The Isis Covenant

XI

Paul Dornberger straightened his blue silk tie and walked up to the unassuming wooden door set into a ten-foot-high stone wall topped with electrified razor wire. As he reached it, he pressed the bell and looked upwards with a smile into the unblinking eye of the security camera. Inside the house, he knew Gerard, the monosyllabic Brummie, would be studying his face with those cold eyes of his and using the facial identification software to ensure he hadn’t been substituted by someone who’d had plastic surgery. With a soft click the door opened to reveal the tanned features of Vince, the former Delta Force sergeant. There was that moment — no day was complete without it — when Vince looked disappointed he couldn’t shoot him, but it quickly passed and the Californian lowered his Heckler & Koch MP5 and ushered him inside. It was unusual to see anyone other than an armed policeman carrying weapons in London, but this house had been designated an outstation of the embassy of the former Russian republic of, and now independent, Moldova and was diplomatic ground. What went in and out in the diplomatic bag was of no interest to anyone but Oleg Samsonov. The neighbours might have been alarmed at the amount of weaponry often on show in the gardens, but there were no neighbours, because the owner had bought both adjoining properties. Up the gravel path, accompanied by Vince all the way, past the cameras and between the sensors to the house, a huge modernistic cube of a place, all brushed steel and blast-proof mirrored glass. The main accommodation lay on the upper floors, with the ground and basement devoted to the kitchens, servants quarters and garaging for the owner’s ten-strong fleet of identical limousines and his sports cars, none of which, to Dornberger’s certain knowledge, he had ever driven. They approached a glass door set in the corner of the ground floor and Dornberger punched in today’s code. Again there was the click as it opened onto an enclosed stairway. Up the stairs, all twenty-four of them, safe in the knowledge that Gerard was watching his every move and at the first sign of suspicion he could isolate the stairway and fill it with incapacitating gas. Finally, he reached the top and another keypad, before the door opened onto the security area.

Gerard looked up from his monitors. ‘You’re three minutes late.’

‘And a good morning to you, Gerard. I was visiting the old man in hospital.’

Gerard nodded and typed the information into his computer, where every deviation in routine had to be recorded.

‘Mornin’, Paul.’ Kenny, the former Australian SAS man, gave him a grin that disguised the fact that he was the deadliest killer in a house full of deadly killers. ‘Any improvement in the old fella?’

Dornberger shrugged. ‘They’re doing their best.’

Kenny nodded sympathetically and opened the steel door to the main apartments.

His glass-fronted office was along a corridor lined with thirteenth-century Russian icons and just off an enormous lounge area. In the centre of the lounge stood a large cube of what looked like stainless steel, which Paul Dornberger knew rose to form the core of the top three floors of the building; a multi-storey panic room whose lock combination was known only to the owner and his wife and which was designed to survive the collapse of the building and anything but a nuclear explosion.

On his desk a secretary had placed a list of the owner’s particular interests for the day and he spent an hour on the computer and the phone gathering the information he would need for his briefing to the world’s forty-first richest man.

At precisely 10 a.m., he stood up and knocked on the door of Oleg Samsonov’s office overlooking the park.

‘Come.’

‘Good morning, sir.’

They spoke English at the billionaire’s insistence, but Paul Dornberger would have been perfectly at home in Russian or any one of several other European languages. Linguistic ability was only one of the reasons he had been considered for the job as Samsonov’s personal assistant.

‘What’s first for today, Paul?’

‘The usual overview of the world economy, sir. There’s a situation developing in Greece that might interest you.’

He saw the predator’s eyes brighten. Oleg Samsonov could smell weakness the way a big cat scented blood and his reaction would be just as deadly. The son of a high-ranking KGB official, before perestroika Samsonov had been in charge of importing computers for the Young Communist League. Where others saw the end of the system that had nurtured them for a lifetime, Oleg saw opportunity. He had foreign suppliers, a network of outlets, all he needed was import licences and the money to make it work. Using a combination of hard work, utter ruthlessness and his father’s contacts, he created a business empire within two years and had his own bank by the end of the third. But banking in post-Soviet Russia could be a dangerous business. Oleg’s rivals and business partners turned out to be remarkably accident prone and he could see it was only a matter of time before he joined them. His big chance came in 1995, when he used the bank as collateral to diversify into oil, gas and steel in the great auction of Russia’s state industries. By the time of the economic collapse that inevitably followed, the bank, now forced to default on its loans, was a millstone around someone else’s neck. Success didn’t make a man popular, especially success bought at the price of so many livelihoods. As the new millennium dawned he moved, with the blessing of his friend Vladimir Putin, to the heart of the world’s financial capital, where, for a member of the planet’s most exclusive economic club, he kept a relatively low profile. Others could have their football clubs and their super-yachts. Oleg Samsonov was just a man looking for his next billion and his next step up the ladder of the world’s rich list. In law-abiding London he could feel safe from disgruntled Kazakhs who resented the profits of their mines and their oilfields ending up in offshore banks, rather than being reinvested in their impoverished cities, and from his former friends in the bratva, who still didn’t understand that dumping them with a worthless bank was just a good piece of business. Naturally, he knew that the greatest danger came from those closest to him. Other Russian oligarchs valued the loyalty of their countrymen, but Oleg knew people who had been killed by friends they had known from childhood. The only loyalty Oleg Samsonov valued was the kind that could be bought at a price no other man could afford. That was why his safety was in the hands of a former SAS captain turned security adviser who chose his operators mainly from amongst the veterans of his old regiment, apart from a trusted few outsiders, like Vince, who he’d worked with in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were twenty of them and they worked round the clock in shifts of six.

The two men continued working until Samsonov called a halt and left to have lunch with his family in their private quarters on the floor above. Dornberger would return to his desk for coffee and a pastry. That was another of the things that endeared him to his employer. Like the security guards, he was unmarried and lived a monk-like existence that allowed him to devote all his energies to the man who paid his wages.

The billionaire turned in the doorway. ‘Oh, Paul, I almost forgot. How is your father?’

‘Still fighting on, sir.’

‘The hospital people are doing their jobs?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Samsonov wasn’t interested in the health of an old man, only that he was getting value for money. After all, he was paying for the treatment. ‘And thank you, sir.’

The Russian nodded.

A few minutes later a young boy darted into the office a few paces ahead of his harassed English nanny. The child launched himself into Dornberger’s lap and Paul smiled and ruffled the dark hair. He was a good boy, with his father’s quick intelligence and his mother’s fine-boned good looks, but like all boys of his age he had too much energy packed into that slight body.

‘Hey, Dmitri, can’t you see I’m busy? They’ll be waiting for you at lunch.’

He handed the child back to the nanny, who led him away protesting in a high voice.

As they disappeared up the spiral staircase, the smile faded and for a moment the carefully tended mask slipped to reveal another man. The phone rang.

‘Dornberger.’

He listened for a few moments before replacing the receiver.

Another step forward.