Everyone has a weakness. Lukov’s was women. Enslaved to his cock—to which he proved himself a devoted and unaccountably successful servant—he was an internationally notorious skirt chaser. He roared with laughter again, and then as quickly as it flared up his face dropped.
“Are you buying or selling?” I went to answer, but he cut me off. “And don’t think Sergei is going to be cheap. You, here—this is a problem, my friend. A big fucking problem. You understand?”
I told him I did and lowered my hands, looking around for somewhere to sit. He pointed to the table and I drew up a chair. I sat down and folded the tan overcoat I’d bought on the way tightly across my chest. Lukov reached up to a cupboard over the sink and produced a bottle and two little Duralex glasses, into each of which he poured an ounce or so of clear liquid.
“Rakia,” he said. “For the cold.” I hesitated. “Relax.” He smiled. “Guaranteed one hundred percent Bulgarian grape poison.” We lifted our glasses and banged the rims together loudly. Lukov looked me straight in the eye. “Nazdrave.”
“Sláinte,” I replied, holding his stare.
I took the rakia at a gulp and clenched my throat before breathing out. My guts burned. Lukov sat down and lit a Gauloise and then pushed the packet and a lighter toward me. I lit one, too, and held the smoke down. It tasted good. We both exhaled into the room. The tobacco smoke smothered the tang of shit, the rakia, the biting cold.
“Selling,” I said.
“Bad luck for you.” He smiled. “Buyer’s market. Seems like everyone has something to sell these days.” I took another drag on the Gauloise, and he fixed his marble eyes on me through the smoke. No smiles now. We stared at each other for a moment over the empty glasses. “What are you offering?”
I dropped my cigarette into the ashtray. Then, slowly, so as not to incite his trigger finger, I removed the hundred-dollar bill from my ticket pocket, careful all the while to keep his gaze. I unfolded the note and placed it faceup on the table between us.
“Benjamin Franklin,” I replied.
The laughter erupted again. Lukov’s face warped into a mass of unshaven creases. His body rocked; his left hand slammed the table like a tag wrestler desperate to climb out of the ring. But his right hand never strayed more than a second from the pistol in his belt. It was a talent of his that you never knew if he was genuinely amused or just hamming it up; likewise, his bouts of gravity were equally inscrutable. But Lukov’s real talent was not as an actor, but as a broker.
Neither buying nor selling anything personally, he was merely a key—albeit an expensive one—that unlocked the doors through which clients who could otherwise never be seen to meet could do business: the Americans and the Russians; the Russians and the Chinese; the Chinese and the Iranians; the Iranians and the Saudis; the Saudis and the Israelis; the Israelis and the North Koreans; the North Koreans and the Americans. The list was infinite, the cycle unending.
His stock-in-trade was not intelligence but information. What other people did with it, how they assessed it, categorized it, classified it, was apparently of no interest to him. Whether he took pleasure in pimping his wares, thrills from driving up or down the price, remained unclear. What was clear was that he took ten percent of every transaction, in cryptocurrency, in advance. A multimillionaire who lived and laughed like a hyena, he was, in his soul, a mirthless motherfucker, both loved and loathed by Vauxhall Cross, Langley and Moscow in turn. Though they all despised him, they all protected him, for the simple reason that they all needed him.
His world revolved around percentages, but his business was built on trust—and favors. Two years ago I’d saved him from a Chechen hit squad on his own doorstep, and he’d been resentful ever since; he owed me, big-time. He dug his left hand into his pocket and tossed a crumpled fifty-euro note on the table.
“For you, Max McLean,” he snorted, “and only for you, my friend, Sergei will wash your C-note at fifty cents on the dollar.” He slapped his thigh. “Buyer’s market! Super!”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “Incredible. Really incredible. You know why?”
“No, my friend. Sergei absolutely promises you he does not know why.” He was still laughing. Tears formed at the edges of his eyes and moistened his cheeks. “Tell me, please.”
“Because . . .” I paused and reminded myself to be patient with him, tempting though it was to throttle him. “Because this isn’t a hundred-dollar bill.”
“Ah, really, Max McLean? What is it, then?” His smile was slipping again.
“It’s a death warrant.”
Lukov tapped his cigarette and dried his eyes and poured two more glasses of rakia. He lifted his high, and then with great and sudden solemnity proposed a toast.
“To death.” We clinked glasses again and swallowed the grape distillate. “But whose?”
“Mine, nearly,” I said truthfully. “The Brits want the bill, and so do the Russians. And they aren’t choosy about how they get it.”
“My friend, there are a hundred and forty million Russians. Sergei knows. He’s met all of them.” He licked the last of the rakia from the rim of his glass and lit another Gauloise. “Which Russian?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“OK. And the British, they are trying to kill you, too? For this?” Lukov rarely asked questions to which he didn’t already have the answers. His interrogations were intended to corroborate what he already thought he knew.
I shrugged. He shook his head.
“But . . . why?” He sounded genuinely, uncharacteristically, confused.
“I don’t know, Sergei. Truly. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the note. Maybe it was the hit.” There isn’t one damned straight line in any of this, I thought to myself, and I wasn’t about to lay out everything I knew for Sergei Lukov. “The last week has been, uh, unpleasant. The note, that note, is the only thing that links a series of very unfortunate events.” I picked up the cigarette and drew on it again. “That note, and me.”
“So . . .” He chose his words carefully. “The golden boy of MI6 is here to see Sergei, how shall we say, in a personal capacity?” I nodded again, and pushed the note toward him. He laughed and picked up the bill, turning it over in his hands—and flinched. Not even Lukov could mask his surprise at seeing the single Russian word scrawled across the back of the note. “Еbah mu maikata,” he swore. “What is this?”
He held the note up so I could see what I already knew was written on it.
“It’s what makes it personal,” I said.
“What, Max McLean is on the side of the angels now?”
I smiled at that.
“Maybe. Maybe not. You’ve seen the photo?” I asked him. “In the press?” Lukov choked on his cigarette smoke and held his hands up—Gauloise in one, hundred-dollar bill in the other—as if to say, “Of course.” “So? What do you hear?”
Lukov dropped his hands and his expression and pushed the note back across the table toward me.
“Sergei hears,” he said, “that you tried to do the Russians a favor.”
“How so?”
“By completing their contract for them.” He stubbed his cigarette out. “But he also hears they lost something very valuable in the process.” He pointed to the hundred-dollar bill on the table. “Maybe that is half the mystery solved, nali?”
“Their contract? I don’t understand.”
“Max McLean,” he said, then paused to drag hard on a new cigarette, “are you just talking or are you buying now, too?”
“Buying. Fifteen percent on the note.”
“Twenty.”
“Fuck.” I rubbed my face. “OK. Twenty. Which contract?”
“The old man.”
“What old man, exactly?” I said, choosing my words carefully.
“The old man in the, uh, v kashtata?” He fished for the right words in English. “In the cottage?”
“Got it,” I said, though I hadn’t. “The Russians and the Brits both wanted Chappie Connor dead?”
Connor hadn’t been named in the newspaper reports. Throwing the name at Lukov was like trying to land a spotting round on a fire mission when you couldn’t see the target. Sometimes you overshoot. Sometimes you get lucky.
“Chappie Connor?” Lukov spluttered. “That piece of shit?”
“Uh-huh.”
It was always amusing when Lukov thought someone else was deplorable. The Lord only knew what he thought other people said about him. He pressed his lips together into a tight smile and nodded, processing the information.
“Connor worked for the Russians. No question. But he worked for the British, too.”
“How do you mean?”
“Simple. Like I said. He worked for the British.”
“When?”
“When he was in the Irish Republican Army.”
“And how would you . . . ?” Then the veil lifted. “Because you brokered his defection. You sold him back to the Russians.” I looked at the note and the empty rakia glass, and into Lukov’s beady black eyes. “Wow.” Lukov finished his cigarette. “And when he, uh, died, who was he working for then?” I asked.
“My friend,” he said patiently, “now only the angels know who Chappie Connor really worked for, and when he worked for them.” I could do nothing but accept the infuriating truth of that. “Sergei,” he continued, “is not an angel.”
“You got that right.”
“But Sergei does know that the man you were sent to kill was not Chappie Connor.”
“How?” It was uncomfortable being perplexed in his presence. He cocked his head to one side and grinned widely, relishing my ignorance.
“OK. But first Sergei has a question for you.” His nose twitched and he fiddled with the cigarette packet. “When did Chappie Connor die?”
“You know that,” I said, wondering if in fact he did know that Connor had been dead at least a week before I got to him. There was every reason not to tell him anything. But once bargaining began, it was difficult not to tell him everything.
“Da,” Lukov agreed. “I do. But does Max McLean? Sergei Lukov doesn’t think he does.”
“Sergei Lukov,” I replied, “is very close to pissing me off.” I caught hold of my temper and smiled again. “All right. You can have this for your twenty percent. Connor was already dead when I got to the cottage. So if there was another contract on him, they got there first.”
“That,” said Lukov, “is correct.” He plucked another Gauloise from the packet and lit it carefully. “Chappie Connor was already dead. Da. Bravo. He was killed by the KGB.”
“The FSB, Sergei.” It was hard not to laugh at his slipup. “The Cold War is long gone, my friend.”
“Not in 1988 it wasn’t.” His face was set, serious. Lukov wasn’t joking.
“What, exactly,” I asked him carefully, “do you mean?”
“Sergei means,” he said, “exactly what Sergei has said.”
“That Chappie Connor was killed thirty years ago? By the KGB? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Da. That is what Sergei is telling you.”
“And how would you know that?”
My mind raced. It didn’t matter that Lukov had brokered his defection. Connor would have been given a new identity, a new life, a fireproof exit into the new Russia emerging in the thaw of glasnost.
“He was hit by a truck. In Sofia,” he said with evident pride, patting his chest with his free hand. “Sergei’s hometown. The driver of the truck,” he continued, “was Sergei’s priyatel.”
“Careless driver, your friend.”
“That is the only problem with Bulgarians. They are very bad drivers. Very bad indeed.” I felt a line of sweat break across my back. My mouth went dry. “Sergei has a better question for you. There are sixty million British. Which one ordered the hit? That is the real question, nali?”
“Yes, Sergei. That is the question.”
“And what is the answer?”
“Are you buying now, too?”
“Da.” He scratched his head. “Why not?”
“Ten percent on the note.” I smiled. Lukov sighed and raised his eyebrows.
“Fifteen?” he countered.
“Done. King. General King. Director Special Forces. Off the books, of course.”
Lying to Lukov was a hard card to play. His face remained expressionless. Not even a flicker.
“Of course.”
“Though whether he knew it was Chappie Connor, I have no idea.”
“And now you are in shit?”
“No offense, but I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
“Da. OK. That is the truth. So . . . You are sure you want to do this?”
“Yeah. Sure. Just put the note on the market. See who bites.”
Lukov dragged on the Gauloises and blew his smile away for good with the smoke.
“Let me be very clear with you. Sergei is a broker. He makes sales. And the way he makes them is to guarantee them. You put that note on the market, then you sell it. It’s merchandise, not bait. Sergei does not do your reconnaissance for you. You know the rules. If you want to sell, then you guarantee the sale, so I can.” He took another drag. The moment he stopped calling himself Sergei, I knew he was serious. “And what, Max McLean, do you have for collateral?”
I showed him my empty hands again and pulled the left-hand side of my overcoat away from my chest. With my right thumb and forefinger I produced Dr. David Mann’s passport from my inside pocket and dropped it on the table in front of him.
“Me,” I said. “I’m your collateral.”
Lukov picked up the passport. I picked up the hundred-dollar bill and put it back in my pocket.
“It’s not you,” he said. “It’s not your cover. Who is David Peter Mann?”
“A sap,” I said. “It’s stolen and it’s how I got here. Like I said, the job was off the books. And like you said, I’m in deep shit. Whoever pays the most gets the note. If you give them this, they’ll believe you, believe it’s really me selling.”
“And the note? I can keep it?”
“I like you, Sergei. But I don’t want to fuck you. So don’t try to fuck me. I keep the note. You keep the passport.”
“OK.” He slipped Dr. Mann’s identity into his back pocket. “And the price?”
“Five million.”
“Dollars?”
“Pounds.”
He inhaled sharply across his teeth.
“That is a very expensive hunch, Max McLean. It will make them take notice. Of that we can be sure. You want it in crypto, da?”
“Yes. It has to be anonymous.”
“Sergei will drink to anonymous.” He filled the glasses for a third time. But I stopped him before he drank.
“One more thing.” His eyes narrowed and he nodded. “When this blows up, I’ll need a way out.”
I dipped my hand back into my coat pocket and put the strip of instant photos I’d had taken at the Gare du Nord earlier that morning on the table between us.
“A passport?”
“Yeah. Canadian.”
“Canadian will take one week. Greek, Sergei can have tomorrow.”
“Yamas,” I toasted him in Greek.
Lukov raised his glass, too. “Yamas,” he replied. “Finally those Hellenic sons of bitches are good for something.” We drank down the rakia and both stood up. He extended his hand, and I took and shook it. “Noon tomorrow. There’s a bar in the onzième. La Fée Verte.” He winked at me. “The waitress there. Sochni dini.” I shook my head and walked to the door. He pressed my hand again, serious this time, with a wad of folded euros. “In case you get hungry. I don’t want my collateral to get damaged.”
I
thanked him, and he showed me out, carefully, onto the street. A trickle of light crept into the courtyard through the open door. My temples felt tight from the alcohol and the intel.
“You know, Max McLean,” he said as I pulled up the collar of my overcoat, “you Irish have the same problem as us Bulgarians.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, “what’s that?”
“Nobody ever knows which side we’re on.”
12
Goddamned Lukov. He was either an idiot or a genius.
La Fée Verte—an absinthe joint northeast of the city center on the corner of Rue de la Roquette and Rue Basfroi—had about as much cover as a greenhouse. Along each street tall, wooden-framed French windows, shut against the cold, stretched the full length of the building. Shooting fish in a barrel would, by comparison, have been challenging. Outside, a couple of smokers sat at one of the small tables heated from above by electric burners. Inside, it was already buzzing with brunch customers. Blending in as a solo diner is an unenviable task. There was no immediate sign of the fabled barmaid through the windows, which remained worryingly clear. And there was no sign of Lukov, either.
I resisted the temptation to circle the block and instead made for the bakery on the corner opposite. The entrance was set well back under the overhang of the first floor, shielded from the street by a masonry pier. I bought a croissant and loitered plausibly in the doorway while I ate it.
After leaving Lukov’s cell the day before, I’d ditched the tan overcoat and bought a decent black waterproof jacket with deep pockets and a down liner, new jeans and hiking boots, plus neoprene gloves, a sweater and a baseball cap. I’d reupped on painkillers, too. And a toothbrush. Man cannot live by Gore-Tex alone. In my jacket pocket: one hundred milliliters of legal pepper spray and a Pozidriv screwdriver with a six-inch shank. Knives were illegal to carry, and if I got stopped and searched I needed to be as clean as possible. A screwdriver would be easier to explain away than a blade, and would stab and throw just as well. On my wrist: the cheapest waterproof watch I could find. On my mind: nothing except the angles and arcs of fire around La Fée Verte that a sniper might use.
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