by John Sweeney
‘Do you want the bear?’ asked the general.
‘No, General, you can keep the bear, too. I’m too old for it.’
Gennady chuckled to himself.
‘General? Get him – get the murderer. Then if I die here at least I’ll know I helped you get him, I did something with my life. Bring him down, General, bring them all down.’
Now, Gennady could feel tears running down his face. The thing about Russia, the reason that he could never, ever leave his wretched country, was the raw courage of the ordinary people. This boy, blinded and crippled at the age of eighteen, in the cause of a ghost war no one in authority dared acknowledge, was more of a man than any of them who had started the killing. He shook Max’s hand, said goodbye, and stopped by the nurse, who was sipping tea at the delivery-suite end of the basement. Gennady pressed two hundred-dollar bills into her hand.
‘Look after Max,’ he said.
‘That’s way too much money.’
‘Look after Max,’ he repeated, and was swallowed up by the gloom.
BAY OF BISCAY
The harbour master of the small fishing port had wanted a hundred euros for the SleepEasy’s tracking beacon. Instead, he got half a litre of diesel poured down his gullet. Under normal circumstances, Reikhman would have done much worse, but his ears were still ringing from the rebuke he had suffered from Grozhov after the errors in Manaus.
The goal was simple: retrieve the insurance policy, capture the dog, eliminate the Irishman and the Chechen woman – and that was all. No more collateral damage.
‘Where is Tiplady, woman and dog?’
The harbour master vomited up a glug of diesel and much of his stomach lining. He gave Reikhman and Oleg, the surviving twin, everything Seamus had sworn to him was the truth about where his black-hearted bastard of a brother had gone: name of vessel, full description, recent photograph, radio call sign, the date it had departed, its presumed destination and its speed through the water.
Two hundred feet off the port bow, the sea started to shape-shift, a blunt-edged shunt of water, nigh on six hundred feet long and seventy-five feet wide, gathering form and motion, running parallel with An Dóchais na hÉireann – The Hope of Ireland.
It was noon, the sea calming, a breeze of four knots, a great glad-to-be-alive day, with a few white clouds puffing their way across a duck-egg-blue sky. The fishing boat was two days out of Donegal, in international waters, just outside the junction where the French and Spanish twelve-mile sea borders meshed.
The skipper, Kevin O’Malley, was at the wheel, more drunk than sober, too whiskey-sodden to realise what jeopardy he was in. The shunt of water surged ahead of An Dóchais and then began to carve a track in the sea to starboard, directly into the path of the fishing boat. The nets were full of holes, the winding gear didn’t work, An Dóchais was more showboat than working vessel, but still, if it sunk, the crew would all be dead.
The mate, also drunk, was fast asleep; the cook was in the galley, peeling spuds; so it was the youngest man on board, a sixteen-year-old tearaway but strong with it, Conor was his name, who sprang into action. He hurled himself from the tip of the bow, where he had been painting the frayed woodwork, and ran back to the wheelhouse, shoved O’Malley aside and spun the wheel hard to port.
As he did so, the shunt of water began to rise, inexorably, and bared itself: a Typhoon-class Russian nuclear submarine. Conor’s speed and sharp wits saved them, but only just, the side wash from the immense vessel almost overturning An Dóchais.
Five Russian sailors in striped T-shirts hurried out of the conning tower, armed with rifles and handguns, carrying a large rubber dinghy. With them was a small dark-haired man with ferocious eyes and another man, bald and pale. Within seconds the dinghy was in the sea, the sailors and the strange duo zipping across the water to board the An Dóchais.
The Russian sailors pointed their weapons at the crew, who held up their hands. No one, neither the Russians nor the Irish, said a word. The man with the fire in his eyes was carrying a waterproof bag. He let it down from his shoulder, unrolled it and took out a small black electronic device that none of the crew had ever seen before.
Everyone in Donegal – well, everyone but the Garda, who sometimes looked the other way – knew that the boat’s owner, O’Malley, wasn’t a true fisherman. He neglected his nets, drank too much – a real rebuke in this part of the world – and hardly ever brought back a catch worth a candle. Every two months or so, he would disappear and then reappear a month later, waving fistfuls of cash in the local pubs. Word seeped out that O’Malley was going to Morocco and coming back not with a catch of cod but hashish, amphetamines and ‘pages’, they called them, or legal highs. Gogaine was the popular one – mock-cocaine, complete with a line on the wrapper: ‘Not for human consumption’.
Many of these pages were manufactured in bulk in China, a sideline for a general in the Public Security Bureau, and, thanks to people like Kevin, they ended up in the very poorest parts of the evil, rich, capitalist West. But some of the shit they spliced it with was worse than the original hard drug.
Kevin’s ‘catch’ from Morocco would be sold in the bleak council estates of West Belfast and North Dublin. Every now and then, but not so often that the PSNI – what the RUC called itself these days – or the Garda would get too troubled, some poor spotty teenager would end up with tubes coming out of his mouth and wires attached to his chest while his mum and dad sat by his bedside, mouthing half-forgotten Hail Marys. And then the heart monitor would stop beeping and zigzagging and depict a straight, steady flat line.
The two men were in the crew quarters for fifteen, twenty minutes, the only sounds the slap of the waves against the Typhoon. The shadow from its conning tower cast An Dóchais in the shade, chilling the crew. Then the fiery-eyed man and the bald man re-emerged and went aft, going down the engine room hatch.
Long minutes passed. Then they resurfaced and went to the fish hold, forward, and, having examined that in close detail, the sea-anchor hatch.
The short man held the device against both lifeboats and ran it along An Dóchais’s length. He turned to the lead sailor, shook his head, and then all seven men disembarked into the rubber dinghy, which sped back to the Typhoon.
Conor, who had now hurried back to the wheel, put the engine full ahead, swinging An Dóchais as far away from the submarine as possible. He had correctly predicted what was going to happen next. The great monster started sinking with unbelievable speed, the conning tower creating a shunt of water ahead of it, until – shunt and all – it vanished, leaving An Dóchais alone in the ocean.
The boarding of the An Dóchais remained an utter mystery to O’Malley, which is why he altered course, sailed directly to Bilbao, sold An Dóchais for a thumping loss and never went to sea again. Conor went on the Internet and spent hours at his laptop, searching, searching, searching, until finally he found something that was the spitting image of the thing in the fiery man’s hand: a thermal-imaging device. That meant, Conor concluded, that the submariners were looking for somebody. He worked out that it was the traitor Joe Tiplady, the bomb-maker who had betrayed an IRA spectacular. He told some friends in the pub, and that very night a man in a black balaclava stopped him on his walk home, pulled him into a side alley and placed a pistol in his mouth and said, ‘Seamus says, keep your tongue still.’ And then he walked off.
But Conor’s puzzlement was as nothing compared to the stupefaction of Anatoly Reikhman. His woman, the Irishman and the dog had fallen off the known world and if he didn’t find them soon then Grozhov would have him killed. Of that he had no doubt.
ROSTOV
Gennady bought a coffee and a shot of vodka, tucked himself behind a pillar in the café, with a clear view of the door to his left and the TV screen above the bar to the right. They were showing the usual guff on the screen, a montage of shots proving the Ukrainians to be fascists, back in 1941 and today, when the pictures changed. A great burning: bodies, plane seats, luggage, lim
bs, aircraft engines, all scattered across a cornfield.
That would be the work of the BUK rocket launcher he’d seen earlier. The idiots had been aching to bring down a big Ukrainian transport plane. But they’d killed a bunch of tourists instead, kids too. For some time, he held his head in his hands.
It was with an enormous act of will that Gennady put the horrors on-screen to one side. The dead in the cornfield, there was nothing he could do about them, nothing at all.
He pressed the flash drive into the port of his computer and hit play. The very first images were the worst, but once seen they were ineradicable. His only daughter, his flesh and blood, lying on the floor of a lift, her killer’s thumbs on her throat. The killer turned to camera, a short, strikingly handsome man in his late thirties – athletic, clean-shaven, short dark hair, something in his face deranged, unhuman.
A blur of movement, a chase down a few flights of stairs, gunfire, sounding cheap and tinny and not so loud through the speakers of Gennady’s laptop, then a long-distance shot of Iryna being dumped into the back seat of a Mercedes SUV and then – oh bless you, Max, bless you – a zoom-in on the number plate. The crime, the face of the killer and his vehicle, all caught in one video clip.
Gennady reached for the shot of vodka, ice-cold from the freezer, and drank it in one. He still didn’t know the killer’s name. He called Oblamov, pinged him a cropped image of the man strangling his daughter, and waited.
The useless traffic policeman phoned back in nineteen minutes exactly, with a name: Reikhman, Anatoly, a hotshot tax inspector from Moscow. Someone at Rostov police station had recognised him from a photograph of him getting some fancy award: it had been all over the news. The general opened up his computer, typed Anatoly Reikhman into a search engine and up he popped, receiving the ‘Best Investigator for the All-Russia Tax Inspectorate’ award from the President himself. The useless traffic cop wasn’t so useless after all.
Gennady typed up his report: terse, no rhetoric, plainly written. He described the phone call in the middle of the night telling him of the death of his daughter, how information he’d received led him to the state cemetery in Rostov where a gravestone marked Iryna’s grave. In it, the body that was disinterred was not that of his daughter but a woman who had been poisoned by nerve gas: Maria Kudasheva, aged eighty-three.
He attached the report by Rostov’s eminent pathologist, Dr Venny Svaerkova, on Kudasheva’s death. It would appear that after Kudasheva had been killed by the nerve agent, Gennady’s daughter Iryna Dozhd, an operative for the Tax Inspectorate and a material witness to the first death, was killed by strangulation.
The killer was Anatoly Reikhman, clearly to be seen in the following video, also attached. Reikhman was a serving tax inspector and had received an award for ‘Best Investigator’ from the President himself, photograph also attached. Reikhman was driving a black Mercedes SUV, car registration number ending EK61, the vehicle owned by the Rostov Tax Inspectorate. The general tapped out his full name and former rank, printed the document, signed it, read it over slowly, and then phoned Venny.
‘You sure you’re happy that I stick your name and your report in this thing?’
‘Happy? No.’
‘So should I take it out?’
‘Is there anything wrong in my report?’
‘You wrote it.’
‘It’s a rhetorical question. Of course there is nothing wrong. I wrote it.’
‘So?’
‘Go ahead. I will come to you in an hour.’
‘Venny, thank you. I am an old fool but I think I am falling in love with you.’
‘Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers – you will be the death of me.’ And she cut the call.
He emailed the report and attachments three times: to the only good newspaper left in the whole of Russia, to the Moscow office of a great international broadcaster and, via a new email identity, to himself.
It was late when he filed it, and that was, it turned out, a cardinal error. The office of the only good newspaper was closed and the file would only be inspected in the morning, but the good officers of the state security service, they never slept. They hacked into the file, speed-read its contents, hit alarm bells, removed the file, sent a series of corrupted files similar in name but not in content to the same address in order to cover their deceit, and made an urgent phone call to colleagues in Rostov.
The leading correspondent of the great international news organisation was keen to attend Zoba’s talking shop, an annual event where the great man pressed the flesh of the world’s media. He pretended to listen; they pretended to ask questions. She scanned the report’s first sentences, knew that it would engender the ill-will of those in power, yawned, then sent it to her computer’s recycle bin.
Venny arrived at Gennady’s hotel, as she said she would, one hour later. The thought of seeing Genya excited her. He was a force of nature, bold, unscared – and that was something very unusual in Russia these days. But there was also an essential goodness about the man that shone through. The disgraced pathologist smiled at her own folly and remembered a joke that she and her friends would say at school if they had a pash for a boy: ‘If I had a pencil case, I would write his name on it.’
Venny had just pulled up outside the hotel when she saw three police cars, two black SUVs and an ambulance screech to a halt at its front entrance. Police officers in uniform, men in black suits and sunglasses – they would be FSB – and two men in white coats who, to Venny, distinctly did not look a byword for medical excellence, emerged from their vehicles and climbed up the faux-marble steps.
She undid her seatbelt, switched off the engine but didn’t open the door. Better wait and see. They worked quickly. Within two minutes, she saw two spooks and the medics emerge from the hotel, at their centre Gennady’s stocky figure, his arms locked high behind his back, half crawling, half running. The medics and spooks led Gennady towards the back of the ambulance. One of the medics ran forwards and opened the rear doors, and at that moment Gennady renewed his efforts against his captors, kicking out at them, using his legs to bounce off the vehicle.
Venny got out of her car and ran to the side of a burger van, where she had a line-of-sight view but was concealed by the other customers, who stopped munching to gawp at the spectacle of the reluctant patient.
A third spook – bald, thickset, with arms like barge hawsers – ran over to the melee and produced a heavy rubber cosh and thwacked it against the base of Gennady’s skull, twice. He fell limp and was laid down on the stretcher, belly down. Through the still-open doors of the ambulance Venny saw one of the medics prepare a syringe, roll back one of Gennady’s shirtsleeves and jab it into his arm. Then the doors were closed.
The convoy fired up its sirens and zoomed off into the traffic, causing a bus driver to stand on his brakes and slew his bus half across the road to avoid an accident. Venny watched the convoy hightail it for some moments before she started slowly walking back towards her car.
As the reality of what she had just witnessed dawned on her, she hurried up, dropped her car keys in anxiety, stooped down, picked them up, scrambled into the car and gunned it so hard its tyres screeched on the asphalt as she sped off in hot pursuit. The convoy had left so fast that there was no trace of it, and she zipped through the streets of Rostov, fearing that she would never find it again.
But luck, of a kind, was with her. An ancient tractor pulling a trailer full of slurry had stalled halfway across a narrow railway crossing, causing a tailback in both directions. The goons from the convoy were out of their vehicles, roaring at the driver in the tractor cab – an old, grim-faced man – to get a move on. He ignored them, got out of his cab, tinkered with the tractor’s innards until he seemed satisfied, then clambered back into the cab, taking his time, every step laborious and slow, as Venny’s car joined the back of the queue. She could have kissed the tractor driver for his truculence, a superb performance of contempt for authority without giving them any specific reason to
trouble him.
The tractor chugged off the crossing and the traffic got moving again, but Venny’s tail-job was much easier now she had sight of them. Within fifteen minutes the convoy turned off towards the airport, swept past the main passenger terminal and headed to an area where a private jet was parked. The convoy crawled to a stop while a security man opened a wire gate. Venny parked two hundred yards short of the fence, not wanting to bring attention to herself. The convoy was through the gate and headed off towards the jet.
Venny turned off the ignition, struggling to come to terms with what was happening in front of her eyes. Then she snapped into action, her fingers scrabbling in her bag until she found her mobile phone. She fiddled with the buttons, found the camera app and hit record. Squinting at the screen on the phone, she narrowed in the focus, and through that saw the ambulance drawing to a stop by the jet, its doors opening and Gennady, now strapped into a stretcher, carried out and up the stairs into the belly of the jet. Venny switched her attention to the aircraft’s registration number. She’d read somewhere that you could track planes on the Internet. It might be possible to find out where in the biggest country on earth they were taking Gennady. If not, he had no chance. Getting the focus right was fiddly and her concentration was total, when a soft click sounded behind her, a rear door opened and closed, and the suspension of her little car sagged heavily to one side.
‘But why would a pathologist be so interested in filming a jet?’ said a man’s voice. ‘That’s the puzzle.’
The stench of sweat and lavender was overpowering.
COUNTY DONEGAL
