Eternal Empire (29 page)

H
alf an hour earlier, as they headed for the parking lot south of the harbor, Asthana had removed her jacket and handed it to Maddy. “Here, take this. And give me that blanket. We don't want to attract attention.”

Maddy unwound the sheet from her shoulders and took the jacket in exchange. “What are we worried about?”

Asthana balled up the blanket and shoved it into the nearest wastebin without breaking stride. “We don't want to run into the
politsiya
. I don't have any jurisdiction in this city, and I'm not exactly here in an official capacity.”

As they continued toward the secluded space where she had parked, Asthana noted that while security was tight at the port, it slackened considerably away from the water. This was lucky, because a great deal of what she had just said was true. She was acting on her own initiative here, and she didn't yet know how it would play at the dacha. “How are you feeling?”

“I hit my head on the yacht, but I'm fine,” Maddy said. “What are you doing here if you aren't here officially?”

“Consulting on another case,” Asthana replied. “A lot of back-and-forth in advance of the London games. Wolfe caught me at the office this afternoon, just after she called you. I'm the only other officer here.”

They arrived at the car. Asthana unlocked it with her key fob and was about to slide behind the wheel when she saw Maddy hesitating at the passenger's side. “Is something wrong?”

Maddy looked at her across the roof of the car. “Where exactly are we going?”

“A safe house,” Asthana said. “We need to sit tight until we can get you to the consulate, and it's a long drive to St. Petersburg. In the meantime, we need to keep away from the police. Otherwise, you'll end up in a back room at the Department of Internal Affairs, and that isn't where you want to be.”

Asthana waited for her words to hit home. After a beat, Maddy opened the door and got in. Climbing inside, Asthana started the engine and backed out, keeping her headlights off. A moment later, they were heading for the service drive that ran parallel to the water, which she hoped would allow them to circle back to the main road without attracting attention.

Soon they were heading north toward the dacha. As Asthana drove, she felt in control of the situation at last. She had been weighing her options ever since it became clear that many of the passengers would survive. At first, she had feared that this would leave her with some undesirable loose ends, but she had finally seen that it could also be a source of leverage.

She glanced over at the woman in the front seat, who had fallen into an exhausted silence. Asthana had left the dacha an hour earlier, saying only that she wanted to keep an eye on the harbor. With luck, she could convince the others that Maddy was more useful alive than dead, at least for now. And if the situation changed, it would be easy enough to get rid of her.

First, however, it was necessary to determine what she knew. Reaching out with one hand, Asthana switched the radio to a news station, but she kept the volume turned down. “The reports are saying it was a drone attack, but they can't seem to agree on the details. Did you see it?”

Maddy closed her eyes. “Yes. It knocked me out. I didn't see the crash. By the time I woke up, we were already evacuating.” She opened her eyes again. “Has there been any word on Tarkovsky?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Asthana said. “You didn't see him?”

“Not since I left the party. I don't know what happened next. He wasn't on the first or second lifeboats.” Maddy turned back to the view from the window. “Have they said who was behind the attack?”

“Only rumors. Sochi is on the front lines of two different conflict zones. Abkhazia is twenty miles south, and you've got the usual rebels in the Caucasus. A hell of a place to host the Olympics. The lines are so tangled that there's no telling who did what. At least not until we can conduct a proper investigation.”

Something in this last statement seemed to catch Maddy's attention. “Why was Wolfe worried about me?”

Asthana had been expecting the question. “I'm not sure. But she told me a few things. That you were working for Alan Powell, for one—”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Maddy start. “How did she know that?”

“Powell must have told her. She didn't say much, but I could tell she wasn't happy. I think she was afraid it would come out sooner or later, and it would raise questions, especially after the attack. Everyone on that yacht will be scrutinized. It's better if we deal with it from London.” She paused. “It's hard. I know. But once this is over, you can resume your life as before.”

Maddy only glanced away again, looking out the window at the night beyond.

As they continued north, Maddy rested her head against the glass, as if tired, and did not speak again for a long time. Inside, however, her mind was racing, and she was afraid that the beating of her heart would give her away.

We need you to perform a service for us.
Once this task is concluded, you will never hear from us again. You can resume your life as before—

Maddy turned to look at the woman behind the wheel, whose face passed through alternating bands of light and dark. It occurred to her that Wolfe had left her original message hours before the attack, which meant that if the officer had been afraid for her safety, it could only have been about something else. “Do you have a phone? I should let Wolfe know I'm okay.”

“We can do that back at the house,” Asthana said, keeping her eyes on the road. “It's just a few minutes from here.”

Maddy only nodded. As she turned back to the window, she casually put her hands into the pockets of the jacket that Asthana had given her. Both pockets were empty. A second later, as Asthana glanced away to make a left turn, Maddy reached out and unlocked the door on her side of the car as quietly as she could, resting her fingers on the handle.

She looked through the windshield at the featureless street. They had been on the road for fifteen minutes. To her right, she could make out a line of trees, while to her left, past the dark blocks of apartment buildings and hotels, stood the water. They were heading north, away from the city center, toward the resort areas that ran along the edge of the sea.

At last, leaving the road, the car began to slow. Looking ahead, Maddy saw a long driveway with a steel fence. A man was standing next to the gate with what looked like a shotgun in his hands.

As they came to a stop, Maddy tightened her grip on the door handle, seeing that a few yards of open ground stood between her and the trees. If she was going to run, it had to be now. Through the windshield, she watched as the guard turned to open the gate. She reached for her safety belt. And then she paused.

If she ran, Maddy thought, she would not get far. Not with an armed guard nearby. And if they had been willing to let her die on the yacht, they would not hesitate to kill her now if she forced their hand.

But if they had brought her here, it meant that they had reason enough to keep her alive, if only to find out what she knew. And if that were true, she had one advantage. She knew that Ilya had not killed Tarkovsky. And there was a chance both men might still be alive.

With this thought echoing in her mind, Maddy let go of the door handle, which had grown slick beneath her fingers. No more running, she thought. Not if this was how it was meant to end.

As the guard opened the gate, Asthana eased the car forward until they were moving along the gravel driveway. In their headlights, Maddy could see the dark outline of a dacha.

She was surprised by the sound of her own voice. “So there's no hood this time?”

Behind the wheel, Asthana stiffened. For a second, Maddy caught a glimpse of the other woman's true face, the one lurking behind the mask that she had so carefully worn. Then, strangely, she smiled.

“No,” Asthana said at last, turning back to the house up ahead. “Not tonight.”

S
hortly after midnight, the shadow boat exploded. The incident commander in Sochi had concluded that there was no way to fight the fire safely, given the risk from the hundred thousand gallons of diesel fuel. As a result, after the surviving members of the crew had been evacuated, rescue launches had maintained a respectful distance as the ship smoldered quietly and drifted out to sea.

Finally, the fire crept forward far enough to reach the tanks, rewarding the news cameras with a satisfying burst of flame. As the fireboats went in, the burning ship was visible for miles, a sooty candle kindled in the darkness around the city. The resulting footage was shown repeatedly on all stations, along with images of the sinking yacht, which continued to list in the direction of greatest damage.

At the port itself, crews from state television had been allowed to film the rescue from designated points near the water. One of these crews happened to be nearby when a third lifeboat approached the harbor shortly after the explosion. Instead of the enclosed boats that had been observed earlier, the latest arrival was an inflatable raft with a trolling motor, evidently pressed into service after the angle of the yacht had rendered the remaining boats unusable.

In the lights of the cameras, eight men and women could be seen as the raft tied up at the quay. Most were in life jackets, with several dressed in survival suits of orange neoprene, which had black face seals that left only the eyes and nose visible. The cameras caught them climbing out of the raft one by one, with most of the attention directed to a photogenic female who turned out to be the ship's purser. In her life vest and culottes, she cut an attractive figure, and at the approach of the reporters, she agreed to be interviewed for Channel One.

Only the most alert of the newscast's viewers would have noticed the man in the life jacket caught briefly in the background of the camera frame, moving away from the water. Declining the offer of a blanket, he pulled off his life vest and left it on the dock, continuing along the quay until he was at a safe remove from the cameras. At the moment, most of the rescue crews and volunteers were clustered at the southern end of the port, so he headed in the other direction.

Orlov rounded the corner and entered a region of shadow, sheltered from the rest of the scene, where a line of smaller boats stood at a separate marina. Only then did the security chief turn to face the two figures, both of whom had also emerged from the raft, who had detached themselves from the others to follow a few steps behind, dressed from head to toe in immersion suits.

Once they were alone, one of the men pulled off his hood. It was Ilya. He breathed in deeply, grateful for the air on his face after the suit's stifling confines. Before he could take the rest of it off, however, he heard a voice from behind him: “Stay where you are, please.”

Ilya turned and saw that Orlov had drawn the pistol he had taken from the bosun on the bridge. He was not aiming it yet, not exactly, but there could be no question about his intentions. “What are you doing?”

“I can't let you go,” Orlov said, still holding the gun by his side. “You know this as well as I do.”

Ilya had no trouble reading the meaning in the security chief's eyes. “I've told you all I can. I did not know the attack was coming. If these men are still in the city, I will find them. You need to give me that chance.”

For one tense moment, they stood eye to eye. Then the third man, the one who had not yet removed his hood, spoke up for the first time. “That's enough. Help me get this off.”

Orlov looked over at Tarkovsky, who had pulled the hood away. At last, he slid the gun into his waistband and went to assist the oligarch. Ilya watched them for a second, then quickly removed the rest of his suit, keeping an eye on the others. Tarkovsky, for his part, continued to look out at his yacht, the shadow boat burning beyond it, with no trace of emotion on his face.

It was not difficult to guess what he might be thinking. Shortly after their final meeting, Tarkovsky had gone to the library on the bridge deck. If he had been in his suite when the drone struck the yacht, or if the ship had not been more solidly built than its attackers had expected, he would have been killed. And as Ilya considered what he must be feeling now, he saw a way to use it.

He also understood how blind he had been. This assault would have required years of preparation, which explained why Vasylenko had been allowed to remain in prison for so long. After the war in South Ossetia, he knew, Georgian arms had appeared on the black market in great quantities, including parts of drones shot down over Abkhazia. The remaining components would not have been difficult to acquire. All that was needed was a man with the ability to deploy them, which was why Bogdan, with his military training, had been included in a project that had otherwise drawn most of its resources from the civilian side.

Once his immersion suit was lying on the ground, Tarkovsky turned toward the line of survivors at the far end of the quay, his wife and daughter among them. “I want to see Ludmilla.”

“Not yet,” Orlov said. “You need to wait until we know more about the situation.”

Tarkovsky sighed. Beneath the suit, he was still wearing his tuxedo shirt from the party, now rumpled and damp with perspiration. “And what exactly do we think the situation is?”

These words were directed at Ilya, who was standing to one side. He seized the opening. “It would not be safe for them to leave yet. If they're in a secure location, they would wait until morning.”

Tarkovsky began rolling back his shirtsleeves. “But you don't know where.”

“No,” Ilya said. “But I have an idea. It would be secluded, a place where four armed men would not attract attention. In the old days, they could fall back on Vasylenko's connections, but not now. Sochi has cleaned house in advance of the games. The networks are no longer there. Am I right?”

Orlov had been listening closely. “Perhaps. Minalyan, who ran most of the old gangs, was killed two years ago in Moscow. They would not have been able to rebuild so quickly. So where would they go?”

“Inside the system. State security must have a presence here. And if I were them, I'd want to keep an eye on Vasylenko.”

“A safe house, then.” Tarkovsky looked out at the wreck on the water. “But where?”

Ilya turned to Orlov. “You must have contacts. Someone who would know where the safe houses would be—”

Orlov shook his head. “No. That information is closely held. And the two sides don't share their toys.”

Ilya wanted to push back, but he fell silent instead. For the first time in years, he felt tired, the energy he had stored up for so long draining inexorably away. He also knew that what the security chief said was true. Any contacts that Orlov retained would be on the military side, a world apart from civilian intelligence. To find Vasylenko, he needed information from within the same agencies that had carried out the attack, which meant that all was lost. Unless—

Out of the depths of his exhaustion, Ilya felt an idea flicker into flame, and before it could fade, he turned to Tarkovsky, remembering something that Maddy had said in their long conversation the night before. “You have one connection there. The man who told you about Lermontov.”

Even in the shadows, Ilya could see Tarkovsky's face grow dark. “What do you know about this?”

“I know enough,” Ilya said, aware that he was playing his last card. “I know you had a contact who said civilian intelligence was funding its operations with stolen art. Only a man at the highest ranks of state security would have known this. He must have been sympathetic to your cause. If he isn't dead or in prison, he can tell us where these men would have gone.”

Tarkovsky's eyes remained fixed on his. After a long moment, he said, “I have nothing more to offer you. My men have their hands full here. If you go after Vasylenko, you go alone.”

“I understand,” Ilya said. “I ask for nothing else. All I need is a car and a gun.”

For a moment, the three men stood in silence. Ilya sensed in his bones that Vasylenko and the others were still in the city, but he also knew that they would not remain there for long.

When Tarkovsky spoke again, facing the water, his voice was as quiet as death. In his eyes, Ilya could see two pinpoints of light from the distant fire. “All right. I'll make the call.”