Stealing People

by Robert Wilson

  ‘She was devastated. As was Deepak,’ said Boxer, nodding. ‘I arrived after the … event. There’d been a mix-up. They thought she was in ICU, but she didn’t make it through the emergency C-section. She’d kept herself alive to deliver the baby and then died.’

  ‘Don’t you want to be there with him?’

  ‘I can’t … I have to do something. I can’t just stand there watching him struggle for life in an incubator surrounded by nurses, doctors, machines, monitors. What would I do?’ said Boxer. ‘And why wasn’t I there with Isabel? If only I’d been there …’

  ‘Is that what you’re thinking?’ asked Mercy. ‘Really?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Guilt. You’re feeling guilty because you weren’t with her every minute of the day.’

  ‘She was pregnant because of me …’

  ‘No,’ said Mercy. ‘No. Two people make a woman pregnant. And no woman in the history of the world has had the father of her child with her twenty-four/seven for the entire term of her pregnancy. So forget that as a line of thought. You should not feel guilty, Charlie.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘I can see where you’re headed.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Boxer. ‘I’d like to know.’

  ‘Complicated grief,’ said Mercy. ‘Look, Charlie, something terrible happened. Isabel flew back from Mumbai, some sort of blood clot formed during the flight, she fell down the stairs. It’s just … fate. None of that is your fault.’

  ‘I think she knew before she went to Mumbai,’ said Boxer. ‘What woman wouldn’t know that she was eighteen weeks pregnant?’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘To talk to Alyshia.’

  ‘There are phones for that sort of thing. She went because she wanted to go.’

  ‘I’m responsible,’ said Boxer. ‘In some way, I’m responsible.’

  ‘You’ve lost her, which is bad enough. Don’t make it worse.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it then.’

  ‘OK,’ said Mercy, slowing down for some roadworks, looking over her shoulder to get into the right-hand lane. ‘Why are we going to see Martin Fox?’

  ‘He’s in this somewhere, I know it … I just don’t know where,’ said Boxer, taking out his smartphone. ‘When Siobhan came to see me and asked me to find her father, she knew things that she shouldn’t have known.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Mercy.

  ‘That I kill people,’ said Boxer, ‘who deserve to be killed.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Mercy, slamming on the brakes for a red light. ‘You can’t say that sort of thing to me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Boxer. ‘You know it too now.’

  ‘I didn’t know it. I guessed it,’ said Mercy. ‘I guessed that you were going to kill El Osito because you thought he’d killed Amy.’

  ‘You knew, which was why you asked me to deal with Marcus’s kidnappers.’

  ‘I didn’t know. You only know with irrefutable evidence.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘So why does that make you think that Fox is involved?’

  Boxer didn’t answer. He’d been going over his conversations with Siobhan and now he was looking things up on the internet.

  ‘Now that’s interesting,’ he said. ‘Did I ever tell you what Pavis means?’

  ‘As in Fox’s company Pavis Risk Management? No.’

  ‘It’s Latin for “shield”,’ said Boxer. ‘Siobhan told me that around the time of Conrad Jensen’s disappearance, three of her father’s companies had paid money into three other companies in the same territories called Xiphos, Hoplon and Kaluptein.’

  ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Listen to this. Xiphos is a double-edged sword used by the ancient Greeks. Hoplon is a circular shield used by Greek infantrymen. And Kaluptein is … the root of the word “apocalypse” and it means “to cover”.’

  ‘And you want me to bring Martin Fox in for questioning on the basis of that evidence?’

  ‘No. We don’t even know if he owns any of those companies and it might be tricky to find out, but it’s an indicator.’

  ‘We’ve got people who can look into that.’

  Boxer told her which of Jensen’s companies had paid money into Xiphos, Hoplon and Kaluptein. Mercy told him to put it in an email and gave him an address to send it to.

  They’d just gone through the Limehouse Link and were now tearing down the Highway heading for St Katharine Docks and the Tower of London. Mercy had put a blue light on the roof. Boxer sent the email, took hold of the security strap above the window.

  ‘When are we going to get an answer to that?’

  Mercy punched a number into her mobile, put her finger to her lips. The communications centre set up for the kidnaps answered. Mercy asked if they’d received the email, which they had. She told them she needed an answer in ten minutes.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked the female police constable.

  ‘You don’t need to know,’ said Mercy, and hung up.

  ‘That was a bit brutal.’

  ‘Somebody in the unit is watching me. Since I’ve been operating on my own, I haven’t had any threatening calls.’

  ‘Maybe they’re too busy with this procedural crisis you were on about.’

  At 1.47, Irina Yermilov was pacing the living room, constantly checking her watch, knowing that the deadline had passed because of Sergei’s intransigence. They were already at two minutes past and closing in on three, which would mean, if the kidnappers were sticking to the letter of their threat, that Yury would be punished. She could barely tolerate Sergei’s presence in the room. His power play disgusted her. The old politics. He had thrown the Metropolitan Police kidnap consultant out of the house as soon as he’d arrived in the middle of the afternoon. Now he stood with his cronies at the other end of the room yabbering away to Moscow on his mobile phone, drinking vodka and smoking a Cohiba cigar.

  The computer gave its little ringtone to signify that an email had arrived. It was entitled ‘Karla’. She called out to Sergei and the men lumbered across the room like a family of bears.

  Irina opened it and clicked on the QuickTime symbol. It lasted twenty-three seconds, in which time all the strength went out of Irina’s legs and she collapsed on the floor, holding her hands over her ears to block out Karla’s screaming. When it was over, she came up on one elbow and vomited on the pristine carpet. The men looked down on her without moving. She was covered in a cold sweat. She got herself on to all fours and crawled unaided out of the room, washed her face in the kitchen, couldn’t find a bucket, didn’t know her own house. Found a dustpan and brush.

  The men were standing around the computer talking. Not one of them was in the slightest bit moved by what they’d seen on the screen. Their faces betrayed no concern, pain or emotion.

  The computer gave another ringtone and Sergei raised his head, indicating to one of the men to open it. It was called ‘Sophie’. They watched as the little girl was waterboarded. No one said anything. They sipped their vodka. Men so used to violence it made no impression on them to see an innocent girl suffer in such a way.

  Irina couldn’t stand it. Something came into her eyes, a great rush of furious black blood that crowded her vision, and she flew at her husband and beat him over the ear with the brush, brought it down on his stupid fat head again and again and again until finally Sergei pushed her away with such a shove that she cannoned backwards, flipping over the back of an armchair and landing heavily on her bottom on the floor. The wind was knocked out of her and she slumped to one side, grunting.

  Sergei made the call that Irina had been wanting him to make since the gang’s ultimatum came through. He nodded as if his point had been righteously made and slipped the mobile into his pocket. Blood trickled down the side of his face, which he cleaned up with a handkerchief given to him by one of his cronies.

  Thirty seconds passed in total silence. Irina didn’t move from her position on the floor. The computer gave another
ringtone. Sergei ordered one of the men to open it. In a thickly accented voice he read out the email.

  ‘“Too late, Mr Yermilov. Sorry.”’

  This time the short film didn’t even require a click to start it. The video rolled. Some of the men in the room who’d seen action in Chechnya knew what the elephant was as soon as it appeared. They tried to stop the film but it wouldn’t respond. Yury’s head disappeared into the mask and they saw his struggle. Finally one of the men ripped the plug from the wall.

  Irina, who had been facing away from the screen, went upstairs to the bedroom and stripped to her bra and knickers. She put on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a jumper and some trainers. She packed a small case and went downstairs. She seemed to change her mind at the kitchen door and put her suitcase down. She extracted the largest knife from the wooden block on the work surface and went into the sitting room. Sergei was on all fours, weeping into the carpet, roaring with pain and rage. She knew she had to act quickly and she ran at him with all the remembered athleticism of her youth. The only thing that saved him was her vomit, which she’d failed to clean up. She slipped as she ran and fell short of her target, and the knife went into the calf of one of Sergei’s cronies. One of the other men stepped forward and, with an open-palmed blow, knocked Irina into unconsciousness.

  Todd Bone wasn’t seeing things very well. The lights were blurring and doubling in his vision. He felt light-headed, dizzy, sick. The pain in his side was creeping deeper into his middle and up to his armpit. His stomach was swelling and very painful. His extremities were cold. He knew these were the symptoms of an internal bleed but didn’t want to go to hospital.

  ‘Stupid,’ he said aloud. ‘Stupid way to go. All that time in Africa. Iraq, Afghanistan. Fucking Taliban. Suicide bombers in your driveway. Shit. And then some dumb broad in nice old London town sticks it to you. What an asshole!’

  He pulled up messily on to the pavement just before some kind of footbridge; had no idea where he was any more. Just been driving to get away from the scene. Trying to contain the pain, keep his thinking straight. He looked around him, saw cranes, a building whose top he recognised, and HSBC emblazoned on the block next door to it. He looked out the other side and realised it must be a station of some sort, but no name was visible. He called the emergency number.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s me. I’m hurt. Been stabbed. Got an internal bleed.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On a road next to a station. Not strong enough to get out. On the other side is the HSBC building in Docklands. I need help.’

  ‘Throw away your phone. We’ll be right out there.’

  He hung up, turned the engine back on to get the window open and threw the phone into some bushes. It took everything out of him. He collapsed over the edge of the window, an arm and his head hanging out in the cold night.

  A black cab pulled up behind. The driver thought that maybe the car had crashed, or at least come off the road, especially when he saw the guy hanging out of his window, the engine still running. He got out, went over.

  ‘You all right, mate?’ he asked.

  No answer.

  He touched his face. Still warm, but unconscious. He called the police and an ambulance.

  At 01.53, another email arrived at the central communications unit. It was sent straight out to all concerned.

  Hello Ryder,

  We’re glad your group has finally come to their senses and we’re sorry that it took some unpleasantness to get them to that point. We hope the next element will not be so troublesome because this time we’re talking about a commodity that your people understand very well. Money.

  This is how we want the money for expenses to be put together and delivered. We are going to make this very easy for you. You have all day until close of business (17.00 hours) to arrange the funds. They must be loosely packed, not sheafed, and the only denomination we will accept is £50 notes.

  Each block of £25 million should be wrapped in clear plastic. Each package will measure 1.56m x 0.85m x 0.665m, configured in stacks of 10 x 10 and will weigh 605 kg. Six of those will come to 3.63 tons, so you will need a truck capable of a minimum load of four tons. The truck must be open, with a crane for off-loading and the cargo visible at all times. The packages of money must not be on pallets.

  Now that you have seen what we are capable of, we are confident that you will not attempt to cheat. Remember, this is not the ransom payment. This is merely for expenses. What we can guarantee is that the children’s release will not require any additional payment to us.

  Failure to achieve this task by 17.00 hours today will result in the hostages drawing lots again and being punished along the same lines as before. We have no doubt that your group of billionaires can raise this kind of money in the time allotted. The only question remains: can they part with it?

  At 02.27, DCS Oscar Hines was knocking on the door of 31 Wilton Place. The man in the blue suit didn’t take him into the lower living room but straight up to the top one, where Ryder Forsyth was waiting, sipping orange juice on the rocks and wishing it was bourbon. He was standing by the window looking out into the pitch black of the rear garden while computer and recording equipment blinked in the corner of the room. The two men shook hands, sat down simultaneously, eyeing each other warily.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ asked Hines.

  ‘If I was them, I would only want to deal with one person. Nobody wants to handle six separate negotiations. The time it would take, the possibilities for delay. No gang would want that,’ said Forsyth. ‘As for the money. That’s very interesting. Nearly four tons of loosely packed notes on an open truck. The delivery of that sort of cargo is going to be very demanding on their resources. I don’t know how they’re going to get away with it.’

  ‘And it’s not the ransom,’ said Hines. ‘But then they add that strange guarantee: “that the children’s release will not require any additional payment to us”.’

  ‘I think the idea is to get us feeding off their riddle. I don’t think we should be distracted.’

  ‘Another thing. “Hello Ryder” for a start. The targeting of the Kinderman’s CEO’s daughter, which they knew would mean you’d be handling the kidnap consultancy. It struck me that these are people who know you.’

  ‘Or know of me.’

  ‘I was looking at your CV before I came here. There’s a bit of a black hole for eight years or so after you left the Staffords and re-emerged in the United States. I understand that to start with you were in Africa. Can you tell me what you were doing in that time?’

  ‘I was a mercenary. I trained fighters in the Democratic Republic of Congo – or Zaire as it was then – Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Sierra Leone. I was an adviser in Angola and Mozambique. I also, I might add, advised the British military on insurgency and guerrilla tactics in Bosnia and Kosovo. You might want to check that out.’

  ‘And presumably you came across and even worked with other mercenaries in these areas of conflict?’

  ‘Inevitably,’ said Forsyth. ‘It’s a big leap to think that they would have anything to do with what’s going on here. Most of that stuff was twenty years ago.’

  ‘Before you surfaced in the USA, you were working in South America. I understand from our CIA partners that this was your training ground for the kidnap work you eventually became involved in. And that resulted in your big coup for Kinderman and your permanent post with them.’

  ‘You seem to be implying something there, DCS Hines.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I started off working for a number of private military companies, as we call them in the US. It was strictly security-based operations: film crews, teams of engineers, technicians, sometimes politicians, especially when FARC were targeting them. When I started working in South America, FARC were responsible for nearly three and a half thousand kidnappings a year; by the time I finished, it was less than a thousand.’

  ‘You say you wo
rked in various PMCs in the US. Do you remember any colleagues there who particularly bore a grudge against you, for whatever reason?’

  ‘A lot of people didn’t like me,’ said Forsyth. ‘That includes my employers as well as colleagues. I have my way of doing things and people sometimes disagree with me. I put my point of view very strongly. People don’t like that. All I can say is that my record speaks for itself. I never lost anyone when I was running a security operation. None of the hostages I was employed to rescue have ever been killed.’

  ‘These people we’re dealing with here. What do they sound like to you?’ said Hines.

  ‘I understand you’ve already captured one of them, an ex-marine, a vet of Iran and Afghanistan. I don’t know his role because I haven’t been able to speak to him, but I would imagine it was peripheral. That to me is an indicator of the quality of personnel we’re dealing with.’

  ‘The sort of people you used to work with?’

  ‘Let’s be clear about this, DCS Hines,’ said Forsyth. ‘I’m English but I’ve adopted some American ways, meaning I prefer it when people say what’s on their mind.’

  ‘You’ve pissed somebody off and they want to teach you a lesson,’ said Hines.

  22

  01.58, 17 January 2014

  St George’s Square, Pimlico, London SW1

  ‘Xiphos is wholly owned by Julius Klank, Hoplon by Martin Fox and Kaluptein by Boris Bortnik,’ said the police constable from the central communication centre on speakerphone in the car.

  ‘Do you have any information on those people?’

  ‘Julius Klank runs a US-based private security company called SureSafe. Martin Fox runs a London-based PSC called Pavis. And we haven’t been able to find anything out about Boris Bortnik other than in a 2009 Guardian newspaper article he was mentioned as someone trying to help the Russian arms smuggler Viktor Bout when he was arrested in Thailand in 2008. We’ve run the name past MI5 and they’ve had an initial reaction from MI6 saying they believed he had been an SVR agent but weren’t sure what he was doing now.’