Page 122 of The Collector
He had been putting his affairs in order for some time now—God, how he hated the phrase—so there was very little left to do. A few final papers to sign, a couple of letters to post, a half dozen telephone calls he had been meaning to make. He was careful about whom he rang and what he said; he didn’t want anyone else to contract his illness. He even misled Raisa, promising to join her in exile in time for the winter holidays. How was his health? Never better.
He took a final walk around the perimeter of his circular office,with its panoramic views of Moscow below, and from his preposterous desk removed a single item, which he wedged into the pocket of his overcoat. His bodyguards were in the anteroom outside his office, flirting with the youngest of his three personal secretaries. She thrust a stack of telephone messages into his hand and reminded him about his 3:00 p.m. conference call with several of TverBank’s biggest investors. He instructed her to cancel the call but didn’t explain why. The messages he stuffed in a rubbish bin on his way to the lift. Dead men, he thought, didn’t return phone calls.
The last ride in his Mercedes saloon car was pleasant enough, but the wrinkled woman at the ticket window of Novodevichy accepted his rubles with Soviet indifference. Behind the cemetery’s redbrick walls, the incessant din of Moscow receded. The snow covering the footpaths was untrampled. As Gennady walked among the dead, he thought about his favorite line fromZhivago—the line that had inspired him to embark on his treacherous path.
To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune...
He arrived at the grave of Gorbachev, destroyer of the Soviet Union, and at the stroke of three o’clock heard a commotion, something that sounded vaguely like the beating of wings. Turning slowly, he saw Nikolai Petrov and his security detail coming toward him through the evergreens. Behind them was a contingent of black-clad FSB thugs, the sort who dealt with traitors like Gennady.
Petrov slowed to a stop about ten meters from where he stood. His security detail hovered, overcoats open. The FSB thugs were content to remain in the background for now—like jackals, thought Gennady. His hands were now in the pockets of his overcoat. It was bitterly cold, after all, and he was unwell. His right hand was wrapped around the item he had removed from his desk.
To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune...
Petrov, mastermind of the Ukraine invasion, enabler of the Russian president’s worst instincts, was staring at his wristwatch. “Let’s get on with it, shall we, Gennady? I’ve got to get back to the Kremlin.”
“Still looking for that document you misplaced, Secretary Petrov?” Gennady managed to smile. “Security Council of Russia directive 37-23\VZ.”
Petrov lowered his arm. “Why did you do it? Why did you throw away your life?”
“Because it was madness. And I was the only person in Russia who could stop you.”
“You haven’t stopped anything, you fool. I will do whatever it takes to win this war.”
“And so must I, Nikolai.”
It was Volodya whom Gennady wanted to kill, but Volodya was now unreachable, so Petrov would have to do. It would have been quite easy to shoot him through his overcoat—like some movie gangster, he thought—but he drew the weapon instead and eyed his quarry properly down the barrel. He never knew whether he managed to hit him or even if he was able to pull the trigger. It was no matter; for one magnificent moment he was a Russian hero rather than a Russian villain.
He had no idea how many times they shot him—it must have been a hundred, at least—but he felt nothing. He toppled to the flagstones before Gorbachev’s grave, his cheek against the snow, and for an instant he thought he saw Petrov lying next to him. Then it grew dark, and some part of him rose and went for a stroll among the graves. He was a citizen of Novodevichy now; he had earned his place here. He had chosen to hope and to act. His misfortune required nothing less.
Part Four
The Conclusion
60
Moscow–Venice
It began, like most matters of significance in Russia, with a rumor. Eventually, it reached the ears of two reporters from the independentMoskovskayaGazetawho found sanctuary in Latvia after the Kremlin made journalism a crime punishable by death. Their story, four paragraphs of carefully worded speculation, resulted in an immediate denial-of-service attack that rendered theGazeta’s website inoperable. The reporters had no doubt who was behind the attack—or that they were onto something.
But nothing could have prepared them for the news that Nikolai Petrov, the powerful secretary of Russia’s Security Council, had been assassinated during a visit to Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery. Also killed was Gennady Luzhkov, the chairman of Russia’s fourth-largest bank. The two men, both members of the Russian president’s inner circle, had been shot to death. The gunmen, according to the Kremlin, were operatives of the Ukrainian intelligence service.
Because the statement had been issued by Yevgeny Nazarov, one of the world’s great liars, independent Russian journalists and their Western colleagues automatically assumed it was a fabrication. Thestate-run Russian media, however, reported it verbatim and with an outrage appropriate to the moment. The NTV propagandist Dmitry Budanov wept as he read the news to his millions of viewers, then demanded immediate retaliation. Within minutes, missiles were raining down on civilian targets in Kyiv. The barrage was short-lived. Russia, it seemed, was running low on munitions.
By morning, even the docile state-run Russian media were beginning to ask questions. Why had the two men gone to the cemetery in the first place? And how had the Ukrainian assassins known that they would be there? Dmitry Budanov, for his part, was most troubled by the fact that they had been killed near the grave of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose funeral the current Russian president had not seen fit to attend. Also suspicious was the timing of the incident, coming as it did on the same day that several missiles had fallen—inexplicably, it seemed—on the tiny border hamlet of Maksimov.
Adding yet another layer of intrigue to the unfolding situation was a report in the authoritativeHelsingin Sanomatregarding an exchange of gunfire between Russian and Finnish border guards at the Vaalimaa-Torfyanovka crossing point. The Finnish president quickly denied the report, going so far as to call it dangerous and irresponsible. In the next breath, however, he announced that he was moving several hundred additional Finnish troops to the border, lest the Russians get any foolish ideas about widening their already disastrous war.
But the Finnish president soon found himself on the defensive when it emerged that Magnus Larsen, the CEO of the Danish energy company DanskOil, was fighting for his life in a Helsinki hospital after being shot once in the back. This was the same Magnus Larsen, the press pointed out, who had gone to Russia several days earlier to extract his company from its controversial joint venture with the Kremlin-owned oil company RuzNeft. The whereabouts of Larsen’spersonal assistant, thirty-six-year-old Astrid Sørensen, were not known. Her colleagues at DanskOil headquarters in Copenhagen, who knew little if anything about her, feared the worst.
Finnish authorities refused to disclose the circumstances by which the prominent Danish energy executive had arrived in Helsinki, leaving reporters no recourse but to fill in the blanks with speculation. The logical conclusion was that Larsen had been shot in Russia, perhaps as a result of his determination to sever DanskOil’s ties with RuzNeft. DanskOil’s spokesman was able to offer the press no guidance, for the spokesman knew far less than the Finns. RuzNeft issued a terse statement wishing the CEO a speedy recovery. Kremlin spokesman Yevgeny Nazarov, for once, had nothing at all to say. Russia experts described his silence as tantamount to an admission of Kremlin complicity in the attempt on Larsen’s life.
Much of the subsequent coverage focused on the CEO’s long and unseemly relationship with Russia’s president. Such talk was put to rest, however, by a lengthy exposé inPolitikenthat revealed Larsen’s long-standing ties to Danish intelligence and, by extension, the CIA. For two decades, said the newspaper, the Danish energy executive had been a clandestine asset operating at the upper reaches of the Russian political and business worlds. He had preserved the RuzNeft joint venture at the request of his handlers and had returned to Russia on a dangerous mission to gather intelligence regarding the Kremlin’s intentions in Ukraine. The woman who had accompanied him was not his personal assistant but an undercover PET operative. She was alive and well, according toPolitiken, and back in Denmark.
Neither the Danish intelligence service nor the CIA chose to comment on the story, which most observers regarded as ironclad confirmation that every word of the article was true. A week after its publication, Larsen was back on Danish soil as well. Owing to concerns over his security, there was no one on hand for his arrival atCopenhagen Airport other than his wife, Karoline. Thirty minutes later they were safely behind the walls of their home in Hellerup, surrounded by officers of the PET’s protective service. Larsen referred all press inquiries to DanskOil’s spokesman, who declined all comment. The matter, he said, was now closed.
The press, as usual, had other ideas. They wanted to know the precise nature of the mission that Larsen and the PET officer had undertaken in Russia—and the exact circumstances surrounding the CEO’s shooting. Was it somehow connected to the deaths of the two members of the Russian president’s inner circle? Had it happened at the Russo-Finnish border crossing? And what about that mysterious missile attack on a petrol station in the Russian town of Maksimov? Surely, the reporters reasoned, there had to be more to the story.
They were right, of course. But no matter how many calls they made or sources they badgered, they were never able to uncover it. Still, the clues were all around them—in a darkened antiquarian bookshop in Copenhagen, behind the counter of a café on the island of Funen, and at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where visitors to the second-floor Dutch Room gawked at an empty frame measuring 72.5 by 64.7 centimeters.
