Page 93 of The Oligarch's Daughter

His ears remained alert for Galkin’s return.

He turned the brass clasp lock and opened the flap. The bag was stuffed with papers. He saw the inside pocket he’d been instructed to look for. Pulled the tracker out of his right pocket, quickly peeled off the paper on the adhesive, and holding the tracker carefully, stuck his hand into the intended briefcase pocket.

And he listened . . . because if Galkin returned right now and saw him with his hand inside the briefcase, there would be no way out. No way to explain what he was doing. Nothing he could think of quickly, anyway.

Swiftly now, he slipped the tracker into the bottom pocket, sticky side out so it would adhere to the inside of the pocket. He patted the tracker into place.

He closed the flap of the briefcase, turned the clasp, and looked up.

Arkady was standing there watching him.

It had been an unexpectedly quick pee.

Paul’s heart rocketed. He held up the briefcase, his face flushed. “What is this, hand-rubbed calfskin?” he croaked with an admiring smile.

Galkin, smiled, seemingly flattered, and looked as if he were about to say something when the doorbell rang. It was nine o’clock exactly. The Russian turned to let Berzin in.

“Good morning,” Berzin said.

Paul stood up as Berzin entered the suite. The chief of security eyed him suspiciously. He, too, was wearing a suit. Paul wondered where the two men were going, and if they were going together.

62

Tatyana was just waking up when Paul returned to their suite, her sleep mask pushed up into her nest of tangled hair. “Where were you?” she asked.

“Meeting with your dad,” he said. Fifteen minutes after planting it, he was still anxious about the tracker. If it were discovered, he’d be the obvious culprit. Galkin had seen him with the briefcase, but did he suspect anything? And maybe Berzin would search his boss’s briefcase. Paul didn’t want to think about that possibility.

“When do you get finished with meetings today? Lunchtime again?”

“Probably,” he said.

“Mama wants to see you again. Lunch or dinner today. Tomorrow we’re leaving.”

Paul, however, had something to do this afternoon. He couldn’t use the line again about just being a tourist. That wasn’t a good enough excuse to get out of lunch or dinner. So he said, “I have to leave the afternoon open for a business lunch and all that. Let me join you two for dinner.”

While she was in the shower, he took out the second iPhone from his suitcase, switched it on and opened Signal.It’s done, he messaged Aaron.

Congratulations, came the reply a minute later.Better late than never.

*

After another series of pointless-seeming morning meetings with more potential clients, there was indeed a business lunch at a two-Michelin-starred restaurant called Twins Garden, run by twin brothers. Farm-to-table modern cuisine, dishes that resembled Magritte paintings, and an exhaustive wine list. After lunch, his two colleagues asked Paul to join them on a tour of the Kremlin Armoury, the Imperial Treasury, and the Diamond Fund, which housed the crown jewels, the ivory throne of Ivan the Terrible, and the Kremlin’s collection of ten Fabergé eggs.

But he turned them down, claiming he was going to join his wife. A plausible excuse.

In truth, he wanted to find the woman who had made Arkady Galkin rich.

*

The closest Metro stop was Mayakovskaya, named for the famous Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The entrance was half a block away, just past a KFC. An escalator took him deep underground. He’d read about how deeply into the ground the Moscow Metro system was dug: deep enough for its stations to serve as bomb shelters for the citizens during wartime. But he wasn’t prepared for how stunning it was. Chandeliers and marble columns, vaulted ceilings with vibrant mosaics depicting scenes of Soviet life and glorifying the past achievements of the Soviet Union. Soft lighting created a warm glow.

A few other people entered the station when he did, but they didn’t seem to be following him, at least as far as he could tell. At a ticket machine, he saw that a single trip cost 57 rubles. He bought a day ticket for 265 rubles, about 3 dollars. The signs were in both Russian and English, fortunately. After a moment’s confusion, he saw that he needed to take the brown line, Koltsevaya. After several changes, he exited at the Baumanskaya station. This one was far plainer, though it did have a mural of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin looking heroic.

Paul took the steep escalator up to the street and saw before him a huge, beige wedding cake of a building built in the Stalinist Empire style: the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, from which Arkady Galkin had graduated over fifty years before. The entrance to the building was red stone with heavy columns bedecked with statues of both ancient gods and renowned Soviet scientists. Paul entered and, after a while, found on the first floor the library. In his crude Russian, he said to the first librarian he encountered, a small man with a thick thatch of prematurely gray hair, “I am looking for a yearbook for 1969.”

The man replied quickly in Russian with a scowl, seeming to correct him. Then he switched to English. “Are you student? Tourist?”

“My father graduated from Bauman in 1969.”

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