by Wilbur Smith
“You say this to a woman trained by the Spetsnaz, who can chew you up and spit you out like they eat for breakfast?” Nastiya asked contemptuously.
“That’s enough!” Cross commanded. “I spend too much time with an actual infant to have any interest in dealing with you three acting like two-year-olds. Stop pissing off your co-workers, Paddy, and give me your first thoughts about defending the Bannock Oil installations in Angolan waters.”
Paddy spoke for nearly an hour from the notes he had worked up. As he listened Hector congratulated himself—not for the first time—that he had grabbed Paddy before he had been snapped up by any other company. When he finished speaking Hector nodded. “All of that makes good sense. Let me have your notes to forward on to the Bannock Board. They are going to have to make provision for all that extra equipment. Once we’ve got that in motion, Paddy, you and I need to start planning precisely how many extra men we’re going to need down in Angola, what our protocols are going to be in terms of crisis response, and how we’re going to get them all trained up. Next item on the agenda: intelligence-planning. I am giving that job to Dave, as usual, because he’s the man we need to plant a bug or hack a system, and Nastiya, because she’s the only person in this room who’s actually been a spy for a living. So, Mrs. O’Quinn, where do you think we should start?”
“With da Cunha, since he is the only person we know who is a potential threat. And it is wise of you to ask the advice of a woman, Hector, because this job requires the feminine touch.”
“Such as . . .”
“Such as seducing Mateus da Cunha. He is a man who wants to conquer and rule a country, so he is, by definition, even more of an egotist than any other, normal man. He has also been brought up in France, so he will have a French attitude to infidelity.”
“And what a fine attitude that is,” said O’Quinn cheerfully. “I sincerely hope that you are not proposing yourself for the role of seductress.”
“I hadn’t thought about it, darling. But now you mention it . . . it might help me pass a rainy afternoon,” deadpanned Nastiya.
“What’s good for the goose is just as good for the gander,” Paddy suggested, and his wife winked slyly at him.
“Don’t fuss yourself. Home cooking is good enough for me.”
“Mostly because I’m the best cook in the house!” Paddy laughed.
Nastiya ignored him, and went on smoothly: “Da Cunha’s record tells us that he is highly intelligent, sophisticated and also disciplined enough to succeed at a very high academic level. But I suspect that he is also a vain, arrogant, privileged young man who cannot resist boasting to people, and to women in particular, just how brilliant he is and how great he is going to be in the future.”
“I am following you.” Hector nodded. “But we’ll need covert surveillance on da Cunha and a properly worked-up cover for Nastiya, Dave. If da Cunha meets a woman who promises him sex and money, the first thing he’ll do is thank his lucky stars. The second will be to hit Google and check her out. So make sure Nastiya’s cover has online back-up.”
“Got it,” Imbiss assured him.
“Then unless anyone else has anything they need to say, our meeting is temporarily adjourned. You all know what you have to do. Give me an hour to get things moving in Houston, and then we can go and get something to eat. I’m paying.”
Yevgenia Vitalyevna Voronova, known as “Zhenia” by the multitudes of her male friends who admired and adored her, and even by her few female friends (who were more cautious in their approval), kissed Sergei Burlayev, her partner of the evening, goodnight and clambered out of the Ferrari 458 Italia that Sergei’s father had given him to replace the one he’d written off in a crash six months previously. She set off across the concrete floor of the private underground car park, teetering just a little unsteadily in her 10.5-cm-high heeled Chanel pumps. With the self-satisfaction of one who is just slightly tiddly, Zhenia congratulated herself on the skill with which she had matched her shoes so perfectly to the color of Sergei’s car, which was now roaring back up the ramp and out into the streets of the Moscow International Business Center.
She reached the express lift and slid her personalized key card into the slot at the second attempt. The doors opened, Zhenia tottered in and gratefully leaned against the wall of the lift, snuggling into her coat of jet-black, wild-caught Barguzin sable as she was whisked more than seventy floors up the bizarre, apparently random structure which was the Moscow Tower.
Zhenia giggled when she recalled how proud her papa had been when he managed to get a penthouse right at the top of what was, for a short while, the tallest building in Europe, and how his pride turned to fury when it was promptly overtaken in height by the Mercury City Tower, right here in the Moscow IBC. Papa had stood at the five meter-high windows that wrapped around his living room, watching the Mercury Tower go up, raging at the fact that he had been beaten to the penthouse there by one of Vladimir Putin’s favored henchmen. One word from the President’s office had been all it took to ensure that no other offers for the property were considered.
The lift pinged, the doors opened and Zhenia stepped out into the Voronov family’s entrance lobby. Its design had always displeased her. The wall directly opposite the lift was mirrored from floor to ceiling, an admirable idea in her view, except that the important business of examining her own reflection was made extremely difficult by the huge stone fireplace that stood right in the middle of the wall.
Still, this was no night for complaining. Sergei had taken her to Siberia, a restaurant-cum-club on Bolshaya Nikitskaya where it cost 25,000 roubles just to book a table. Lots of their friends had been there and they’d all eaten gloriously, drunk extravagantly, danced wildly and generally laughed, flirted and delighted in the joy of being young, beautiful and rich. The only disappointment had been that she had not been able to bring Sergei back to the apartment. Zhenia had harbored steamy fantasies of dragging him back home and exploring every position in the Kama Sutra and all fifty shades of gray with him.
That was always possible when Papa was away and Mama was too drunk to take any interest in her surroundings. However, tonight she had had to be satisfied with a quickie in the cramped back seat of the Ferrari, trying frantically to keep pace with Sergei’s mercurial libido rather than be left dangling high and dry at the end. She had managed to reach the summit with just seconds to spare and was feeling so satisfied with her achievement that she decided to have one last nightcap.
Zhenia had first tasted Bailey’s Irish Cream during her years studying History of Art in London and been utterly seduced. There was bound to be a bottle in one of the fridges behind the splendid marble-topped bar in the living room. Zhenia dropped her coat and her clutch bag on the lobby floor and stepped out of her heels, knowing that the servants would pick up all her belongings and put them neatly away. Then she made her way to the living room wearing nothing but her little red party dress.
“Where have you been, you little slut?”
The words were slurred and spiced with malice. The man who spoke them was sitting at the bar in a shiny gray suit. His shirt, which swelled around the mound of his monumental paunch, was so tight at the collar that the layers of fat drooped over it. Despite an expensive series of transplants and the application of a wide range of gels and sprays, there was more pink bald scalp in evidence on the top of his head than thin gingery-gray hair.
“Good evening, Papa.” Zhenia studiously ignored the question.
“I said, ‘Where have you been?’” Vitaly Voronov was the man known throughout Russia as the Woodpulp Tsar for the fortune he had made chopping down trees and turning them into paper. “But I know the answer: you have been rutting like a bitch in heat with that bone-idle wastrel Sergei Burlayev. Don’t deny it. You smell like a whorehouse on Saturday night.”
“And you, my darling Papa, smell like a pathetic old drunk who’s just had a bellyful of the cheapest potato vodka he can find,” Zhenia snapped back at him. She had drunk
just enough that night to have abandoned her usual caution. “You are sitting at a bar stocked with every fancy brand there is, and yet you drink that peasant urine. Look, you even kept it in a paper bag just like a true moujik! Didn’t Mama teach you how to use a glass?”
“You want to know why I drink this?” Voronov said, getting up from the cream leather bar stool and advancing toward his daughter, his hand still around the bottle in its brown paper overcoat. “I drink it because it reminds me of the old days, that’s why. When I was poor, and I grew up in an apartment that wasn’t half . . . no, not even a quarter the size of this room. Six of us, squeezed in there, my daddy coughing his lungs out after twenty years down the coal mine. My mum cleaning the blood and God knows what off the sheets in the hospital laundry, then standing in line for hours, just to buy a loaf of bread and a couple of cabbages, if she was lucky.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it, Daddy. Life was tough. You had to work and fight for everything you ever had. Blah-blah-blah . . .”
“Don’t you talk to me like that, you spoiled little bitch,” he shouted, making her recoil from his flying spittle and the stench of his alcohol-drenched breath. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”
Zhenia faced her father. “If you really want to know, I’ve been at a club with Sergei and some friends, and then Sergei brought me back here like a gentleman. I gave him a little goodnight kiss and then I came up here.”
“You’re lying! You have been screwing him—”
“No!” she protested. And then she stopped, as if struck by a revelation. She stared at her father’s face, really peering at it, and then she burst out laughing. “Oh my God! I’ve only just got it! Now I know why you’ve been up all night drinking, why you want to know about my sex life and why you’re always telling me that I’m a whore. I know what you want from me, my darling Daddy. I know exactly what you want, you filthy old peasant.”
Voronov stepped forward, his face contorted with fury, squaring up to her, just as he would to a man he was about to fight. “All right then, slut,” he snarled, “if you’re so clever, if you know so much with your fancy education, go ahead, tell me . . . what am I thinking?”
There was a devil in Zhenia, an aggressive, fighting spirit that came straight from her father she hated so much and it seized her now. She stared right back at her father, provoking him, taunting him, matching his brute, male presence with the womanly power of her youth, her beauty, her body and her scent and purred, “Here’s what I think, darling Papa,” Zhenia paused again, just to add to the tension, and then she said the words that would change her life, and many others forever. “I think you’re jealous of Sergei. You want to screw me yourself.”
Her father hit her across the face with the flat of his hand, putting all his great strength into the blow. Zhenia’s vision exploded with pain and the force of the impact wrenched her head to one side, taking her body with it and tearing at her neck muscles as she was sent spinning to the floor. Voronov stood over where she lay, moaning in agony on the floor. He was aiming wild, drunken kicks at her stomach, shouting filthy abuse at her. She was curled up into a foetal position trying to protect herself.
She had no idea how much time had passed when, through the fog of semi-conciousness that had fallen over her like a dark cloak, she heard a woman’s voice somewhere far away screeching, “Stop it! Stop kicking her, you bastard! Leave her alone!”
She realized dimly that it was her mother, Marina Voronova. She almost laughed through her pain as she thought, Mama has come to watch someone else get beaten up for a change.
Voronov stopped kicking her as he turned to face his wife, shouting, “Shut up! Shut your stupid mouth. One more word and you’ll get a taste of my boot also!”
Her mother was screaming back at him, “I hate you, you bastard, I hate you!”
Some tattered shreds of her own survival instinct warned Zhenia that this was her opportunity to escape. She stumbled to her feet and desperately tried to break into a run.
Her father yelled, “Come back here, you little slut! You are going to suffer for the things you said about me,” but before he could chase after her, he was crying out in alarm as Marina launched herself at him, raking his face with her long, manicured nails, knowing that she could not hope to overcome her powerful husband, but desperately trying to buy Zhenia time to escape from him.
Zhenia staggered back into the lobby, where a Filipina maid was just gathering up her coat, bag and shoes from the floor.
“Give me those!” Zhenia shouted.
The maid looked around in surprise that turned to shock when she saw Zhenia’s face. She stood there, dumbly, staring at the blood spurting from Zhenia’s nose.
“Give them to me!” Zhenia insisted, her voice rising in desperation as she snatched everything from the terrified servant and then raced to the door of the lift. She hammered at the button with the side of her right fist, in which she was clutching the ankle-straps of her shoes.
“Come on, come on!” Zhenia pleaded. She could hear the sound of her mother sobbing in the living room and her father shouting, “I’m coming for you, Yevgenia! You won’t get away from me!”
Not daring to turn around she heard his footsteps pounding over the marble floor. Where was that damn lift?
“I’m going to smash your lying mouth. I am going to break your jaws so they will never be able to put them back together again. I am going to mash your face so that no man will ever look at you again . . .”
Then the lift pinged, the door opened and Zhenia almost threw herself into it, pressing the “doors closed” button again and again.
She looked around and her father was only a few paces away, filling her whole field of vision.
The doors began to close. Voronov forced himself between them, pushing them apart with his bare hands.
Zhenia hit him with the heel of her shoe, bringing it down on the back of his right hand. Voronov howled in pain. He pulled his hands away. The doors closed, and the lift plummeted back down the shaft, carrying Zhenia to safety.
She didn’t have her car keys in the tiny evening bag, nor the internal passport that was essential for almost any official transaction in Russia, nor even her driving license: just her lipstick, some tissues, a packet of ten Marlboro Lights, a miniature going-out purse that contained her black Amex card and 5,000 roubles in cash, and last, but most importantly, her mobile phone.
Zhenia closed the bag, shrugged on her coat and stepped back into her shoes. It was only when she straightened up that she caught sight of her reflection in the lift wall. Her left eye looked puffy and swollen, as did her cheekbone, which was already starting to color with the beginnings of an ugly bruise. There was blood coming from one of her nostrils. She suddenly realized that her neck was aching and that even the slightest movement of her head sent shooting pains through her strained muscles and ligaments. She felt sick and disoriented and when the lift reached the ground floor and the doors opened it took Zhenia several seconds to gather her thoughts and find the will to walk out into the reception.
The next few hours passed in a semi-conscious blur as she called Sergei again and again without ever getting an answer, leaving endless messages begging him to come and rescue her and then gazing in bewilderment when he finally texted her: “Your dad called mine. We can never talk ever again. S.”
She wandered the streets, wondering why her father hadn’t come after her, or sent his security men to grab her, only slowly understanding that he’d chosen another, crueller form of retribution as one dear friend after another turned their back on her. The Woodpulp Tsar had put the word out to his fellow oligarchs, calling in favors or making threats, as each one required, but always making sure that they got the same message: his daughter was a non-person and no one was to have anything to do with her until she crawled back home and begged for his forgiveness.
It took Zhenia till dawn to find one contact her father couldn’t get to. Andrei Ionov had been a rebel since they were
in kindergarten together. He left home for good when he was eighteen, rejecting his privileged upbringing and working, mostly unpaid, as a freelance journalist for a series of anti-government websites and magazines, somehow managing to stay out of jail as one avenue after another was closed down. When she called him he gave her an address in Kopotnya, an infamously lawless and impoverished district in the south-east corner of the city, jammed up against Moscow’s ring-road, the MKAD.
“Are you sure this is where you want to get out, miss?” the cabbie asked her as he dropped her—Chanel shoes, fur coat and all—outside an old Communist-era apartment block, on a street of cracked paving stones and patchwork tarmac. Dawn was just breaking as she walked, still dazed and only vaguely aware of her surroundings, into the courtyard at the center of the block. She saw high white walls that were filthy, peeling and pockmarked. The surface of the yard was just beaten-down earth and rubble, from which three spindly, leafless trees were trying to grow between the cars parked wherever their drivers could find a few square meters’ space. Laundry was flapping from the railings of the balconies: cheap clothes in vile colors, and sheets so filthy it was hard to believe they’d ever been washed. She heard a voice call down from one of the balconies, “I’m up here!” and somehow managed to make her way up a stairwell that was strewn with rubbish and stank of vodka and urine to a door where Andrei was waiting to greet her.
Zhenia slept for little more than an hour and woke with a splitting headache, feeling more nauseous than ever, and when she saw her swollen, discolored face in the mirror she burst into tears of misery and despair. She was about to give up, surrender and crawl back on her knees to her cruel and twisted father and her hopelessly disfunctional mother when she remembered one last possible source of help: the half-sister, ten years her senior, whom she’d never really known, still less liked. But they had exchanged occasional birthday emails, and Zhenia’s sister had always attached her phone number to the message, each time with a different overseas dialing code.