‘The classic combination of bribery and blackmail,’ I conceded, ‘which ACC is it?’
‘Brinklow.’
‘What can we do about this?’
‘It will be difficult,’ he told me, ‘with his support they are untouchable by anyone from inside Lothian and Borders Police and there’s a lot of politics. They don’t like outside interference.’
‘What about SOCA?’
‘Won’t be interested, unless we can provide conclusive proof Brinklow is on the take.’
‘And you don’t have that proof?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Amrein, we pay you a lot of money to fix things like this.’
‘I feel sure we can come up with it,’ he told me, ‘in time. Leave the Serbian brothers to us,’ he urged me.
We’d reached the stone footbridge over the River Wear. ‘There is one other thing,’ he told me, when we crossed to the other side, ‘and I suspect you will not like to hear it.’
At this point it was hard to imagine how my day could get any worse, but it did. ‘Yaroslav Vasnetsov insists upon a meeting.’
28
Have you ever wondered what it must be like to have money? I mean real money, not just a few thousand dropped on you by a long-lost uncle you never knew, who dies and leaves it all in his will. If you’ve ever wondered what it must feel like to have fifty grand tucked away, a hundred maybe or, if you actually have the imagination, to ponder what you’d do with a million quid, then you know just how much it can change your life. No mortgage, a big house, all bought and paid for, the flash car most people only get to see in their rear-view mirror, before it flashes past them in the fast lane. If you want enough to buy anything you could ever want, including high-end, three-grand-a-night hookers, plus mountains of coke and vats full of Cristal, then you’re probably already thinking you might need at least a couple of mil, more maybe.
Me, I reckon it would take about four million just to put you in a position where you can actually tell the boss to go fuck himself and his crummy job, to set yourself up so you never need to earn another penny, to be in a position where you can look after yourself and your whole family for the rest of your days.
Now imagine that, instead of four million, you had a hundred or two hundred times that? Serious money. That’s your own Lear jet, taking you off to your personal Caribbean island with wall-to-wall Playboy bunnies flown in, until you get bored with them all and send out for more. Let’s say you have two hundred and fifty times that four million and now you are a billionaire? You’re financing art galleries, museums, Hollywood movies, presidential campaigns.
Now imagine you have twenty times that amount. Twenty billion dollars. What does that make you? It makes you Yaroslav Vasnetsov.
His front lawn was the size of a cricket pitch and the driveway leading up to it from the main gate was so long we were chauffeured down it. The house was enormous; one of those neo-gothic piles with gargoyles that peer down at you from the buttresses. It looked like it had been purchased from the estate of Aleister Crowley; a Hammer House of Horror film-set in the heart of leafy Surrey.
We went through a marbled hallway and I was conscious of how many people were busily going about their business. This wasn’t just the man’s home, it was the hub of the Vasnetsov empire.
Yaroslav Vasnetsov was not born to wealth, but into a dirt-poor Georgian family who could barely afford to feed him, or the rest of his siblings. When he was still young, his father moved them all from Georgia to St Petersburg, craving the opportunity a big city could provide. Vasnetsov’s first foray into private enterprise was selling toys from a market stall but now, at just forty-five, he had amassed one of the biggest fortunes in the world, estimated at between fifteen and twenty billion dollars, depending on which newspaper’s estimate you believed. To fathom how he was able to do this is to understand Russia at the end of the Cold War. When Boris Yeltsin came to power he swept away the Communist old order and plunged his nation into an era of unrivalled corruption. If you bankrolled politicians you got the opportunity to plunder the state’s wealth by buying up enormous companies for fractions of their true value. Vasnetsov already understood how to make money by buying political influence and paying off local crime lords, so he merely took this know-how to the next level. His investments were shrewd and the state-owned oil companies and aluminium plants were privatised, modernised and soon began to deliver the billions he now enjoyed.
Of course, the population weren’t too happy about a handful of individuals creaming off the nation’s wealth and it is said that when President Putin first came to power he made a deal with these oligarchs. Stay out of politics, unless you are on my side, and keep your wealth, or face the consequences. Men like Abramovich toed the line, bought yachts and football clubs and lived happily ever after. Others like Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky didn’t and were soon exiled or imprisoned. Perhaps the most outspoken oligarch of them all however, was Yaroslav Vasnetsov, earning him the label of Russia’s public enemy number one, but not before he managed to flee the country, taking most of his fortune with him. He set up home in England and soon bought his way into British society, donating entire collections to art galleries, a number of Oxbridge bursaries and even a hospital wing. I mean, how could we deport the man after all that? Vasnetsov’s presence in this country has affronted Russia to such an extent that he is now almost personally responsible for a freezing of relationships between the two countries to a near cold-war level. What has all this got to do with me? I had no idea, but assumed I was about to find out.
‘Before your meeting with Mr Vasnetsov, there are some documents he would like you to familiarise yourself with.’
The young man in the sharp suit took us into the library and motioned towards a large table with papers laid out on it. Palmer walked over to them while I awaited an explanation. ‘I will leave you to examine the information we’ve provided before Mr Vasnetsov joins you,’ was all I got.
Palmer was already looking at the material. I couldn’t see what it was, but I could tell from the look on his face that he was taking it seriously.
‘What is it?’ I asked and when he didn’t immediately answer me I walked over and joined him. On the table were a series of folders containing papers but I ignored them and instead scrutinised the dozen ten-by-eight black and white surveillance photos thoughtfully arranged in a line for us to view. They were of an extremely high quality, considering they had been taken without any of us knowing. There was a very clear one of me with the Turk, sitting opposite each other in one of his cafes that we used as a discreet meeting place. The next one showed us leaving the building with Palmer and one of the Turk’s bodyguards following behind. The cars we used had been photographed too, but then there was more damning material, including shots of the lorries we used to transport the heroin.
I turned the page and found notes from a surveillance report, listing the makes and registration numbers of some of those trucks and the route they took into the Balkans and beyond. Some were tracked heading west to Amsterdam, where their contents would be off-loaded into freight containers. These were loaded onto ships that crossed the North Sea and were off-loaded at Hull. Others went east, into Russia via a little Ukrainian border post east of Kharkov; a territory Remzi had been ruthlessly fighting his way into for more than a decade.
The next series of photographs included nice close-ups of people who helped us get our drugs out of Turkey and across Europe. Some of our key men were photographed near the lorries and the tankers we used and in incriminating shots with officials we bribed to turn a blind eye. I was in enough of the photos to prove that I had a lot of very dodgy friends indeed. This alone would have been pretty damning, but there was more. I was used to dealing with Amrein’s organisation, so I knew how this kind of operation could work but even I was astonished at the level of detail Vasnetsov had amassed on our drug line. He had managed to chart almost every inch of it, presumably by mounting an enormous and highly-sophisticated
surveillance operation, the type that the CIA would struggle to fund, on each and every one of us. He had details of our consignments; dates, times, places and estimated yields. I’d say he had us down to almost the last kilo. Palmer and I read this material for a good fifteen minutes and, by the end of it, I realised I was looking at serious prison time. There was enough evidence here to get me a sentence in excess of twenty years in Britain, if this file ever fell into the wrong hands. I was suddenly glad it was Vasnetsov holding it and not the Crown Prosecution Service, but I was worried too, because there could be only one reason for a man like Vasnetsov to invest his time, energy and considerable resources into an operation as thorough as this one. He wanted something from me and that something was going to be big.
‘This surveillance…’ Palmer was shaking his head, ‘I don’t know how we didn’t spot it… unless they used an army of bloody good people, but if they did that, the cost would be…’
‘I don’t think you’re getting it,’ I told him. ‘If this surveillance cost him a couple of million dollars he wouldn’t notice. He could spend one hundred million dollars on the operation, employ dozens of former agents of the FSB, CIA, Mossad and MI5, and it still wouldn’t even put a dent in his fortune. His resources are pretty much inexhaustible and he doesn’t have to account for any of it to a government select committee or the US Congress. There are no rules he has to follow. He’s unaccountable, beholden to no one, except himself. He does what he likes. Do you get it now?’
We both turned when the door opened. The man who walked into the room was instantly familiar. The phalanx of bodyguards were straight out of central casting, an oligarch’s idea of what a minder should look like; absurdly tall, barrel-chested men with shaved heads that proclaimed them as ex-military or FSB, happy to take vast inflations of their state pay to keep the man at their centre breathing.
I recognised two other men from my briefing with Amrein. Evgeny Gorshkov was Vasnetsov’s head of security, a personal bodyguard and rat-catcher who smoked out plots against his boss and dealt with the perpetrators ruthlessly. He was a big man in his forties. The other man I recognised from the photographs Amrein had showed me was Mikhail Datsik, Vasnetsov’s personal banker, who shuffled money around the globe at the behest of his boss. Datsik was a small, tubby man of mixed ancestry and dual citizenship, his American mother having married a Russian émigré. It was said that Datsik had managed to double Vasnetsov’s vast fortune in just ten years.
Vasnetsov wore a simple, plain white tailored shirt that probably cost more than a working man takes home in a month, black trousers and patent leather shoes that had most likely been custom made in Milan. He wasn’t a particularly big man, just average looking; average height, average build, but there was nothing average about his life. He eyed me like I was something trivial that was in his way, and snapped something in Russian to an aide who immediately dipped his head and left the room. He seemed irritated that he had been forced to emerge from the shadows to talk to me.
‘You know who I am.’
It wasn’t a question.
‘Of course.’
‘Then you will take what I have to say seriously.’
‘Obviously.’ The man could buy and sell me, Amrein and everybody else we’d ever met, in an afternoon. Compared to him we were yachts bobbing on the ocean and he was the QE2.
‘Good. Because, if you listen, you will make much money and if you do not…’ he clicked his fingers, ‘all gone.’
He walked up to our table but ignored the surveillance report. Perhaps he felt that it spoke for itself. He put a newspaper down in front of me and tapped it with a finger. ‘I am close to a breakthrough and must leave tonight,’ then he became quite animated, ‘you have heard of my latest business venture?’
‘African oil,’ there had been a feature on it in the newspaper he was holding and a small piece on the TV news.
He nodded. ‘There are five billion barrels of crude oil waiting underground in a small East-African country that will be transformed by my wells.’
‘You know this for sure?’
‘I have hired many experts; surveyors, geologists, oil company men, it is they that tell me this.’
‘The trouble with paying big money for experts is that they often feel obliged to tell you what you want to hear.’
‘In Uganda they are already taking one hundred and fifty thousand barrels a day out of the Rift Valley. That’s real oil. My wells will be bigger, there will be more of them and I am building the refinery there myself. I will control everything.’
‘You think their government will just let you do this?’
‘It is taken care of. I have made many rich men already and they will continue to profit by my presence in their country. In one month we start to drill, then the oil and the money will flow.’ I had no idea why he was bothering to tell me all of this until he added, ‘with this oil I will have five, maybe ten billion dollars a year to put aside to spend on my passion. Do you know what my passion is, Mr Blake?’
‘Human Rights?’
He looked irritated for a moment then he brushed my comment aside. ‘My country, my homeland, a place to which I can never return. Cowboys and crooks run everything there now. This so-called government everyone deals with, the one even the official EU reports say is no more than a gangster state…’ and he shook his head in seeming amazement, ‘a gangster state? Can you imagine?’
I could, easily.
‘When the communists ran everything, when you had to pretend to be on their side, when even a man like me was forced to join the fucking communist party so I could do business of any kind, then it was bad, but now? There is no hope for anyone. The President, the Prime Minister, the FSB, the so-called Red Mafia, they are all just part of the same corruption. The shit has piled so high now you can smell it all the way across the world. I want to bring it all crashing down so there is nothing left. Then we can rebuild it and start again. What we need, Blake, is a new revolution.’
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. The guy might have been worth billions, but he was just one man, and here he was talking about bringing down the government of one of the biggest countries on the planet. It couldn’t be done. I was starting to wonder what madness had been festering away all of these years while he was exiled in London, surrounded by flunkies. What did it do to a man if he never heard the word no?
‘Khodorkovsky already tried that.’
‘Khodorkovsky was an idiot. He tried to change Russia from within, by founding schools on political thought and funding opposition parties. He thought he could stay out in the open and give Putin the finger, that he was too rich and famous for the FSB to come after him. Look at him now.’
The FSB is the Russian Federal Security Service, successor to the notorious KGB, which is directly controlled by the President. Less than a decade ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky had been the richest man in Russia, now he was serving fourteen years in prison for tax evasion and fraud and all because he wouldn’t keep quiet and toe the line. Khodorkovsky’s trial and conviction has been condemned all over the world as political and rigged but still he rots in jail.
I didn’t want to spend any longer hearing a monologue about corrupt politicians in Russia so I just came out with it.
‘What exactly do you want from me?’
‘Your supply line,’ he told me, ‘part of it, at least; the part which runs from the eastern ports of the UK to Amsterdam, then through Europe until it reaches Russia. I know about your Russian supply line so please don’t bother to deny it. You will waste the time of both of us.’
There didn’t seem to be any point in denying anything. He knew everything there was to know about our European operation.
‘Why do you need to use our supply line?’
‘Men and materials,’ he said simply, as if he was discussing a building job.
‘What sort of men and what kind of materials?’
‘You do not need to know that.’
�
�Oh, but I do. If you are paying me to use our supply line, I need to know what’s going through it.’
He shook his head. ‘Let me explain this. I will pay you, sure, but I am not giving you a choice. I will use your supply line to ship men and materials into Russia. If you cooperate with me, you will be generously rewarded, if you do not I will remove you and use the supply line anyway.’
I had already resolved to find any way I could to duck out of this arrangement but not here; later, when I could get Amrein onside, to help me kick this mad Russian into touch. For now, I went along with it as if it might be a slim possibility.
‘I don’t need you to explain,’ I told him, ‘it’s not drugs, clearly, that’s not your business, so what could you possibly want to ship over a border into Russia that you couldn’t just send by air freight with your guys flying in on a passenger jet? You’re planning something and you’ve stated that the men who run your country don’t understand democracy, reform or free politics, so what is it? If you are going to blow up the Kremlin using my supply line then you’ve no chance. They’ll go to war on you,’ I told him, ‘and me.’
‘The Russian government declared war on me years ago. They have tried to assassinate me many times. Before I left Russia I tried to follow the political road. I was even the governor of a province. One day I was due to take a helicopter flight with my family, only I had to stay behind and finish a deal, so I let my wife and young son go on ahead. The helicopter was blown out of the sky, shot down by a missile, everyone on board was killed. Nobody could provide a satisfactory explanation for the “tragedy”. I have lost my wife and child in this struggle and the authorities in Russia will not rest until I am also dead. I am already at war.’
‘That has nothing to do with me.’
‘Which is a good reason to use you,’ he said, before adding, ‘you have no links to me at all. You pay corrupt officials to look the other way while you send heroin and cocaine to the Russian crime syndicates your associate, the Turk, has cultivated. Those same officials will continue to look the other way when my men and materials are delivered by your supply line. The men I wish to send back to my homeland cannot simply fly in on a scheduled flight. They will be picked up as soon as they land. The materials will enable me to bring the war to my enemies.’
The Dead Page 16