Arkady Pashkin
Who they are
The Russian industrialist James Webb has spent the spring cultivating: a man with an oil interest, a penthouse in the Ambassador, and a summit at The Needle that is meant to turn him into an asset ahead of talks about talks. He is also, on the evidence of his own press, almost entirely a fiction. The newspaper profile was forged and posted on his own site; outside it he barely exists.
What he actually is: a gangster using a diplomatic errand as cover, in London for the diamond merchant on the Needle’s sixty-fifth floor and the Rumble prototype on the sixty-eighth. The joke is at the Service’s expense — the Park spends three weeks vetting a man who barely exists, while he spends the same three weeks measuring stairwells.
What they want
Two floors of a tower and a way out of it. The summit is not a negotiation he intends to lose or win; it is a room he needs emptied of cameras, and an air ambulance he means to leave in.
Book 2 — Dead Lions
- C07 — Receives Louisa and Marcus in the penthouse, tells them he knows they are not from the Department of Energy, and asks to see the Needle.
- C08 — Walks the tower asking about cameras, stairwells and emergency exits, then proposes taking the stairs; Louisa overrules him and takes the lift.
- C09 — Treats the dinner as personal, toasts Min Harper’s memory, and tells Louisa he always has a plan.
- C13 — Is driven in through the garage on a contractor’s credentials, so that his arrival is never recorded.
- C14 — Has the room’s cameras torn out, sets a white-noise device on the table, refuses his case searched, and admits he knew the evacuation was coming.
- C15 — Leaves the delegation locked in with a wounded Webb, goes down to rob the diamond merchant’s suite and Rumble’s prototype, and is shot on the roof while waiting for a helicopter.
Tells
The courtesy never slips, not even while admitting he knew the building was about to be emptied — “I’m afraid I did.” He asks about architecture rather than oil. His aphorisms are the kind a man uses to end a conversation: that the British have had more practice at capitalism than the Russians, that he always has a plan.
Open questions
Who forged the profile, and whether anyone in the Park was meant to notice. Whether the talks were ever anything but cover, and when he decided so. What happened to the diamonds once the roof was cleared.