The Gambit (Ben Lewis Thriller Book 2)

by David N Robinson

  “Borys, let me ask a simple question.” It was Virenque speaking. “On the assumption that you are unlikely to hand over your codes without additional persuasion, I am going to give you three options. Option one is that my friend here,” he said, pointing at Panich, “provides some symmetry to your current infirmity and does to your left hand exactly the same as he did to the right. Option two is that he and I take it in turns to tread very carefully and repeatedly on your right hand. This will render it completely useless as well as being very painful for you. Option three,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, “is what I fear my friend over there,” he said pointing at Panich, “really wants. Option three sees us tying your sister up against the wall over there, completely naked, and then we both take it in turns to enjoy ourselves whilst you are forced to watch. How does that sound, Borys?”

  Both Olena and Borys began shaking visibly, fear and tension wracking their entire bodies.

  “Of course, there is always a fourth option,” Panich was speaking, his head on one side, looking at them both pityingly. “The fourth option is that you tell us what we want and there will be no need for any unpleasantness.”

  “But then you will simply kill us,” Borys blurted. It was a brave, yet foolish, thing to have said. It caused an instantaneous reaction from Virenque. With lightning speed he bent down and picked up a terrified Olena under both armpits as if she was a child, as light as a feather. With her in his hands, he thrust her backwards towards the wall immediately behind where they had been sitting. The impact of her body crashing into the wall made her scream, the force making the cellar walls reverberate. Virenque thrust his right hand directly against Olena’s windpipe and pressed it hard against the stone behind her. Olena struggled desperately to breathe: choking sounds emanating from her throat.

  “How about option five, assuming that you really want to go there?” Virenque was shouting, the adrenalin in his system pumping fast and furious. “Why don’t I simply kill your sister now, Borys? She’s already given us her codes. She’s now excess baggage. No longer needed – so we kill her, just as you suggested.”

  Olena’s eyes were bulging. She was fast becoming desperate: unable to breath, unable to swallow, the pressure on her throat intolerable.

  “I quite like option five, actually, Oleg.” Virenque said, deliberately addressing Panich. “It’s one less to worry about. What do you think, Borys? Do you have any last words to say to your darling sister? Your silence is going to be the thing that kills her.”

  “NO!” Borys suddenly screams. “No! I’ll tell you,’ he starts sobbing. ‘Don’t kill her. I’ll tell you what you want.”

  Virenque looked at Panich and the two of them nodded. The Frenchman released his grip on Olena’s throat, letting her fall to the floor where she gasped and coughed, heaving for breath.

  “Okay, Borys.” It was Panich speaking now. “You’ve earned Olena a reprieve. You’ve got two minutes to tell us all we need to know. Otherwise, my friend will not hesitate to kill your sister. Killing is his particular expertise.”

  The game that had been chosen for Borys had been the Ukrainian grandmaster, Alexander Areshchenko against the Russian grandmaster, Sergei Rublevsky in the 2009 world cup held in Khanty-Mansiysk in Russia. Rublevsky, playing white, had made a tactical error on the seventy-sixth move. White Queen to g6. Areshchenko had moved his black knight to f4. Thereafter, the Ukrainian trapped the white queen and used his pawn to put Rublevsky’s king in check and force a resignation. The code was in the final four moves of the game: Kg3 Rh5 Kh3 g4. Borys gave up his secrets without any further encouragement. The time was almost exactly four o’clock in the morning.

  88

  Before disconnecting his phone from the network, Lewis uses the map function to plan his route to Newton. As Zeltinger had suggested, the village is close to his current location. There are two roads running through the middle; one roughly north-south and the other east-west. About to arrive from the north, Lewis decides to make a quick sweep through the village and explore the entire area by bike first. Then he will park up and perform a secondary scan on foot.

  By four-fifteen, his first scan is complete. The village is indeed small. There are possibly no more than ten houses that, in Lewis’s mind, fit the description of being a farmhouse. Of these, all bar two have cars in their drives, indicating some kind of possible human presence. Four have lights on in one part or other. It is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Two stand out as being places that he would have chosen: one is on the road heading east from the village; the other is on the road to Harston, heading west. Both are isolated, both about a mile from the village centre and thus quiet. He decides to modify his secondary scan on foot by starting with these two first. He begins with the property on the west side.

  He parks his bike in a small turning to the left. It is the entrance to a field, allowing Lewis to tuck his Honda behind a hedge and out of sight. He approaches the house on foot from the road. The main building is set back some distance and hidden by trees and bushes. At this time of year, the leaf cover has disappeared: in the pale moonlight, Lewis can see through them directly onto the property. A Range Rover is parked in the drive. Lewis did not see this on his first drive past the property: probably because it is tucked in, tight next to the hedge, adjacent to the road. Lewis salts away the number plate. His one nagging thought is that Nemikov had a Range Rover. Earlier the same evening, Fedorov had driven off to Luton Airport in it. Could it be the same vehicle? Lewis dismisses the idea as an unlikely coincidence: too many people in this part of the country drive the identical make and model. There are two lights on downstairs, but no movement he can detect. He decides to get closer. The drive is laid with pea shingle, causing him to tread carefully so as not to make a sound. To one side there is a small open-fronted garage. As he gets closer, Lewis finds a motorbike parked up. He feels the engine block. Despite the cold night air, there is residual warmth there. This machine has been used in the last few hours. No more than three or four, perhaps less. He tries looking through the windows of the house, but the curtains are drawn and he can hear no sound. He waits, listening, smelling the air. Nothing. There is no letterbox on the main door to look through either. Still stepping carefully, he checks the garden: again finding nothing. The time is four twenty-five. Time to check the other property.

  Retrieving his Honda, he heads to the other side of the village, leaving his bike parked once more behind a hedge. This second property is more exposed to the road than the other. There are two cars in the drive: another Range Rover and an old, ‘T” registered Volkswagen. Once more faced with a driveway covered in pea-shingle, Lewis creeps carefully up to the house so as to get a closer look. There are three lights on: two upstairs and one downstairs. This time, there is a letterbox on the front door. Lewis pushes it open and peers inside, letting his senses eke out anything unusual. He neither sees nor hears anything. He does, however, smell lingering tobacco smoke. Could this be Panich? It is possible.

  The time is four thirty-five in the morning. He should be calling Zeltinger once again.

  Backing away from the property as stealthily as he is able, he pulls out his phone. Zeltinger answers it on the second ring.

  “We might have found one property,” the half German Detective Inspector tells Lewis. “It’s a rental property, on the west side of the village. It’s on the road to a village called Harston.”

  89

  Fedorov found the farmhouse without any difficulty. He reversed the Range Rover into the drive and parked it next to a thick hedge, where it wouldn’t be seen that easily from the road. The time was five minutes after four in the morning. He had no keys to the property. Without any doorbell to ring, he instead banged loudly on the door a couple of times. After waiting in the cold night air for what seemed like an age, he was about to knock again when he felt the blade of a knife being pressed hard against his th
roat. He had never heard a thing.

  “Who the fuck are you?” came a voice from behind him. “What the hell do you want round here at this time of night?”

  Already sporting a broken nose from his earlier encounter with Lewis, the last thing Fedorov wanted was another confrontation.

  “My name is Sergei Fedorov,” he said weakly but with a tinge of pride, his poor English clearly audible.

  The man behind him seemed to consider this for a while before releasing the pressure of the blade.

  “Okay, we were expecting you. Do you have a gun?”

  Fedorov shook his head. He did earlier, before Ben Lewis had confiscated it from him.

  “So first thing, I am going to check to make sure. No funny tricks, Sergei. It looks like you’ve been in the wars this evening. Who did that to your nose?”

  He was patting him down expertly whilst he was speaking. He even checked behind him, in the small of his back, to Fedorov’s chagrin: the place where the Ukrainian had failed to find the knife on Lewis.

  “A man called Ben Lewis.” He pretended to spit on the ground having spoken the name.

  “Ha!” the man laughed, the body search complete. “Then we have common enemies, even if we don’t know one another. I am Virenque, by the way. And your arrival is most timely. We are shortly to be leaving, and you are going to be our designated driver. Follow me and I’ll show you around.”

  Virenque let Fedorov lead the way down into the cellar. He wanted to observe the Ukrainian’s reaction when he saw both Olena and Borys tied up. It would help make it clear where the man’s loyalties really lay.

  The light in the cellar was dim and it took a while to adjust to the semi-darkness. When he was finally able to make out what was going on, Fedorov let out a cry.

  “What have you been doing?” he asked Virenque, pointing to where Olena and Borys were lying with their hands and elbows restrained. “They are no threat! This is barbaric!”

  Virenque turned to Fedorov and smiled thinly.

  “If you want to see barbaric, I’d be happy to show you.” He turned to face the Nemikov pair and waved with his arm. “Why are you so concerned about them both anyway, Sergei? You’re meant to be on our team, not theirs.” He looked at Olena and Borys, and saw that he had their attention. “Yes, that’s right. Your friend Fedorov has betrayed you. All these years, he’s secretly been working for the Russians. Isn’t that right, Sergei?”

  Fedorov said nothing.

  “You’ve gone very quiet all of a sudden, Sergei. Why not explain to Olena here who tipped us off that she was leaving Kensington with Lewis in the Audi, and not with you in the Range Rover? I am sure she’d love to hear the truth.”

  “It’s complicated,” is all that Fedorov said.

  “Too bloody right it’s complicated,” retorted Virenque. “Everyone has their own secret agenda. These two included. Or at least they did.” He laughed as he said this. “In any event, it no longer matters. They have told us all that we need to know.”

  “Then let them go.”

  “Sergei!” It was Olena speaking. “You’ve got to help. They are going to kill us, I know they are.”

  “Shut up, woman,” Virenque snapped. A Glock 17 pistol had suddenly appeared in his hand: it was pointing directly at her.

  “Unless you’d like to take the first bullet?” He turned to face Fedorov, tapping the man’s chest with the barrel of his gun.

  “So, Sergei, just to prove finally that you and I are on the same side. I’d like to hear you explain how you’ve betrayed these two, and their father, all these years. That’s all.”

  Fedorov said nothing. He was staring at Borys and Olena, a mixture of anger and sadness on his face.

  “We can wait all night, if you’d rather,” Virenque said, casually moving his left sleeve cuff with the barrel of the Glock to check the time.

  Time stood still for several seconds.

  Then, as fast and as unexpected as a lightning strike, he spun the Glock pistol abruptly towards Fedorov’s face and pulled the trigger: at point blank range, directly between the eyes. The sound was deafening: blood, sinew and bone fragments of what had been Fedorov’s head splattered far and wide in the bullet’s wake. Olena and Borys both screamed, but in the depths of the brick-lined cellar, with nothing but earth and stone on four sides, the noise was barely audible, even to Panich on the floor above.

  “Pull yourselves together. The man was a traitor. He betrayed your father.” Virenque assessed the petrified look in their eyes. He bent down on his haunches so as to be at their level. “Nobody trusts a traitor. We’re better off without him, don’t you think? At least you now know what happens to those who piss me off.”

  He raised himself back up to full height again.

  “We shall be leaving very shortly. If you need to use the bucket,” he said with a nod to the white plastic receptacle in the corner, “now is the time to do so. I am about to undo your wrist bindings. Don’t start getting any smart ideas. If you plan on messing me or my friend around, you’ve seen now how I’m likely to react.”

  90

  Already suspicious because of the information that Zeltinger had passed him, by the time Lewis approaches the house on the Harston Road for the second time, his hackles are well and truly raised.

  The Range Rover is no longer there.

  Also, since his earlier visit a few minutes ago, all the lights in the property have been turned off.

  It is time to look inside.

  Still treading stealthily on the pea shingle, he reaches a side entrance and tries the handle. The door is unlocked. Another bad sign.

  He closes the door behind him and listens. There is no sound to be heard anywhere. Once again he can smell smoke. Cigarette smoke. This time it is a brand he knows: Turkish. This is the place, he feels sure. Reaching for his phone, he flips the screen with his thumb and turns on the flashlight. He is in the kitchen, and there is evidence that people have been here. Two mugs are on the table. More importantly, numerous cigarette butts have been stubbed out on a saucer.

  This is definitely the place.

  He reaches for the Walther P-22 pistol still tucked in his waistband, moving the safety to the firing position. Inching his way into the hallway, he has the clear sense that the house is deserted. He checks from room to room to make sure. The ground floor first: there is no one: all rooms are empty. The stairs to the upper floor creak as he shuffles his way up. Lewis takes care to press his heels on the edge of the tread nearest the wall so as to minimise the noise. He checks each room methodically: again all are empty.

  The only remaining place to check is the cellar. The steps are behind a door leading off a passageway from the kitchen. He opens the cellar door and the smell of death rushes up to meet him. Emboldened by the absence of anybody in the rest of the house, Lewis flips the light switch on as he descends the stairs. Step by step, all the while listening. He makes an easy target, he knows, to anybody waiting with a gun. However, he is confident that no one is lying there in wait: no one alive, that is. When he reaches the bottom and sees what little there is left of Fedorov, his face and most of his head blown away, he knows that he was right.

  Zeltinger answers the phone on the second ring once more.

  “Saul,” Lewis says with no introductions. “This is definitely the place. If you can mobilise all police units, there is a chance of catching Panich and the two young Nemikovs: possibly also the bomber on the train. I arrived about five minutes too late. They’ve taken off in Nemikov’s Range Rover.” He recites the car’s registration details from memory.

  “I’ve no idea where they’re heading, but they can’t be far from here. Why don’t you call me back in a couple of minutes, once you’ve got that sorted, and I can give you a proper heads up?”

  Zeltinger calls back in t
hree minutes.

  “I’ve set the ball in motion,” Zeltinger says. “We’re a bit early for the commuter rush hour into London, clogging the roads. With luck we might be able to catch them.”

  “Great. Look, Saul, you need to get the Cambridgeshire police out to this place. The house is completely empty, I’ve checked. Nemikov’s head of security, Sergei Fedorov, is however, lying dead in the cellar. He’s had half his head blown away by a gunshot wound to the face.”

  “Bloody hell, Ben. Did you do that?”

  “It was tempting, but not guilty. There’s also evidence in the cellar that one or more have been held here against their will. You’ll need a forensic team. I am certain Olena and Borys were here.”

  “I trust you haven’t left prints everywhere, Ben?”

  “I’ve been über careful. I’d like to beg a favour. A ‘no’ answer is perfectly acceptable. I need to come back London. If I go to my apartment, I am likely either to be arrested or, if Panich is still at large, to find myself dragged somewhere unpleasant and interrogated. Are you at home for the next hour or so? If so, could I drop by to freshen up, grab some fuel and recharge? Always assuming, you’re not about to turn me in.”

  “Ben, I’ve had virtually no sleep tonight. What’s another interruption going to change? I am not about to turn you in, I promise, if that’s what you’re worried about. The deal is that, in return you’ll have to promise to give me straight answers to each and every question I may have.”