by L J K Cross
Finally Amanda relaxed and released her captive. She came up gasping and gulping for air, a look of distressed shock on her face. Indeed with her smeared makeup, tangled hair and scratched skin, she looked like she had been savaged by a wild beast. Amanda hadn’t realised just how carried away they had been and was just about to apologise but he spoke up instead.
“That was mind blowing. Out of this world,” he gushed. “Now just come over here,” he indicated to his wife, “and let me see you lick my spunk of these big hard breasts.”
“Get lost. I’ve done everything you asked and it is still not enough for you is it,” she cried as she hastily retrieved her strewn clothes from the various corners of the room.
“I just thought...” but thought better of it and stopped himself. Instead he turned to Amanda and pulled a face as if to say that he would be in trouble when they got back to their room.
She was dressed again and storming out the door in about ten seconds flat. He only paused briefly to thank Amanda for making his ultimate fantasy come true before he scarpered off after his wife, mindful not to antagonise her further. As Amanda wiped the incriminating evidence off her chest she wondered if he would still be glad that he had indulged his fantasy once the afterglow had worn off and reality had set back in or would he come to regret it and wish it had remained just an erotic figment of his imagination. Not that Amanda gave it too much consideration. As soon as she stepped in the shower and felt the hot jet stream over her, she washed the couple and their potential relationship problems clean from her mind. She had much greater concerns to think about.
As promised, the phone at the side of the bed rang at 9pm on the dot.
“Hello Miss Hearst” chirped the warm American voice. “This is Valet parking downstairs. Mr Sokolenko has asked me to call you and let you know that your limousine has arrived.”
“Thank you,” murmured Amanda somewhat embarrassed.
“No problem Ma’am. Happy to help.”
“Here goes. There is no turning back now,” thought Amanda as she picked up her oversized leather handbag and made toward the door. She had already sent the rest of her luggage on ahead downstairs but as she shut the hotel bedroom door behind her she felt empty handed in more ways than one. It felt like she was leaving all her old baggage behind in that room. Amanda had imagined that she would feel relieved, liberated even but instead she felt tense and apprehensive. Was it uncertainty about her future with Alexander or disquiet about leaving Steve, especially in such circumstances? The ping of the arriving elevator reverberated in Amanda’s head as if a robotic switch had been switched on, replacing any doubt with compelling resolve, propelling Amanda forward towards her destiny.
****
“Take a right here. Put your foot down man and you’ll make it before the lights turn red,” urged Steve through the Perspex screen of the taxi and much to the annoyance of the Indian taxi driver. The ride from the jail back to the hotel should have taken twenty minutes at most but it seemed to Steve that the Vegas nighttime traffic had conspired against him and the journey had seemed to take an eternity. He had spent the entire journey with his face pressed up against the Perspex screen urging the driver to under take, over take and just put his bloody foot down! At one point he had even promised to double the fare if the driver was willing to jump the odd red light or two.
They were still at the far side of the hotel car park when he saw her – just as she disappeared into a black stretch limousine. Steve screamed out her name in desperate futility causing the taxi driver to swing his head round in shock and swerve dangerously close to a row of parked cars. The taxi hadn’t even come to a stop outside the main hotel entrance before Steve was out of it and sprinting in the direction of the rapidly departing limousine, leaving the tubby middle aged taxi driver cursing and gesticulating wildly behind him. Steve knew that even if he had managed to get up close the blacked out windows would have prevented him seeing who was in the limousine with Amanda. The only thing he could make out from this distance was the registration plate: VLAST.
CHAPTER 15
As the Gulfstream jet accelerated down the runway, Amanda’s head was gently pushed back into the soft cream leather seats. It was all so exciting; bypassing the usual irritation of airport security and driving straight onto the private airfield, the private jet and champagne on ice that awaited you once you had boarded. Amanda could barely contain herself as she looked around at the padded leather sofas, offset with polished walnut and gold fittings. Her eyes fell on Alexander who was sat opposite in an armchair. He seemed totally indifferent to it all. Already he was distracted by the laptop in front of him. Amanda imagined him surveying and scrutinsing the world’s affairs, controlling and condemning them with just the push of a button. The illumination of the screen was the only sign of life that registered on his face. Amanda could almost see the dollar signs dancing in the blacks of his eyes and wondered what multi million dollar deals a man like Alexander was considering. This was his world: the world of the immensely rich and powerful. A world of discreet locations, mysterious deals and guarded privacy. Even now, as he sat within arms reach, he seemed full of ambiguity. His dark, brooding features gave him a closed, uneasy air. His apparent mandatory uniform of exquisitely tailored suits suggested he rarely did informal and relaxed, if ever. It dawned on Amanda at that moment just how little she knew about this man sat opposite her, or more to the point, how had he become so disgustingly rich?
****
Despite being thousands of feet below, on the ground, Steve was pondering exactly the same question and although Amanda was in such close proximity to Alexander, Steve was much closer to uncovering the truth about him. He had started as soon as the tail lights of the limousine had merged into the nighttime traffic to become just another indistinguishable blur. As luck would have it, and God knew how Steve was due some good luck, the valet he had spoken to was the same one who had rung up to Amanda’s room. He still had the message he had been asked to relay jotted down somewhere if Steve would just give him a minute to find it.
“Ah! Here it is. I knew I hadn’t thrown it away. The owner of that limousine was a Mr So-ko-len-ko,” he pronounced slowly, uncertain of the foreign name. “He wanted me to ring up to the room of a Miss Hearst and let her know that he was here, waiting to pick her up. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than that. I didn’t actually see the guy myself, just his driver. A beast he was with a big red scar just here,” he added tracing his index finger down the right side of his face.
Steve flinched. Surely it was just a coincidence as the grimaced snarl of the cop from last night flashed before his eyes.
“The only other thing I can say about him for sure was that he was one hell of a generous tipper,” hinted the valet none too subtly. There was an awkward pause as Steve lagged behind in the conversation, trying to process the information he had just been given.
“Right. Yeah. Sure. Sorry,” floundered Steve as he pulled out his wallet from his jacket pocket. “Thanks for the information. You’ve been a great help,” and slapped a twenty dollar bill in the Valet’s outstretched hand.
Steve couldn’t help but notice the disparaging look the valet gave him. It was obvious that Steve’s tip seemed stingy in comparison to that of the flash foreigner. Steve felt with even more pressing urgency the need to find out just who exactly this Sokolenko character was. He needed to get to a computer and fast!
Steve didn’t bother going back up to the room. There didn’t seem any point. He knew Amanda wouldn’t be there and he was pretty sure her laptop wouldn’t be there either. So instead, Steve had to make do with one of the hotel’s computer terminals sat incongruously juxtaposed amid the glamour of flashing slot machines. Judging by the mood that Steve was in though, short of a natural, earth shattering, disaster striking, nothing was going to distract him. Which was just as well seen as when Steve typed “Sokolenko” together with “Vlast” into Google, it brought up over 28,000 entries.
; “Got to start somewhere,” muttered Steve, pressing his thumbs hard into his temples to try and extinguish the wearying aftermath of too much alcohol and too little sleep. He called over the waitress to order a double espresso and set to work. The entire twelve hours Amanda spent in the air futilely observing Alexander’s mannerisms and idiosyncrasies and trying to read meaning into them, Steve immersed himself in some reading of his own which proved altogether more insightful and much more interesting.
The first few pages of entries were dedicated to Vlastneft, which, Steve quickly deduced after a cursory scan, was the largest oil company in Russia or more to the point, was the largest oil company in Russia, in which Sokolenko just so happened to have a controlling interest.
“Subtle,” muttered Steve under his breath, thinking back to Sokolenko’s registration plate. Several clicks of the mouse later, Steve also gleaned from a rudimentary online Russian to English translation site, that “Vlast” was Russian for power. Authority. Control. Clicking on the third entry down, Steve brought up the slick, but sterile, homepage for the company’s website. He didn’t spend long wading through all the bilious, corporate spiel. It was neither here nor there to him how many percent Vlastneft was up on the securities market and the MICEX graph, which Steve imagined to be the stuff of every Wall Street trader’s wet dreams but to him just looked like an erratic ECG. According to their website, Vlastneft was in the preliminary stages of building a new pipeline to export oil to Europe and was expanding its projects in Yamal and Sakhalin.
“Fantastic,” exhaled Steve in one long sarcastic sigh but in truth he had never even heard of these places. The whole site might as well have been in Russian considering how little he understood of it. Apart, that is, from the breaking news ticker tape that ran across the top of the page: “Vlastneft Board of Directors announce annual profit of $19bn – eight percent increase on previous year.” Now that Steve didn’t need translating. 19 billion translated into serious wealth in any language.
After an hour or so Steve looked up from the screen and tried to catch the attention of a passing waitress. The double espresso was starting to wear off and so far Steve was only halfway down the second page of entries. As he waited for her to come back, Steve glanced at his note pad to recap. It was mainly random, indecipherable doodles with the odd word jotted here and there: oligarch, narcissist. Megalomaniac was underlined and Steve had retraced the word, rich, so many times with his pen that he had gone through to the next page. Those four words probably described Sokolenko to a T but as Steve knocked back his espresso in one gulp and refocused on the screen in front of him, he had to admit they weren’t exactly the concrete facts he needed that would lead him to Amanda.
Steve began to get increasingly frustrated as his eyes skimmed furtively and frantically over the plethora of fatuous entries. Every five minutes or so, Steve vigorously rubbed at his eyes, digging his clenched fists in deep as the bold black type swam across the screen before him leaving a trail of illegible ripples in its wake. It wasn’t the only thing on the screen causing offence to his eyesight. Apparently Sokolenko was a patron of the St Petersburg Mariinsky Theatre and as Steve found himself trailing through innumerable photos of Sokolenko at various opening nights and fundraising events for the Theatre, he felt a growing irritation at having to repeatedly look at that sly, conceited smile. It seemed to sneer at him, to taunt him. It seemed to be goading him. It wasn’t until Steve felt a shooting pain up his right index finger that he realised he had been taking his pent up resentment of Sokolenko out on the computer mouse.
According to a sizeable number of Google entries, the Mariinsky Theatre wasn’t Sokolenko’s only involvement in the Arts. Steve sat open mouthed as he read that Sokolenko was the owner of one of the largest private art collections in the world. Several articles ventured to estimate the size and value of the collection but no one seemed to know its true worth. The general consensus was that Sokolenko was not very forthcoming in discussing his magnificent art collection, never mind inviting people to view it. Some attributed his reluctance to his “reclusive nature”, others to his zealous desire to protect his privacy. One art critic even went so far as to describe him as “covetous and rapacious” in his acquisition of the world’s most valuable art for his own private pleasure. Steve read, re read and then had to read again how much Sokolenko had paid for Picasso’s “Le Reve.” $155 million! Add to that the $137.5 million he had paid for de Kooning’s “Woman III”. Another Picasso he had in his collection, “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” was reported to have set him back a further $106.5 million. Steve just shook his head incredulously as he tried to add up the value of the paintings mentioned, then slumped back in his chair when the realisation hit him that those were a mere fraction of the paintings in his collection.
Steve remained slumped, stupefied, flicking through the seemingly endless works of art that Sokolenko was reputed to own, until an article in the Culture section of the British Guardian caught his eye. At first glance, as Steve skimmed through it, the article seemed fairly innocuous. It seemed to be based more on presumption and postulation rather than hard evidence and facts. Yet buried amid the dross was a quote from a renowned international art dealer wishing to remain anonymous for obvious reasons that made Steve sit up and pay closer attention. As he read on his hand hung, frozen in mid sentence on the paper where he had idly been making notes.
Apparently, several years ago, this art dealer had been hired by Sokolenko to conduct discreet, under the radar negotiations for some highly sought after works of art and as such had been granted access to the vast art collection housed in Sokolenko’s palatial residence in St Petersburg. According to the art dealer: “From The Gradiva to Titian’s Venus of Urbino to numerous paintings of the Roman Goddess Diana by Rubens and Rembrandt there is a common theme that runs throughout the collection; that of strong, spirited, vibrant women.” The art dealer even went so far as to state that Sokolenko appeared to be “fascinated, captivated and obsessed” by the form of strong sensual women. For the first time since his arrest the previous evening, Steve was able to think clearly and things were starting to make sense. What could be more desirous to a collector of art celebrating the female form than to own a living work of art; a female bodybuilder? Something mortal and yet at the same time divine. Steve now clearly understood Sokolenko’s motivation but what he still failed to comprehend was why Amanda would succumb to such flattery and obsequious adulation? As a world famous body builder, Amanda was accustomed to obsessive fans, desperate to impress with wild, outlandish promises of lavish gifts and travel to exotic locations. Yet no matter how determined and desperate they had tried, Amanda had never been tempted. So why, wondered Steve, should Amanda’s head be turned now? Just what exactly was so beguiling about Sokolenko?
Steve pressed on with renewed urgency. He had to find out all he could about Sokolenko. The more he found out, the more disconcerted he felt. With each revealing detail the Internet divulged, Steve began to slowly realise that he was not just searching for clues as to Amanda’s whereabouts but that he was trying to discover more about his rival for her affections. A rival in what looked to be a very one-sided contest from where Steve was standing. Sokolenko’s biography on Wikipedia was perfunctory. The details were limited and sketchy to say the least. It struck Steve as odd that so little should be known about a businessman as successful as Sokolenko. The only information Steve had noted down from the scant biographical sources was; born Voronezh, outstanding academic record, studied international law at Leningrad State University, entered the KGB, meteoric rise through ranks. The glaring omissions such as how he had made his fortune raised more questions than they answered. Even the brief mention that Sokolenko’s mother had been a celebrated athlete, representing the Soviet Union in power lifting got Steve thinking. Was that where Sokolenko’s fascination with strong, athletic women had come from? Steve couldn’t help thinking that Freud would have had a field day with such a manifest study of an Oedipus comple
x.
“That’s sick!” said Steve, unwittingly out loud, causing the old lady next to him to briefly break from her hypnotic staring at the flashing lights in front of her. Steve smiled apologetically but was met with the same dazed, unresponsive stupor. Within seconds she had returned her full attention back to the captivating slot machine in front of her and Steve went back resignedly to his research, if you could call it that.
About half an hour later Steve was on the verge of calling it a day. He had a pounding headache from focusing on the screen for so long and he was still no nearer to finding out exactly who Sokolenko was. It didn’t help that Steve wasn’t sure what it was he was looking for but right now he had very little options. The only alternative was to go back to a deserted hotel room and Steve wasn’t sure if he was ready to face up to such a cold brutal reality quite yet. He had to keep going until he found something useful that he could use. Moments later, and over thirty pages into his search, Steve brought up an article published several years earlier in the New York Times. As soon as he read the headline, “Declassified KGB documents shed light on dark past of Russian business man,” Steve knew he had found what he had been looking for. Steve read on, hardly daring to breath. The only sign of life were his eyes speedily searching the text for clues.