| |
THEY TIED ORLOV’S HANDS and three men in their early thirties, plus Tebloev, took him to the first floor of the office compound. He was thrust into a room with a filing cabinet, a fax machine and a computer on which a screensaver was playing the Windows logo back and forth. Box files stood haphazardly on shelves and a desk backed onto a large single-paned window.
Tebloev waved his pistol. “Sit down, Colonel.”
Orlov did as he was told. The three men went into the filing cabinet and took out several coils of rope. They spent the next few minutes tying Orlov to the chair. They were in no hurry. They left when they’d done an expert job, and closed the door behind them.
“Comfortable?” Tebloev said.
“I’ve felt worse,” Orlov replied. “So what now?”
“Relax, no one’s going to hurt you. We’re your friends in here, all of us.”
Orlov looked down at his ropes. “Odd way to treat me, then.”
“Just because we like you, it doesn’t mean you reciprocate. We’re well enough acquainted with you to recognise that.”
“So what’s going on here?”
“We’re going to fix the British election.”
“A tall order. Why?”
Tebloev stood up and went to the window. “It’s quite complicated. I’ve never really been one for long explanations. We’d like you to join us, by the way.”
“I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’ll take that to imply you’re keeping an open mind.”
“I know enough about you to say no.”
Tebloev chuckled. “That, I doubt.”
“I know you killed Jonathan Hartley-Brown, Jilly Bestwick, Zane Cruse and a whole raft of press photographers. Innocent people.”
The door opened and a tall man with a cuboid jaw and hard eyes entered. Kramski himself, dressed in overalls, like Orlov. He rubbed oil off his hands with a cloth. He looked vacantly at the prisoner then turned to Tebloev. “Let me talk to the Colonel, Valentin. He’s not likely to get much sense out of you.”
“I’ve already told him I’m not one for long explanations,” Tebloev said.
“You may as well go back to London now. There’s only the driving left for us to do. We should be all finished up here by eleven.”
Tebloev got up with a sigh. “I suppose to divert suspicion from myself ... ”
Kramski shook his hand. “You’ve been very helpful throughout this whole thing. I’m not sure we could have done it without you. In fact, we couldn’t. Thank you again.”
Tebloev closed the door behind him. Orlov heard him descending the stairs.
Kramski sat down. “I don’t know whether Valentin told you we’d like you to join us? I don’t suppose that means much at present, of course. I’m sure you have very little idea who we are.”
“One can tell a tree by its fruits.”
“And every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire, eh? Are you a Christian, Colonel?”
“No.”
“A shame. It might have made my task easier. You’re a Muslim, I take it?”
“I’m an atheist.”
“That must have been a source of unease for your wife. She was a practising Sunni, wasn’t she?”
“Let’s cut the chit-chat.”
“I’m not one of those who hates Chechens, incidentally. Quite the contrary. The war’s over now, but it was a stupid waste of life provoked by the Kremlin.”
Orlov had no reply to this. He wasn’t even sure one was required.
“What do you think of Russia, Colonel?” Kramski asked.
Orlov paused. “I - ”
“You see, it’s quite difficult, isn’t it? Whenever I ask any decent Russian that question, the reaction’s always the same. There are lots of reasons to love it. Our history, our geography, our religions, our architecture, our traditions, our culture. But then there’s the Mafia and the Kremlin and the racism and the fact that it’s as good a place as any to fleece honest, decent people and set yourself up as a tin pot dictator.”
“And you propose to get rid of the bad and keep the good, do you?”
“There would nothing interesting or original about that. It’s the world’s oldest, most widespread ambition.”
“It’s the way you propose to do it then.”
“If you’d looked into the family trees of the men you killed in Constantine Slope’s house in Oxfordshire, you’d have emerged with a clue.”
“There never was a Constantine Slope, was there?”
“Oh, there was. Only he’s not called Constantine Slope. Someone had to coordinate all this and he’s about the right age. He’s left the country now, I believe.”
“What ‘clue’?”
“We’re all descended from the nobles of old Russia. Pre-1917 Russia.”
Orlov laughed. “I don’t believe it. You’re going to tell me you’ve found Anastasia, last of the Romanovs, aren’t you?”
Kramski grinned. “Pretty much, yes. Although it’s not quite that simple. You see, it doesn’t matter whether we have or not. What’s important is that we can get people to believe we have.”
“Why would you want to?”
“We’ll come to that later.”
“Presumably, to pull it off, you’ll have to control the state media.”
“On the contrary. We simply have to control the evidence.”
“Fabricate it, you mean.”
“There’s an old philosophical thought experiment, Colonel. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It says, Imagine the world came into existence ten seconds ago, complete with everything you see around you, including you and what you now think are your memories. How would you ever know?”
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.”
“The world could be full of manufactured facts, for all we know. A fabrication that no one knows is such and which no one can discover is such – for all practical purposes that’s the same thing as a hard fact, isn’t it?”
“It’s a pretty difficult stunt to pull off, though.”
“But of course you would think that, because you only ever heard of the failures. If you only ever hear of X in association with Y, after a while you come to think all X’s must be Y. But don’t you see? Where Y equals ‘unveiling’, the situation’s completely different.”
“I’m missing something here. History lessons when I was at school weren’t exactly impartial, but I’ve never yet found reason to revise the view that the Romanovs were a gang of dim-witted anti-semites.”
Kramski beamed. “I entirely agree.”
“So why would anyone want to resurrect them?”
“Not to give them any real power, that’s for sure.”
“Which is no answer.”
“It’s where the Church comes in.”
Orlov smiled. “So you want a theocracy now, as well.”
“We want a liberal democracy. But there has to be an absolute standard for public life. People may not adhere to it – that’s in the nature of democracy: people are people. But unless they know what that standard is, your democracy lacks justice. Which is precisely the problem with the present setup.”
“And the Church is going to provide that standard, is it?”
“‘The Lord said, “Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel”.’ The Orthodox Church has always required a monarch at its apex. It was designed that way from the days of the Romans. Ours would merely be constitutional.”
“I’ve still no idea why you want to rig the British general election.”
“You must have. The British have what we want, but they’re losing it. This is designed to restore it and spread a fashion for it across Europe. Prepare the ground.”
“I’m still in the dark, I’m afraid.”
“The British, Colonel Orlov, have lost their plumb line. Their politicians have their snouts in troughs of swindled expenses, their senior executives are given huge bonuses for failing, their journalists are either stymied by defamation laws to the point where Britain’s actually become a global centre for libel tourism or they’re hacking into people’s phones, they’ve flushed their manufacturing base down the toilet and what’s taken its place is a nothing run by armies of nobodies. Shall I go on?”
“And yet they’ve got a national church headed by a constitutional monarch.”
“Our purpose is simply to complete the process of disillusionment by ordinary people with their putative rulers. Once they discover the election’s been manipulated, their faith in parliament will finally crash. It will throw them back onto the one person in this country who’s widely considered beyond reproach.”
“Only a foreigner could think the British see the Queen as irreproachable.”
“Even only relatively speaking, she is.”
“There are lots of Republicans out there.”
“We’re not talking about what is, Colonel. We’re talking of what’s to come. Republicans come and go. By and large, they lack a plumb line.”
“Well, assuming you get your way, we’ll see, I suppose. Who’s going to be the monarch in your new Russia, by the way? Difficult post to fill, I’d imagine.”
“Haven’t you guessed? It’s why we thought you’d join us.”
“Surprise me.”
“Why, Vera Gruchov, of course.”
“Vera Gruchov?”
“We’ll be ‘going public’, as the phrase has it, in 2017, for obvious reasons. So there’s lots of time. Of course, she doesn’t know it yet. We’ve been grooming her for years.”
“I ... I see.”
“Think about it for a moment. It’s inconceivable that someone like her could have come this far under her own steam. All those complaints she’s made about what happened to poor Mikhail Beketov, all that railing against corruption in the Mossovet, all that standing up for Chechens and Nenets and Gypsies and speaking out against skinheads? No, without us to protect her, the FSB would have had her hide for new boots years ago. She’s entirely our creation.”
“And – that’s why she withdrew from the Mayoral election?”
“Simply a piece of theatre designed to fix her moral irreproachability in the minds of ordinary people. Yes, Tebloev had to take a bit of a fall, but he’s an idealist so he didn’t object. Of course, if we’d let her run, she’d have won by a landslide. That would have been bad news for us. The last thing we want is her getting her hands dirty with the day-to-day business of real politics.”
“The last thing, yes.”
“I can’t help feeling you’re disappointed with her.”
Orlov looked at the floor.
“I take it you’re not prepared to join us, even after all I’ve told you.”
Orlov shook his head. “No.”
Kramski shrugged. “I may have murdered a lot of people to get here, Colonel, but I’m not a natural killer. I’m a soldier just like you and I fight to defend the cause I serve. Whether you join us or not, I’m not going to kill you. None of us is. Do you know why? Because even if you were to tell Vera Gruchov all about us, she wouldn’t believe you. Secondly, I know that you will join us. Maybe not today, maybe not even next year. But there’s a long time to go till 2017. You will relent.”
He left the room and went downstairs. Outside, Orlov could hear the vans starting up. They started to peep their horns all together.
He assumed they were celebrating.
