The First Billion

48

They took off into the storm, the last plane out before the clouds enveloped the airport, and Gavallan wondered if the pilot had disobeyed the control tower and said, “To hell with it, I’m taking off whether you like it or not.” The sky was black, absolutely black, the plane jolting up and down and every which way with sudden, violent tremors.

“I want to talk to Cate,” he said to Boris. “Excuse me, I mean Miss Kirov. Your boss’s daughter.”

The two men were seated facing each other at the rear of the roomy cabin. Cate was up front with the sofas and conference tables, Tatiana her assigned guardian.

“Sorry, Mr. Jett. You are not to talk to her.” Sweat coursed from his forehead and his complexion had gone sallow. “Right now, you stay in seat.”

“Just give me five minutes,” Gavallan persisted, undoing his safety belt, standing. “It’s important. I’ll be right back.”

Despite his sickly mien, Boris was up in a flash, thrusting an open palm against Gavallan’s chest. “You sit. Understand? You talk to Kirova when you get to Moscow. Okay?”

Gavallan knocked away the offending hand. “Yeah, I understand.”

Sitting down, he refastened his seat belt. Boris waited a moment, glowering above him. The plane hit an air pocket, fell for a second, then pancaked, shoving Boris into his seat. His hands scrambled for his seat belt. His mouth was open, breath coming fast and hard.

“You should be scared, buddy,” Gavallan whispered.

He knew he should be scared, too, but right now anger was kicking fear’s ass in the emotional war raging inside him. Leaning his head to the right, he caught sight of Cate, seated forward in a separate grouping of sofa and lounge chairs closer to the cockpit. Even now, she looked as if she had things under control. Eyes closed, hands laid calmly on the armrests, head back, she looked as though she was taking a nap. He knew she had to be frightened to death. Why didn’t she just show it like anybody else?

Suddenly, it was painful even to look at her.

He stared out the window. The wings were torquing something awful. The pilot had flown them directly into the maw of a thunderstorm. Either he was one crazy mother or he was under instructions to get his new passengers to Moscow as quickly as possible. Either way, he was reckless—the pilot’s cardinal sin—and Gavallan hated him for it.

A bolt of lightning struck the aircraft, a hellishly bright flashbulb that bathed the cabin in pure, electric luminescence. Then came the thunder, a rollicking, tumultuous clap that seemed to explode inside the cabin itself. The plane rolled into a thirty-degree bank, the nose going down, down, down. Skeins of Saint Elmo’s fire flitted around the bulkhead, a freakish blue and white light emanating from every piece of exposed metal. The port engine whined furiously, the turbine seeking purchase somewhere in the maelstrom of conflicting air currents. The fuselage shuddered as if God had taken the plane in his hand and was shaking it to within an inch of its life.

Gavallan looked around. Soldier Boris’s eyes were closed, his chest pumping up and down, hyperventilating. Fore, Tanya had gone whiter than the dead. Her diamond blue eyes were wider than they’d ever been, the cords of her neck stretched to breaking. Her mouth was parted, and over the rattle and hum he could hear her moaning. Anytime now, he figured, she’d either break out into hysterics or throw up all over herself.

He caught Cate’s eye. She was scared all right, and despite his distrust of her, his unremitting fury that she had deceived him not once but time and time again, he wanted to be next to her.

The shaking worsened. The starboard overhead luggage bin fell open. A handheld fire extinguisher tore loose from its clasps and crashed onto Boris’s head. Oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling. In the galley, plates tumbled from their shelves, shattering. A chaotic choreography danced to the nerve-jangling accompaniment of Tatiana’s grating scream.

Then, just as suddenly, there was calm. The plane righted itself. The nose came up and they resumed a steady climb. The engines purred. Sunlight flooded the cabin.

Unbuckling himself, Gavallan crossed to the Russian. Boris was shaken, and a gash on his forehead was seeping blood. Bastard, thought Gavallan, too bad it didn’t break your neck. Finding his handkerchief, he pressed it to the cut. “Keep pressure on it.”

“Spaseeba,” said the Russian, removing the compress, seeing the blood and swearing. “You want to talk, you go now,” he said, jutting a thumb over his shoulder toward Cate. “Maybe you don’t have so much chance later. I take Tatiana to the bathroom. Clean her up. Go. I owe you favor.”

Gavallan waited until Boris passed him, an arm around Tatiana’s shoulder en route to the lavatory, then walked fore and took a seat facing Cate. He wanted to make light of the bumpy ride, to offer her his pilot’s confident smile and say, “That was nothing,” but the words caught in his throat. He’d left his store of niceties back on the tarmac, along with his willful naÏveté. One question needed to be asked.

“Did he know about us?”

Cate looked at him for a moment, not saying anything, her flashing eyes boring into him with unsettling frankness. “Who? Father?” She gave a tired laugh. “Yes, Jett, he knew.”

Gavallan glanced out the window. They had climbed above the clouds and were soaring across an azure sea. Sporadic lightning flashed below in a downy gray quilt, smothered eruptions that reminded him of distant gunfire.

“Well, that explains a lot,” he said. “You both had me going, I’ll say that. Jett, the consummate dealmaker. Mr. Big Shot wangling Mercury away from Goldman and Merrill and every other big swinging dick on the street. Hell, those suckers didn’t have a chance. At least I know how Pillonel learned that Black Jet was getting the deal a month before I did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you hear him this morning? Your father recruited him in November to do his dirty work. You know, to fake the due diligence and say that Mercury was more than the sum of its parts. The funny thing is, Black Jet didn’t win the deal until January. Remember? You refused to toast the occasion. I drank the entire bottle of DP myself.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I paid your father fifty million dollars of my firm’s money to win a deal he had every intention of giving me anyway. This is enormous, Cate. I handed a man fifty million bucks to give me the royal screwing of the century. I sank my company for no reason whatsoever.”

“Jett, don’t do this to yourself.”

“And you knew the whole time that it was rotten. The story just gets better and better.”

“My father was involved. It couldn’t be legitimate. It’s that simple.” Her tone was apologetic, conciliatory. “I tried saying everything I could to put you off the deal: ‘Kirov’s a crook.’ ‘You can’t trust an oligarch.’ I reminded you he’d gone bankrupt twice before.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Gavallan. “We’ve already had this conversation.”

“What else did you want me to say?”

“How about the truth?”

“I already told you. If you’d done your job, you would never have touched the deal to begin with.”

“If you’d told me he was your father, if you’d told me about what happened to Alexei, I would have pulled the plug in a New York minute.” He looked at the floor for a moment, then back at Cate. “Why?” he asked again.

She hesitated, her emotions close to the surface. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

“Of course you could! Ten people, Cate. Ten people are dead. Graf… the company…” He shook his head, and then the anger, the frustration, the deception, grew too much for him to bear. Balling his hand into a fist, he pounded on the armrest once, twice, three times, with all his might. “He’s my friend. My best friend. He’s got kids. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“I didn’t know what would happen,” Cate shot back. “None of us did. You can’t blame me. You have no right, no right at all. You don’t know what I’ve been through, why I’m even here.”

“Then tell me. But this time, I’d appreciate the truth, Miss Kirov.”

Cate sat straighter, and when she spoke the apology that had cracked her voice had fled. Anger, disdain, conviction, seeped in, bonding the fissures. “Five years ago, I swore that Konstantin Kirov would never be a part of my life again. I vowed to myself that my father would never touch me again in any way. I moved back to the States. I changed my name. I found a job as a journalist. I built myself a new life from scratch. I became Cate Magnus and I stopped being Konstantin Kirov’s daughter. I tried to pretend my father no longer existed, but it was impossible. For me, he will always exist, his birthright like a disease.” She took a breath. “Did you know I skated, Jett? That I was an alternate to the Russian Olympic team in 1988 when I was only fifteen? The day I left Moscow, I quit. Did you know that my favorite writer is Chekhov? Or that I adore Tchaikovsky? That I cry every time I hear the Violin Concerto in D Minor? Since coming back to the States, I haven’t read a page of Chekhov or listened to a single piece of Tchaikovsky. I can’t, because he gave me those things. He gave me his love of literature, of art, of music, and I will have nothing to do with him. Nothing! It’s like having dirt all over your body that you can’t get off. No matter how much I wash, how hard I scrub, I can’t clean his blood out of my veins or his name from my soul. Inside, I will always be Katya Kirov. And I will always hate being her. At least on the outside I can be someone I like. Someone other people might like, too.”

“You could have told me. I would have understood.”

“I don’t want you to understand! That’s the whole point.” Cate squirmed in her seat, and he could sense the frustration that was consuming her. “For me, he does not exist. Or do you think I should have given up everything I’d built, all I had become, to help you avoid a bad business deal?” She stopped, staring hard into his eyes. “Besides, Jett, I did tell you. You just weren’t listening.”

“I didn’t listen? To what?” And then it hit him. He exhaled grimly, stunned. “You said no because he was your father.”

Cate nodded. “When I saw that no matter what I said you wouldn’t back away from the deal, I had no choice. If we stayed together, I knew it was inevitable you’d find out the truth, my secret history. I couldn’t allow that. No matter how happy we might have been together”—she grabbed Jett’s hands and squeezed them lovingly—“I would have been terrified of that day. I can see now that you would have understood… that it’s me who’s the problem… but I don’t care. Even now, I despise you seeing me as his daughter. I hate you knowing. I’m not like him, Jett. Not at all.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Gavallan after a moment.

But he was unable to bring himself to sit next to her.

So, is Cate your real name?” he asked. The door to the lavatory was open and he could see Boris wiping a washcloth across Tatiana’s face. “I mean, if your last name’s Kirov, maybe the rest is different, too.”

“Actually, it’s Ekaterina Konstantinovna Elisabeth. My mother was a quarter English. Her grandmother married an English soldier who’d come to fight alongside the Whites in 1920.”

“Where’d you come up with Magnus?” But even as he asked, the answer came to him. “Oh, I get it. ‘Magnus’ as in great… as in ‘Catherine the Great.’ Clever.”

A modest shrug. “I had to come up with something.”

All you had to do was look and you’d have known, Gavallan scolded himself. The high cheekbones, the Slavic eyes. It was all in front of you the whole time. He remembered how their conversations had always turned awkward when he’d made even the slightest mention of her father, the moderately successful international trader. Never a picture. Never a word.

“And what you said about Kirov—er… your father—it’s true?”

“You mean about killing Alexei? Yes. It’s true. Pretty awful, huh?”

“It’s beyond that.”

“All in a day’s work for Mr. Kirov,” she said, her jaw riding high, eyes to the fore, the soldier bearing up under her ungodly burden. He could tell she was fighting to keep it together, doing whatever jig or two-step she danced to prevent all those jagged edges rustling around inside her from ripping her to bits.

“What hurt most was the betrayal,” she went on, the hurt ripe in her voice eight years later. “Learning that your father wasn’t the man he’d built himself up to be. He meant everything to me. Mommy was dead. I had no brothers or sisters. He was the world.”

“I can imagine.”

“Did you know that originally he was a curator at the Hermitage? Icons were his specialty. He was one of the world’s leading authorities on religious subjects. When the winters grew cold and the heating in our apartment building gave out, we’d spend whole weekends inside the museum just to keep warm. He would take me through the workshops below the palace and show me how the paintings were renovated—so much paint, so much albumen, so much shellac. You should have heard him preach. ‘Art was honest. Art was untainted. Art was the truth. Everything we could be, if only we tried.’ This was in ’85 or ’86. ‘Perestroika’ was the word of the day. Glasnost was in full bloom. Suddenly, it was okay to admit how worm-eaten the regime was. Art was his way of proving that even in a lousy world, light still shines. Or at least that’s what he had me believe. All the while he was smuggling icons from the museum’s stock out of the country, building up a fortune on the side.”

“What about Choate? What about growing up in Connecticut?”

“Don’t worry, Jett, I’m not a total phony. I’m still a Choatie. My father had me thinking that one of his rich American friends was paying my tuition. When he was arrested and the checks suddenly stopped coming, I was able to convince the headmaster to let me finish up my classes and graduate. One semester without tuition, he could let slide. He couldn’t kick out the valedictorian, could he?”

“I guess not,” said Gavallan.

“Anyway, soon Kirov was back in business. No more skulking through dark alleys. Now he could conduct his affairs in the open. The K Bank, he called it. Finally, he was the businessman he’d always aspired to be. Everything aboveboard. On the straight and narrow. I forgave him. Worse, I believed in him again. ‘Katya, we are making Russia great again!’ he would say. ‘Come join me. Work at my side.’ You know how persuasive he can be.”

Gavallan nodded. Yes, he knew. He had believed Kirov too. Every word.

“I took a plane to Moscow the same day I finished my exams at Wharton,” she continued. “I couldn’t wait to get to work. To help make Russia great again. To rebuild my country. The Rodina, we call it. The motherland. And then…”

Behind them the lavatory opened, and Cate clipped her words. The sound of running water mixed with weary sobs drifted into the cabin. Checking over his shoulder, he saw Boris’s muscled shoulders easing into the gangway. Cate tapped his knee, and he said, “What?”

When he turned back, he saw that she’d opened her purse and was handing him her pink compact. “What should I do with these?” she asked, a thumb flicking her makeup kit open. Tucked inside were the minidiscs Pillonel had given them from Silber, Goldi, and Grimm.

“Jesus, you still have those?”

Cate nodded eagerly, her eyes darting over his shoulder. “Take them. Quickly.”

Gavallan recalled the painstakingly correct and intimate strip search to which he’d been subjected in Geneva. He’d assumed Cate, as a fellow prisoner, had suffered like treatment. “No. They’re better with you,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “If anything happens, get them to Dodson.”

“But—”

“Cate. Keep them. Use them if you get a chance.” He held her eyes, signaling he had no illusions about what awaited him when they landed.

Rising, he headed aft, loitering in the cramped gangway long enough to allow her to conceal the financial records that were their only proof against Konstantin Kirov and the key to the salvation of Black Jet Securities.