The Take(51)

And so it was that the archivist had found the letter.

The buff-colored envelope had been sitting in a box three floors below ground (sector R, row 51) in the section dedicated to Russian Operations 1990–1995. From there, the letter had made its way to Borodin’s agent and onward to Prince Abdul Aziz, only to be stolen during a random robbery.

Or had it been random after all?

Borodin looked at the photograph one last time.

Of course it was not random, he said to himself, barely suppressing the desire to slam a fist on the table.

With a calming breath, he brought his attention back to the business card. Swiveling in his chair, he turned toward his desktop computer and logged into the SVR’s intranet. He did not use his own name but that of a fictitious agent he’d created when he’d begun his inquiries, Nikolai Beria. A sharp-eyed historian might recognize the family as that of the founder of the NKVD, Joseph Stalin’s dreaded secret police and predecessor of the KGB.

Borodin accessed the service’s international intelligence registry and entered the name Valentina Asanova had given him. The registry contained names, aliases, and, when possible, physical descriptions of all individuals known to work for a foreign intelligence agency. The names included both overt employees like contract staff for the Central Intelligence Agency or the British Foreign Office and covert operatives who had been identified but not exposed. Currently, the registry contained names from over seventy nations.

The name Simon Risk(e) brought up no hits.

There was a Simeon Rosak, age fifty-seven, former paratrooper with the Israeli Defense Forces, now listed as an analyst with the Mossad. There was a Simon Rhys-Davies, age twenty-seven, graduate of McGill University, currently a minor official in the Canadian foreign ministry. And a Simone Risen, age forty-four, employed by the DGSE, the French intelligence agency.

But no Simon Riske, with or without an e.

Borodin logged out of the registry. He hadn’t expected a hit. If the man was an agent, he was using an alias, though with the installation of facial-recognition software at nearly all international transport hubs as well as the widespread adoption of biometric passports, it was becoming increasingly difficult for covert operatives to move about unnoticed. These systems relied on the precise mapping of an individual’s physiognomy—the distance between a man’s eyes, for example, or the width of their lips—which no disguise could alter. An agent could make his eyes green or blue. He might wear a mustache or shave his head. He might use makeup to appear seventy or forty. But once the topography of his face had been captured, his days of moving freely were over, no matter what he called himself.

To amuse himself, Borodin pulled up his open-source web browser and Googled the man’s name. Several Facebook accounts showed up, a LinkedIn page, and a mention in a British automotive journal. He checked them in turn, finding little of interest. As Riske’s business card listed him working for a London-based investigative firm, he paid particular attention to the article discussing the sale at auction of a vintage Ferrari restored by a garage in London owned by a Simon Riske…with an e. There was no further mention of the man, nor was there a photograph. He moved the cursor to close the page, his finger poised to click. He looked at the article again, his eye spotting the words “American born.” For a second, less even, a spark of suspicion fired in his brain, much like the shock one receives when walking across a carpet in socks. But like that shock, the spark was short-lived and he discounted it.

He closed the article, then phoned the agent in charge at the Russian embassy in London.

“Find out everything you can about a firm named Special Protective Services and Investigations,” he said. “I want something by morning.”





Chapter 28



Boris Blatt walked down the Bahnhofstrasse, the stress of the past days easing from his neck and shoulders. He adored Switzerland, and especially Zurich. The food was uniformly excellent, the weather better than either London or Moscow, and the police well trained and incorruptible. His enemies knew better than to come after him in Switzerland.

Blatt continued down the prosperous thoroughfare lined with the world’s most famous boutiques, jewelers, and, of course, banks. At one point he’d held accounts at nearly all of them. Bank Leu, Zurich Gemeinschaftsbank, Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft. Just saying the names was enough to trigger memories of his rise to power: visions of blood, lucre, and fear.

Boris Abrahamovich Blatt had started his career as a businessman peddling smuggled American Levi’s at Sunday flea markets along Moscow’s outer ring road. With the profits from jeans he moved into sports shoes and Italian designer suits. His new contacts in Italy, namely the Camorra in Napoli, proposed he look into selling more lucrative merchandise. They sent cocaine his way and Blatt sent unrefined opium theirs. By 1994, he was doing over a hundred million dollars a year in turnover.

It had been a frightening time. Even at a distance of twenty years, Blatt’s palms grew clammy at the memory. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the move to a free-market economy, Russia descended into a state of chaos. Business was conducted at the end of a gun barrel. A successful negotiation was one where you walked away alive. A day didn’t pass without a businessman being assassinated on the streets of Moscow. Blatt made it through by being smarter, stronger, and tougher than the rest. He was loyal to a fault, but woe unto those who betrayed him. His favored punishment involved boiling an enemy to death in a giant vat of hot oil. He did this often enough to know that a man could last between three and four minutes.