Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,20
the fund had been presented to him in person by Zorn’s right-hand man, Nicholas Orwell, the former British Prime Minister. They had met over dinner at the Sommelier’s Table, which sits in a private underground dining room in Mayfair, next to the wine cellars of the Connaught Hotel. Azarov had insisted that Alix should accompany him to the meal; whether to show her off to Orwell or him off to her, she had not been entirely sure.
Either way, it was the sort of occasion to which she had become accustomed since she had first arrived in Moscow almost a quarter of a century earlier, a gawky, unsophisticated, acutely shy teenager from the distant city of Perm. In those days she’d been anything but a beauty. She wore shapeless clothes and thick spectacles that failed to disguise the squint for which she had been mocked throughout her childhood and adolescence. Yet one woman, a KGB officer called Olga Zhukovskaya, had spotted Alix’s potential. Thanks to her, she had been transformed by a combination of surgery, diet and arduous training into a professional seductress. By the age of twenty-two she’d been able to converse in English as easily as in Russian; to charm a man into bed; to give him the erotic experience of a lifetime once he was there – and to extract whatever information her masters required from her pathetically grateful target.
Orwell, Alix concluded, was little different from the diplomats, politicians, military attachés and businessmen who had been the victims of the honeytrap operations on which she’d once been sent. For all his stellar political reputation, all his familiarity with the most elevated corridors of global power politics, he was now essentially a salesman. Over dinner he had come out with slick, persuasive patter about the genius of Malachi Zorn and the huge returns to be had from his fund, being careful never actually to say that profits were guaranteed, but making sure that vast returns were clearly implied. He had been well-briefed for the meeting, and displayed his knowledge well. He showed a keen, flattering interest in Azarov’s commercial prowess and took care to compliment Alix not just on her beauty, but also on the success of the Washington DC military and political consulting business she had inherited from her late husband, General Kurt Vermulen, and subsequently run herself.
‘This Nicholas Orwell is a fine man,’ Azarov had reflected, as the chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce took them back to his red-brick Queen-Anne-style mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, or, as London estate agents liked to call it, ‘Billionaires’ Row’. ‘He understands how the world works. For a socialist, he appreciates the value and power of money.’
‘His was not the kind of socialism that you and I learned when we were growing up,’ Alix remarked.
‘No, but it was the kind our masters practised. Make all the money you can, and let the masses fend for themselves. In any case, he is right about Zorn. That man is a magician. You know they say he cleared over ten billion in a single play against Lehman Brothers?’
Alix had placed her hand on Azarov’s forearm in a gentle gesture of restraint. ‘Are you sure that Zorn will work his magic on your behalf?’
‘Why would he not? The more money I make, the more he makes. Of course, there is bound to be some risk. We are playing for the highest possible stakes and a man should not pick up the dice if he has not got the balls to lose everything on a single roll. But I am confident that Zorn’s scheme will make us all big, big profits. I can feel it in my guts.’
Alix was not so sure about that. So far as she was concerned, Azarov’s guts were filled to the brim with the Connaught’s legendarily fine food and wine. If he was feeling anything, it was mostly likely to be indigestion. As for his brains, Azarov had a Russian’s head for alcohol, but even so, his judgement seemed less piercing than usual. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more Alix concluded that Orwell had not resembled her former targets so much as herself. He had been engaged on a mission of seduction. And it appeared to have been a success.
The following morning she called the Connaught and discovered that the hotel charged one thousand two hundred pounds for the Sommelier’s Table, exclusive of the wines, which must surely have cost far more than usual. Of course, such expenses were