Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  By the time the phones were working, the room was choked with clouds of cigarette smoke and charged with ions of high-energy tension. This, clearly, was to be the make-or-break point of the plot; either Robert would be convinced that the money was forthcoming, or he might well abort the whole thing. I was certain that if he had any doubt, our time would be up.

  More chillingly, before handing Danny one of the phones, Robert told him what to say to Ian about our location—that we were not at the Checkhova street office because Grigory had gone to a relative’s funeral. It seemed to be a particularly dark excuse, and given Grigory’s absence, I could only think that if Miasnikov was indeed attending a funeral, it may have been his own.

  Still, it also hit me that telling Ian this might well help us, as it would eliminate the office as a location for our whereabouts—particularly if we would be able to give him the number to where we were.

  I took a seat on the stool, irrationally believing they would allow a woman the luxury of the only place to comfortably sit in the whole apartment. Oleg ended that notion by immediately shooing me off of it—so that the telephone could be placed on it. I then sat on the floor, coughing uncontrollably because of all the smoke. I looked at Oleg, who was again nervously standing by the window, and made an upward motion with my hands, hoping he would lift the glass, even if a crack. He ignored me.

  With all ready, Danny began to dial.

  WAYNE, NEW JERSEY

  It was 2am in Moscow, 6pm in New Jersey. Though it had also been agreed that Ian would be calling the Chekhova Street office at 6pm, that plan was obviously no longer viable—something Ian and Gerry Ingrisano found out when Ian began to dial the number Danny had given him the last time. For the next half-hour, he heard only endless ringing. Ian and Wendy were getting nervous. Ingrisano kept them calm. ‘Just keep trying,’ he repeated over and over.

  During the same half-hour, Danny’s calls to the house were yielding, curiously, nothing but busy signals. Finally, he tried another of the multiple lines Ian had, one that was his private number. When it rang, Wendy ran into the study to pick it up. She lifted the receiver and said nothing as she listened.

  ‘Hello?’ she heard. ‘Is that you, Dr Rayman? It’s Daniel Weinstock.’

  Wendy was startled to hear Danny’s voice on that line, but Ingrisano had prepared both her and Ian about what to do should they receive Danny’s call—exactly what Ingrisano did not want to have happen, considering the far higher probability of tracing a location if Ian could call Danny. If Danny or Yvonne called, he had said, hang up without saying a word. She did. At this point, Gerry Ingrisano still believed the Weinstocks were at the same location as they were for the previous calls and that since they had just called, they would be there to answer Dr Rayman’s call. It may have seemed a risky strategy and totally illogical to have hung up on Danny – but they wanted to hear from him and now were slamming down the phone on him. However, Gerry knew these kidnappers were greedy enough that they would wait all night if they had to. They weren’t going to go anywhere until they heard what Dr Rayman had to say. Gerry felt confident that they were playing it right. But then when they still couldn’t get through, his throat tightened a little.

  Actually, Danny didn’t even realise Wendy had hung up on him. Considering how difficult it was to get a stable phone line out of Moscow, he just thought the connection didn’t go through. Repeated calls got nowhere. Attempting to break through the busy signals, Danny tried to get the international operator to break through and tell Ian there was an emergency call for him. Mystifyingly, Ian refused it.

  ‘No, I won’t accept the call,’ he said. ‘Tell him I’m trying to call him.’

  Of course, that was impossible, since Ian had not the slightest idea where we were or what number we could be reached at. The continuing missed connections had now begun to irk Robert. It wasn’t going to take much for him to believe that the Raymans were up to something.

  I could sense his uneasiness. Needing to figure something out before Robert cut the call session short, Danny offered up one last option: to call Ian’s pediatric office and leave a message. Robert consented, and after Danny dialed the office, a young associate of Ian’s, Dr Alvin Edelstein answered the call. Danny identified himself and said he needed to speak with Ian urgently. Edelstein asked for the number.

  This, of course, was a potential pitfall for Robert—provided he had any reasonable doubts that he could ever be tracked down by the local authorities. But I could read the man’s mind. If this was the only way to get Ian Rayman on the phone tonight, I’m sure he was thinking, then let him have the damn number. He asked Oleg what was the number. Oleg, looking pained that Robert had made the decision to reveal the number, recited it aloud, and Danny dictated it to Edelstein. Though I didn’t know for sure what was going on at Ian’s house at that very moment, when that number was passed, I couldn’t help but think something important—and possibly beneficial to us—might have just occurred.

  Gerry Ingrisano’s throat had tightened even more after Ian, again at his insistence, spurned Danny’s emergency breakthrough call. In his single-mindedness to initiate contact to Danny from Wayne, in order to enhance the odds of a trace, two calls from Danny had now been rejected. What if Danny wouldn’t answer at Chekhova Street? What if he wasn’t even there? Had Ingrisano pushed it too far?

  Ian Rayman wondered about that, too. He couldn’t believe what he had just said—that he wouldn’t accept Danny’s call because he was trying to call him instead.

  Jesus, he mused, that had to be the single most illogical comment in the history of mankind.

  Ian kept hitting the redial button. Still nothing. Then, out of nowhere, with the uncanny timing normally reserved for a cliffhanger scene in a whodunit movie, there was an audible tapping on the kitchen window. Turning their heads to the noise, Ian and Wendy recognised the figure of Alvin Edelstein silhouetted in the darkness outside after having driven over from the office to personally deliver the message he’d taken. Ingrisano told Ian to make it quick, and the doctor opened the back door a crack to take the note from Edelstein.

  ‘Who is it, who called?’ he asked.

  ‘A man named Weinstock.’

  Ian needed to catch himself before his jaw dropped at this incredible stroke of luck.

  He politely thanked Edelstein, closed the door, and took the note inside to Ingrisano, who wondered if his hide had been saved by this seemingly divine intervention.

  ‘We got it! This is just what we want! Okay,’ he told Ian, flipping on his recording machine, ‘let’s get a trace.’

  It was 6:30pm in Wayne, 2:30am in Moscow. His pulse racing, Ian dialed.

  Everyone in the kitchen felt a feeling of immense relief when Danny Weinstock picked up at the other end of the line.

  ‘Danny! Where are you?’ Ian began. ‘I’ve been trying to call you, as we planned.’

  ‘We’re at a different place.’

  ‘You’re not at the Chekhova Street office?’

  ‘No. We couldn’t go there because Grigory Miasnikov had to attend a relative’s funeral.’

  Changing gears, Ian went into a stalling tactic, as per Ingrisano’s instructions. ‘Tell me again,’ he said, ‘about the business transaction and why the money has to be paid. If you are with friends, why can’t you and Yvonne just go straight to the airport and leave Russia?’

  Danny didn’t go along. ‘Please don’t ask any questions.’

  ‘Fine. Is Yvonne there with you? Can I speak with her?’

  Robert nodded for Danny to say yes, I was there. Unlike the previous call, when Ian had asked to speak with me, Robert by now had reason to think I could handle it. It was imperative I do so in any case; Robert knew Ian would not move on the money if he thought I was already dead. Still, Robert felt he had to warn me. ‘Keep it short and sweet,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry or get upset.’

  I was so nervous that I would say the wrong thing that my palms were heavy with sweat, and the phone nearl
y slipped out of my hands when Danny handed me the phone.

  ‘Hello, Dr Rayman,’ I began, my voice shaking a bit though I was able to maintain the same mechanical, unemotional tone Danny had mastered. Without wasting a moment, I went right into the clue I had thought up and debated with myself about delivering. Do it, I thought, before you can change your mind.

  ‘Dr Rayman, perhaps you can give me some medical advice. I am having severe stomach pains from the pregnancy. What do you suggest I do?’

  I squeezed the receiver hard waiting for his response to the fallacious question. At the same time, I noticed Danny’s reaction. Thankfully, he had read what I was up to because he sat impassively, betraying no emotion. But would Ian get it? Finally, after what seemed like an hour, though it was only a few seconds, Ian had his answer.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  He’d gotten it, too. Thank God.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You’d better see a doctor,’ he continued.

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘The best thing to do is to keep warm, lie down, and rest.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Rayman.’

  I turned the phone back to Danny, still shaking but content that I’d accomplished something. I’d gotten through to him in no uncertain terms that I had been beaten and that we were in very pressing danger. Hopefully, that would prompt him to wring some vital information from Danny about our whereabouts. Through it all, Robert was none the wiser about what I was doing.

  Danny seemed revitalised by my performance. I could feel his confidence growing as he found ways to keep the conversation going—it having been crystallised to us, if not Robert, that Ian and Wendy were not alone back in Wayne and that the call surely was being recorded and hopefully traced.

  When Ian yet again asked for the details of the fertiliser trade, Danny didn’t hesitate or consult Robert before launching into an intentionally long-winded explanation that must have consumed a good fifteen minutes.

  It helped that Robert at this point was only half paying attention, as he was engaged with Kuzin and Oleg in a series of discussions. Thus, Danny had a chance to pass more critical information, right under the gang’s noses.

  The first nugget was when Ian asked if we were in danger. Of course, the last time the question was asked, Danny had stayed on script, overstating that we weren’t in the ‘minutest’ danger. Now, his reply was unvarnished and, I’m sure, jarring to Ian and whoever else was listening in.

  ‘Yes, very much,’ he said.

  ‘How many people are with you?’

  ‘Ten.’

  Robert now turned back to the call, which he had apparently believed was merely tedious chatter. That minutes were being burned up was less important to him than if we could carry on a comfortable, even boring, conversation with Ian; that way, he would believe we weren’t being held by madmen. Robert even allowed me a last word on the phone after I asked if I could say a few words to Wendy. I clutched the receiver again and asked Ian to put her on. When she heard my voice, she nearly broke down.

  ‘Yvonne,’ she sighed, ‘we’re so worried about you.’

  Once more, to leave no doubt about my underlying message, I used my pregnancy fib. Like Ian, she didn’t flinch.

  ‘Please, Yvonne, take care of yourself and your baby. I want to be there for the birth.’

  Perfect.

  After asking how the children were, I returned the phone to Danny. And if I didn’t feel good enough about how I’d handled my role, I was absolutely astonished to see Oleg giving me an approving thumbs-up! What imbeciles, I thought. Here I had passed incontrovertible proof not to believe a word that we were saying, and the big baboon thought I was helping him! Some Mob boss. Robert now began to show his impatience. He wanted to wrap it up. ‘The money,’ he mouthed to Danny, ‘when is the money coming?’ Danny posed the question, and Ian told him he would have the money on Wednesday. He would call on Wednesday, same time, to confirm. He’d send a telex to the Chekhova Street office tonight to that effect.

  ‘One thing, though,’ Ian added. ‘I don’t know where I’ll be Wednesday night. I may be at the office. Call my answering service and leave a number where I can call you back.’

  Danny wrote down the number for the answering service. ‘Okay, got it,’ he said. Then he hung up.

  Robert looked quite satisfied. The money was getting closer. He could almost taste it.

  ‘Charasho,’ he said, lifting the phone off the stool and sitting down with it on his lap—’Good.’

  I checked my watch. The call had taken twenty-five minutes. It was long and, I hoped with all my being, fruitful.

  WAYNE, NEW JERSEY

  Ingrisano was satisfied as well. In the course of those twenty-five minutes, any doubt that may have been left as to whether the Weinstocks were in mortal danger had been erased. With Ian having gotten a commitment from Danny to call the service with a number to call Wednesday, there would be no replay of the communications snafu that nearly snuffed out tonight’s call. He told Ian how impressed he was by his calm but probing manner. ‘Usually,’ he said, ‘people fall apart.’

  Everything seemed to go perfectly—that is, until the other FBI men told Ingrisano that, even at twenty-five minutes, they hadn’t gotten a traceable location for the Moscow end of the call. Such were the realities of trying to trace a call from tens of thousands of miles away and in a near-Dark Age place like Russia, a black hole for American intelligence agencies, by any measure.

  When the Raymans heard this, Wendy broke into tears. However, this failure wasn’t as significant as it seemed. In truth, even if the trace had been complete, the FBI was still not authorised to do anything with it. Specifically, they could not release any such information to the Russians and could not even release it to the American Embassy in Moscow—the very reason why Ingrisano had instructed Ian to arrange the next call for Wednesday instead of the next day. That too carried some risk, as every hour was critical to the Weinstocks’ survival. But the extra day might be worth the wait if the bureaucrats got their act together.

  For now, all Ingrisano could do was sit on whatever else had been gleaned from the call. Even so, when and if authorisation did come, they would have to start from scratch with the tracing on Wednesday night. Left unsaid, but on everyone’s mind in the house, was that it could be too late by then.

  What the Raymans could not have known that night was that their prearranged information shuttle with Dimitry Afanasiev in Philadelphia was far more effective than the FBI phone-tappers. Given the number Danny had called from, Dimitry funneled it to the MVD switchboard via his open line to the MVD.

  Within minutes, the number was run through the Ministry’s data banks. Less than an hour later, at around 3am, it was matched to an address in downtown Moscow—right down to an apartment number on the ground floor. An officer spoke on a walkie-talkie to Colonel Rushailo. He and his men were in four cars cruising the area around the SovAustralTeknicka office on Chekhova Street.

  It would take them only around twenty minutes at top speed to get to the address. They began to move.

  Robert and Oleg wasted little time getting out of the apartment. Oleg killed the light, and we were hurried out to the car, its lights glaring through a mist of freezing snow in the dark night. The three cars rumbled their engines, breaking the deathly quiet of the neighborhood. We were taken to a nearby wooded park wedged between apartment-studded blocks.

  This sent chills down my spine, as any wooded area was a logical dumping ground had the gang wanted to dispose of us. The reason for this stop became clear when the lights of the cars shone on a white object, which, as we got closer, turned out to be a white Mercedes-Benz nearly buried in a foot-high snow bank. It had obviously not been driven for days.

  That’s when I really felt a chill. Peering through the icy window of the car, I recognised this particular Mercedes-Benz. It belonged to Grigory Miasnikov.

  With a key, one of Oleg’s men opened the door and
after a few tries started up the motor. At that point, my face must have been as white as the Mercedes. If the gang had Grigory’s car key, I couldn’t help but believe Miasnikov must be dead. Was his body perhaps even in the trunk of his own car? As much as I had come to detest Miasnikov, just thinking that he might have suffered such a horrible fate, combined with the fumes from the cars, made me feel seriously nauseated.

  Bloodthirsty savages, I kept thinking as the three-car convoy headed out of Moscow and back to the dacha. The fear I was now feeling was deeper and more intense than ever. I didn’t know if I could live much longer with it.

  MOSCOW, 3:30am

  When Rushailo’s rescue force approached the target address, they cut their lights. Parking down the block to evade the attention of any lookouts, they alit from their cars. Clad in black, military-style jackets, black pants, and black skullcaps, they were bare outlines against the night. Checking for any lights on in the building, Rushailo saw none. He directed his men to seal off the entrance to the three-storey building. With automatic weapons in their hands, they led five cops to the apartment, stealthily quiet as cats on the prowl.

  At the door to the apartment, each unlatched the safety catch on his gun. Rushailo began to count down with his gloved fingers. One … two … three.

  At three, two of them kicked at the door with their steel-tipped boots.

  The door collapsed. They stormed in, guns pointing back and forth and side to side in the dark, shouting in Russian for anyone who might be hiding to show himself or be shot on sight. Trained to see in pitch-black conditions, they moved further inside, checking the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen.

  Rushailo flicked a cigarette lighter. The flame made the shadows of the policemen and their guns flicker on the walls.

  He looked around again. Nothing. Not a damn thing but for cigarette butts all over the linoleum floor and a single stool in the middle of the room, a phone perched on it.