by Ryan, Chris
You people, Sotov thought. His parents had been part of the migration from the west, which is why he stood out from the native Siberians. Where they had dark features and ruddy cheeks, Sotov sported blue eyes, sandblasted hair and pale skin.
‘It’s warmer in the car,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, perhaps only minus ten.’ Sotov was smiling to himself.
His chauffeur, Denis Popov, six-two with a long, thin neck and silver hair the colour of a knife edge, manoeuvred around the Lexus and opened a door for Ledinsky. The Lexus was just one of a fleet of luxury cars. Sotov’s official title was the CEO of Russia’s leading diamond-mining outfit, Strelka Corporation. But Sotov was also mafya.
The engine was already running when Sotov and Ledinsky took their seats in the back of the Lexus.
‘I take it you’ve covered your tracks?’ said Sotov.
‘Of course,’ Ledinsky replied. ‘I’m taking a big risk too, you know. If this thing goes missing—’
‘It won’t.’
Sotov pointed to a black truck reversing towards the Herc’s ramp. Strelka guards stood either side of the truck. Overhead one of the Sikorsky helicopters belonging to Sotov’s private fleet patrolled the surrounding area.
‘I didn’t realize you had so many men,’ said Ledinsky.
‘Here, in Yakutsk, I’m the only law there is. The people around here joke that when Aleksandr Sotov shrugs, the whole of Siberia shakes.’
‘How many—?’
‘Men in my force? I forget the exact number. Eight thousand? Enough to get things done.’
‘What kind of—?’
‘Vodka?’ Sotov produced a bottle of Russian Standard and two shot glasses from a fold-away cabinet.
Ledinsky eyed the bottle suspiciously. ‘I don’t drink.’
‘Nonsense! A man cannot do business in Yakutsk without vodka warming his belly.’
Sotov poured Ledinsky a generous shot. Knocked back his own and aaahed.
Popov steered the Lexus out on to the highway. The icy road was flecked with black spots: frozen corpses of the millions of midges and mosquitoes that had swarmed over Yakutsk in the brief summer respite. Only three weeks ago temperatures had been a mild fifteen degrees. Seemed like history now.
‘What about my payment?’ said Ledinsky, looking down at his still-full glass.
‘I’ve decided to kill you instead.’
Ledinsky froze.
‘I’m joking, Maxim. We’re on our way to collect it now.’
They drove through what an outsider would have mistaken for a ghost town. No cars were on the roads, just a few trucks shipping in vital supplies of petrol and food. Streets devoid of people. Only the fish market showed any signs of activity. It was where, decades earlier, Sotov had set up his first business, crushing his competitors by poisoning their catches with diesel fuel.
The Lexus slowed to fifty kilometres and hour an hour as they headed north-west, Yakutsk in the rear-view mirror, the banks of the River Lena to their right. Now and then the car jumped and sank from the holes in the road.
Heading west, they passed a radar installation and a pyramid-roofed church. The chauffeur turned on to a gravel path and, half a kilometre down, stopped at a checkpoint. An imposing yellow sign warned that intruders would be shot. Guards, armed with A-91M bullpup assault rifles and with the company’s Siberian husky logo sewn to their lapels, peered inside and nodded sombrely at Sotov. The gates opened; the guards waved them through.
The road continued for another couple of kilometres until it reached the mouth of a low cave. Foot patrols with sniffer dogs cleared the Lexus to proceed. At the cave’s mouth four guards stood to attention, two on each side of a solid-lead vault door.
Golden statues of snow leopards were perched on the pillars either side of the door. Sotov exited the Lexus and took a keycard from his pocket. One of the guards also removed a keycard. They inserted their cards simultaneously into their slots. A series of clicks followed, then the door cranked open.
‘Come I have something to show you,’ said Sotov.
Ledinsky hesitated. ‘What’s inside?’
‘Why, your reward.’
‘Good. And please, let’s make it quick,’ Ledinsky said, the blood draining from his face. ‘I’m a busy man.’
‘Of course.’
The cave was cool and dark. Ledinsky took off his hat to reveal a comb-over. Steam wafted from his bald patch like cigar smoke. Another guard directed them towards a lift. They entered. The guard slammed the cage door shut, and the lift rattled as it descended three hundred feet below the surface. Ledinsky wiped sweat from his pate.
‘I was not aware you had another facility.’
‘We needed somewhere to store a few things.’
‘What things?’
‘Secrets, Maxim. Secrets.’
The lift screeched to a halt. Brilliant light flooded the black of the shaft. A guard cranked the door open. Sotov gestured for Ledinsky to exit first. The FSB chief scrunched up his eyes, as if staring directly at the sun. Sotov handed him a pair of sunglasses.
‘We’re in the only place in Siberia where a man needs these,’ he grinned.
Ledinsky’s jaw slackened.
‘In Yakutsk we like to say, there’s a lake or river for every person who lives here,’ Sotov said. ‘But the truth is that we have more diamonds than people. Here, comrade, diamonds are as common as snowflakes.’
‘It’s incredible… I’ve never seen—’
‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’
They were standing in a dome-shaped underground mine. Searchlights fired powerful blue rays at the ceiling, fifty feet above. Sotov lowered his eyes to the ground, to an area the size of six football pitches. Filled with mountains of polished diamonds.
Ledinsky picked up a handful. Each gleaming stone hypnotized him. He managed to peel his eyes away. Looked quizzically at Sotov.
‘These must be worth billions.’
Sotov shrugged.
‘But… why are you hiding them underground?’
The mafya man kneeled beside a small mound of diamonds. A stone the size of his fist rested on top. Four times as large as the Cullinan diamond in the English Crown Jewels, the rock in front of him, he reckoned, was the largest rough diamond in the world. And it was kept underground, gathering dust.
‘Some things are more valuable when they are not seen,’ he said.
‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘Do you know that one diamond merchant controls fifty per cent of the global market? That’s an impressive figure, no? It means they have the power to raise the price of rough diamonds or lower it, however they see fit.’
Ledinsky frowned.
‘They say diamonds are rare,’ Sotov continued. ‘It’s a myth. We keep the stones down here, in the mine, because it benefits this particular merchant to have fewer organic diamonds on the market. They pay us not to supply them. It works for both of us. They keep the price of diamonds artificially high, and we get paid for doing nothing.’
‘That’s preposterous.’
Sotov rose to his feet. He scooped up the fist-sized diamond and offered it to Ledinsky.
‘Accept this as your payment,’ he said, lighting up a black Ziganov. ‘Take as many as you want, or need. Take some for your wife, your children. Take some as bribes for your colleagues. Take all you want, Maxim, but remember this: each diamond in your pocket is a promise from you to me. Cigarette?’
Ledinsky shook his head, rolled the sparkling stone in his hands like a ball. ‘What kind of a promise?’
‘Simply that we both agree to keep silent about our arrangement.’
Sotov waited for an answer that did not come. He turned to look at Ledinsky, and found the much-respected FSB director plunging his hands, joyously, into a pile of diamonds.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Sotov said.
3
Belgrade, Serbia. The next day. 1833 hours.
Gardne
r parked his rented Toyota Avensis two blocks from the Tiger Bar, slap bang in the heart of Silicon Valley. The district got its name from the number of artificially enhanced women who prowled its streets. A few days ago Gardner would have been tempted to check out the scenery. But he had come to Belgrade to settle a score and bury an old friendship. The Page Three girls of Silicon Valley would have to sit this one out.
Land had instructed him to hit the Tiger Bar at precisely six-forty the evening he arrived.
‘Who am I looking for?’ Gardner had asked.
‘Don’t worry, my boy – they’ll find you,’ Land had assured him.
Now Gardner’s eyelids felt heavy, as if someone had sewn hockey pucks into them. Just three hours’ sleep in more than forty-eight hours, and it had finally caught up with him. He’d taken a British Airways flight from Gibraltar to Heathrow. Passed the two hours waiting for his flight at a chain restaurant, drinking sugary coffee and grazing on a ham-and-cheese sandwich that gave him £2.50 change from a tenner. From there he boarded a Swiss Airlines plane bound for Zurich. He drank a pint of Guinness at a bar and watched Sky Sports News for an hour before taking an onward flight to Nikolai Tesla Airport.
Belgrade. It was twelve years since Gardner had set foot in the city. He felt like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. A lot of fucked-up shit had gone down there during the Kosovo War, and the Regiment had played a right royal part. Dispatched to the capital, their mission had been to cripple the Milosevic state machinery by whatever means necessary.
As the troop’s designated demolitions expert, Gardner had been part of a four-man patrol charged with silencing Milosevic’s personal mouthpiece, the state radio. At sun-up he had rigged the station with enough plastique to tear the ozone a new arsehole. Intel had indicated the building was empty. But the int turned out to be wrong. At the moment Gardner pressed the clicker, twenty-eight civilians were inside. No one survived.
He never saw any bodies. Didn’t hear their screams above the explosion. But their shadows still haunted him, shadows without arms and legs, limp as rag dolls.
Twelve years later and the city had been given a fresh lick of paint. Snazzy new shopping centres, casinos and mobile-phone shops jostled for attention. Gardner saw that hints of the old Belgrade remained: the Communist architecture tucked away in dilapidated backstreets, and the frothing nationalist graffiti on underpasses and bridges.
It was cooler than Gibraltar, hovering around ten degrees. Gardner wore navy combats, a white V-neck T-shirt and a grey hoodie. He’d snapped up all three from a duty-free shop at Heathrow. And he had something else slapped around his wrist.
‘I’m concerned about your personal safety on this mission,’ Land had said in Gibraltar. ‘Now Bald’s more cautious than ever before and is working with some bad apples, there’s a fair chance they might suss you out. If that happens, you’re in trouble. Wear this.’ He’d given Gardner a red bracelet. The bracelet was fitted with a radio-frequency identification chip which sent out a signal on UHF passive frequency, triangulated via the Firm’s GIS computers to produce a real-time fix on the bracelet’s location.
‘If you press this button,’ Land had told him, tapping a small metal circle attached to the plastic, ‘it will send an emergency relay directly to MI6 HQ. That’s your signal that you’re in extreme danger and wish to be extracted. I can’t give any guarantees, but in normal circumstances we should be able to extract you within an hour of your pressing the button.’
Now, as Gardner approached the Tiger Bar, he clocked a photograph taped to the door. Some mean-looking guy in military uniform stood in front of a tank, surrounded by his militia mates. He had an AK-47 in his right hand but in his left was a curious thing: a baby tiger, held up by the scruff of its neck.
He pushed through the door. It was like crossing into another dimension, a place where smoking bans didn’t exist and Lady GaGa hadn’t yet been invented. Accordion music bleated out of a single speaker. About a dozen men huddled in groups of two and three at booze-soaked tables, drinking brandy, smoking foul-smelling tabs. They eyed him suspiciously as he made his way to the bar. He ordered a pint of the local lager from a barman with a face like a pig’s arse. Fuck me, he thought. It’s like I’m in Yates’s, minus the slappers.
Gardner pulled up a chair. He sipped his beer; it tasted watered down and glowed green beneath the bleary lights. His eyes adjusted and he realized there was a single female in the bar, a woman smiling a broad smile at him.
She had coffee-brown hair, brushed back behind small, elf-like ears, to fall in teasing strands at her neck. Her lips were delicate in the middle and curved up at the corners. She wore a three-quarter-sleeve flame top and a pair of indigo jeans, and had the kind of body that could look good in a shell suit.
She was by herself. Her eyes, black as a winter sky, searched his. I might be in here, Gardner decided. He glanced away, then stole another look at her figure, legs like a catwalk model. He had a strong urge to jump her bones.
The woman seemed to ignore him for several seconds. Then she stood up and walked over.
‘You must be Joe Gardner,’ she said in a soft and light voice that confused him. He’d assumed she was Serbian but the local women all seemed to have deep, full voices. He couldn’t quite place her accent.
She drew up the seat opposite him and placed a half-full glass of red on the metal table. Rested a black purse beside it.
‘And you are?’ he said.
The woman arched one of her elegant eyebrows at him. ‘You don’t need to know my name.’
‘No, but I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned like that.’
As a smile spread across her lips Gardner felt a hot wave of air push against the wall of his chest.
‘Leo warned me about you,’ she said.
‘Really? What—?’
‘Just that trouble follows you around like a bad smell and you’ve got some anger-management issues.’
Gardner drank some more cheap lager and reflected.
‘Pretty accurate, I’d say.’
The woman laughed, the smile full-on now, stars sparkling in her soft eyes. ‘Leo’s telling the truth for once?’
‘But I still don’t know your name.’
She sipped her wine, and the corners of her lips coloured dark red. ‘Aimée Milana,’ she said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Likewise, Aimée. I’m guessing you’re not local.’
She shook her head. ‘Strictly speaking, I’m only half-Serbian. My father’s from Belgrade, my mother’s from Paris. I grew up here but moved to France to study when the war broke out.’
‘And now you work for the Firm?’
Aimée’s eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose. They were arched and alluring. ‘Not for. With. If your government wants to stop people using my country as a drugs market, that is a good enough reason for me.’
‘You know why I’m here?’
‘Yes… back to business?’ Her smile crawled back into its hole.
He nodded. ‘Leo said you might be able to show me around.’
‘It seems your friend is mixed up with some very bad people,’ she said. ‘Come, I’ll take you there.’
Gladly leaving behind the filmy gunk in his glass, Gardner followed Aimée out of the bar. He was wondering what kind of shitstorm John Bald was stirring up on their old stomping ground.
4
1907 hours.
The Zira Hotel stood on Ruzveltova Street in old Belgrade, a concrete maze east of the River Sava. Gardner and Aimée were sitting in the Toyota on a sidestreet opposite the hotel. He could see all the way to the other side of the river, where the tall buildings of new Belgrade dominated the skyline.
‘This is where your friend is staying,’ Aimée said.
‘He likes to travel in comfort.’
Aimée popped a stick of chewing gum in her mouth. ‘He checked in under an assumed name. Let me see,’ she said, checking her phone. ‘Gary McAllister.’
Gardner la
ughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ Aimée demanded.
‘Too hard to explain,’ said Gardner, reflecting on the striking similarity between Bald and the old Liverpool midfielder.
At that moment Bald emerged from the hotel lobby. Gardner thought he looked tired. Bald climbed into a Mitsubishi Shogun 4x4 parked out front. The windscreen wipers swiped at drizzle as iron-grey skies leaked rain. Throw in a bunch of hoodies setting fire to a BT phone box, Gardner reckoned, and you could almost be in Moss Side.
The Shogun lunged forward.
‘Let’s follow him,’ said Aimée.
Gardner pulled out into traffic three vehicles behind the Shogun. Bald powered south-west down Ruzveltova for about a kilometre, then turned right into Aleksandra Boulevard. Gardner followed the Shogun past baroque libraries and museums. The old gave way to the new: porno shops and fast-food joints. Men slept on park benches in the mid-afternoon sun. The Shogun headed south. New apartment blocks lined the road: Belgrade was demolishing its old quarters, eager to join the twenty-first-century rat race.
Gardner gripped the wheel hard, fighting to keep his emotions in check. Been a hell of a ride, he told himself. Halfway across the fucking world. He dared to think he might be nearing the end of his mission. The thought dripped like acid in his stomach.
Less than ten kilometres south and the city receded like a politician’s hairline.
‘I know this place,’ Gardner said. ‘Belgrade’s slummy end.’
‘Used to be.’
They rolled past swish new penthouses. Parks, a gym, tennis courts, an outdoor swimming pool. Each of them carried the same bold message: Belgrade’s going places.
Bald parked up outside a two-storey villa. Gardner brought the Toyota to a rest a hundred metres back, next to a bus stop. He reached for his Nikon D3.
The digital camera was a specially modified unit courtesy of the Firm. Instead of Gardner saving images to a flash memory card, a secure network adapter transmitted the images in encoded format back to Vauxhall via a near-space satellite. The 12.1-megapixel snaps were hitting Land’s desk in the time it took to microwave a Pot Noodle. That way, if Gardner lost the camera or it was damaged, MI6 already had the photographs of everyone involved in the smuggling ring.
