The Traitor's Story (27 page)

He felt violently hollow, as if he might crumple inward, because he immediately knew it to be true. He’d been duped, emotionally as well as intellectually, and it was worse because he loved her and had believed that she loved him. But she hadn’t, and Alex wouldn’t have told him this if he weren’t certain of it being true.

“You need to go home, Finn. Confront her. There may be an explanation.” Finn nodded, knowing there could be no explanation plausible enough to mend the sickness he felt inside. Alex took Finn’s hand in his and said, “I’m so sorry, my friend.”

“Thanks, and thanks for telling me.” He glanced back into the museum, but the girls were nowhere to be seen. He was glad of that, in a way, because he didn’t want the memory of Katerina mixed up with how he felt right now. “Look after her, Alex.”

“I will. And if there’s anything you need. I mean anything . . .”

“I appreciate it.”

Finn shook hands again and left, stopping only to get his backpack from Valentin. He felt as if the world had tilted on its axis, as if nothing made sense anymore, as if his whole life had added up to nothing.

And a part of him was still clinging stubbornly to the belief that Sofi wouldn’t do this to him, that she loved him as he loved her, and that Alex, even with all his resources, had to be mistaken. Whether or not, Finn had to get back to Tallinn, urgently. He had to get back, no matter what the truth that awaited him there.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The last time he’d flown into Heathrow, he’d sworn he would never do it again. He’d taken the train and the Eurostar on every subsequent trip back to England, but here he was again passing through the seven circles of hell. It at least served the purpose of reminding him why he loved history so much.

He’d called Alex before booking his flight, making sure he was in London, but when he got to the hotel the concierge said, “There’s a message for you, Mr. Harrington.”

It was from Alex, giving him an address in Mayfair. Finn stowed his bag in his room and jumped in a cab.

It was a fine-sized townhouse, but from the outside at least, it looked a lot smaller than the place in Kensington. He rang the bell, and almost immediately a young guy in a suit, looking for all the world like a member of staff in a trendy design hotel, opened the door.

Finn didn’t recognize him, but the young guy spoke in a faint Russian accent, saying, “Good afternoon, Mr. Harrington. Mr. Naumenko is expecting you.”

He was taken through to a living room, furnished entirely in white, where Alex was sitting watching the BBC news channel on a wall-mounted TV. At the sight of Finn, he hurried to turn it off and jumped up, coming over and hugging him as he said, “Finn, great to see you!” He stood back, smiling. “You’re looking very well indeed.” His English had always been good, but now there was almost no Russian lilt at all.

Alex was tanned, lean, and fit as ever, more relaxed than Finn had ever seen him. Last time they’d met, his hair had been graying, but now it was a uniform natural-looking brown.

Was he still dangerous? Did he even need to be anymore? Of course, Finn had never seen him like that anyway—their friendship had always been too good, their business partnership even better.

“You’re looking pretty good, too, Alex. The new girlfriend?”

“Not so new anymore. Three years now, and yes, we’re very happy.” The guy who’d opened the door was still standing, awaiting instructions, and Alex turned to him now and said, “Champagne, I think. We’ll take it in the study.”

The guy nodded and disappeared.

Finn followed Alex out of the room and said, “What brought about the move? I thought you loved the place in Kensington.”

“It’s being remodeled. I bought this place so we don’t have to be around all the noise and disturbance. I should have told you—I imagine you’re at The Halkin.”

Finn nodded.

“I should have thought, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not far.”

They reached the study, and Alex stepped aside for Finn to go in first.

“As a matter of fact, you’re lucky to catch me—we’re flying out tomorrow. Can we give you a ride anywhere?”

“I doubt it, not unless you’re going to Helsinki.”

“Intriguing,” said Alex, smiling, trying to guess what Finn might be up to. “But no, wrong direction. Okay, we’ll talk business after the champagne comes, but for now I need you to do something for me.” He walked over to one of the bookshelves and took down Finn’s three published books in hardback. “It’s very good of your publisher to send them to me, but please, you must sign them.”

As it happened, Finn had never told his publishers about Alex, knowing it was a friendship they would have wanted to exploit for its publicity value. Finn had sent the books himself on his various visits to London.

“Of course.” Alex placed them on the desk and handed him a pen. As Finn signed, he said, “Did you enjoy them?”

“Very much. I knew I would. What are you working on now?”

“Well, as it happens, I haven’t done very much work on it this last week or so, but I’m writing a book about the Cathars, focusing on the siege of Béziers.”

Alex smiled and nodded his approval. “Yes, I know a little about it. They destroyed the whole town for refusing to give up a handful of heretics.”

“That’s the one. I’m glad to see you’re still interested in history.”

“A man needs a hobby, Finn, and all the best football teams have been taken.”

The young guy came in with the champagne in an ice bucket and a couple of glasses on a silver tray. He opened the bottle, poured them both a glass, and left.

Alex raised his glass. “To old times.”

“To old times,” said Finn.

“Come, please.” He gestured across the room to two large sofas facing each other. As they sat down, he said, “And last time we met you also had a new girlfriend. Adrienne?”

“Yeah, we’re still together.”

“Good.” He sipped at his champagne. “What’s troubling you, Finn?”

“Ed Perry—and Karasek.” The second name caught Alex’s attention. Finn quickly explained the events of the last week, including the contents of the memory stick. Alex listened intently but without judgment. Finn ended by saying, “Naturally, I need to find out what they’re after, and I need to deal with it.”

“And you want revenge.” Finn offered him a puzzled expression, asking what it was he needed revenge for. “The boy was a friend of yours, no?”

It seemed odd to say it, because he’d met him just a few times, but Finn said, “Yeah, I suppose he was. I’ll be honest, killing Perry and Karasek seems like the only way of guaranteeing I’ll be left alone, but you’re right, they deserve to die for what they’ve done this week.”

“As a rule, I think one only ever needs one good reason for killing a man, but if having two eases your conscience, so be it.”

“Aren’t you concerned about your name appearing there—the numbered accounts?”

Alex smiled. “Karasek is a bitter man and I’ve had several successes which he might have believed were at his expense. He’d be afraid to challenge me directly, but if he could find something, anything to discredit me, he would.”

“You don’t seem unduly concerned.”

“You remember we had a great conversation once, you and I, about how the Russian oligarchs were no different to the American robber barons of the nineteenth century, making money in dangerous times. We took risks, and you took some of those risks with me, for which I will always be grateful, but now we are no longer robber barons, we are part of the establishment. Karasek can do nothing to harm me.”

Alex was flattering Finn, both in the part he’d played in his robber-baron past, and in the extent to which he was now part of the establishment. But the real difference between them was that Perry and Karasek didn’t fear Finn, and they could hurt more than his reputation if they decided to do so.

Alex got up and crossed the room to the champagne, bringing the bottle over to top up their glasses, then taking it back to the ice bucket.

“Paranoia is a possibility,” said Alex. “I heard Karasek was working on something, I don’t know what, but a comeback of some sort, and he’s a paranoid man. They would have known about your involvement with Sparrowhawk . . .”

“But Sparrowhawk failed—okay, it ruined Perry’s career, but if anything, it left Karasek even stronger.”

“It doesn’t matter. They knew the intent, and you know, there
have been many rumors in the last six years, suggesting you never
left.”

Finn smiled. “If I hadn’t left I’d be putting in a call to Louisa Whitman, because that’s who I’d like to see right now, but I don’t have those contacts anymore.”

“You want to meet Louisa? Let me see what I can do.” In response to Finn’s bemused expression, Alex added, “As I said, I’m part of the establishment now.”

He walked to the door, called a name, and had a brief conversation with someone in Russian. He came back into the room then and said, “There is another possibility, of course.”

“You think he’s still bitter about the girl?”

“No, that hadn’t occurred to me, but you could be right.”

There was a pause as Alex sipped at his champagne, and Finn said, “About Katerina . . .”

Alex smiled. “We said we’d never talk of her again. You want to know what happened to her now, of all times?”

“No, you’re right.” It was a complication he didn’t need, that was certainly true. “You’ve thought of another motive?”

“Yes, the numbered accounts. Maybe it’s all about the money.”

“You think they’d go to all this trouble for that? And Karasek, why would he need—”

Alex wagged his finger, a playful admonishment, as he said, “Karasek’s finances were never as strong as they appeared. He’s an Estonian—he never had access to the commodities and natural resources that were available to us. I understand much of his wealth was leveraged, built on debt, and during the credit crisis many of those debts were called in. It’s one of the reasons he had to leave Tallinn and move to . . . Of course, Helsinki.”

“So that’s it—you think all this could be about money.”

“Isn’t everything?” He shrugged. “Karasek and Perry probably have some idea of the business we did together—it could be a combined operation, ostensibly investigating my concerns, trying to undermine me, but finding the means to refinance in the process.”

A suited guy knocked and came in, not the same one who’d opened the door to Finn earlier. He handed Alex a piece of paper, gave a small bow of the head to Finn, and left.

Alex looked at the paper and said, “She’s having an early dinner at the Berkeley hotel, Marcus Wareing’s restaurant. The table name is Adams. If you go there about eight thirty, she’ll see you.”

“That’s impressive.”

“Money opens doors, and trust me, whatever other motives they have, Perry and Karasek are chasing the money—yours, mine, and all the money in those other accounts.”

Finn shook his head. “I don’t believe it. It just seems too crazy.”

“You don’t want to believe it, because you don’t want to believe that people could carry out such crimes for any amount of money, but you and I both know of people who’ve carried out far worse for loose change.”

“True enough. I could use a number for Karasek if you have one.”

“I’m sure you could. I’ll get it and send it to you.”

“Thanks. I’ll use it wisely.”

Alex nodded, but said, “Isn’t there a famous phrase about Béziers—something about killing them all?”

Finn had met a few other Russian oligarchs in his time, and he bought Alex’s robber-baron analogy because they were smart people as a rule, and serious, but Aleksandr Naumenko was still the only one he could imagine showing this level of interest in thirteenth-century history.

“That’s it. The Abbot of Cîteaux was asked how they’d recognize the two hundred heretics among twenty thousand townspeople. He’s said to have answered, ‘Kill them all, God will know his own.’”

Alex smiled appreciatively, absorbing words that had managed to maintain their power over eight hundred years—their power and their perverse wisdom and all their compelling horror. It was a ruth
lessness of the kind he’d often used in his own life, and Alex’s message s
eemed to be clear, that the real wisdom for Finn now would be to show a little bit of that ruthlessness himself.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Finn arrived at The Berkeley a little after eight, sat in the bar and had a drink, checking out who else was in there, out of habit rather than because he believed Louisa would respond to his sudden appearance by putting people on the ground. She was too relaxed for those games, too in control.

At eight thirty he ordered another drink, but then went to the front desk and said, “I have an important message for someone dining in the Marcus Wareing restaurant, sitting at a table in the name of Adams. She’s a Miss Whitman. Could you let her know that her nephew has arrived and is in the bar?”

The concierge had been scribbling on a notepad the whole time he’d been speaking, and he smiled now and said, “Of course, sir, I’ll do that right away.”

Finn strolled back to the bar and sat down. A moment later, his second drink arrived. He was looking forward to seeing Louisa again, and oddly, he found himself nervous, too, as if he were about to face an appraisal. It took some effort to remind himself that he no longer answered to Louisa, nor to anyone else.

He waited ten minutes. If she’d been mid-course, she wasn’t the kind of person to stop just so that she could come out and chat with him. It summed up one of the things he’d always liked about her, that she’d never allowed a job that could be socially cauterizing to limit her enjoyment of life.

When she did appear, it took him by surprise. Someone left the bar, briefly distracting him, and when he turned back Louisa was almost on him. She looked younger than he remembered her, less matronly, a lot less matronly.

He imagined she was only in her mid-fifties, an age gap that had seemed huge when he’d been in his twenties but was now marginal, as if he’d grown older but she hadn’t. What he saw in front of him was a bookish, attractive woman in clothes that could pass either for business or for “ladies who lunch.”

He stood and she said, “Oh, do sit down, Finn. How lovely to see you.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Nephew! Younger brother would have been more appropriate.”

The barman started to head over as she sat down, but she whisked him away again with a hand gesture that managed somehow to be both authoritative and friendly.

“Thanks for agreeing to see me, Louisa.” He thought of mentioning the irony of Aleksandr Naumenko being able to set up a meeting with her whilst Finn didn’t even have her number, but he saw how that conversation would go, how the world had changed, how Naumenko was now a useful ally. “I’ll get straight to the point. There’s a company called BGS—Brac Global Systems—and for the last two years it’s had me under surveillance. I know from my own sources that it’s also very interested in the events surrounding Sparrowhawk. I know that Ed Perry heads this organization and that Karasek is, at the very least, a client.”

There was a pause but no facial reaction, and then she said, “Is
there anything else you want to tell me?”

“Okay, how about this—last week, two employees of BGS put a noose around the neck of a fifteen-year-old boy and hanged him in the basement of his building in Lausanne. The police still think it’s a suicide. One of those same employees last night tried to shoot an overdose of heroin into a schoolgirl, but failed. The boy and the girl were best friends, and what they did wrong was accidentally hack into a BGS network and download information.”

Her expression became grave, and though no one else in the bar would have spotted it, he knew he’d shocked her.

“They were the sources you mentioned?”

“Yeah, and if it hadn’t been for something else, I might never have found out and the boy might still be alive.” She nodded, deep in thought, and he said, “That wasn’t what you were thinking of, was it, when you asked if I had anything else to tell you?”

As if telling him something that no longer mattered, she sounded distracted as she said, “I was going to ask if you knew anything about the deaths of the two men you’ve just mentioned, the second of whom was found floating in Lake Geneva late this morning. I presume they
are
the two men you’ve just mentioned?”

“Tell me about BGS, Louisa.”

“It’s about to be wound up.”

He felt a numb horror as the meaning of those words sunk in.

“You mean it’s yours? Gibson told me it was private.”

“Gibson.” She sighed wearily. “It is a private company—almost everyone who works for it believes that to be the case and it can’t be traced back to us. It’s Perry’s baby, and for a while it looked like a good way of keeping him occupied.”

Perry
. The horror turned to anger. The one thing he’d been assured of six years ago was that, although they’d failed to take down Karasek, they’d harvested enough intelligence to end Perry’s career. Only now did he fully appreciate how untrue that had been. Maybe Perry’s desire for revenge had been personal, but it seemed he’d been directing it from within the safety of the government’s tent.

“Perry’s still in? Do you not remember the last conversation we ever had?”

“I do, and I believed it to be the case at the time, but Ed had powerful friends and favors to call in. It’s not what many of us would have wanted.”

“Most especially Harry Simons,” said Finn. “Harry
is
dead, isn’t he?”

“Of course he is! And look, Ed Perry’s position was seriously weakened after Sparrowhawk
—
even if we weren’t able to end his career, we were able to fence it in.”

“By giving him free rein over his own little fiefdom?”

“Not entirely. Gibson was ostensibly ex-GCHQ and had quit to join BGS. In fact, he’d transferred to us and was working for us from within.” Finn remembered something Gibson had said, how most of the notes on the memory stick had related to his attempts to make sense of things. Was that why he’d had a network in the first place? “Of course, that makes it all the more regrettable that you and he had a little run-in.”

“He killed a schoolboy.” Louisa nodded, accepting the point. “What about Taylor, was he one of yours?”

She shook her head. “Former SBS.”

“No he wasn’t!” She looked askance. “Louisa, I can handle myself, but if I’d run up against special forces last night, it’d be me floating in Lake Geneva.”

“Former SBS is what he claimed, and as far as BGS is concerned, that’s what he was. Ed might be having his doubts now, of course.” She smiled. “I believe in reality he spent two rather unremarkable years in an infantry regiment, nine months in prison, and four years as a freelance bodyguard in Iraq.”

As she was in an expansive mood, he said, “What’s BGS about, Louisa—what was its purpose, what are they doing coming after me?”

“Finn, do you believe for one moment that I’m about to discuss operational matters with you? As to the latter question, I’m not sure, frankly—we’ll look into it, we’ll get to the bottom of it, and you’ll never be any the wiser.” She looked at her watch. “I should go back in. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

That was typical Louisa, to ask a question like that when she hadn’t actually helped at all yet. But he also knew that the help could be forthcoming, down the line, if she thought it appropriate.

“You could tell me where Ed Perry is.”

“Indeed, I could, but I won’t. And what are your plans? Back to work on another book? I bought one, by the way—haven’t got around to reading it yet, but I will, perhaps this summer.”

“When I was leaving six years ago, you offered me an oppor
tunity to go out in style, with Sparrowhawk—I’d be considered
a traitor by many, I’d leave under a veneer of disgrace that only a
select few would know to be unjustified, but the prize was the downfall of Karasek and the exposure of Ed Perry as someone who’d been working against this country’s interests.”

“Not every operation succeeds, Finn. If it had, it would’ve been a great achievement, and I wish it hadn’t failed in quite the way it did and at quite the cost, but that wasn’t your fault, either.”

“You’re missing the point, Louisa.” She looked mockingly intrigued. “It’s too late in many respects—clearly the world’s moved on—but I’m flying to Helsinki early in the morning, where I intend to pay Karasek a visit and finish what should have been finished six years ago.”

She raised her eyebrows, still smiling a little. “So those are your plans. I could stop you doing that, of course.”

“Indeed, you could, but you won’t. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you want to help me or not. Give it some thought.”

“No, and I won’t condone such stupidity, in either a personal or professional capacity. Not that anything I say will stop you going.” She stood up and moved around her chair, then looked at him again. She sounded more conciliatory as she said, “It’s been a while since I was in Helsinki. Will you stay at the Kämp?”

“Yes, for old times’ sake. Harry and I had some riotous nights in the bar of the Kämp.”

“I can imagine.”

“Where’s Perry, Louisa?”

“You’re a fool even to ask.”

“I don’t think my foolishness has ever been in doubt.” She smiled. “Just do me one favor—do a check on Jonas Frost. He was the boy they killed, and I only just met him but he was one of the best people I’ve ever known. Do a check, and see the real cost of our failure to fence Perry in.”

She gave a little nod. “Okay, I’ll do that much. And do be careful, Finn. One day very soon, you and I will sit down and have a proper conversation.”

She turned and walked purposefully out of the bar. He could imagine her going back to the table, and depending on the identity of her fellow guests, dismissing the interruption and the reasons for it as gracefully and succinctly as she’d dismissed the barman a short while before.

Finn was left wondering what he’d come to London for. He’d found out the galling truth of Perry’s survival, and something of what BGS was about. But he still had nothing more than Gibson’s talk of revenge or Alex’s speculation about money to explain why they’d come after Finn, or what they wanted from him.

He’d laid down a marker with Louisa Whitman, letting her know what had really happened in Switzerland. He’d also let her know what he intended to do, gambling that she wouldn’t put obstacles in his way. And he’d received Karasek’s contact details from Alex, but all together these things hardly justified the trip.

Perhaps nostalgia had brought him here, a desire to meet Alex and Louisa again, to immerse himself once more in the world of information. But above all, he suspected it was uncertainty that had propelled him. He had no idea what would happen in the next few days or whether his luck would hold, and he wanted someone—even someone who would never talk about it—to know what his purpose had been.

He’d made it clear to Louisa that he was going to finish what should have been finished six years ago, or at least his part in it. Because for all that time, without even realizing it, he’d been living on edge, pushing away the people closest to him, and he wouldn’t live like that anymore—the cost was far too high.