Ravil arrived back into the criminal underworld in time to prove himself in a bloody war with the Chechen Mafia, who were challenging the Bratva’s dominance. Ravil, who had never killed anyone before, killed three of six Chechens in a shoot-out at the Kazakhstan cinema. The battle also saw four of his Bratva brothers die. Ravil escaped, carrying one of his compatriots on his back while shooting at the remaining Chechens—and his legend had been secured.
Sergei, reasoning Ravil had a fluent grasp of German, English and Spanish, sent him to Western Europe. He would take advantage of any opportunities that would present themselves in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Ravil agreed, although he also thought it was a play by his mentor to get him out of Moscow, where he might have challenged Sergei’s leadership.
Yelchin’s contemporaries liked to think of themselves as businessmen for whom crime was a necessary endeavour; that it was no different to what corporate types did anyway. Ravil didn’t lie to himself though—he was an out and out criminal and liked it.
Though, he didn’t accuse himself of having a complete lack of morality. There was always going to be crime—it was human nature—but a ‘good’ crime lord could do more to uphold order than a ‘bad’ Police Chief Superintendent. The chaos in Russia during the nineties had convinced him of this. He’d seen more than his share of ‘bad’ policemen, bankers, and politicians to know criminality came in all forms.
At least he didn’t deny what he was. Ravil knew he wasn’t destined for sainthood. He liked amassing power and wealth for himself and the people he cared about. Drugs, prostitution, robbery and extortion were in existence before he came and would be long afterwards. There were things one needed to be capable of, certain levels of brutality that had to be reached to keep order. It was part of the business.
Yelchin saw Britain in the words of Al Pacino’s Scarface, ‘as a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked.’ Britain was full of corruption at the highest levels, and the media influenced the opinion of the masses. He marvelled at how the powers that be within the country could distract its population. His theory was a that long-term perspective was always the mark of a great man. The dregs of any society only ever made decisions that affected them in the short term—‘What will I eat tonight?’ ‘Where will I go this weekend?’ ‘Where shall I spend this year’s holiday?’—That was about as far as they went. The great men set seeds in the present that wouldn’t bear fruit for years, decades and sometimes not even in their own lifetimes.
Ravil had dreamt of this sort of power for just over two decades. It had taken him that long to climb the rungs of the ladder. Unlike his contemporaries, whose impatience had cost them their lives, wealth and liberty; he’d set the fountains for his own success long ago.
The UK wasn’t like Russia, where the underclass had to be suppressed through poverty and an oppressive regime. The people who controlled Britain were much subtler. They did it by pacifying the public into a comfort zone of consumerism and reality TV from which the populous didn’t want to escape. This kept them from rising to their dangerous potentials. Like a woman in denial regarding her cheating spouse, the British were in denial about the golden cages they were in. Potential widespread social anger from issues like tax evasion, homelessness, bankers’ bonuses, and judicial corruption were suppressed with sensationalism, entertainment gossip and free internet porn.
A black man gets shot by police, the underbelly riot, shoplift and vandalise. The media whips it up for weeks and all the while the people are blind to the real picture, but Ravil knew. He knew that if the Government wanted every man and woman to be a master of his own destiny, they would teach financial astuteness lessons in school. Their news would have highlighted the success stories of working class men and women who had rose to prominence within their local communities, but they hardly ever did.
No ruling system wants its underlings getting above their station—a country needs its ‘worker bees’ and consumers for the multinational corporations to survive. He saw a nation transfixed with tabloid news that had no direct effect on them, keeping them amused enough to work jobs that were unfulfilling to buy things they didn’t need.
Ravil continued his walk through the busy and impersonal city that was London, deep in thought. He’d been enthralled as a boy reading about the swashbuckling, vast British Empire that had ruled half the planet. He always enjoyed coming to Trafalgar Square with the history behind it. He’d avidly read about the Napoleonic Wars. While some felt Nelson reckless to the point of arrogance to be dressed in his full Admiralty regalia on the ship’s deck at the time of his death, Ravil knew why he had. To inspire one’s men in crucial battles was vital. Nelson had died during the battle of Trafalgar having already implemented his unorthodox campaign tactics. It was left up to his second in command Vice Admiral Collingwood to ensure the battle was won. Now every true Englishman knew who Horatio Nelson was, even centuries on.
He stood before Nelson’s column considering his own tactics. He would make no apologies for taking advantage of what the once great nation had become.
Connor and Grace lay naked on her Persian rug in front of the fireplace. She smirked as she felt his cum sliding down her thighs, realising that she should probably now get her rug cleaned.
He had never been straight laced with her, not even in the beginning. He seemed to instinctively know she wasn’t either. That surprised her; usually, men were very vanilla in the beginning, as not to be seen as depraved or weird. It was different with him. He seemed to sense she’d like it—or maybe he didn’t care. There were a few minutes of silence.
“What did she have done?” Connor asked.
“Who?”
“The woman you were tattooing?”
Grace sighed. “A butterfly on her lower back, I couldn’t talk this one out of it. She says it’s a memorial to her deceased sister who loved butterflies. I didn’t think bringing up the term ‘tramp stamp’ was appropriate.”
“I wonder how many butterflies have a picture of a fat, unemployed woman above their arse,” he said.
“Oi. She’s the head anaesthetist at work, and she’s not fat.”
“OK…we’ll say she’s extra medium. I’ll wind my neck in.”
Grace shook her head at him keeping her face straight. Shirley was a bit overweight, despite being on a new fad diet every week.
“When are you going to let me tattoo you?” she asked, stroking her fingertips over the Superman tattoo on his chest. She liked the scratchy feeling of the hair on it.
“When a design jumps out at me. Besides, I’d be frightened of you etching your name into me as a deterrent to the rest of the harem.”
She gave a derisive snort. “You’d need a harem to compare to me.”
He smiled. “Any chance of a cup of tea since that was the main reason I am here?”
“Since you performed adequately, I’ll stretch to it.”
Connor watched Grace walk to the kitchen donning her shirt on the way. Connor did have tattoos: a Superman logo on his right pectoral and a half-sleeve that covered his left shoulder and upper arm.
In the Royal Marines, a lot of the lads got particular tattoos referred to as ‘Pusser’s stamps’. Connor never fancied having either of them as he thought them to be the height of unoriginality until one of his oppos pointed out that only Royal Marines could have this type done.
Still, considering the line of work he was embarking on, he was glad he never had.
12
Carl Wright rode the Eurostar from Paris to London as the hum and his thoughts washed through him.
The general concept of what he was being asked to do wasn’t much different to what he did for a living anyway, he mused. Nevertheless, he did not want to have anything to do with the kidnap and the probable murder of one of the most dangerous men on the British Isles. He felt frustrated being put in this position, then frustrated at being frustrated—I can’t make a living from killing people and expect a life of sunshine and roses.
He looked at the young Asian woman sat adjacent to him. She was wearing a veil that covered her head and neck—a hijab—which framed her pretty face. She caught him looking and gave him a shy smile which he returned. She looked out of the window. Carl thought back to what made him join the military in the first instance.
His father Finn had regularly taken him to see the Detroit Lions Football team ever since he could remember. Finn’s affection for the Lions and the famous Barry Sanders had rubbed off, and he enjoyed going to the games with him even deep into his teenage years. Carl remembered the last game that he saw in 1999 for two reasons. One, the Lions losing effort to the Washington Redskins would be the last time the Lions made the playoffs.
The second was his father’s murder in a mugging two days later outside a local bar. The suspects were caught and were found to be a part of the Lebanese gang culture that had begun to grow in Dearborn. This lit the touch paper that led him to enlist in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He could not have envisioned, as a young recruit, the position in which he now found himself in.
Back then he’d been exhausted, hungry and deprived of sleep. But he’d been fulfilled then. Every day passed was one step closer to becoming someone more than he was.
Now he felt very different.
“Makar, come, how are you brother?” said Ravil standing to greet Makar with a handshake.
“Very well, sir,” answered Makar, returning it. This was their custom: Ravil would forgo any address to his hierarchal superiority, whereas Makar would make a point of it. Makar would use the word ‘Pahkan’ when assured of their privacy. Here they spoke English with the dialects removed. Makar’s English was flawless and Ravil, although his English was superb, had been finding contractions like he’d, I’d, I’ve difficult. It’s what had prevented him sounding like a native.
They sat down together at a small table in the outdoor section of one of Kensington’s most private clubs. Tall trees danced in between the canopy lighting, bathing the area in a simmering orange. The leather seating wrapped the occupant in comfort, overlooking the centrepiece of the small pool and Jacuzzi.
Striking, statuesque women, dressed so demurely upon entrance in cocktail dresses, now frolicked in the pool with just their underwear on. Suited gentlemen with jackets removed and ties relaxed looked on.
Ravil wore a light blue shirt enclosed by a grey patterned waist coat with the dark blue tie relaxed. Makar wore a darker blue shirt with white patterned flecks throughout. His dark grey trousers held up by brown slacks. The ensemble shouldn’t have worked, thought Ravil, but it did. He’d noticed a few of the women glancing at his masculine countryman.
“Cheers,” said Ravil, holding up one of the whiskey snakebites he’d ordered for them both. They’d been made with an imported Canadian Club 100% Rye. Makar clinked glasses with him.
“So, what do you think?” asked Ravil, referring to Makar’s meeting with a Pierre Gaultier.
Ravil and Makar always kept conversations of this nature vague and in code when in the open like this. Parabolic listening devices had become ever more sophisticated.
Makar took a sip of the snake bite. “He’s smart and ambitious. He knows he’s not able to dictate terms to us, but he knows his worth.”
“What is his worth?” asked Ravil, wanting to confirm what he already knew.
“He’s perhaps the best businessman of that speciality in Western Europe. With our help, he could become a very formidable ally.”
This concurred with Ravil’s own assessment.
“Your agreement to his proposition was unexpected my friend,” said Ravil, referring to Makar’s calculating nature which often erred on the side of patience.
“This gentleman the Frenchman wants to be removed, if the stories are true, will have had to be dealt with one way or another, considering our goal.”
“To retaliate first so to speak,” said Ravil, remembering he read that somewhere. “I have asked our friend by the river for his thoughts and he has agreed. He has asked you to contact him to work out a plan of action.”
‘Our friend by the river’ was a highly-placed contact for the Russian Bratva known only by Ravil and Makar.
There were a few moments of silence before Makar spoke, “So it’s true?”
“Yes.”
A smile threatened to break out on the ex-KGB agent’s mouth. “I’d heard rumours on the demise of certain highly placed individuals and organisations being down to a mercurial ghost. I could never discover a name.”
The laughter from the pool reached a higher crescendo and Ravil noticed two beautiful dark-haired women in an embrace. He thought them to be attempting to catch his Avtorityet’s eye, who seemed to pay them no heed. A few of the men around the pool were not oblivious to the scene.
“Well our friend knows his name among other details,” said Ravil.
“Is this where I ask the name and you let the tension build with a theatrical air?” Makar said with a smile.
Ravil smiled back, they never said names aloud unnecessarily. He would not have appreciated the jibe from anyone else, but Makar had been instrumental in his success.
Ravil had already been adept and prosperous in criminal enterprise prior to the mid-nineties when he had first met the KGB agent. Back then, Ravil realised his favoured crime from a business standpoint was the extortion of officials. It was preferable not to exhort them of their own money but to persuade them to tap Government funds—typically for projects with the appearance of legitimacy. Ravil preferred to gain this co-operation through uncovering a transgression: an affair, drug addiction, or crime. This way the individual could look upon the blackmail as a form of penance. There was nothing sexy in that sort of criminal enterprise and Ravil did have a certain nostalgia for his ‘rooting tooting gun toting’ days, as the Americans liked to say. However, he surmised the more shoot outs you had the more likely you’d be shot eventually. He already had plenty of those and embezzlement rarely led to gun fights.
Makar had come to see him in the summer of ‘95 regarding fifty-two million roubles that Ravil had extorted from various Moscow officials. After dispatching two of Ravil’s armed henchmen with his bare hands—mercifully leaving them alive—he made Ravil an offer: to pay back part of the money and take Makar on as a consulate of sorts. The alternative was to ‘suffer a fever’. Ravil agreed in principle.
After a few negotiations on specifics, they began a partnership that precipitated a rise within organised crime; the speed of which had rarely been seen.
“I have been provided with a lengthy file,” said Ravil, handing a small memory stick out to Makar. “It’s all in there.”
Makar took it. “Give me the bullet points so to speak.”
“After a troubled youth, he got involved in Judo and made the national team as a teenager.” Ravil looked at Makar. He knew Sambo to be a derivative of it, and once remembered the former KGB agent describing Judo as ‘the best kept secret in martial arts’.
“Go on sir.’’
“Joined Britain’s Parachute Regiment at eighteen after training. His Mother died when he was twenty.”
“How?”
“Suicide.” Makar didn’t say anything and Ravil continued, “Passed what they call ‘selection’ at 23 years of age and joined the SAS. Our man told me that there is a…how do they say… ‘crème de la crème’ unit within the United Kingdom’s Special Forces, and this man entered it. It was from there he was recruited into his current position.”
Makar said, “There’s a unit some term ‘the increment’, made up of experienced special forces soldiers drawn off both the SAS and SBS to carry out highly sensitive operations.”
“You have encountered these men? In your earlier days?” asked Ravil, more of a statement than a question.
Makar gave a non-committal shrug before asking, “Why isn’t he more well-known?”
“Our man says this man has almost complete independence now,”—said Ravil, observed out of the corner of his e
ye the men on the far side of the pool remonstrating with the girls in it. Despite Makar’s angle, he knew his Avtorityet must have noticed it too—“He thinks that we are going to assassinate him. In fact, he is demanding of it.”
“He demands it,” corrected Makar.
“Yes, thank you. He demands it.”
“That’s understandable that he should want that,” said Makar. “How’s your Brazilian Jujitsu training, sir?”
“Very well my friend. The first six months was not pleasant though,” answered Ravil, thinking of how inept he felt during those months. It had been oddly refreshing too; it had been a long time since Ravil had felt anything approaching inferiority.
“It’s a constant learning curve. One I reckoned would appeal to your enquiring mind,” said Makar. It was he who suggested that Ravil would enjoy it.
“Oh it is. There is a phrase drilled into us; “Position before submission”, quite relevant to our current plans,” said Ravil raising his glass.
As Makar raised his glass a loud, English public school boy voice cut through the air.
“To what are you gentlemen toasting?”
There stood a large gentleman, sipping a cocktail while swaying slightly.
“A conclusion of a business arrangement,” answered Ravil.
“Aha, I am a businessman myself, maybe you would like to share with me the nature of it?”
“Maybe we wouldn’t,” answered Makar curtly.
“I do believe I was asking this chap,” said the stranger, with a slight shrill to his voice. Two of his companions appeared on his left close to Makar.
“Gentlemen, without wishing to be rude, my friend and I have a lot to discuss so—” said Ravil before he was interrupted.
—“You said you had concluded your business deal? And now we can’t help you celebrate?” said the man.
Makar stood up abruptly causing the three men to flinch but they remained rooted in place.
The Bootneck Page 10
