The Ice House

by John Connor

  He looked unsure. ‘I need an update as much as you,’ he said. The door behind him had an ordinary lock, but a keypad too. He keyed in a number, the door clicked and he pushed it open. ‘There’s been a slight hitch,’ he said. ‘A man called Rudy was meant to be here, to take care of you until Mr Rugojev arrives. He would have all the information you need. This is where he lives – Rudy, I mean – but he’s not here and we can’t locate him.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I have to go out and find him. It won’t take long.’

  ‘You know where he is?’

  ‘I know his other address. They just gave me it.’ He turned to her and his smile was back. ‘Come in. You will have to wait in here for a while. You will have to try to relax a little.’

  They walked through a hallway, Drake looking in two rooms coming off it, then came into a kitchen. He left her there and searched the rest of the house ‘just in case’, then spent ten minutes talking on his mobile. After that he came back into the kitchen and opened a briefcase on the kitchen counter, not the one he had brought with him. ‘He’s definitely not here,’ he said. ‘But everything is cool. I’ve spoken to them. I just have to give you this before I go.’ She stood by the sinks while he got something out of the briefcase.

  The kitchen smelled of glue and paint, as if it had just been put in. There was no trace of mess or food, no signs that any meal had ever been prepared there. She opened a cupboard at random and saw neat stacks of crockery. The fridge was standing with the door half open, the light off. She saw Drake take out a handgun and place it on the counter he was leaning on.

  ‘That’s for me?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just in case. Always best to be sure. I’m following Mr Rugojev’s instructions.’ He didn’t smile. ‘You know how to use a gun?’

  She told him she hadn’t a clue and didn’t intend to learn. Nevertheless, he brought it over to her, showed her the safety catch, the magazine in the handle, how to hold it, aim, pull the trigger. He spoke quietly, hefted it easily. She nodded, not wanting to even look at the thing. It looked heavy, brutal, dangerous, though she knew it was probably only a compact model, one suitable for a silly little girl with tears running out of her eyes. ‘Where’s Rebecca?’ she interrupted. ‘Was she on the plane, like you said? Has she landed? Is she with Bowman? Why aren’t we looking for Bowman? Why are we here?’

  ‘Mr Rugojev is handling it all,’ he said, putting the gun on the counter and facing her. ‘You mentioned a man called Sergei Zaikov. Well, Mr Rugojev’s people are talking to Zaikov’s ­people. It’s delicate. But Mr Rugojev is confident of success.’

  ‘So Bowman works for Zaikov?’

  ‘That’s not certain – but probably.’

  ‘You couldn’t stop her when the plane landed? What happened?’

  ‘The plane didn’t land in London. It was diverted. We don’t know the new destination. Not yet.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. She could be anywhere, then.’ She put her head in her hands, felt a kind of vertigo starting. ‘You told me she was coming here,’ she muttered. ‘Do you have any idea where she is?’ She stared at him. What if she was in Seville? What if they had totally fucked it up?

  He shrugged, like the question was hard to answer. ‘Probably the plane landed at a regional airport,’ he said. He sounded too calm. None of it meant enough to him. ‘There are various possibilities.’

  ‘So tell me about them,’ she demanded. ‘You’re meant to help me, so help me. I have to know what’s happening. I’m her mother. Michael is doing this for me – remember? So you either tell me exactly where she might be or get Michael on the phone, or I’m out of here right now. I need to know what’s going on.’

  He smiled tolerantly at her. ‘That’s no problem,’ he said. ‘No one is keeping anything from you, believe me. I can pass on what I know. But it’s not everything.’

  From his own briefcase he took out a tablet and messed around on the screen for a few moments, then handed it over to her. It was a page from Google maps. She read the address he had highlighted, on the Hammersmith Road, near Brook Green. She knew that area because there had been a couple of clubs there she’d frequented when she was a teenager. ‘That’s Bowman’s house?’

  ‘It’s an apartment, in a block.’

  ‘And she’s being held there?’

  ‘It’s possible, though she hasn’t been seen there. There are other possibilities too.’ He got up four more addresses in succession, all belonging to people connected to Zaikov. One was in Docklands, one in Highgate, two outside London, in Surrey. She tried to memorise the addresses.

  ‘They’re still looking for her,’ Drake said. ‘Still trying to ­locate Bowman. It’s probable they’re in the UK, but not certain. But finding them isn’t crucial. They don’t need to know where she is to get a resolution. So there is no need to panic. Certainly no need to involve the police or contemplate the use of force to enter these places. That would only lead to errors. It’s not the way to handle it. At the end of the day all these Russian matters come down to business.’ He smiled wryly. ‘They will find a suitable price. They will agree it between themselves. Everything has a price for them, and that’s a good thing, because that way problems can be resolved peacefully. Without deaths.’ He closed the laptop. ‘Now you know what I know. Now you just need to be patient and trust Mr Rugojev. Whatever the price, be assured that he can pay it.’ He took out his phone, checked the time. There was a clock on the kitchen wall, but it was stopped. ‘I have to go,’ he said. He rummaged in the briefcase again and took out a smart phone, handed it to her. ‘This has one number in the memory – mine. Call me if anything happens.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anything you think I should know about. I should be back in an hour, with Rudy. He will know more about what’s happening – the detail.’ He pointed to the car keys, on the draining board by the sink. ‘I’ll leave you that car, also just in case, but don’t go out without telling me. Mr Rugojev strongly advises you wait here. OK?’

  She nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘We are doing everything we can to resolve things as quickly as possible, to get Rebecca back to you.’

  She watched him leave, walking through to the front room and parting the net curtains there. He got into the car that had already been there when they arrived, drove off in the direction they had come from.

  He had told her Rebecca was on a plane bound for here, but that had been wrong. She felt a wave of terrifying desperation sweep through her. For a moment it all seemed utterly hopeless. The world was vast, swamped with people. Billions of hectares, billions of people. Cities with too many buildings to count, to many places to hide a child.

  She turned away from the window and took deep breaths. She couldn’t wait here. She would go crazy. She scrutinised the room. He hadn’t told her the code for the front door, she realised, so if she left she wouldn’t be able to get back in without him. She was meant to stay, of course, he had made that clear. But she couldn’t just trust others to handle it and sit back doing nothing. She had tried that already – let them bring her here, instead of going to Seville. At the very least she would need to check the addresses he had showed her, know for sure that Rebecca wasn’t there. Then she could decide what to do next.

  She held the mobile he’d given her and checked the time, then walked through to the kitchen, picked up the car keys, tried Rebecca again, using his phone. She resisted the temptation to fling it at the wall when she got the same useless service message in her ear. Instead, she walked through to the hallway and up to the front door. She didn’t even consider bringing the gun. She opened the door and looked at the road outside. No sign of him. She stepped out, closed the door and walked over to the car.

  31

  Zaikov’s boat was a twenty-one-metre conversion, built in Finland in the seventies, sold to the Russian state for marine research, t
hen converted to a luxury yacht on the back of the collapse of the communist regime. Zaikov had paid for the conversion, but he would have got the yacht itself for a fraction of its value because that was the way it worked in the days of Yeltsin – everything the state had once held was sold off cheap to those in favour.

  Creeping into the heart of Helsinki south harbour, into a berth often reserved for the boats of visiting monarchs or heads of state, it drew a small crowd of onlookers. Carl stood in the market square, amongst the dwindling tourists, watching the slow docking procedure. As it went on, the big boat ­manoeuvring very cautiously into position, the crowd began to get bored and thinned out. They wouldn’t know whose boat it was. It was flagged to the Isle of Man and called Bravo Delta Two.

  In any case, Zaikov wasn’t a celebrity oligarch like those the world could read about in magazines or dedicated online sites. He kept a low profile. Even the boat wasn’t slapping new wealth in your face – it was old, elegant, slightly faded, and lacking the sleek sci-fi lines that were the current fashion. Viktor leased a modern ten-metre model which looked like a spaceship. But Zaikov’s yacht still bore traces of the working vessel it had been, complete with ice-breaker hull. You could see the luxury – the three-tiered sun decks at the stern, one with a pool, the helipad, the cluster of jet skis and smaller boats stowed under awnings – but it wasn’t screamed at you. It was a statement of some sort to bring the thing here, to arrive in Finland like this, to take this particular berth in the heart of the capital, in full view of the cathedral, the parliament, the president’s offices. But not a statement about Russia – hence the absence of a Russian flag.

  Zaikov had extensive interests in Finland. He was here for an AGM for one of his largest holdings – a multinational logging company. Probably that was what Viktor was buying into. The ceremonies had already started in the Kalasjatorppa Hotel, in the west of the city, twenty minutes away, and Zaikov would speak and meet there within a couple of hours. From there, Viktor had been told, he would use a house on the small island of Kaskisaari, in Helsinki south harbour, not returning to the boat at all.

  Carl had parked the motorbike in a side street a little further back, the gun left in the locked top box, the helmet clipped there too, the keys pushed under the seat. He could have left the helmet dangling from the handlebars, the top box on the pavement beside the bike, and been more or less guaranteed that no one would interfere. There were parts of Helsinki where people still left their doors unlocked.

  Before they had even got the mooring ropes secured, a column of four shiny black Mercedes pulled onto the dock alongside the boat. The drivers got out and lit cigarettes, chatted, waited. Carl wondered if they were hired locally. They looked local. There would be no guns, he thought – Zaikov couldn’t risk that sort of thing here. But would they have guns on the boat? He didn’t think so.

  He walked closer – past the old indoor market building – and watched the crew moving around on deck, organising the arrival. He tried to count them and thought he could see around ten, all in smart white uniforms. The online details for the boat – all publicly available – stated there were crew ­quarters for twenty-six, five luxuriously appointed staterooms and guest cabins for ten. He watched them lowering a steel gangway to the quay and securing it, then checked his phone again. He had tried calling Viktor many times, to check on Rebecca, but he wasn’t picking up. That was irritating, but not unusual. Since there were no last-minute messages calling it off, the plan stood. He would meet Zaikov, apologise. Viktor would take care of the rest.

  He waited another five minutes, then walked over to the cars and the gangway. There were no police vehicles, no security presence that he could see, the drivers barely looked at him, the people up on deck were all busy, so he just walked up the gangway and waited for a response.

  A man in a suit – definitely not boat crew – stepped from somewhere and blocked the entrance before he was halfway up the ramp. He was about Carl’s age, though shorter and slighter. Carl stopped about two metres down from him. ‘I’m here to see Zaikov,’ he said, in English. ‘I’m here about Rebecca Martin. My name is Carl Bowman.’ It was what Viktor had instructed him to say.

  The man repeated back the details and Carl waited whilst he spoke into a concealed microphone. There was a visible earpiece. The man spoke very quietly, in Russian. He didn’t seem to have recognised either name.

  ‘Please wait,’ he said, after a moment. Carl watched his eyes scanning the dock behind him, quick professional eyes, looking for others who might be with him, for his transport, for anyone who might be watching. After about a minute his eyes came back to Carl and he stared at him, no expression in the gaze. ‘OK. Follow me.’

  Carl stepped past him onto the deck and raised his arms a little, in case a search was coming. The guy didn’t touch him though. He pointed to a set of steps leading off the deck, down below, then led the way.

  What he felt – going down the companionway into the boat, turning the corner at the bottom, walking to the open set of double doors guarded by another much bigger guy in a suit, arms akimbo, waiting to close the doors after him, shutting him in – what he felt was that he had missed something, somewhere along the line, missed a detail.

  The risk was clear – that Viktor was totally wrong about Zaikov, that Zaikov would ignore anything he had agreed with Viktor, regardless of the business price. Zaikov was a wealthy man – maybe he didn’t need an alliance with Viktor to the extent that Viktor thought he did. Maybe his ‘principles’ came first.

  That risk had been twisting in Carl’s stomach for the last three hours. But he had felt fear before and he knew how to slide his attention away from it. If he didn’t then nothing would be achieved. The fear wasn’t the detail he was missing.

  It was something about the very idea that Zaikov was behind the contract on Rebecca. Federov, the man who had the proof on that, had not showed up on time. Instead, Viktor had showed him documentation which might prove that the money sent to Carl’s account had come from a company which traced back to the Zaikovs. Not proof such as a court would need, but enough to suggest that Viktor was probably right about Zaikov placing the contract. Yet he wished now that he had taken photos of those documents with his phone, so he could check them again. Because something about them was tugging at his mind. What if Viktor had made a mistake?

  The doors shut behind him with a heavy click. He didn’t look behind but knew that only one of the security people had come in with him and was standing there now about three metres back, doors blocked. He kept his eyes on the man standing at the opposite end of the room. Sergei Zaikov. No doubt about it. He’d studied the photos.

  The room was like a lounge in a plush bar, with low easy chairs and tables, at the moment stacked around the edges. A crimson carpet, gold fittings. Carl imagined it would be the reception room. The lights were all off and there were blinds pulled over all the windows, so it wasn’t well lit. When they met people here, did corporate entertainment, there would be waiters taking your coats and orders. But there was no one now – just Zaikov and the guy behind Carl.

  Zaikov was leaning against the back of one of the chairs, staring at him, his arms hanging at his sides. Carl could hear him breathing in short, quick breaths, his fingers clenching and unclenching like he was doing some arthritis exercise. He was eighty-three, Carl had read, and it was undeniably an old man standing there – an old man dressed in a smart suit, with a shirt and open collar. Short and stooped, very thin, drawn features. The eyes – at this distance – looked black, slightly recessed under a heavy forehead.

  ‘I’m known as Carl Bowman,’ Carl said, again sticking to the formula Viktor had agreed, using English. ‘That’s how you will have heard of me. Carl Bowman. I’m here about Rebecca Martin.’

  Zaikov didn’t move, didn’t speak. Carl stepped forward a couple of paces, trying to better see the face, but all he could see were lips set tight, an unflinchin
g gaze. He couldn’t work out what it meant – that Zaikov hadn’t heard him, or that he was seriously pissed off with him? He took a breath. ‘She’s a ten-year-old girl,’ he said into the silence, thinking more explanation was needed. His voice sounded very shaky. ‘You put a contract on her and her family. I was meant to execute it. I didn’t. I’ve come to apologise.’

  One of Zaikov’s hands came across to his stomach and he clutched it, like he was in pain. The breathing was louder but still the eyes didn’t move.

  ‘I think you know what I’m talking about,’ Carl said, uncertainly. ‘My brother Viktor has spoken about it with you. It’s because of that I’m here. I come with the greatest respect, to apologise. I come because you have arranged this with Viktor.’

  No reaction. Had the man heard at all? Maybe he was deaf. Carl glanced back at the security guy but he was staring at the floor.

  ‘Could you hear what I said, sir?’ he asked, gently. He tried to sound polite. ‘I don’t want to waste your time. I’m here to apologise. I’ve come to assure you that your money will be repaid, and to ask you to cancel this contract.’ Did he also need to say that he had taken precautions before walking in – to lie about that? Surely Zaikov would know he couldn’t just kill him, here, in the middle of Helsinki harbour? His walk up the gangway must have been recorded on countless security cameras, observed by many.