Exoteric Read online

  The darkness made it impossible to see Zolin’s face, but his voice carried a grim inflection. Arkady turned away, scanning the hedgerows and the windows of the dacha, reassuring himself they were alone.

  “You’re suggesting Maslok had Molchanov killed,” he clarified. “Why?”

  “Actually, no,” replied Zolin, after a pause. “At least, not directly. I’m fairly sure the shot was taken by a British SIS operative codenamed ‘Copperhead’—one of their ‘E squadron’ assassins. However, the reason he was killed is that he was going to meet the president and expose Maslok.”

  “Expose? Expose him as what?”

  “As an MI6 asset. The British were running Maslok. They still are. Molchanov had proof, and that is why they killed him.”

  “You can’t be serious!” hissed Arkady, turning back to face the Section Director’s silhouette. “The head of the SVR? The president’s chief of staff? We would have known!”

  “I have known,” confirmed Zolin, “for a long time now. But the proof died with Molchanov.”

  “Unless he was talking out of his backside!” pointed out Arkady. “Some jumped-up oligarch has a conspiracy theory, and you believe him about something like that? What proof did Molchanov have?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” admitted Zolin. “Whatever kompromat he had gathered was on an encrypted hard drive in his pocket, with a copy in a safe at his lawyer’s office. Why people expect lawyers to avenge them, I do not know; Molchanov’s quietly handed over everything he had to Maslok’s people without even looking at it.”

  “So, it could have been nothing.”

  “It could, but I do not think it was. Consider: when the British froze everyone’s accounts and assets in London, whose were unfrozen after a single phone call? Maslok’s. They claimed his had been suspended by mistake. Do you believe that?”

  “Well, it’s possible that—”

  “Why did the British let his two embassy agents go without questioning, after they were caught with Borisov? Or, remember how instrumental he supposedly was in deterring them from loaning drones to the Ukrainians? How do you suppose he pulled that off?”

  “These are all things that were good for us,” pointed out Arkady. “They are acts of diplomacy, not the actions of a traitor.”

  “Ah yes, but what did he give them in return? When we discovered they had the Northern Fleet’s encryption keys; when confidential economic reports were being splashed across the business pages of London newspapers; when they started using the computers we had compromised to send us misinformation, and he was the only person to scoff at it—was that all down to him? Was that the price he paid?”

  Arkady stared. His eyes had adapted somewhat to the darkness now, and he could see Zolin take off his spectacles to blot condensation from the lenses. The Section Director was a pragmatist, who wasn’t above doing deals with foreign intelligence services himself, but Arkady could tell their conversation was making even him feel squeamish.

  “Those incidents were all years ago,” he pointed out, sounding more cynical than he felt. “Maybe he did have an arrangement with the British back then. Why wait until now to mention it?”

  Zolin’s silhouette shrugged. “I have had suspicions, but no proof, for a long time. He was Aspidov’s rival, though. I assumed Aspidov would send him into the wilderness once he took the presidency, and the problem would go away. I was wrong. Yes, these incidents are old, but that does not matter. Once he is president, they have him. Any time they want, they can threaten to release evidence of his collaborations with them, proof that he betrayed his fellow agents.”

  “You’re worried they’ll blackmail him?”

  “You are not? Even for a president, treason is an unpardonable crime. He could claim they have fabricated whatever they have, to keep the media and the public quiet, but we know how it goes. Enough of us would recognise the truth, and steps would be taken. No, he would have to do whatever they want—and after Trump, Yanukovych, Le Pen, and the rest, their appetite for revenge will be mighty! Relinquish our territorial claims, send them cheap gas, sit quietly by while Europe and America run around the world doing what they will…he will make all of Russia into MI6’s bitch! It cannot be allowed.”

  There was a barely-suppressed anger in his voice, and for a moment Arkady was reminded of a younger Zolin, uncompromised by political considerations, aggressive in his defence of the Motherland. The Zolin who had ordered air raids in Dagestan and brokered war in Chechnya; who smothered suspects with plastic sheeting to extract confessions: the Zolin of the KGB.

  “This goes beyond our Section’s remit,” Arkady felt obliged to point out. “You should take it to the Director, or the Secretary of the Security Council.”

  “Both Maslok’s allies,” grumbled Zolin. “Everyone is his ally—except for those who were Aspidov’s, who are now desperately trying to become his allies. Everyone is corrupted. No one cares for anything but their own advancement. Once, we were Comrades. Now, we are just whores.”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I need to know you are willing, Arkady,” he continued. “I am not in a position to do what must be done. Maslok must be discredited before he becomes unassailable and sweeps us away. I need to know that you have one fight left in you before we creep into the twilight.” He turned away to make clear it was Arkady’s decision to take. “Well?” he prompted, without turning back. “Do you?”

  Did he? Arkady swam against a tide of reluctance and despair. He owed Zolin; he knew he did. Without the older man, he would have been left out in the cold when the Wall came down. Zolin was his patron, his advocate, and as close to a friend as one could make in the FSB.

  Ana would have told him no, but Ana was no longer there. As the keeper of Arkady’s conscience, she had never liked or trusted Zolin. She had hated Arkady’s career. In the weeks after a gang of enraged dockworkers had dragged him from his car and beaten him half to death, she was the one who bathed and dressed him. She had been the one to hold him when dead Chechens came in the night to scream through his mouth. In her eyes, Zolin had been an arch-manipulator who goaded Arkady into doing his dirty work. Arkady had always been careful to hide from her just how dirty the work sometimes was.

  “I hope you are sure of this, Vsevolod,” he replied. “You are making me an enemy of the second most-powerful man in Russia.”

  “Better to stop him now, before he becomes the first,” replied Zolin, reaching into his pocket. “Here. Take this.”

  He held out a small object. Arkady took it, and turned it over in his fingers, trying to identify it in the darkness. It was a USB flash drive.

  “That contains all the files we have on Molchanov’s assassination: interviews, forensics, photographs, the lot. The password is ‘idolisce.’ I want you to take it away and study it. Read it, think about it, and tell me how we can find Molchanov’s proof. We will meet again in a week.”

  “You said Molchanov’s proof was destroyed,” objected Arkady. “How am I supposed to retrieve it now, years later? What you ask is impossible.”

  “I have a copy of the hard drive he was carrying. Perhaps you will see something that has been missed. Maybe the solution to Molchanov’s encryption is hiding in plain sight, somewhere in those files. Understand the man, get inside his head, and perhaps the answers will present themselves.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Just read the files, Arkady—please. That is all I ask for now.”

  Arkady pursed his lips and nodded, before realising it was probably too dark for Zolin to see him do it. “Okay. I will read it,” he confirmed. “Now, can we go back inside?”

  “Yes,” agreed his boss. “Let us go and eat. We will talk more of this next week. For now, put it from your mind. Let us enjoy the evening.”

  He clapped his subordinate on the shoulder to signal the end of the conversation, and led the way back towards the house. Arkady glanced up at the dacha’s scowling windows as they walked. The Black Dacha, midwife to so man
y plots and conspiracies, had birthed another. Another two men had decided to fight history. Arkady just hoped they wouldn’t share the fate of so many who had gone before.

  *

  Arkady switched off the computer and returned the memory stick to its hiding place behind the light switch. He had been staring at the screen all day, and needed some time away from the Molchanov files.

  Zolin was right: Maslok had been thorough. Molchanov’s relatives and acquaintances had been systematically interrogated, burgled, hacked, and followed, ostensibly as part of the investigation into his murder. They had spilled all kinds of information about the dead man’s business affairs and underworld ties, but none of them knew why he was going to see the President that night. None of them had seen his evidence.

  The killing itself had been the work of a professional. A single bullet from an SV-98 rifle had chopped clean through Molchanov’s heart, killing him instantly. The shooter had made his escape in a car with fake license plates and never been caught. A phone call from the British embassy, reporting the killing, had been intercepted minutes later, before the death was public knowledge. A retrospective search of cell phone records had revealed that a handset registered to a British network was active in the area of the sniper’s nest in the hours before the shot was fired. There, any proof of MI6’s complicity ran out.

  Arkady squirmed his feet into a pair of shoes and knelt down to lace them up. His back protested and threatened to seize. He’d spent too long sat at his desk. About fifteen years too long, muttered a snide voice somewhere inside him. You’re too old now, and too soft. You don’t even care about this silliness anymore.

  He planted a hand on his hip to mute the sciatica as he pushed himself to his feet. Ana’s cane was still by the door, a relic of those last few months when the cancer began to gnaw on her bones. He was supposed to return it to the hospital but didn’t feel ready to face that place again. It could wait. Besides, he might need it himself if his back got worse…

  Oh, come on, you’re only fifty-eight! Ana’s voice this time, chiding him. Vsevolod Zolin’s got ten years on you! You’re going to live for a long time yet. Arkady grunted, and reached for his coat. The prospect failed to fill him with joy. Don’t forget your keys! There—by the telephone, where you left them. He groped for them and jangled them, letting her know he appreciated the reminder.

  It took some time to shuffle down the four steep flights to the ground floor. By the end, the stairs had become too much for Ana, leaving her confined to their apartment for the last weeks of her life. Determined, for his sake, to maintain her cheerful façade, she’d insisted there was nowhere she would rather be than their home—nowhere she would rather die.

  They had lived in the same flat since Arkady first joined the KGB, buying it outright when the Cold War ended. It was on the top floor of one of the pre-revolution townhouses which survived inside Moscow’s Garden Ring. High-ceilinged and relatively spacious, they had been lucky to get it. That flat, and each other, had been all they’d ever needed. They’d had few friends. Ana hadn’t liked his colleagues, and his job made it difficult to associate with people outside the bureau. They hadn’t needed friends though, as long as they had one another.

  Arkady’s feet carried him towards Chistoprudny Boulevard while his mind wandered misty avenues of regret.

  They’d never had children; never quite managed it. Ana had claimed not to care, but of course she did. She just cared for Arkady more. Knowing that made him feel guilty and unworthy. If he hadn’t shackled her with his sterile and fruitless affection, she could have been been a mother—could have left something of herself behind in the world he ushered her out of.

  The roe-hued walls of Menshikov Tower glowed a fluorescent orange in the last rays of the setting sun. If Ana had been with him they might have paused to appreciate the sight. Without her, there seemed little point. Arkady kept walking.

  The pavement at his feet was mottled with flat, grey-white discs of trampled chewing gum. Every street in Moscow looked like that now, as if the city was having an allergic reaction to capitalism. In the old days, ‘zhvachka’ had been indelibly associated with a stereotype of slack-jawed, belligerent Americans, and was never seen in Russia. Arkady supposed that had changed when everything else did. Now, every pavement was spattered with these constellations of thoughtlessness and decadence.

  He turned right, onto the boulevard. It was a route he’d walked with Ana many times, though usually in summer, when leaves adorned the trees and ducks bobbed on the waters of Clean Pond. Now, the birds had flown and the trees were just skeletons, shivering in the darkening air. But Arkady wasn’t there to wallow in memory.

  It was also the spot where Molchanov had been taken out, killed while ice-skating with his daughter on Clean Pond. Arkady could remember the shaky, whirling camera-phone footage that had made it onto television. Molchanov’s body splayed on the ice, bodyguards slipping and falling as they drew pistols and rushed to shield him. The screams and cries of other skaters as they threw themselves flat or struggled towards the edges of the rink. Most of all, he remembered the sight of the oligarch’s young daughter, pushed aside, sat sobbing on the ice.

  Molchanov had been due to meet the President that same night. Attempts had been made to decrypt the hard drive in his pocket, but the forensic engineer quoted in Zolin’s file had concluded it was unbreakable on a time scale which included the heat-death of the universe. By leaving no record of the encryption key, Molchanov had made himself the weak link in the security chain, ensuring his intended revelations died with him.

  A few young Muscovites were already out on this year’s ice, their hissing skates scything its surface, leaving elaborate, looping patterns like particle tracks in a bubble chamber. Daisy chains of multi-coloured bulbs were strung between the trees, bathing the pond in soft, prismatic light. Arkady stopped to watch. Couples, mostly, holding hands and chatting, their legs sculling in tandem; a few lone girls, headphones on, lost in reveries of romance or revenge; one young man showing off his moves, trying to catch the eye of any of them.

  Had Molchanov realised the danger he was in, Arkady wondered? At the time he was killed, it was no secret that uncooperative oligarchs were liable to blackmail, exile, or other forms of coercion. Perhaps he had counted on exposing Maslok as a way to earn the Kremlin’s tolerance; or maybe he had just fatally misunderstood the exchange rate between money and actual power.

  Arkady wondered about the daughter. Molchanov’s friends had spirited her out of the country as soon as they were able, and the government had left intact the trust funds set up for her. She lived in London now, a city where money was easily turned into property and assets lest the Kremlin become acquisitive once more. Could Molchanov have told her the encryption codes?

  It seemed doubtful. She had been nine years old when he was killed, and had revealed nothing during questioning or in the years since. Maslok would have kept her under surveillance for a long time. Zolin would have thought of it, too, and had evidently dismissed the notion.

  Two of the skaters glided to a halt by the fence next to him, and began kissing. Arkady turned away as the man’s hand crept around to his girlfriend’s buttocks. He couldn’t begrudge them their youth or their leisure. He wasn’t sure what he’d hoped to achieve by visiting the site of Molchanov’s slaying. He’d been there many times before, and had seen the footage dozens of times over the years. Any physical evidence of what had happened was long gone.

  He began walking back towards his empty, lifeless apartment. The sun had vanished beneath the horizon now, and it was time for solitary old men to be indoors. He still had Molchanov’s medical records to read. Perhaps the answers Zolin was looking for would be in there.

  *

  Arkady waited until there was no queue for the turnstiles before stepping forward with his ticket. The crowd was drunk and rowdy, shouting to one another and exulting in guttural barks as they bounded up the steps to the terraces. Arkady wanted no part of that
. Risk-averse by habit and inclination, he would rather be late than attract attention.

  The seats Zolin had booked were in the middle of the upper tier, and Arkady was alarmed by how out-of-breath he was by the time he reached their block. You’re too old, he told himself again. Too old and too unfit to be running around like this. You should be behind a desk—or in the ground with Ana.

  The stadium was nearly at capacity, the match already underway. A couple of flares burned in the lower tier, spewing clouds of glowing smoke which gave the scene a surreal, dream-sequence ambience.

  He traipsed down the steps until he found their row. Zolin was sat with his driver, an empty seat between them. Arkady pushed past people until he reached it.

  “Arkady!” exclaimed Zolin. “Good—you made it. Sit. You have not missed much. Well, I think there was a goal. Artyom?”

  “It was a penalty, sir,” replied his driver. “Krutyov saved it.”

  “Ah, a penalty. There you go. Artyom, please fetch my umbrella from the car. I fear we may have rain.”

  “What—now?” asked the driver, visibly crestfallen at the prospect of missing the game.

  “If you please.”

  The young man’s shoulders slumped, but he rose and began to shuffle back along the row towards the exit.

  “That will take him some time,” said Zolin, stretching his limbs like a satisfied cat. He had to raise his voice to be heard over a sudden swell of noise from the crowd around them. “It should be safe enough to talk here. Do you like football? I cannot remember.”

  “I like it well enough,” replied Arkady, trying to remember when he had last been to a match. The club he’d followed before his marriage, Torpedo, no longer existed in any meaningful sense. The stadium they were sitting in hadn’t existed then, either: it had been an airfield. Arkady remembered taking his ailing father to see the Soviet Air Fleet Day there a few months before his death. The heat had been sweltering, his father’s wheelchair heavy and unwieldly, the air heady with jet fuel. It had been the old man’s last day out.