The Fulcrum

Chapter One: The Room Above the Bookshop

Rain came off the Bayswater Road in long grey sheets, and Arkady Morosov watched it from a window that had not been cleaned in a decade.

Below him, the bookshop was closing. He could hear the owner dragging the pavement trolley of secondhand paperbacks inside, the wheels catching on the doorframe, the same complaint every evening at six. Morosov had rented the flat above for eleven weeks. It had a gas fire that hissed, a kitchen that smelled of other people's cooking, and a bathroom with a window that did not lock. Two years ago he had owned a house on Cap Ferrat with a lift down to the sea.

He had owned other things too. Four gas-processing plants in the Yamal. A Gulfstream. Twelve hundred kilometres of pipeline steel. A president's private telephone number.

All of it gone in nine days last spring, after he had put money behind the wrong general, and the general had lost, and the men who did not lose had made a list.

Someone knocked twice, paused, knocked once.

Morosov let them in himself. He had dismissed his last bodyguard in January because he could no longer pay him and could no longer trust him, and the two facts were related.

Three men came up the narrow stairs.

The first was Colonel Sergei Nechayev, twenty-eight years in state security, retired in disgrace, wearing a raincoat that was too good for a man with no pension. He shook the water from his shoulders like a dog and said nothing.

The second was German: Bernhard Kleist, sixty-one, third-generation owner of a valve and compressor works in Duisburg that had shipped equipment east for forty years and now shipped nothing anywhere. He had the flat, pale, offended face of a man who had never once considered that the law might apply to him personally.

The third came up last and closed the door and checked the corridor before he did it. Miloš Draganić. Fifty-four. Once a section chief in Belgrade's foreign intelligence service, now formally a private security consultant and informally the reason four people in three countries had gone missing in the past decade. He had a broad, calm face and the habit of standing where he could see both the window and the door.

Morosov poured whisky into four glasses because it was expected. Only Draganić drank.

"Say it," Morosov said.

Nechayev laid a phone on the table, face down, battery removed. "April the fourteenth. Strasbourg. The European Energy Security Summit. Riefenstahl gives the keynote at eleven-forty in the morning."

"I read newspapers, Colonel."

"Then you know what's in the speech." Nechayev's voice was hoarse from thirty years of cigarettes. "Not sanctions. Sanctions expire, sanctions get traded away. This is architecture. Permanent exclusion mechanisms written into the union's energy law, ratified by twenty-seven parliaments, with an enforcement secretariat in Brussels that has subpoena power over any bank touching euros. Once it exists, nobody has to be brave again. It runs by itself. Forever."

Kleist spoke for the first time. "My grandfather built that company out of a bombed shed. I have laid off four hundred and ten people in fourteen months." His hands were shaking slightly, and Morosov noted it, and understood that this man had come here out of humiliation rather than greed, which made him more reliable and more dangerous.

"And Riefenstahl personally?" Morosov asked. "Chancellors are replaceable. There will be another one."

"Not like him." Nechayev shook his head. "He built the coalition with his own hands. He telephones prime ministers at midnight. The Poles trust him, the Italians fear him, the French need him. Take him out of the room and the room falls apart. His own party is split three ways behind his back. There is no second Riefenstahl."

Draganić set down his glass. "He is the fulcrum," he said mildly. "Every lever needs one. Move the fulcrum and the lever is only a stick."

The rain thickened against the glass. Down on the street a bus sighed to a stop and pulled away.

Morosov walked once around the small room. He was sixty-three years old. He had a Cypriot passport that would not survive serious examination, an indictment waiting in two jurisdictions, and eleven million euros left in places that had not yet been found. He had spent his life buying leverage and had woken up one morning with none.

"How much," he said.

"Four million euros," Draganić said. "Two on contract, two on completion. Cyprus, then Dubai, then three trade-finance shells in Sharjah that invoice each other for cable drums. The money will look like a dispute over marine insurance."

"And the man?"

"There is a man." Draganić's expression did not change. "He has no name that means anything. I have used him twice. Once in Basra, once in a place I will not say. He is German-Danish, ex-Bundeswehr, long-range. He is not political and he does not drink and he has never in eleven years been photographed by anyone who intended to photograph him."

"He will do a head of government?"

"He will do a mathematics problem," Draganić said. "That is all it is to him. Distance, wind, glass, exit. If the mathematics fails he simply doesn't fire, and we lose the fee, and nobody ever learns we existed. That is the value of him. He does not care whether the man in the crosshairs is a chancellor or a customs officer."

Kleist said, quickly, as if to get it over with, "There must be no connection to any of us. No connection at all."

"There will be four cut-outs between this room and his hand," Draganić said. "He does not know your name, Herr Kleist. He does not know mine. He will never know Mr Morosov's. He deals with a broker in Istanbul who deals with a lawyer in Nicosia who deals with a company that exists on a filing cabinet in Larnaca."

Morosov stopped by the window. Across the road, in a lit first-floor window, a woman was setting a table for three. He watched her fold napkins. He thought about the general who had lost, whose family had been photographed leaving a courthouse in November.

"You understand," he said, without turning, "that if this fails, I will not go to prison. They will not permit it. Nor will the people you left behind permit it for you, Colonel."

"I understand," Nechayev said.

"And if it succeeds, we do not get our money back. We do not get our companies back. We get chaos, and in chaos, doors reopen."

"Yes," said Kleist, too eagerly.

Morosov turned. He looked at each of them, and he thought: three men in a rented room with rain on the window, deciding to kill the most guarded man in Europe. It should have felt enormous. It felt, instead, like signing a mediocre deal in a bad year.

"Send the first two million on Thursday," he said. "And do not use that word again in front of me."

"Which word?" Draganić asked.

"Fulcrum," Morosov said. "Names travel. Everything else can be denied. Names travel."

But it was already too late, because Draganić liked the word, and men like Draganić could never resist a name that made the thing they were doing sound like engineering.