Page 62
Story: The Oligarch’s Daughter
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.”
“Oh, very impressive,” the librarian said, smiling. “What did he study?”
“Chemical engineering. I was hoping to see his yearbook entry.”
“Come with me.”
The man led Paul up a set of stairs and through the stacks to the yearbook section. In short order, the librarian located and pulled off a high shelf a book entitled Scientific and Technical Bulletin of Bauman Moscow State Technical University 1969 . Which was presumably a yearbook. Paul thanked him, took the book over to a table, and began to look through it. The librarian had told him to come find him if he had any questions.
Paul skimmed through the book. How many of the Class of 1969 would still be alive after fifty-six years? he wondered. That would make them seventy-six, seventy-seven years old. Most of them were men, and the average lifespan for a Russian man—Paul had looked this up—was sixty-eight. But the classes were small, he saw. Around two hundred students.
Once he figured out how the book was laid out, he located Arkady Galkin. A small, square black-and-white photo showed a young man with a head of curly hair and an unsmiling face. No question it was Galkin.
Then he went through the faculty pages, looking for Ludmilla Sergeyevna, the surname Tatyana had mentioned, or Ludmilla S. Something.
There were five Ludmillas on the faculty. Paul jotted down their full names on a piece of scrap paper, the five Ludmillas. One was high in the administration, a majestic-looking blonde named Ludmilla Aleksandrovna Khramova. Too beautiful and too senior to be the right one. And besides, Tatyana had given the patronymic “Sergeyevna.”
Then there was was Ludmilla Artemevna Sidorova. And Ludmilla Maximovna Mikhailova.
And then Ludmilla Sergeyevna Zaitseva. A picture of a dark-haired young woman with very thick black-framed glasses.
That was his Ludmilla. The right name, the right look.
On one of the computer terminals in the Reference Room, he opened a Russian search engine and entered her name. It popped up with a Moscow address: 322 Kedrova Street in the Chertanovo District. He entered her address and phone number into the iPhone the FBI had given him.
If he was able to find out who she was and what her role was in Arkady Galkin’s rise, he would then own information the FBI didn’t.
And information was power.
Table of Contents
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