Ark Angel (16 page)

“Good afternoon, Mr Drevin, sir,” the man said. He was young, clean-shaven, with short blond hair and dark glasses. “Welcome to New York.”

“Thank you.” Drevin held out his passport. The man ran it through the scanner on his computer without so much as glancing at it, then stamped one of the pages. He did the same for Paul and Tamara. He took Alex’s last, gazed at the photograph and lowered it behind the lid of his case. For a moment it was out of sight as he scanned it, but then he was holding it up again with a look of polite puzzlement.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said to Drevin. “We have a problem here.”

“What problem?” Drevin was annoyed.

“This passport is out of date. It expired two days ago.”

“That’s not possible.” Drevin reached for the passport. He looked at the expiry date, then at Alex. “The man is correct,” he said.

“No.” Alex was shocked. It was true he hadn’t looked closely at his passport for a long time, but he was certain he’d only had it four years. There was an absurd photograph of him aged ten; he remembered going with Jack to have it taken. “It can’t be!” he protested.

Drevin handed him the passport. Alex studied it. It was the same photo. The terrible haircut embarrassed him as it always did. There was his signature, and Ian Rider’s name and address as next of kin. But the immigration man was correct. His passport had expired the day before he left London.

“But how can it have happened?” Alex asked. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. “Why didn’t they notice at Heathrow?”

“I guess they didn’t look closely enough,” the American said.

“What does this mean?” Drevin asked. His voice was cold.

“Well, sir, I’m very sorry but we can’t allow your guest to enter the United States. In normal circumstances he’d be sent back home, but I guess we can work something out. How long do you plan to be here?”

“Less than twenty-four hours,” Drevin replied. “We leave tomorrow.”

“In that case, we can hold Mr Rider here at the airport. It’ll be like he’s in transit. You can pick him up again when you leave.”

“But the child only wishes to stay here one night. Surely he can’t be such a threat to American security that you won’t allow him to stay with me!”

“I’m very sorry, Mr Drevin. It’s like I say. Really he should be on his way back to the UK. I’m stretching things as it is. But I can’t allow him in.”

“I don’t understand it,” Alex insisted. “I only got it four years ago—I’m sure of it.” He was feeling wretched. Both Drevin and his son were staring at him as if this were all his fault, which, he supposed, in a way it was.

“It seems we have no choice in the matter, Alex,” Drevin said. He turned to the immigration officer.

“Where will you hold him?”

“We have rooms here at the airport, sir. He’ll have a TV and a shower. I can assure you he’ll be fine.”

“Then it seems we’ll have to pick you up tomorrow, Alex.”

Drevin got up and left the aircraft. Paul and Tamara followed. The assistant had said nothing throughout the discussion. Alex looked out of the window as they got into the limousine. A moment later they drove away and he found himself alone with the two Americans.

“Do you have any hand luggage?” the immigration man asked.

“No.”

“OK. My name’s Shulsky, by the way. Ed Shulsky. You’d better come with me.”

Alex followed the American down onto the tarmac, the customs official close behind. There was another car waiting for them and Alex climbed into the back. Shulsky took the front seat. The other man stayed behind.

“Just relax. This won’t take long,” Shulsky said.

The doors had locked themselves automatically. Feeling far from relaxed, Alex sat back and watched where they were going.

They drove out of the airport, passing through a double barrier and a gate. That already struck him as odd.

Hadn’t Shulsky just said he was going to have to spend the night at JFK? But it seemed they were heading for Manhattan. The driver joined the traffic on the freeway that led to Brooklyn Bridge, and suddenly Alex found himself looking across the water to the most famous skyline in the world. Even now, even in these circumstances, the view couldn’t fail to thrill him, the magnificent arrogance of the skyscrapers packed together on the cramped, chaotic island a monument to power and success and the American way of life.

Alex leant forward. “Where are we going?” he demanded.

“We’ll be there soon,” Shulsky answered.

“I thought you said we were staying at the airport.”

“Relax, Alex. We’ll look after you just fine.”

Alex knew something was going on. There had been nothing wrong with his passport. He was sure of it.

But there wasn’t anything he could do. He was locked in a car on the other side of the world and he might just as well sit back and—as the Americans would say—be taken for the ride.

He looked out of the window as they crossed the bridge and turned north, heading past the terrible empty space where the World Trade Center had once stood. He had visited New York a couple of times and had happy memories of the city. Now he was being driven through SoHo, in south Manhattan.

The car slowed down and he noticed an art gallery with a window full of cartoons, its name printed in gold letters on the glass. They turned into a parking garage. Alex sighed and shook his head. Now he knew exactly where he was.

In Miami they had called themselves Centurion International Advertising. The gallery here in New York was called Creative Ideas Animation. Two different names but the same three letters.

CIA.

The car drove up to the first floor of the garage and stopped. Shulsky got out and opened the door for Alex.

“This way,” he announced.

Alex followed him to a bare metal door that could have led into a storage cupboard or perhaps an electric generator room. A keypad was built into the wall and Shulsky entered a seven-digit code. There was a buzz and the door opened. Alex walked through into an empty corridor with a closed-circuit television camera pointing down at him from above and another locked door at the end. It swung open as he approached.

There was a comfortable reception area on the other side, and, beyond that, open-plan offices filled with phones and computers. Two telephonists sat behind the main desk, and men and women in suits walked along the carpeted corridors. A black man with white hair and a moustache was waiting to greet him. Alex recognized him at once. His name was Joe Byrne. He was the deputy director for operations in the Covert Action section of the Central Intelligence Agency of America.

“Nice to see you again, Alex,” he said.

“I’m not so sure,” Alex replied. He remembered how his passport had briefly disappeared into Shulsky’s attaché case. “You swapped my passport,” he said. “The one you showed Drevin was a fake.”

Joe Byrne nodded. “Come this way. Let me show you to my office. I think it’s time you and I had a little chat.”

Byrne’s office was identical to the one that Alex had visited in Miami. It had the same ordinary furniture, the same blank walls, the same air-conditioning turned up one notch too high. Only the view was different.

Alex guessed he probably had something similar in just about every major city in America.

“You fancy a drink?” Byrne asked as he sat down behind his desk.

“Some water, thanks.” There were a couple of bottles on a sideboard. Alex helped himself.

“It’s good to see you again, Alex.” Byrne sounded tired. He looked as if he hadn’t been to bed for a week. “I was never able to thank you for the work you did for us on Skeleton Key.”

“I was sorry about your agents.”

“Tom Turner and Belinda Troy. Yeah, it was too bad. I was sorry to lose them. But that wasn’t your fault.

You did a great job.” Byrne ran his eyes over Alex. “You look in good shape,” he went on. “I was sorry to hear you got hurt in London. I told that boss of yours, Alan Blunt, that it wasn’t a good idea getting a kid involved in this sort of work. Of course, he didn’t listen to me. He never does. In a way, that’s why you’re here now.”

“Why am I here now?”

“We had to get you away from Drevin without alerting him to the fact that the CIA was involved,” Byrne explained. “Like you said, we swapped your passport, so now he thinks you’re tied up with customs and immigration. That gives us a chance to have a talk. As a matter of fact, I was rather hoping you might be able to help us.”

“Forget it, Mr Byrne.” Alex shook his head. “I’d already made up my mind before we landed. I don’t want anything more to do with Drevin. So if you don’t mind putting me on a plane to Washington, I’ll say goodbye.”

“Washington?” Byrne raised an eyebrow. “It’s funny you should mention that. But I’m afraid you can’t just walk out of here, Alex. Apart from anything else, you’re an illegal immigrant, remember?” He quickly raised a hand in a conciliatory gesture. “Just hear me out. What I’ve got to say may be of genuine interest to you. And when I’ve finished, then you can tell me what you think. The truth is, right now you’re in a unique situation. You could be very useful to us. And you have no idea how much is at stake.”

Alex sighed. “Where have I heard that before?” He opened the bottle of water and sat down opposite the CIA man. “OK. Go ahead.”

“Well, as you’ve probably guessed, this is all about Drevin,” Byrne began. “Nikolei Vladimir Drevin. By our count, he’s the fourth or fifth richest man alive and, of course, the British just love him. He’s bought a soccer team; he’s a big businessman; he gives money to charity. And then there’s Ark Angel. Thanks to him, you British are going to corner the market in space tourism, and that’s a prize worth having. But I’m afraid it’s not as easy as that. You see, for the last eighteen months the CIA and the State Department have been investigating Drevin, and we’ve discovered that he isn’t quite what he seems. I’m talking about organized crime, Alex. And all roads lead straight to him. To put it in a nutshell, we think he’s just about the biggest criminal in the world.”

Byrne paused. Alex showed no reaction. After all he’d been through, he no longer had it in him to be surprised.

“It’s complicated,” Byrne went on. “And even though you flew over here on Drevin’s sky palace, I guess you’re probably jet-lagged. So I’ll give it to you in broad strokes.

“To understand Drevin, you have to go back to the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early nineties.

Communism was finished and the whole country was looking forward to a fresh start. But there was a problem. The new Russian government was broke. It needed money badly and it decided to sell off all its assets, which is to say, its car manufacturing centres, its hydroelectrical plants, its airline and—most crucial of all—its oilfields. They sold them cheap, often for a fraction of their real value. They had no choice, because they needed the money fast and they needed it up front. In the next few years a new group of businessmen appeared. They were in the right place at the right time and they saw that this was a fantastic opportunity. These people weren’t going to become millionaires overnight. As share prices rose, they were going to become billionaires—and that’s exactly what happened.

“Nikolei Drevin was one of these people, but he was very different to the rest. We don’t know a lot about his past. It’s hard to find out anything that’s happened in Russia in the last twenty years. We believe that Drevin started off in the army. He was certainly a senior figure in the KGB. Then we lose track of him until he re-emerges with a successful business selling—of all things—gardening equipment. He also dabbled in shares, particularly oil. He was doing well, but not that well, and when the sale of the century started he didn’t have enough money to cut himself a slice.

“And this was when he had his big idea. His work with the army and the KGB had brought him into contact with the Russian underworld—I’m talking about the mafiya. He knew all the big names and so he went to them for a loan. You see, he was a respectable businessman. He’d seen the future, and with their support he could buy into it big time. He needed about eighty million dollars, enough to buy a controlling interest in Novgerol, one of the big Russian oil companies. The mafiya met with him and decided they liked him, but they didn’t have enough money, so they turned to their friends in Japan. You’ve heard of the yakuza? Well, they were interested too, and just to round things off, the Chinese triads also decided to join the party. Between the three of them they raised the finance and Drevin was in. Suddenly he was a major player.

“So he bought into Novgerol. He got it for a song and the people who suffered in the end were the Russian people. It was their oil and it was more or less stolen from them. I doubt that Drevin lost any sleep over that. His shares doubled and trebled and multiplied by about a hundred, and he was able to pay back all his criminal friends with interest, and that was the end of that. Of course, there were people who got in his way. There were protesters. The police launched an inquiry. And do you know what? They were all murdered. You only had to sneeze at Drevin and someone would call round at your house with a machine gun. Kill you. Kill your family. Kill everyone who knew you. It was easier to keep quiet and, believe me, after a while, people did just that.

“So Drevin is in with the mafiya. He’s in with the yakuza. And he’s in with the triads. And of course, once these people know him, they’re not going to leave him alone. Not that Drevin cares. He’s got as much money as anyone could possibly want; but the funny thing is, people like that—they always want more. So he keeps working with them. He becomes, if you like, the banker for half the criminal organizations in the world. The yakuza are selling Russian energetics weapons to terrorist groups; the triads are running drugs out of Burma and Afghanistan; the mafiya are moving into drugs and prostitution throughout the West: Drevin provides the cash flow. I would say that around the world there are hundreds of dirty deals done every day and Drevin’s money is behind just about all of them.”

“If you know so much about him, why don’t you arrest him?” Alex asked. His head was spinning. He had just spent almost a week living with this man and he was trying to marry what Byrne was saying with what he had himself observed. He had guessed that Drevin was no saint; but he had never suspected anything like this.