The Raymans wanted to know more about this ‘debt.’ Ian had in the past met Joe Krycer, the couple’s attorney. Before doing anything else about the situation, they tried calling Krycer in Melbourne, but he wasn’t in. Referred to the Weinstocks’ accountant, Ian carefully sidestepped any mention of the call from Danny. He said Danny had told him to call Morris, as a potential investor. Did Morris know of any bad debts the company had? He said he didn’t.
Clearly, then, the Weinstocks’ ‘debt’ was something else. By any other name, it was a ransom.
‘What do we do?’ Wendy said. ‘We don’t have a million dollars.’
‘Well,’ Ian told her, ‘we’re going to have to make it look like we do.’
When Danny was gone, I was brought into the kitchen, and I just sat at the table, my eyes glazed, my hands trembling in worry. Most of the goons had left with Danny, but three remained behind and stood guard over me, mumbling amongst themselves and laughing. Then, one of them walked to where I was sitting and, saying nothing, grabbed my left wrist and slammed it hard against the red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth while another pulled my wedding ring off my finger.
As I screamed in pain, the third man took out of his pocket a small tin of lighter fluid and dripped some on my hand. He reached in his pocket for a cigarette lighter and, with a smirk, flicked at it, holding it a few inches from my hand.
No matter how often these ghouls would pull a stunt like that, I never was prepared to expect merely a scare tactic. My heart pounding, I thought my entire body would ignite in flames, and only when they all laughed and left the room did I again realise the power of their psychological torture. I ran to the sink, rinsed my hand, and scrubbed it with a piece of soap, then rubbed myself raw with a dishrag. Then I went back upstairs and dissolved into tears until, at around 3am, I heard the front door open. My spirits lifted. Danny was back!
Things must have gone well with the call to Ian. Thank God.
Danny was genuinely pleased as he quietly filled me in on the details, though at this point, he had no idea what the next step would be beyond the follow-up call tomorrow. He also told me that on the ride back to the dacha, the car had been chased for a time by the Gaee, the Russian traffic police. When he saw the police car behind them, Oleg, who was sitting next to Danny in the back seat, asked Boris for a knife. Boris, who must have been in more than a few of these sorts of chases with the law, slowed down, fooling the cops into believing he would stop, then when they were only a few yards behind, he slammed his foot hard on the gas pedal and sped off into the night.
‘Damn,’ I said, ‘you just missed getting rescued.’
‘No,’ he replied, ‘it’s just the opposite. I just missed getting killed. If that car was stopped, Oleg would have killed me and would have killed the cops too.’
I looked him in the eye.
‘Is there anybody out there who can help us?’ I asked.
There was no answer. Only silence.
11
DAY FOUR:
THURSDAY, JANUARY 9th,
THE DACHA, MOSCOW, AND WAYNE
There is a well-known psychological condition commonly attributed to kidnapping victims: the so-called ‘Stockholm Syndrome,’ in which the victims come to identify and even fall in love with their abductors. Unless one actually lives through such an ordeal, it is impossible to understand just how anyone subjected to the constant degradation and anticipation of pain as well as inevitable death could become so attached to the very people inflicting these indignities. While I loathed my captors to the marrow—and would have sooner slit my own throat than feel any emotion other than pure loathing—and while their capacity to turn my stomach only kept growing, by day four, I found that I had settled into a kind of functional, if not exactly peaceful, coexistence with them.
I was now part of the ‘family,’ expected to pull my weight and pitch in with everyone else when it came to chores. Not only were Danny and I brought to the kitchen or dining room tables for meals, but I would also be trundled over to the sink to wash dishes or prepare food. I had, in effect, become the babushka’s apprentice, working under her gaze, whether it was slicing bread exactly the way she did with a long knife, making a cut down the center of the loaf, then making precisely angled cuts on both sides, or putting three to six teaspoons of sugar into each glass of black tea.
Holding our fate in their hands as the family did, it was natural that we would want to please them. Perhaps we even believed subconsciously that the more they knew and liked us, the more difficult it would be for them to think of disposing of us like yesterday’s trash. And, as bizarre as it sounds, even though none of them would have thought twice about abusing us, that was their job; on a personal level, they still had something of a proper respect for us, recognising our status as ‘wealthy Westerners.’
For example, at moments when they weren’t beating us or hauling us off to the cellar, they would politely ask for favours, such as borrowing the deck of playing cards Danny had in his suitcase. The lounge-bound goons would play Black Jack for hours on end, staked by thousands of dollars or stacks of rubles on the table. They would then make sure to return the deck, albeit with their greasy fingerprints smeared all over it.
It was also possible, rarely, to look at these men as semi-human instead of a pack of animals. Sometimes in the wee hours, I would see Oleg walking up and down the hallway outside our bedroom, cradling and rocking to sleep his youngest child, an eighteen-month-old son named Sascha.
The children of the dacha, in fact, had a softening effect on the environment—though, sadly, being raised in that environment boded very badly for all the kids. Even at age three, Oleg’s other son, Piotr, was already psychologically scarred. He would run around using a real knife as a toy, pretending to attack the adults and even little Sascha. Allowed to stay up until after midnight, he would be unbearably cranky the next day. Just three and already he was a monster like his father.
No matter how ‘domesticated’ we would get, it never took long for cold reality to set in, and usually in the most ludicrous ways. One day, Danny took an orange from a dining room bowl without asking permission from the babushka. Seeing this, the old harpy ran after him, shrieking and raising hell. That sort of ‘crime’ could get us whipped brutally.
Our minds were always occupied with a sense of impending doom. On day four, at around 11am, a group of men in coveralls arrived at the dacha and began hammering something; the sound of the banging went on for several hours and was so unrelenting that Danny and I actually believed they were constructing a gallows in the house! It wasn’t until later that we saw they were carpenters renovating the living room ceiling. Oleg’s gang had done such a good job at psychological torture that we were now psychologically torturing ourselves, with no help from them.
Although Danny and I couldn’t speak openly about any strategy we might have had for the phone calls to Ian Rayman, in the interim between the first and second calls we were able to communicate between us some clues we wanted to get across to him. We always did share a kind of telepathy, and now we would have to use it to create ways to tip off Ian that we were in grave danger without actually saying so. These clues had to sound sincere and not contrived, spoken in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. We could practice doing this by throwing out possible clues to each other. If either of us thought of something that sounded promising, the other would ‘check-mark’ it with a near-imperceptible arch of an eyebrow.
The best clue we came up with developed after Danny recalled that Ian and Wendy had made plans to go on vacation with their kids to the Catskill Mountains the very next day, Friday.
‘The kids are looking forward to it,’ he said. ‘But we must stop them. They must keep working to get the money.’
Immediately, like a bolt from the blue, I knew what we could say. ‘Right. They are looking forward to it, to visit their Uncle Chaim and Auntie Tova.’
Danny’s eyebrow flinched. Perfect! We both knew that these relatives of
theirs had died recently. If Ian had caught on to Danny’s robotic manner the last time they spoke, he would surely know the score hearing such an obvious whopper of a lie. Of course, the chance did exist that he would be so flummoxed that he would lose his bearings and correct the statement—in which case, the game would be over, and we might be done away with right then and there.
To keep that from happening, Danny and Ian would need to have their own kind of telepathy. But would they?
‘A CREDIBLE MATTER’
Ian did in fact ‘get it’ on the first call. He had already begun to put out feelers, though he was flying in the dark, with no idea of where to go from here. His first step after Danny’s call was to call a family member, a lawyer, who, because of the Russian element of the story, put him in touch with the only person he could think of who knew that turf: Jerry Shestak, a partner of the Philadelphia law firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. Shestak had an impeccable reputation and friends in very high places, having represented not only the Russian government in trade matters but a number of top-tier American corporations needing to establish a foothold in the newly formed capitalist country. If anyone could get a few doors open in Russia, he could.
When Ian called and relayed the details of Danny’s call, Shestak leaned back in his chair and thought a while. A blunt and rather gruff man in his early fifties, he laid out in lawyerly fashion three possible scenarios based on hard-edged realities:
• It could be a kidnap/ransom.
• It could be a business debt. However, if the Weinstocks owed money to the Russian ‘authorities,’ they were not in fact being ‘held.’ It would be a commercial debt, not a criminal situation, and the new Russian government would not tolerate old-style alliances with the underworld.
• It could be a cooked-up, bogus story. They were perhaps desperate for money and used the Moscow trip as a convenient backdrop to con the Raymans into getting cash for them.
Ian was a little taken aback by Shestak’s last two scenarios because it would mean Yvonne and Danny were connivers, not victims. While he knew them better than that, right then he would have taken those scenarios in a second. As he told Jerry, ‘I can live with anger more than I can with fear. We may never speak with them again if they’re pulling something, but at least we’d know they were alive and safe.’
They had no choice but to act on the first premise, because if it was so, the clock was ticking on the Weinstocks’ lives. There was someone Shestak thought could be of greater help: a young Russian fellow working for his firm, Dimitry Afanasiev, who had once apprenticed in the prosecutor’s office in Leningrad. He would tell the young man about the situation and told Ian to call and ask for Dimitry the next day. For now, he advised, call the FBI. ‘They may not be able to do anything; it’s a Russian case. If it’s extortion, then you are the victim,’ he said. ‘The FBI ought to know about it.’
Ian had been reluctant to go to the FBI. All that red tape, all that official crap. And what if they found out Yvonne and Danny were trying to pull off an extortion scheme? Would Ian then be responsible for the couple being sent to prison? It would be so much easier if he could just talk to them, find out what the hell was going on. What did he know about dealing with such things—what to ask, how to tell if other people were lurking behind them when they called? He called the closest FBI office, in Newark, and waded through the maddening ritual of being routed from one operator to another until finally being connected to a supervisory agent who took all the information. The matter worked its way across a chain of assessors and investigators. Follow-up calls were made to Ian, others to the Weinstocks’ business associates in Melbourne with whom Ian was familiar.
Finally, late that afternoon, a determination was made. The threat to the Weinstocks was deemed ‘credible.’ At 4pm, the phone again rang at the Raymans’. On the other end was an agent named Gerry Ingrisano. ‘Dr Rayman,’ he said, ‘will you be at home tonight? I’d like to come out and talk to you.’
When he arrived at the house at around 8pm, Ingrisano was accompanied by two other agents, Joe McShane and Thomas A. Cottone Jr. Ian and Wendy took them into the living room. At the time, Danny’s teenage son, Jonathan, who’d been staying with the Raymans, had been in the kitchen on a food run. When the three men in crisp business suits strode in, Wendy asked him to go upstairs. ‘I don’t want him to hear any of these things about his mum and dad,’ she told them. ‘It would upset him terribly.’
Ingrisano nodded. Fortunately, he noted, it was a big house. ‘But let’s keep an eye out for him.’
Then he opened the cover of his notepad. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘now, let’s go over this whole thing again.’
The conversation stretched past midnight. Ingrisano sat back and pondered the uniqueness of the case. He’d been an agent for twelve years, had been an analyst in the white-collar crime section in Washington DC and had seen some challenging cases in his time. Never had he come across something like this. Logistically, it was a three-headed monster, a wicket of conflicting orbits and jurisdictions: Australian citizens kidnapped in Russia and demanding money from America. Could anything even be done by the bureau? There was no mechanism in place to effect communication between America and Russia, much less coordinate any kind of rescue operation. Where along the locus of American and Russian law enforcement could the two ends meet? The scope of this case was so broad and so unprecedented, and the options were so limited.
Ingrisano saw in these people’s faces how concerned, how worried they were. He tried not to let emotion get in the way when he worked a case, but he knew the difficulties. They could investigate, but how could they get that information to the right people in Russia? There were a lot of protocols involved, a lot of roadblocks. The FBI had no legal attaché in Moscow, no contacts, no infrastructure, no one with a track record of dealing with them. Structurally, it just seemed impossible. But that is hardly a sufficient explanation to people whose relatives are in a life-and-death situation. Gerry felt they owed it to the Raymans to do all they could and hopefully find a way as they progressed. He was under no illusions. It was a long shot. All the FBI could do was take it a step at a time. The first step for them would be the next phone call from Russia. That would answer a lot of questions.
THE THURSDAY CALL
Ian woke up that day with his stomach knotted and it would stay that way the whole day. It was something of a relief that the pediatric office was especially hectic. Patients were backed up because of the previous day’s flood, leaving him scant time to think about the next call from Russia. Scheduled to be in surgery from 6 to 9pm, he had to scramble to find other doctors to cover for him so he could be home at 5 and await the call with the FBI men, who would bring equipment to try to trace the call. Driving home, his hands squeezing the wheel tightly, he arrived at 5:10.
The Thursday night run up to the call was interminable. Since it wouldn’t be made until around 2:30am Friday, our time, Danny and I had all day Thursday to prepare for the moment. Having approved of Danny’s performance the night before, Robert, Grigory, and Oleg apparently trusted us to adhere to their directions without having to drill them into us any more. This was a good sign, we thought. They could almost taste the money; they were depending on our ability to deliver, even if it meant we could improvise on the script a bit. That, of course, afforded us some wiggle room to drop our clues and, if there was a God in heaven, more time to get the deal done.
Time. That was everything, the very boundary of our world. The longer things stretched out, the longer we would remain alive. The problem was that we had no earthly idea what Ian would—or could—do. As it stood right now, we couldn’t even imagine being rescued. After all, how could an SOS sent to the United States bring about a rescue attempt in Russia? If that were somehow possible, did we even want it to be attempted? If Oleg ever saw police storming the dacha, we would no doubt be silenced in a minute. We had heard how notoriously incompetent and corrupt the Russian police were. Oleg had probably paid o
ff the local cops, and Robert and Grigory may have had the intelligence people on a leash. A rescue seemed as though it could easily be a waste of time.
Thus, our best hope may have been that Ian didn’t figure it all out and actually did send the money. Maybe then they would let us go, as unlikely as that seemed. Every instinct I had, told us to drop our clues and pray against all odds for a rescue. My gut told me that was the only way I would ever see my children again.
Oleg came to our bedroom at 11:30pm, to take both of us this time. Apparently, Oleg, or Robert, or whomever, wanted me to observe the call so I would know firsthand what Ian was saying. They may have also believed it would keep Danny from deviating too much from the script if he saw me in the room, a knife held to my throat.
Danny and I, wearing sneakers, sweats, and our overcoats, were led into the lead car of the same three-car convoy to make the same trip over the same icy roads back to the Chekhova Street office, where we were met by Grigory. After the successful call of the previous night, Robert, Grigory, and Oleg looked completely unworried, unfazed by the prospect that Ian had been able to connect the dots from his telex to the office. Robert in particular was sanguine to the point of being blasé. I wondered if he was thinking that this was too easy.
Maybe, just maybe, I thought, he would let his guard down somewhere along the way.
As Danny sat at the conference table in the boardroom, Oleg roughly diverted me to the opposite side of the room. When Danny began to dial, Oleg twisted my arm and forced it behind my back. Then he took out a knife and perched it under my chin. I was not to say a word, utter a sound.
Waiting for the call to go through, I swallowed hard, trying in vain to shoo away the lump in my throat.
Eleven Days of Hell Page 14