by Wilbur Smith
“Never mind that, all you need to know is that they are good men, completely trustworthy and tough enough to keep you safe. All you have to do is learn the whole of Maria Denisova’s legend: who she is, what she does, who her clients are—everything.”
“I can do that,” said Zhenia, “but what am I going to wear? I mean, wouldn’t a personal assistant go around in, I don’t know . . . business clothes? I don’t have anything like that.”
“Then we’ll buy you some.”
“Oh good! But there’s still one other thing that worries me. You said that I have to know all about Maria Denisova’s clients.”
“That’s right. And if anyone wants to speak to them, you must make the connection.”
“But who are they? This business of yours doesn’t really exist. How can it have clients?”
“Because our darling father is going to give them to me.”
“Are you sure?” Zhenia asked dubiously. “I don’t think he’ll want to give you anything.”
“And I don’t think he’s going to have any choice in the matter. Give me his number. It’s time I said hello after all these years.”
Voronov was intrigued by the prospect of meeting his long-lost daughter, and interested when she said she knew where he could find her younger sister, who was still missing. He summoned her to his dacha, just outside Moscow, where he lived when the demands of business weren’t keeping him in the city.
Nastiya had no intention of giving her father any excuse to degrade her with the same kind of insults he had hurled at Zhenia, and she certainly didn’t want to provide him with the slightest encouragement to develop any incestuous feelings toward her as he had done with Zhenia. So she put her hair up into a very casual chignon and donned an impeccably tailored, slim-fitting trouser suit by Jil Sander that played with the idea of a man’s double-breasted jacket without being in the slightest bit butch. This she teamed with a pair of flat brown brogues that were not only chic, but also had artfully hidden steel toecaps. As a fighting outfit, this gave her complete ease of movement, and a dash of hidden danger. But by pulling her hair up off her face and neck, she merely revealed the perfection of her bone structure, while the trouser suit was cut so cunningly that it constantly hinted at the figure it was apparently disguising.
She was met outside her hotel by a chauffeur-driven black Maybach limousine. The driver, she saw at once, was trying to hide a gun in a shoulder holster beneath his uniform jacket. The fact that she had found it so easy to spot reassured her. It suggested that he was far from first-rate and, if the need arose, could be dealt with relatively easily. Nastiya smiled sweetly as he opened the door for her, deciding to play the role of the pretty little woman: one of her great pleasures in life was seeing the look of surprise on the face of stupid, thuggish men when they realized, too late, that she was not at all what she seemed.
They drove out of the city and into the woods where, in decades gone by, the Party bigwigs had built their dachas, or country cottages. Today, all those relatively humble buildings had been knocked down, replaced by grotesquely oversized mansions, temples of bad taste for men with ill-deserved fortunes, hidden behind endless kilometers of high walls, watched over by security cameras as if the men and women beyond them were prisoners of the State, rather than its owners. Finally, the Maybach turned off the road and drove up to an ornate wrought-iron gate, guarded by a sentry box. The limo stopped by the box, the driver conferred with the guard and the gates swung open. The tree-lined drive that greeted them twisted and turned around an open landscape dotted with trees, classical follies and even a lake with an ancient stone bridge at one end that hardly seemed Russian at all. Then Vitaly Voronov’s country cottage came into view and Nastiya suddenly found herself gripping her hand to her mouth to stifle her giggles. The building in front of her would have been instantly recognizable to hundreds of millions of people around the world, for it was an apparently perfect reproduction of Highclere Castle, the stately home in Berkshire, England, best known as the location of TV’s Downton Abbey.
“My God,” Nastiya whispered to herself, “the crazy, drunken pervert thinks he’s the Earl of Grantham.”
The car scrunched up the last stretch of gravel and came to a halt before the main entrance. The driver opened the passenger door and Nastiya walked up the front staircase to the massive, studded wooden doors that opened, as if by magic, at her approach. She steeled herself for the moment when she and her father would clap eyes on one another for the first time in more than fifteen years. But when she stepped into the great hall, the first person she met was her stepmother Marina.
Marina was exceptionally beautiful—Nastiya saw at once where Yevgenia had got her looks. However she was so impeccably dressed, groomed and painted that she seemed less like a living person than a precious object. But there was a look in her eyes that Nastiya recognized at once, for she had seen it in her mother, many years ago. It was the despairing, broken look of a woman who has had the joy of life beaten out of her, whose soul has been ground down by violence and abuse. At once, any hostility or suspicion Nastiya might have felt toward the seductress who had taken her father from her vanished, replaced by a fierce determination to defend a woman who was herself defenseless.
Marina did not say hello. Instead, she stepped forward, took Nastiya’s hands in hers and, in a voice that was little more than an anguished whisper, asked, “How is she?”
“She is safe and well,” Nastiya assured her, leaning forward to kiss Marina on the cheek. She paused when their heads were side by side and murmured, “And you will be too. I promise.”
Then they stepped back and Marina raised her voice to the normal pitch of one woman greeting another and said, “You look so chic, my dear. You must tell me where you found that divine suit. Doesn’t she look lovely, darling?”
Vitaly Voronov grunted noncommittally as he walked into the lobby. He was wearing a tweed shooting jacket and a pair of plus-fours that were clearly the work of a Savile Row tailor, yet even the skill of the craftsmen who had cut and sewn them could not disguise the vulgarity of the mustard-colored checked pattern that Voronov had chosen, or the fact that the man inside them was a crude, uncultured boor.
“You didn’t tell me Anastasia was so beautiful,” Marina added. “You must be very proud.”
Voronov ignored his wife completely and looked at his oldest daughter with an indifference that bordered on contempt. Nastiya was mortified by how deeply the little girl in her was hurt by the total absence of love in his voice. She told herself that she should never have been so stupid as to expect even a shred of paternal affection from a pig like him.
“Go,” Voronov said to his wife, dismissing her with a wave of his hand.
One more reason to hate him, thought Nastiya, watching her stepmother vanish obediently into the depths of the vast house.
“Follow me,” Voronov said, leading Nastiya into one of the reception rooms that led off the hall. However faithful the architects had been to the exterior of Highclere, they had paid no attention whatsoever to its interior decoration. The homely grandeur of family portraits, antique furniture and great bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes had been replaced by a vulgar profusion of black marble, glittering mirrors, gleaming chrome, gold knick-knacks and white leather furniture that seemed more appropriate to a sheikh’s bordello in downtown Riyadh or a bachelor pad for a Colombian cocaine baron than a family’s country home.
Voronov sat himself down in a large armchair, indicated that Nastiya should take a similar one opposite his and picked up a telephone handset from a side table. “You want a drink?” he asked.
“No thank you.”
“Your loss. Give me a bottle of vodka. No, not that gutrot, the good stuff.” Voronov put the phone down and looked at his oldest child. “So what do you want? Because if you want money, you can just piss off. You aren’t having any from me.”
“No, Father, I don’t want money.”
“Good. So what is it th
en?”
A waiter in a white jacket—also covering a weapon, Nastiya noted—placed a tray on the table beside Voronov. Nastiya saw a heavy crystal tumbler and a silver ice bucket from which protruded the neck of a vodka bottle. The waiter then reached for the bottle, swathed it in a gleaming white napkin and poured it into the tumbler, all the way to the top, before replacing the bottle in the bucket. He then disappeared without a word.
Nastiya watched the little performance and let her father have a good long drink before she spoke. “There are a number of things that I want from you, Father, and they will not cost you a single rouble. But before I explain precisely what they are, I want to ask you a question: do you want to die?”
Voronov put down his glass and looked at her as if she were talking gibberish. “What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I don’t want to die.”
“Good, because you will die, and I will be the one who kills you, unless you do exactly what I say.”
Voronov burst out laughing. “You? Kill me? Don’t make me—”
But he never finished the sentence. Somehow—for Voronov could not possibly have explained how she’d done it—Nastiya covered the gap between them before he was able to move. She pinned him down with a crushing grip on his throat.
“I assume that your security people are watching on closed-circuit TV,” she told him.
Voronov made a squawking sound and flapped his hands weakly.
“You will agree that I could have killed you and been gone from the house before they reached you. You see, Papa darling, I was trained by the Spetsnaz.” She released her grip on his throat and slipped gracefully back into her chair. “When your useless buffoons arrive, tell them there’s nothing to worry about. Just a little spat between a father and his daughter. If you say anything else, I will not be so kind the next time and, believe me, your guards will not be able to save you, or themselves. So, I can hear them coming . . .”
By the time the bodyguards burst into the room, Nastiya was sitting with her legs demurely crossed and the first thing they heard was her laughing prettily and saying, “Oh Papa, you’re so amusing!”
The lead guard stopped in the doorway. “Is everything all right, sir?”
Voronov opened his mouth to speak, discovered that he could emit no more than a harsh, painful croak and waved them away with a desperate grin.
“You should have paid more attention to me, Father,” Nastiya said as the door closed behind the last guard. “Then you would have known about the work that I’ve been doing and the skills I’ve picked up along the way. But since you’ve now learned from experience what I’m capable of, I’ll tell you what it is you’re going to do for me.”
She got up from her seat, walked toward Voronov and was delighted to see him cringe away from her as she approached. “Here,” she said, “let me be a good daughter and pour you another drink. You’ll feel better with this inside you.”
As her father drank, gasping at first as the alcohol went down his bruised throat, Nastiya listed her demands. “Firstly, you are going to give me everything Yevgenia needs to get on with her life, including her internal and international passports, her driving license, the keys to her car—I assume it’s where she left it in the garage beneath the Moscow Tower—her laptop and tablet and three large suitcases filled with her belongings. I have a list of what she needs. Give it to your staff and we will pick it up from the tower this evening, at the same time as we pick up her car.”
“Forget it,” Voronov rasped. “I’m not giving that ungrateful little bitch the dogshit off the bottom of my shoe.”
Nastiya gave him an indulgent smile, as if talking to someone with a tragic mental handicap. “No, you’re going to give her everything. Do you need another demonstration, just to remind you what I can do?”
Voronov looked at her. Perhaps he was trying to work out if her threats were real. Or maybe he was wondering how the little girl he’d left behind more than twenty years ago had somehow turned into a trained killer. Nastiya really wasn’t bothered either way. She stared right back at him until he cracked and said, “What else do you want?”
“You are going to call two of the richest, most powerful people you know. I don’t care where they live: Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, New York, Paris—doesn’t matter. They just have to be rich, trustworthy and willing to do you a personal favor. You’re going to tell them that you have a new mistress. Her name is Maria Denisova. She used to work in a bank, but now she wants to set herself up as a financial adviser, finding unique investment opportunities that offer massive potential rates of return: from companies that are way undervalued, to new artists who are about to hit the big time. You are indulging her in this foolish ambition because the happier you make her, the happier she wants to make you, and we all know how she can do that.
“So now this mistress has found a man with investment potential. His name is da Cunha. She needs to be able to tell him that she is working for other ultra-high-net-worth individuals. All you need your friends to do is to be ready to take da Cunha’s call and to reassure him that Maria Denisova can be trusted. If he tries to sell them anything, they should tell him that they’d rather everything went through Miss Denisova.”
“Who is this da Cunha?” Voronov asked.
“A Portuguese, with an African father who has big development plans in West Africa.”
Voronov suddenly perked up. “Really? Should I invest with him?”
Nastiya answered his question with a question of her own. “When you get an email from Nigeria, asking you for money, do you send them the cash?”
Voronov nodded. “OK, I get it. So what’s your interest in this da Cunha, then?”
“Professional. I can’t say any more than that. If I did, it would only give me another reason to kill you.”
Voronov laughed. “That’s funny!”
“No . . . it’s not. And just to be clear, da Cunha will be given your name too, so if he contacts you, reply to him in the way I have outlined. So now, please, you have two calls to make. Start dialing.”
It took Voronov five attempts to find the two men Nastiya needed: he’d already used up a lot of goodwill having Yevgenia shut out of Moscow society. But in the end he persuaded a newspaper magnate based in London and a retired petrochemicals tycoon now taking it easy at a palatial villa in Cyprus to act as referees for his fictional mistress. “If she ever gets sick of you, Vitaly,” the oil boss said, “tell her to give me a call. She can forget her little finance business. Just lie in the sun all day and screw me all night. Then she’ll know what a real man feels like!”
Voronov gave a forced laugh and ended the call. “There.” He looked at Nastiya. “Are we done now? I’d like to get on with my life. Without you in it.”
Nastiya did not answer him immediately. She looked deeply and steadily into the eyes of her father and she saw there the confirmation of what she had known about him all along. Vitaly Voronov, for all his boasting and manly posturing, was a craven coward. She, her mother and her half-sister had nothing more to fear from him, ever.
“Yes, we’re done,” she replied to his question at last. “But there’s one more thing you should know. If I ever hear that you’ve laid a finger on Yevgenia, Marina or any other woman unfortunate enough to enter your life, I will hunt you down and kill you. No matter where you are in the world, no matter how many men you hire to protect you, I will terminate your miserable existence. Now, could you tell your driver to get the Maybach? I need a lift back into Moscow.”
While Dave Imbiss and Nastiya O’Quinn had been setting up the da Cunha sting, Hector Cross had been thinking about the other matters on his agenda. It had not taken him long to work out that while the sinking of the Noatak had created one problem it might then have immediately solved it. After all, there was now a perfectly good, ocean-going tug with nothing to do in the Arctic any more. So why not take it down to Cabinda in the Atlantic to act as his floating headquarters on the Magna Grande offshore field?
Then one morning, soon after Nastiya’s return to London, Hector Cross summoned the team and told them, “I received a report last night from our investigator in Caracas—his name is Valencia, by the way. Guillermo Valencia. He and his people have been carrying out surveillance on the Villa Kazundu, or as I like to think of it ‘Chateau Congo’ for the past two weeks, and he’s done a damn good job. So, this is what we know . . .”
Cross pressed a key on his computer and an image appeared of a large house and its grounds, seen from above. “The villa is part of a private estate, built on a hill overlooking Caracas. The house is built against the hill and partly dug into it: from the huge garage that’s actually dug into the rock at the basement level to the bedrooms on the top floor. It’s in the highest, and therefore smartest row of houses, with just a short, steep stretch of scrubland above it before you get to the ridge that runs along the top of the hill. So this shot is taken from that land and you can see that it’s a very handy vantage point, one we should make use of.”
Cross pressed the key again and a grainy, zoom-lens image of a large African-American, dressed in swimming shorts and an open towelling robe, sitting astride a recliner by the pool, with an iPad on the cushion between his two thighs and a phone pressed to his ear.
“I don’t have to tell you who that is,” Cross said. “The reason Valencia made a point of sending it to me was that he said Congo spends a lot of time on the phone, or his iPad. In other words, he’s in touch with people in the outside world, and he’s talking to them for a reason.”
“I guess you’re the reason, Heck,” Dave Imbiss said.
“That’s one possibility, yes.”
Now three photographs of men in identical black suits, edited together into a single image, popped up onscreen. “Congo shares the property with three groups of people,” Cross continued. “The first are his security guards. They work in shifts of three at a time: one in the gatehouse and two patrolling the grounds. These men work for a security company, so they don’t have any personal loyalty toward Congo. They’re used to Congo being away, so they’ve become very slack in their procedures and Valencia says they don’t look like they’ve sharpened up much since Congo arrived back. Finally, they’re not expecting trouble. A lot of the residents on this estate are connected to the Venezuelan government, so if anything ever happened to them or their property, it would be taken very seriously indeed. They’d probably bring in SEBIN—short for Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional—the political police, who’ve been doing the dirty work for every Venezuelan government, whether hard right or far left, since 1969. And no small-time crook in their right minds would want to screw with them.
