The Silent Oligarch: A Novel by Christopher Morgan Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

check.”
    “That’ll be novel.”
    Webster paused. Outside two men were getting out of a taxi, struggling with boxes of legal papers. He turned to Hammer. “Look. I need to be straight with you. I’ve been waiting for this case. Or one like it. I may not be the best judge.”
    “You want to afflict the corrupt?”
    “Something like that.”
    Neither said anything for a moment.
    “Maybe we shouldn’t take it,” said Webster at last.
    “Can we do what he wants?”
    “We’d have to be very lucky and very clever.”
    Hammer leaned in confidentially, lowering his voice. “I think this has the makings of a landmark project.”
    “I thought you might say that.” Webster felt a flutter in his chest.
    “Tell Tourna we want two million U.S. up front. We’ll keep that on account and bill him a million a month until the end of the project. If we help him get his fifty back we want five percent. If we finish off Malin, we want another ten million.”
    “You’re serious.”
    “I am. You said it. If we can crack this without doing much in Russia, fantastic. If we can’t, we haven’t lost anything and we’ll probably help Tourna get his money back at least. If Malin kicks up a fuss it’ll die down and in the meantime you can do a few Kazakh cases. It’s not like we’ve got an office in Moscow to raid or employees to imprison.” He paused. “Where does Lock live?”
    “Moscow.”
    “That’s a shame.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he started to work for Malin before either of them knew what they were doing. That means he knows where the mistakes are. And if you’re right, he’s not exactly battle-hardened. Get him out of Moscow. He’s protected there.”
    “With pleasure.”
    “He’s worth a lot to us. Go after him.”

Three
    L ONDON WAS A GATEWAY FOR L OCK; he passed through it often on the way to his island world, where the sun shone and he was in charge. But in a broader sense it led to a life that was closed to him in Moscow. He would buy his suits there, from Henry Poole—the oldest tailors on Savile Row, he had once discovered with satisfaction—and the shirts and ties, shoes and socks that set him apart, he liked to think, from his Russian colleagues. There he would boss his lawyers, have his hair cut, dine well with the very few friends he still had, and feel briefly his old self, part of a confident, distinguished fraternity, the equal of his peers. In London, too, he would occasionally see his family.
    But he hadn’t seen Marina or Vika on his recent visits. He told himself that there were good reasons for this: he was usually passing through and was seldom in town for long; the greater the size of Malin’s secret empire the more meetings he was forced to have; Vika was in bed by eight, just as his working day tended to finish. Today, however, on his way to Holland Park to see them, scenes from the Riviera playing in his mind, he found guilt mixed in with the usual apprehension.
    He had discharged his driver, and to stretch his back after the morning’s flight was walking across Hyde Park, happy that August and Monaco were behind him. His last four days there had been uncomfortable: he had been tetchy, Oksana sullen. He wanted to tell her what was troubling him but knew he couldn’t; she had taken his nervousness to mean that he didn’t trust her. Monaco, hot and threatening thunder, had tightened around him, and trips to Cannes and up into the hills around Grasse had failed to give release. The storms never came. He had felt relief when Oksana had boarded her flight, and no doubt she had too. Ten days were simply too many to spend in Monaco—perhaps too many, he thought, to spend with me.
    The park was green, vivid, old, full of tourists. It was five o’clock but the sun was still high and Lock, in his shirtsleeves, his jacket over his shoulder, walked at an idling pace past the Reformers Tree and the Old Police House, across the Serpentine Bridge and toward Kensington Palace. He was aware