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 emigre. 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.’
‘So, you’re a terrorist, plain and simple?’
He slammed his hand on the table, hard.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘I am one side in a war and I must win that war to survive. I am not a terrorist, I am a freedom fighter. I am the agent runner and the men I am recruiting and training are all patriots. My Joes are willing to return to Russia to risk their lives fighting injustice and corruption. It is the only way, we have tried everything else.’
‘But it’s ridiculous,’ I said, ‘what can one man with a bomb achieve? You can’t bring down a government like that.’
‘With one man, no, you cannot,’ he agreed, ‘but with a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand? When the government cannot prevent wave after wave of sabotage and civilian unrest coordinated by my people then it loses all of its authority.’
‘You are going to try to send ten thousand trained men into Russia along my supply line, without anyone noticing? It’s madness.’
‘Not at first, of course,’ he seemed calmer now, more reasonable, ‘your route will be for the first men, the vanguard of a new revolution. What they will achieve can change history, believe me, I know.’
‘When the first man is ready, I will summon you to me; this could be anywhere in the world but not Britain, never here. I will not jeopardise my good relationship with your government. When you meet the first Joe, you will receive a two million dollar fee and leave with him for Amsterdam. Then you will send him down the line.’
‘You need to find another route,’ I said firmly, ‘I can’t help you.’
‘We have examined many possibilities while devising this strategy,’ he informed me, ‘yours was the best by far. We will use your route and there is nothing further to discuss. You have some time to think it through, so you can evaluate what it means to say no to a man like me. There will be no place for you to go where I cannot find you.’
‘You don’t fuck about, do you?’
‘Are you familiar with the concept of Krysha?’ I shook my head. ‘In English the word means roof. In Russia it means protection. The person who provides Krysha enables a man to do business because of their powerful connect
ions, but they expect something in return when they ask for it. You are under my Krysha. If you have a problem with your business, I can remove it. Think about that.’
‘And if I think it through and still refuse?’ I challenged.
There is an old saying in Georgia, Mr Blake. ‘If you forgive the fox for stealing your chickens, he will take your sheep,’ he told me, ‘so I do not forgive. I never forgive.’
29
‘What do you think?’ asked Palmer, when we were driving out of the main gate.
‘I think he’s crazy, out of his fucking mind.’ I was angry now. ‘He’s a Bond villain, sitting in a hollowed-out volcano, stroking a white cat and plotting to blow up the world. He’s barking,’ I forced myself to calm down, ‘but he doesn’t know it and there’s nobody around him who’s brave enough to explain to him that he’s gone crazy. He reckons he’s at war with a country and, worse than that, he thinks he can actually win.’
‘He’s got billions,’ said Palmer, ‘with that kind of money he can cause a whole heap of trouble.’
‘Maybe, but that’s all he’ll ever be able to do. Napoleon and his armies couldn’t bring down Russia. Neither could Hitler and his Panzer divisions. Vasnetsov’s got no chance and sooner or later they will get him.’
‘They’ve been trying to get him for years and not managed it,’ Palmer reminded me.
He was right about that, which left me in an impossible position; trapped between the entire Russian state and a madman.
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