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‘Five minutes,’ agreed Sandro, with a tight smile. He was courteous for a Nergadze, but that didn’t mean he liked taking orders from the help. He rested his briefcase on the bedside table, then accompanied the nurse to the door, closing it emphatically behind him before returning to his father’s bed and standing across it from Boris, so that his father could follow their conversation with his eyes, even if he was too tired to take part in it himself.
‘Well?’ asked Boris. ‘What can I do for you?’
Sandro pursed his lips before replying. ‘You know as well as anyone, Boris, that our family has its fair share of enemies.’
Boris nodded. He’d been Sandro’s head of security until everything had gone to shit, after all. ‘Of course, sir.’
‘Things have grown even worse since our Greek … setback.’
Our Greek setback, thought Boris. Is that what they’re calling it these days? Some two years before, during Ilya Nergadze’s ill-fated run at the presidency of the Republic of Georgia, the campaign team had got a tip that their nation’s greatest lost treasure, the golden fleece, had been rediscovered in Greece. But their efforts to bring it back here and so boost Ilya’s flagging popularity had backfired spectacularly, culminating in the death of Ilya’s grandson Mikhail and the destruction of the family’s business empire and political aspirations. ‘I can imagine.’
‘It’s not merely that we have more enemies now,’ continued Sandro. ‘It’s also that they’ve grown bolder, less respectful. People no longer fear us as they did. We’ve introduced extra security, as you no doubt noticed. We’ve also been compelled to start a programme of active threat monitoring.’
‘Active threat monitoring, sir?’
Sandro gestured towards the French windows, the fine view over treetops down to the Black Sea. ‘It’s the damned Internet,’ he said. ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, these days, for our enemies to learn about us. They download satellite photographs of our estates. They check for our names at public events. They search the archives of local newspapers. They gossip about what cars we drive, what planes and yachts we own. All from the comfort and safety of their living rooms.’ He turned back to face Boris. ‘But it works both ways, particularly if you hire the right people.’
Boris nodded. The Nergadzes had never begrudged spending money on their own safety. ‘As you have, no doubt.’
‘We’ve set up various websites and chat rooms,’ said Sandro. ‘We’ve seeded them with the kind of confidential information that our enemies would dearly love to know. Some of it’s even true. We make these sites hard to find, so that only our more dedicated … followers can find them. Then we monitor them, particularly for return visitors. Mostly these prove to be journalists or business rivals. Nuisances, not menaces.’
‘But not always?’ suggested Boris.
Sandro opened his briefcase, drew out a single folded sheet of paper. ‘One of the most persistent comes from a British marine salvage company calledMGS,’ he said. ‘Quite small. Just fifteen full-time employees, though they add subcontractors for certain projects. They’re scheduled to run a month-long survey of the eastern Black Sea this autumn.’
‘Ah,’ said Boris, glancing towards the French windows.
‘This is a printout of their Who We Are page,’ said Sandro, passing Boris the sheet. ‘Recognise anyone?’
Boris unfolded the page, eight thumbnails of young and middle-aged men, presumably senior staff. But the portraits were too small for him to tell much about them; and the names and job titles meant nothing either. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Bottom row,’ prompted Sandro. ‘Second from right.’
Boris looked again. A man called Matthew Richardson. His photo wasn’t just small, it was blurred, too, as though taken on the move. And now that it had his attention,there was something faintly familiar about him, though he couldn’t at first work out what. But then he realised who Sandro and Ilya thought it was, if only because they’d never have summoned him here otherwise. He flinched from an unpleasant memory like flesh from a flame, shook his head. ‘Daniel Knox is dead,’ he said emphatically. ‘He had kidney failure from the burns he took when he and Mikhail …’ He trailed off, not wanting to finish the thought.
‘That’s what they told us,’ agreed Sandro.
‘Why would they have lied?’ asked Boris. But he realised the answer even as he spoke. They’d have lied to protect Knox from the five million euro bounty that Ilya Nergadze had put on his head in retribution for killing his grandson during the golden fleece fiasco. Boris breathed in deep before he looked again at the photo. There was a superficial resemblance; he couldn’t deny it. And the man in the photo had shaven his scalp and grown a thin beard, much as you’d expect from someone trying to change their look. But he also had higher cheekbones than he remembered Knox having, the bridge of his nose was broader, and he looked darker, older, angrier and altogether more formidable. He shook his head as he looked back up at Sandro. ‘It’s not him,’ he said.
‘Are you certain?’ asked Sandro. ‘Bear in mind you might not be the only one who’s had plastic surgery.’
‘Then how can you possibly expect me to identify him from this?’ protested Boris. ‘I’d need to be able to get up close to him, see how he walks, hear his voice and how …’ He broke off as he realised belatedly where this was going. ‘No way,’ he said flatly. ‘The Europeans have my biometrics. They have my DNA. They’d grab me the moment I landed. I’d never get out this time.’
‘Relax,’ said Sandro. ‘We’re not suggesting you go back to Europe. As you say, it was hard enough for us to get you out last time.’ He allowed a little time to pass, presumably to let Boris reflect on the fact that he’d still be in his Greek hellhole prison if the Nergadzes hadn’t had him sprung. ‘But this man isn’t in England at the moment. Or even in Europe. That’s why we brought you here so urgently. We only learned of it ourselves this morning.’
‘Where, then?’
‘On a salvage project,’ said Sandro, opening his briefcase again, taking out a bulky white envelope that he offered across. ‘Off the west coast of Madagascar.’
The envelope’s flap was tucked inside itself. The edge of the stiff paper cut Boris’s thumb as he released it, coaxing out a thin line of blood that left a series of smudged red partials on the contents as he spread them on the bedside table: ten thousand euros in several bundles of banknotes; a sheaf of press-cuttings about some Chinese shipwreck; a first-class ticket in his new name, flying via Istanbul and Johannesburg to the Madagascan capital Antananarivo; a separate ticket on to some provincial airport he’d never heard of called Morombe. ‘And what do you expect me to do when I get to this place?’
‘We want you to track down this man Richardson,’ replied Sandro. ‘We want you to determine whether or not he is really Daniel Knox.’
‘And if he is?’ asked Boris.
Sandro glanced down at the floor, his discomfort evident. But a noise to Boris’s left startled him. He’d almost forgotten that Ilya was there. The old man clawed his mask down once more so that he could speak; his mouth and eyes were cruel and fierce, though his voice was so weak that Boris had to lean in closer to him to make out the words.
‘I want you to kill him,’ he said.
TWO (#ulink_7bbf8d2d-237b-5f25-b213-165d44615b29)
I
The tiger shark reappeared while Knox and the rest of his dive-team were at three metres, finishing their decompression. It circled several times, looking unnervingly interested, but then the inflatable arrived to pick them up, and the noise and churn of its outboard seemed to deter it, for it turned and swam away.
The Maritsa was chugging slowly towards them as they surfaced. It usually stayed well clear of the wrecksite, partly from respect for the nearby reefs, made doubly dangerous by the freak waves that sometimes came out of nowhere along this coast, but mostly to make it hard for anyone watching to mark the site of the wreck with a notional X. But the stern crane was the easiest way to recover artefacts the size of the anchor, which meant positioning directly above it.
As an archaeologist, Knox was accustomed to taking plenty of time examining artefacts in their context before recovering them; but that wasn’t possible here. They only had the Maritsa for six weeks, and once they were done they couldn’t lock this site up as they could on land, put a fence around it and hire security guards until the following year. It would be open season for any unscrupulous treasure hunter with some scuba gear or even an industrial dredge, so they needed to recover what they could, while they could.
They climbed the starboard gangway, stripped off on the stern deck, hosed themselves down with fresh water. A door banged open on the strengthening wind, and Ricky Cheung emerged from the conference room, puffing at one of his evil roll-ups. Ricky was the head of this salvage operation, an overweight Chinese American in his mid-fifties with perpetually tired eyes, as though he’d just woken. He waited a moment for a fair-haired woman in outsized sunglasses and a baseball cap to follow him outside, with Maddow the Shadow, his personal cameraman, bringing up the rear. Ricky spotted Knox and waved cheerfully, then led his small party over. ‘The hero of the hour,’ he beamed. ‘Great job down there.’
‘Thanks,’ said Knox.
Ricky nodded, turned to the fair-haired woman. ‘This is the one I was telling you about, Lucia,’ he said. ‘Matthew Richardson. Though everyone calls him Danny for some reason.’ He turned to Knox with a frown. ‘Why is that, actually?’
‘My father was Matthew too,’ said Knox, with practised ease. ‘Calling me Daniel saved confusion.’ In truth, he’d been such a mess for the first few months after Athens, especially from Mikhail Nergadze’s brutal murder of his fiancée Gaille, that he’d often not responded when people called him by his new name. At work one time, Miles—one of the few people who knew the truth about his past—had grown so exasperated by this that he’d yelled out his real name instead, provoking the obvious questions from his new colleagues, forcing him to come up with an explanation on the hoof. His handlers at MI5 had been admirably understanding about it, retrospectively tweaking his new identity to make Daniel his middle name; and he’d been Daniel ever since, except in interviews and other formal contexts.
‘Must have been one hell of a thrill,’ said Ricky. ‘Finding that anchor, I mean.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Knox.
‘Most archaeologists go their whole career without ever making a find like that.’
‘Quite.’
Ricky’s expression clouded briefly, as though he suspected Knox was making fun of him; but he quickly brightened again. ‘Lucia is here to write an article about me,’ he said.
‘About the salvage, actually.’ She removed her sunglasses, showing off striking blue eyes. She was in her mid-forties, at a guess, with an attractive, open face and the kind of pale freckled skin that needed protection from the Madagascan sun.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Knox.
‘I’ll leave you two together, if I may,’ said Ricky. ‘All those questions you had about history and archaeology, Danny Boy’s your man.’ He nodded cordially to them both, then walked briskly over to the stern crane, where the hoisting of the anchor was just getting underway, and barked out redundant orders for Maddow the Shadow to capture for posterity.
‘What a wretch!’ scowled Lucia. ‘That’s your triumph he’s stealing.’
‘He’s been working towards this for thirty years,’ said Knox. ‘I’ve been here less than a week.’
‘I’ve never met a man who talked about himself so much,’ she said. ‘I thought he must be a flamenco singer. You know: aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.’
Knox smiled politely. He knew better than to give a journalist easy copy about dissension in the ranks. ‘You have some questions for me?’ he suggested.
‘Yes.’ She gave him a warm smile, calibrated to win his sympathy. ‘I’m a travel writer really, you see. It’s how I pay for my holidays. I come to a place like this for a month with lots of ideas for possible features, but I’m never quite sure which will pan out and which won’t.’
‘I understand.’
‘I was supposed to be heading down to the Eden Nature Reserve today.’
‘The Kirkpatricks’ place?’
‘You know them?’
Knox gave a noncommittal shrug. ‘They’re pretty wellknown along this coast.’
‘They were supposed to have left a message letting me know when would be a good time to visit. But there was nothing at my hotel, and so I wanted to bag another story, just in case. My concierge suggested I come out here, and even arranged it for me, which was terrific of him; but of course I never had the chance to do any background reading, and your boss is a hard man to interrupt once he gets going. All that stuff about China and the treasure fleets—honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about half the time.’
Knox nodded. Ricky was notorious for giving lectures rather than interviews. ‘So you’d like a little background?’
‘That would be wonderful. Yes.’
‘Okay,’ said Knox. ‘Then let’s head on back to thirteenth-century China.’
II
Sandro Nergadze was walking Boris out to the courtyard when he touched his elbow and drew him to one side, out of earshot of staff and bodyguards. ‘A question,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘How do you feel about Davit Kipshidze?’
Blood rushed to Boris’s cheeks; anger clenched his heart. Davit was a former rugby lock he’d used a few times for strong-arm work, because the man was a giant and just having him standing beside you prevented a whole heap of trouble. But the moment their Greek enterprise had turned to shit, he’d broken like a little girl and blabbed his mouth off. He said bitterly: ‘You should have left him in Athens to rot.’
‘And have him reveal our secrets in open court?’ asked Sandro rhetorically. ‘Besides, he’s one of us. His father did some excellent work for us; his sister is married to my cousin. And a lot of our people like him. They say what happened in Athens wasn’t his fault, that he should never have been on that kind of a job in the first place.’
Boris bridled. He’d picked Boris for that mission himself, as Sandro knew full well. ‘He’d always done okay before.’
‘Of course,’ said Sandro smoothly. ‘It’s just that I’m hearing more and more that we should give him another chance.’
For the second time that day, Boris realised he’d been slow to see where Sandro was steering the conversation. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not taking him with me. What if he gets spotted at the airport? He’ll take me down for sure.’
‘Relax. We’d send him on a later flight. You’d only meet up again in Madagascar.’
‘I don’t trust him. I won’t trust him. He wouldn’t do it anyway. He’s too much of a do-gooder.’
‘He might, if he didn’t know your real purpose.’ Sandro nodded through the front door to the courtyard, where a white van with tinted windows was parked on the cobblestones. ‘All he knows so far is that we’ve a possible job for him. What if we were to tell him only that Knox may still be alive, and that we want you both to go see if it really is him; and if so, to persuade him to a truce?’
‘He’s not that stupid.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Sandro. ‘Men like Davit always assume the best about their fellow men. That’s why people like him. Besides, he wants to believe it. This is his opportunity to redeem himself for Athens.’
‘It’ll take more than this,’ snorted Boris.
‘And he’ll be useful to you. He’s the only other person we have who knows what Knox looks like, after all. He’s strong as a bull and he’s good with equipment too. Remember that computer business he tried to start?’
‘So?’
‘My father is taking a personal interest in this matter, as you’ve seen. We’ll therefore be supplying you with a satellite videophone.’
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ scowled Boris. ‘You want me to top Knox live on TV? What if those bastards in Tbilisi are watching?
‘You think we’re idiots?’ asked Sandro. ‘All our equipment is fitted with our own encryption software. We use it all the time for our more … controversial businesses.’
Boris nodded. The Nergadzes had made their original fortune smuggling arms for heroin. If Sandro was confident that a communications link was secure, it was secure. ‘Okay,’ he said grudgingly.
‘Good. It’ll make it much easier for us to communicate and provide the necessary … logistical support.’
‘Logistical support,’ snorted Boris. Sandro did love his euphemisms. What he meant was that they’d have to get him a gun once he arrived in Madagascar, because there was no way to take one on board a plane, not these days. ‘And what will Davit think about that?’
‘I don’t imagine we’ll be having that conversation in his presence,’ said Sandro. ‘Do you?’
‘Okay,’ said Boris. ‘But I’m not doing this for free. Not on camera, for Christ’s sake. You offered five million euros for Knox’s head. I assume that’s still good.’
‘We retracted that offer once we learned Knox was dead.’
‘But he’s not dead.’
‘We’ll pay you one hundred thousand euros for the identification, whether it’s him or not,’ said Sandro. ‘If it is him, my father has authorised another four hundred thousand for … for carrying out his wishes.’
Boris nodded. Five hundred grand was proper money, and there’d surely be opportunities for more. The Nergadzes’ reputation and business empire had been badly hit by the fallout from the Greek debacle, but Ilya was still richer than God, and he clearly craved this revenge before he croaked. And revenge was like champagne: the more it cost, the better it tasted. ‘What about Davit?’ he asked. ‘You don’t expect me to split my money with him, do you?’
‘No,’ said Sandro. ‘I’ll make a separate agreement with Davit. Your money will be yours. His will be his. Agreed?’
‘Fine,’ said Boris. ‘Agreed.’
‘Good,’ said Sandro, nodding at the van. ‘Then let’s go talk to him.’
III
Lucia took a microcassette recorder from her bag. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked.
‘Of course not,’ said Knox.
She nodded at the crane, the metal beginning to groan and shriek a little as it took the weight of the anchor and began lifting it from the sea-bed. ‘And maybe we could go somewhere quieter?’
He led her up a gangway and past the ship’s decompression chamber, leaned against the starboard rail. The wind had picked up; the sea was getting frisky. The ship’s dynamic positioning system had been turned on, however, and its GPS sensors, gyroscopes and thrusters were keeping them impressively steady, a vital capability for using a crane on a sea-bed sixty metres deep. A large wave swept past them to break against the reef. On its far side, he could see the white cotton sails of several fishing pirogues in the lagoon, all of them heading for shore. ‘Better?’ he asked.
‘Perfect,’ said Lucia. ‘You were about to sweep me off to thirteenth-century China.’
‘The time of the Mongol Khans,’ said Knox. ‘Genghis was a conqueror. He rampaged through Russia and China and put the fear of God into Europeans.’ Literally, as it had happened: Christians had feared he and his armies were the end-times prophecy of Gog and Magog made flesh. ‘But his successors were different, particularly his grandson Kublai.’
