“Welcome back, Mr. Marlowe.”
In the entrance hall the two women were now conversing in animated Russian. Mr. Marlowe was peering through the oven window. “What are they saying?” he asked quietly.
“One of them is relieved that the other is still alive. It seems they’re old friends. Evidently, it’s been several years since they’ve seen one another.”
“Are the microphones switched on?”
“That’s Mr. Parish’s province, not mine.” She took down a serving platter from the sideboard. Absently, she asked, “Does your pretty new girlfriend like cottage pie as well?”
“You don’t miss much, do you?”
Miss Coventry smiled. “American, is she?”
“Not too.”
“She’s one of us?”
“A former cousin.”
“We won’t hold that against her. Though I must admit, I had hopes for you and Miss Watson.”
“So did she.”
It had been Miss Coventry’s intention to serve a socially distant supper outside in the garden, but when a blustery wind blew suddenly from the northwest, she laid a formal table in the dining room instead. The first course was an onion tart with an endive and Stilton salad, followed by the cottage pie. She and Mr. Parish dined at the small table in the kitchen alcove. Occasionally, she overheard a snatch of conversation in the next room. It couldn’t be helped—eavesdropping, like cooking, came naturally to her. They were discussing the Russian billionaire who had been murdered at his home in Chelsea. Apparently, the black-and-blue-haired Russian woman was involved somehow. Mr. Marlowe’s American friend, too.
Miss Coventry served a bread-and-butter pudding with custard for dessert. Shortly before nine o’clock, she heard the scrape of chairs on the wooden floor, signaling the meal had concluded. It was a cottage tradition to serve coffee in the drawing room. The chief and the Israeli gentleman took theirs in the adjoining study and invited the black-and-blue-haired Russian woman to join them. The pleasantries were over. The time had come, as they used to say in the old days, to have a look beneath the bonnet.
In another lifetime, before the Wall fell and the West lost its way, Miss Coventry might well have been hunched over a reel-to-reel tape machine in the next room, a pencil in her fist. Now everything was done digitally, even the transcriptions. All it took was a flip of a switch. But that was Mr. Parish’s province, she thought as she filled the kitchen basin with water. Not hers.
13
Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor
Parish had flipped the switch in question at seven that evening. Nevertheless, owing to a technical glitch brought about by the nimble fingers of Nigel Whitcombe, no audio recording or written transcript of the evening’s proceedings would ever find its way into the official record of the affair. Had such a document existed, it would have revealed that the debriefing of Nina Antonova, lone suspect in the murder of Viktor Orlov, began with the email she received in late February. Like many investigative journalists, she publicized her address on her Twitter feed. It was hosted by ProtonMail, the encrypted email service founded in Geneva by scientists working at the CERN research facility. ProtonMail utilized client-side end-to-end encryption, which encoded the message before it reached the firm’s servers. Both were located in Switzerland, beyond the jurisdictional reach of the United States and the European Union.
“How do you access the account?” asked Graham.
“Only on my computer.”
“Never by mobile device?”
“Never.”
“Where’s the computer?”
“My apartment in Zurich. I live in District Three. Wiedikon, to be precise.”
“You work from home, I take it?”
“Don’t we all these days?”
She was seated primly before the unlit fire, a cup and saucer balanced on her knee. Graham had settled in the chair opposite, but Gabriel was slowly pacing the perimeter of the room, as though wrestling with a guilty conscience. From beyond the closed door came the murmur of voices. Outside, the wind prowled in the eaves.
“I assume the Russians know your address?” probed Graham.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if I was on the embassy mailing list,” replied Nina.
“You’re careful with your Wi-Fi network?”
“I take all the usual precautions. But I am also well aware of the fact that it is virtually impossible to fully shield one’s communications from the various agencies of state surveillance, including Britain’s GCHQ. Besides, the Russians aren’t terribly discreet. They sometimes post a team outside my apartment, just to let me know they’re always watching. They also leave threatening messages on my voice mail.”
“Have you ever played them for the Swiss police?”
“And give them an excuse to revoke my coveted residence permit?” She shook her head. “Zurich is an excellent place from which to monitor the flow of dirty money out of Russia. It’s also a rather pleasant place to live.”
“And the email?” asked Graham. “Who was it from?”
“Mr. Nobody.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That’s how he referred to himself. Mr. Nobody.”
“Language?”
English, she answered, with two examples of British spelling. Mr. Nobody said he had left a package of documents for Nina in an athletics field not far from her apartment. Wary of a Kremlin trap, she asked Mr. Nobody to email her the documents instead. But when twenty-four hours passed without a reply, she donned a protective mask and a pair of rubber gloves and ventured into the dystopian void. The athletics field had a red artificial running track, around which four unmasked Zurichers were spewing their droplets. Trees lined the perimeter. At the base of one, she discovered a rectangular parcel wrapped in thick black plastic and sealed with clear packing tape.
She waited until she returned home before cautiously opening it. Inside were about a hundred pages of financial records regarding wire transfers, stock trades, and other investments such as large purchases of commercial and residential property. One corporate entity appeared frequently, a Swiss-registered shell company called Omega Holdings. All of the documents were from the same institution.
“Which one?”
“RhineBank AG. Financial insiders commonly refer to RhineBank as the world’s dirtiest bank. Not surprisingly, it has numerous Russian clients.”
“What did you do with the documents?”
“I photographed the first ten pages and emailed them to a well-known expert in Kremlin corruption.”
“Viktor Orlov?”
She nodded. “He called a few minutes later, practically breathless. ‘Where did you get these, Nina Petrovna?’ When I explained, he told me to delete the photographs from my phone at once.”
“Why?”
“He said the documents were far too dangerous to transmit electronically.”
He flew to Zurich the next day on his private jet. Nina met him in the lounge of the FBO at Kloten Airport. His left eye twitched as he leafed through the documents, an affliction that surfaced whenever he was anxious or excited.
“I take it Viktor was excited?”
“He said the documents concerned the personal finances of a very high-profile Russian. Someone close to the president. Someone from his inner circle.”