The First Billion

54

You want Kirov, I can help. Meet me at Pushkinskaya Metro, southwest exit, at seven o’clock. And make sure to bring a briefcase. You won’t believe the shit I have on him.”

A coarse laugh, and the call ended.

Yuri Baranov, prosecutor general of the Russian Republic, put down the phone. Eyes rimmed with sleep, he checked his watch. It was six o’clock. Through the curtains, a hazy sun filtered in. It took him a few moments to clear the cobwebs from his head and evaluate whether the call was legitimate or a crank. Since the investigation into Novastar had begun, his office had been inundated with complaints against Konstantin Kirov. Everything from an employee’s griping about her unfair dismissal to anonymous promises to obtain Novastar’s offshore banking records. Baranov thought the call a ten-to-one shot, but decided to go anyway.

Rising, he ducked beneath the clothesline that bisected his one-room apartment, picking off a shirt, some clean underwear, and a pair of socks, then shuffled to the window. There was a carton of milk on the sill, along with a jar of pickles, some plums, and a plate of smoked herring left over from last night’s dinner. He owned a refrigerator, but it was broken and he couldn’t afford to repair it, never mind the electricity to run it. Opening the window, he brought the food inside and performed a hurried ballet, dressing and eating at the same time. A strip of herring while he buttoned his shirt. A plum while he threaded his belt. A last sip of milk as he knotted his tie.

Four days after seizing some eight hundred fifty-three pages of documents from Kirov’s headquarters, his investigators had yet to find the evidence they needed to link Kirov to the millions of dollars stolen from Novastar Airlines. Oh, they’d dug up false receipts, double billings to clients, all manner of petty schemes to launder money and avoid paying income taxes. The practices were illegal. The state would file suit. But they’d come across no smoking gun that Baranov could set before a magistrate. The few documents he had found from the Banque Privé de Genève et Lausanne had led nowhere. The Swiss bank would not even confirm that Kirov was the holder of the numbered account.

Finished dressing, he considered taking some of the precautions that had become second nature to any government official working to put a crimp in an oligarch’s style. He thought about calling his deputy, Ivanov, and asking him to come along. No, he decided; Ivanov deserved to eat breakfast with his family. Better to request a police escort. Baranov dismissed that idea, too. The police would never show up on time, even if they had a car parked in Pushkin Square. Besides, he wasn’t so old that he couldn’t meet an informant on his own. He was hardly meeting a gang of thugs in a dark alley at midnight. This was Pushkin Square. Early on a Monday morning there would be throngs of passersby.

Dressed in yesterday’s trousers, his scuffed briefcase strangely light in his hand, he headed down the stairs and walked the fifty meters to the subway. The morning air was crisp and clean, not yet fouled by the legions of automobiles that had taken Moscow hostage these last years. Street signs advertised the latest American films. One showed four grotesquely obese Negroes seated on a couch, smiling like idiots. Baranov had no doubt but that the picture was an unquestionable masterwork, something Eisenstein himself might have directed. Giant billboards demanded he drink Coke and enjoy it. Part of him bristled at this relentless onslaught of Western imperialism, this secret invasion of the Rodina that was occurring can by can, frame by frame, ad by ad.

Relax, Yuri, he told himself in a voice that belonged to the new millennium. Let the people enjoy themselves. Life is hard enough as it is. Besides, Coke beats the hell out of Baikal any day.

He arrived at Mayakovskaya station at six forty-five. Descending the escalator to the Circle line, he ran his impromptu caller’s words over and over in his mind. You want Kirov, I can help, the man had said. Baranov tried to put a face to the voice. Was it an older man or a younger one? A Muscovite or someone from Petersburg? He decided the voice was familiar. Was it someone in his own office? Or someone they’d interrogated from Kirov’s? A Mercury insider, perhaps? Vexed at his inability to come up with an answer, he caught himself breathing harder and gnashing his teeth.

He had forgotten just how much he hated Konstantin Kirov.

Jean-Jacques Pillonel was having a terrible dream.

He saw himself from afar, a tired, bent man dressed in prisoner’s garb, gray dungarees, a matching work shirt, his feet carrying the heavy boots one saw on the rougher sort of motorcyclist. The man, who was at once him and not him, was marching in a circle around a dusty yard. There were no walls, but a voice told him he was in prison and that he was not free to go anywhere else. He continued his rounds, but with each circuit his steps grew heavier, his body denser, his mass harder to move. He began to sweat. He was not frightened by his plight as a prisoner so much as by the impending impossibility of mere locomotion. He realized that his burden was not one of extraneous weight but of conscience, and that he would never be rid of this load. A current of anxiety seized him, threatening to paralyze his every muscle.

The scene shifted and he was looking in the mirror at this man who was and was not himself. He was gaunt, poorly shaven. His eyes were lost, forlorn. This isn’t right, he was telling the familiar visage in the mirror. The reward for honesty must be greater, the relief more fulfilling, certainly longer lasting. The anxiety grew stronger, arcing up his spine, bowing his shoulders. Sensing he had no more time, he raised a fist and drove it into the mirror. The looking glass shattered. Everywhere shards of green and silver glass fell to the floor.

Struggling to the surface of consciousness, he felt a rustling in the bed next to him. A kick in the legs. He heard a shout, but it was muffled, distant.

“Claire?”

He opened his eyes.

His wife of thirty-two years stood across the room, held in the arms of a black-clad intruder. He had her by the neck, one hand over her mouth, the other pinning a knife to her throat.

“Claire!” he yelled, sitting up. A half second later a coarse, powerful hand cupped his mouth and forced him back down onto his bed.

“Silence!” The voice belonged to a stocky figure clad entirely in black. Black trousers. Black sweater. A black stocking snubbing the nose, rendering the lips flat, grotesque. The intruder wore plastic gloves and in one of his hands he held the knife. It was a monster, the blade twelve inches long, partly serrated, curling upward to a hungry tip.

“You’ve been a naughty boy,” he said in accented French. “You don’t know how to keep secrets.”

“Non,” Pillonel argued. “I can. I can.”

The flattened lips drew back into a smile. “We shall see, Monsieur Pillonel.”

The subway pulled into Pushkin Square at six fifty-seven. The timing was perfect, thought Yuri Baranov while riding the wooden escalators up to the mezzanine level. And as he entered the tunnel that passed beneath Tverskaya Ulitsa to the Metro’s southwest exit, his gait assumed a triumphant rhythm. Something told him this was the real thing. That Kirov’s goose was finally cooked. His step faltered only once, when he wondered whether the informant might wish some quid pro quo. Immunity for his own crimes, perhaps, which Baranov could grant. Or money, which he couldn’t. Marching past the babushkas hawking their flowers and the Chechens their pirated videos, he decided he wanted Kirov so badly he’d be tempted to dish out a little of his own savings if it might help secure the villain’s conviction.

A humble table stood at the end of the tunnel, covered with an embroidered muslin cloth and decorated with twenty or so candles of varying colors and heights, all burning. The candles served as a memorial to the innocent victims killed at the spot a few years back by a Chechen guerrilla’s bomb. Some had whispered it was a ploy by the president to drum up support for the never-ending war against the insurgent republic. Baranov didn’t believe a word of it. Volodya was an honorable man. Who else would give him free rein to pull in thieves like Kirov?

It was with a subdued smile that Yuri Baranov mounted the stairs to the southwest exit of the Pushkinskaya Metro station. He did not notice the phalanx of young, crew-cut males who quickly erected a chain of sawhorses to block the tunnel behind him. Nor did he pay attention to the scaffolding at the head of the stairs, or the seesaw pounding of a jackhammer nearby. Construction was an omnipresent hazard in modern Moscow and the century-old subway stations were in constant need of repair.

The first shot took him high in the leg. He hadn’t heard a thing and had it not been for the spout of blood that erupted from his pant leg, he would have thought it a bee sting at worst. One hand grasped the railing for support, while the other fell to his thigh. “This is absurd,” he heard himself saying, and then somewhat irrationally, “It’s Monday morning, for Christ’s sake,” as if murder were not a state-approved way to begin the workweek. His eyes darted around, but he saw nothing. A sense of desperation seized him. Frantically, he tried to continue up the stairs. He took one step and fell to the pavement, writhing in pain.

“Get up, Baranov. It’s unseemly for government officials to grovel. Especially honest ones.”

It was the voice from the telephone. The voice he couldn’t quite place. Only now, he knew exactly to whom it belonged. Grimacing, Baranov lifted his head and squinted to make out the figure at the top of the stairs. “You,” he said.

“Who else?”

Konstantin Kirov stood in a black suit with a black tie, hands on his hips, offering a gaze as morbid as his attire. “I have a message from the president. He asked me to deliver it personally.” Kirov snapped his fingers, and someone tossed him a large rifle. A Kalashnikov. With a halting, unsteady motion, Kirov cleared the chamber and brought the weapon to his shoulder. The gun looked ridiculously large in the small man’s hands.

“He said, ‘Be quiet,’” Kirov finished.

Baranov raised himself to his feet. He felt neither fear nor lament, but a pervasive contempt for this pitiable excuse for a human being.

“Liar!” he shouted.

A hail of bullets riddled his body in time to the jackhammer’s renewed assault.

Tell me the truth,” said Konstantin Kirov.

“Yes, I promise.”

“What did he want?”

Pillonel hesitated, and the knife dug in. “Mercury,” he said. “They knew I had faked the due diligence. They wanted proof.”

“And you gave it to them. Without so much as a call to a lawyer or the local police, you gave it to them.”

“They knew,” said Pillonel. “They already knew, goddamn it. Gavallan said he was going to the SEC with or without my help. He was going to report me to the Swiss authorities.” The intruder had tied his hands and feet to the bedposts with elastic cord and was kneeling beside the bed. In one hand, the man held the knife delicately, as if ready to fillet a fish, the point inserted meanly between Pillonel’s ribs. In the other, he had a cell phone, which he pressed to Pillonel’s ear. Pillonel had an urge to explain everything at once. “Gavallan had a gun. He put it to my head. I thought he would kill me. I had no choice. Of course I gave them the real books.”

“I can understand your anxiety at being confronted with your misdeeds. But why did you take them to your offices?”

“Gavallan demanded I show him Mercury’s exact financial condition—how much money the company had really been earning, its revenues, its expenses, its profits.”

“And you showed him. How kind of you to be so helpful.” The voice was more ominous because of its even tone, the complete absence of aggression, irony, or anger. “Did you ever once consider telling him he was mistaken, to leave you alone?”

“I couldn’t. I told you, he had a gun. He said you had killed the man on the Internet, that you would kill me next.”

“I never knew you for such a gullible sort.” Kirov laughed, then resumed his unhurried interrogation. “And after Mercury, what did you show them? Did Gavallan have any idea he was so close to the crown jewels?”

“Nothing. I gave them nothing.”

“Novastar?”

“It did not come up.”

“Not even a mention? What about Futura and Andara? Baranov knew well enough about them. Didn’t Miss Magnus have any questions about them? You didn’t show them the holding company’s banking records?”

Pillonel lay still, the lie poised above him like the blade of a guillotine. “I’m no fool. The records would take me down too.”

“If you gave them Mercury, you were already going down. If I were you, I might have taken the opportunity to win over the authorities, show them the error of my ways, maybe even try to offer up something to protect myself. I’m sorry I must be so thorough in this matter, but I’m sure you can understand that it is of the utmost importance I learn exactly what materials you gave Mr. Gavallan and Miss Magnus.”

Pillonel looked at his wife, his eyes begging her forgiveness. “I gave them nothing,” he whimpered. “Only Mercury. Novastar did not come up.”

“Ah, Jean-Jacques, you are a poor liar. Calm yourself now. You have nothing to worry about. I have them both with me—Cate and Mr. Gavallan. No more harm can be done. You don’t have to worry. I think you know what will happen if you decide to go to the authorities.”

“Yes, absolutely. Not a word.”

“Now tell me the truth and you’ll be on your way to Mahé before you know it. What evidence did you give Gavallan?”

Mahé. Sanctuary. A new life.

Pillonel grasped at the words, seeking solace and safety. His hands came away scratched and empty. Kirov was also a poor liar. “Nothing.”

“Good. I’m happy for it. As for the confession, you know that they don’t hold up in court when made under duress. Don’t be too hard on yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gavallan’s lawyer throws the thing away.”

“What confession is that?” he blurted.

Pillonel heard Kirov murmur something like “I knew it” under his breath. Then he heard a harsher “Damn him,” and he realized he’d said something wrong. Something very, very wrong.

“Well,” scoffed Kirov, “at least this conversation wasn’t a total waste of time. Give the phone to Sergei.”

Sergei took back the phone and after a moment hung up.

“Well?” said Pillonel, eyes paralyzed with hope.

“Good news and bad news. The bad news is you’re both to die. The good news is you go first.” And even as the words left his mouth, he slid the razor-sharp blade between Pillonel’s ribs, puncturing his heart and killing him instantly.