“Oh, give it a rest,” laughed Shamil. “Or are you into him? You want him to fuck you? If I shock him good, he’ll have a hard-on you can use.”
“You’re a pig, Shamil!” said Biryuza.
“Sorry, sweetheart!” Shamil went on, laughing. “Hey, where are you going? We need to move him!”
“I’ll send someone,” Biryuza replied, and walked toward the exit.
Shamil lit a cigarette. He saw that Stanley was awake.
“Welcome back,” he said. He took a deep drag, then put out the cigarette on Stanley’s chest again.
Two men entered the hangar. They were nearly identical, both tall and broad-shouldered, with buzz cuts, heavy faces, and low foreheads.
“Okay, wheel him out and load him up,” instructed Shamil, pointing toward the gurney where Stanley was bound. “Did you bring the car around? Good.”
The two low-browed men pushed the gurney out of the hangar, rolled it to the open doors of a minibus, and took the stretcher off the gurney. But they moved too forcefully and dropped it. Shamil stood watching impassively.
“Sorry, boss,” one of them said, clearly expecting a blow to the head.
“Excellent!” said Shamil. “Do it again, but then toss the stretcher in the back. And don’t be gentle about it. Just don’t kill him.”
Stanley understood that the beatings and shocks weren’t going to stop. He also knew that Shamil would keep coming up with new ways to hurt him. But he didn’t have the slightest chance to escape the torture. If he did know something, where Gagarin’s money or Lagrange was, he would have told them immediately, after one or two punches, way before they brought out the electrical currents. He would have admitted to everything. He was afraid of the pain, but mostly he didn’t see any point in refusing to confess. He didn’t believe there was anyone who could withstand torture. And he didn’t see any point in trying to.
The only thing he was guilty of, if the word guilty applied here, was agreeing to work with Frank Dillon, and of taking the flash drive and connecting it to the bank’s network. But Gagarin didn’t even suspect him of that and wasn’t going to ask about it. Moreover, Gagarin had seemed satisfied with the explanation that Alex (who his people had taken for a man, apparently not believing that a woman could shoot that well and/or that quickly) was Stanley’s old friend, Iraq war vet and employee of a private security company.
That would have been good if Gagarin’s main concern was the identity of the person who had killed his men. But Gagarin didn’t care about anyone; money was all that mattered to him. Stanley lost consciousness again.
Chapter 48
The minibus doors slammed shut.
“One of you up front with me,” said Shamil.
He sat in the driver’s seat and started it up.
“How are you doing back there, Stanley?” he asked loudly, and then, to the man sitting next to him, “Make sure he’s tied up tightly back there. And check the gag! The last thing we need is him shouting help if we have to brake somewhere along the Promenade des Anglais.”
The guard got into the back seat of the minibus. His thick fingers felt along the knots on Stanley’s hands and feet and tugged on the gag.
“Everything’s good!”
“Okay, stay back there with him. And keep an eye on him!”
The minibus started moving.
Promenade des Anglais. The phrase echoed in Stanley’s head. That sounds familiar. Hmm, Nice, I think. Gagarin has a villa in Nice. We must be heading there.
Shamil was a sloppy driver, braking and accelerating sharply. The stretcher slid back and forth across the floor until the guard with Stanley pressed his foot down on a corner. The temporary peace let Stanley return to his train of thought.
Sure, Gagarin could talk about betrayal, could quote Dante, and maybe it did actually hurt him that—from his point of view—everyone betrayed him and Stanley had too, but money was what mattered to him. Only his money. Most of which didn’t even belong to him, but to those Russian officials, general, and other members of the government mafia who entrusted Gagarin to oversee their funds. Losing it was a death sentence for him. It was just too bad that Stanley wouldn’t live to see it. Shamil would make sure of that.
Stanley let out a stifled laugh.
“Boss!” the guard next to him said. “His lips are moving!”
“Yeah? Check his pulse. Make sure he’s breathing. We’ll be in for a world of shit if he dies.”
“Seems to be breathing, and his pulse is normal.”
“Normal? I’m not doing my damn job! I beat the shit out of him and shocked him so hard that smoke was practically coming out of his ears, and his pulse is normal? All right, you fucking Yankee, I’m going to really give it to you next time.”
Money, money, money. That was what all Gagarin wanted, in the end. And Stanley couldn’t do a thing for him there. He didn’t know anything. He refused to believe that Lagrange had pulled off a scam for Gagarin’s money. He had to know it was death sentence.
Or maybe Lagrange had accomplices, and he’d planned a long time for this. Maybe he was getting an operation to change his appearance, moving to a different country, different continent. Maybe he was running one of the world’s most grandiose banking schemes and Stanley would end up paying for it. Or perhaps Lagrange was operating with the consent of one of the oligarchs who’d been on Gagarin’s yacht. He couldn’t rule that out. Anything was possible. But for now, everything looked bad for Stanley. They were going to torture him until they maimed him, and then pour cement over his feet and drop him in the sea. They wouldn’t be able to just return what was left of him to the bank, after all.
“Boss,” shouted the guard. “He wants something!”
“How do you know?”
“I can see it in his eyes!”
“Take out the gag, ask, then put it back in place.”
The guard pulled out the gag.
“Let me have a smoke,” said Stanley, surprised at how firm his voice sounded.
“He wants a smoke!” the guard shouted to Shamil.
“I heard him,” replied Shamil. “I don’t like his voice. Too cheerful. As if I haven’t just fucked him up. Okay, I’ll do my best to rectify that. Well, we’re not animals. Let him have a smoke. Hey, Stanley! Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got good news for you. Viktor asked me to tell you—you’re going to see your wife soon. Did you miss her?”
Stanley’s heart seized up. Please, not Christine. God, no. Did they catch her before she made it out of Russia?
Shamil decided to head to Nice via Toulon, made a U-turn onto the A50, and hit the gas.
He did everything he could to demonstrate his kindness to Stanley on the way. He instructed the guard to put out his cigarettes on Stanley’s chest—clearly a favorite pastime of his—where the burns were forming a large open wound. He seemed to delight in Stanley’s cries of pain and curses, only ordering the guard to put in the gag again when it was time to beat him with the baton. But the guard was less skilled as Shamil and, wanting to impress his boss, overdid it a little—Stanley passed out from the pain, and woke up to Shamil swearing at the guard.
“Asshole! You’ll kill him like that! Torture, but don’t kill. Maim, but so he can still walk. Hit him in the balls, but don’t tear the balls off,” he lectured. The guard listened with the guilty expression of a schoolboy with bad grades. “I have to teach you everything. You don’t know how to do anything! Where did they find you idiots?”
The minibus turned off the highway, drove along the coast, and then through open gates and onto the territory of an enormous villa.
Shamil drove down the drive to a pier that extended out into the sea. Two motorboats and a small yacht made of mahogany were anchored nearby. He parked by a squat, two-story building that looked like a house for staff.
>
Two men came hurrying out of the house to help the guard pull Stanley’s stretcher out of the bus and carry it inside.
They untied his hands and feet, took out his gag, and doused him with water. Then they put him in a room that Shamil considered the best torture chamber in the world, although he acknowledged that not everyone could use it well—torture was a science, he told his people, and gave them instructions to stand guard over Stanley and watch him closely. Then he went off to have lunch.
Stanley came to his senses soon enough, roused by the unbearable, glaring light. But it wasn’t the same light that had blinded him in the hangar. He couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. There was no way to turn away from it. His whole body hurt, his bruises ached, but Stanley sat up, with great effort, and looked around.
He was in a small room with a white floor, walls, and ceiling. The panels over the powerful lights on the ceiling and walls were also white. There was no furniture in the room. A white toilet sat in the corner, and a bucket with water next to it, also painted white. Next to Stanley on the floor was a white plastic plate with a mound of white rice topped with a drop of soy sauce.
Stanley remembered reading an article about torture. Conditions like these were used when you wanted to break someone’s spirit, oppress them emotionally, deprive them of the will to resist. He thought that maybe they wouldn’t beat him anymore, but had to tell himself not to be naive—Shamil’s greatest joy in life was causing pain. He wasn’t going to stop torturing Stanley.
He tried to stand up, but could barely manage it. His body was covered in bruises, and black spots marked the places where Shamil had attached the electrodes from his little machine.
Stanley was surprised by the reserves of strength he found within. But even though he’d only been in the white room for a short while, he knew he couldn’t survive in these conditions for long. Again, he regretted his absolute lack of knowledge. He would have been happy to tell everything he knew about Lagrange and his theft—and Stanley was now certain that Lagrange was the one who’d stolen the money, who’d set Stanley up. He would have been so delighted to sic Shamil the maniac and his thick-headed henchmen on that traitorous bastard.
He tried to walk across the room. This proved very difficult. The white light and white color worked together to create the illusion of distance; it seemed to Stanley that the closest wall was a meter or two away, but, in actuality, the wall was barely centimeters away, and he banged his head badly against it, and fell with a groan. Neither the floor or the walls were padded. Stanley covered his face with his hands. The bright light got through anyway. It started to drill into his brain, causing physical pain.
Then he heard a light humming noise, starting soft and gradually growing louder. It started on a low note, and climbed higher and higher, eventually turning into a high-pitched squeal, almost ultrasonic. Stanley crawled over to the plastic plate, gathered up some of the sodden rice, and stuffed it in his ears. That helped a little.
Stanley couldn’t tell how long the torture with sound, light, and color lasted. It might have been several hours, or several days. When he passed out, someone came into his cell, checked him over, nodded approvingly, and left the room again silently. Stanley woke up, crawled over to the toilet, and threw up. He curled up into a ball next to it on the floor. And sank back into oblivion once more.
Stanley woke up to someone standing over him and kicking his foot. He couldn’t see who it was, just got an impression of dark glasses.
“You don’t recognize me?” Gagarin asked. “Look at you, lying around. This isn’t a resort! How do you like our little room? It’s equipped with the latest in technology—we got help from someone who used to work at MI5. Nice, huh? I like it too. Sorry we had to take a break. I had some more urgent things to attend to, and I didn’t want to put Shamil completely in charge of you. He likes you so much that I had to tell him three times not to touch you while I was gone.”
Gagarin squatted down next to Stanley.
“He would have killed you already, I think.”
“Where’s my wife?” Stanley asked, although he had some trouble operating his tongue.
“Wife? What wife?”
“Shamil said she was with you.”
“Ah yes, your wife! She’s here. You can see her now. Have a chat. You’ll have time while Shamil works you over. Under my supervision, of course. Don’t worry, he’s not going to kill you, maybe just maim you a little. Foot, hand, knee. Get up, fucker!” Gagarin stood and kicked Stanley with the toe of his shoe. “Stand up! We haven’t finished our discussion. You can’t? I’ll get some help. Hey!”
Two men appeared at Gagarin’s shout. They picked Stanley up and dragged him out of the white room, along a hallway, and down a staircase to the basement. The basement had a low ceiling and was cluttered with shelves. Part of it was fenced off by an opaque plastic curtain, and a large metal tub occupied another part. The men raised Stanley up and tied him to a table that looked like a carpenter’s workbench. Gagarin sat in a chair, and one of the men who’d dragged Stanley in lit a cigarette for him. Then Gagarin sent them off with a wave of his hand.
“Shamil got held up,” Gagarin nodded toward the curtain. “He’s busy with something over there. Can you hear that rustling? He’ll be free in a minute. You’re not in a rush, are you?”
“No.”
“Louder! Speak up, goddamn it.”
“No!”
“Well, I am. Ah, here’s Shamil…What were you doing over there?”
Shamil went over to Gagarin and whispered something in his ear.
“Really?” Gagarin jerked back in surprise. “Well, that’s unexpected! Anyway, we have to get started.”
Shamil came over to the workbench and wrapped Stanley’s head in two layers of fabric, then clamped his head into a wooden vice.
“Ok, my dear Swiss banker, let’s start from where we stopped last time. Shamil!”
Shamil began to pour water on Stanley’s cloth-covered face. He poured water from a hose until the outline of an open mouth appeared in the cloth and Stanley’s body began to arch upward. He took a break, and then started again.
“Where’s Lagrange?” asked Gagarin during the break, but called for Shamil again before Stanley had the chance to answer.
The water torture continued. Water got into Stanley’s lungs, and he tried to spit it out, arched his back, and cough, but the pain was too great. His body convulsed.
“Where’s Lagrange, Stanley? Tell me, and we’ll give you an easy death.” Gagarin, as usual, took out his flask, took several sips, and lit a cigarette. “Otherwise you’ll die in agony. Shamil, take that rag off his face. Talk! Otherwise you’ll die like her!”
Shamil unwrapped Stanley’s head and pulled back the plastic curtain. Someone was hanging by their hands from a hook on the ceiling, their arms twisted up and back behind them.
“Wipe his eyes, Shamil,” Gagarin said. “Recognize her?” He nodded toward the hanging body.
Stanley tried to focus, but his vision was still blurry.
“Recognize her?” Gagarin asked again.
It was Christine, his Christine, her head bent back, her legs tied, covered with bruises. Her hair covered her face, and there was a bloody cut across her neck.
“I see that you have.” Gagarin nodded and laughed. “What did you expect? The ones who love us must share our fates. And she did love you, Stanley. But you didn’t love her! You loved fucking my wife every way you could get it, and we couldn’t fuck yours? That’s not fair! We believe in fairness, don’t we, McKnight? American justice. What are you getting all worked up about? Look, Shamil. He’s twitching around, making all kinds of noises. McKnight, you poor thing. Are you crying?”
Gagarin walked over to Christine’s hanging body and pushed her leg. The body began to sway lightly on the hook.
“It’s just Old Testa
ment principles—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You fuck someone else’s wife, someone fucks yours. Biryuza described your meetings for me in detail. Gathered info. So it turns out you betrayed me twice. And that’s just too much. Shamil got a little out of hand, put a little too much elbow grease into it. Your wife was too delicate, not like my slut. Mine is happy taking it any way you want to give it, but yours couldn’t handle it. Go on, Shamil!”
Shamil wrapped Stanley’s head back up and started pouring water again. When Stanley started to choke, Shamil brought the table with the megohmmeter over, hooked up the electrodes, and gave Stanley a shock.
Gagarin smoked calmly, observing the torture, sipping from his flask and asking the same question over and over: “Where’s Lagrange, Stanley? Where’s Lagrange?”
But the torture was set up so that even when Stanley wanted to say something, either his mouth was covered with cloth and had water pouring over it, or he was being shocked, and foam came out of his mouth instead of words.
Gagarin finally stood up.
“I need to make a few calls. Your wife can hang there so you’ll have something to look at during the break. You won’t have much time for that, but still. Shamil, take a break, and then back to it!”
But Shamil didn’t want a smoke. He carried on, alternating methodically between water torture and electric shock. When he got tired, he dropped Stanley into the iron tub, which was filled with muddy, filthy water. To keep from drowning, Stanley had to hang on to the rough sides with his teeth. It was those moments when Shamil took the time for a cigarette and frank conversation. He told Stanley that even though he didn’t like women, he had liked Christine.
“She was a stuck-up bitch, Stanley. But only till I started fucking her in the ass. What are you mumbling about, Stanley? I can’t hear you. Anyway, your wife was the first American woman I ever had, and I have to say, it wasn’t bad at all.”
Shamil grabbed Stanley’s nose and started swinging his head back and forth.
“And you know what, Stanley? I was choking her while I fucked her, and she came. Can you imagine? She came right before she died. I felt it. What a slut, huh? That was your wife, man! What a whore! And you’re a piece of work, yourself,” Shamil said, patting Stanley on the cheek before clamping his hand down over Stanley’s throat.
The Banker Who Died Page 47