Chapter Fourteen The Brother
The letter arrived on a Tuesday.
Anastasia was at her office in Shoreditch when her assistant brought the post in at eleven, as usual. Most of it was unremarkable: invoices, contracts, the occasional piece of junk mail. But one envelope was different.
It was handwritten. The script was Cyrillic; Ukrainian, not Russian, she noted automatically and the paper was heavy, expensive. The return address was a hotel in Geneva.
She didn’t recognise the handwriting.
But she recognised the name.
She opened the letter with steady hands. She had learned, long ago, not to let her reactions show and she gripped the paper hard to stop herself dropping it. She read it three times.
Then she set it down on her desk and stared at the wall for a very long time.
Viktor Morozov. Alive.
The reports at the time had been clear: killed in a building fire in the eastern provinces, pulling a child from the wreckage.
It had sounded like Viktor; not the heroism, but the theatricality of it, the story too neat, too cinematic to be entirely true.
But the reports had been confirmed through the usual channels and she had allowed herself to believe them because believing them meant she was free.
Two years. Two years of building a new life on the foundation of his absence. Two years of learning to sleep without listening for footsteps, to trust without calculating angles, to love without keeping one eye on the exit.
And now this letter, in his handwriting, from Geneva.
Viktor Morozov. Her handler. The man who had recruited her at sixteen, when she was nothing but talent and anger and shaped her into something useful.
For eight years she had worked for Ukrainian intelligence; cyber operations, mostly, though not exclusively and Viktor had been her constant throughout.
Her mentor. Her controller. The person who gave her missions and received her reports and knew more about her than anyone else on earth.
Two years ago, she had walked away. Built a new identity. Covered her tracks well enough that no one had found her.
Until now.
She didn’t tell James. She couldn’t have explained it. The relationship had no civilian equivalent, it existed in a world he had never seen and would never understand. For a week she said nothing and every night she read the letter again, parsing Viktor’s words for the threat beneath the affection.
You are my sister. It was a claim. A statement of ownership, how dare he, they were not family.
But then she remembered the mission, the forged papers establishing a family connection, created years ago for an operation that never happened.
It was a message, a reminder that he had leverage.
The question was what he intended to do with it.
On the morning of the fifteenth, she went to the Connaught.
???
The Connaught didn’t announce its luxury. It simply existed, in Mayfair, in a manner that suggested permanence. James’s kind of wealth, she thought, as she pushed through the revolving door.
She paused outside room 412, hand raised to knock and took a moment to compose herself.
She knocked.
The door opened almost immediately. He’d been waiting. Listening for her footsteps. That was Viktor; always positioning himself for advantage, even in the smallest interactions.
‘Anastasia.’ He stepped back to let her in. ‘You came.’
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
‘I thought you might try to ignore me. Hope I’d go away.’ He closed the door behind her. ‘But you were always too smart for that. You know I don’t go away.’
Viktor positioned himself by the window, silhouetted against the grey London light. He looked older than she remembered. Thinner. There were lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
But his eyes were the same. Cold. Calculating. Seeing everything.
‘You were dead,’ she said.
‘I was reported dead. There’s a difference.’
‘I mourned you.’
Something flickered across his face, surprise, perhaps, or something softer. ‘Did you?’
‘In my way. You shaped my entire adult life. You were the most constant presence I had. And then you were gone and I was…’ She stopped. Drew a breath. ‘I was free. For the first time since I was sixteen years old, I was free.’
‘And you built something with that freedom.’ Viktor gestured at the room, as if it represented everything she’d become. ‘A life. A business and an English fiancé with more money than sense.’
‘His name is James.’
‘I know his name. I know rather a lot about him, actually. The family money, the property portfolio, the career in insurance that consists mostly of lunching.’ Viktor’s smile didn’t reach his eyes.
‘He seems like a very nice man. Harmless. The kind of man who’s never had to fight for anything in his life. ’
‘He’s kind.’
‘I’m sure he is. Kind is easy when you’ve never been tested.’ Viktor moved away from the window and for a moment, Anastasia saw him as he had been a decade ago: prowling, predatory, always in motion. ‘I didn’t come here to discuss your fiancé’s virtues, Anastasia. I came here because I need help.’
‘Help.’
‘The financial kind.’ He said it without embarrassment, without the shame that most people would feel. Viktor had never been constrained by conventional emotions. ‘I’ve made some poor decisions. Accumulated some debts. The people I owe are not patient and they’re not forgiving.’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred thousand euros. To get me out of a hole.’
‘And you think I’m going to give you two hundred thousand euros?’
‘I think you’re going to consider it.’ He reached into his jacket pocket and produced an envelope, cream-coloured, expensive, unmarked. ‘Because I’m not asking for a gift. I’m offering a transaction.’
He set the envelope on the table between them. Anastasia looked at it but didn’t touch it.
‘Inside that envelope,’ Viktor said, ‘are copies of documents. Records from your time in the service. Communications you sent, operations you participated in. Actions you took.’
‘Those files are classified.’
‘They were classified and probably remain so, but here they are.’ His smile was almost apologetic. ‘When I left, I took what I could carry. Insurance, you might call it. I never knew when it might prove useful.’
‘You’re blackmailing me.’
‘I’m proposing an arrangement.’ Viktor’s tone was patient, reasonable; the tone he’d used countless times when explaining an operation, when walking her through the logic of a mission.
‘You help me with my immediate difficulties. In return, these documents stay where they are: in my possession, unused, forgotten. You continue with your English life, your fiancé, your future. Everyone’s happy. ’
‘And if I refuse?’
‘We both know that is not going to happen.’ His expression was regretful, almost apologetic. ‘You have too much to lose, Anastasia. You have fought too hard to let it go. I don’t want to do this, but I have limited options, very little time and I need to use what I have.’
‘You’d destroy everything I’ve built.’
‘I’d prefer not to. Truly.’ Viktor picked up the envelope, turned it over in his hands.
‘Anastasia Kovalenko, cybersecurity entrepreneur, is a compelling story. Anastasia Kovalenko, former intelligence operative with a classified past, well that’s a very different story.
The kind of story that makes investors nervous.
That raises questions. That casts shadows. ’
‘James doesn’t care about my past.’
‘James doesn’t know about your past. There’s a difference.
’ Viktor set the envelope back on the table.
‘And his mother, the formidable Elizabeth. I suspect she would care rather a lot. She’s already convinced you’re a gold-digger.
Imagine how she’d react if she learned you were something considerably more interesting. ’
Anastasia felt something cold settle in her chest. Not fear, exactly. Something older than fear. The strange numbness that came with realising that escape was an illusion, that the past had claws, that no matter how far you ran, someone was always waiting to drag you back.
‘I need time,’ she said. ‘To think.’
‘Of course. I’m not unreasonable.’ Viktor’s smile was almost warm. ‘Take a few days. Consider your options. But understand: the people I owe are not as patient as I am.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘It’s information. What you do with it is up to you.’
He walked her to the door. Before she left, he put a hand on her arm, gently, almost affectionately.
‘I’m sorry it’s come to this,’ he said. ‘I always hoped things would be different between us. That when we saw each other again, it would be as friends.’
‘We were never friends, Viktor. You were my handler. I was your asset. That’s all it ever was.’
‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it was more complicated than that.’ He released her arm. ‘Either way, I meant what I wrote in the letter. Whatever you’ve become, you’re still family to me. The only family I have left.’
???
Anastasia walked out of the room, down the corridor, into the lift. She walked through the lobby and out onto Mount Street and kept walking, past the expensive boutiques and the art galleries and the people who had no idea that the world contained places like the one she had just left.
She walked for an hour.
She could pay. Two hundred thousand euros was a lot of money, but she had money now.
The company was doing well, investors were circling and her personal accounts held more than she’d ever imagined possible when she was a sixteen-year-old in Kyiv.
She could pay, and Viktor would go away, and life could continue as if none of this had happened.
She knew that this was the most dangerous option of all, because blackmailers didn’t stop. They come back, again and again, until there was nothing left to take. She knew this, Viktor knew this. He’d taught her this.
But right now, she needed time. Time to think and plan. Time to find another way.
And time cost money.
She stopped walking. Looked up. Found herself outside a branch of Coutts; the bank of the old money, the quiet money, the kind of money that didn’t need to prove anything to anyone.
James’s kind of money.
She took out her phone and called him.
‘Darling!’ His voice was warm, delighted, utterly unsuspecting. ‘How was your meeting?’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Boring. Business things.’
‘You sound tired.’
‘I am tired.’ It wasn’t a lie. She was exhausted, exhausted by the weight of the past, by the effort of keeping it separate from the present, by the knowledge that no matter how far she ran, Viktor would always find her.
‘Come home,’ James said. ‘I’ll make tea. Or attempt to make tea. I’ve been practising actually. Watched a YouTube video and everything.’
This ridiculous man. This caring, oblivious, impossible man who thought making tea was an achievement and who loved her in a way that made no demands and asked no questions.
‘I’ll be there soon,’ she said.
She hung up. Stood on Mount Street in the grey London afternoon, surrounded by wealth and privilege and people who had never had to calculate the cost of survival.
Then she went home to James and smiled when he presented her with some overly strong tea and said nothing at all about the man in the hotel room who held her past in his hands.
*
Three days later, she transferred two hundred thousand euros to an account in Geneva.
Viktor sent a single text in response: Thank you. I knew you’d understand.
She deleted the message, blocked the number and went home to plan her wedding.