‘You were asking about a man named Richard Varley,’ the former KGB member said without preamble. In the background, a door slammed, a bell jangled and laughter echoed in a hollow corridor. School noises. God, she’d slept later than she’d thought. Her watch told her it was nine-thirty.
‘That’s right.’
‘I happened to mention him to friends of mine.’
‘People you used to work with?’
‘Just friends. They know of him. They say Varley is nothing. A foot-soldier… a doer of deeds, not a decision maker.’ She coughed, the sound moving abruptly away from the phone. ‘Sorry — too many cigarettes.’
‘How would your friends know of him? He’s American.’ Just for a second, Riley held on to the vague thought that Richard was nothing to do with the man who had threatened her. She was soon disappointed.
‘No.’
‘But he told me he was an army brat.’
‘An army brat, yes, Miss Gavin. But not American army.’ She paused. ‘Russian.’
A ticking on the line was the only sound for a long time.
‘What?’ Riley finally managed to drag out a response. She felt something drain out of her.
‘His real name,’ continued Natalya softly, ‘is Vasiliyev. He comes from Petrograd.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. He was a good student and worked very hard; he scored top grades in his class. When they discovered he had a facility for languages, he was recruited into the army where they placed him in a political section and polished off his rough edges, preparing for operations against the Americans.’
‘Spying?’
‘Not directly. At the time, they had plans to use American-sounding officers to become friendly with their American counterparts. It was all part of a grand plan — a soft infiltration. Then everything changed and they had no use for men like him. No money, either. He left the army and went into private work.’
‘What sort of private work?’
‘Mostly criminal. He uses other names from time to time. Men in his line of work often do.’
Riley slumped against the headboard, waiting for more. She wondered if Natalya’s friends had got the name wrong. Or maybe there was more than one Varley in publishing. Richard had seemed so smooth, so in charge, she had a hard time imagining him as anyone’s gofer, still less someone named Vasiliyev. Then she recalled his manner when he had come to her flat. For a man normally so in control, he hadn’t been exactly calm. She’d attributed that to the pressure he was under from the shareholders of Ercovoy Publishing. Now she knew better. She felt a stab of something akin to shame at how naive she must have seemed.
‘You say he works for someone?’
‘Yes. I am told a man named Fedorov.’
That name again — the one Koenig had mentioned. ‘Who is he?’
‘A man you do not wish to meet,’ Natalya replied bluntly. ‘He is well known in the country I come from. Fedorov has many friends and contacts across Eastern Europe. He is not a man to cross.’
‘He’s one of these oligarchs?’
‘An oligarch? I don’t know for sure. Rich, certainly. Very rich. For that reason, maybe he pretends to be something he is not. But he is different. We have our career criminals, too, you know. They love money, like all crooks.’
‘Is he Russian mafia?’
‘Perhaps. Probably. Nobody knows. They are not always easy to identify, these people. They belong to impenetrable factions, hiding behind various identities, their loyalties changing all the time. Mafiya is an easy title to put on men like him, but not always accurate.’
‘What’s his full name?’ Her instinct for detail asserted itself, dulling the disappointment of discovering that Richard Varley was not what he seemed.
‘Ah, that I do know. He is called Pavel Ivanovich Fedorov. But he is not called Pavel by those who know him well. He uses the name Grigori. He does not care for Pavel, because it is from Latin, and means small.’
‘Great. A rich man with an ego problem.’
Natalya gave a bark of laughter. ‘Tell me any man who has not. He was brought up by an uncle who was not successful with women due to his small stature. Because of this, he took out his frustrations on the boy.’
‘What happened?’
‘One day the uncle disappeared. Fedorov was sixteen. He reported to the police that his uncle had gone looking for work.’
‘Oh.’
‘Later, Fedorov disappeared, too. When he returned, some years later, he was a different man. He was making money — doing what, nobody knows. But we can guess. He had moved up in the world and continued to do so. Now he has friends and wants more. It is said he is under investigation by the Interior Ministry in Moscow for illegal business practices and state fraud. This is very serious, but there are ways around it. He is looking for ways to make those investigations go away.’
Riley remembered the analogy Natalya had used before, about exiled Russians. The boy going back home with the school prize. ‘Would that be enough, though?’ she asked. ‘Ruining Al-Bashir’s chances in the telecoms market?’
‘It would,’ the professor confirmed, ‘if it meant control would stay in the hands of local organisations. Better that than going to a westerner.’ She sighed as if recognising that some things could never change. ‘As I explained to you before, there are some sins that can always be forgiven if the price is right.’
‘What does this Fedorov look like? In case I should bump into him.’
‘I hope you do not, Miss Gavin, for your sake. But I think you will know him as soon as you do.’
‘How?’ Riley felt a thud in her chest. Even as Natalya said it, an image, unbidden, had begun to swim up from deep in her consciousness. Suddenly, she knew without a shadow of a doubt: she had met Fedorov — and the next words confirmed it.
‘Fedorov is short and becoming bald. He looks and dresses like an accountant, and always stays in the background, where nobody sees him. My friends say he is a man to miss in a crowd. But most of all, a man to avoid.’
Riley switched off her phone. Her mouth was dry and she felt her heart pounding at the realisation that she had made a serious mistake. The colourless ‘associate’ was actually the boss. Which made Richard…what, exactly? According to Natalya, he was a soldier…a doer of deeds.
But did it also make him a killer?
38
Riley spent the day in the hotel, confined as much by her own feelings of disquiet, as by Palmer’s advice to stay out of sight. The unusual attractions of room service palled rapidly after the first two orders, along with daytime television, the video selection and the view across the rooftops and back gardens of Maida Vale. When she opened the window, she could hear the steady boom of traffic along the Westway, reminding her that life was still going on out there, in spite of and no doubt ignorant of death threats, Russian killers and wounded cats.
She called the surgery for regular updates on Lipinski, and found each one offering better news than the last, each report holding out more hope of a complete recovery.
‘I don’t know what you feed him on,’ said the receptionist at one point, ‘but that’s a hell of a tough cat.’
‘Polish meatballs, mostly,’ Riley told her, and thanked her before hanging up.
Out of boredom, she soon found herself going over everything that Richard Varley had said, the files on Al-Bashir… and the threats uttered by the man she now knew as Pavel Ivanovich Fedorov.
And Varley. She was still having trouble coming to grips with the idea of him being someone called Vasiliyev. It was all too alien.
Then came thoughts of Helen Bellamy and the German reporter, Annaliese Kellin, and the part they had unwittingly played in this affair. And how she had come within an ace of sharing the same fate.
‘You okay?’ Palmer stood in the doorway. He’d just returned from a tour of the streets around the hotel. He was, she knew, unwilling to take for granted that the gunman who had come to Riley’s flat wouldn’t find some way of tracking her down if those were his orders.