She shook her head abruptly. Don’t think about this. Don’t think about Min. Do the job. Collect secrets of your own.
“A problem?”
“No. Nothing.”
Arkady Pashkin nodded.
And keep your thoughts inside your head, she added. She didn’t like the way Pashkin looked at her, as if reading a script from her features.
They were in the lift, heading swiftly skyward. Their names had been recorded on entry, security protocols demanding a register be kept of who was in the building at all times. For the meeting with Webb, they’d be sidestepping this: Webb had supplied a keycard for the service lift which could be accessed from the underground car park. They planned to be above the City but under the radar. No one would know they were there.
Today, though, they’d been shepherded through the atrium, where a small rainforest now flourished. This, the eco-flash of the new hotel, had taken root in the last three weeks. Guests would be able to take walks in the undergrowth when they tired of the big city, and emerge for a drink and a sauna when they tired of nature. All around the greenery, ever-diminishing people pursued a variety of tasks integral to the grand opening of a world-class hotel, which was still a month off.
“In China,” Pashkin remarked, “buildings this size, even with all these fancy, these fancy …”
Losing his way, he snapped a word at Piotr, who replied, “Trappings.”
“All these fancy trappings, they go up inside a month.”
Marcus said, “I gather they’re not overburdened with health and safety.”
In the suite, Pashkin strode round the table as if measuring it. He spoke several times in Russian: short blunt sentences Louisa guessed were questions, because to each Piotr or Kyril made an even shorter response. Meanwhile, Marcus stationed himself by the door, arms folded. He’d been ops, she reminded herself; would have worked on bigger jobs than this before losing his nerve, if that’s what had happened. For now, he seemed unfazed by the views, and was mostly watching Piotr and Kyril.
Pashkin stood with thumbs hooked into his jacket pockets, lips pursed. He might have been a prospective tenant, looking for an angle to hang a price reduction on. Nodding at the cameras affixed above the doors, he said, “I assume they are off.”
“Yes.”
“And there are no recording devices of any sort here.”
“None.”
As if following a mental checklist, he then said, “What happens in an emergency?”
“There are stairwells,” Louisa said. “North and south walls.”
She pointed, to be clear. “The lifts freeze, and won’t take passengers. The wells are reinforced, and all the doors are fireproof, obviously. They unlock automatically.”
He nodded. What kind of emergency was he expecting, she wondered? But then, the whole point about emergencies was you didn’t expect them.
It was difficult, once you’d embarked on such a chain of thought, not to become entangled in its linked banalities.
Pashkin said, “That’s a lot of stairs.”
“It could be worse,” she said. “You could be coming up them.”
He laughed at that; a deep laugh from the heart of his burly frame. “That’s a good point. What kind of emergency might that be, that would have you running up seventy-seven flights of stairs?”
Whatever kind it was, she thought, if it wasn’t serious to start with, it certainly would be before you reached the top.
The pair of them, and the other two Russians, crossed to the window. Last time she’d been here, she’d been overwhelmed by the space on offer; all that sky overlooking all that city. It was beautiful, but stank of wealth, which was what had been weighing on her that day: her need for money, her need for a better place for herself and Min; a bigger slice of all that space. And Min had been there, of course, in touching distance. They didn’t have much money, and didn’t have enough space, but they’d had a hell of a lot more than she had now.
An air-ambulance swam into view, carving up the distance between east and west. She watched its silent progress; an orange dragonfly, oblivious to its own ridiculous shape.
“Maybe,” Pashkin said, “we should try going down the stairs, yes? To see how well we’d cope with an emergency.”
She turned. Marcus had moved to the table, was leaning over it, his palms resting on its surface. She had the sense of interrupted movement, but his expression was unreadable.
“I’ve a better idea,” she said. “Let’s use the lift.”
In the back of the cab Jackson Lamb opened the envelope Chapman had given him to find just two sheets of paper. He read them, then spent the rest of the journey so distracted he almost forgot to demand a receipt.
When he reached his office Standish was there, her cheeks tinted, as if she were the one who’d just climbed four flights of stairs. “Mr. B has a name,” she said.
“Oh god. You’ve been investigating.”
He shrugged off his coat and threw it. She caught it and folded it over one arm. “Andrei Chernitsky.” The words rolled off her tongue darkly. “He used a passport in that name when he flew out. It’s on the Park’s books.”
