Moscow USA. Gordon Stevens

       1

      Kazakhstan that August morning was like Kazakhstan every August morning: hot, the land flat and featureless and stretching for ever, and the ground below it running with wealth. ConTex had signed up three years before, and now operated an oilfield on the north-east coast of the Caspian Sea. ConTex was also hustling contracts elsewhere, which was why its head office was in Moscow.

      Maddox rose at five.

      Arnold Maddox, Arnie to both friends and colleagues, had been with the Consolidated Oil Company of Texas six years and had switched from Angola to Moscow nine months earlier. Maddox was late thirties, tall and lean build, hailed from Austin, Texas, and had been in exploration and production since graduation. He was married with two teenage boys, though his wife and family never accompanied him on his overseas postings. In the political chaos of Angola he had brought order and efficiency; in the frontier atmosphere which was the new Russia he brought an instinct for the local way of doing things which singled him out from many of the foreign businessmen now streaming east. Thus the night before he had spent four hours over black bread, local black caviar and Absolut vodka with the general introduced to him as head of the republic’s KGB, even though the KGB had been renamed and reorganized after the dissolution of the Soviet Union five years ago.

      By seven he had tied up the remnants of paperwork left over from the previous day; at seven-fifteen, over breakfast of cheese, cold meats and black coffee, he held a final meeting with the local manager and security chief. By early afternoon he was back in Moscow.

      The suites which ConTex occupied were on the eighth floor of a modern block off Tverskaya. Red Square and the Kremlin were 200 metres away, on the other side of the inner ring road, and the red and yellow of McDonald’s occupied the ground floor.

      After Kazakhstan the office seemed the height of civilization: prints of ConTex’s various operations on the walls, cocktail cabinet, conference table at the end nearest the door, and Maddox’s mahogany desk in front of the window. PC to the right, a bank of telephone monitors, including a Stu-iii, to the left, mandatory family photograph in the middle and executive chair behind.

      He checked with his secretary, asked her to get him a coffee, and called Dwyer on an internal line. ‘I’m back. Do we need to talk?’

      Ten days earlier, and two months before they would even unofficially be known to exist, Maddox had acquired the preliminary details of a new exploration area, plus names and backgrounds of relevant officials and politicians, and ConTex had sent in Dwyer.

      Dwyer came through, sat down and shook his head when Maddox’s secretary offered him coffee. ‘Looks like we’ll get what we want.’ Dwyer was Vice President responsible for New Business Development and on the main board. I’ll need five million.’ At this moment in time, and at this stage of the process. Because five million dollars was small beer. When it got really heavy you could put a zero on the end of that, and ConTex wouldn’t think it was out of place.

      So five million, plus the one million Maddox needed for Kazakhstan to cover local wages, expenses and other payments. Delivery tomorrow and everything straightforward and routine. Three minutes later the request had been sent to Houston on the secure fax.

      When Maddox and Dwyer left the office the early evening was warm. Maddox’s driver dropped Dwyer at the Balltschug-Kempinski, across the Moskva river from the Kremlin and next to the British embassy residence, then took Maddox to the former sanatorium, now a country club, where he leased a luxury chalet. At eight-thirty, having showered and changed, Maddox joined Dwyer for dinner.

      The Kempinski was expensive, but the Kempinski was safe-relatively speaking, but everything was relative in the new Moscow. Black-windowed Mercedes and BMWs were parked outside, but black-windowed Mercedes and BMWs were parked outside everywhere nowadays. Guards on the doors, but it was only when there were no guards that you began to worry.

      At nine-thirty they left the hotel, crossed the river, and walked past St Basil’s into Red Square. The evening was still warm and the sky was an almost transparent shade of blue.

      ‘You want a drink?’ Dwyer asked.

      ‘Where?’

      ‘How about Nite Flite?’

      They crossed Red Square then dropped between the Arsenal Tower of the Kremlin and the sterner red brick of the Historical Museum into the tarmac area beyond. Even though it was late evening the area still milled with people: along the pavement to Ploshchad Revolyutsii the booths selling cigarettes and alcohol were crowded with shoppers. Opposite, on the pavement under the grey featureless mass of the Moskva Hotel, was a single stall selling drinks, a handful of wooden tables around it and cars parked in front of it. At the entrance to the subway under the inner ring road to Tverskaya and the Okhatniy Ryad metro station, there was another cluster of vendors – mainly men but two women.

      The first woman was selling cigarettes. She looked mid-sixties, small and thin and stooped. She was wearing a cardigan, skirt, torn basketball boots, and a Michael Jordan cap which had long lost its shape and colour.

      The second was taller and early fifties. On a tray in front of her, balanced on makeshift legs, were sets of audio tapes. Her hair was tied back, her back was straight and her dress was blue and clean and neatly pressed. A light coat was thrown over her shoulders and on the left side of her bodice she wore a row of medals.

      They walked past her and down the steps into the underpass. The passageway was the familiar grey concrete, beggars and vendors lining the walls: a blind war veteran holding out his hands and a couple selling matryoshka dolls, a woman selling lottery tickets and more stalls selling military badges and fake icons. From the end nearest the metro came the sound of a string quartet.

      They passed the musicians and took the steps to Tverskaya. The National Hotel was on the corner, Maxim’s nightclub on the ground floor below it and a fashion boutique next to it. Food stalls were spaced to the left, people eating at tables and a gypsy girl, thin and pretty, begging near them, her parents watching from twenty yards away. Beyond the shops the Intourist Hotel towered into the sky, Mercedes and BMWs were parked three deep on the road and along the pavement outside, a stretch limousine was pulled against the steps to the canopy over the entrance, and heavily-built young men in suits stood like phalanxes at the doors.

      Ten minutes later they came to Nite Flite. Two well-dressed young women smiled at the thick-set man on the door and went in. Behind him a queue of tourists waited patiently. Maddox ignored the queue and went to the man on the door. Two more big men hovered in the shadows inside.

      ‘Full,’ the man told him.

      Maddox reached inside his jacket for his wallet and snapped out two $50 bills. The minder took them, stepped aside and allowed them in.

      The following morning Maddox spent ninety minutes in the office then took the 9.55 flight to St Petersburg. In London it was seven in the morning. Forty minutes earlier American Airlines flight AA106 had touched down from New York. Amongst the items unloaded and placed in bond were the six million dollars Maddox had ordered the previous afternoon. By the time they were secured in the bond area near Terminal 4 Zak Whyte had done his five miles, returned to the Holiday Inn at the edge of the airport, showered and changed, and taken the lift to the restaurant on the ground floor.

      Zak Whyte was thirty-one years old: he stood six-three, weighed in at 190 pounds, and had been out of the United States Marine Corps two years. The security/courier company for which he worked, like others in related fields, had a propensity to recruit men of similar backgrounds. Pearce, the courier who would double up with Whyte on the Moscow run, had served nine years with the British Royal Marine Commandos, making corporal and ending his service with the elite Mountain and Arctic Warfare cadre.

      When Whyte entered the restaurant Pearce was already at a table in the corner furthest from the door. Whyte helped himself to orange juice and full English breakfast, and sat down.

      ‘You all right?’

      Pearce’s coffee