Azarov laughed. ‘How much does anyone need? It is not about need. It is about winning. It is about being the best. It’s that way for all of us. The money is just the way we keep score.’
‘Well, I hope you know what you are doing. I think you are making a terrible mistake, and you will live to regret it.’
‘Oh, really?’ sneered Azarov. ‘And how would you prefer that I spend it? On more jewels and pretty dresses for you, my pampered darling? I suppose that’s what you expect, after all. Your services have always come at a price.’
Her slap hit his face like a full stop at the end of the sentence.
‘How dare you?’ Alix hissed. ‘I have never asked you for a penny. I earn my own money and pay my own bills. And what right have you, a petty thief from the gutters of Kiev, to look down on what I have had to do to survive?’
Azarov stepped towards her, raising his fist. The red mark left by her hand was clearly visible on his cheek.
Alix stood her ground. ‘Go on, then,’ she said raising her chin defiantly, presenting it as a target. ‘Hit me. Show me what kind of a man you really are.’
Azarov stood for a moment with his arm raised, then took a step back, his breathing heavy and his lips white with a fury it was taking all his self-control to contain. They seemed to stare at one another for an age before he turned on his heel and strode to a console table on which was a telephone. He picked it up.
‘Tell Connors to pack me an overnight bag. Now,’ he commanded. ‘I want my Ferrari brought to the front door immediately. And book me a suite at the Ritz… Yes, for tonight. Mrs Vermulen will be staying here.’
Azarov slammed the phone down, then turned to face Alix again.
‘Satisfied?’ he said.
Burlington, Ontario, Canada: six months earlier
The shoes were a statement of defiance. Classic black brogues by Luca del Forte, reduced from three hundred and fifty bucks to one-eighty at the Browns store in Mapleview Mall, right off the Queen Elizabeth Way. These were investment shoes, the kind that would never go out of style; shoes a man could treasure for years, feeling the leather mould itself around his foot, getting ever more comfortable as time went by. Kev Lundkvist was forty years old. He should have had decades to get those brogues just the way he liked them.
Kev didn’t want to come home with nothing but presents for himself. He went along to the Swarovski crystal outlet and got his girlfriend, Alyson, a couple of little beagle figurines. They were cheesy as hell, but Kev knew that she would think they were cute. She’d stick them on her special shelf, right by her dressing table, and they’d make her think of him, every time she saw them.
He stopped off for coffee and a double-chocolate muffin. So by the time he left the mall it was dark. When he got outside, the wind off Lake Ontario whipped up the thin snowfall so that it almost stung when it hit his face. Ken had to stop and wipe his glasses clear just to see where he’d left his car, and it was while he was standing there, right in the middle of the parking lot but well off the main driveway, that he was hit by a speeding Nissan Frontier truck.
Kev was knocked right off his feet, and sent crashing into a parked SUV. His body ended up motionless on the ground, with his broken limbs splayed in unnatural angles around him. He was dead on arrival at Joseph Brant Hospital.
As for the Frontier, it slewed after impact and skidded on the slushy tarmac, but the driver managed to regain control and was racing for the exit before any of the other shoppers making their way to or from the mall had worked out what had just happened.
When it was found a couple of hours later on a residential street close to the Tyandaga Municipal Golf Course, the Frontier stank of whisky from the discarded bottle of Crown Royal, whose dregs had seeped into the carpet of the passenger-side footwell. A forensic search yielded no significant fingerprints. Detectives were disappointed, but not surprised, by the negative results. They’d already opened the glove compartment and found a crumpled receipt that indicated the truck had just been cleaned inside and out by a local company. The people there couldn’t remember much about the guy who’d picked up the truck, but they did recall that he was wearing mitts. It was midwinter. Who wasn’t?
The truck belonged to a contractor more than seven hundred kilometres away in Sault Sainte Marie. He’d reported it stolen four days earlier, and was in a bar with four of his men when the hit-and-run occurred. One of the guys had even posted a picture of them all on his Facebook site that same evening.
Someone had got drunk in a stolen truck and committed an act of homicide. But who that person might have been remained a total mystery.
‘ Don’t feel too bad about it,’ the pathologist reassured the detective in charge of the investigation when he handed over the post-mortem report. ‘Lundkvist had Stage 3B liver cancer. There were a bunch of tumours in the liver itself, and it had spread into the lymph nodes around the organ as well. He didn’t have too long to live: somewhere between six to nine months would be my guess. Twelve if he was very lucky. A quick end like this, well, I guess you could call it a small mercy.’
12
Saturday, 25 June
London N1
Grantham was woken at quarter to five in the morning by the ringing of his phone. The duty officer was on the line.
‘You said I should call, no matter what time it was,’ he said.
‘I did, yes, but there’s no need to sound so damn smug about it,’ Grantham grunted, propping himself up on his elbows.
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Well?’
‘We found something, sir… a chap called Ahmad Razzaq. He’s ex-ISI. Nothing very remarkable about him, just the standard rumours of links to al-Qaeda you get with anyone who’s been in Pakistani intelligence. But he was flagged yesterday because he works with that American financier, Malachi Zorn. The one the ex-PM’s now-’
‘I know who Malachi Zorn is,’ Grantham snapped. ‘What does this Razzaq do for him?’
‘Runs his personal security operation, which appears to be pretty extensive. I mean, it’s not just bodyguard duty. Zorn effectively has his own private intelligence network.’
‘So I gather. What was Razzaq doing in Mykonos?’
‘Well, that’s what we haven’t yet worked out, sir. He came in on a private helicopter yesterday morning, and from his phone-traffic it looks as though he was talking a fair amount to people from that TV production company, the one that caused all the fuss at that restaurant.’
‘Does Zorn have any interests in media or TV?’
‘Not that we can see, sir, no.’
Grantham got out of bed, went downstairs to brew a very strong cup of tea, then made two more calls before getting dressed. The first was to Piers Nainby-Martin, telling him to shift the investigation into Malachi Zorn up a notch, paying particular attention to the life and times of Ahmad Razzaq.
The second call was to Samuel Carver.
‘This is Grantham. I want a word with you.’
‘Why?’ The word was more of a heavy, lazy grunt. Carver had not been awake for long.
‘Mykonos. I’m wondering why you were running away from that restaurant. And there’s a Pakistani gentleman I think you might have met…’
There was silence down the line. The next time Carver spoke he sounded decisive and fully alert. ‘I assume you’re talking on an encrypted line?’
‘Of course.’
‘Right, then… can you get on the six forty-five BA flight out of Heathrow this morning?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll see you by the Rousseau statue at ten. It’s on its own little island, halfway across the Pont des Bergues. And Grantham…’
‘Yes?’
‘Tell me you’ve not been sat on your arse behind a desk for so long that you’ve forgotten all your fieldcraft.’
‘You realize you’re talking to the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service…’
‘That’s what I’m worried about.’