‘Have you got that pen drive with you?’
‘What if I said it was at home?’
‘I’d probably ask for the bill,’ said Papadopoulos, holding up his hand.
‘So what do you think the property thing was all about?’ she asked.
‘It could be she was looking for a suitable place to hide Sasha Bobkov,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘It’s the single most difficult thing in a London kidnap: where to keep your hostage where nobody else can see him.’
‘I want to write a letter to my mum and dad,’ said Sasha.
He was in a strange hiatus. His shoe and sock were still off. The big toe was bandaged and hurting, but they hadn’t cut it off. Now he was in this uneasy lull. One of the Russians had stayed behind to play chess with him. He was unnerved by the switch from extreme brutality to near humanity.
‘Why?’ asked the voice.
‘I don’t know whether I’m going to see them again.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘You were going to cut off my big toe.’
‘But we didn’t. It was just to show your father that he has to take us seriously.’
‘The man who touched me. He said . . . that you were going to kill me.’
‘What did he say? Your Russian’s not so good. Maybe you didn’t hear him right.’
‘I heard him all right,’ said Sasha, and repeated the line in Russian.
‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He was angry,’ said the man. ‘Let’s just play the game.’
The man gave him his latest move.
Sasha shook his head. ‘I thought all Russians knew how to play chess.’
‘I’m out of practice.’
‘Do any of you know how to play?’
‘One of us does. You haven’t met him yet. He’s out.’
‘Can’t you see what’s going to happen to you?’ asked Sasha, almost sad for his opponent.
The man looked at the board for a long time. Sasha gave him his move. The Russian positioned the piece.
‘Do you see it now?’ asked Sasha. ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re dead in three.’
‘Your mother’s in hospital,’ said the man suddenly.
‘Is she all right?’ asked Sasha, listening hard, blinking behind his mask.
‘She’s O.K. but she’s in intensive care. Why do you care about her so much? She’s a drunk. She hasn’t looked after you in years.’
‘No, but I look after her and she does her best for me,’ said Sasha. ‘She’s lonely, you know. And I know what that is. It’s horrible.’
The Russian told him the move he’d just made. Sasha instantly gave him his in return.
‘I see it now,’ said the man and knocked over his king. ‘Why are you going to kill me?’ asked Sasha, legs swinging.
‘We’re not going to kill you,’ said the man, gently now, knowing that he shouldn’t have said anything but unable to stop himself from getting involved. ‘Your father’s going to pay us some money and we’re going to let you go. Don’t take any notice of what the other guy said. Let’s play another game.’
Sasha’s masked face stared into the man with the blank intensity of a disbelieving prisoner.
‘I’d still like to write the letter.’
22
11:00 P.M., THURSDAY 22ND MARCH 2012
Outside Bar El Rocío, Puerta del Sol, Madrid
Where the hell did we go last Saturday night?’ asked Jaime. ‘We started with drinks at Le Cock,’ said Jesús. ‘After that . . . it would be the usual places. Charada. Joy. Kapital . . . maybe the Palacio de Gáviria too.’
‘Right, where do we start?’
‘Maybe we should call El Osito first? Tell him what we got,’ said Jesús. ‘That’s the important stuff.’
‘It might be to you and me, but I know El Osito, and what’s more important is how the Englishman found him, because if Charles Boxer could find him anybody can,’ said Jaime. ‘The answer is in these clubs somewhere. Somebody told him they saw his daughter with El Osito. And we’ve got to find the guy before the police do.’
‘But the police already know Charles Boxer; they can ask him.’
‘Jesús.’
‘What?’
‘You think Boxer is going to tell them anything after what he did to El Osito?’ said Jaime. ‘Boxer went in there to kill him. The only reason he didn’t was because El Osito hit the panic button.’
‘You know, we—’
‘Don’t say it,’ said Jaime. ‘I know. We should have ignored the call. It would have saved us all this shit and we’d have got rid of El Osito.’
The brothers walked into Puerta del Sol. The square was quiet because it was cold and spitting rain.
‘Well, seeing as we’re here, we might as well start at the Palacio de Gáviria and Joy in the Calle del Arenal.’
The Mexicans knew almost all the doormen at every club. They tipped them heavily so their dealers could get in easily to sell product. They were careful. First they asked the doorman which nights he’d been on. The guy at the Palacio was new, so they moved straight on to Joy. The doorman there had been on duty the whole of last weekend and was one of their regulars. Jesús stood in for him while he took Jaime inside to a room behind the old theatre box office where he kept his clothes. He looked at the passport photocopy of Boxer, nodded.
‘He came in here on Tuesday night asking for one of the DJs, David Álvarez. David warned me he was going to show so I called one of the girls and she took him up there. Don’t know what it was about.’
‘Is David working here?’
‘Not tonight. I don’t know where he is. Hold on.’
The doorman took out his phone, went onto Twitter and checked out Álvarez’s tweets.
‘He’s doing the first set at Kapital, starting at eleven o’clock.’
‘Do you know where he was on Saturday night?’
The doorman scrolled down on his mobile. Nothing. He called someone on the internal phone, waited, asked the question.
‘Friday and Saturday he does a set from one until three at the Charada on Calle de la Bola.’
Jaime shook hands with the doorman, clapped him on the back.
‘So what’s it all about with David?’ asked the doorman.
‘We’re going to have a party,’ said Jaime. ‘We need a DJ. We like David’s music but, you know, we’re looking at others too, so don’t talk to him.’
‘He’s great. Very nice guy,’ said the doorman.
Jaime held the doorman by the biceps and looked him in the eye to make sure he knew what he meant: if David disappears we know who to come looking for, and if things turn out badly for David you can always persuade yourself it was nothing to do with you.
Jaime let him go, went out onto the street, pulled Jesús away with him, told him what he’d found out as they moved off. The doorman came out onto the pavement, watched the two Mexicans walk away, let his eyes fall back onto the young hopefuls in the queue, shook his head.
Jaime and Jesús trudged up Arenal in silence, turned right past the Opera Metro station and headed towards the Plaza de Oriente. They were both thinking the same thing. They were brothers and this was a tendency. What they were doing now was not work. All they were doing was controlling the risk to which El Osito had exposed their operation: tying up loose ends. And in Jaime’s experience that was a never-ending process. Loose ends had split ends.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Jesús.
‘Only I’m three steps ahead.’
‘So what are you going to do about it, before it all gets out of control?’
‘You ask me that when we’ve only just found out what the fuck we’re dealing with? Give me a break, Jesús.’
‘You the one who’s three steps ahead.’
�
�The police are on to it and they’ve got the five-kilo weights to think about,’ said Jaime.
They were walking past the Opera Gym.
‘It’s lucky we’re in Madrid,’ said Jesús. ‘Full of arseholes trying to keep fit. There’s probably a few thousand five-kilo weights just here in the city centre.’
‘They’ll know the weights don’t come from a gym.’
‘You got to talk to Vicente,’ said Jesús.
‘I’ve been talking to him every day for months. Whenever I mention the problems El Osito has with black girls, he tells me to shut up.’
‘Maybe now he’s killed one he’ll start listening.’
‘Slow down, Jesús,’ said Jaime. ‘We’ve got to clear everything up first; only then do I go to Vicente. If I go to him with shit still down my front you know what he’ll say.’
It was quiet in the Charada. They went through to the bar and sat on stools, ordered two shots of mescal reserva. The barman poured, stood in front of them as there was nothing else going on. He knew who the brothers were. He was a user. He took every opportunity to be nice to them. He left the bottle on the counter, didn’t ask for any money.
‘You were here last Saturday night?’ asked Jesús. ‘You remember us?’
‘Sure,’ said the barman, shrugging his shoulders, smiling.
‘You remember our group?’
‘You were with the tall girl, Conchita—long legs, long dark hair, great dancer—and El Osito was with a mulata, but I didn’t know her. She was a foreigner.’
‘How do you know she was a foreigner?’
‘She came to the bar, didn’t speak any Spanish. One of the DJs sent her a note written in English, asked me to give it to her.’
‘Did you read it?’
‘My English is not so good and he was probably asking the same thing all the guys ask.’
‘What did she do with the note?’
‘She read it and dropped it on the floor,’ said the barman. ‘I mean, she was with you guys, what does she want with some DJ? Watch him play music all night? You got to be in love for that.’
‘What was the name of the DJ?’
‘It was David . . . David Álvarez. Nice guy. Good music. He’s not on tonight.’
Mercy’s phone rang at the Netherhall Gardens house. Chris Sexton picked it up and explained the situation to Papadopoulos.
‘So something’s going to happen tonight . . . finally?’
‘Difficult to say with these guys. There’s been so little contact we haven’t been able to get a hold on them,’ said Sexton. ‘We’re not even sure what will happen if there’s a satisfactory show of trust. Bobkov and Kidd have effectively taken it out of my hands.’
‘What did the DCS have to say about that?’
‘He said they’re spooks and they think they know more than anybody else about everything. He’s cleared it with the Home Office.’
‘Is there a tracker on the car?’
‘No, we’re concerned that they’re FSB. They seem to know about our phone triangulation technology so we reckon they’ll be able to detect a tracker. We’re using CCTV to keep an eye on their progress.’
‘I’ve got a list of estate agents that Irina Demidova, aka Zlata Yankov, visited looking for a property to rent with a spec that sounds like a place you’d want to keep a hostage. But I’m having trouble tracking down numbers. I doubt I’ll get news on any of this until tomorrow morning.’
‘And we can’t stop what’s happening now,’ said Sexton.
‘Have you spoken to Tereshchenko’s widow about what’s happened to Sasha?’ asked Mercy, pulling away from the traffic lights. ‘Of course,’ said Bobkov, staring out of the window, Regent’s Park flashing past on the right-hand side. ‘She thinks they’re FSB. She would. She’s completely paranoid, with good reason. She just told me to do anything and everything to get Sasha back.’
‘Does that include breaking your promise to her about finding the perpetrators of the polonium 210 poisoning?’
‘She loves Sasha. She wouldn’t hold me to that,’ said Bobkov. ‘I told her about this—what we’re doing now, this bizarre process where I have to show them that I’m trustworthy. Me? They steal my son off the street, torture him and I have to show them. This is what she thinks is classic FSB behaviour. I am somehow in the wrong. They now expect me to show my allegiance. This was why Tereshchenko and I left the FSB in the first place. We got out before we had to do something that we really couldn’t live with.’
‘So you agree with her? This is an FSB operation?’
‘Almost everything points to it: the president getting back into power, the inquest into the poisoning coming up here in London in the autumn and next year, and I admit I’ve been stepping up my investigations. Only James knows this, but I even managed to recruit a Russian nuclear scientist to our cause. He was so disgusted by what had happened he promised to help in whatever way he could.’
‘And the British government? How do they feel about it? I mean it’s good that they’ve given you James Kidd, but then again that keeps them in the loop.’
‘Now the pressure is really coming down on the British government, who, of course, would like good relations with Russia, but cannot accept executions using nuclear material by a foreign power on their soil. I think there are a lot of people who would like this unfortunate problem to disappear. One man’s death is standing in the way of an awful lot. Morality often goes out of the window when the economy is in trouble.’
‘So you think Sasha’s kidnap is part of the process to get people to shut up about Tereshchenko?’
‘Not just me, but his wife as well. She has an eighteen-year-old son. Something else is always implicit in these actions,’ said Bobkov. ‘On the other hand we always have to be aware of, and wary of, paranoia. Russia is not a normal country. A literary agent asked me to write a non-fiction book about the Tereshchenko case. I said I wouldn’t do it but I’d be happy to write fiction. I’ve always admired John le Carré. The agent wasn’t interested. He said there were three places in the world where he thought crime fiction didn’t work: Africa, South America and Russia. When I asked him why, he said that they were all too surreal; nobody would be able to suspend their disbelief.’
‘And what does James Kidd think?’
‘He hasn’t made up his mind. He’s like that. He only operates on what he knows, which is that Sasha has been taken and, thanks to your investigation, how it was done,’ said Bobkov. ‘He’s unnerved by Irina Demidova and the murder of Jeremy Spencer. He hopes that this next stage of the process will reveal more to us.’ Mercy pulled up outside Wunjo Guitars on Denmark Street. Bobkov went up the stairs to the side of the shop window. The Internet café was on the first floor behind a flimsy door. A couple of people were working online behind some rows of monitors while a gothic-looking girl sat behind a Formica counter.
Bobkov asked for his package, produced his ID. She gave him a Jiffy bag. He took it back down to the car and opened it. It contained a mobile phone, a coil of rope about seven millimetres thick and a printed page in Russian.
This phone can only receive calls. You will tell your driver to take you to Tower Hill Tube station and drop you there. She is not to follow you. We will be behind you and if she interferes she will get hurt. You will bring the case of money with you and the rope. You will be instructed by phone what to do with it. If all goes well you will be rewarded. If there’s any outside interference Sasha will be killed.
Bobkov translated for Mercy, who started the car, drove down to the Embankment and past Blackfriars, Southwark and London Bridges. She dropped Bobkov off at the Tower.
He crossed the street, case in one hand, phone to his ear, shoulders hunched over, the desperation growing inside.
‘This is very good,’ said El Osito, lying in bed, both legs slightly raised, leafing through Raul Brito’s research
and the documents. ‘How much did it cost you?’
‘Nothing much. We paid for it out of our own pockets.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘I commissioned it. I paid for it. It’s not a legitimate expense.’
‘A very careful response.’
‘Vicente is even more careful,’ said Jaime. ‘I assume you don’t want to have to explain all this to him. You know what he’s like about risk.’
‘That’s good. I’m glad you understand how things are, Jaime,’ said El Osito. ‘I’ve already spoken to Vicente.’
He registered the surprise in Jaime’s face.
‘You think I can operate like this for two months without Vicente knowing?’
Now Jaime wondered what he’d told Vicente. El Osito had already confused him by calling Dennis Chilcott as soon as he’d finished reading Brito’s report and telling him to come to room 401 in the clinic. Why was El Osito involving the British in their domestic business?
‘What about the other problem?’ asked El Osito.
‘The Englishman found out about you from one of the DJs in the clubs,’ said Jaime, who told him what they’d discovered from the doorman at Joy and the barman of the Charada. El Osito remained calm, hands folded across his flat stomach, the morphine drip maintaining a steady near-euphoric state.
‘You know what to do,’ said El Osito.
‘I’ve sent Jesús to Kapital. We’ll take the DJ to La Escuela after he’s finished his set.’
‘When is that?’ asked El Osito.
‘One o’clock.’
‘You cover every exit,’ said El Osito. ‘If he gets away that will represent this “risk” that you and Vicente worry about so much.’
‘It’s already done.’
A knock at the door. A nurse showed Dennis Chilcott into the room. He looked as bewildered as a tourist who’d found himself yanked out of a holiday and into real life. He was flat-footed and overweight, with his trousers belted under his gut and hanging off his arse. His rumpled roll-neck sweater seemed to be choking him. A brand new Burberry trenchcoat mac was the only thing holding him together.
You Will Never Find Me Page 27