Читать книгу Chameleon - Mark Burnell, Mark Burnell - Страница 15

He looks disappointed to see me. Maybe it’s the black long-sleeved T-shirt I’m wearing. As I shrug off my donkey jacket, I catch him staring at it. Across the chest in gold letters it says: DON’T SEND A BOY TO DO A MAN’S JOB.

Alexander doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. I know he disapproves, as surely as I know it’s childish of me to wear it.

‘We’ve been unable to identify Koba.’

‘What a surprise. Who are the candidates?’

‘Vladimir Vatukin, the man who succeeded Oleg Rogachev as boss of the Tsentralnaya crime syndicate, and Anatoli Medayev, who was Rogachev’s right-hand man. Since Rogachev’s murder in Paris, Medayev has drifted out of the picture.’

‘Unlike Vatukin, who’s benefited directly.’

‘There’s another man who might point us in the right direction, though. Konstantin Komarov. A Russian businessman. He’s not a member of any gang in particular but he’s affiliated to several. Or none, depending on your point of view. If the gangs are the cogs in the Russian criminal machine, he’s the oil between them.’

‘A lubricant? How tasteful.’

‘Komarov travels a lot but he’s based in New York.’

‘Like George Salibi. Let me guess. You thought you’d save Magenta House an air-fare and get me to do two jobs for the price of one?’

‘Komarov is a known associate of Koba’s.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s an investor. And a financial advisor.’

‘A money-launderer …’

‘Technically, he’s clean.’

‘A crook by proxy, then.’

‘Not quite. He’s done his fair share. But it’s all in the past.’

‘What’s the deal?’

‘You use Komarov to get to Koba.’

‘How?’

‘By masquerading as a buyer for Plutonium-239. Komarov won’t want to know himself. But he’ll see the chance to take a percentage by passing the business on to Koba.’

‘And if that doesn’t work?’

‘Throughout the Russian criminal world, Komarov’s reputation – and, by extension, his fortune – depends upon his integrity. If that reputation was undermined, he’d be in trouble. First things first, though. The approach to Komarov must look legitimate. If he suspects anything, it’ll be a dead end. However, once he’s vouched for you –’

‘What if he won’t?’

‘You’ll have to find a way to make sure he does.’

‘How do we get to him?’

‘There’s someone here in London who can help. A Pole named Zbigniew Sladek. Rosie Chaudhuri will provide you with all the information you need.’

‘Could Vatukin or Medayev have been responsible for Paris?’

‘You’re asking me?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake …’

As I get up, Alexander looks at my breasts again and, perhaps, at the slogan which runs across them. DON’T SEND A BOY TO DO A MAN’S JOB. I gather my tatty jacket from the back of my chair. This gives him the opportunity to see what’s written between my shoulder blades: SEND A WOMAN.

‘Is that your idea of a joke?’

I return his glare with interest. ‘No,’ I reply. ‘You’re my idea of a joke.’

Rosie Chaudhuri’s eyes widened. ‘God, what happened to your hair?’

‘Don’t ask.’

Magenta House, Basement Level Four, Room 2A, an octagonal room without windows. The halogen spots embedded in the ceiling were dimmed. All Stephanie could hear was the soft breath of air conditioning and the murmur of computer terminals. She sat down in the high-backed leather swivel chair next to Rosie. The three twenty-one inch terminals formed a curve in front of them. Rosie typed as she spoke. ‘Sladek, Zbigniew, V. Birth date, 1963, September the fourth. Place of birth, Cracow, Poland.’

The three screens changed simultaneously. The one on the right subdivided into sixty-four squares, the monitor on the left drew down three script lists. On the central screen, there was a photograph of a young man with flat features, grey eyes with grey smudges beneath, and wispy light brown hair.

Rosie said, ‘On the right screen, we have parcels of information. If you squint hard enough, you’ll see that each has a heading. Just touch the one you want and it’ll appear on the central monitor. On the left, you have reference tags to guide you to associated general information. It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it.’

Sladek ran the London branch of Almatinvest from a rented office in the Hyde Park Business Centre. The head office was based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He lived alone in a first-floor, one-bedroom flat in Cadogan Square and drove a silver Mercedes Kompressor. Since his arrival in Britain two years before, his life had been a picture of propriety. Before that, however, he’d been a financial cowboy in the Wild East, pioneering new forms of banking in places where livestock was still the predominant currency. As a thirty-year-old, he’d run a small private bank named Vassex in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Rosie went to one of the associated topics. A picture of snow-capped peaks formed on the central screen.

‘This is the Tian Shan which straddles China and Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan is a tiny, mountainous country which, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, has become a sort of CIS version of Switzerland for those whose banking arrangements run to the unorthodox. Sladek spent four years in Bishkek before Vassex went into liquidation, along with three of its founders. The following year, he turned up in Moscow.’

She pressed another of the squares to her right. It was some film footage: a large room with a raised dais at one end and rows of chairs for an audience in front of it. Behind the dais, two large screens displayed rows of numbers beneath Cyrillic headings. Rosie pointed to a man in a double-breasted suit in the fourth row. ‘That’s Sladek.’

‘What’s this?’

‘A Moscow currency auction, usually held in hotels – like this one – or in a conference hall, generally for between twenty and fifty people.’

Stephanie watched the silent movie. ‘What are they doing?’

‘They’re bidding for dollars that the Central State Bank offers as lines of credit. They pay over the odds for the cash because they know they’ll make a profit on the interest they’ll charge when they lend the dollars to business ventures. It’s a carve-up, naturally. Strictly invitation only.’

‘How was Sladek involved?’

‘This auction was back in 1997. He was buying on behalf of Ivan Timofeyev, a mobster-turned-banker. Timofeyev was persona non grata at these events but that didn’t prevent him from sending his representatives. Or from being decapitated by Siberian bandits in Krasnoyarsk last October.’

‘But these days, Sladek’s clean, right?’

Rosie smiled. ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. But compared to some of the other companies he’s worked for, Almatinvest is a picture of respectability.’

‘Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are neighbours, aren’t they? Is there any connection with what he does now and what he did then?’

‘It’s true that Bishkek and Almaty are stranded together in the middle of nowhere. A lot of the money from Kazak and Azerbaijani oil fields has passed through institutions in Bishkek and a lot of Almatinvest’s commercial partners and clients are in the oil industry. Then there’s this …’

Another square, another image. A picture of Zbigniew Sladek shaking hands with Murtaza Rakhimov, president of Bashkortostan, one of the eighty-nine members of the Russian Federation. Rakhimov and his immediate family had come to regard oil-rich Bashkortostan as a private fiefdom; Ural, the president’s son, ran one of Russia’s largest oil companies. The file listed examples of their autocratic rule, of brutality, corruption, cronyism, media control, governmental fraud.

‘Once you start to follow the leads,’ Rosie said, ‘you find yourself being dragged through Dagestan, Tatarstan, Chechnya, St Petersburg, the Baltic States and into western Europe. By the way, these are for you.’

She handed Stephanie a small plastic box. Stephanie removed the lid. Inside, there were embossed business cards: Katherine March, Galileo Resources. At the bottom of each card there was a phone number, a fax number and an e-mail address. But no physical address.

‘When you go to see Sladek, this is who you’ll be. In conversation, you’re Kate, not Katherine. The identity isn’t complete yet but the numbers and the e-mail address are established. We’ve removed Galileo Resources from the listed companies as a precaution. This should be enough to get you past Sladek but we’ll give you a little leverage, just to make sure. We’ll have the rest of the Kate March identity in place before you meet Komarov.’