All of which went some way to explaining why Sarah Bancroft, on a wet Wednesday evening in late July, was seated at a corner table in the bar of Wilton’s Restaurant in Jermyn Street. The mood in the room was uncertain, the smiles forced, the laughter uproarious but somehow false. Julian was tilted against the end of the bar. With his Savile Row suit and plentiful gray locks, he cut a rather elegant if dubious figure, a look he described as dignified depravity. He was peering into his Sancerre and pretending to listen to something that Jeremy Crabbe, the director of the Old Master department at Bonhams, was murmuring excitedly into his ear. Amelia March of ARTNews was eavesdropping on a conversation between Simon Mendenhall, the mannequin-like chief auctioneer from Christie’s, and Nicky Lovegrove, art adviser to the criminally rich. Roddy Hutchinson, widely regarded as the most unscrupulous dealer in all of London, was tugging at the sleeve of tubby Oliver Dimbleby. But Oliver seemed not to notice, for he was pawing at the impossibly beautiful former fashion model who now owned a successful modern art gallery in King Street. On her way out the door, she blew Sarah a decorous kiss with those perfect crimson lips of hers. Sarah sipped her three-olive martini and whispered, “Bitch.”
“I heard that!” Fortunately, it was only Oliver. Encased in a form-fitting gray suit, he floated toward Sarah’s table like a barrage balloon and sat down. “What have you got against the lovely Miss Watson?”
“Her eyes. Her cheekbones. Her hair. Her boobs.” Sarah sighed. “Shall I go on?”
Oliver waved his pudgy little hand dismissively. “You’re much prettier than she is, Sarah. I’ll never forget the first time I saw you walking across Mason’s Yard. Nearly stopped my heart. If memory serves, I made quite a fool of myself back then.”
“You asked me to marry you. Several times, in fact.”
“My offer still stands.”
“I’m flattered, Ollie. But I’m afraid it’s out of the question.”
“Am I too old?”
“Not at all.”
“Too fat?”
She pinched his pinkish cheek. “Just right, actually.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I’m involved.”
“In what?”
“A relationship.”
He seemed unfamiliar with the word. Oliver’s romantic entanglements rarely lasted more than a night or two. “Are you talking about that bloke who drives the flashy Bentley?”
Sarah sipped her drink.
“What’s his name, this boyfriend of yours?”
“Peter Marlowe.”
“Sounds made up.”
With good reason, thought Sarah.
“What’s he do for a living?” blurted Oliver.
“Can you keep a secret?”
“My darling Sarah, I have more dirty secrets stored inside my head than MI5 and MI6 combined.”
She leaned across the table. “He’s a professional assassin.”
“Really? Interesting work, is it?”
Sarah smiled. It wasn’t true, of course. It had been several years since Christopher worked as a contract killer.
“Is he the reason you came back to London?” probed Oliver.
“One of the reasons. The truth is, I missed you all terribly. Even you, Oliver.” She checked the time on her phone. “Oh, hell! Will you be a love and pay for my drink? I’m late.”
“For what?”
“Behave, Ollie.”
“Why on earth would I want to do that? It’s so bloody boring.”
Sarah rose and, winking at Julian, went into Jermyn Street. The rain was suddenly coming down in torrents, but a taxi soon came to her rescue. She waited until she was safely inside before giving the driver the address of her destination.
“Cheyne Walk, please. Number forty-three.”
2
Cheyne Walk, Chelsea
Like Sarah Bancroft, Viktor Orlov believed that life was a journey best taken without aid of a map. Raised in an unheated Moscow apartment shared by three families, he became a billionaire many times over through a combination of luck, determination, and ruthless tactics that even his apologists described as unscrupulous, if not criminal. Orlov made no secret of the fact that he was a predator and a robber baron. Indeed, he wore those labels proudly. “Had I been born an Englishman, my money might have come to me cleanly,” he dismissively told a British interviewer after taking up residence in London. “But I was born a Russian. And I earned a Russian fortune.”
In point of fact, Viktor Orlov was born a citizen not of Russia but of the Soviet Union. A brilliant mathematician, he attended the prestigious Leningrad Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics and then disappeared into the Soviet nuclear weapons program, where he designed multiwarhead intercontinental ballistic missiles. Later, when asked why he had joined the Communist Party, he admitted it was for reasons of career advancement only. “I suppose I could have become a dissident,” he added, “but the gulag never seemed like a terribly appealing place to me.”
As a member of the pampered elite, Orlov witnessed the decay of the Soviet system from the inside and knew it was only a matter of time before the empire collapsed. When the end finally came, he renounced his membership in the Communist Party and vowed to become rich. Within a few years he had earned a sizable fortune importing computers and other Western goods for the nascent Russian market. He then used that fortune to acquire Russia’s largest state-owned steel company and Ruzoil, the Siberian oil giant. Before long, Orlov was the richest man in Russia.
But in post-Soviet Russia, a land with no rule of law, Orlov’s fortune made him a marked man. He survived at least three attempts on his life and was rumored to have ordered several men killed in retaliation. But the greatest threat to Orlov would come from the man who succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president. He believed that Viktor Orlov and the other oligarchs had stolen the country’s most valuable assets, and it was his intention to steal them back. After settling into the Kremlin, the new president summoned Orlov and demanded two things: his steel company and Ruzoil. “And keep your nose out of politics,” he added ominously. “Otherwise, I’ll cut it off.”
Orlov agreed to relinquish his steel interests, but not Ruzoil. The president was not amused. He immediately ordered prosecutors to open a fraud-and-bribery investigation, and within a week they had issued a warrant for Orlov’s arrest. He wisely fled to London, where he became one of the Russian president’s most vocal critics. For several years, Ruzoil remained legally icebound, beyond the reach of both Orlov and the new masters of the Kremlin. Orlov finally agreed to surrender the company in exchange for three Israeli intelligence agents held captive in Russia. One of the agents was Gabriel Allon.
For his generosity, Orlov received a British passport and a private meeting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. He then embarked on an ambitious effort to rebuild his lost fortune, this time under the watchful eye of British regulatory officials, who monitored his every trade and investment. His empire now included such venerable London newspapers as the Independent, the Evening Standard, and the Financial Journal. He had also acquired a controlling interest in the Russian investigative weekly Moskovskaya Gazeta. With Orlov’s financial support, the magazine was once again Russia’s most prominent independent news organization and a thorn in the side of the men in the Kremlin.