by Brian Martin
After a minute or two, Arne appeared with the driver. I realised then that I should not have worried too much. Arne was a man who kept to time: he was efficient. He would not keep anyone waiting. His precision and punctuality were points of which he was proud. When he had made himself comfortable next to me in the back, I mentioned that I found it odd to be locked into the car. He apologised.
‘I am so sorry. It is Lars’s automatic response. This car has that device that we sometimes need to use, and this is the car that he invariably drives. I do hope you did not feel trapped.’
I wanted to say that I was beginning to feel extremely trapped and that I was almost standing at bay, but I refrained.
‘No, but it was an odd feeling, just as though I were in a police car.’
It was the first time I had heard Arne attempt a laugh. Then he smiled and commented, ‘I can assure you, we are not like the police.’ He said no more, but his remark certainly did not give me any sort of assurance.
There was a glass partition between the rear passengers and the front seats of the car, and to my experienced eyes, it looked as though the car was bulletproof. Everything about the car was heavier than it usually is. The last time I had been in a car with a similar feel was when I was taken through the Blue Line in Cyprus in the High Commissioner’s bulletproof Jaguar. He had needed, one Sunday morning, to attend an Anglican matins service at a church in Kyrenia that was in the Turkish Cypriot part of the island, and he had taken me with him.
‘So,’ I said to Arne, ‘your driver’s name is Lars. He didn’t introduce himself.’
‘Yes. Again, I am sorry. We instruct him to be of few words; but it must seem awfully rude to you English who are keen on sociability and good manners. You must take us as you find us, I fear.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘am I right in thinking this car is bulletproof?’
‘Yes, you are right. You do not have to worry. We use this car when we go to Russia. Between here and Moscow or St Petersburg, it is a lawless country; and I mentioned the police just now. In Russia at the moment we have to defend ourselves against the police. They will try every means of extortion there is. Let me tell you, Pelham, if you were driving as a private citizen from here to St Petersburg, you would do well to pay the first police patrol you came across to escort you to the city suburbs. Otherwise every policeman you meet on the way would blackmail you. Myrex prefers to pay for its own security and this car is a form of insurance.’
‘It’s bizarre,’ I commented. ‘It’s just like going back to the 1920s in the US – mob rule, mafia, gangsters. Stalinist discipline has broken down.’
‘The old discipline has not just broken down; it has gone altogether. Stalin’s control was iron-fisted. Step out of line or swindle the state and you were sent off to the Gulag, or, in the terms of twenties Chicago, you were dead meat.’
We had descended into a dreary, desolate part of the new town. Lars drove us steadily along a bleak treeless boulevard, past concrete office blocks and some light-industry factories. Few people were about. Everyone was at work. At the edge of the city we passed huge blocks of flats and some private houses, cramped, cold-looking boxes, in which natives of Tallinn led uneventful lives intent on survival. Before long we had reached the long, straight, narrow roads that ran through pinewoods. The dark trees added to the gloom of a heavily overcast sky. Every so often there was a flurry of snow in the air. The wiper swept the flakes from the windscreen. Outside the warm and comfortable car, the weather was brushed aside.
Halfway through the journey, about thirty-five minutes after we had started out, Arne turned to me, put a hand on my arm, and said, ‘I want to ask once more, probably for the final time, will you join with us at Myrex. You have now had time to think carefully about our offer. I have told you that Raoul is determined to have you with us. Again, like our Chicago gangsters, he will not be thwarted.’
It struck me that Arne’s reference to Chicago gangsters was the closest he could reach towards a joke. That was it: an attempt at a joke but it had menace in it. Perhaps all his humour was connected with threats and violence. I was seriously wondering what sort of a mess I had placed myself in. For a moment I closed my eyes and saw my small house behind Olympia. What was I doing? Why was I not there leading a calm and ordered life as a London journalist who was occasionally sent on pleasant trips abroad? Why had I mixed myself up in the security of the realm when it was a matter of choice? I opened my eyes again and gazed at the murky greenness of the forest. I felt particularly isolated: why had Mark not been in touch? Where was he? I came back to my present surroundings. Arne’s hand was still on my arm.
‘Your insistence flatters me. Thanks. I don’t understand why Raoul is so keen to have me. I can only be an ordinary foot soldier.’
Arne shifted his hand, this time to grip my arm. ‘You underestimate yourself. What you can do for us is extremely valuable. You will see. If you do not see it now, you will.’ He released his grip: I relaxed. His sudden fierce grip had made me tense. I prayed inwardly to be freed from the pressure of this persuasion.
‘I can’t understand why Raoul doesn’t speak to me himself. After all, we have met even if only briefly. Why doesn’t he talk to me face to face?’
‘He is in Paldiski. You will meet him. He expects you to say yes. If you persist in refusing our offer, you will have to explain to him.’
It was awful. The whole situation was a disaster. I felt like a schoolboy about to go before the headmaster. I was going to have to explain myself and yet there were certain matters I could not talk about because of various crises of conscience. I increasingly wanted to be away from this situation; and I desperately wanted to urinate. The combination of my breakfast coffee and my nervousness made a stop absolutely necessary. It was embarrassing but I could not face the agony of my physical condition any more. I said to Arne, ‘Look, very sorry about this, but could you ask Lars to stop. I must have a pee.’
‘Of course. We’ll be there in twenty minutes, but of course.’
He touched an intercom button and explained to Lars that we should stop. Lars halted the car at a break in the trees where a track led into the woods. The door lock clicked and I walked to the cover of the first trees. Arne studiously kept his gaze ahead. Lars watched my every move until he was confident that I was actually performing my act of relief. He watched me carefully again as I pulled up my zip and stepped back towards the car. I recognised at once that he was a man with expert security and bodyguard training. Lars was a professional, what is known as a gorilla in the profession, not just an ordinary chauffeur.
Little conversation passed during the twenty minutes it took us to reach Paldiski. As we drove into that distressed ghost town, we passed a few morose Russians, remnants of the old order, marooned in that diminishing, failed and isolated community left behind by the Soviet empire in retreat.
I suddenly recognised the huge Myrex hangar with its neighbouring single-storey white building. We drove on. Just past a decaying grey building that had once been white and now looked as though it had contracted leprosy, we turned off the main road. We passed similar blocks that once must have housed offices and we came to a low two-storey spiderweb complex that Arne said had been a thriving computer technology research lab. It comprised seminar rooms, administrative offices and technical labs. It looked as though one small part was now operational. The exterior had been given a lick of paint and the characteristic detritus that seemed to cover most of the built-up area of Paldiski had been cleared away within a radius of about fifty yards. Discarded bottles, tin cans, plastic containers and bags, old bits of wood, had been gathered up and dumped outside the fifty-yard perimeter.
‘Something has to be done about the mess here. It is so bad for our image. The whole of Paldiski needs discipline. The trouble is that the government in Tallinn is not interested in this old Russian base, especially when there are still some Russians living here. So … I suppose we shall have to make our own arrangements.’
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I thought to myself that once Arne had put his mind to it, this place would look as good as new. We pulled up in front of a pair of doors recently painted dark blue. Next to them on the wall was a notice in three languages, English, Russian and Estonian, which said ‘Myrex Holdings (Research): private’. Lars came round to the back of the car, opened Arne’s passenger door and ushered him out. He then did the same for me. We went through the double doors and Arne showed me into a reception room. The interior of the block was infinitely better appointed and maintained than the outside. The walls were painted in what suburban chic interior decorators would call ‘magnolia’. There was a Persian carpet on the floor that looked authentic. I remembered someone instructing me about patterns woven into the design that would invariably prove that such carpets were genuine. This one looked the real McCoy. There were four leather armchairs and a Middle Eastern upright upholstered bench which could seat four people, three comfortably. On the walls hung, inconsequentially and bizarrely, a portrait of General De Gaulle and cityscapes that I recognised of Seville and Copenhagen. Naturally, I was not surprised about the scene of Seville.
Arne suggested we had some coffee. He stepped towards a telephone on a small occasional table, picked it up and spoke rapidly into it in Estonian. After a minute or two a rather drably dressed girl in a navy blue suit brought in coffee and a bottle of vodka. The old Soviet habits died hard. She looked as though she could have been working as an airhostess on a low-budget internal airline of a central European state. We drank some coffee. Both Arne and I declined the vodka, but Lars poured a measure into his cup. Arne said he would show me what they had set up so far in the Paldiski complex: perhaps, he added, what I saw might encourage me to join them. He was still insistent in his persuasive attempts. He mentioned that later in the day some of the main board directors would be in Paldiski. Raoul was already there but he was not certain who else would arrive. At the mention of Raoul’s name, my heart leapt and my imagination took off. Where would Roxanne be? Would he bring her with him? It was hardly likely that he would have taken her to Paldiski, but, I questioned myself, might he not have left her in Tallinn? What a delight it would be to return to the Gloria and find that she was staying there. More likely she would be at the Italian hotel: that was more Raoul’s style. I brought my mind back to the reality of the present.
Arne explained to me that the series of low buildings were being renovated, the computer labs being upgraded and refitted. Two sections of the spiderweb complex were working fully. He intended that we should look at them. We left the reception room and in it Lars. He was still drinking his coffee. He had poured himself another cup from the jug that had been left on the table. Arne clearly did not intend him to accompany us on our tour. His remaining behind was not instructed: it was understood. Lars knew his place.
Arne and I walked from the reception room down a corridor with a number of doors on either side. It reminded me of a provincial university back in the UK, one of those housed in converted mental asylum buildings or in cheaply constructed concrete-shed architecture of the fifties and sixties. The wall surfaces were painted brick or breezeblock. Economy, Soviet-style, had prevailed in the planning and execution of this development. Arne commented that it would not do for the future. The whole place was going to have a face lift. He had been looking at forecast figures of the profits from their Russian trade. Myrex was scheduled to do well. Somehow Arne’s optimism did not balance with what I saw there in Paldiski. The site was run-down and seedy. It would take years of investment to put things right there. Messing about with computer technology, e-commerce, encryption systems, was not going to produce enhanced profits that could take care of Paldiski’s immediate rehabilitation. Where was the finance coming from?
‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Arne. ‘Where does the money come from for this enterprise? Your resident computer boffins aren’t going to generate the cash for this venture.’
‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘They will, once we get going. In the meantime, our other interests will subsidise Paldiski. There is more than enough profit coming out of Russia to finance this project. Raoul is a careful investor. He knows what he is doing.’
‘How do you make so much out of Russia?’ I decided to ask a leading question. It had puzzled me for a long time, and I regarded their operations in Russia as highly suspect. To make money out of Russia, any business had to have special blessing from the Russian government, or you had to be involved in organised crime. In Myrex’s case, since I had no evidence of the former and nor did the intelligence service, I concluded Myrex must be connected with the mafia underworld in some way. It would have to be my job to find out what was going on. A good one-way bet was that it would have to do with drugs and then money laundering. So far as I knew, Myrex was well positioned for both activities. It had the contacts, the installations, and the cover as a legitimate international business. Maybe, it occurred to me, the computer labs were just simply a blind, and if my conjecture, rapidly maturing in my mind, were right, then I should keep alert in my tour for evidence. It would also make sense for Raoul to be so keen to have me working for them. I put myself in the place of Raoul and Arne. There I was, known to be an inquisitive reporter and with someone like Willy as a contact. I had to be either neutralised, or suborned to work for Myrex. It made sense. It was no doubt for that reason that Arne was insistent. He avoided an answer to my question by walking briskly ahead of me.
We reached a point where the corridor turned to the right. Arne held open one of a pair of dark blue doors. We entered a long room with four parallel benches running its whole length. There were six men and one woman working at computers. The computers were in various states of existence. Some were skeletal with their inwards showing. The woman was tinkering with a microprocessor board that she appeared to be fitting into a machine. One or two of the others were entirely preoccupied with what was happening on the screens of their monitors. Arne explained to me that they belonged to one of the working labs. We walked through and out of that room into another, and then turned left and went through a series of other disused, unoccupied labs. It was obvious that they were in a similar state to that in which the Russians had left them. Nothing seemed to have been done. They stood derelict.
Arne took me through a number of similar lab rooms. A huge amount of money needed to be spent on the project. In one room that was in the process of being cleared and tidied, Arne spoke to one of the men engaged in the work. He was a native Estonian. To begin with, Arne spoke in Estonian. He then changed to English and introduced me to the man. The Estonian spoke near perfect English and for some time we chatted as Arne talked to some of the other workers in that room. The Estonian explained when I asked him that he had worked for the old Soviet navy as a computer scientist. He had been trained in Helsinki and then in Moscow at a technical laboratory in the outskirts attached to Moscow University. He held a doctorate from Moscow University. So, that was the quality of employee that Myrex was able to employ in Paldiski. It did not surprise me. We knew that the Soviet retreat had left many well-qualified people like the Estonian without any employment whatsoever. He told me how grateful he was for Western investment and development in his country. He saw Myrex as a kind of economic saviour for him and his family and was full of praise for what the corporation was doing. I asked him how long he thought it would be before the Paldiski site was properly put back together again and functioning at full throttle. He thought it would take about three months. He was extremely optimistic and enthusiastic. I thought to myself that if all Myrex’s employees were like this, the firm would flourish in that part of the world.
Arne rejoined me and said that there was not much more to see at present. He suggested we went for a walk outside the Myrex site to look at the state of the rest of Paldiski in the Myrex vicinity. That seemed a good idea but I mentioned my fear that it might be dangerous. Arne told me not to worry and that precautions would be taken. We went back through the lab rooms to the receptio
n room, a warm and hospitable contrast to the largely derelict labs. Lars was not there. Arne summoned the girl who had first met us, spoke rapidly to her and she disappeared into what appeared to be her private office. Some minutes later, Lars returned accompanied by three well-built men in heavy loose-fitting overcoats: two were in their late twenties and the other in his early forties, fit-looking and decidedly tough. I realised immediately that these were our bodyguards for our walking tour. Sure enough, when we went outside and started to walk away from the lab complex, Arne and I were well protected. The three men and Lars took up their positions and hemmed us in: they made up the four angle points of a square, and we were kept inside it. They certainly looked menacing. Nobody was likely to interfere with us. The four of them emanated a ferocious, threatening energy that it was clearly unwise to unleash. They were obviously armed.
