December (8 page)

From: firstclassdrycleaning.com

To: Customer 39789G

Date: Saturday 6 December

Customer notice: First Class Dry-Cleaning regrets to inform you there has been a problem with your order. Please contact our Customer Service division immediately for details.

‘Fuck,’ Alex muttered to himself as he stuffed his BlackBerry back into his jacket pocket.

What the hell was going on now?

This project already had him on edge, without their emergency contact route being used already. It was only the morning after his last briefing with Sergey.

He replied to say he would collect his dry-cleaning in twenty minutes and then legged it out of the door of his house and up the Fulham Road to the upstairs room of the Fulham Tup pub, which they had agreed to use as a meeting point.

Sergey had an arrangement with the owner to use the room, which was normally let out for parties only in the evening, during the day. It wasn’t perfect but they could both
slip in via a back entrance and it was less obvious than Alex turning up at Sergey’s house, or his offices in Mayfair, which he was pretty sure were under observation by the SVR.

Alex squeezed through the back door, stamped the snow off his feet and ran up the stairs into a room filled with empty tables, the noise of his footsteps echoing on the floorboards.

Sergey was already there, sitting at a table away from the window, wearing an Aquascutum overcoat, his hair as tousled as ever. He rose as Alex came in and strode over to shake his hand, offering profuse apologies.

‘Alexander, I am so sorry to call you out of your house in this weather!’

Alex demurred and they sat down.

For once, Sergey seemed in a sombre mood. He looked at Alex in the wintry light from the window.

‘I’m not sure what is going on…’ he started hesitantly.

Alex waited for him to continue. Could this whole fucking madhouse scheme be about to collapse? A sudden urge within him hoped it would.

‘Krymov called me yesterday after you left; he wants me back in Moscow.’ Sergey pursed his lips and looked across at the window.

Alex frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

Sergey nodded. ‘They might know something. Gorsky, the SVR guy you met at the party, might have picked something up.’ He narrowed his eyes in thought. ‘No, it’s too quick, we haven’t done anything yet for them to pick up on.’ He looked at Alex candidly. ‘Krymov sometimes calls me in the middle of the night to discuss things. He trusts me.’ Having voiced his concerns, he seemed to have come to a decision. ‘No, he wouldn’t have taken fright so quickly; it’s nothing that I can’t smooth over with him.’ Having convinced himself that he
was safe, he perked up again. ‘So, I will fly to Moscow today and see what it is all about. For you, just ignore it.’

Alex spoke calmly: ‘Well, I’ll need a week to get the team sorted out in Herefordshire anyway, so I guess you will know for sure by then what it is about?’

‘Yes, exactly! We’ll know for sure by then. I’ll keep sending you the all clear signal about the mail order,’ he waved his BlackBerry at Alex, ‘but if they do screw me over then it will stop and you will know to call off all the plans. If they start interrogating me then I have no illusions about my ability to resist the boys in the Lubyanka. They really know what they are doing in there,’ he said with grudging respect, ‘so I’ll tell all and they’ll just kill me quickly and the whole thing will be over anyway.’

Alex was disturbed by Sergey’s clinical assessment of the possibility of his own brutal death. He suddenly had a sense of the ruthlessness that had built Sergey’s vast business empire.

‘So, Lara will have to fly down to your house to check up on you on her own, eh?’ He cocked a knowing eyebrow at Alex, who responded with an innocent expression, even as he fought to control the surge of interest that this comment provoked inside him.

Alex had decided to assemble his team of mercenaries at Akerly. It still had a huge area of parkland around it and so was completely private. It was also snowbound, which would be good training for cross-country skiing and other drills he wanted to put the team through, plus it had sufficient accommodation and no outsiders need be involved. All in all, at short notice, it had seemed the perfect place.

The idea had been for both Sergey and Lara to fly down in Sergey’s helicopter to inspect the team, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen now.

Alex didn’t rise to Sergey’s bait. ‘Well, I’m sure we’ll manage without you.’

‘Hmm,’ Sergey mused. He didn’t seem to have given up on his game entirely. ‘Well, I brought you some Russian literature to read in the long dark nights by the fire.’

Alex groaned internally. He couldn’t stand it when people pressed their favourite books on him.

‘Oh, OK,’ he said in an unconvincing display of enthusiasm.

‘No, really, it’s good stuff!’ said Sergey defensively, as he pulled a slim paperback out of his overcoat pocket. ‘I told you you needed to read more Russian stuff to know what this coup is all about.’ He handed the book to Alex:
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

‘It’s acknowledged by George Orwell as the basis for
1984
,’ Sergey continued in a self-justificatory tone. ‘The fucker ripped off the plot completely. Written in 1920, really ahead of its time.’

‘What’s it about?’ Alex took an interest now, despite himself.

Sergey grinned a little too smugly for Alex’s liking. ‘It’s a story about a straightforward guy who falls in love with a crazy girl who is trying to overthrow a totalitarian state.’

He looked at the Englishman meaningfully. Alex blanched. He was beginning to learn that it was typical of Sergey to mix apparently trivial and serious issues.

Sergey shrugged apologetically. ‘Look, it’s OK. Just be careful, huh?’ He grinned. ‘In Russia, we tell folktales about Brother Wolf and Sister Fox. Now, what you have to know is that Sister Fox is the smart one and she
always
wins. Watch out for her, she’s a man-eater.’

Sergey settled back into his luxurious white leather chair and watched the lights go out across London.

His Gulfstream G550 intercontinental jet had got one of the last take-off slots of the day at London City airport. For once, the snow had stopped falling and it was a clear, dark evening, so he had a perfect view through the porthole as the aircraft banked over the East End and they shut off the electricity substations one by one.

A whole block of Dagenham suddenly winked out, the orange grid of street and house lights all went in an instant, leaving just a few car headlamps floundering in the murk.

Well, oppressed people of Britain! You won’t have to put up with that for long if my plan works out! Sergey broadcast in his head.

As the plane levelled off, Bayarmaa sauntered in from the kitchen section at the front of the aircraft in a tight black cocktail dress with a tray of Sergey’s homemade vodka, pickled mushrooms and meats. She knew him well enough to see that he wanted to be left alone so after stroking his hair and kissing his cheek she slunk back out again. Sergey followed her slim backside with a dangerous look in his eye. He hadn’t yet got through the lust phase with her; he knew he would move on, but he was enjoying it at the moment.

Other things occupied his mind now, though; he took a shot of vodka and chewed on the food slowly as he thought. The softly lit cabin was a good brooding cocoon as they hurtled out over the North Sea towards Moscow. His face darkened and he pursed his lips, staring into the night and thinking hard.

Although he had been full of bravado with Alex he was actually deeply troubled about the forthcoming encounter with Krymov. He thought about what the summons could mean; it was hard to tell, as the President was such an erratic character.

Sergey wondered at his own capacity for duplicity. He was a good example of Soviet era ‘double think’—the ability to think opposite thoughts at once. He had grown up with it as a boy: the ability to swear passionate allegiance to Marxist-Leninism at school and then go out and indulge in the raw, black-market capitalism that was necessary to survive it.

He remembered an Uzbek expression that one of his operations managers from a refinery there had told him: Uzbeks can say one thing, think another and do a third.

Sergey was a prime example of such flexibility. Sometimes he lived the part of a supporter of the regime and enjoyed the intellectual trickery of misleading them so much that he felt he had lost touch with what he really believed in. Only at odd moments of solitude, like this, would he call to mind the feelings that drove him. He suddenly felt the whole weight of the coup resting on his shoulders—he had a moment of self-consciousness like an out-of-body experience.

What the hell did he think he was doing?

He was trying to overthrow the government of Russia. No one had done that since the Bolsheviks in 1917. He could be on the brink of a major civil war. Even after the Bolshevik victory, it had taken two years of vicious fighting that had
raged across the whole country and taken millions of lives. Was he about to inflict the same on his beloved Mother Russia?

Sergey had the capacity to dream great dreams, but the flipside of this was that he was prone to moments of black doubt, when the grand scale of his ideas seemed to crush him.

He was really just a small-town boy from Voronezh, a decaying industrial town, smack bang in the middle of the steppe. As a child he had a phenomenally high IQ and was very sensitive. He had watched everything intently, noticed things quickly and made connections unprompted. His mother felt unnerved by how closely he watched her when he was a baby, how fast he put two and two together.

He used to watch his father playing chess with mates from the steel mill in the kitchen of their tiny workers’ flat. Once, as a two year old, he had been given jumbled up chess pieces in a box to play with whilst his mother peeled some potatoes. When she turned round she found that he had set all the pieces out accurately on the board and had begun moving them correctly: pawns forward and back, knights two forward, one to the side, and bishops diagonally. She stared at him, disconcerted. He had looked up, smiled at her sweetly and carried on as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

At primary school he ate up the curriculum. His teachers were very pleased with him, but then aged eight he became very frustrated; he would look at his classmates sitting quietly, looking around with vacant and content expressions or stumbling to learn things that he took in at a glance, and he would be suddenly filled with anger against them. They seemed such hateful dullards to him.

‘Do you even think? Is there anything going on in your heads?’ he would shout at them in his mind.

He fell into sudden rages and would rush at quiet, slow boys in his class and attack them for no reason, beating and kicking them. He was suspended from the nursery section of School 17 several times that year until he had had enough wallopings from his teachers and his father to know better.

After that he gave up trying to solve the problem of life and took to flippancy as a way of displacing the boredom and frustration in his head. He became the class clown, winding his teachers up, coasting through school, underachieving and driving his parents mad. But underneath his easy wit and idiotic banter, he felt the pressure of existence keenly; subconsciously he questioned why he existed and found no answers.

The lack of a solution distressed him. As a boy he would jump onto the slow-moving flatbed trains grinding through the points outside his family’s concrete apartment block on the edge of town, and let himself be carried out onto the steppe. Then he would jump off and walk miles out into the endless, flat grassland, forgetting about how and when to get home and sleeping out under the stars.

He watched the sunset over the steppe, a painting of vast colours being shifted across the heavens by an unseen hand. The shades heaved and convulsed: yellow to orange to pink to red to purple to black.

The whole scene was watched by the earth in utter silence; it lay flat and quiescent, overawed by the majesty of the spectacle unfolding above it. And he too lay on his back on the warm summer earth, spreading out his arms and drawing breath up from the land under him, startled by the beauty of being alive.

To him, this landscape came together with the Russian character to form the Russian soul. It became for him the embodiment of great strength and yet, at the same time, great tenderness.

In reading
Life and Fate
—Vasily Grossman’s epic of the Russian nation centred around the battle of Stalingrad—he experienced a moment of revelation: ‘The earth was vast, even the great forests had both a beginning and an end, but the earth just stretched on for ever. And grief was something equally vast, equally eternal.’

He realised that the never-ending nature of the terrain was the same as the vastness of life, and this created both a sense of great freedom because it existed, but also of a great corresponding sadness because life will end and it will all be gone. He struggled to reconcile the tension between these forces.

He wondered at the wisdom that he could learn from observing natural phenomena: the flight of birds, the slow graceful gestures of trees and the stately progress of clouds across the sky. He felt that all these things were words in the conversation that nature was having with him in his life.

However, with such passionate experiences came the pain of unrequited love. He might love life but it did not feel the need to explain itself to him. He waited patiently, as a child waits on a parent to tell him how things work.

But all he got was silence.

He would go out onto the steppe and stare up angrily at the sky, but it just looked back at him with a gaze as empty and content as that of a Buddha and resolutely refused to answer his questions.

Sergey felt this absence of communication as a physical force, pressing in on his skull. It was the same as when he swam down deep in the local swimming pool, where the silence was heavy, and he could look up and see the surface shimmering a long way above his head.

He could feel the water pressing in on him from all sides; the walls of his head bulging in under it. He knew then that he had to swim desperately to the surface far above him to
escape the pain. But the faster he swam the faster he ran out of breath and so the more desperately he kicked out. The feeling culminated in a fear of inactivity and created a terrified energy within him.

From his early teens onwards, this found an outlet in two ways. Literature was his first love. He discovered that other great human minds had confronted and wrestled with the same issues that he did and had left traces of their battles behind them. So he hunted meaning in literature furiously, frantically ripping through books like a starving man looking for food between the pages, all the while marvelling at the power of writing to gather and pin meaning onto a piece of paper. When he came across insights he shivered and thought to himself: This is black bread—black bread for my soul.

Books piled up in his room, all with significant passages underlined, pages folded and with thoughts that had spun off from the writing scribbled in the margins and on the blank pages at the back.

The second outlet for his skills was on his mother’s market stall. She was a
chelnoki
, a market trader, who allowed people to survive both the incompetencies of the Soviet system and then the anarchy of its collapse in the 1990s. From her Sergey learned how to lie, to cheat and to bribe the police and other authorities that variously sought to regulate and profit from their activities. He started out by selling underwear off the back of a lorry, then graduated to buying second-hand Mercedes in West Germany, driving them back home through long days and nights, and then selling them on for a huge mark-up.

From this he went on to buying companies. He understood accounts instinctively and loved the challenge of ripping through a balance sheet, diagnosing faults and then taking on the cold-blooded risks necessary to win in the
bare-knuckle capitalism of the Yeltsin era. From humble beginnings his business empire gradually expanded from automotive parts, to mines, to food preparation, and then into more glamorous sectors like media.

However, at times of inner crisis, like now, he had to turn back to literature to steady himself. He needed books as his touchstone.

He pulled the greatest book ever written out of the Louis Vuitton briefcase at his feet:
Life and Fate
. His battered copy had been heavily annotated.

He turned to the section where Sokolov and Madyarov were arguing about the true nature of what freedom meant in Russia. Sokolov was in full flood: ‘Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history—the banner of a true, human, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man.’

The bearer of the banner of the dignity of the Russian man! That was what he was! That was what
Russkaya dusha
was all about!

He could see himself with a grand banner unfurled over his head expressing his love for the people of Russia. The great image stuck in his head, revivifying him.

He sat in his luxurious executive jet with the book in front of him, holding it and staring out of the window, lost in renewed dreams of glory as he swept on to meet President Krymov.