The Fire. Katherine Neville

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СКАЧАТЬ going?’ Vartan’s voice shot after me like a bullet.

      ‘To get a hacksaw,’ I tossed over my shoulder, and kept on moving. After all, I reasoned, I could hardly deploy Lily’s rock-smashing technique. Even if the contents had nothing to do with Mother, there might be something fragile or valuable tucked away in that panel.

      But Vartan had crossed the room, swiftly and silently, and was suddenly there beside me, his hand on my arm, propelling me toward the door right into the mudroom. Inside the cloistering closet he slammed the inner doors shut and leaned against them, blocking any exit.

      We were jammed there together in the tiny space between the food locker and the coat hooks that were laden with enough fur and down-stuffed parkas, I could feel the static electricity plastering my hair to the wall. But before I could protest this preemption, Vartan had grasped me by both arms. He spoke quickly, under his breath so no one outside could hear.

      ‘Alexandra, you must listen to me, this is extremely important,’ he said. ‘I know things you need to know. Crucial things. We must speak – right now – before you go about opening any more cupboards or drawers around here.’

      ‘We have nothing to talk about,’ I snapped, with a bitterness that surprised me. I extracted myself from his grasp. ‘I don’t know what on earth you’re doing here – why Mother would even invite you—’

      ‘But I know why she asked me,’ Vartan interrupted. ‘Though I never spoke with her, she didn’t have to say it. She needed information – and so do you. I was the only other person there on that day, who may be able to provide it.’

      I didn’t have to ask what he meant by there – or what the day in question was. But this hardly prepared me for what came next.

      ‘Xie,’ he said, ‘don’t you understand? We must speak about your father’s murder.’

      I felt as if I’d been socked in the stomach; for a moment my wind was gone. No one had called me Xie – my father’s preferred nickname for me, short for Alexie – in the ten years since my chess-playing youth. Hearing it now, coupled with Your father’s murder, made me feel completely disarmed.

      Here it was again, that thing we never spoke about, the thing I never thought of. But my suppressed past had managed to penetrate the crushing, suffocating space of the mudroom and was staring me in the face with that horrid Ukrainian sangfroid. As customary, I retreated into complete denial.

      ‘His murder?’ I said, shaking my head in disbelief – as if that would somehow clear the air. ‘But the Russian authorities maintained at the time that my father’s death was an accident, that the guard on that roof shot him in error, believing that someone was absconding with something valuable from the treasury.’

      Vartan Azov had suddenly turned his dark eyes upon me with attentiveness. That strange purple gleam was burning from within, like a flame being blown alive.

      ‘Perhaps your father was escaping the treasury with something of great value,’ he said slowly, as if he’d just spotted a hidden move, an oblique opening he’d previously overlooked. ‘Perhaps your father was leaving with something whose value he himself might have only just grasped at that moment. But whatever did happen on that day, Alexandra, it is certain to me that your mother would never have asked me to come all this distance just now – to this remote spot, along with you and Lily Rad – unless she believed, as I do, that your father’s death ten years ago must be directly related to the assassination of Taras Petrossian, just two weeks ago, in London.’

      ‘Taras Petrossian!’ I cried aloud, though Vartan silenced me with a swift glance toward the inner doors.

      Taras Petrossian was the rich entrepreneur and business mogul who, ten years ago, had organized our Russian chess tourney! He’d been there, that day at Zagorsk. I knew very little more than this about the man. But at this moment Vartan Azov – arrogant bastard or no – suddenly had my full attention.

      ‘How was Petrossian killed?’ I wanted to know. ‘And why? And what was he doing in London?’

      ‘He was organizing a big chess exhibition there, with grandmasters from every country,’ Vartan said, one eyebrow slightly raised, as if he’d assumed I would already know that.

      ‘Petrossian fled to England several years ago with plenty of money, when the corrupt capitalist oligarchy he’d created in Russia was seized, along with that of many others, by the Russian state. But he hadn’t completely escaped, as he might have imagined. Just two weeks ago, Petrossian was found dead in his bed, in his posh hotel suite in Mayfair. It’s believed he was poisoned, a tried-and-true Russian methodology. Petrossian had often spoken out against the Siloviki. But the arm of that brotherhood has a very long reach for those whom they wish to silence—’

      When I seemed confused by the term, Vartan added, ‘In Russian, it means something like “The Power Guys.” The group who replaced the KGB just after the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, they’re called the FSB – the Federal Security Bureau. Their members and methods remain the same; only the name has changed. They are far more powerful than the KGB ever was – a State unto themselves, with no outside controls. These Siloviki, I believe, were responsible for your father’s murder – after all, the guard who shot him was surely in their employ.’

      What he was suggesting seemed crazy: KGB gunmen with poison up their sleeves. But I could feel that awful chill of recognition begin to creep into my spine again. It had been Taras Petrossian, as I now recalled, who’d relocated that last game of ours outside of Moscow, to Zagorsk. If he’d now been assassinated, it might give more credence to my mother’s fears all these years. Not to mention her disappearance, and the clues she’d left that pointed to that last game. Perhaps she had been right in her suspicions all along. As Key might say, ‘Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.’

      But there was something more that I needed to know, something that didn’t make sense.

      ‘What did you mean a moment ago,’ I asked Vartan, ‘when you said that my father might have been “escaping the treasury with something of value” – which only he might understand?’ Vartan smiled enigmatically, as if I’d just passed some important esoteric test.

      ‘It didn’t occur to me myself,’ he admitted, ‘until you mentioned the “official” explanation of your father’s death. I think it likely that your father was leaving the building that morning with something of enormous value, something that others could only intuit might be in his possession, but which they could not see.’ When I looked mystified, he added: ‘I suspect he was leaving the building that morning with information.’

      ‘Information?’ I objected. ‘What sort of information could possibly be so valuable that someone would want to kill him?’

      ‘Whatever it was,’ he told me, ‘it must have been something which apparently he could not be permitted to pass along to anyone.’

      ‘Even assuming my father did get information about something as dangerous as you’re suggesting, how could he possibly have discovered it so quickly there at the Zagorsk treasury? As you yourself know, we were only inside that building for a few brief minutes,’ I pointed out. ‘And during that entire time, my father spoke to no one who could have given him such information.’

      ‘Perhaps he spoke to no one,’ he agreed. ‘But someone did speak to him.’

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