The Third Woman. Mark Burnell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ wondered how long he’d been alone. Not that it mattered. There was nothing he could do. He and the chair had become a single entity, she’d made sure of that. An entity isolated at the centre of a Bokhara carpet, a castaway in his own apartment.

      He couldn’t reconcile the woman in his apartment with the woman who’d approached him at the bar in the Lancaster. Claudia Calderon had been confident, relaxed, playful. And sexy. He could admit that, even now. And then there was the creature with the gun. What had she done? What did she want?

      He tried to convince himself that she wouldn’t harm him. That she’d float away, like a bout of bad weather, leaving him as she’d found him. But Leonid Golitsyn and another man were dead. Newman had seen that on TV. She’d admitted to being in their room. And she had the gun. He’d barely heard her denial. Stranger still, she’d seemed more preoccupied with coverage of the Sentier bomb than events at the Lancaster. Were the two connected? Was she the connection? And if she was, what would that mean for him?

      Stephanie said, ‘I’m going to untie your hands. You need to get your blood moving.’

      The purple scars around the wrists were shiny and ragged. There was no smoothness to them, nothing … uniform. The hands themselves were swollen. As they separated a shudder coursed through Newman. He brought his arms to the front of his body in a series of stiff jerks, catching his breath with each halt. Once his hands were in his lap he flexed his fingers. She saw the solid tension in his shoulders, knotted muscle crawling on itself.

      ‘Who’s Carlotta?’

      He didn’t answer.

      ‘I usually like to know whose clothes I’m wearing.’

      Still nothing.

      ‘Was the earring hers?’

      She could see no fear, no anger, no emotion at all.

      She left him and took Golitsyn’s attaché case to the sofa. Keys, pens, a leather-bound address book, lots of business documents. His letters were addressed to him at several locations: the head office of MosProm on ulitsa Tverskaya in central Moscow; Galerie Golitsyn on avenue Matignon, Paris; the Hotel Meurice, Paris; an apartment on East 62^nd Street in New York City.

      In a see-through foolscap plastic wallet was a set of architectural plans. Stephanie turned it over to see the address. Cork Street, London; another art gallery, she assumed. There was something inserted between the folds of the drawings. She unzipped the wallet and a sheet of paper slipped free.

      It was an agreement with an immobilier named Guy Grangé on boulevard Magenta in the 10ème arrondissement. A one-month rental, a one-room apartment in the Stalingrad district, cash paid in advance. Not the sort of area Stephanie would have expected Golitsyn to frequent. Or the sort of property, for that matter. There was no address, just a reference number. The printed key code corresponded to the number on the red plastic disk attached to the keys.

      Why had Stern pointed her in the direction of this seventy-seven-year-old Russian?

      There were some credit-card receipts in the attaché case, including one from the fabled jeweller Ginzburg, on place Vendôme. A small card was stapled to the receipt. On the back, written by a shaking hand, was a brief message:

      Leonid, mon cher,

      merci pour tout,

      N x.

      Beneath that, in Russian, was an addition:

      Diamonds or bread? Only we know which.

      Stephanie looked at the first part of the message. N for Natalya? Aleksandr Ginzburg’s widow was Natalya. And alive, it seemed. Stephanie was a little surprised. Aleksandr Ginzburg had died a long time ago – a famous car crash outside Cannes sometime in the late Seventies or early Eighties – so Stephanie had just assumed that his wife had died since then. Apparently not. Which now made her a very old woman. Except that Aleksandr hadn’t been so old when he’d died. Perhaps she was as young as eighty. In other words, of the same vintage as Golitsyn.

      Stephanie stared at the message and felt the pull of its undercurrent.

      Diamonds or bread? Only we know which.

       London, 04:05

      When the phone rang in Rosie Chaudhuri’s small first-floor flat off Chichele Road in north London, she was already awake. She’d fallen into bed at one, exhausted, a little drunk, unhappy. The alcohol was supposed to have soothed the pain but hadn’t. An inexperienced drinker, the very least she’d hoped for had been a deep sleep but she’d been awake by half-past-three.

      Her first night out in a month, her first as a single woman in more than a year. Her friend Claire had insisted upon it. Time to move on. Time to consign him to history. Reluctantly, Rosie had capitulated. A poor decision, as it turned out. There had been no balm for the hurt, no boost for the self. Just a large bill and a hangover.

      When her relationship failed, Rosie did what she always did: she buried herself in work. An easy solution which, for a week or two, seemed to deliver. Then came the familiar sensation; the weight in the chest, the suspicion of a greater malaise lurking at the heart of her. How could a smart, attractive woman continue to stumble from one third-rate relationship to another?

      A second-generation Indian, Rosie ran an organization at the cutting edge of global intelligence. From any point of view – race, gender, age – she was a success. But she didn’t feel like one. Never had, if the truth be told, and now, at five-past-four on a dismal winter morning, she felt a total failure.

      What good was her position – her power – if she couldn’t hold down a relationship? Dumped by an out-of-work actor because he was intimidated by her professional success. He thought she worked for the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College, London. That was the lie by which she was universally known among her family and friends.

      The actor was a lovely man; kind, funny, good-looking. But not much of an actor. When he’d complained about the hours she kept she’d seen straight through him; he’d resented her work because it fuelled his own sense of professional inadequacy. Which, in turn, she’d resented. It wasn’t amusing to come home after a sixteen-hour shift to be criticized by a man who’d spent the day lying on a sofa watching Countdown and Neighbours, waiting for Steven Spielberg to call.

      She picked up the phone. ‘Yes?’

      ‘This is Carter, S3.’

      S3 was the intelligence section. ‘What is it, John?’

      ‘There’s a car on its way. It’ll be with you in eight minutes.’

      ‘Give me the bare bones.’

      ‘Last night, Paris. The Lancaster hotel. A shooting, two victims: Leonid Golitsyn and Fyodor Medvedev.’

      The first name was vaguely resonant, the second meant nothing. ‘Go on.’

      ‘S9 has intercepted communication between DST and DGSE.’

      Both agencies formed part of France’s intelligence community. The DST, the Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory, was concerned primarily with counter-espionage, counter-intelligence СКАЧАТЬ