by Joanna Rees
But there were a hell of a lot of ifs. And it was seriously dangerous. Frankie knew what could happen to her if Khordinsky found out that she was hacking into his companies and snooping around.
That’s why Peaches had called Danny here in LA. He was her assistant Angela’s brother and Peaches insisted he was the best. A super-hacker. Completely off radar. As far as most people knew, Danny, aka ‘the Worm’, was a ghost. He was practically impossible to find, unless you knew exactly where to look for him – which, luckily, Peaches did. If anyone could help Frankie get into Alex’s computer system undetected, then it was Danny.
Nevertheless, Frankie felt herself tingling with nerves. She knew that this plan they’d come up with was their best shot and Peaches and Emma were relying on her. But even if Frankie did find the evidence they needed, she knew it may not be enough, because everything hinged on Alex believing in her . . . not those phoney photographs. Did he have enough faith? she wondered. Did she?
Frankie hardly had time to take in Peaches’ louche apartment, with its dancing poles and disco balls and Angela’s office crammed with sexy underwear samples, because Angela had bad news.
‘Oh Peaches,’ she said. ‘Thank God you’re back. Yana. She called . . .’
‘Aw shit!’ Peaches said. She looked at Angela, and Frankie could see that they knew each other well enough for Peaches to know what the hell Angela was talking about. Peaches threw her bag across the room. Frankie could tell Peaches was close to tears.
‘You got to call her. She’s terrified,’ Angela said. ‘She says she didn’t tell them anything.’
‘What’s happened?’ Frankie asked.
Peaches looked up sharply. Her eyes bored into Angela’s. ‘Khordinsky’s men? They found Irena?’
Angela nodded. ‘They came in the night.’
‘What did they do? Tell me!’
‘They . . . they slit her throat.’
Frankie felt her heart aching with pity and fear. Peaches let out just one sob. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
‘This is my fault,’ she said. ‘I knew this would happen.’
‘No,’ Frankie said, going to her. She glanced at Angela, knowing that Peaches’ trusted secretary would back her up. ‘Listen to me. This is Khordinsky’s fault.’
‘But if I hadn’t mentioned Irena’s name—’
‘You could have said a lot worse. And you could be dead. It’s down to your strength that we’ve still got a chance to get him.’
‘There’s no way he can trace you here, is there?’ Angela asked.
Peaches blew out a deep breath, clearly forcing herself to stay calm. ‘I signed the hotel register in a false name.’
‘OK,’ Frankie said. ‘Let’s think. Can they trace you through that name?’
‘No. Not a chance. If they suspect I’m Irena’s daughter, they’ll try and find Albert Rockbine.’
Frankie rushed over to Angela’s computer. She booted up the search engine and typed in his name. She bit her lip as the news wire report from Louisiana was flagged up.
‘You’d better look at this,’ she said, turning the screen around to face Angela and Peaches.
Albert Rockbine had been found last night under an interstate bridge. He’d been stabbed to death.
Peaches pressed her lips together. She looked down at the carpet, then she looked up at Frankie. Tears brimmed in her eyes, but her look was grim. ‘Frankie, I’m telling you, you better find a way to nail that son-of-a-bitch. And fast.’
‘OK, Peaches, I will,’ Frankie said. ‘I promise.’
Frankie wasn’t going to ask Angela about her face, but Angela volunteered the story as she rushed Frankie away in her car to Santa Barbara where they were going to meet Danny. She owed her life to Peaches, she said. Peaches was her guardian angel. One of a kind.
Frankie could tell how shaken Angela was by what had happened to Peaches’ mother in Moscow. She felt more determined than ever to crack on with her part of the plan.
Danny, on the other hand, was hungover and suspicious when Angela took Frankie to see him in his apartment in Santa Barbara. The room was stiflingly hot. Thick black blankets covered the windows, shutting out the bright day outside. The air-conditioning was hardly able to cope with the heat coming from the snaking mass of routers, wiring and computers.
Frankie marvelled at the serious kit he had and the simultaneous programs he was running. A lot of what was on show was commercial, hardware that Frankie had worked with or read about before. But some things she didn’t recognize. They didn’t even have manufacturer’s IDs on them, which meant that they were ex-Government or military, then. Or hybrids which Danny had constructed himself. She could only imagine what kind of software he had running on them, and to what purpose.
Danny had been on his motorbike down to Mexico and back and hadn’t had much sleep. He looked terrible: pale and sunburnt at the same time. His dark hair was curly and matted and he looked as if he hadn’t washed for days.
And yet he had a glint in his eye as he looked up and down Frankie’s legs in her denim mini-skirt and she told him that she might need a couple of days of his time.
‘You got a boyfriend?’ he asked.
Frankie looked him dead in the eye and answered, ‘Yes.’
‘And she’s not one of Peaches’ girls, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Angela warned him. ‘So don’t go getting fresh with her, or you’ll have me to deal with. You got it?’
Danny smiled ruefully. ‘Receiving you loud and clear, sis. No offence intended,’ he said to Frankie.
‘He doesn’t get out much, do you, Danny?’ Angela said. ‘You could meet someone, you know, if you made the effort.’
Danny ignored her, his attention still on Frankie, and nodded at the computers by way of explanation. ‘I spend too much time down here. These babies are the love of my life.’
Frankie smiled. ‘Well, I have to admit, you’ve got some pretty neat kit. Ex-Government, or military, I’m guessing . . .’
Danny smiled at her for the first time, not flirtatiously but more like a kid in school who’d just spotted a kid wearing the same sneakers.
‘Sis told me you knew your stuff. So what kind of work you done before?’ he asked.
As Frankie and Danny chatted through their techy CVs, Frankie found herself relaxing in his company. He might be shy and a little left-footed when it came to the opposite sex, but now that they were talking as equals, Frankie knew they were going to get along just fine.
Angela fussed around clearing up old crushed soda cans whilst Frankie gave Danny the brief: how she wanted his help to find enough hard evidence to sink a billionaire. Even as she said it, she knew how impossible it sounded.
But Peaches was right. Danny was the guy for the task. Frankie soon got the impression that the bigger the challenge, the happier he was. She sat down on one of the swivel chairs next to him as his fingers rattled over the keyboard.
After just a few minutes, he smiled and winked at her. ‘Just as well you’ve got memorable blue eyes, eh?’
Frankie grinned. ‘The passwords? They work?’
‘It seems your friend Alexei Rodokov has been too busy or too sentimental to change them.’
Frankie squeezed her lips together, glad to be over the first hurdle. Alex hadn’t changed his passwords. Whatever the reason why not, that meant Alex had to type in ‘Frankie’s blue eyes’ every day. The most memorable thing he could think of. Did that mean that he still thought of her every day, just like she thought of him?
Danny quickly set up a host account to monitor the mail activity and before long they’d found the pathway into the Forest Holdings database and mainframe files. Frankie downloaded the company accounts which Danny printed out.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘This is nothing special. You could ring up the company and get these sent to you.’
‘Can we get into Khordinsky’s email and private files?’ Frankie asked. ‘Is that possible from here?’
&nbs
p; Danny leant back in his giant swivel chair and put his hands behind his head. Frankie had to stop herself recoiling from the smell emanating from his armpits and the sight of his hairy belly poking out from under his T-shirt.
‘OK . . .’ He thought for a moment, scratching his head, before outlining his strategy for getting in. ‘It’ll take a while, though. You up for staying?’
‘Sure.’
It was dark before Danny got a result but Frankie hardly noticed the time. Being with Danny was like doing a crash-course Ph.D. in her favourite subject. She’d learnt more about hacking in a few hours with him than she could have in years alone.
Frankie brushed aside the empty bento boxes and Styrofoam coffee cups and leant in closer. ‘What is it?’
Danny was frowning. ‘This is really odd. He’s got a special link set up to encrypted files.’
‘Encrypted? How well encrypted? Can we decrypt them?’ Frankie asked.
‘We can certainly try. We’ll have to run some cracking utilities. We might be in for the long haul.’
‘I don’t care,’ Frankie said. She felt too wired with caffeine and anticipation to leave now. They might finally be on to something.
Tommy Liebermann seemed to be in a good mood, despite the lack of sleep he’d claimed to have had, as he welcomed Peaches and Frankie on to the large motor yacht in Santa Barbara harbour. Frankie was on tenterhooks and still buzzing from her own lack of sleep. She felt like a vole that had crept out into the midday sun after the hours she’d spent in Danny’s apartment. Everything seemed too bright. Being so absorbed in Forest Holdings for the past forty-eight hours had left her feeling as if she really had just stepped out of a forest. After her confinement, the world seemed impossibly big again and the challenges ahead like a mighty range of mountains, which she hoped she still had the strength to climb.
Peaches had instructed her to send over copies of all the documents she and Danny had downloaded for Tommy to analyse, insisting that Tommy would be able to work out what they meant.
That was why they were here in the bright morning light. To get some answers. Frankie couldn’t wait. She certainly hadn’t been able to make head nor tail of the contents of Khordinsky’s files, once Danny had busted their encryption wide open. Or the sheafs of emails written in Russian. Peaches had enlisted the help of one of her bilingual Russian girls, Magda, to translate, seeing as she owed Peaches a favour. By the admiring look on Tommy’s face and Magda’s confident swagger as she walked around the deck of the yacht in her skimpy aquamarine bikini, it looked as if she’d been doing Tommy some favours too.
‘So what’s the score, Tommy?’ Peaches asked once they’d settled around the table in the cockpit. ‘You got anything good for us?’
‘Man oh man, I’ve seen some tricks in my time, but this is some scam,’ Tommy said.
‘Go on,’ Peaches said.
‘I’ve done some digging around. Pulled in a few favours with some old contacts and a bod up at UCLA to help fill in the bigger picture behind all that gen you found in the files.’
‘And . . . ?’ Frankie said.
‘The Kremlin are all over Khordinsky. The Government want to renationalize his oil and gas companies. They’re on a mission to freeze all of his companies’ assets in court. But Khordinsky was very smart. When he left Russia, he got a guy called Boris Nazin to get all his money out.’
‘Nazin!’ Peaches said. ‘He was murdered. I saw it on the news when I was in Moscow.’
‘Yeah, but before he got the chop, he squealed, and the authorities know that Khordinsky buried his assets in Forest Holdings.’
‘That’s Alex’s main company,’ Frankie said.
‘It sure is. And that’s where it gets nasty. Khordinsky’s name isn’t on any of the paperwork.’ Tommy let the implication hang in the air for a second or two, before filling in the blanks. ‘Alex’s is.’
Frankie’s caffeine-loaded blood pressure hit yet another peak.
‘But Khordinsky has been busy dissolving the assets and siphoning off all the funds through a network of companies branching out of Tortola, the main one of which is called, appropriately enough, Matryoshka-Enterprises.’
‘Hang on,’ Frankie said, studying the sheet of data that Tommy pushed towards her. ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ she asked Tommy.
She quickly dialled Emma in the UK and explained where she was. ‘All those companies in Tortola,’ she said. ‘What Detroy told you was right. They were all Matryoshka-Enterprises. Khordinsky’s private companies: one within another, within another, just like the Matryoshka dolls. And right here’ – she looked at the papers Tommy had given her – ‘in my hand, is the transfer deed showing the money went from Platinum Reach to Matryoshka-Enterprises.’
‘I knew it,’ Emma said, her voice catching. ‘He stole all that money.’
This was it then, Frankie thought. Exactly what they’d all hoped for. Physical proof that Khordinsky was behind everything. But any triumph she felt was tinged with fear. She thought about the three masked men in Detroy’s office, and of the knife as it slashed Emma’s face: it might as well have been Khordinsky himself who’d done it.
And she thought of the photographs those brutes had taken of her. It only went to prove that Khordinsky would do anything to protect his interests. But with this information, she felt that they were one step closer to him, as if they’d found a blurry shadow, which was now pulling into focus in their sights.
But Frankie knew from the time she’d spent growing up on her Uncle Brody’s farm that cornered animals were the most dangerous of all.
Tommy was talking again. Frankie told Emma she’d call her back and listened in.
‘What happened with Platinum Reach is just small fry. What you’ve uncovered here, Frankie, is huge. We’re talking billions. The whole of Forest Holdings. That’s why there’re two sets of accounts,’ he said. ‘The public ones and the actual ones, which were hidden in the encrypted files. And the actual ones show that Forest Holdings is virtually bankrupt.’
‘So let me get this straight,’ Peaches said. ‘When the authorities want the assets back, there won’t be any.’
‘Exactly. And guess who’s going to take the rap for it?’ Tommy said.
‘Alex,’ Frankie said. ‘Oh my God.’
‘He’s your natural ally, ladies. Magda translated a whole bunch of those emails Frankie sent over.’ He flicked through the paperwork. ‘ “Alexei, my fall guy”,’ he quoted. ‘He’s said it over and over. I tell you, Khordinsky’s smart. He’s done enough to clear his name and implicate Alex in everything.’
Frankie felt her throat constricting. This was so much worse than she’d thought. Khordinsky had duped Alex all along. Everything Alex had told her that Khordinsky had said about prizing loyalty and honesty above everything else was all just a big smokescreen. Khordinsky didn’t have a loyal or honest bone in his body. It was all bullshit.
It was Alex who was loyal and honest: two perfect qualities for Khordinsky to use to his own advantage to keep Alex in the dark. And Khordinsky could pull the plug on Alex any moment, especially if he found out that Peaches and Frankie were on his trail.
‘So I guess Alex is going to have to help us whether he likes it or not,’ Peaches said, glancing at Frankie. She was clearly thinking exactly the same as Frankie.
‘He sure is. Otherwise Mr Rodokov will be in the slammer before he knows it,’ Tommy said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Emma adjusted the wide brim of her Philip Treacy hat and undid the jacket of the Vera Wang suit Victoria had let her borrow for the day. She was boiling underneath, the sun beating down on the VIP marquee in Windsor Great Park from a cloudless blue sky.
Next to her, Yolanda De Vere Burrows slugged back her fourth glass of Veuve Cliquot, her cheeks starting to match the magenta silk dress she was wearing. She grinned at Emma as they watched the players assemble for the next match.
‘I wouldn’t mind some horseplay with him!’ she said, nudging Emma
. ‘Nothing like some decent stud muffin to cheer a girl up, don’t you think? Those Argies. Phwaarh! Great thighs! Probably hung like thoroughbreds as well.’
Emma knew what Yolanda was trying to do, but Julian being gone did not mean that she would ever consider being Yolanda’s partner in her increasingly frequent indiscretions. Little did Yolanda suspect that Emma was scrutinizing the team for an altogether different reason.
‘That’s the Maverick team. They’re on next,’ Emma said, looking at her programme, then tucking it under her arm. She’d already read all about the team: how it was a friendly team made up of international players who had an unblemished record at events like this. ‘Come on, Yolanda, drink up. Let’s go and watch.’
Yolanda let out a cheeky guffaw. ‘Steady on, old girl. They’re not even up for grabs until the match has finished. Plenty of time to get revved up before then.’ Yolanda held out her glass to a passing waiter for a top-up.
But Emma was already striding out of the marquee, past the vast pedestals of flowers, down the red carpet and out into the roped spectators’ area next to the pitch.
She held up her binoculars, feeling her heart pounding with adrenalin. Yes, if she wasn’t mistaken, that was him . . . Alexei Rodokov. She watched him laughing on the chestnut horse as he and his team-mates circled on the pitch.
He was in a red team shirt and beige jodhpurs and even from a distance Emma could tell how athletic and fit he looked. She rubbed her face, feeling the tender tissue around her scar. The scar caused by Khordinsky’s thugs. She knew that for sure now. Was the handsome young man she was observing now really unaware of everything his boss was responsible for?
