The Searcher (10 page)

O
tar Iosava had a monstrous look. Some of it was in his eyes, which were black, as far as you could see them, and quick with a sort of bruised cunning. Some was in the stoop of his back when he stood. But mostly it was his skin, bubbled and pockmarked and a dead yellow-gray, like clay molded onto the face and left in the heat to shrink and crack.

“Mr. Hammer. Sit, we talk.”

When he spoke, his gray lips barely moved, so that to Hammer it seemed that he was addressing a mask whose occupant was somewhere far within. He rose stiffly an inch or two out of his chair and offered his hand, its skin in contrast pale and smooth. Hammer looked at it for a moment, arms crossed.

“You want to tell me why I should?”

“You are grown man. You understand world, how it works.”

His voice came from some deep gurgling place in his throat.

“Not this world,” said Hammer, and meant it.

He was solid, thick around the neck, clearly strong under his bulk, like a boxer in comfortable retirement, and he dressed as his henchmen did in clothes a fraction too small—a T-shirt and a zipped black cardigan and trousers with a light shine in them. Everything expensive and apparently new. A gold cross on a simple gold Georgian chain swung clear of his neck when he leaned forward. He sat back down, withdrew the hand.

“This is not respectful business, but OK, is not surprise. Americans not so polite.”

“You're serious.” Hammer laughed and shook his head. “Who the hell are you?”

“You do not know me?”

“No. I don't know you. I don't know your country and I'm beginning to wonder if I want to. But I'm sure you're a big deal. No doubt that's my loss, and if we'd met under other circumstances I'd be just dying to spend time in your company. Now—no, listen—you tell me why I'm here and what you want and I'll decide if I'm going to stay. Yes?”

Iosava's black eyes looked at him, too recessed to be read.

“OK. You play, I play. Is OK.” Abruptly he stood. “Come.”

They were in a huge, bright room, the width of the three old houses that had been knocked together. Through the long galleried window, over the cracked and crooked rooftops of old Tbilisi, Hammer could see the river, the president's residence, his hotel, the whole city. He felt like a duke taking stock from his palace. Old beams lined the ceiling, warped wooden boards the floor, and everywhere there was modern furniture in a sleek, bland style. It was an elegant room, at odds with its owner. Maybe somewhere there was a wife with taste.

At the far end of the long wall was a vast pair of doors on black iron hinges. Iosava walked to them and turned.

“Come.”

Hammer crossed his arms. “I guess you're used to being in command. But no, thanks. I'll stay here and you can tell me what you want.”

“You are big detective. But you do not want to know things.”

He had a point. The wise thing now was to leave here having learned more than he'd given away. Hammer breathed deeply, put his anger to one side, and relented.

With some ceremony Iosava opened first one door then the next, throwing both wide and revealing another large room, light, bare of furniture, with a concrete floor. Two yards in, metal bars ran across the width of it and up to the ceiling, and half of the outside wall was also railed and otherwise open to the air. Beyond were the woods that rose up to the castle, but Hammer barely registered them because his eye was fixed on the room's one occupant—a brown bear, huge and unmoving, lying on its front against the back wall. One eye watched him back.

The cage was maybe thirty feet square, and empty but for two troughs, one for water and another for food. It smelled deeply of old fish and the
wild. Iosava said nothing, enjoying the effect as he must have done many times before.

“What's it supposed to do all day?” asked Hammer. On his list of all the disgusting things in the world, caging vulnerable creatures came somewhere near the top.

“Eats, sleeps. Shits. What we do.”

“Why are you showing me this?”

From a bucket by the bars Iosava took a fish and threw it to within a yard of the bear, who eyed it lazily, adjusted its weight, and reached out a paw to slide it under his snout. Holding it there, it began without urgency to tear at the flesh. The fur on the top of its head had come out in clumps and exposed the starkly white skin beneath.

“See this bear?”

“I can see the bear.”

“Was police bear. Lived in cell, like this.”

“A police bear?”

“Sure. The police want you scared, they put you in cell.”

“With the bear.”

“With bear. But I feed bear. And they do not.”

Iosava waited for a reaction, but Hammer had no intention of giving him what he wanted. He looked from this man's dying face to the poor faded creature in the corner and wondered which had seen the greater horrors. He had a good idea.

“I saved it,” said Iosava. “In civil war, they wanted kill it, I saved it. My enemies say I am bad man. But in my way I do good.”

“That's why you showed me this? That's the lesson?”

“Come. We have things to talk.”

As he left, Iosava threw another fish, which slapped across the floor and came to rest a foot from the bear's paw. The bear glanced at it and slowly closed its eyes.

 • • • 

B
ack in the grand room Iosava settled into his armchair and Hammer perched less than comfortably on the front edge of a sofa. He didn't
want to accept anything from this man, not even a seat. The guard who had led him up the stairs remained by the door, hands crossed in front.

Iosava leaned forward to take a cigar from a lacquered box on the coffee table and held it out to Hammer, who raised a hand to refuse. He clipped and lit it, taking his time, smoke obscuring his face.

“Only pleasure for me,” he said at last, watching smoke spiral from the tip. “Everything else . . .” he shrugged. “OK. Webster. Ben Webster. Tell me where is he.”

Hammer hadn't expected that.

“I have no idea.”

Iosava exhaled, laughing through the smoke.

“OK. This is good. You don't know where is he. OK.”

“No. I don't. Do you?”

“Mr. Hammer. You give job, you expect job be done, yes? How business works.”

“You hired Ben?”

Iosava laughed again, a phlegmy chuckle, and shook his head.

“I hired him, I hired you. What fuck I care, so long job is done?”

This was a misunderstanding, surely. A miscommunication. Iosava was staring hard at him with those black pits he had for eyes.

“Ben left my company three months ago.”

Iosava watched him for a few moments, smoking, the eyes calculating, wary.

“He told me you were together. That you work on my case.”

“We are not together.”

That was the limit. In London he blackens my name, here he pimps it out. So Ben had come here looking for work, trading on the Ikertu name, his high-minded plans shot—this was where his morals had brought him, to the palace of this monster. Despite everything, Hammer didn't want to believe it—and why believe anything this piece of work said?—but it had the air of being true. It fit.

“He doesn't represent me. You need to tell me what he told you.”

Though his face barely moved—could barely move—somehow Iosava let Hammer know that the fun part of their conversation was over. The ash on
his cigar had formed a brittle gray plug and he knocked it off into an ashtray.

“I paid you money,” he said, his eyes dead on Hammer's.

“You paid him. How much?”

“One hundred thousand dollars. Retainer.”

A hundred grand. That was a proper piece of work for one man.

“I don't have your money. I don't need it. What was it for?”

“I think you know what I ask him.”

“Let's just pretend I don't know. Can you do that? You play, I play.”

The look in Iosava's eyes shifted as he considered this strange person who wouldn't bend to his will. Then he nodded, the calculation made.

“This?” He brought both hands up to his face and pressed them to his cheeks, where they made no impression on the cracked flesh. “President do this. Since two years. He thinks I wish to be president. To push him out. Who vote for this face, yes? Is smart move for him. But I do not want to be president, never. I have different businesses, very important, everything complicated. I like better to be power behind power, understand? There is control.”

He reached forward, took a glass of water from the table, brought it up to his lips, and tilted his head to pour the water into his mouth. A little ran out from the corner onto his chin and he wiped it with the back of his other hand.

“Very simple. Simple operation. I drive, two policemen they stop me. They say I drink, I say no, they take car and some of my blood. Two weeks after, this. Dioxin. Enough to kill but it does not.”

This was said with a kind of pride: clearly it would have killed lesser men. He put the glass back on the table, eyes on Hammer throughout. “Who else has power to do this? No one. Only president. Now I am dark part of his soul that he must always see. I look like this outside. But president, he look like this in here.” He struck his chest with a clenched fist. “And Georgia must know.”

“So that's what Ben's doing for you? Investigating what happened to you?”

Iosava's laugh was black and from somewhere deep inside him.

“No. Georgians not care who does this to me. They think I deserve. Maybe I deserve. Who knows?”

His stare grew more intense. Hammer got the impression that if he'd been sitting any nearer Iosava would have reached out and grabbed him by the lapels. He prepared himself for a harangue.

“Poison is in me, is in Georgia. Soon it will die. No one has money, no one has job. Is no respect. Respect for church, for how you say, rules of life. Georgia is old. Oldest country, enemies everywhere. But even oldest tree can die. Everyone, they fear Russia, but Russia is not enemy. Enemy is inside.” He held his fist against his breast. “Russia story is bullshit. Politics. President uses to win election. But he is poison. Understand? He is inside tree. He kills Georgia.”

Iosava stared at Hammer and let the words take effect. His face was like a mask of dried mud, and Hammer found himself disturbed by the contrast between the dead exterior and all that fire within.

“So. I ask your friend, show who made explosion in Gori. Find proof was president.”

Now that was a case that would get you disappeared.

“I thought Karlo already did that.”

“Karlo was good man but he could not say president signed order. Not hundred percent. President knew, for sure he knew. I need proof. Strong proof, no doubt. So he will be in prison. For thousand years.”

Iosava held his hands out, appealing to Hammer to see the sturdy logic of his case.

“Game is over. Opposition will win. My money, good candidate. No question. Is over. Over. But president, still he fight. To death.” He leaned forward, confidential, threatening. “So. I need your friend. Where is your friend?”

“He's not my friend.”

“Then why you look?”

“I need him to do something for me. Just like you.”

Iosava watched him for signs of deceit but appeared to find none.

“Probably he is dead. Like Karlo.” He leaned forward and slowly ground the end of his cigar into the ashtray, releasing a final acrid stink.

Probably he was, if this was what he had taken on. Hammer imagined a series of scenes: calling Elsa with the news, flying back from Georgia with a body, his awkward presence at the funeral. Trying to convince Sander that the hacking and everything else had been done by his former colleague, now conveniently dead.

“So now you do work for me,” said Iosava.

Hammer kept his eyes on him, with difficulty. Of all the foul people who have come my way, he thought, this one may be the foulest.

“Mr. . . . What is your name?”

Iosava eyed him for his impertinence. “Iosava. Yoss-av-a.”

“Mr. Iosava. Tell me something. How did you find me? There was no tail.”

“Newspaper is mine.”

Of course. Jeladze. Oh, to know how this country worked.

“Television is mine. Banks mine. Water mine.”

“The water, huh? Anything else? Don't you own any investigators?”

“You. And your friend. If he lives.”

Hammer held his brow, closed his eyes for a moment, and let his thoughts settle. God, this was a mess, but in it there had to be opportunity. Everyone is a source.

“Tell me what you said to Ben.”

“You take job. Good.”

“I don't take any job. I don't work for people like you. Here's how it's going to work. I'm going to look for my friend, OK? You tell me what you know. When I find something that's good for you, I'll tell you. That's it. The hundred thousand I'm going to pay you back.”

Iosava sat back, crossed his legs, and clasped his hands together tight until the knuckles whitened. He looked at Hammer for a good ten seconds without saying a word, his eyes shining black in their deep clay sockets.

“Your friend is dead, I think. By end you will be also.”

“I'm kind of immune to threats.”

“No threat. Statement. Without my protection.”

“I'll be fine.”

“The police,” he said it with a short i—polliss, “they do not have bear, but they are same. Always same. Put drugs on your clothes. Pay drunk man to cut you with knife.” Abruptly he sat forward again and mimed the action, a stabbing and then an upward rip. “They do not want you here. They will find way.”

“I can look after myself,” said Hammer, wishing that he believed it. “Tell me what you know.”

P
robably your friend is dead. As he walked back through the narrow streets into the city the words knocked around in Hammer's head. There was a good chance Iosava was right; he hadn't allowed himself to entertain the thought, and it lay on his unformed hopes like ice. Your friend, who is not your friend, may be dead, and your quest already over.

For a moment Hammer felt the anger that had brought him here fade, and in its place an old, familiar sense of slipping under layers of blackness, of a forced retreat to a place where thought was reduced to a series of indistinct, unmanageable fears. Something about Iosava had sparked it in him. His mouth was dry and his hands wet with sweat and he found himself unable to tell whether these were the first signs of withdrawal from his medication or the normal reaction to a reasonable dread.

He had come to see it as a loss of faith. Not in God, but in the unseen fabric of life: in the taste of food, in the possibility of friendship, in next week. In every healthy breath there was an assumption that the next was worth taking—an assumption that otherwise you never so much as noticed. Depression assumed nothing. It broke the tacit contract with the world, until everything in it was just an empty form.

Today Hammer did his best to banish it to the edges again. Concentrated on his work.

Iosava had told him little that he didn't know beyond a few more details. The men from Dagestan who had set off the bomb belonged to a group called the Islamic Army of the Caucasus, rebels who wanted to establish a Sharia state across the region. The Russians, the Georgians—everyone had
relationships with these groups, who loved nothing more than to play them off against each other. The two men had come through the mountains, picking up a 4 x 4 just this side of the border and driving it to Tbilisi only the day before the bombing, which suggested that someone else had prepared the ground.

Otherwise, all Hammer learned was that Iosava was at the center of all things. Without him, very little of note would happen in Georgia, and nothing without his noticing. The president had been his creation from the start, of course, something that was now a source of regret to him. Karlo had been a brilliant journalist, and in his pay. His relations with the Russians were excellent—if Hammer ever needed help in Moscow, he should say. Georgia needed Russia like a dog needed its master. The dog did not understand that it could not survive on its own.

If he wasn't the most important man in the country he was a world-class fantasist, and in either case a bully. Hammer hated him. It was a good, clean emotion and he nourished it.

 • • • 

T
he goon had returned his battery but his first task now was to buy some Georgian phones, which was easier than he'd imagined: some cash, a few smiles, and a false US address. He bought three—one for now, one for someone else, as the need arose, and one for emergencies or the unforeseen.

A mile or more from his hotel he saw what he had been looking for: an Internet café, its door open and its fluorescent tubes fixing the rows of screens with a cold, dead light. Hammer went in, offered some lari, and took a seat in the furthest corner, having been told by the manager in a brusque gesture that he could pay at the end of his session. The room was cheap and tatty, the computers four or five years old, and there were no cameras in sight. One other customer, an untidy man in a thick black coat, sat peering at a screen.

There was a single e-mail waiting for him in the account he had set up for the purpose, and though it wasn't artfully written it contained a great deal that was of interest. It had been sent by Wesley London, who did not
exist, but was in fact Dean Oliver, who did, more or less. From a blank office somewhere north of King's Cross Oliver delved discreetly into people's lives: into their bank accounts, their telephone bills, their health records, and sometimes the rubbish they left outside their houses. He was a slightly more refined version of the people Ben had used to do his hacking, but hardly refined.

The hypocrisy and the risk were unavoidable. Elsa hadn't known the passwords to her husband's various accounts, and the official route would have been too slow.

One of the paradoxes of Oliver was that for someone who did such aggressive work he was scrupulously polite (as he had to be, of course, to win the confidence of those he tricked), and his e-mail began with his hopes that Hammer was well and that Webster, whom he knew and respected greatly, would shortly be found. After that it was raw and technical, as Hammer wanted it.

Webster's current account had seen no outgoing activity, as Oliver put it, since he had left for Georgia almost a week earlier, the last payment being by direct debit to a building society. The balance of the savings account had diminished steadily over the previous three months, but just three days earlier a sum of sixty-four thousand, six hundred and seventy-eight pounds had been received from a Cyprus company called Swift Holdings Ltd.

Since Webster had landed in Georgia, only six calls had been made from his mobile: five to Webster's own home and one to a mobile number registered to Elsa Webster, who, in Oliver's ponderous prose, cohabited with Webster at a north London address. This told Hammer that if he had made other calls in Georgia, as he surely had, Webster had bought a local phone for the purpose, and his mind began to turn to how on earth one might find the number. But just before he had left England, Webster had made a number of calls in a short burst: to Lufthansa, to the Hotel Kopala, to his bank, to two Georgian numbers, and to one Moscow number, which Hammer thought he half recognized. One of the Georgian numbers was Natela's; the other he didn't know. It might be Iosava's, or it might not.

He moved on to the credit card statement, much of which was
predictable. Five hundred lari to the hotel on the morning he checked out, a cash withdrawal from the airport the night he arrived, some money for meals. An hour after paying the Kopala—on the day he was supposed to be going home—he had given two hundred and seventy lari to a car-rental company in Tbilisi, and half an hour after that two hundred and forty to what appeared to be a Gulf gas station.

Unless rental companies had started sending their cars out empty this was odd. He looked up the price of fuel in Georgia, and worked out that Webster must have bought about thirty-two gallons, roughly another two full tanks. For a few minutes he wandered round the rental company's website, trying to work out which car Webster had rented and for how long, but it was impossible.

Two more people had now arrived and were quietly tapping at keyboards; neither paid him any notice. From his pocket he took one of his new phones and made his first call.

“Hertz Rental.” A young, male voice, Georgian.

“Good morning. This is Bob Hopper from the central fraud department at the head office in the UK. You speak English, by any chance?”

“Of course, Mr. Hopper.”

“That's great. Can I have your name, please?”

“Ilya. Ilya Muladze.”

“That's great, Ilya. Thanks for helping me this morning. This won't take long. I'm looking at a job here, opened on Tuesday, name of Benedict Webster. Let me give you the credit card number.”

Ilya listened, taking it down.

“Now, Ilya, we have that card on a list of stolen cards, and I'm not sure how it got through the system, but it's been flagged and I'm a little worried that maybe the guy who rented the vehicle isn't what he seems.” Hammer could hear Ilya's concern on the other end of the line. “I need you to give me some details about the booking, because I can't see everything you can on my end.”

“Of course.”

“That'd be a great help. OK. What vehicle type was that?”

“A Mitsubishi. Pajero.”

“That's great. You have the color?”

“Silver.”

“A silver Pajero. That's great. Registration?

Ilya obliged.

“And what's the transaction time on that, Ilya? When did he pick up the vehicle?”

“It says here . . . sorry, OK, here it is. Eight twenty, in the morning.”

“Very useful. Did you serve the gentleman?”

“I did not, sorry.”

“That's OK, no problem. Can you tell me who did?”

“My colleague, Mariam. She is not here right now.”

“And when will she be in, Ilya?”

“I do not know. Perhaps Monday now.”

“OK. No problem. Just a couple more things. The vehicle hasn't been returned yet?”

“No, sir. Return date on the order was yesterday but it was not returned.”

“OK. That makes sense. And one last thing, Ilya, before I let you get on. That would have gone out with a full tank of gas, yes? There a reason why it wouldn't?”

“Of course. Is there a problem?”

“No, no. Not in the least. Thank you, Ilya. That's been very helpful. I may call again on Monday, speak to Mariam.”

Hammer hung up and returned to his computer, where he found out that the Pajero could travel roughly four hundred miles on a single tank. Georgia wasn't a large country, and it seemed to have a reasonable number of gas stations. Where had he planned to go?

From the evidence left by his credit card Ben had headed west, stopping in Gori, where the bomb had gone off, to buy lunch. That night, he had spent two hundred lari at somewhere called the Restaurant Tamar, which a quick search found to be in Batumi on the Black Sea coast, and a smaller sum at a bar nearby. Two hundred lari was a big dinner. The following day there were payments to the Batumi Sheraton, Turkish Airlines, and the Istanbul Café inside Batumi airport. After that, nothing. That was Tuesday,
three days ago. If he had spent money on that card since, Oliver would have known about it.

In each place he had eaten well. Enough for two, in fact—Hammer was almost sure he hadn't traveled alone. At the Sheraton, which wasn't cheap, his room had cost three hundred bucks a night.

Maybe the bastard wasn't dead. Maybe he was altogether too alive.