the Protection of the Islamic Revolution,’ Dmitri muttered excitedly. ‘Their elite foreign intelligencedepartment. Mostafa Vahaji … hello.’

  ‘And goodbye, Mr Al-Jani, gasfield worker. Look at his record.

  Bright lad, travelling far and fast.’

  The file was brief. Vahaji, whose life had ended in a Siberian gas town, had been sighted by the old KGB, over the years, in Egypt, the Gulf, then London, Paris and Moscow. There were unconfirmed rumours of activities in the central Asian republics, post 1989. And most recently he had been posted to Washington.

  ‘Until April last year,’ Vorontsyev read aloud. ‘Then nothing. Suspected recall either for disciplinary hearings or special assignment. Then suddenly he turns up here as a roughneck on a rig, someone who’s supposed to be barely literate, with no qualifications …? Until last year, Moscow Centre was rating him four star. Likely to reach the top or very near it. What happened?’

  ‘Damn,’ Dmitri muttered with impotent, nervous anger.

  ‘What if this was his special assignment? Us — here? Oh, ballocks, that bloody big picture again!’ He seemed anguished, as if a joke had turned into the drowning of a friend. ‘Why couldn’t it have remained small?’ he wailed.

  There was a bleakness in his eyes. Major Vahaji’s real identity had snatched away his illusions, his comforts, just as the drugs had snatched away his family. Vorontsyev, watching the moon once more smothered with cloud, felt their inadequacy, too. The thing was growing like a rampant tumour, spreading, infecting, killing. It was too big.

  ‘It hasn’t!’ he snapped. ‘It’s what it is, no bigger, no smaller.

  Right?’

  ‘You’re worried, too.’

  ‘You’re bloody right, old friend. But we can’t do anything else but go on with it. if only one of us knew, we could hide it from the other. But we both know. We can’t lose face — can we?

  We’re landed with it, and that’s that!’

  Dmitri said after a long silence: ‘He’s just someone who helped kill my daughter. Something to be stepped on.’

  Bob Kauffman owned an apartment overlooking the Potomac in the Watergate complex on the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway.

  In the wet afternoon, the cars swished through the falling rain and the river was dull and chill under low cloud. Lights were already springing out in the complex and its surrounding hotels. Office buildings blazed with light, as if it were already evening. Headlights sprang out across the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge.

  Lock sat in the hire car and watched the frontage of the Watergate complex, or studied the rain-puckered water of the Potomac. His thigh and knee hurt, as did his bruised hip. And he seemed still to possess the chill of his flight as he sat, engine running, heater on, hunched towards the steering wheel.

  He had, somehow, evaded the two men in the Lexus — or they had given up. Eventually, after more than an hour, he had stumbled onto a minor road and hitched a ride back into the city. From his apartment, after he had showered and two bourbons had begun to calm him, he had called the police to report the accident. No, he didn’t think he could prefer charges … no, he didn’t know the number of the truck, maybe it was green, or blue … no, fine, I’ll have the wreck towed away, sure …

  A third bourbon had allowed him to begin to form a resolution.

  His two pursuers had been Caucasian, not Vietnamese. Not that that ruled out Tran, nor did it rule in Turgenev … but Bob Kauffman’s unhelpfulness and suspicion kept returning to him, flashing on a huge screen in his imagination, so that he could minutely inspect the expression. And the earliest embodiment on Kauffman’s face was the recognition of Tran’s name. Kauffman had served with the Company in ‘Nam. He could have known Tran then …

  There was only Kauffman. For the moment. Turgenev had checked out of his hotel and flown back to Russia in his own jet. He was temporarily out of the game. Perhaps he had left orders concerning Lock and it had been his people in the grey Lexus and one of his men driving the truck … but Kauffman knew Tran and that link was much more direct than any cloudier speculations concerning Pete Turgenev and the way in which he had frightened both Vaughn Grainger and his dead son. So, he had to talk to Kaulfman.

  Almost as important were his memories of his apartment. It had been as if he had occupied a hotel room in a new and strange city. He had showered, poured himself a drink, then another, called the police, changed his clothes — all as if the place had been rented for the afternoon and he was engaged on business that had nothing to do with the place as his home. He had neglected even to switch on the hi-fi, play some music. It was a recognition of something that was cold, even icy; as if he had passed from one stage of his life to another with only an amnesiac interlude that blotted out all sense of change.

  He had refused to check the answerphone, as if it was nothing more than a learning tape for a foreign language, spoken in a tongue which he would never require, not now. That part of him, and of his life, was finished with, meaningless. He had glanced into the small study, seen the scattered stave paper, the various printed scores of that obscure opera on which he had fitfully worked — and the music’s paged deadness had been too akin to his ordinary life; an unperformed work, grown musty with JacJc of use.

  He knew he had changed. He just hadn’t seen it in the mirror in the bathroom or the cheval mirror in his bedroom or the mirrored wall in the hallway. Only seen it now, sitting in the rented Chrysler in the downpour, watching the lights across the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge as if assessing the worth of a double string of glowing pearls. Cars hissed and susurrated past him, sounding like waves on a beach. A tide raging but going out, leaving him stranded. He was changed. His apartment had been nothing more than the bones or carapace of someone else, a chrysalis he no longer needed.

  Sea change. Into a past self. The boy who had fought other boys who insulted or teased his sister, the young man who had fought the Russians ~ helped to fight them — with the same innocence as the boy had done. The field agent given an assignment. That was who he was. His mission was to find and deal with Beth’s murderers, who had tried to kill him, twice.

  And he had no other avenue to explore outside of Kauf
fman

  … whose proximity to Tran and Vaughn and maybe Billy in

  ‘Nam tormented him now like something he was attempting to remember in a half-waking dream. He had to go down that mean avenue, whatever he might find at the end of it He looked at his watch. It was almost five in the afternoon, and the light was beginning to drain away above the cloud, darkening the rain. It made the river glitter with reflected light from the bridge and maybe fifty buildings along the parkway.

  Kauffman probably left his office early these days. He was just serving out his time. He hoped Kauffman wasn’t on his way to the Mayflower or some other bar … because he was impatient now; however reluctant something deep in him was about facing the worst, he wanted to begin. His body was shivery with anticipatory nerves, not fear.

  Turgenev — awful, dark irony — was almost his creation. His and Billy’s. He’d pointed Billy in Turgenev’s direction, he’d checked the man and his companies out…

  He shut out the creeping guilt that clung like seaweed to the memory.

  Watched a Ford pull off the parkway towards the Watergate complex. As its cloudy windows passed beside a streetlamp, he recognized Kauffman. Lock swallowed. The car moved through an archway towards the entrance to the underground garage.

  He knew the apartment number. He would give Kauffman ten relaxing minutes that would make him comfortable, off guard.

  He flicked off the wipers now that he had recognized Kauffman.

  Rain streamed between himself and the scene, all but blanking it out, like the dead screen of a TV. The minutes passed precisely in his head.

  He got out of the car into the downpour, shrugging his raincoat across his shoulders, bending his head as he scuttled towards the Watergate complex. The pistol, in the raincoat pocket, bumped ominously against his thigh as he hurried.

  Vorontsyev yawned, with impatience as much as sleeplessness, as he leaned on the counter of the hospital’s reception desk.

  The plump, heavily made-up woman, her skin crow-walked beneath the orange foundation, studied the photograph from the forged passport he had found in the dead Iranian’s glove compartment.

  ‘Did anyone enquire after him or visit him — even come with him in the ambulance after he had his heart attack?’ His forefinger tapped the enlarged snapshot.

  ‘I don’t know, Major — when exactly was this?’ There was at least a minimal, ingrained respect for his rank and office in her manner.

  ‘I gave you the date. He was admitted to Emergency, he was in Intensive Care — then he died. Try to be helpful.’ He could have consulted someone in hospital records. But Bakunin seemed already aware of his every move in the direction of Rawls, and the Iranian was linked to Rawls. Better the oblique approach — even if it didn’t seem to be leading anywhere.

  The hospital foyer whispered with the voices of the central heating and the occasional nurse or doctor. The warmth and luxury numbed.

  She squinted again at the photograph, her nose creased with assumed concentration. She’d been on the day shift, changed two days ago to nights and didn’t enjoy the change. She’d been on duty when the dead man had been admitted; she’d have supervised the form-filling.

  ‘I think there were two of them who came with him in the ambulance — or in a car following the ambulance.’ She shrugged.

  Her grey eyes looked up. ‘I didn’t take much notice.’ Her white uniform was tight on her plump body. ‘They seemed concerned about him, of course.’

  ‘They evidently knew him.’

  ‘I think they said they were friends of his.’

  ‘Staying at the Gogol, like him?’ Dmitri was on his way to the hotel now to question the porter, the night staff, anyone who would know who was booked in at the same time as the dead man.

  ‘I don’t know, Major. They sat in the foyer — over there — for a while, then went away. One of them came back the next day, but the patient was dead by then.’ She nodded. ‘I remember telling the one who came back his friend was dead. He seemed upset.’

  Vorontsyev sighed. ‘And that’s all you can remember?’

  ‘That’s all there was.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He put the photograph back in his wallet and turned away. ‘Goodnight.’ He walked towards the lifts. He ought, to assuage any remaining guilt, to look in on Marfa. Tell her she was a clever girl, that they’d identified the Iranian as an intelligence officer.

  His mobile phone peremptorily summoned his attention as he waited for the lift. In an instinctive, anxious hurry, he went out of the sliding glass doors into the icy wind, where the stars seemed to wobble and dance. Whatever the call, security needed to be paranoid because of Bakunin’s suspicions.

  He answered the call. The moon was a cold knifecut in the black, starry sky. Beyond the town, the rigs glowed like enemy campfires surrounding Novyy Urengoy. He crunched on the ice of the car park as if maintaining a hopeless patrol, awaiting an attack.

  The line crackled with distance.

  ‘Major? Inspector Vlad Botchkov, Kiev Militia. Your office told me your mobile phone number — eventually.’ There was what might have been a laugh, or just an exasperated exhalation of air. ‘Lazy bastards, your people.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you Ukrainians always say about Russians, Inspector?’ There was a kind of shallow camaraderie. ‘You’re bad tempered because you’re on the graveyard shift, is that it?’

  ‘Too true. Major, your enquiry was dumped on me by Criminal Investigation. They couldn’t be bothered with it.’

  ‘I’m sorry ‘

  ‘That’s all right. Missing Persons was the right place to come, as it turns out.’

  ‘Oh.’ He felt a tickle of excitement. ‘You’ve identified the man in the photograph.’

  ‘He wasn’t very well when it was taken, was he?’

  ‘Sorry again. He died of a heart attack.’

  ‘You had him on a false passport, is that right? That’s the other picture of him?’

  ‘He was calling himself a supplier to one of the gas rigs. Name of Pomarov at his hotel and on his papers. But there was a Dutch passport with his photograph, in someone else’s possession.’ An Iranian intelligence officer.

  ‘I’ll fax you the’details — but he was neither Dutch nor a businessman. He’s from Kiev, all right. At least, his family is. He moved back a year or so ago. His only daughter reported him missing fairly recently. He’s a widower and she and he didn’t get on. Nearly three weeks ago now, she called at his house, only to find the place locked up and deserted. She went back a couple of times, tried calling. But eventually she reported it. No trace of him anywhere. Now he’s dead/

  ‘Yes.’ While his daughter had been looking for him, he had been a thousand miles away, in another country. ‘What’s his real name?’

  ‘His name actually is Pomarov. That’s why we didn’t have too much of a problem.’

  ‘Who was he — what was he?’

  ‘A redundant research scientist. There’s a lot of them about.

  Like so many of them, now the arms race is over, there was no job for him any more. He was bitter about it, his daughter said.

  Pride hurt, I suppose. He worked at Semipalatinsk at one time.

  Anyway, the girl said he was depressed, which was why she was worried. And that’s about it. Any help?’ Carefully, having recovered his breath, Vorontsyev said:

  ‘Doesn’t seem to be. I can’t see how that background fits in with my problems. Looks like a dead end. Thanks, anyway, Botchkov — I owe you.’

  Vorontsyev switched off the phone, newly aware of the wind’s howl, the distressed moon and stars. He felt cold, icily chilled to his marrow. Semipalatinsk, where they He cut off the thought, even as it threatened to grow like a nightmarish weed in a speeded-up film sequence, flowering hideously. He hurried back into the hospital foyer, his feet uncertain on the icy tarmac. The receptionist he had questioned hardly remarked his return. He pressed for the lift. Mostafa Vahaji, alias Al-Jani, of the Office for the Protection of the
Islamic Revolution in Tehran … and a scientist from Semipalatinsk who was to leave Novyy Urengoy on a Dutch passport.

  With others. The lift doors opened and he pressed for the floor of Maria’s ward. He shivered. Vahaji had a permanent suite at the Gogol Hotel, Pomarov had booked in there, with friends. He had travelled from Kiev under the cover of a connection with GraingerTurgenev.

  It wasn’t just drugs. It was some kind of trade in people scientists.

  It was smuggling knowledge, maybe exchanging intellect for heroin, who could say? Dangerous knowledge; the knowledge of men who had worked in Semipalatinsk.

  The lift doors opened and he hurried into the aseptic, hot corridor. He pushed open the door of the ward, and the duty nurse looked up, recognized him, and returned to the report he was writing.

  Vorontsyev saw Marfa sitting up in bed, her nightlight on, arms folded across her breasts, glowering at the foot of her bed.

  Then she saw him and her features brightened. It was as if he were her father, come to take her home. Yet, as he neared the bed, her eyes seemed pale and cold, retaining the terror she must have felt. She looked older, fragile. Her hands were pale on the coverlet, and her freckles looked like liver spots, as if she was made up for the part of a much older woman.

  ‘Where’s Goludin? I told him’

  ‘Gone to the toilet.’ She peeled back the coverlet, revealing a gun. ‘He left me this. He’ll be back—’

  Vorontsyev heard the doors open and the breathy hurry of someone approaching them.

  ‘Sorry, sir-‘ Goludin began apologetically, but Vorontsyev waved him into his chair at the bedside and sat down himself on Marfa’s other side.

  ‘You all right now?’ he asked awkwardly.

  Marfa shivered. ‘I think so …’ She nodded. ‘Have to be. They say I have to stay in for at least two days, for observation. Nothing’s fallen off — so far.’ The attempted humour was leaden, false. Her eyes were wide with remembered fears and her skin more ashen than when he had entered. He felt deeply guilty, profoundly angry.

  ‘Good. I’ve some interesting news.’ Goludin leaned forward.