“Not graves, grave, singular.”
“Whose?”
“It’s in Germany, an hour’s ride outside of Frankfurt, a small village.”
“That’s where, but whose grave do you look at there?”
“A woman’s.” The strain on Shaw’s face was perceptible.
“I take it you two were close?”
“Close enough.”
“Can you tell me her name?”
“Anna. And now I think the pretending to be normal period is over.”
CHAPTER
71
FEDIR KUCHIN was impatient, which meant he was irritable, which meant he was once more pacing in his precise ninety-degree grids. A leased jet had just touched down forty kilometers from here. He envisioned Alan Rice climbing in an SUV and setting off to come and meet with him. In his possession was information that Kuchin now craved more than he had anything in his life.
But he had to wait. Forty kilometers over mediocre roads. An hour, perhaps more if the weather continued to deteriorate as it had threatened to do all day.
“Everything okay, Mr. Waller?”
He stopped pacing and looked up to find Pascal standing in the doorway. He wore jeans, boots, flannel shirt, and a leather jacket. Always a jacket and always a gun underneath the jacket, Kuchin knew. His mother had been small, spare, and Pascal had taken after her instead of his tall father. The facial features too were hers. Greek had trumped Ukrainian in this genetic instance. Those features were now marred by yellow and purplish bruises, thanks to the tall man who’d beaten them both in the catacombs of Gordes.
“Just thinking, Pascal. The others will be here in about an hour.”
“Yes sir.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Not bad.”
The little man was tough, Kuchin could not deny that. His arm could be dangling by a sliver of skin and he would probably only ask for aspirin or more likely nothing at all.
He is tough, like his father.
The affair had been brief but memorable. Kuchin had taken a holiday in Greece as reward for his good work in Ukraine. Under brilliant sunlight that did not seem to exist in the Soviet Union, at least that he’d experienced, Fedir Kuchin had bedded a woman and together they’d made a baby. Kuchin had not been there for the birth but he had named his son. Pascal was a Francophone given name for a male. In Latin it meant relating to Easter and in Hebrew to be born or associated with Passover. Kuchin had named the boy in honor of his French mother, who was also a Jew, though she’d converted to Catholicism when still a young girl. He’d never told anyone about her ethnicity, nor of her and his religious beliefs. In the power circles of the Soviet Union, that would not have been looked on in a positive way.
“You do good work, Pascal,” said Kuchin. Searching the other man’s features, as he sometimes did, Kuchin would imagine he saw a glimmer of himself there. He had sent his son off to various skirmishes across the world as a mercenary. Pascal had been trained by some of the best military minds around. He’d fought in places like Kosovo and Slovakia, Bosnia and Honduras, Colombia and Somalia. He’d always returned to his father with a smile on his face and more experience grafted into his DNA. Kuchin had taught him some old tricks of the trade as well, taking some fatherly pride in doing so, but not too much. He was a bastard child after all. But he was also all Kuchin had in the way of descendants. Not smart enough to run the business, but smart enough to protect those who did.
“Thank you, sir, you need anything, you just let me know.”
Pascal moved off and Kuchin rubbed the scars on his wrist. They’d been caused by ten-pound fishing line that had cut into his skin so deeply as a child that the marks had become permanent. This was his father’s way of teaching his son to obey. These lessons were usually accompanied by drunken screams and thundering fists. He would be strung up like one of his father’s catches, his toes barely touching the icy floor. This would go on for hours until Kuchin thought his hamstrings would collapse, his Achilles tendons dissolve.
His back too held the marks of violent intrusion. A belt, a strap, a fishing reel whose metal guides had bitten into his prepubescent skin and stung like the blitzkrieg of a thousand-wasp army. These were his father’s choices, his father’s life lessons to his only child.
His good mother would always fight for him and even attack her far larger husband, whose height and girth eventually had been passed on to his son. And for her loyalty to her child the woman had been dealt with more cruelly. For hours afterwards they would lie on the floor and cradle each other, nursing wounds, sharing tears, speaking in French in low voices so the father and husband could not hear, for it would undoubtedly drive him into another rage.
Kuchin had lied to Alan Rice and later to Janie Collins or whatever her real name was. His father had not died from a fall at the cottage in Roussillon. Kuchin’s father had never been to Roussillon or even France at all. A poor family from rural Ukraine during that time would never have had the money nor the permission to travel abroad. They would never even have made it to the border. No proper papers, no reason to be leaving the Soviet empire. They would have been executed on the spot, their bodies left where they fell like trash flung from a truck as a message to others contemplating disobedience. And Kuchin had to admit, that message could be very effective. He’d later conveyed such messages himself.
It was only after he’d risen to his post in the KGB that out-of-country travel was possible for the most loyal, which included him of course. He had gotten special permission to take his mother to the town of her birth. By now she was clearly old before her time, and the years left to her were few. The cottage had been empty, and Kuchin, though he did not have much money back then, had found a way to purchase it for her. She lived there for five happy years until her death. Kuchin visited her when he could. She would call him by a French name that in her diminished mental state she believed to be his real one. A Soviet to the core, Kuchin would have killed any man who called him that, but when his old, failing mother did so he would merely nod and shed a tear or two and hold her withered hand, answering her queries like a nice little Frenchman looking to appease his beloved mama.
Kuchin stared out the window of his cabin, toward the not too distant coast. Yet his hearing was attuned to the swirl of rubber over crushed gravel that lay on the opposite side of the house. He checked his watch. Alan Rice should be here in no more than twenty minutes. His gaze returned to the nearby waters and another memory entered his thoughts. This time it was a happy one.
The Sea of Azov was far too shallow for his plan, of course. That was why one moonless night in October several decades ago, a grown-up and very strong Kuchin, now a valued member of the deeply feared Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or KGB, had dragged his father from his shack, loaded him on a boat, and set off to deep water. Through the Strait of Kerch they had entered the Black Sea, which had an area over ten times the size of the adjacent Azov. More importantly, the deepest point there was over two thousand meters.
Kuchin had anchored down and he and three of his comrades who had come to help him had used the strongest fishing line they could find to tie up the old man. The senior Kuchin’s eyes bulged with the terror of what was happening to him. Attached to the line and the heavy metal cables that they’d draped over his head and shoulders were two fifty-gallon metal drums filled with sand. It was a favored disposal technique for the Soviet security forces. Indeed, some of the KGB officers had started terming this pairing the “golden slippers.”
Kuchin had looked into his father’s eyes one last time. The roles were reversed now. The large was now small and the young child was now a strong man more than capable of defeating the monster that had punished him relentlessly for so long. He spoke to him in two languages. First he said the words in French, which he knew the old man could understand, however grudgingly. And then in Ukrainian, which he knew would be crystal clear to the bastard.
Then over the gunwale the drums went and
seconds later the cables drew taut and the old man sailed overboard too, screaming in terror. In a few seconds it was finished. Kuchin took the helm and steered them back to where they had come. He looked back only once at the spot where the man who had plagued him would carry out the last few seconds of his life. And then he turned back and thought no more of him.
The SUV came into view. Alan Rice was here with the promised intelligence.
For Fedir Kuchin it was time to track down and catch another adversary who would dare seek to harm him.
CHAPTER
72
YOU DID NOT use the company jet, correct?” asked Kuchin.
“No. Like you said to, I rented a private plane under one of the corporate shells we have. Untraceable to you or me.”
“And you have stayed outside of the city in the safe house?”
“Yes. Just as you instructed. I’ve conducted business through secure phone and computer lines.” He paused. “You think people are after me?”
“No, they’re after me, but they can use you to help in that search. I could have killed you or kept you under wraps. I chose the latter.”
Rice looked like he might be sick.
Kuchin gripped his arm. “Now your report.”
“It was quite fascinating how we were able to crack this. The technology is really remarkable. We started with using—”
Kuchin raised a cautioning hand. “Alan, get to the point.”
“We found nothing on the data banks we could get into. No doubt if we had access to some of the Americans’ files or even Interpol’s it would have been a different story. But we don’t and thus we had to turn to other things. Now, in these alternative venues the data streams were immense and the server access protocols were complex, but—”
“The point,” snapped Kuchin.
Rice hurried on. “The thing we turned to was aftermarket surveillance feeds.”
“Aftermarket surveillance feeds? Explain this.”
“These days there are observational cameras everywhere. I’m not talking about people running around with their cell phones snapping away when a celebrity does something stupid and it gets posted online. I mean cameras at ATM sites, along streets, office buildings, courthouses, airports, train stations, and millions of other places. Hell, London is one big camera, particularly with the congestion charge enforcement requirements. The result is there are literally trillions of bytes of images out there and it ends up on enormous servers. It’s made the cops’ job easier. With just about any crime, at least in a public area, there’s a decent chance it was captured on film somewhere.”
“But how does that help us? Were there such cameras in the ancient town of Gordes?” Kuchin said skeptically.
Rice opened up his laptop and set it on a wooden coffee table. “No, we went at it from a different angle. You have to understand that a lot of this data is not locally stored. The capacity just isn’t there, particularly for smaller firms and average-size municipalities, and it’s hugely expensive to store and maintain even for megafirms and large cities. So what do folks do when confronted with a need that they are not equipped to handle or is too capital-intensive to take on alone?”
“They outsource it to firms who specialize in that area.”
“Exactly. So much of this data is stored centrally at gigantic server complexes around the world. Think of it as massive file cabinets organized by countries, states, cities, towns, suburbs, or divided tactically into government buildings, banks, commercial office properties, even military facilities, and dozens of other subcategories. The images are typically saved for years, or even in perpetuity. It’s not like you’ve got billions of photos stacked somewhere. It’s all digital. The storage footprint is relatively small.”
“And you never know when some of this data might have value?”
“Exactly. Let’s say there’s an image of an employee meeting outside a building with the same person for weeks. It might not mean anything then, but two years from now when business secrets are stolen it might very well aid in building a corporate espionage case against that employee.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Years ago entrepreneurs saw opportunities in this fledgling field and took advantage to build substantial global businesses from the fact that we really have become a Big Brother society. Now, here is the key for our purposes. Certain people within some of these companies quickly realized that the stored images had value to many others besides the original client. This is so because a camera captures many things outside of the original intent of why it was placed in a certain location. For example, aside from anything to do with the client who put the camera there, if you know someone was at a certain place at a certain time and you want a compromising picture of that person, chances are very good there was an electronic eye there and that the feed exists on some server.”
“So in effect employees of these companies are selling the images to people who want them for reasons unrelated to why the surveillance was conducted in the first place?”
“Exactly. They let it be known discreetly that they can run checks for the right price and the picture is delivered for a fee. Some have gone a step further and the actual companies that collect this data and store it are also selling images to third parties. Apparently the law is vague in some countries, or at least inconsistent enough about the uses that can be made of the stored information to allow sufficient wiggle room for the companies to do this. And the original clients either don’t care or more likely are unaware of these additional uses of the data.
“And that’s where we came in. We sent one well-known server platform covering a number of countries in Europe the digitized images taken from your drawings and the photo of the woman. They ran it through every file they had. We didn’t get a hit the first go-round, but we did the second.”
“And the hit?”
Rice keyed in some commands on his computer and turned the screen around for Kuchin to see. “It was only one hit, but it was better than nothing. Zurich. Outside a hotel, seven months ago,” Rice explained.
Kuchin sat forward and studied the picture. That was the tall man all right.
“But who is he?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Kuchin slapped the table with his palm. “Then this is useless to me.”
“Wait, Evan, please, there’s more. Look at the woman beside him.”
Kuchin did. She was tall, slender, and blonde. Then he noted that the woman’s arm was touching Shaw’s hand. He shot a glance at Rice. “They are together?”
“Apparently so, yes. We checked with the hotel. They would give out no information on either of them, so we next ran her photo through the image data banks.”
“And you got a hit?”
“More than that.” Rice handed him a file. “I know you prefer paper to digital.”
Kuchin took the file, but did not open it. “Her name?”
“Katie James.”
CHAPTER
73
CAN’T WE at least eat our meal before the pretend time is over?” said Reggie earnestly.
“Does it mean that much to you?”
“Actually it does.”
Shaw rifled a glance at the waiter hovering nearby. “Okay, this is probably not the best place to do it anyway.”
Their food came and they talked about things other people would normally talk about over a meal out. Another bottle of wine, this one a red, was ordered and fully drunk. Coffees followed and they shared a dessert that had coconut and ribbons of white icing on top. Shaw paid the bill with a credit card.
“A. Shaw?” said Reggie as she spied the name on the plastic. “What’s the A stand for?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
He signed on the dotted line and they rose and left. The evening was still warm, at least by London standards, though now Reggie wished she had brought the sweater. Noticing her chill bumps, Shaw took off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders. It hung down like a dress.
>
“Forty-six extra long?” she said, gripping the material.
“Something like that. How’re the feet?”
“Depends on where we’re headed.”
“My hotel’s in that direction. Ten-minute cab ride.”
She looked startled. “Your hotel?”
“Or we can go to your place.”
“Why does it have to be either one?”
“Or we can just go to another public place and talk about it and hope nobody overhears us.”
Reggie thought of the sex-crazed couple in the rooms above her. “My place is not that quiet,” she said.
“Mine is.”
“Where exactly is it?”
“The Savoy. It recently reopened. Excellent river views. Very nice.”