by Henry Porter
She didn’t speak.
‘You locked door. You wanted me to burn. But Yuri and Timur here, they saved me. I owe my life to them, Anastasia.’
‘Tell them what you were doing in that room.’
He smirked and poked the fire with his stick. ‘They knew. It does not matter to them. They don’t give a shit for you. They will be the ones that bury you.’
He rose and gestured to the four men, and they picked her up and bore her down the short slope to the road, leaving the knife and the remnants of her meal beside the smouldering fire, and pushed her into one of two vehicles that had slewed to a halt when the smoke had been spotted.
When Samson arrived at Harland’s cottage by the sea, Vuk was lounging by a black BMW coupé with low-profile tyres, flared exhaust pipes and bonnet vents. He remembered Simeon and Lupcho appearing in a similar car on the Greece–Macedonia border when he had first encountered Vuk, but this was much larger and could doubtless outrun any police vehicle in the six or seven states they had flashed through to reach Estonia in just under eighteen hours.
Vuk wore the same large khaki jacket with bulging pockets as he had three years before, a black cap, a fleece of great age and a red jersey with a zigzag motif. He held a cigarette in one hand and a bottle in the other and was staring into the distance. When he saw Samson, he flung his arms around him and gave him a bristly, smoke-laden kiss on both cheeks. ‘Magnificent cunt! How you are doing?’
Samson smiled weakly. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Looking at ocean. Disco pussies never see sea in Macedonia.’ He roared with laughter and proffered the bottle. Samson shook his head and took him by the elbow to the beach, where Simeon and Lupcho were skimming stones. He spent five minutes explaining the situation; anger and outrage flickered in Vuk’s face. They settled on a price for the operation – €5,000 in cash each for Lupcho and Simeon and €8,000 for Vuk.
‘Anastasia best woman in the world. We get her for Samson to make babies.’
‘I told you, she’s married to Denis.’
Vuk shrugged and spat out a piece of tobacco. ‘Samson love this woman and that not fucking detail.’
‘Follow me and we’ll go through the plan at the house. By the way, Naji is there.’
‘Little Syrian bastard?’
‘He’s a grown man now and you can’t go round calling people “little Syrian bastard”, Vuk.’
‘Smart little bastard,’ said Vuk, seeking compromise. He gave a piercing wolf whistle. Lupcho appeared from the beach in a long leather coat with headphones horseshoed around his neck and lifted a hand. Simeon, sporting a new tattoo beneath his Adam’s apple, shaven hair, ripped jeans and a red hoodie, followed and aimed a finger with a cocked thumb in Samson’s direction. Just as he registered that both of them were probably high, his phone vibrated in his hand and he answered a call from Zillah.
‘It isn’t good news,’ she said. ‘They found the place where she’d been – the fire was still warm. There was some food and a knife, which sounds like the one the old lady said Anastasia stole from her kitchen.’
‘Maybe she abandoned camp?’
‘There are two sets of tyre tracks on the side of the road. Those vehicles braked in a hurry. They’re ninety per cent sure she’s been recaptured.’
‘You’ve told Denis?’
‘He’s in court right now – not a good moment.’
‘What about his plan B?’
‘I have no idea what it is.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Has there been activity on the bank accounts?’
‘I sent an email,’ she said. ‘This comes from within an agency so it’s accurate.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s all in the email.’ She was losing patience with him.
‘Okay, thanks. Keep me in touch with what’s happening on the other side of the border.’
‘We’ll look for the rest of today, but after that I have to pull them out.’
He hung up, went into the house and called for Naji, who was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Harland, whose Volvo estate was parked beside the rented white Porsche. He shouted again and returned to Vuk, who was giving his two assistants a dressing-down. Samson took in the scene. ‘They’re out of their heads,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t use them.’
‘They take too much drugs to drive in night.’
‘I’m not having them anywhere near this operation. They’re out. I’ll pay their expenses and a thousand each for driving you here.’
‘Make it fifteen hundred,’ said Vuk.
‘Okay, but they should leave now,’ he said, counting out the money and adding €500 as a generous fuel allowance. ‘Now you wait here,’ he told Vuk. ‘I’m going to see our host.’
He found Naji inside and sent him the email from Zillah. ‘Have a look at the email I just sent you – there’s a lot of information which may be useful. Something might strike you.’ Naji slipped the laptop under his arm and tugged a ring pull on a tin of Coke.
Harland was out at the back, standing over a chopping block with a hand axe, looking out to a mass of birds that had appeared over the bay. ‘Starlings,’ he said. ‘They’re migrating to Western Europe.’
‘They think she’s been recaptured,’ said Samson.
Harland turned to look at him. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s not surprising.’ He flipped the axe into the chopping block and took off his gloves. ‘So that means you’re going ahead.’ He moved towards Samson and gripped his shoulders. ‘How on earth do you expect this to work? Think about it. You’ve spent precisely five minutes in that bar. You’ve got no one on the inside. You know nothing about Crane’s schedule. No idea if he has bodyguards, what kind of back-up they can summon. And if, by some undeserved miracle, you do manage to grab Crane, you don’t know how to contact the people holding Anastasia and you haven’t even thought of where you’re going to put the bastard until you do. Unless you’ve got something seriously good up your sleeve, I would suggest that you abandon the whole thing.’
‘I have to go ahead. This is her only chance.’ He glanced at his phone, which had just vibrated with a message from Zillah Dee. ‘Looks like he’s going down,’ he said. ‘And a story is breaking about Anastasia.’ He read the text out to Harland.
‘Publicity is not what we need,’ said Harland. ‘Look. I’ll help, but when I say I won’t do something, please don’t argue. We’ll use Johannes’s fishing cabin. There’s a key, but we’ll have to break in because he can’t be implicated. I’ll make good the repairs afterwards and add something for the inconvenience.’ He held out his hand. ‘A thousand will do the trick.’
Samson handed him the money.
‘You can never breathe a word of this to Ulrike. She’s gone back to the city and thinks I’m just keeping an eye on you here. Okay?’
‘Yes, of course. Thanks, I’m grateful.’
‘You can thank me when we’ve got her out,’ said Harland. He glanced at the wind chime, which had suddenly become agitated on a low bough. ‘Bad weather’s coming in. That could be to our advantage.’
Samson explained about the loss of Simeon and Lupcho.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Harland. ‘I’ve had an idea, and I’m going talk to some people now.’
‘Look at sunset, Anastasia,’ Kirill said, and wrenched her chin towards the orange slash in the clouds to the west. ‘Look, because this is your last.’
Kirill had changed. He no longer pretended to be anything but a sadistic killer and he was as rough with her as the men who threw her into the car had been. She had changed, too. She accepted that she was going to die and just prayed that he wouldn’t rape her before ending her life.
She looked dully at the sunset. She had never liked clichéd sunsets and, besides, this one wasn’t especially beautiful – just a sign that the day was ending. She wouldn’t see another. So what? She didn’t matter. She had had her time.
‘You li
ke sunset?’
‘It’s hard to appreciate when you are in pain,’ she said. They were in the open and all around were concrete buildings without windows. It looked like an abandoned military facility, a place that could withstand bombs. Her hands were bound behind her back and plastic ties cut into her ankles. She had lost the circulation in her left foot and her shoulder was in spasm, and when the pain overwhelmed her, as it did in the car, she gave up all pretence of bravery and just cried.
Kirill may have let the mask slip, but he was no less ridiculous strutting around, barking orders and trying to provoke her with needless insults.
‘Why have you done this to me? What did I do to you?’ she asked.
‘You tried to kill me.’
‘I had to get away. You were drunk. You wanted sex.’
That earned a vicious kick on her thigh, which made her topple over and bang her head. One of the men picked her up and placed her against a wall.
‘If I’m going to die, I want to know why,’ she pleaded through fresh tears. ‘Why don’t you kill me now?’
He hooked his thumbs into the armholes of a gilet under his jacket and stomped around some more. ‘We wait. I will receive word, then you will be no more.’
‘But why?’
‘Because your husband causes trouble to my organisation and we must rectify certain matters.’
‘What organisation? What matters?’
‘Political matters. Matters of great importance that you would not understand.’
‘Try me,’ she said.
‘Husband infiltrated network in United States and used a spy to gather information and disrupt operation.’
‘He’s a businessman, for Christ sake! He’s not interested in politics.’
‘You do not know your husband well.’
‘Just have the good manners to explain why you’re going to kill me.’
He smiled and sat down beside her with his back to the wall. She smelled some kind of hair product. Clearly, not everything had burned in the fire, as he claimed. Though it was cold, she noticed a fine sheen of sweat across his forehead and a trickle ran from his temple. His face shone when he lit a cheroot. He turned to her, smoke dribbling from the corners of his mouth. ‘You hear noise, Anastasia? That’s my men digging new hole for you! First hole we could not use because people are looking for you. They found dacha and hole. They were very smart to find dacha. Truck driver told them, I think.’ His face creased with a smile and he laughed – not a real laugh, of course, because she doubted Kirill was capable of genuine emotion. But he wheezed and slapped his thighs and made as though the joke had suddenly just struck him. ‘If you didn’t make fire at dacha, they would have found you. Maybe they rescue you.’
‘Well, I avoided having sex with you. That makes it worth it.’
‘We can still have sex.’
She knew he was playing with her. ‘You couldn’t get it up last time.’ A muscle moved in his cheek but he didn’t strike her. ‘You can’t even rise to that,’ she added.
‘You are not serious person, Anastasia.’
‘Maybe, but I know the difference between serious and pompous.’
He shook his head, as if to say that she did not even have the power to provoke him now, and puffed furiously on his cheroot. ‘I now explain everything to you. When Soviet Union fell, people in West believed Russia would become a liberal democracy. But Russia was still Russia and West was still West. We hated you just the same, but we were weak because economy was shit and we lost Soviet Empire. Yet we kept our hatred of West and we knew one day we would triumph over complacent liberal democracies. You know how we do that?’
She looked away and muttered, ‘I may die of boredom before you have the chance to kill me.’
‘You are brave to make such joke, Anastasia. But it is good joke.’ He raised a finger. ‘I finish now without interruption. We destabilise West with two things. First, we use social media, invented by Americans, and we kill their truth and Americans don’t know what is true and what is false, what is up and what is down. Second, we use fault in human nature, and you know what this is? Racism. Hatred for migrants, for blacks, Arabs, Jews, Roma, for Pakistanis, for any fucking person who is not same as you. And we do just little to inflame hatred with Internet. Political elite sees hatred and fear everywhere in their own societies and illusion of Western superiority dies, morale is fatally undermined. When enemy does not believe in himself, he loses his power.’
‘And you’re saying Russia did all this as a planned strategy?’
‘No. West helped us by taking bad decisions. Bringing million migrants into Europe was like dream for us. But there was one other thing. Instead of protecting liberal democratic system, Westerners became obsessed with themselves. Identity politics. Gender politics. Personal fulfilment – all that shit. Me fucking Too. No one is serious about anything if it’s not their own pain or their personal journey. This is the decadence communists predicted.’
‘That’s all such a cliché. Anyway, if the West is already doomed, what’s the point of what you’re doing?’
He pulled out a flask. ‘The sun is down. I drink now.’
‘Are you going to give me some? I’m cold.’ The forlorn point of the remark was to remind Kirill that he was dealing with a human being who felt the same things as he did. ‘I’m really cold.’
He ignored her. ‘You know what pressure point is, where nerve lies close to surface in human body? We use far-right action all over Europe’s pressure points. We give them money and they execute certain tasks for us.’
‘Violent fascists.’
He smiled. ‘Insurgents.’
‘You’re financing terrorism. They’re no different from ISIS.’
‘Both serve our purpose to weaken West. In my lifetime, we will see the Russian Empire strong again.’ He swept his hand across the massive concrete towers and bunkers which glowed faintly in the last of the daylight. ‘In my lifetime, but not in yours, Anastasia.’
He put the flask to her lips and tipped brandy into her mouth. She choked but managed to keep some in her mouth so she could swallow it slowly and take what pleasure she could from it.
‘I regret that you must die. You have good spirit, Anastasia.’
‘And I regret that my last conversation on this earth is going to be with an impotent, fascist hypocrite. Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this, because you’re loving it.’
He chuckled to himself and looked at his phone. ‘We have not got long now,’ he said, as though they were waiting for a supermarket to open.
Naji saw a pattern of transactions in the four bank accounts, although he had no figures. The email address of the man who generated the data had survived being forwarded through three parties, including Samson. Naji replied to the email, suggesting they moved to an encrypted messaging service. For Naji, it was standard to imply he was much older than his actual age and, in this case, that he was an experienced investigator. He soon won this individual’s confidence. His name was Jamie, and he explained he was no longer at the office, having finished an early shift at some kind of financial monitoring agency, which Naji took to be a branch of the US government. Since he was twelve, Naji had been used to corresponding with young men and women in science and tech forums – it helped his English. Sometimes he realised their expertise could only have been gained in government service. Also, they liked to show off. Jamie was no exception. He had an expert understanding of SWIFT, the highly protected network that allowed financial institutions to exchange information about transactions. Most laypersons wouldn’t know that the architecture of the SWIFT network was divided between European and transatlantic transactions. Jamie volunteered that the transactions of all data centres in the Netherlands and the underground facility in Switzerland weren’t mirrored in the US data centre. The transactions they watched all took place late at night, between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., Estonia time, every working day, and in the last ten days, millions of dollars had flowed between the four
principal accounts and hundreds of accounts across the world. Jamie couldn’t swear to it, but most seemed to be new because they were associated with freshly minted shell companies. He confirmed that these entities were mainly registered in London and Cyprus.
Naji kept an ear on what Samson, Harland and Vuk were planning. He noticed that Harland did not seem to like Vuk at all, but the exchange with Jamie went quickly. Soon he realised that Jamie was telling him a lot and he began to experience the thrill he’d had when hacking into IS systems as a boy. All the transactions came from the same location and were apparently made on the same device. And the pattern was the same every night. First, the bank account of the new shell company would transfer funds – usually between $250,000 and $350,000 – to one of Crane’s four principal bank accounts. Then another would transfer a much larger sum, in the millions of dollars, to the shell company’s bank account. Jamie wrote: ‘Maybe the kickback is being paid up front. That’s why your Joe is using multiple accounts. He is skimming!!!!’
Naji realised that the faster Jamie responded, the more he gave away.
‘What device is he using?’ he typed.
‘Looks like a new iPad Mini – the compact version of iPad.’
‘Would that remember passwords?’
‘If he allowed it, but most people don’t when using it for banking. Palm prints, iris or face recognition are most often used.’
‘Have you got a list of new shell companies and accounts?’
‘It’ll take a while. Hey, are you kosher? Which agency did you say you’re with?’
‘I didn’t. British SIS.’
‘Respect! Okay, so this is going to take a little while. We were doing this for a former colleague and have not bundled up the data. But it would be my pleasure.’
‘Thanks,’ Naji replied, punching the air.
‘Do you mind telling me what you’re working on?’
Naji considered the risk. The guy seemed cool, so he gambled. ‘Money is being supplied to far-right violent groups in Europe,’ he typed.
‘You got it, brother. Give me an hour.’
They signed off.