The Dead
Page 28
I sailed through Customs with the fake passport and boarded a flight to Stockholm, just to get me clear of the country. Then I took another flight from Stockholm to Berlin. I checked into a hotel, took a long hot shower and fell into bed. I planned to stay in Berlin for one night only. I hadn’t finished travelling yet, not by a long way.
You can buy English papers in Berlin and the next morning one of the broadsheets wrote. ‘International condemnation is mounting against the Russian government following the alleged kidnapping and repatriation of a western-based oligarch who is resident in London. Yaroslav Vasnetsov, a long-time campaigner for human rights and a staunch opponent of the Russian President, was apparently snatched from a house near Helsinki by agents of the GRU or FSB, the Russian Military Intelligence and State Security Service, following a pitched battle with his bodyguards, which reportedly left several people dead. The President of Finland was said to be outraged by such an inflammatory act on Finnish soil.
The Russian government has denied the kidnapping, stating instead that Vasnetsov had returned to Moscow voluntarily, to answer numerous criminal charges levelled against him. A business associate of Vasnetsov has described this as laughable, adding that, ‘A return to Russia is just about the only thing Yaroslav Vasnetsov was afraid of’.
Vasnetsov resurfaced in the Russian capital yesterday, standing in the dock of a Moscow court in handcuffs and regulation prison uniform, where he was charged with nine counts of tax evasion, embezzlement, money laundering, sponsoring terrorist organisations and treason. If convicted, he faces a life sentence in a Siberian prison. Human rights organisations have dismissed the spectacle as a show trial with the verdict already beyond doubt.
Mystery surrounds the fate of an unnamed British businessman who was also reported to have attended the high-level meeting near the Finnish capital. However, the Foreign Office stated that it was not aware of any British citizen being harmed.
Though there has been denial of any state involvement in the alleged kidnapping, a source close to the Russian Security Service said, ‘Russia staunchly defends its sovereign right to defend its territorial borders against the threat of international terrorism. Terrorists and their sponsors do not have human rights. Yaroslav Vasnetsov was not taken on foreign soil but when the west does this, you put your suspects in orange suits and fly them to Guantanamo, locking them away for years without charge or even the opportunity of a trial. The Americans call this ‘extraordinary rendition’. When the Russian government is accused of returning one of its own citizens to his homeland to stand trial, the American President and the British Prime Minister call this kidnapping. The hypocrisy of the western so-called democracies is staggering.’
‘It was the US who launched a commando raid into another sovereign state, Pakistan, to carry out the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. The Russian government did not sanction a similar raid in Finland to seize the terrorist Vasnetsov but, from the precedent set by the United States of America, it seems we would certainly have been within our rights to do so.’
I was happy with the coverage. It made my subsequent disappearing act a lot easier. We ensured reports of a British national being caught up in the shoot-out at Vasnetsov’s estate reached journalists and the DNA that was eventually recovered from the banker’s body in Helsinki matched that of north-east businessman David Blake. The little package the Major gave me contained a sample of hair and blood and I had handed it on to the pretty receptionist at the hotel, so it could be mailed back to the UK. Sharp got it into the evidence room and filed it under my name. There was also a buccal swab, which I knew all about thanks to our recent experience with Henry Baxter. One of the commandos had kindly stuck the swab into what remained of the banker’s mouth, catching his saliva and blood in the process. This also went into Sharp’s evidence bag. It was labelled as DNA, apparently taken from me during a routine investigation into the death of a Glasgow gangster some years earlier. Sharp then went into action, making strident demands of his counterparts in Finland to release the DNA evidence taken from a corpse with an obliterated face they apparently discovered on land formerly owned by the oligarch Yaroslav Vasnetsov. When the two DNA samples were compared, Sharp was able to categorically prove that the man murdered and left in the woods near Helsinki was none other than ‘Tyneside gangster, David Blake’. I didn’t mind that last bit. Sharp could have his moment in the sun. After all, you can’t slander the dead. My stated occupation also tempered the outrage of the British Foreign Office, which was keen to avoid another row with Russia.
I paid DCI Sharp half a million pounds to go along with it and he was convincing. After all, he had a lot riding on it. Even my own lads believed it, by all accounts. They were a little upset to begin with but Vasnetsov was gone and there was no one else to take revenge against. Since they weren’t daft enough to go to war with an entire country, they reorganised and settled down and, after a while, it was business as usual, just as I had predicted.
I looked after Palmer too. He was the only other member of my crew, apart from Danny, who knew the truth. As well as getting me the fake passports from one of his old contacts, it was Palmer who approached the FSB, to broker my deal. When Vasnetsov’s people gave me the location of our meeting, Palmer passed it to them in a dead-letter drop. Helsinki was a dream come true for the Russians, since Finland is on their border.
An investigative journalist would later win awards for his report into the Vasnetsov case. He revealed the Russians were able to locate the oligarch’s estate using one of their sixty orbiting, Cosmos-class, military satellites, to monitor the area around Helsinki and track the progress of the British businessman’s hire car from Vantaa airport, which led them straight to Vasnetsov’s estate.
The commando team flew in below radar from a base in Russia outside the city of Vyborg in the Isthmus of Karelia, just a hundred and thirty miles away. They set down a few miles from their target and yomped overland so nobody heard the helicopters till the firefight was over. Fortunately, Major Uri and his men were happy for me to be pretend-dead as opposed to the real thing. Maybe they thought I had no reason to own up to the deal I’d made with them and they were right. Vasnetsov might have been rotting in a Siberian prison but he still had a lot of money and a long reach. There was no way I could just resume my old life in Newcastle and I didn’t want to. If Vasnetsov didn’t get to me, sooner or later someone else would.
Sarah played her part to perfection, she really did. She was the grieving partner, the single mum left alone just a few short years after her dear old dad had disappeared. The local plod wanted to turn her into a poster-girl for the crime-doesn’t-pay lobby. They came round the house for days afterwards making cups of tea, helping themselves to the biscuits, while they offered Sarah all manner of state-funded help because they didn’t want to think of Emma missing out if times got really hard. All they wanted in return was a breakdown of everything Sarah knew about my business. Why waste a perfect opportunity to arrest everyone who ever knew or worked for me? That way they could really clean up the city.
Trouble was, Sarah turned out to be a complete airhead; a dumb blonde who knew nothing about my line of work. She admitted she knew I was a bit dodgy but, according to her, she didn’t know where the money came from.
‘And I never asked neither. I didn’t want to know.’
The way she spun it, all she cared about was buying new clothes and having lunch with her mates. Now she had no idea what she was going to do. After a couple of weeks, the police stopped watching her, convinced she was a waste of effort. They had her tagged as a gangster’s WAG whose biggest worry before now was wondering exactly when and where to get her nails done.
When a WPC went round the house a couple of months later, to ask some routine follow-up questions, she was surprised to learn that Sarah had gone. The furniture was still there and most of Sarah’s possessions but she hadn’t been seen in days and nor had her little girl.
Rumours abounded; Sarah had turned her
back on the dirty money and gone down south to start a new life, earning an honest wage from a proper job. Some said she’d waited till the heat died down then left with suitcases full of cash she’d been squirrelling away for a day like this.
There was a more outlandish notion that it was all a put-up job and David Blake was very much alive, still controlling things in exile, pulling the strings from a country hundreds of miles away, but then they used to say that about Bobby Mahoney and no one ever saw him again.
The rumour of Sarah’s death was the one that really took hold. Detective Chief Inspector Sharp made sure it was the strongest line of enquiry pursued by Northumbria Police. Sharp assured everybody that contradictory reports of Sarah leaving the north-east suddenly and of her own free will were just disinformation, put out by parties who wanted to ensure the authorities didn’t delve too deeply into her disappearance.
My deal with Sharp was a sweet one for both of us. He agreed to do three more years as a DCI, before suddenly retiring early on health grounds; we agreed stress. Only then will he receive all of the money I’ve promised him, in return for sending the investigation down a series of blind alleys, while we made a different life for ourselves under new names at the other end of the world.
Auckland is a beautiful place; a laid-back haven, eleven thousand miles from home, where they still speak the same language we do. The weather in New Zealand is great, the people friendly and there’s plenty to do. Emma loves it already and Sarah and I are just happy to have fallen off the grid. Last night we both slept without nightmares for the first time in a long while, despite the absence of bodyguards at our rented house. We kept our first names, so Emma doesn’t get completely confused, but have a new surname on the passports Palmer provided for us all.
I’d been skimming off the top for a while now, stashing the cash, because I knew this day had to come, sooner or later. I didn’t get to the magical four million, because I had to look after Sharp and Palmer, but I wasn’t too far away in the end and I don’t need to be flash out here. I just want to keep my head down and live a real life.
You see I always knew it would never be over for me until I was finally dead. Well, I’m a dead man now right enough, but that was the easy part. Want to know the tricky bit? Staying dead. That’s the act I’ve got to pull off; for me, for Sarah, for our little girl.
I said we were like magicians in our firm, making people look the other way while we pull off our trick and that’s just what Sarah and I have done. There’s an art to that; distraction, misdirection, sleight of hand.
THE END
First published in the UK in 2013
by No Exit Press an imprint of
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This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Howard Linskey2013
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