Eternal Empire (18 page)

I
n the bedroom of the house in Hackney Wick, Wolfe could see several distinct sprays of blood. The bodies themselves had been taken to the mortuary, leaving behind only the thick stench of decomposition, as well as a sour smell, like ammonia, that floated unaccountably above it all.

At her side, the scenes of crime officer produced a set of forensic photographs. “Two bodies. One was Andrew Ferris, the driver who was taken hostage. The other has been identified as Ivan Sturza. You've seen his file?”

Wolfe studied the photos with a connoisseur's eye. “Moldovan national with a Romanian passport. Petty criminal record. Based on video from the riots, he was one of the men at the prison break.”

She pointed to the picture on top, which displayed two bodies, one tied to a chair, the other slumped awkwardly across the other. “Ferris, the hostage, was killed first. Sturza was shot as he was bending over the other man's body. And I don't think he was expecting it.”

“That's consistent with our analysis,” the officer said. “I spoke with the lab in Lambeth. The bullet was smooth, with no rifling, which implies it was fired from a reactivated gun, possibly a converted starter pistol. And they used ammonia to remove trace evidence from the rest of the scene.”

“They did the same thing in the van on Mare Street,” Wolfe said. “We should check the database for similar crimes. What else?”

“One partial shoeprint in the blood. The men in the house wore smooth gloves. Plenty of latex smears, but no prints. With one exception.”

“You mentioned that earlier.” Wolfe headed for the door. “Let's take a look.”

She left the room, glad to move away from the smell of death, and went back into the hallway, keeping to the approach path. The house itself was small and depressing, abandoned, like so many others, in the recent downturn, which had pushed repossession rates to their highest level in ten years.

At the center of the kitchen stood a warped table with two plastic chairs. The table was covered with gray smears of fingerprint powder, as well as a pair of white cards that marked where two glasses had been found and bagged. Wolfe pointed to the nearest card. “Here?”

The officer nodded. “The only set of prints we found. Clear impressions on one of the glasses. And they belong to Ilya Severin.”

Wolfe frowned. “He must have removed one of his gloves. I wonder why—”

Looking down, she saw something else. On the linoleum floor by one of the chairs, in which Ilya had evidently been seated, there was a worn dishrag, apparently taken from the counter by the sink. Picking it up with one gloved hand, Wolfe saw that it had been tied into a loose knot.

She set the rag on the table and carefully undid it. There was nothing inside.

The knot reminded her of something, but before she could put it into words, her partner entered. “I spoke with the sergeant,” Asthana said. “They're checking cameras nearby. Ferris was a contractor, but he was still an employee of Her Majesty's prisons, so they're taking the murder to heart.”

“Then we'll leave them to it,” Wolfe said. After thanking the officer for his time, she and Asthana left the house together, moving past the blue incident tape strung across the entrance. Arriving at their car, Asthana got behind the wheel as Wolfe went over her notes. “I want to try Hughes again. Maybe word of the murders will rattle him further. And then I want to go after Dancy.”

“I'll take care of it,” Asthana said, heading south on the trunk road. “You see anything useful back there?”

Wolfe thought about mentioning the knotted dishrag, which had continued to stick in her mind, but finally decided against it. “I keep wondering about the resources involved. At least six men on the outside. Vehicles, weapons, a safe house. This takes time and money. But I still can't figure out why.”

Asthana did not seem troubled by this. “Vasylenko didn't want to die in prison.”

“But that isn't enough to justify the risk. Vasylenko doesn't have the authority he once did in London. The younger generation isn't going to blindly follow a man just because he has the right tattoos.”

“Granted,” Asthana said. “But a man like Vasylenko can be useful in other ways. He ran extortion and weapons rackets for years. There's institutional knowledge there. It's good to have a man like this around.”

“But you don't need to break him out of prison to get the benefit of his experience. It's easy to run operations from Belmarsh. That's what a
vor
does. If they broke him out, it had to have been for a specific task—”

Even as she spoke, she began to glimpse an answer. When you looked at Vasylenko, you saw an old man, but to the right pair of eyes, he was something more. The tattoos on his body weren't arbitrary symbols but the visible signs of the life he had led. His mind, too, was full of signs that had never been written down. And even if you could pass them along to others, they were still only words, at least in the absence of the man whose history gave them meaning.

All these thoughts flashed through her mind in a fraction of a second. Wolfe turned to Asthana. “There's one thing a thief can do that nobody else can. He can talk to other thieves.”

Asthana seemed absorbed by the traffic. “I'm not sure I understand what you mean.”

“Vasylenko is useful only as a symbol. An icon in the form of a man. He can open doors, guarantee safe passage, draw on the full resources of the brotherhood. But only if he's there in person.”

Asthana looked unconvinced. “But you said yourself that the thieves are losing their power in London.”

“But not in other countries.” Wolfe turned to the last page of her notes. “Ivan Sturza, the dead man, was born in Moldova. That's a country where the old ways still have force. If you want to get something done, you need a
vor
on your side. And if you don't have one already—”

“—you bring him in,” Asthana finished. “All right. Vasylenko isn't useful here, but they can take him someplace where he's still valuable. He won't stay in London. But why bring Ilya?”

“I don't know,” Wolfe said. “Maybe they have something special in mind.”

As she said this, it occurred to her that if Ilya was involved, it could mean only one thing. And she wondered for the first time, with a sinking heart, if Ilya had fired the shots that killed those two men in Hackney.

She was about to say more when her cell phone rang. As she dug the phone out of her purse, her mind continued to follow the thread from before. The next step was to look at the map of Europe, not by country, but by regions of power that had little to do with political boundaries. Somewhere at the heart of that map, she thought, was where Ilya and Vasylenko had gone.

Her cell phone displayed an unknown number. She answered it. “Rachel Wolfe.”

The voice on the other end was uncharacteristically nervous. “Wolfe, this is Owen Dancy. I hear you've been trying to reach me. . . .”

T
he following morning, a town car brought Maddy and Elena to the Port of Tomis. Maddy had overslept, having spent much of the night going over the material from her conversation with Powell, only to be awakened by a call from Tarkovsky's assistant. Throwing on her clothes, she had packed and rushed to the lobby, where she discovered that the others had already left.

When they arrived at the port in Constanta, Maddy found herself at a pretty marina. Leaving their car, they headed toward the berth from which they were scheduled to embark. The day was bright and warm, the salt wind blowing her hair to one side as she hurried to follow Elena. Up ahead, she saw a cluster of guests in fashionable casual wear, standing before a sleek white limousine tender.

As they approached the passerelle, a uniformed deckhand with epaulets came up to take their bags, saying that they would be departing in a few minutes. Maddy watched as he stowed their suitcases in the compartment in the stern, then saw that Elena had moved off without a word, going to greet a pair of new arrivals who were standing up the quay.

Maddy took a step back, pretending to look out at the water while really studying the crowd. She couldn't see Tarkovsky, his family, or any of the board members. The executives from Argo and their wives stood apart from the others, and a member of the security team was stationed by the passerelle, his eyes lighting briefly on her face as he observed the scene in silence.

Near the water, standing by himself, was a man who had caught her attention earlier. He was fairly young, perhaps in his late twenties, and a touch on the heavy side. With his hands in the pockets of his jacket and a pair of white headphones in his ears, he seemed less than comfortable here. Maddy had learned a few useful facts about him already, and as she regarded him now, he struck her as a member of a type that she understood very well.

As the others began to board, Maddy climbed onto the tender, where she was shown into a cabin with two rows of facing seats cushioned in nude leather, the skylight open to the sun overhead. She made a show of looking outside until the man with the white earphones had taken a seat at the end of the row. Without glancing over, she sat down beside him, her camera in hand.

A second later, Maddy caught his eye, as if by chance. “Hi there. I'm Maddy.”

In response, the man removed his headphones and reached out for a handshake. Aside from a few extra pounds, he was pleasant enough to look at, with a broad open face and a hint of dark stubble. “I'm Rahim. Nice to meet you. So what brings you to this ship of fools?”

“Good question,” Maddy said. “The short answer is that I work for Tarkovsky. You?”

“You might say I work for him, too, in a way.” Rahim looked out toward the quay as the deckhand cast off the stern lines and climbed into the cockpit. “I was on the yacht design team.”

Maddy knew this already, but she made a show of interest. “Oh, so you're an engineer?”

“Not exactly,” Rahim said. “I coded the onboard systems. Not the most glamorous part of the process, but still—”

He paused as the tender began to ease out of the marina. As they pulled away, Maddy saw a line of people watching silently from shore. The rest of the passengers were looking out as well, the conversation momentarily halting as they moved past the jetty. Then the tender opened up, its diesel engines rising to a roar, and they headed at full throttle into the open water.

Maddy gazed out at the sea. They were moving roughly parallel to the shoreline, the spray rising to either side as the boat accelerated, cutting like a knife through the waves. To the north lay a line of crowded gray beach, a narrow strip of land between the sea and the lake beyond.

A moment later, Maddy turned to the window across from her and saw the yacht itself anchored in the distance, recognizable by the four petals of the lotus on its prow. Her first reaction, oddly, was one of disappointment. The yacht was large, but it was not as impressive as she had expected, with five decks, a vacant helipad at one end, and a davit and crane at the other. Seeing that it was only a ship like any other, she felt some of her apprehensions fall away. “It's not as big as I thought.”

At her side, Rahim laughed. “That isn't the yacht. It's the shadow boat. We converted it from a decommissioned oil vessel. It travels with us, carrying spare fuel and a few extra toys.” Glancing over her shoulder, he pointed to the view from the prow. “
That's
the yacht.”

Maddy turned, noticing that most of the other guests were already looking in that direction. When the ship in the distance finally came into view, she could only stare in disbelief. “Oh my God.”

She forgot her camera entirely as they drew closer to the yacht, which had been built by Fincantieri in the Muggiano Yard near La Spezia, and from there had traveled up the Mediterranean to the Aegean, through the Strait of the Dardanelles to the Sea of Marmara, and then through the Bosporus Strait to the Black Sea, a voyage of over a thousand miles to where it was waiting now.

The yacht was a monster. With its massive profile of six decks, it looked like a vast wedding cake on the water, its superstructure a blinding white, a helicopter perched on its highest level, visible past the aerials that crowned it like a pair of giant antlers. Yet it was more than just a luxury vessel. Looking up at it, Maddy received an overwhelming impression of power and strength, one that only increased as they drew closer to the ship, the tender dwarfed by its size.

Rahim was grinning. “Four hundred and twelve feet long, with a beam of seventy feet. Not quite in the top ten of the largest yachts ever built. But it's a gorgeous ship all the same—”

Maddy was still staring up at the hull. “You'll have to show me around sometime.”

Around her, the cabin grew dark as they passed into the
Rigden
's shadow. The yacht loomed above them as they approached the raised hydraulic door of the tender bay, six feet above the waterline, where a boarding platform had been lowered. As she watched, the tender slowed and positioned itself so it could be tied up by the waiting deckhands. The engines fell silent. A moment later, the passerelle was extended and the guests prepared to disembark.

Rahim and Maddy, who were seated at the end, were among the last to leave the tender. She rose, feeling the boat rocking slightly beneath her feet, and made her way forward. For a moment, as she was about to mount the passerelle, she hesitated, feeling the immensity of the yacht waiting to swallow her whole, as if it were not a ship but a prison. A second later, she crossed onto the platform, breathing in the salt air, and found herself on the yacht.

Maddy looked around the tender bay, a gleaming space filled with water scooters and kayaks in aluminum cradles. At one end stood the expedition tender, slightly smaller but sturdier than the boat in which they had arrived. Before she could explore any further, she was ushered politely up the stairs to the deck above. Up ahead, she saw that Rahim had joined the rest of the design team, the members of which were looking around, as if in a dream, at the yacht they had helped to will into reality.

Following the others, Maddy emerged onto the boards of the aft deck, blinking in the sudden light. Lined up before her and the other passengers was the crew, smiling and standing at friendly attention. The deckhands wore formal shirts with epaulets, while the stewardesses had shoulder boards with silver crescents. Each had a white lotus embroidered on the left breast.

A woman's voice came from her side. “Miss, would you like to give me your shoes?”

Maddy turned and saw a stewardess, not far from her own age, holding out a pair of slippers. She slid off her pumps and handed them over, taking the slippers in exchange. The shoes, she saw, went into one of two baskets on the deck, in which more than a few red soles were visible.

Putting on the slippers, she moved quickly past the line of crew members, who smiled at her as she went by. Most of the guests were already gathered on the aft deck. Tarkovsky was standing near the railing in a linen suit, a glass of something in his hand, his wife and daughter at his side.

As she saw him, Tarkovsky noticed her as well. He gave her a nod, his eyes on hers. Maddy stared back, feeling, as if for the first time, the full insanity of what she had done, and realized that someone was offering her a glass of champagne. She took it without thinking, managing to resist the urge to drink it all at once. Then she went forward into the sunshine of the yacht.