Illegal Action

7

Geoffrey Fane was not a modest man, but neither was he ostentatious. He moved quietly and unobtrusively among a wide group of acquaintances in various overlapping circles at the upper end of London society. He knew the inside of most of the embassy dining rooms, and all of the St. James’s clubs, but Rupert’s Club, where he had been invited to meet Sir Victor Adler, was virgin territory.

As he lifted the knocker on the front door of the small Georgian town house in a quiet street on the west side of Berkeley Square, he allowed himself to wonder for a moment what he would find inside.

Adler was a man he had known for a very long time—socially they had met at the occasional dinner party and embassy function—but their contact was mainly professional. Adler had for years supplied MI6 with what was perhaps little more than gossip which he had picked up on his regular visits to the Soviet Union and now to Russia. When Fane, who kept a close eye on these things, knew that Adler had returned from a visit, he would invite him to MI6’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross for a chat. The contact was low-key, very civilised and understood by everyone, including the Russians. Fane was curious to know what had caused Adler to break the pattern and initiate a meeting.

The front door was opened silently by a short, frog-eyed man in a tailcoat. To Fane’s enquiry for Sir Victor, he inclined his head, and without speaking motioned towards an inner room where about a dozen men and a few women sat in groups in high-backed, well-padded armchairs. Conversation stopped for a moment as Fane walked in, and eyes were raised as quick assessments of the newcomer were made. Victor rose from his seat in a corner and indicated the chair opposite him.

As Fane sat down, he looked around. The room was highly decorated, over decorated in fact, almost vulgar to Fane’s ascetic eye. On the high ceiling were painted scenes of nymphs and swags of flowers, the walls were hung with gilt mirrors and every available inch was covered with assorted pictures in gold frames. The curtains were heavy brocade with tasselled tie-backs and the side tables were fruitwood. It was quite obvious from the general air of opulence that to become a member of Rupert’s Club a man could be tall or short, fat or thin, Christian or (as with Adler) Jew, but the one inflexible requirement was that he be rich.

Which Adler indisputably was. He had social cachet from birth, since his mother came from one of the earliest Sephardic families in Britain. Any residual doubts about their Englishness had long been assuaged by a series of canny marital alliances made over the course of several centuries—including, a century before, marriage to a Curzon.

But it was from Adler’s father’s side that Victor had inherited the cash that supported the cachet. The Adler clan descended from a single banking patriarch who, like the original Warburg and the early Rothschilds, had come to London from Germany in the 1840s—as if sensing a hundred years ahead of time that it was better for a Jew not to stick around in Frankfurt.

Sir Victor Adler himself had never shown the slightest interest in joining the family bank, but then, thought Fane, why should he have? He owned enough of it to finance his other, far greater interest. From adolescence, curiously perhaps considering his own Germanic antecedents, Victor was deeply, passionately interested in Russia. Its art, literature, music, food and particularly its politics.

Adler was one of a small elite band of international figures who wielded “influence,” that strange, difficult-to-define commodity, which if examined too closely, seemed to dissolve into thin air like a djinn. But it was real to those who believed in it, and there were many such believers who sought Adler’s advice—companies doing business with Russia, banks investing there and, of course, politicians. Fane was not one of the believers, but he knew that Adler talked to people he and his colleagues were interested in. And that was enough for him.

Now he looked at his host and waited for him to speak. A heavy cut-glass tumbler of whisky materialised on the table by Fane’s arm. Victor pushed across the jug of water, then leant back in his chair, crossing his well-padded legs at the ankles. “Let me tell you why I wanted to see you. As you will know, I returned from a short visit to Russia a few days ago. I was there for a week, seeing mainly old acquaintances. Some of it was social, some political, some business; most of it all three.” He smiled briefly. “Then the day before I left I had a message at my hotel from someone I have known for years. He said he had something of the utmost importance to tell me. I was curious, so we met in the morning before I left for the airport.” Victor paused and leant forward almost imperceptibly in his chair. He didn’t whisper but spoke in a low voice that Fane had to struggle to hear. “I am sure you know the name Leonid Tarkov?”

Fane nodded. “One of the oil ministers.”

“That’s right,” said Adler, and chuckled. “That’s part of his problem—that he is still a minister. Do you remember when the Russians nationalised Yukos Oil?”

“Of course.” How could he forget? It was a notorious act of expropriation which seemed to reverse the trend towards privatisation begun under Yeltsin, and warned that the Russian state could still bare its autocratic Communist teeth whenever it wished.

“Tarkov was slated to become a senior official in the new nationalised company. After twenty years in the Kremlin, he was looking forward to working somewhere else—and to the perks of the job. At the last minute, Putin gave the post to someone else. Who knows why? But it served to alienate Tarkov from Putin. He still has a government position but is no longer on the inside track. Which may explain what he told me.”

Fane could see Adler was enjoying himself, so he took a sip of his drink and leant back. There was no point in trying to rush the old boy.

“Last summer, Tarkov attended a wedding, at a dacha outside Moscow. It was a lavish affair—the groom’s father had made a fortune in platinum during Yeltsin’s time, I believe—attended by many senior political figures and businessmen. There was a lot to drink—perhaps you have been to a Russian wedding—and towards the end of the evening Tarkov found himself sharing a bottle of vodka with a colleague named Stanislav Stakhov.”

Fane nodded. Stakhov was one of the few senior Yeltsin aides who had managed to prosper under Putin.

“He and Tarkov have known each other since they were boys. They grew up together in Minsk; they even joined the Party in the same year. Yet, Tarkov told me, he was careful when they talked, since Stakhov is a Putin man and always much in favour. Tarkov says he didn’t grumble about the president or about his own fall from grace, though I take that with a grain of salt since the man seems incapable of opening his mouth without complaining.”

Fane smiled. He had long ago learnt that Victor Adler performed best before an appreciative audience. Adler continued, “However, according to Tarkov, the drunker Stakhov got, the more he became critical of Putin. He said Putin was starting to act erratically, power was going to his head. He was growing insecure, almost paranoid.”

Fane nodded, not entirely surprised. It was almost an axiom in his experience that the greater the accumulation of power, the greater the fear of losing it. One had only to look at Stalin, without a challenger to his authority in sight, yet obsessed with conspiracy phobias by the time he died. Fane asked quietly, “Any particular people he’s paranoid about?”

“That is the odd thing.” Adler paused and took a sip of whisky. “Apparently, he’s not worried by the Russian mafia—most of them are on his side anyway—and internal political opposition is negligible. What seems to concern Putin are the new oligarchs.”

“But they’re utterly dependent on him. He can ruin any one of them just by nationalising their company.”

“Indeed, so. But it’s the oligarchs who’ve left Russia that he’s scared of.”

“Most of them are here,” said Fane. There were said to be thirty Russian billionaires living in London alone.

“Exactly. Putin is terribly uneasy that so many are in one place.”

Fane frowned. “What does he think, they’ll form a government in exile?” he asked. “That’s just the old Bolshevik neurosis about émigrés, like the White Russians congregating in Paris before the war. They never stood the slightest chance of toppling the Communists.”

The little man in tails reappeared, and placed a bowl of macadamia nuts on the table next to them. Adler offered them first to Fane, who shook his head, then took a handful himself, with a large hairy hand, munching thoughtfully for a moment. Then he said, “I doubt it’s anything that extreme. Stakhov can be a little dramatic.”

“I know Putin a little,” Adler continued, and Fane knew this was true. “I don’t view him as paranoid. Stakhov might call him that, but I think the appropriate word would be ‘careful.’ He can see a threat before anyone else can even imagine it. Of course on a personal level, Putin despises these expatriate oligarchs because he thinks they are decadent. He is, after all, ex-KGB. But their money makes them powerful. They don’t like him and some of them have become quite vocal. They could help fund opposition to him within Russia and certainly on Russia’s borders. That’s what concerns Putin.”

Though President Putin’s concerns were interesting, Fane didn’t imagine for a moment that Victor Adler would have asked him here just to relay high-level Kremlin gossip emanating from a late-night session with a vodka bottle. He waited patiently, looking as if he had all the time in the world. No one would have guessed he had a dinner to go to.

“Tarkov claims he didn’t react when Stakhov started spouting about Putin. He just waited to see what would come next. It seems that Stakhov thought he didn’t believe him. It was then he told Tarkov about the plot.”

Fane raised an eyebrow and crossed one leg languidly across the other. Only those who knew him very well would realise this indicated a sudden raised interest. “Plot?” he asked mildly.

Adler nodded vigorously. For the first time, he looked around the room, which was slowly emptying as its occupants moved to the dining room or left for engagements elsewhere. He leant forward and spoke again in a lowered voice. “It has been decided to make a pre-emptive strike against the oligarchs. One of them is going to be silenced, pour encourager les autres. By removing one thorn in its side, the government intends to convey a very strong warning.”

“‘Silenced’?” asked Fane.

Adler merely shrugged in reply. They both knew what it meant.

“Here in England?” Fane asked casually, as if it happened all the time.

“Apparently.”

“Which oligarch has been selected for this privilege?” He kept his tone light, but he was watching Adler intently.

“That Tarkov couldn’t tell me. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t know. He said he had the distinct impression the plan hadn’t been finalised yet.”

“Would he be able to find out?”

Adler looked doubtful. “Probably not. He told me he phoned Stakhov a week later to ask him to lunch, but Stakhov didn’t take his call.”

Fane was thinking hard. “Wouldn’t they try and lure their target back to Russia? Surely, he’d be easier to deal with there than here.”

“Of course. But then it would lose its symbolic power. If they’re hoping to show that no enemy of the state is safe, wherever they live, it will happen abroad.”

“God knows it’s happened often enough before,” said Fane grimly. The Kremlin’s assassination of opponents overseas had a pedigree dating back to Trotsky’s murder. In Mexico, of all places. But then, thought Fane, the story might be nothing more than a rumour, inflated into certainty by too much vodka, relayed to Sir Victor for some Byzantine Muscovite motive, as impenetrable to British observers as tarot cards. And what about Sir Victor himself? He was not exactly a spring chicken, thought Fane, taking the last sip of his whisky. Might he not be mistaking some tittle-tattle for a state secret, out of some inflated sense of self-importance perhaps, or even incipient dottiness?

“Did he have any more specific information about this plot?”

“He said he had told me all he knew,” said Adler, and his dark, sad eyes were unwavering.

“If Tarkov attended this wedding in the summer, then he’s waited long enough to tell anyone.”

“I know. But I think it was only this autumn that Tarkov’s hopes of a job in the private sector were extinguished. After that, he decided to approach me.” Adler reached down and scooped up another handful of nuts. But he paused before popping them into his mouth. “I think Tarkov is intent on an old-fashioned act of revenge. Not professional perhaps, but perfectly understandable in personal terms. That’s why I believe him.”

Fane nodded. It made sense. He looked around the room and realised that he and Sir Victor were alone. “So,” Adler said shortly, “I was asked to communicate this to the appropriate person—someone who would know who should be informed. You and I have seen each other over the years, and I knew I could trust both your discretion and your judgement.”

The flattery was wasted on Fane, for already he was thinking about what to do with this interesting piece of information. “But I mustn’t keep you from your dinner,” said Adler, now lighthearted. The implication was clear: he’d done his bit.