“That’s impressive.”
“Money opens doors, and trust me, whatever other motives they have, Perry and Karasek are chasing the money—yours, mine, and all the money in those other accounts.”
Finn shook his head. “I don’t believe it. It just seems too crazy.”
“You don’t want to believe it, because you don’t want to believe that people could carry out such crimes for any amount of money, but you and I both know of people who’ve carried out far worse for loose change.”
“True enough. I could use a number for Karasek if you have one.”
“I’m sure you could. I’ll get it and send it to you.”
“Thanks. I’ll use it wisely.”
Alex nodded, but said, “Isn’t there a famous phrase about Béziers—something about killing them all?”
Finn had met a few other Russian oligarchs in his time, and he bought Alex’s robber-baron analogy because they were smart people as a rule, and serious, but Aleksandr Naumenko was still the only one he could imagine showing this level of interest in thirteenth-century history.
“That’s it. The Abbot of C?teaux was asked how they’d recognize the two hundred heretics among twenty thousand townspeople. He’s said to have answered, ‘Kill them all, God will know his own.’”
Alex smiled appreciatively, absorbing words that had managed to maintain their power over eight hundred years—their power and their perverse wisdom and all their compelling horror. It was a ruthlessness of the kind he’d often used in his own life, and Alex’s message seemed to be clear, that the real wisdom for Finn now would be to show a little bit of that ruthlessness himself.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Finn arrived at The Berkeley a little after eight, sat in the bar and had a drink, checking out who else was in there, out of habit rather than because he believed Louisa would respond to his sudden appearance by putting people on the ground. She was too relaxed for those games, too in control.
At eight thirty he ordered another drink, but then went to the front desk and said, “I have an important message for someone dining in the Marcus Wareing restaurant, sitting at a table in the name of Adams. She’s a Miss Whitman. Could you let her know that her nephew has arrived and is in the bar?”
The concierge had been scribbling on a notepad the whole time he’d been speaking, and he smiled now and said, “Of course, sir, I’ll do that right away.”
Finn strolled back to the bar and sat down. A moment later, his second drink arrived. He was looking forward to seeing Louisa again, and oddly, he found himself nervous, too, as if he were about to face an appraisal. It took some effort to remind himself that he no longer answered to Louisa, nor to anyone else.
He waited ten minutes. If she’d been mid-course, she wasn’t the kind of person to stop just so that she could come out and chat with him. It summed up one of the things he’d always liked about her, that she’d never allowed a job that could be socially cauterizing to limit her enjoyment of life.
When she did appear, it took him by surprise. Someone left the bar, briefly distracting him, and when he turned back Louisa was almost on him. She looked younger than he remembered her, less matronly, a lot less matronly.
He imagined she was only in her mid-fifties, an age gap that had seemed huge when he’d been in his twenties but was now marginal, as if he’d grown older but she hadn’t. What he saw in front of him was a bookish, attractive woman in clothes that could pass either for business or for “ladies who lunch.”
He stood and she said, “Oh, do sit down, Finn. How lovely to see you.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Nephew! Younger brother would have been more appropriate.”
The barman started to head over as she sat down, but she whisked him away again with a hand gesture that managed somehow to be both authoritative and friendly.
“Thanks for agreeing to see me, Louisa.” He thought of mentioning the irony of Aleksandr Naumenko being able to set up a meeting with her whilst Finn didn’t even have her number, but he saw how that conversation would go, how the world had changed, how Naumenko was now a useful ally. “I’ll get straight to the point. There’s a company called BGS—Brac Global Systems—and for the last two years it’s had me under surveillance. I know from my own sources that it’s also very interested in the events surrounding Sparrowhawk. I know that Ed Perry heads this organization and that Karasek is, at the very least, a client.”