The Hunt series Boxset 2

by Tim Heath

  They spent twenty minutes sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, each nursing a warm cup of tea in their hands, words somewhat sporadic between them. Rad glanced out of the window often, not sure what to say. The scenery outside was beautiful. They had built this dacha with nature in mind––his with privacy––and it gave them a great view of the nearby lake and river. The river ran across the end of their property, though where their land ended, and nature continued, it was not clear. Nobody needed a fence in the forest. It had been the river at the front of the property where Rad had spotted Nastya the previous time bathing. His mind flashed back to that sacred glimpse for a second before coming back into the moment. She was sitting right across from him and talking to him.

  “I said, my uncle built us the new bathhouse just over two summers ago. I can show you if you want?”

  “Sure,” Rad said, his focus back in the room, as he placed his empty cup onto the table, having refused another top up of green tea. He followed her out towards the banya, which was set back a little from the house, about thirty feet from the edge of the water. There was even a wooden jetty and a diving board at the end, presumably for summer months, when swimming would be more appealing.

  The whole hut was very new and built well. It was inspiring. Quickly, Rad’s mind was making him imagine her sitting by herself in the banya, walking naked to the river to cool down before returning for more hot steam. He caught himself.

  “Look, I’d better get back to things,” he said. He knew how his thoughts were going. Being around Nastya any longer would not be a wise idea.

  “Oh,” she said, somewhat put out, it seemed. “Okay, you must have writing to do.” He was about to follow his confused expression with a question about what she meant but stopped himself in time, recalling what she thought he did. He’d written nothing in his life, not of any worth, anyway.

  “Will I see you again soon?” she asked, now blatantly flirting with him, playing with the tips of her long, straight, black hair, and it was working effectively on Rad. He really didn’t know. He had a mission to plan for, at least two journeys to make, and getting involved with a beautiful, very attractive young lady had not been on his agenda.

  “You know where I live,” he said, without thinking. He instantly knew that was the wrong thing to say. He didn’t want Nastya coming looking for him, especially as Rad usually wouldn’t be there. “I mean, I’m travelling away soon, so don’t come by. I meant, when I’m here, I’m local, so I’ll look out for you. Do you have a number?”

  “For here?” She sounded surprised. “Of course not. No signal this deep.” Rad had forgotten where they were, momentarily. It was clear they wouldn’t have a phone there. He only had that possibility because of the government issued satellite antenna carefully hidden on the inside of one of the tall pines near his house. That covered internet and telephone for him.

  “Well, I’ll just look out for you when I’m next here.”

  “But you can’t see my house from your place,” she said, having just been there. There was a long way between the two places, not to mention a considerable ridge, besides the millions of trees.

  “From the river near my place. I can see the edge of your property. I spotted you the other week,” Rad said, catching himself though not before he blushed a little. She spotted the embarrassed expression on his face.

  “What?” she said, confused. Even the water’s edge must have been well over three kilometres from there. She recalled Rad’s weapon, his scope attached to the top that would easily make that distance seem like nothing. She also recalled the only time she’d gone down to the river in recent weeks. “Oh, you were spying on me were you?” she said, part serious, part playful.

  “Oh, no, don’t get me wrong. I saw you, and yes you were about to bathe in the river. But I didn’t take a second look.” That last sentence seemed to deflate her somewhat. Rad continued, “No, it’s not like that. I wanted to look… I felt it wasn’t… wasn’t…” He’d not been this lost for words for a while. She finished it for him.

  “Wasn’t what a proper man would do?” She was smiling all the more.

  “Yes, exactly.” He wasn’t thinking like a gentleman at that moment that much was for sure. He had to move.

  “I’ll get going then. I have a lot of meat to cook.”

  “I can help you if you like,” she said, her eyes boring into him like a drill on an oil field. That would have been perfect. He certainly enjoyed her company, and he’d always eaten alone inside his lockup. But he had work to do, and if she spent too much time at his place, she might see things that didn’t fit with the image of him being an author. She might ask questions. Most problematic of all was he didn’t trust himself being around her for too long.

  “Maybe another time,” he resolved. How he longed for another time––when this was all over––with her. Even then, that darkening thought arose. When would it ever be over? There would always be another war, always another hit he had to make, another President wanting him to take out the opposition. He would never be free to live the life so many took for granted.

  “Okay, well, you know where I am. I’ll be waiting for you, Radomir,” she said, sounding out every single syllable deliberately as if her life depended on it. His pulse nearly went into overdrive. He switched on the bike. Now without the meat or Nastya, it felt rather empty. He throttled away, waving to her as he went, her face seeming more downcast the further he got away, and Rad knew he had a complication he’d never seen coming.

  He liked her, and in a way he had not felt about any woman. And the crazy thing was, she apparently liked him too.

  “If only you were actually a writer,” he said aloud to himself as he raced back towards his lockup.

  26

  Amsterdam

  There were two ways Filipov could have planned for Svetlana’s flight to the Netherlands in his personal jet. The first would have required a little luck. Assuming the European satellites weren’t looking his way, and that they were not explicitly watching his aircraft, he could have ordered the FSB to block all knowledge of the trip. He could have masked her flight as one of the thousands of other flights and used many tactics so that by the time it landed at the private airstrip in Amsterdam, no one would know Svetlana was on board. He would have then had his people meet her, and a blacked out vehicle ready to clear her through customs, moving her around the city, doing what she needed to do before they would make a repeat for the return trip.

  That was what she expected to happen.

  Filipov chose a second option, however. His way. That included using a few intermediaries to tip off the Dutch authorities so that as the jet was touching down on the runway, the police were already on the way to meet the plane. They detained Svetlana seconds after the crew opened the door, officers rushing on board, much to everyone’s surprise.

  Images of Svetlana Volkov in handcuffs would circulate the world before that day’s news cycle was over. They took her directly to Scheveningen, the Dutch prison in The Hague where all ICC detainees were housed pending trial.

  Locked in her cell, alone that night, it startled her to hear a tray being pushed through the metal door shortly before nine. Dinner had been served, left untouched, over three hours before. A mobile phone was on the tray. There was only one number in the contact book, one she knew well by now. It was a Russian number. She called it.

  “What in the hell am I doing here?” Svetlana demanded when Filipov had answered the call. He’d been expecting it for the last half an hour, growing more concerned as the minutes passed, unwilling to fear the worst, but starting to anyway. Then she’d suddenly called.

  “I take it you found your way there safely?”

  “You knew this would happen?”

  “Yes, I did. You are precisely where I need you to be right now.” Strange as it sounded, that part brought comfort, even as she sat up on the clumsy metal bed frame, the confined space already closing in on her. She did not know how she would
get much sleep that night.

  “You planned all this?”

  “Well, I needed them to do their part, but yes, I wanted someone inside the prison.”

  “You have someone here. Someone on the inside already. He passed me the phone. Why couldn’t they have done whatever you needed?” She dreaded for a moment he was about to ask her to kill somebody. She wasn’t a killer.

  “Nobody I trust as much as you.”

  “You said you were sending me here to get the code. Why did you lie? Why not just tell me the truth?”

  “I didn’t lie. You are there for the code.”

  “The code’s inside the prison?” she said, that realisation dawning on her suddenly. “The Serbian?” Recollection was flooding back.

  “The Serbian,” Filipov confirmed, his tone victorious. Svetlana swore under her breath. The Grand Master had done it again. Checkmate.

  The Serbian––ICC War Crimes Trial, The Hague

  2013

  Vlatko Vladić was one of the most high-profile Serbian dissident leaders to stand trial following the war that had ravaged his nation years before. Unlike the others, he’d been profoundly connected to the criminal underworld for decades before. He was already an old man when he stood trial. He would be dead before the trial had entirely run its course.

  Vladić was one of just seven men on the planet who knew the code for the vault in Switzerland, something he’d tortured hundreds of people for information on, and something he only got towards the end of the Bosnian war. He was now standing trial before he could get to the Bank. The net had closed fast around him.

  The fact he was after the information was alarming, and the few that did know, knew he couldn’t be allowed to act on that information. Before his arrest––which all sides had fully supported––it was unclear whether he had got the information on the Bank, though the body count suggested he had stopped at nothing to find out. Vladić had planned to use the funds to finance his own army while crippling the opposition. The Bank wasn’t meant to be used for that, its location and existence kept secure only by its anonymity. Vladić threatened all of that if they allowed him to escape Serbia.

  They arrested him before he’d even left the country, the war in its final weeks. They held him in The Hague indefinitely while they gathered information, collected evidence. Those on the outside also watched everyone close to Vladić, but no one was making a move towards Zurich. After a while, they stopped being concerned.

  Yet Vladić had obtained the information, kept on his person at all times, but crucially now he couldn’t do anything about it. He had a son, born to him before the war, and living with a former lover––one of many reasons his marriages never lasted long––in Georgia. Vladić hoped to get the information to his son, someone who wasn’t on the West’s radar, someone his enemies didn’t know about, as far as he could tell.

  Filipov, aware of Vladić’s presence in prison, saw an opportunity. He had his own men in place. They passed letters, pretending to be from Vladić’s son in Tbilisi, through Filipov’s contact at the prison. It overjoyed Vladić to have the connection. A steady flow of correspondence started up over the last two years of Vladić’s life.

  In the last letter, Vladić’s health ever worsening, he knew he would not get out. He knew he would never even have to face trial. His time was up, life had caught up with him. He’d told his beloved son about the code, made his son aware of the Bank. Told him he couldn’t have trusted the code across a single letter, in case they discovered it. Falling into the wrong hands would rob his son of a glorious inheritance. Instead, and with this plan in mind the entire time, in the early letters, Vladić had asked his son to keep every single one. He wrote a specific sequence of Serbian writing on each letter he sent out. The order would be necessary for the future.

  Then, using screws from his bedspring, over countless nights, and across the various cells Vladić was kept in––they moved him between three, which was standard procedure––Vladić carefully, and without it being noticeable, added his own carvings onto the already marked and spoiled walls. He sequenced each part of the code with the order of the letters, so only his son, who Vladić trusted had the letters safe, would know how to order the code carved into the prison wall.

  Except the letters were not in the possession of Vladić’s son, they were with Filipov. Vladić’s son had died in an unfortunate traffic accident the day they put Vladić into prison. Filipov couldn’t have the son making contact at some later point. That would have blown his plan out of the water, exposing the ploy Filipov had been using.

  With everything accounted for, all it would take Filipov now was to have someone gain access to the prison, and for them to get the information to him, from which he could understand the actual code for the vault in Switzerland. Getting into a high-security prison reserved for national leaders charged with war crimes, however, was never an easy thing. It was a good job, therefore, that Filipov had already started the ball rolling with a challenge at the next Russian Presidential elections, due to happen in five year’s time.

  Scheveningen Prison, The Hague––The Netherlands

  They had held Svetlana for four days already. She had yet to move cells though Filipov in his one conversation with Svetlana had mentioned the fact she would be. He needed her to be.

  She had by this point already located the first couple of sections of code carved into her cell wall, at the base of the wall, in the right-hand corner, as Filipov had said it would be. Vladić had used a similar spot in all three cells, to make it easier for his son. Only with the letters, the order of sequencing crucial, could he create any sense of what had been written.

  Svetlana had never been in prison though she’d been around many people who were involved in criminal activities. Her husband, a man she’d not seen since before the election, had done time in prison. She’d first started their association by visiting him inside.

  Then, she had only ever spoken with Sergej in a section designed for visitors, a glass partition between her and him, somewhat comfortable on her side, nothing but bare metal on his. She’d often thought about Sergej as they removed him from sight each visit, about what it felt like, what he was going through. Now, she was experiencing something similar herself. Unlike the Soviet-era prison, which was rough, open and crowded, she was on her own. Not that Sergej had been in any danger. All the other inmates feared him––he controlled the prison, guards and all.

  The first change of cell came on the fifth day. They gave little warning––for those not in the know as she was, they designed the move to keep the prisoners on their guard, to break routines, to stop them getting overly comfortable. It was not done because of any fear of an actual escape though it lessened that danger. The guard stood at her door, an explicit instruction given to Svetlana that she was to collect together everything, as she was moving cells. She had little to arrange, but what there was, she slipped into a bag provided by the prison guard, and they walked down the corridor, each cell empty, stopping at the fourth door which stood open. They showed her in. They locked the door behind her. A freshly made bed and a clean towel were all that was different about the room.

  Svetlana dropped her bag onto the bed. Checking that there was no one looking in through the door, she got down onto the floor and inspected the same corner as in her previous cell. There were once more markings from Vladić. The Serbian had been in that cell as well. Was Filipov making sure they only put Svetlana in the same cells that Vladić had occupied? There were only eight options, and with them all empty, she would get there eventually. But she wouldn’t put anything past Filipov, and the quicker she got this over with, the faster she could get out of there.

  They had given no news to her about the trial. Svetlana was being held until evidence was ready.

  By the end of the first week, Svetlana was in her third cell. Once more, and as instructed by Filipov, though the guard in question didn’t really know the reason, they moved Svetlana to the final cell descr
ibed in Vladić’s last letter, where he’d come clean about his whole plan, explaining to his son what he would need to do to understand the code himself.

  It was the same night that Svetlana had been moved into the cell––next door to the cell she’d started the week in––when, once more, and already getting late, someone pushed a tray through the door to her prison cell, and a mobile phone sat waiting. Svetlana pressed the speed dial immediately.

  “I have it all,” she said, her voice desperate, her release now surely moments away.

  “Well done. You’ve done fantastically. You have the phone all night. Half an hour before they serve breakfast, there will be a knock on your door. Be sure to give him the phone. They can‘t catch you with it, or they’ll know I’m up to something.”

  “But you are getting me out, right?” She sounded alarmed for the first time.

  “Of course, but you will have to be patient just a little while longer. The team I asked you to send to Zurich. They are in place?”

  “Yes. They have been there for over a week already.”

  “Fantastic. I’ll need them in the morning. And listen carefully. It’s highly likely others will track the messages you send me tonight. So I need you to understand what I will ask you to do. If they were to intercept, they might get there before me. I can’t allow that to happen.”

  “Just tell me,” she said, desperate to get out of there. She’d trusted Filipov this far, she had no option but to follow through with whatever he needed next.

  “Send each unique sequence, as written by Vladić and exactly as he recorded them, in its own message. Send the messages at five-minute intervals, with your first one at ten. I’ll need you to send dummy codes too and will explain why now. If anyone is watching, they’ll not be able to make anything from it. So for each message, you must create variations, where you change a few letters or numbers. Knowing which messages are to be genuine code and which are fake is crucial. If you think of them as messages number one, two, three, and so on, then messages with a prime number will be Vladić’s actual code, the rest will just be fake. That way, and if you send each one at five-minute intervals, I’ll know precisely when the legitimate messages are due. You know your prime numbers?”