White Hot Silence

by Henry Porter

  Samson called out to Naji, who was standing in the same spot, engrossed in his phone. He stirred and came over, holding the phone up to show Samson that the CNN news site was leading with a story headlined, JAILED BILLIONAIRE’S WIFE KIDNAPPED IN ITALY. The piece was short and had little information but carried a quotation from the State Department which confirmed that State officials were coordinating efforts with the Italian authorities to find Mrs Hisami.

  Then Naji handed Samson his own phone. ‘Look, the kidnapper!’

  While holding the phone up to Samson and Crane during the FaceTime exchange, he had had the presence of mind to take video grabs and had captured two images of the Russian with Anastasia in the frame as well as a series of close-ups of the man on his own.

  Samson laid a hand across his shoulder. ‘That’s great, Naji! We can probably identify the bastard. He’s almost certainly on a database somewhere.’

  He emailed an image of the Russian to Zillah Dee. ‘Can you ID this Russian hood?’

  Robbed of the pleasure of killing her in front of Samson, Kirill replaced sadism with a display of high dudgeon and strode off up the incline towards the buildings to make several phone calls in Russian. She assumed he was consulting his masters about what to do with her but, judging by his gestures, he was also defending himself. That call to Samson would have to be explained to his superiors. She was cold and terrified, yet alert enough to recognise that the iPad was probably more important to Kirill and his friends than any single life, even that of the man whom Samson had taken hostage. This might just save her.

  She stared down into the hole and, for the first time, she noticed that the pungent chemical smell she’d noticed clinging to the buildings was much sharper here. It occurred to her that the whole facility had been abandoned because of some sort of contamination.

  She moved away, aiming a defiant look at the three men who, just minutes before, had been content to watch her murdered then fill her grave. The sudden reprieve seemed to embarrass them. They had written her off as good as dead but now she had acquired a little agency and they avoided meeting her eyes. She took a few more steps before one of them lazily waved a gun at her and she stopped. But when they weren’t paying attention a few seconds later she shuffled a few more steps. The further away she got from that stinking ditch, the better chance she had of surviving.

  She knew her life depended on the outcome of Kirill’s calls. They seemed to take for ever, but at length he returned and made a scene about her not being ready for execution. She squared up to him. ‘How dare you treat me like this! How dare you!’ He grabbed her by her arm, but then the man who had waved the gun at her and also, she thought, had whispered to her in the truck that the journey would not take much longer, protested. From his tone, it was obvious he was telling him to let her be and wait for instructions. A ray of decency had shown itself – so rare in the men who, in the history of Eastern Europe, had executed hundreds of thousands of innocent people at the edge of hurriedly dug trenches like this. Tiny though the gesture was, it stayed Kirill’s hand and she remained rooted to the spot.

  Eventually, a text pinged on Kirill’s phone and he walked off up the incline towards the buildings and the vehicles. She was saved! The men seemed relieved. One even took her arm to help her on the slippery ground, and when they arrived at the cars to find Kirill with a cheroot in his hand and his flask being shaken empty into his mouth, they quietly supported her next display of defiance. As she was manhandled towards the rear of one of the SUVs, she told Kirill that she would not be bundled into the boot. She demanded a seat in the back of the car.

  He shook his head.

  ‘If you think about it for one moment, escape is the last thing on my mind. I need you like you need me, you fucking moron.’ She spat the words out.

  The men around her understood quite enough English to find this highly amusing and, without asking Kirill’s permission, one of them steered her to the rear door and helped her into the seat, his eyes never leaving Kirill’s indignant face. If Kirill hadn’t lost all their respect when he was found locked in her room as fire ripped through the hunting lodge, he had with that business of trying to film her death. Besides being cruel and unnecessary, it was also a security risk. She read it in their faces and she knew they loathed him almost as much as she did.

  CHAPTER 29

  Harland looked out on to the bridge that carried the Tallinn to St Petersburg rail line through the Estonian city of Narva then on to the Russian city of Ivangorod on the other side of the river. He had been here before, though not at this exact bridge, which, like most examples of Soviet post-war reconstruction, was no beauty. He recalled a similar bridge in Berlin, where agents had escaped with false IDs and spy swaps between the West and the Soviet bloc were conducted at the same deathly hour and in the same perishing conditions as these – a vigil by a bridge between one universe and another, where sometimes you waited through the night for men and women who didn’t make it and were never heard of again.

  Thirty years on, he was back at a similar bridge, chilled to the bone with his eyes watering and nose running, smoking one of Samson’s cigarettes as though he were still a young man. He wasn’t. He felt old and tired and faintly absurd, and he wondered how he came to be standing there at this hour. He would see it through, of course, because Samson was right and his love for this woman was right. In a world of bad actors and liars, that counted for a lot.

  The storm they had pursued eastwards had lost its fury when it met with a bank of cold air over Russia. At the demarcation between East and West, the rain was turning to snow, which haloed the few lights in this deserted part of Narva and smeared the lens of the binoculars he had borrowed from Samson, who had gone off to recce the bridge. He searched for him now through the murk.

  Harland had to hand it to Samson. He moved with impressive stealth and, even though a CCTV camera was trained down the line of the track into the mouth of the bridge, he was sure Samson hadn’t been spotted. A small guardhouse stood on the other side of the track, not fifty metres away from where he was standing. No doubt it was full of eager young men protecting the easternmost border of Europe. But there was no sign of alarm, nothing stirred.

  He turned to see Naji in his car, his face illuminated by one of the devices. The boy was a wonder. He had downloaded pictures of the bridge, which he informed them was a classic truss design that relied on Newton’s Law of Motion and had been cheap to build because of the efficient use of materials. The images allowed Samson to think about the distances involved and what to do in the event of a train passing over the bridge. Two had crossed over while they had been there.

  The pick-up containing Crane and Vuk Divjak was about two hundred metres away, parked on a grassy bank under some trees and beside the rickety site fence that protected the railway. The position of the vehicle meant that Samson would approach the bridge with Crane from an angle, not directly along the track. Harland looked around. The city of Narva was still. Apart from the trucks crawling along the official crossing downstream, there was little sign of life. There was certainly no traffic on Raudsilla, the road named after the iron bridge that had spanned the river until the war brought ferocious battles between the Soviet army and the SS division around the Narva bridgehead in the winter of 1944.

  As he raised the binoculars again, he was aware of a scraping noise to his left. Samson had squeezed between two sections of a temporary site fence that had become permanent and within a few seconds was beside him.

  ‘See anything?’ asked Harland.

  ‘No, but we now know who we’re dealing with. He held up his phone and quietly read out the email from Zillah Dee.

  My contact in the Agency would be very interested to know how you came across this man. He is Nikita Bukov, forty-seven, a talented mid-ranking officer in FSR – the successor to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. An expert in psychological warfare, Bukov has been a key mover in operations throughout the Balkans and Eastern Europe aimed at de
stabilising political institutions, amplifying local disputes and maximising sentiment against migrants and migration. A fluent English- and German-speaker, he served in both the London and Berlin embassies. A posting in Athens was terminated in 2012 after Bukov hospitalised a local prostitute when drunk. British Intelligence planned to use his issues with women as an angle, but he was sent back to Moscow before they could get their hooks into him.

  Samson stopped.

  Harland looked at the screenshots of Bukov that Samson was now in the process of sending him for safekeeping. ‘He isn’t the usual thug. Probably doesn’t know how to handle this, and that’ll make him more dangerous. But he’s a killer, remember that.’ He sniffed and dabbed his eyes with a tissue.

  Without either of them realising, Naji had left the Volvo and scrambled up the incline to where they stood. He held the iPad. ‘I can go into the bank account where his money is.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Passcode and print of hand. I have passcode – my friend can …’

  ‘The iPad is part of the deal,’ Samson cut in. ‘I have to take it with me.’

  Naji shrugged. ‘Okay. Just saying.’

  Samson’s phone vibrated. ‘Yes!’ he said.

  ‘Ten minutes on bridge,’ came the voice. ‘Alone with Mr Crane.’

  ‘Agreed. But if you fuck with me, I will kill your man.’

  Bukov laughed. ‘You are real tough guy, Samson.’

  Samson hung up. ‘We’re on. Naji, go back to the car and stay there until one of us comes. Got that?’ Naji handed the iPad to Samson and retreated. Samson stuffed the device down the back of his trousers and pulled the black woollen beanie over his ears.

  They took Crane out of the pick-up. Samson prised the fence apart, pushed him through and followed. Harland returned to his position under the tree and Vuk walked along the road to pass under the concrete bridge that carried the rail track to Narva station. It would be a few minutes before he slipped through a gap in the fence they’d made earlier, entered the guardhouse with his gun and told the guards to turn off the CCTV monitors for the few minutes it would take to swap Crane for Anastasia. Once he had things under control, he would send a text to Samson and Harland, which Samson had taken the precaution of writing, due to Vuk’s incompetence on a keypad.

  Samson prodded Crane across the open area towards a low concrete projection that was part of the bridge’s structure. He glanced at the guardhouse but didn’t expect to see much movement in the slight glow coming from the observation windows. Eight minutes passed and there was still no text from Vuk. Crane’s mouth was taped, but he was complaining about the pain in his knee by dipping his head in the direction of his right leg. Samson told him to sit in the slushy grass. Crane declined. Another minute passed. Then he got a call from Bukov. ‘I am on bridge. Where are you?’

  ‘Nearly there,’ said Samson calmly. ‘It’s all going to be fine. I have Mr Crane and his iPad with me.’

  He called Harland. ‘What’s happened with Vuk?’ he hissed.

  ‘On my way now,’ said Harland. ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Harland clambered up the embankment on the other side of the rail line, cursing to himself, negotiated the fence as quietly as his bad back allowed and covered the short distance to the door of the guardhouse, where he listened for a few seconds before sensing a rush of air behind him. It was followed by a sharp blow on the side of his head. He slid unconscious down the cold metal door.

  Samson rang Harland several times and got no answer. Something must be wrong. His mind raced. Had the Russians brought in people on the Estonian side? They would certainly have had enough time to field their agents in Estonia.

  Bukov called again. ‘You have thirty seconds to show Mr Crane.’

  He was breathless and edgy. Samson stalled. ‘I’m alone with him now. We’re just making sure that there’s no one else with you.’

  ‘I am alone with Anastasia. This is true.’

  Samson thought he could hear Bukov moving on the rocky ballast by the tracks and possibly the tread of another, much lighter person, but he couldn’t be sure.

  He called Vuk and Harland once more but got no response. Then he phoned Naji and asked him if he had seen anything. ‘Mr Harland has gone to the hut and I have not seen him since then.’

  ‘Jesus! Okay, you stay there. Whatever happens, don’t leave the car.’

  He prodded Crane on to the rail track and pushed him towards the towering, square proscenium of the rail bridge. He moved slowly, stopping to listen for sounds coming from the other end. Crane made noises of protest behind the masking tape. Samson told him to shut up. The last thing he was going to do was take the tape from his mouth and let him blurt out that Samson had no back-up. They went a little further and the sounds of people walking carried through the swirls of sleet. He knew from Naji that the bridge was a hundred and fifty metres long and the Russian border sliced through it about ninety metres from the Estonian bank. He estimated they had gone thirty. He’d have to make damn sure not to go too far and stray into Russian territory.

  Now he called the number, just to see where Bukov was. He knew the Russian would have the sound off but had guessed correctly that the phone would be in his hand and saw a brief glow in the dark as he whipped it up to his face.

  Samson said, ‘I see where you are. Walk twenty metres and I will do the same. That should put us at the border. Then we will make the exchange.’

  Bukov swore and hung up.

  Samson jabbed the gun into Crane’s back and said, ‘Understand that, if you try anything, I will certainly kill you.’ Crane jerked his head down the line. Samson saw what he was looking at. Three powerful lights of a locomotive had rounded the gentle bend out of Ivangorod, on the Russian side, and would be upon them in no time. He didn’t bother with the phone. ‘There’s a train!’ he yelled. ‘Wait until it’s passed.’

  Silence.

  ‘A train’s coming!’

  A couple of beats later a man’s voice responded. ‘Yes!’ he shouted back.

  A minute passed and the massive diesel locomotive thundered on to the bridge, making the seventy-year-old structure groan and shudder. The lights from the engine briefly illuminated a man and woman on the other side of the track, about forty metres away, then they vanished behind a procession of silver gas-tanker carriages. Samson felt Crane tense up and knew in an instant that he planned to dive in front of the engine to the other side of the tracks, leaving Samson with nothing to exchange for Anastasia but the iPad. He seized Crane by the collar of his jacket, but Crane was powerful and easily wrenched himself free. He might have made it across the line if Vuk hadn’t set about his knee with such savagery, yet that was debatable. Before he even reached the first rail, the man’s head was knocked sideways by some unseen force, as though an invisible heavyweight boxer had landed a punch at his temple. Samson caught sight of a face suddenly emptied of expression before Crane fell back on to him, utterly dead, as the locomotive stormed past them.

  Samson knew what he had seen – a bullet had smashed into the side of Crane’s head at the moment he was going to dive in front of the train – but he couldn’t process it; couldn’t work out where it had been fired from or who the shooter was. He staggered backwards, aware of the warm blood coming from the side of Crane’s head, and dragged the body away from the track and propped it against the safety fence. One thought was in his mind. The moment Bukov discovered Crane was dead he’d kill Anastasia. He moved away a few paces then stopped and took out his phone, switched on the sound and placed the phone head-high on a ledge on one of the bridge’s vertical supports. Then he ran eastwards, against the endless flow of tanker carriages that clank-clanked past him. He went two thirds of the way across the bridge, into Russian territory, waited for the last carriage to pass and dived over to the other side, where he crouched in the shadow of the bridge supports, ears straining into the night.

  On this side, the sound of the river was louder but, once the train had cleared
the bridge, he heard movement on the stone ballast about twenty metres away. He glanced behind him to see if there were any others on the bridge. He thought he saw a man with a headlamp some distance away on the Russian bank and maybe some shadows of two or three more; he wasn’t sure. He looked ahead and saw the glimmer of a mobile phone. Bukov was calling him.

  Within a second or two, the silence of the bridge was broken by the sound of his phone’s ringtone from the ledge where he had placed it – the first bars of Piero Toso’s violin solo from Vivaldi’s concerto in B-flat major, the music they’d heard together in the deserted church in Venice, which, despite Anastasia’s withering disapproval, he’d put on his phone that day.

  The distraction worked. The shape of a man silhouetted against the nightglow over Narva moved towards the phone. Having decided that he couldn’t risk using the gun for fear of hitting Anastasia, Samson rushed forward and hit the man hard in the small of his back and heard a kind of crunch in his spine before he sprawled forward. Samson was aware of the gun flying from his grasp and clattering across the metal deck, then silence as it shot over the side and down into the river. Then he heard Anastasia’s voice. He took the man’s phone and used the torch to find her. She was cowering by the safety fence. Her hands were tied. He took the knife from his jeans, cut the tape and raised her to her feet. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘I’m with you, Anastasia. I’m here.’

  If she smiled, he could not see it. She leaned into his body and murmured something. She was very weak.

  ‘I need to see this bastard,’ said Samson, waving the phone screen at the face of the man lying unconscious on the stones. ‘This is not Bukov!’ he exclaimed.