Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  Clearly, they were banking everything on Danny closing the final details of the money transfer with Ian that night and hoped that putting on a showy exhibition of ‘friendship’ with Danny would make him work harder to achieve this ultimate result. Watching their insincere show of glad-handing, I was tempted to laugh in their faces. It amused me that these seeming ex-KGB hotshots, who were so coldly calculating in their interrogation techniques, were in reality no less imbecilic than Grigory Miasnikov, who also had believed we were meal tickets in his fantasies of becoming wealthy and powerful. Where was he now? Six feet under?

  Their rank stupidity was perilous for us. What would happen when they at last realised there would be no money for them? They would hardly be in a mood to give us any benefit of the doubt. They’d have to realise we’d been misleading them all along.

  The thought buckled my knees in fear, especially when Danny was told to don his overcoat because it was time to go. He kissed me on the cheek, then, circled by Robert, Kuzin, Oleg, and five gangsters, he was marched out of the dacha.

  Because I had served my purpose during the last call—to prove to Ian I was alive and well—I was left behind. When I heard the door slam shut, it once more dawned on me that I might never see him again.

  I was alone, terribly alone, lost in the cuckoo’s nest, at the mercy of the babushka and her tribe of demented women relatives—and, most chillingly, a lone male member of the gang whom I did not know and had not seen before, whose job it was to watch over me.

  I felt in a warp, absolutely lost in space and time, being separated from Danny. If there was a rescue operation afoot, how could we both be saved if we were in different locations? Perhaps Oleg and his cohorts had this very same thought.

  In any case, I now not only faced having to worry myself senseless about Danny but also about being assaulted again, by the greasy guard whose eyeballs never left me from the time the rest of the men walked out the door. I kept thinking that the insidious Snake might have bragged to the others about his ‘conquest.’ If so, this one may have considered this night to be his turn.

  It all had become so unbearable.

  As midnight came and the eleventh day of the nightmare began, I was about to burst open in anxiety and fear. I couldn’t help but think that even if the end result was death, it would bring relief. At least the torture would be over.

  18

  DAY ELEVEN:

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 16th

  MOSCOW AND THE DACHA

  LYING IN THE WEEDS

  As Thursday began in Russia, it was 4pm in the eastern United States. Ian Rayman had already come home from the office, stomach churning, unable to concentrate on anything but the impending phone call to Moscow.

  The FBI trinity of Gerry Ingrisano, Joe McShane, and Tom Cottone were on their way from Newark to Wayne, call-tracing equipment in tow.

  Dimitry Afanasiev, who’d been on the phone all day with his MVD contacts, was holed up in his Philadelphia apartment, preparing to keep a conference line open to the Raymans’ private phone and the MVD switchboard.

  James Pelphrey was in the guardhouse of the US Embassy in Moscow, Joe Hullings’ IVG freed up and ready to be conferenced into Ian Rayman’s line. He wondered when Colonel Rushailo’s men would get there. Somewhere on the streets of Moscow, Rushailo was riding around with his elite unit, radio handset and walkie-talkie crackling with the sound of his men reporting where they were and what they were seeing.

  As things were developing, they were seeing a lot. Scouting the right pinpointed locations under their surveillance, they had identified several members of the ‘gypsy’ gang that had displayed some peculiar movements for the last few days and had begun following some of their cars. Some were tracked heading outside the city limits to a dacha in Noginsk.

  ‘Follow them,’ was Rushailo’s order, with the proviso that they should hold their positions. ‘Don’t move in right away,’ he advised. ‘Make sure you have cause.’

  Meanwhile, Rushailo roamed the business districts, buzzing by 25 Chekhova Street regularly, as well as the apartment where he’d come up just short two nights before.

  He was getting close. He could smell it. So close, in fact, that he barely thought about his hard-won right to horn in on the call from America that night and to wait it out at the US Embassy. Things were getting too hot on the street. Who needed to waste time twiddling thumbs in a guardhouse while they could be making the bust out there.

  Besides, it may have occurred to him, the Americans had seemed too superior in their attitude in relegating his men to that cramped guardhouse. They could wait in there, by themselves. Then see how smug they’d be. If the Americans wanted to play head games, two could play. On two continents, thousands of miles apart, the trap was set, the bait eager to be taken. For Rushailo, in particular, whatever his motivations and private agenda, the night was inviting. The viper was lying in the weeds, itching to move in for the kill.

  Danny Weinstock, not by coincidence, would be taken on a wild ride that early morning. Almost as soon as the Fiat Tipor into which he was trundled hit the street outside the dacha’s iron gate, hidden eyes were watching it. What’s more, as much as Rushailo’s men tried to keep at a distance, Oleg, at the wheel—with Boris in the back beside Danny, and Sascha the Snake in the front passenger seat—may have sensed that the hunters were out there in the dark. As churlish as he was, Oleg had antennae that piqued when he was being followed. His sixth sense about the ghosts in the night may have led him to take the wheel instead of Boris, his usual driver. Oleg wanted to keep his eyes glued to the road, ahead and behind.

  His route to Moscow was a series of zigzags, keeping Robert and Kuzin and the others in the two Volgas behind him guessing as to where he was headed, and struggling to keep up with the point car on the slick roads.

  As Danny would find out, Oleg’s well-founded paranoia would have another effect. It would mean the focus would shift from his impending phone talk with Ian Rayman to something far more frightening: taking him on a sudden—and likely oneway—journey a long, long way from Moscow.

  For a while, it almost seemed as though Danny was an afterthought, as the gang’s leaders stopped at another of Moscow’s thimble-sized apartments, leaving Danny sitting outside in the car while they conferred about what to do, given the fact that their cover had been blown. Waiting for an hour in the frigid, subzero temperatures, urinating in the snow while making monosyllabic small talk with Sascha the Snake, Danny had no inkling that his night of living in dark shadows was just beginning.

  The night was about to become more confusing and more edgy when he was rushed inside the rundown billiard hall chosen as the site of an impromptu meeting. Squinting through a musky cloud of cigarette smoke rising from all corners of the back office where the gang sat, Danny must have thought he had seen an apparition when he recognised the last member of the group walk through the door.

  The man was sallow, bespectacled, grim. Could it be? Was it really Grigory Miasnikov? Had he risen from the grave?

  Danny blinked to make sure it was really him. Damn, it was. Had Miasnikov been lying low in order to throw the authorities off his scent? Was he called back now because he could provide some cover as a ‘respectable businessman’? Did that mean the plot was falling apart?

  Whatever the explanation, Danny’s anger about Grigory resurfaced. He wanted to rip him to shreds. Trying to think rationally about what Miasnikov’s return meant, he wondered if his and Yvonne’s theory about Miasnikov and Oleg—that they were like oil and water, polar opposites who clashed on every level—would now come to the fore. He would look for signs of a fissure that might split the gang’s unity and leave him a way out.

  Grigory took up a position around the table as Oleg took over the meeting. Up until now, Oleg had been somewhat subservient to Robert and Kuzin, as if bowing to KGB preeminence. Perhaps having been tipped off by the cops in his back pocket that the MVD was closing in on the band, he reclaimed his turf. No longer was he ta
king a back seat to the KGB smooth-talkers who’d been too patient and civil for his tastes. They’d done it the KGB’s way for too long. Now, they’d do it Oleg’s way.

  Speaking feverishly, with Robert translating, he set the tone of the evening with his pleint that the money hadn’t arrived and, ‘I don’t believe Dr Rayman has the money.’

  Danny swallowed hard. The gladhanding by Robert and Kuzin, which had led him to believe he could buy more time when he would speak with Ian again, had turned into a closed fist.

  Digging for a comeback that would mollify Oleg, Danny said, ‘You have not told Dr Rayman exactly where to send the money. Please give me the account details so I can inform him when we speak tonight.’

  Danny knew he wasn’t being truthful on this point, having given Ian an account number at the Vnesh Bank. Oleg was having none of it.

  Danny kept plugging.

  ‘You’ve received the last telex, correct? But you haven’t shown it to me, so I don’t know where Dr Rayman is in the process. Let me make the call so that he can call us back.’

  ‘Dr Rayman does not have the money.’

  ‘That’s right, he does not. But he’ll get it, if I can call …’

  ‘Nyet. No more calls.’

  ‘If you want the money, you must let me make the call. Dr Rayman needs to know we are safe. You’ve told me not to say we’ve been kidnapped or beaten, or in any danger. I haven’t. But I need to keep in contact.’

  ‘Nyet. No more calls.’

  Danny looked imploringly at Robert and Grigory.

  ‘I beg you, Robert, Grigory. We’ve come this far, we’re so close, we can’t give up now.’

  Robert and Grigory, who themselves seemed uncomfortable with Oleg’s unilateral edicts, took him aside to a far corner of the room. After five minutes of arm-flailing discussion, Robert asked Danny, ‘You have the paper?’ He meant the stationery with Video Technology letterhead.

  Danny pulled the plastic bag from his coat pocket.

  ‘We’ve decided,’ Robert continued. ‘No more phone calls. But you will write a fax to the Far East Trading Company explaining what you have done to collect the money.’

  Danny, fully convinced his life was hanging by a slender thread, hoped that perhaps this business of the fax might at least buy him a few minutes—or, dare he be optimistic, another night, if the gang really intended to send the fax to Rud. Good enough for now.

  He was given a pen and began to compose a mea culpa intended to assuage Mikhail Rud and absolve the gangsters of any responsibility for the money not arriving—a tall order indeed. Not knowing exactly what to write, he recounted the phone calls to Ian and his contention that all was on track and one more call would get it done.

  After he had scribbled a few sentences, Oleg cut him off with the words that would forever make him quake.

  ‘Tomorrow, we will take you to Vladivostok.’

  Danny, his head down, staring at the paper, could not chase the words from his ears. The sound of that one word made him wince. Vladivostok. It was more than merely the location of Rud’s joint venture. Symbolically, it was the end of the world.

  The place where the KGB took people, and from where they never returned. The Gulag.

  While Robert and Oleg may simply have wanted to take him there to plead for time personally with Rud, Danny had every reason to believe there would be no return ticket.

  Pretending not to react as he kept writing, his fingers nearly went numb as he contemplated riding a train for seven days, disappearing into the Crimean wilderness and never seeing Yvonne and the kids again.

  His mind grabbed at every straw that might prevent it.

  ‘If you really want the money,’ he tried again, ‘it’s better to keep me here in Moscow.’

  Oleg was still unmoved.

  ‘Keep writing,’ was all he would say.

  Suddenly, there was a din outside the room. Someone poked a head in and called for Robert and Oleg to come out. A short while later, they rushed back in, seemingly disconcerted, their henchmen grabbing up papers and cigarette packs. One took the sheet of paper from under Danny’s pen and stuffed it into an attaché case. The chair on which Danny sat was all but pulled from underneath him as he was lifted up and whisked out the door by three of the men. Outside the billiard hall, men veritably leaped into cars, which took off in a flash.

  There was a great swirl of movement, obviously precipitated by something that threatened the gang. Had a lookout spotted people he knew to be government cops cruising the street? Had a snitch at the MVD gotten word to them that squad cars were on the way there?

  Whatever it was, Danny was back in the Tipor and on the move again. Led by Oleg’s erratic but controlled driving, the three-car convoy careened around corners and crawled along back streets. In the back seat, Danny could barely recognise anything he saw out the window until, after a bumpy twenty minutes, Oleg came to a stop near a railway station.

  The magnificent, stately metal archways towering above the tracks at once identified the depot as the historic Kazan station in northwest Moscow, some three miles from the Kremlin.

  Danny could feel the blood draining from his veins. Was he going to be put on a train for Vladivostok right now? Was this the beginning of his long descent into oblivion?

  That may well have been the intended plan. However, with the gang needing to keep running, there was no time to wait until morning for the next train going east. And so the plan was rewritten. Almost as soon as they had stopped, they were off again, the only change being that Miasnikov was now in the car, replacing the Snake.

  Clearly, Rushailo’s dogs were nipping at the wheels of the cars, their task made easier by the fact that there were virtually no other vehicles on the road at this time of the night. The convoy seemed to be on its way back to Noginsk, but Oleg made several detours. He was able to shake the pursuers for only so long. Twice he was going so fast that police cars for routine speeding flagged him down, but, both times, as on the night of the first call, when the low-level cops approached the car, they were ‘persuaded’ to do nothing.

  Oleg then wound his way to yet another apartment, which couldn’t have been more than a ten-minute drive from the dacha. Here, Boris got out, taking Danny and Miasnikov with him. Everyone else remained in the cars as they sped off.

  Seeing Marusia inside, Danny knew that it was Boris’s flat, and a nice one at that. There was flattering wallpaper, expensive furniture in the living room, pricey crockery adorning shelves in the kitchen, and a cockatiel in a cage. Boris had surely done well for himself, Danny thought, though God only knows what he’d had to do to earn these spoils of the Mob game.

  After his scare at the Kazan station, Danny had a comfortable feeling here. He was invited to sit at the kitchen table, whereupon Marusia brought in some tea—tea again! Was that all these people drink? Then their teenage daughter, Laura, joined them at the table, and Marusia began to fry chicken on the stovetop. Danny just couldn’t figure out these Russians and their off-the-wall customs. It was 2am, and they were having dinner!

  After the meal, Danny again appealed to Grigory to let him keep trying to call Ian Rayman. In fact, he said, it was just about the time that the call had been scheduled to take place.

  Miasnikov, however, was just as adamant as Oleg had been.

  ‘No telephone calls,’ he admonished, ‘but you can write the fax.’ He added that he himself would send it the next morning.

  ‘I can also write to Dr Rayman and to my attorney in Melbourne,’ Danny suggested. ‘First you will finish writing the fax to Vladivostok.’ With that, Grigory produced the fax Danny had begun writing, which had been given to Miasnikov when he had exited the car.

  Dutifully, Danny completed the letter to Mikhail Rud, and then wrote two more, to Ian and Joe Krycer.

  Having done what had been asked of him, he felt he was entitled to make a request—to call the dacha to let Yvonne know he was okay. Since his address book with Ian and Krycer’s fax numbers was
at the dacha, he said, he could also have Yvonne read the numbers to him.

  He was told there was trouble with the phone in the apartment and that maybe he could try in the morning. It was a lame excuse, to be sure, but it at least provided him the answer to what would happen next. Nothing would. He would have to get through another night in the confines of another strange Russian family.

  Stranger yet was what transpired after Boris put out the lights in the flat. Grigory, having apparently pulled rank, sent Boris and Marusia to sleep in the guest room. He deigned that he would use the main bedroom to sleep on this night—and to be able to guard Danny, the two men would bunk together.

  Danny didn’t know what to make of this. It wasn’t bad enough that Miasnikov had betrayed him and Yvonne and gotten them into this nightmare. Now he would have to share the same bed with him! Yvonne and Danny had heard some of the gangsters spend their idle time at the dacha gossiping about Miasnikov, whom all despised as much as the babushka. They couldn’t understand much in the men’s native Russian, but the word pederast came up, apparently in reference to the aging Grigory being married to an eighteen-year-old girl. But what if it went beyond that?

  Danny did not want to find out. While Grigory had no compunction stripping off his clothes down to his underwear, neatly folding and stacking them on a chair, and getting under the sheets, Danny kept his clothes on. He lay on top of the blanket and pressed himself against the wall next to the bed, sequestering himself as far away from Miasnikov as he could. Almost comically, he peered out of the corner of his eye at the lump under the blanket in the other side of the bed.