by John Sweeney
‘And you’re not a psychiatrist.’
‘No.’ Uygulaan took another swig. ‘But nor is the guy who says he’s a fucking psychiatrist.’
‘True. I’m very grateful for what you’ve done.’
‘General, I’ve forgotten how many times you saved my life and the lives of the boys.’
‘Remember that kid in Kabul, the one Grozhov was fucking?’
Uygulaan lifted up his thumb without the tip. ‘I liked my thumb the way it was. How could I forget?’
‘Well, he was going to kill me.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. General, I got you out of the loony house because of two reasons. One, you’re the General.’
‘And two?’
‘There’s a high-up coming to Yakutsk in two weeks’ time. I don’t have a reason to live that much longer. But this fucking country, we might end up doing it a service, like in the old days. Like fighting the dukhi.’
‘Who is it?’
Uygulaan held his tongue.
‘Is it Him?’ asked Gennady.
And Uygulaan looked at his old general square on and said, ‘Yes, it’s Him.’
LABRADOR SEA
They used a stolen key card to access the Duchess Suite. Goggle-eyed with fright, Masha awoke to find two men in her bedroom. One was bald, thickset, the second a slight, strikingly handsome man with intense black eyes. The good-looking one was pointing a silencer at her.
‘So, you must be Reikhman,’ said Masha in Russian. ‘What’s it like to be the worst ex in the world?’
‘Where are they?’ Reikhman asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said, and turned her head from them.
In silence, the bald one taped wires from her wheelchair’s electric battery to her left hand, then, gingerly, to her right. The moment the second electrode connected, her limbs started to jiggle, her mouth frothed spittle, the whites of her eyes shone by the dim glow of her bedside light.
Oleg stared at Reikhman, waiting for the command to stop. Reikhman considered, passionlessly, the old lady convulsing in front of him. Eventually he nodded, almost imperceptibly, and Oleg ripped the wire off her right hand, killing the circuit. The old lady gasped, her breathing forced, desperate, and then, after a time, she started to get out what she wanted to say.
‘Go . . . fuck . . . yourselves.’
Something wrong with the handsome one, Masha thought; he lacked all patience. He shot her once through her left eye, the silenced pistol making no more noise than a wine glass falling on the thick shagpile carpet.
Reikhman told Oleg to wrap the old lady in a sheet. Outside, the sky spangled green and black. They checked that no one was about, then dumped the sheet and its contents over the side.
But they didn’t get rid of the wheelchair or her walking frame, so the mystery of how a frail and disabled eighty-something-year-old lady vanished from her suite in the middle of the night without her only means of locomotion puzzled the cleaner the next morning, and that puzzled the cleaner’s shift manager and, eventually, the ship’s captain.
From the privacy of his cabin, the captain made a satellite-phone call to head office. Should he contact the Mounties, he asked, with this disappearance looking more like a murder than anything else, so they could board the ship when it docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia? The captain was told definitively that murders don’t happen on cruise ships. Accidental deaths and maybe suicides did – but if that were the case, there would be an obligation of confidentiality towards the family.
‘There isn’t a family,’ said the captain.
‘That doesn’t remove our obligation of confidentiality,’ said head office.
To press home the point, head office argued that it wasn’t obligated to renew the contract of any captain who cared to second-guess the authorities when it came to ascribing accidental death as murder without evidence.
The captain gave up, returned to the bridge and demanded that the crew map and visually check all icebergs identified on radar in a fifty-mile vicinity of the ship, whether or not they were on its track. When the first mate demurred, he was told that the captain of the Titanic hadn’t done what he was requesting and probably regretted it – and that wasn’t going to happen to him or his ship.
‘Never seen the old man in such a bad mood,’ muttered the wheel hand into his cup of cocoa. No one disagreed.
Two days later: rain, rain and yet more rain.
‘Nova Scotia gets around four feet of rain a year – that’s twice more than London,’ the captain told the first mate as he stared out gloomily at what might well have been the city of Halifax, smudged and bedraggled behind a wall of water.
‘Looks like it’s all falling today.’
Stair rods of rain crashed down from the sky. Whichever genius in the marketing department had come up with the idea of a Northern Lights cruise should be taken out and shot, the captain thought as he watched CCTV from the bridge of the passengers disembarking. As ever, disabled passengers got priority.
He watched a big chap in medical whites wheel an old lady off the ship. The CCTV picture was a bit fuzzy but he could make out some other passengers – two men – being held back while the priority passengers disembarked. They were kicking up an almighty fuss, but security was telling them to cool it. He walked over to the port side of the bridge and saw the man battling the wheelchair through the rain. That was odd. There was a bus, right there, specially laid on for the tour. And then the captain saw the strangest thing: the old lady got out of her wheelchair and started to run, really run, running like a sprinter, like she wasn’t an old lady at all; the big man in medical whites was running, too, carrying a heavy bag in his hands. They were running to a gate in the fencing.
The captain took out his binoculars to get a clearer look. Now he saw that the two men, one big and bald, the other shorter, a dark complexion, were running after the lady sprinter and the guy with the bag. The gap was two hundred yards, maybe less. The captain couldn’t be sure – the rain was worsening – but it looked like the guy with the bag had some bolt cutters on him.
Now they were through a gate and beyond what was a freight yard. Even now two big locomotives, coupled together, were slowly pulling out of the station, hauling a monster train of double-stacked containers, maybe two miles long. There were two more loco-couples in the middle of the train, and a fifth at the end.
The captain searched again for the lady and the guy in the whites, but they were gone. All he could see was the bald man and the dark guy running up and down alongside the tracks like crazy, and then a fresh squall of rain came in from the Atlantic and blotted out his view.
THE MAMMOTH MUSEUM, YAKUTSK
Rokko wasn’t his real name and black wasn’t the real colour of his hair, and the general disliked him on sight. Still, Rokko was the artistic director of the event, specially flown in on a G550 from St Petersburg, salmon-pink suit and all, and Gennady and Uygulaan were, literally, the grunts.
‘So this is the most physiologically accurate animatronic proboscidean known to science, and I don’t want you two screwing anything up,’ Rokko said.
Uygulaan, frowning with concentration, asked the question Gennady didn’t feel like asking: ‘What’s a robo-probby-thingy, boss?’
‘Come here, I’ll show you the ice cave.’
So not all the money from the gas beneath Siberia had been squandered on fancy yachts in the south of France, thought Gennady as they trudged through the new museum, lined with stuffed mammoths and plastic dinosaurs. He and Uygulaan were dressed in tracksuits and T-shirts, as slovenly as they come, and they looked out of place on the chrome and glass walkway leading up to a large polyhedron the size of a fancy wedding marquee.
They walked up to a double airlock and passed through it, ballooning clouds of vapour from their mouths it was that cold. Stalactites and stalagmites of ice created an inner walkway, twisting this way and that, until they came to a dark cave within the ice cave.
‘Go forward,’ said Rokko and the two me
n did so, and from the recess came forward an almighty mammoth, fully twice as high as a grown man, plodding with determination towards them. Involuntarily, the two Zinky Boys stepped backwards. The great woolly beast eyed them malevolently, lowered its great head and then raised it suddenly, letting out a great roar.
Gennady jumped, causing Rokko to cackle with glee. ‘I do hope the President will have the same reaction. Your role in the mise en scène’ – Uygulaan frowned again, so Rokko was forced to translate into simple, easy-for-commoners-to-understand Russian – ‘in the performance, is to play Neolithic hunters. You will carry a spear,’ he told Uygulaan.
‘Thanks, boss,’ said the Yakut.
Rokko turned to Gennady. ‘And you will have a Stone Age axe.’ The general grunted non-committally and then turned his face away to hide his expression, anxious to repress his inner merriment. No two ways about it, he thought, a Stone Age axe would do nicely.
BEAR LAKE
It was late morning, the sky gin-clear, when they knocked on the door of the log cabin high in the mountains above Bear Lake. After a long while, an old man with an Abraham Lincoln beard and a gap between his teeth came to the door and smiled.
‘Morning. Nice dog,’ he said, reaching down to let Reilly nuzzle his hand. He studied the couple carefully, still smiling, and then he spoke, first to Joe: ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you before, sir.’ Then, turning slowly to Katya, he said, ‘But you’re Reikhman’s lady friend. We met in Moscow a few years back. Katya, I believe. May I ask what brings you to Bear Lake?’
Katya turned to Joe – ‘I told you he was smart, didn’t I?’ – and all three laughed.
Zeke introduced himself to Joe and, still smiling, but with a touch of coolness about him, asked, ‘How did you find me? It’s not as if I advertise. That’s not how the CIA rolls.’
‘It wasn’t easy,’ said Joe.
‘Southern Irish, with a bit of Belfast in your accent. Would that be right?’
‘Spot on,’ said Joe.
‘Come inside. You look like you need some refreshment.’
Zeke made them tea, a luxury he enjoyed now that he wasn’t a Mormon, and passed round cookies. Then he cleared his throat and said, ‘OK, I’m intrigued, I’ve got to admit it. How come a friend of Anatoly Reikhman—’
‘Very much an ex-friend,’ interrupted Katya.
‘OK, an ex-friend. How come you’re in Bear Lake? What’s your problem?’
Katya started speaking in Russian to Zeke. Very occasionally Zeke would lift up a hand, slow her down, ask her a question, and then she would be off again, her voice rising and falling as if she were running through a hilly meadow. At one point he stopped her and asked, ‘Picasso?’ And she nodded and replied, ‘Da, Picasso.’ At another, he double-checked something with Joe in English.
‘You got a lift from Queen Elizabeth?’
Joe nodded.
And then, after more up-hill-and-down-dale in Russian, he cut across her in English again: ‘OK, crossing the Atlantic like that – that could be an adventure. But you came here from Nova Scotia on a freight train? That’s three thousand miles!’
‘There was a lot of freight on the train,’ Joe said. ‘Computers, tractors, food, wine, autos. We drank Perrier, Chablis, ate chorizo sausage, Gruyère cheese. I smashed in a window and we slept inside an auto.’
‘What kind of auto?’
‘A Mercedes-Maybach.’
‘Nice,’ said Zeke, smiling a great gap-toothed grin that made him look more ape than man. And then Katya was back, gabbling on in torrential Russian.
When she was done, Zeke studied them both, poured them each a fresh cup of tea and stirred his own with a teaspoon, abstractedly. Then he smiled, more to himself than anything else, and said, ‘Let me look at that dog of yours.’
Reilly trotted over to Zeke, and he stroked his fur and kneaded his neck between his shoulder blades.
‘Ever had this fellow dog-chipped?’
‘No,’ said Joe.
‘Well, someone has.’
Zeke led the way downstairs to his den, scrabbled around in some boxes, found a device the size of a credit-card machine and scanned it over Reilly’s neck. He plugged the scanner into a computer, hit some buttons and waited for it to upload. At the end of the book-lined den, what had appeared to be a simple white wall became a cinema screen.
‘Whoever has been hunting you down doesn’t want anyone to see this movie,’ said Zeke. Then he hit play.
First, they saw Zoba in his black suit, white shirt and tie, pimp rolling along a street by the Kremlin, stopping, kneeling before a young Russian boy, caressing his torso and lifting up his T-shirt and kissing him on the belly.
‘This is on YouTube,’ said Zeke. ‘Must be just the trailer.’
On-screen, the picture jumped. Now they were looking at a man, in his early sixties, sitting on a chair in a dingy hovel.
The man on-screen, a catch in his throat, said something in Russian. Zeke translated for Joe: ‘What is this?’
‘Get some sugar,’ said a voice, off-camera.
‘Reikhman,’ said Katya.
Zeke nodded.
‘The fuck’s going on?’ said the man.
Off-camera, a metallic voice.
Zeke figured it out for Joe: ‘Sounds like a tape recording of the guy in the chair. Funny thing is, he’s got a southern Russian accent – he’s talking about Zoba back in the day when they were at school together. Officially, this doesn’t make sense because Zoba went to school in St Petersburg. But this guy, he says that Zoba was a bastard, and this guy bullied him. He’s singing the song, the song when they all bullied Zoba.’
On-screen, they watched a figure move towards the man in the chair.
‘Reikhman,’ said Katya.
Zeke nodded once more. On-screen, Reikhman attached a gas mask to the man’s face, then they heard him utter a command: ‘Take off his trousers.’
The old man said something muffled by the mask, and then a woman appeared in the shot. Something was said in Russian but this time Zeke did not translate. The woman was young, beautiful in her way. She stripped the man’s trousers off, then there was more Russian, and then she started sucking the man’s penis.
What happened next was dark beyond all imagining. Joe opened the door to the den and the two of them could hear him retching from the balcony onto the ground below. Zeke pressed pause, found Joe a glass of water, which he drank. Then Zeke pressed play again.
The second killing was of a man – well, more dwarf than man. In a long shot, they could see Reikhman finding him on an icy river, shooting him, then shooting the ice from underneath him, then when he grabbed hold of an ice floe, slashing at his fingers so he slipped into the river.
A fresh voice said something in Russian.
‘“He’s psycho,” says someone, off camera,’ Zeke translated.
The third killing was that of a sharp-eyed old lady in her high-rise apartment. Zeke gave a rough translation for Joe’s benefit: ‘This seems to be Zoba’s old schoolteacher. Quiet kid he was, sad, his mum had him with another man, then he dumps her, she returns to southern Russia, finds a new man, but the new guy hates little Zoba. The other kids don’t like him, too, so they bully him . . .’
Zeke stopped talking. On-screen, they saw some kind of pinky-white foam being extruded from her mouth and nostrils.
The picture jumped again. Two small blond Russian boys were laughing in the back of a helicopter as it swooshed and swayed over snow-capped mountains. Another jump: a shot of the two boys, intent on watching a Hollywood cartoon, maybe Toy Story. Then another jump, the worst quality of them all, fuzzy and indistinct, the two same boys in bed with a man, blond, in his early sixties, his chest naked, his arms strong and well-muscled, like a bodybuilder’s. The final shot was at an angle, of a hole in the ground, snow and earth lying by the side of the hole. The cameraman then moved and the lens caught what was in the hole. Two small pink bodies lay side by side.
And that was the end of the movie.
THE MAMMOTH MUSEUM
Had it not been for that bloody cat, Grozhov would have been on time at Moscow Domodedovo Airport. The presidential flight could never be kept waiting, even by such an important figure as Grozhov. But a photograph of the cat that had been blinded in both eyes by acid to get the Muslim cleaning woman at Moonglade to talk – she’d been innocent, but these things happen – had surfaced on the Internet along with a lot of chatter that Moonglade was some kind of base to test secret weapons.
Grozhov had a devil of a job shutting down that story, ordering the Kremlin trolls to rubbish the credibility of the sightless cat, making sure the environmentalist moron who had first posted the photograph online regretted his foolishness. All of this took far longer than Grozhov had envisaged, and before he knew it, he was cutting it fine to get to the VIP area of Domodedovo.
His convoy shot through the centre of Moscow, blue lights flashing, zooming along the Zil lanes, but when it came to the main drag out to the airport, the traffic turned to treacle. To cut to the chase, Grozhov texted Bekhterev, the stand-in presidential security lead, to hold the plane.
Bekhterev texted back: Zoba says the plane will fly faster without Fatty Grozhov. See you at the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk. Grozhov fumed inwardly: he had created Bekhterev, and now the blond, arrogant idiot was patronising him.
Of course, Bekhterev would ensure all the regular security sweeps would be carried out. That the bomb squad went through the museum, snipers were placed on the roofs of apartment blocks within a mile radius of the site, the local FSB had checked all staff and invited guests against the black, green and gold lists of terrorists, known enemies and public critics of Zoba. Closing down the off chance of someone embarrassing the great man was always a greater worry than the threat of assassination. Opponents had been nullified so successfully, the threat was considered barely to register. But Grozhov’s very existence was predicated on sniffing out what everyone else had missed. The confidential Kremlin report into the events of that day would speculate that Grozhov might very well have detected and deleted the danger, had it not been for the blinded cat.