Chapter Thirteen The Handler
Viktor Morozov had a problem and while I didn’t know the details then, it all came out later.
He had several problems, if he was being honest with himself, which he rarely was. Honesty was a luxury he had abandoned in his teens, along with sentimentality, hesitation and the belief that the world owed him anything other than what he could take from it.
But the most pressing problem, the one that had kept him awake for three nights now in his suite at the Krasnaya Zvezda, was money.
Specifically, the lack of it. More specifically, the hundreds of thousands of euros he owed to people who did not accept apologies, payment plans, or excuses about bad luck at the tables.
Viktor stood at the window of his suite, looking out over the Moscow skyline, the towers of the financial district glittering in the winter darkness, the old Soviet buildings squatting between them like disapproving grandmothers and contemplated the irony of his situation.
The Krasnaya Zvezda’s casino sat twelve floors below him, all crystal chandeliers, green baize and the particular hush of serious money being won and lost. It looked exactly as it had looked two nights ago when he had walked in with a hundred thousand euros he couldn’t afford to lose and walked out with nothing but a marker he couldn’t cover and a very polite suggestion from the floor manager that he might want to settle his account before returning.
The suggestion had not been as polite as it appeared. Viktor understood subtext. He had built a career on subtext.
Behind him, his phone buzzed. He didn’t need to look at it to know who it was.
The same people had been calling every few hours since yesterday, their messages growing progressively less cordial.
First the polite reminder. Then the firm request. Then the observation that Moscow was a large city but that certain debts had a way of finding people regardless.
Viktor was not afraid of them, exactly. He had faced worse than debt collectors in his time.
But he was aware that his current situation was…
delicate. He was operating without institutional backing, without the resources he had once commanded, without the safety net that came from being useful to powerful people.
He was, for the first time in his professional life, genuinely on his own.
And he was running out of options.
???
Viktor Morozov had not always been a man with gambling debts and dwindling prospects.
Once, not so long ago, he had been something considerably more formidable. A handler for Ukrainian intelligence. A man who recruited and ran assets, who turned talented young people into tools of the state, who understood how to find weakness and exploit it.
He had been good at his job. Very good. Good enough that his superiors overlooked certain tendencies (the gambling, the women, the occasional creative interpretation of expense accounts) because his results justified the indulgence.
And then the war had come and everything had changed.
Not immediately. In the first months, Viktor had been busier than ever, running operations, coordinating assets, doing the work that needed to be done.
But as the conflict dragged on, as the institutional structures buckled under pressure, as certain questions began to be asked about certain funds that had gone certain places, Viktor had seen the writing on the wall.
The war was not without its advantages and it was a morning’s work for him to erase all his problems. He officially ‘killed’ himself off while saving a small girl and her dog (he could not resist the additional detail) from a raging fire, before being heroically engulfed in the flames.
The death was reported. The obituaries were brief but respectful.
The people after him as well as Anastasia, wherever she was, would have seen them, or heard through the networks that still carried such news.
They would believe he was dead. He had made sure of that.
With his past erased, he had fled with what he could carry: some money, some valuable documents and some even more valuable leverage. He decided to reinvent himself as a consultant.
A consultant in what, exactly, he left deliberately vague. Efficiency. Strategy. Problem-solving. The kind of words that meant everything and nothing, that allowed him to move through certain circles without too many questions being asked.
It had worked, for a while. There was always demand for a man with his skills, his connections, his willingness to operate in the spaces between legal and illegal, moral and immoral. He had made money. He had lost money. He had made it again.
But the casino had been a mistake. A moment of weakness, of boredom, of the particular madness that sometimes seized him when he felt the world slipping out of his control. He had sat down at the baccarat table with a hundred thousand euros and a certainty that his luck was about to turn.
But it hadn’t, it just got worse.
And now he stood at a window in Moscow, watching the city that had swallowed his money, trying to figure out how to solve a problem that seemed, for the first time in years, genuinely unsolvable.
???
The solution, when it came, arrived in the form of a newspaper.
Viktor was eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant; one of the few remaining luxuries he could still afford, at least until the hotel presented him with a bill he couldn’t pay, when a waiter brought the morning papers.
There was a selection of international editions, as befitted a hotel that catered to wealthy foreigners: The Financial Times.
Le Monde and for reasons Viktor had never understood, The Times of London.
He almost didn’t pick it up. He had no particular interest in British affairs, no reason to care what was happening in a country he had visited only twice in his life. But something caught his eye: a familiar face in the society pages, partially visible beneath the fold.
He unfolded the paper.
And there she was.
The photograph showed a couple at what appeared to be an engagement party. The man was tall, English-looking, unremarkable. The kind of pleasant, wealthy face that populated the upper reaches of British society. But Viktor barely noticed him. His eyes were locked on the woman beside him.
Anastasia.
She was smiling, genuinely smiling, not the careful blank professional expression he remembered.
She was wearing something elegant and expensive and looking at the man beside her with an expression that Viktor couldn’t quite read.
The caption identified them: James Ashworth-Pemberton and his fiancée, Anastasia Kovalenko, at a drinks party celebrating their recent engagement.
Viktor stared at the photograph for a long time.
She had changed. Of course she had changed.
Two years was a long time, especially two years spent building a new life, a new identity and becoming a new self.
But underneath the polish, underneath the expensive dress and the genuine smile, Viktor could still see the woman he had recruited at sixteen.
The woman he had shaped, trained, controlled.
The woman who had walked away from him without permission.
That was the part that still burned, even now.
Not the loss of an asset, assets came and went, were used, discarded and replaced when necessary, but the loss of her.
Anastasia, who had been his masterpiece.
Anastasia, who had understood him in ways that no one else ever had.
Anastasia, who had looked at him wearily one day and said, simply, ‘I’m done,’ and then disappeared into the chaos of war and never looked back.
He had tried to find her, in those first months. Called in favours, activated contacts, followed trails that led nowhere. She had vanished completely, as thoroughly as if she had never existed, which told him, more than anything else could have, just how much she had learned from him.
You couldn’t disappear like that unless you knew exactly how disappearing worked. Unless someone had taught you.
He had taught her.
And now, two years later, here she was. In the Times of London. Engaged to an Englishman. Looking, by all appearances, like she had built exactly the life she wanted.
Viktor looked at the photograph for a long time.
Then he began to research.
???
It took him three days to build a complete picture.
Anastasia Kovalenko, founder and CEO of Sntnl.ai, a cybersecurity startup based in London.
The company was small but growing, with a handful of significant clients and a technology platform that had attracted attention from serious investors.
She had built it from nothing in less than two years, an impressive achievement, though Viktor knew better than anyone how quickly she could work when properly motivated.
She had money now. Not enormous wealth, but enough to live well, to dress well, to move in the circles where money collected.
Her company was valued in the low millions.
If it continued to grow, if the investors currently circling decided to write cheques, that valuation could increase significantly.
The Englishman in the photograph was named James Ashworth-Pemberton.
Viktor spent an afternoon researching him and came away with a very clear picture: old money, minimal ambition, the kind of comfortable, cushioned existence that Viktor had always despised.
He worked in insurance, apparently, though what he actually did remained unclear.
He had a flat in Chelsea, a boat in Cap Ferrat and access to a chateau in France. He was, by all accounts, harmless.
He was also, according to the announcement in the Times, now engaged to Anastasia Kovalenko.
This was interesting.
Viktor understood Anastasia. He had spent years studying her, shaping her, learning how she thought and what she wanted and what she feared.
She was not the kind of woman who married harmless men with inherited money.
She was not the kind of woman who married anyone, really: she had always been too focused, too driven, too aware of the ways that attachment could be used as leverage.
And yet here she was, smiling in a newspaper photograph, a ring presumably on her finger, looking at this James with an expression that Viktor couldn’t quite read.
It was, Viktor thought, an opportunity.
???
He began to plan.
Anastasia had built a new life, both business and personal. She had walked away from everything she had been and become someone new: someone legitimate, clean and with a future that didn’t involve dead drops and encrypted communications and the constant low-level fear of exposure.
Viktor could take all of that away.
He still had documents from her time in the service.
Records of operations she had participated in, communications she had sent, actions she had taken.
Nothing that would interest law enforcement, necessarily (her work had been for the Ukrainian government, after all and the current political climate made such things complicated) but plenty that would interest journalists, competitors, the investors currently considering whether to fund her company.
Anastasia Kovalenko, cybersecurity entrepreneur, was a compelling story. Anastasia Kovalenko, former intelligence operative with a classified past, was a very different story. The kind of story that made investors nervous, that raised questions, that cast shadows.
He could destroy her. He could burn down everything she had built with a few well-placed revelations.
But that would be wasteful and Viktor had never been wasteful.
Better to use the leverage. Better to remind her that the past didn’t disappear just because you walked away from it. Better to make her understand that he was still here, still watching, still capable of reaching into her new life whenever he chose.
And if she wanted to keep that new life she would have to pay for it.
The question was: how much could he extract?
The Englishman was wealthy. Very wealthy, by Viktor’s research.
Old money, the kind that came with trusts and estates and the peculiar British mechanisms for preserving wealth across generations.
The flat in Chelsea alone was worth several million pounds.
The family holdings, the chateau, the boat, the investments were worth considerably more.
And James Ashworth-Pemberton was, by all accounts, completely and utterly in love with Anastasia Kovalenko.
Viktor could see it in the photograph. The way James looked at her, the way he positioned himself near her, the type of attention that men displayed when they had found something they valued and were terrified of losing it.
James was not a complicated man. His emotions were written on his face for anyone who cared to read them.
When they married, Anastasia would become the wife of a very wealthy man, something else that he could surely ruin if she did not want to pay.
???
The letter arrived at Anastasia’s London office three weeks later.
It was handwritten, in Ukrainian, on expensive paper. The return address was a hotel in Geneva, neutral territory, carefully chosen. The contents were brief:
Anastasia,
I know we haven’t spoken in a long time. I know you have reasons for keeping your distance. But I’ve been thinking about family lately, about the past, about what we owe to the people who shaped us.
I’m going to be in London next month. I would very much like to see you. Just coffee. Just a conversation. After everything that’s happened, I think I am owed at least that much.
I’ll be at the Connaught on the 15th. Room 412. I’ll wait until noon. After that, I’ll understand that you’ve made your choice.
Whatever you’ve become, whoever you are now, our pasts are entwined. That doesn’t change. You are my sister, my only family. We should not be alone.
Viktor
He had debated the tone for hours. Too warm and she would be suspicious.
Too cold and she would ignore it. The balance had to be perfect: the message of a brother who had been hurt by her disappearance but understood her reasons, who wanted reconciliation without demanding it.
The Connaught was a calculated choice: expensive enough to signal that he was not desperate, English enough to suggest he understood her new world, discreet enough that she would feel safe meeting him there.
He didn’t expect her to respond. Not immediately. Anastasia was too smart, too careful, too aware of how these things worked. She would research, verify and try to determine what he wanted and whether it posed a threat.
But she wouldn’t be able to resist entirely, she wasn’t that foolish.
Viktor settled back in his chair and waited.