'It is. I am.'

'Do you have a card?'

'No. They don't let me have cards. Why?'

'Would you like to have a drink with me some time?'

Lek look perplexed, and took his gla.s.ses off to squint at her. 'Are you asking me out? On a date?'

'I don't know. Maybe.'

'Shouldn't I be the one asking for your number?'

'They don't let me have cards either. Besides, I don't give my number out to anybody. Company policy, I'm afraid. You'd have to ask my boss.'

If the penny dropped for Lek at that moment, Crystal didn't notice any change in his expression. Instead, he continued to look at her, not in the way that all men had looked at her since she was twelve, but rather like a young boy trying to work out a Rubik's Dodecca for the first time.

'How will we arrange to see each other again then?' he asked innocently.

'I'll find you, Lek Gorski,' she said enigmatically, before disappearing into the crowd.

Lek smiled at this strange turn of events, took another napkin off the stack, pulled out his pen and began writing chemical symbols all over it, pretending nothing had happened.

Crystal did indeed find Lek. She had connections. It didn't even come as a surprise to her to find out that there were so few degrees of separation between her boss and his. In this city, where crime had its roots deep in business and pleasure, the same names cropped up time and again. And so it was that Lek and Crystal began seeing each other, meeting furtively on her free evenings to drink gin and smoke shisha and chat before electricurfew and occasionally after it.

A strange relationship blossomed between the two of them, a love affair founded on loneliness and a shared understanding of the difficulty of the other's life. Lek found he could forget the crime and violence surrounding his work when he was with Crystal, and for her part, she felt herself drawn to a man who was happy to simply be in her company, a man who had no expectations of her, a man for whom she didn't have to put on a show. For the first time in her life, Crystal felt she could truly be herself. She saw a kindred spirit in the lost scientist, trapped in a world of shadows and deceit which had been drawn around him against his will. She talked about her own background, growing up in the Lewisham ghetto, tears spilling down her cheeks when she spoke of her abusive father who, high on crack one January afternoon in The Shangri-La, Danny Calabas' day-club, had gambled her life away on a game of stab-finger with the owner. Since then, she had only known the way of the club-geisha, dancing inside a bulletproof plexigla.s.s cage for money she never saw, and occasionally taking clients upstairs to the cells of The Swinging Hammocks if Calabas insisted, once they had been cleared for disease by the medi-bouncers on the door.

In spite of it all, Crystal remained sanguine about her sad existence, sure that one day she would make it out alive. 'I can't stay pretty forever Lek,' she said, 'they'll just have to put me out to pasture sooner or later'. The truth was, she was more than pretty, with dark almond eyes and cocoa-skin, full lips and curves in all the right places. What's more, it was all hers, she was still 100% human: there wasn't a trace of gazelle, flamingo or Siamese cat attached to her cells. She shunned the beautox clinics and UV salons, relying instead on her natural charms. Although Lek was clearly attracted to her - she could tell - he maintained a certain distance. In the compulsory darkness after sundown, in the solitude of her tiny flat, she misconstrued the way he may have looked at her, and twisted his words, convincing herself that he only met her out of pity, that he believed she was damaged goods, that he would never love her, and she cried at the thought.

Crystal buried these feelings, and she and Lek continued to meet privately. They visited the National Gallery's Forgotten Facebook Exhibition and stared at photos of people partying at the start of the Millennium, blissfully unaware of the superbugs, the energy crisis, the gang violence in their midst. They gorged themselves on Retox meat-sticks and full-fat wheatgerm shakes, while playing in the gas-jets and the sudoku stones in Leicester Square. They iceaskated on the Thames in the height of summer, when Smegcorp closed off an entire section of the river for a marketing campaign and froze it solid. For a time, Lek and Crystal lived the London life instead of merely existing.

And then, one afternoon, Lek didn't show up for their date. He left her standing at the Centrepoint Retro Roller Rink for half an hour, until she grew tired of waiting and drove home. The thoughts she had fought so hard to suppress over the weeks bubbled to the surface again. She never gave him the opportunity to explain himself and just like the fresh cut on her finger, she drew the pain into herself and tried to ignore it.

Hearing his name again after so long brought those bitter memories flooding back. The man on the phone had seemed to be telling her to expect a visit from Lek. But how could he know? And why now?

The sound of the doorbell shook her out of her reverie.

Chapter 10.

A riverboat cruised along the Thames, green water streaming from its paddles, as it cut its way through the algae and weeds. From his office high above the Square Mile, Pechev could just about make out the tourists on the top-deck taking digisnaps of the faded grandeur of London. In spite of all the bad press, Pechev didn't believe the city had fallen to ruin in the time that he had lived there a quite the opposite a he saw a city that had evolved, adapting to the changing flow of the socio-economic climate, the environmentalist movement and the unforeseen shifts in its weather system. He for one enjoyed watching the sun setting through the Icelandic volcanic ash and the methane clouds over Hounslow Industrial Plant. He enjoyed the buzz of a city that teetered on the cliff edge of civilisation, fighting to retain its standing as a world leader in the arts and commerce, education and entertainment, fashion, finance, and of course tourism. In the cool of his office, he watched the city below him sweltering in the early afternoon heat, and settled down in his chair to take his siesta. He picked up the phone on his desk and asked his PA to cancel his meeting with a prominent lobbyist a Pechev had other matters to think about than gambling laws. He leaned back and tucked his disfigured hand inside his jacket, to quell the itch in the stub of his phantom finger. He found it bizarre that after so many years, he still had the sensation that his middle finger was attached and still functioning. You carry your past with you, whether you want to or not, he thought to himself.

Lyubomir Pechev was born Aloysha Petrov in Kalinovka, in the same wooden house on the banks of the Volga where his father, and his father before him, had also been born. It seemed a life struggling against hardship had already been mapped out for him when his grandmother was forced to use a kitchen knife to cut the umbilical cord strangling his tiny blue body as he came into the world. 1986 was an historical year for Mother Russia as Salyut was replaced by Mir, but in the decade that followed, the crumbling of the country's economic and political structures wreaked havoc on the Union as a whole. Unlike the annual spring snow-melt in the Urals, which brought mountain water flooding into the river valley where the tiny fishing village of Kalinovka stood, it would take many years before that change filtered down from the high peaks of Moscow and Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia's capitals of business and commerce. Life in Kalinovka continued in the same way as it had since the time of the Empire and long before the Revolution, unchanged in years, as its population which never topped two thousand continued to eke out its survival from its fishing port and the pota.s.sium mines in nearby Shelanga. Aloysha's father worked in the eel pickling factory, his mother cleaned the Church of St Stepan every Thursday morning to bring in a few extra roubles towards their meagre existence. It was a.s.sumed that Aloysha would find a similar position when his time came, although his father had grand hopes for his only child becoming a doctor, a solicitor, or a man of business in a city somewhere far from the smell of fish, pota.s.sium processing, and wood smoke. It seemed that Aloysha had plans to break the mould too, for by the time his was two years of age he was able to read lines from the few books his family owned and scribble his own name in Cyrillic. While his father worked long shifts to keep the family afloat, Aloysha's mother schooled her son with pa.s.sages from the Bible and with the permission of the parish priest, taught him the basics of musical progression on the church organ for an hour every week after she had finished cleaning the steps of St Stepan's. By the age of four, in spite, or perhaps because of his impoverished upbringing, Aloysha Petrov could read and write like a boy of ten, and was able to play hymns and those pieces of cla.s.sical music his tiny hand-span allowed, like a virtuoso. It was clear that he was a prodigy. His father had already begun to make enquiries in the neighbouring towns about furthering his education, since Kalinovka was obviously too small a pond for a fish of his size. Late into the night while their son slept, Petr and Tishka would talk about his future and their finances, and spend hours counting the roubles saved in the old coffee pot, taking a few coins from one pile to put on another.

In the end, it was all academic. n.o.body could have foreseen what happened to young Aloysha. One freezing afternoon in November as he made his way home from school through the streets of Kalinovka, hand in hand with his mother, a battered Kamaz van pulled up next to them and the driver leaned out of the window to ask for directions. As he explained that he had taken a wrong turning off the Perm motorway and was trying to find his way back, his accomplice, who had been hiding behind a tree, crept forward. Before Tishka Pavel had registered the creaking of his boots in the snow, he had clubbed her over the head with a steel-wire sap and left her for dead. A screaming Aloysha was bundled into the back of the van, knocked out with chloroform and driven away to a new life.

It was a professional outfit, hired by a company working out of Moscow and St Petersburg whose business was human traffic. Their trade was primarily s.e.x-workers: pretty young girls with no future in Russia who dreamed of a better life in Western Europe, as it was still known then, or the USA and were happy to be swept away with promises of a job, a resident's card, and the chance to own their own television set, only to find themselves within two months locked in cages during the day and turning tricks by night. The head of the company was Herat Taloquan, an Afghani who had made his fortune buying weapons from the Russians and selling them to the highest bidder during the Soviet war in his home country. He was a good looking man - long black hair, piercing green eyes - who enjoyed the finer things in life: women, cars, casinos - so when he was offered a job working for the Russian acquaintances he had made in the arms trade, he jumped at the chance to escape the desert sands and bask instead in the luxurious glow of Moscow's underworld. Taloquan was born for the role, using his skills as a salesman to raise a small three-man operation into an international trafficking empire. Over time, he turned his hand to drugs, gambling, protection a he even dabbled in military intelligence a but his true forte, his love, was still selling women, for he saw them not as people, but as commodities. He thought nothing of buying and selling them just as he had with the tanks and missiles ten years earlier. He had never considered the idea of selling children, until one of his employees joked about the innocence of his latest batch of fresh-faced girls. From that moment onwards, Herat Taloquan saw the future in the bright young eyes of every child he pa.s.sed on the street. He cast out his net and waited patiently for the right deal, without letting his plans affect his day to day work. In time, word reached him of a reclusive steel magnate by the name of Vlad Pechev and his wife, who were desperate to find an heir for their millions, since they couldn't produce one of their own.

Taloquan had his men set up a meeting which turned out to be nothing more than a formality. A fee was discussed and agreed upon, as were Pechev's stipulations: the child had to be male; Russian, naturally; under the age of five and in perfect health. Pechev asked for nothing specific with regard to the boy's appearance, but he did insist that the child was highly intelligent: 'a prodigy' were his exact words.

Taloquan spent eight months looking for the child and was about to lower his fee in return for an autistic boy in Tver who was able to draw entire skylines from memory, until he heard reports of a four year old in a tiny village near Kazan, regularly playing organ recitals for the entire village.

After some research, Taloquan was happy, and so arranged for two of his employees to pick the child up and advised the steel tyc.o.o.n to have his money ready by the following week. Everything would have gone to plan, had Pechev not died two days later of a ma.s.sive coronary attack, probably brought on by the stress of dealing with a known s.e.x-trafficker and former arms-dealer.

The deal collapsed there and then. It was a problem for Taloquan, and not one he felt equipped to deal with, never having sold the soul of one so young before. Had it been a woman, he would simply have had her killed and the body dumped. Another victim of the Russian mafia. But the boy, the boy.... it didn't seem right taking a male life, and certainly not the life of so gifted a child. Taloquan resolved to give the boy a week, while he decided on his fate, and had Aloysha chained in one of the cells in the bas.e.m.e.nt of his twenty-bedroomed manor-house in the countryside outside Moscow.

Weeks became months. Taloquan renamed him on the first anniversary of his arrival, and presented him with a framed copy of his new birth certificate. From that moment on, he was no longer to be referred to as 'Aloysha' or 'the boy', but rather Lyubomir Pechev, after Taloquan's first borzoi hunting dog when he moved to Russia, and the boy's late adoptive father respectively.

Months became years, and as Lyubomir grew, so Taloquan grew more attached to him and treated him more and more like a son of his own. In him he began to see the future of his company. The boy was smart and sharp, with an incredible head for names and numbers, and Taloquan vowed to bring him into the business when he was old enough: ten or eleven perhaps. Lyubomir played the part of an obedient child, content to sit at Taloquan's grand piano and churn out cla.s.sical music while his master worked at his computer, capitalising on the new age of business dawning over the internet. Deep down however, Lyubomir remembered the cries and screams of the women who had been locked downstairs in the cells next to his, and while his own living conditions might have improved over the years, he never once forgot what he was: a prisoner.

He chanced his first escape when he was eight years old, slipping out of his room when his keeper was distracted. He calmly walked straight out of the house, across the frozen ornamental gardens and into the woods as though he were off for an afternoon stroll. He was picked up two hours later, when the dogs caught him and Boris, the gamekeeper brought him home to a genuinely disappointed Taloquan.

'After all I have done for you, Lyubomir.'

'My name is Aloysha Petrov and always will be,' said the boy, in a measured tone, and although he did not understand its meaning, he copied a gesture he had seen American actors make in the videos he was allowed to watch in his room. He petulantly raised the middle finger of his right hand to Herat Taloquan.

Without a word, Taloquan took him by the arm and marched him into the kitchens where he picked up the cook's cleaver.

'This will hurt me more than it will hurt you, Lyubomir.'

He chopped the finger off with one swipe.

Chapter 11.

'I don't want to see you, Lek Gorski.' Crystal peered at his distorted face through the fisheye peephole of her front door, 'Now f.u.c.k off.'

'Please can I come in Crystal? I'm running out of places to go. I need your help.'

Crystal took a deep breath and against her better judgement, she opened the door. She was shocked at what she saw. Never had Lek looked so vulnerable. She bit her lip, shook her head and let him in.

'You look... awful, Lek' she said, taking in his wild eyes and tousled hair, not to mention the XXL gym-strip and giant spring-boks he was wearing. 'What are you doing here? What's going on?'

'Can I trust you Crystal?' Lek asked the question so abruptly, it sounded like an accusation.

She immediately thought about the phone call, but answered, 'Yes. You know you can.'

'I've got to be careful,' he said, striding into the room. 'I'm on the run.'

'Have you been sampling the goods Lek?'

'This is serious. They're after me. Pechev's thugs are after me. I've got to hide out somewhere for the next.... ,' he checked the living room LED, 'eight hours.'

Crystal knew there and then that he wasn't lying, but she was so overcome with a c.o.c.ktail of conflicting emotions, she didn't know what to tell him. Part of her wanted to kick him out on the street and have nothing more to do with the guy, but part of her wanted him to stay, no matter what that meant for their safety. She remembered the phone call.

'What have you done?' she almost whispered.

'It's... complicated. No it isn't. The simple truth is I've stolen something from them,' he whispered back, 'I think I know too much, and it was beginning to spook them. They were testing me. And I failed. And your finger is bleeding.'

'I know. You're nothing.... I mean, it's nothing.'

'Let me look at it.'

'No.'

'Don't be silly, let me see.'

He gently held her hand in his for a moment, then without a word, raised it to his lips to kiss it better.

'Don't. You don't know where I've been.' she said, half-joking, but when she felt his breath against the palm of her hand, and his lips brushing her wrist, something inside her became undone. She closed her eyes and gave in.

'What are you doing Lek?' she whispered softly in his ear.

'What I should have done months ago.'

He kissed her then, and for a moment - all the money, all the drugs, Pechev and his gangsters a none of it mattered. He kissed Crystal Purcell as though his world might end in the next eight hours, and he wanted to imprint that kiss forever on his memory. Crystal fought back the tears p.r.i.c.king her eyes, and like a true professional, began to play the part she knew so well. She smiled coquettishly and stepping away from him, pulled her T-shirt over her head.

The lopsided grin fell away from Lek's handsome face and his voice was suddenly sombre.

'Who did that to you?' There were three cigarette burns around her left nipple. 'That wasn't an accident,' he said definitively, before she could lie.

'Calabas,' she sighed. 'I gave him some lip yesterday, so he tied me up for an hour and put his f.a.gs out on me.'

'I see,' Lek nodded and picked the T-shirt up off the floor. 'I think... I'll have to... talk to him,' Lek said, sounding as though he were simply balancing out a difficult equation in his head, rather than considering paying a visit to a violent pimp. But still, there was something in his tone, a certain resignation that left Crystal cold.

'You don't need to do that,' she said. 'I can fight my own battles. So look, just stop a minute for Ringo's sake. Slow down. Let's have a drink. Go and sit.' She shooed him away, pulled her shirt back on and wandered into the kitchen.

Lek flopped into a big leather beanbag and picked up a newspaper. A prominent prosecutor had been found dead outside the New Old Bailey, having overdosed on Tiburon. It seemed he had undergone a particularly heated morning of intense cross-examination. 'Reports suggest that he was seen 'drowning in the air''. Lek threw the paper on the coffee table, disgusted with himself. He lay back and looked at the ivy covering the ceiling. Instead of cutting it back when it started creeping through the woodwork of her window-frames, Crystal had cultivated it instead. He thought about his own place, further east along the river, with its clinical white walls and sterile stainless steel shelving units, adorned with a few ornaments and photos he would never see again. This place felt like a home though, and if things had been different, he would have asked to stay.

Crystal appeared with two gla.s.ses of Juniperus, set them on the coffee table and was about to sit down when the doorbell rang again. Lek sat bolt upright and Crystal's stomach lurched. The man on the phone. He was here.

'Are you expecting anyone?'

Crystal opened her mouth to explain, but Lek saw the look in her eyes and knew at once that she had betrayed him.

'He said he wouldn't hurt you. They just want to bring you in,' her voice began to crack. 'He said he would kill me if I didn't help them,' she was crying now, 'He told me to keep you here,' she sank into the corner of the room and buried her face in her hands.

Six floors up and no way out, Lek considered looking for something that would pa.s.s as a weapon, but a flash of inspiration hit him and he sat down again, seconds before Delia kicked the front door in and lurched into the room. He had already pulled a Meister out of its holster and pointed it at Lek's head, when he noticed Crystal crouching against the wall.

'Who the f.u.c.k are you?' he said, by way of an introduction.

'I'm the woman you spoke to on the phone,' she answered between sobs.

'I didn't speak to n.o.body, lady. I'm only here for this p.r.i.c.k.' Delia focused his attention once again. 'Lek, Lek, Lek....' he said with a grin, and shook his head in a gently admonishing manner. 'How are you Doctor? Wow... this is all a bit f.u.c.king dramatic for you, isn't it? Not your typical day, I'd guess, playing with your test-tubes,' he bent his head sharply to the right and Lek heard the vertebrae at the base of his neck crack. 'Now, the word is you're carrying 100,000 cred of the big man's money, that right?'

In spite of the violence surrounding his work, Lek had never found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. 'Not quite Delia,' he said, weighing his options. 'That is, I don't have it with me. I've stashed it. Why? Is that all you want? The money?'

Delia snorted derisively. 'No. You're worth a lot more to me than a hundred K. Pechev is paying five times that to have you back in your rat-cage.'

'Is that all?' Lek asked, his eyes fixed on the gun. 'Half a million? A measly five hundred thou, when I could offer you the keys to the whole city....'

'Shut up s.h.i.thead. Just get up,' Delia sounded almost bored as he pulled a pair of mistress cuffs out of his raincoat.

Lek slowly got to his feet. 'All I'm saying is, I can give you more than Pechev is offering...'

'Right. You can give me more than half a million cred. You couldn't make that much in a lifetime...'

'Like I said Delia, the keys to the city...'

'Don't tell him anything!' Crystal blurted out, and both men turned and looked at her, each as surprised as the other.

'And why would you know anything about anything, sugar t.i.ts?' said Delia.

'Whatever you tell him Lek, you're only getting yourself in deeper!' she cried.

'No, no, no. You've got me all wrong.' Delia began, a smile playing on his lips. He gestured for Lek to sit down again, and turned to Crystal. 'It's not like that at all. Not. At. All. I work for Mister Pechev, see? So does your fella here. Only, unlike me, he seems to have forgotten that fact. Temporarily, eh Lek? I'm here to help him remember,' Delia placed the gun on the table, put the cuffs back into his pocket, and withdrew an old-fashioned clasp-knife. 'But I have to say, I am interested in hearing whatever it is you have to tell me, Lekky...' he said, sitting down in the chair opposite and opening the blade.

Lek had to think fast. The words spilled out of his mouth before his reasoning was fully formed.

'All I'm saying is this: I can give you access to more than 500 grand.'

'Keep talking,' Delia said, his interest piqued.

'OK, OK,' Lek took a deep breath, feigning resignation, 'let's say, hypothetically speaking of course, that there was...' he shook his head and bit his bottom lip as though the confession were being dragged out of him, '...a book.'

'A book?' Delia looked amused. He's probably never read one in his life, thought Lek.

'Let's say that this book contained all the formulae, all the methodology, the very recipes if you will, for producing all our best sellers a Tiburon, Equinox, Gorillamine, Chillax, Torox, Tigranol...'

'Stop there. No way, d.i.c.khead,' Delia laughed, 'You must think I f.u.c.king came down with the last shower. Do I look like an idiot? A f.u.c.king 'recipe book'?'

'That's what I said.'

'OK, wise guy, hypodermically speaking or whatever, are you trying to tell me you wrote all that s.h.i.t down?'