The heating system was set up to ensure the apartments on the lower floors remained at a constant twenty Celsius. The system had only one setting which meant that the occupants of the fifteenth floor, heat escaping upwards through thin and badly insulated flooring, had to suffer upwards of thirty degrees temperatures throughout the winter season. Her friend Iryna Aleksandrovna’s father kept a tank of tropical fish in their apartment on fourteen. He’d never needed to buy a special heater for the tank.
She walked through the open doorway into her sister’s bedroom. The single bed was empty, covers undisturbed. It had been almost a week. Something had happened to her little sister in the Banya. Something that some sick, evil bastard had done to her. Despite Tatianna’s job, she knew she couldn’t go to her colleagues. The Banya was protected. An investigation would go nowhere. Tatianna would lose her job. Or her life.
---
Tatianna sat patiently in the aging Nissan. She had parked directly across from the alleyway that ran down behind the brothel where her sister worked. From here, she could see anyone walking or driving out of the gated rear entrance to the building’s courtyard. It was now seven a.m. In Natasha’s line of work, this was clocking off time. From this location, Tatianna could also keep an eye on the front door, although she had her money on the rear.
Tatianna had only met him once. Dmitri. She and Natasha were walking along Ryazanskiy Prospekt when they’d bumped into him on the street. He was a large man, overly well built, mid-thirties, shaven head. He was dressed head to toe in black and stopped to talk to her sister for a few moments. Natasha didn’t introduce him and he didn’t introduce himself. It took Tatianna a week of nagging and needling to get Natasha to admit that he was the man who ran the Banya.
Two hours passed. Just after seven, ten minutes separating them, two men came out through the front door. Customers, given their smart dress, saggy middle-aged appearance and uncomfortable demeanor.
At around seven forty, the girls appeared in clusters of twos and threes. Despite having hastily reapplied makeup and sorted their hair, they looked tired and grim-faced. Most trudged towards Kuz’minki metro station. Some were picked up outside by a boyfriend or husband in a car. Two heavily built men that she took to be security, whose job it was to keep the punters in line, left one after the other. Neither was the man she was looking for.
An hour passed. No sign of Dmitri. He’s not here. She turned the key in the ignition. Before the engine caught, the driver’s door was yanked open. A moonlike face, glaring blue eyes and bull thick neck were thrust through the open doorway. The man’s left hand, now resting on the top of the door, had a stump where the middle finger should have been. Although covered, she could see from the dirty brown staining that the wound was recent.
“What do you want, bitch?”
Tatianna, initially shocked and cursing herself for her stupidity, regained her composure.
“I’m Natasha’s sister. I haven’t seen her for almost a week. Where is she?”
“How the hell should I know? What the fuck do you think you’re doing out here, anyway, bitch? A filthy spy? Get out now.”
Dmitri grabbed a handful of her hair in his right hand and started to pull her out of the car. Tatianna could feel the hair giving way at the roots. Tatianna frantically scrabbled in her handbag, desperate to find something to defend herself with. Her hand clutched a cylindrical canister. Jesus I hope this isn’t moisturizing cream. Moments later she was emptying the contents of the pepper spray canister into Dmitri’s eyes. He cried out and released her hair, both hands drawn to his face, desperately clawing at his eyes. He fell to the ground on his knees, completely disorientated by the shock of the attack and his sudden inability to see or breathe.
Tatianna grabbed the cuffs from her pocket, jumped from the car and cuffed Dmitri’s left hand. It covered his face, but she dragged and twisted it behind his back and pulled the wrist upwards, immediately causing significant pain to his shoulder as the upper arm threatened to dislocate from its socket. Dmitri howled in pain, and as he did so she did the same with the right. She opened the rear door of the Nissan, levered herself into the car backwards and yanked on the cuffs.
Unable to speak, Dmitri emitted a stream of unrecognizable grunts as she dragged him across the rear of the car. She kicked the near side door open so that she could clamber out onto the pavement.
She heard voices behind her and turned to see a small crowd of about five people had gathered to watch the show. Tatianna reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out her badge.
“Police arrest, get lost.” The sight of the badge was enough to send the onlookers scurrying away.
She leant into the back of the car, Dmitri’s eyes still closed, continuously coughing as the capsaicin compound took full effect. She rolled him unceremoniously into the rear footwell, rendering him completely immobile. Despite her own level of fitness and physical strength, which was far beyond most women of her age, Tatianna had used every ounce of energy she had to get the oversized thug into the car. She closed the rear doors, collapsed into the driver’s seat and recovered herself. Tatianna opened and reached into the car’s glove compartment and pulled out her police issue MP-443 Grach pistol, leant her right arm between the front seats and shoved the ugly but deadly pistol bluntly into the middle of Dmitri’s back.
“Your life means nothing to me, you piece of scum. I would sooner pull this trigger than have to wipe dog shit from my shoe. You move, you utter one word, I’ll put a bullet through your knee.” She placed the gun back in the glove compartment, started the engine, and headed for the ring road.
The effects of the pepper spray would wear off in about thirty, maybe forty minutes. Tatianna was under no illusion. It would be almost impossible to get a mafia meat-head like Dmitri to talk under normal circumstances. But these were not normal circumstances. Tatianna had a plan.
Chapter 63
Michael’s euphoria didn’t last for long. Despite his entreaties, the pretty young woman behind the counter politely, but firmly, told him that a visa would be issued by the Russian Consulate within two working days if he presented the correct paperwork the following morning. He had no choice. He booked a room in the modern, if uninspiring looking, three-star Troika Hotel on Aleksander Platz, close to St. Petersburg railway station.
He had no idea how he would fill his time over the next two days. He thought of Tereza. What could happen to a captive human being in forty-eight hours? Had Rivello taken her to the lake? Was she still alive? If so, what had they done to her? Images threatened to push themselves into his consciousness. He blocked them out. Michael wasn’t used to feeling concern for someone other than himself. It hurt.
---
Tereza’s heart thumped against her ribs from whatever nightmare she’d just been living through. Unable to move. She may as well have been blind. Her breathing became shallow. She gasped for breath. Panic. She couldn’t control it. Tereza tried to rationalize her situation. Rivello was keeping her alive for a reason. He could have killed her by now if he’d wanted to. He could have done so a long time ago. He was trying to disorientate her. It was working.
The bolt scraped heavily across the other side of the wooden door. Light flooded the room. Her eyes snapped shut on reflex. Light pierced her eyelids. Reflexively, she tried to lift her hands to cover her light-blinded eyes. The cords bound them tightly. Someone approached, footsteps padding across the room toward her.
“Keep your mouth shut and you won’t be hurt. Not a sound. I’ll free your hands. Move and I’ll hit you. Hard. Understand?”
Tereza nodded. The man spoke reasonable English, with a strong Russian accent. Was she in Russia? If so, where? Moscow, St. Petersburg, farther east? He loosened the straps. He stepped back. She bit into her lower lip as the blood rushed back into her fingers. Agonizing.
“Who are you? You work for Rivello?” she said, not expecting an answer. He made his way towards the door.
The door shut behi
nd him. The bolt slid home on the other side of the door.
Chapter 64
Michael struggled to contain his frustration. The short, squat, rotund man resembled the perfect bureaucrat. Mr. Protopopov had clearly already seen the better side of sixty. He was perfectly dressed in a grey woolen suit, pressed tie, brown, heavily starched white shirt and well-polished brown shoes. His mannerisms and gestures were pedantic and precise. His thumb and index finger reached for the leg of the little round glasses that perfectly framed his fleshy, porcine features, each time he said something he thought might annoy, disappoint or irritate Michael.
“And as I previously explained, Mr. Berg, under Russian banking law, it’s impossible to pay out a sum of money this large that’s been transferred in the last twenty-four hours. Please, fill in this paperwork and bring it back tomorrow morning. I will see what I can do.”
Mr. Protopopov slid a pile of paper across the table towards Michael. His hand began rising to his optical comfort blanket as he noticed Michael’s jaw tighten and eyes narrow.
“Listen, Protopopov, it’s my money. I had it wired to your bank yesterday afternoon. You yourself confirmed that the funds have arrived. I don’t have twenty-four hours. I need to leave St. Petersburg now. I won’t be back. My money is in your bank. I want it. Now. What are you going to do about it?”
He looked Protopopov in the eye, lifted his right hand into his jacket pocket and withdrew it, this time holding a thick pile of notes. He peeled off two thousand euros, placed the twenty hundred-euro notes on top of Protopopov’s paperwork and slid the pile back across the table in front of the inscrutable Russian.
“It looks like the paperwork just took care of itself,” said Michael.
His stone-faced glare forced Protopopov to lower his eyes.
Despite his concern that he may have done something either insulting and almost certainly broken the law, Michael relaxed when Protopopov picked up the cash. He licked his finger and flipped through the notes.
“Indeed it does, Mr. Berg. What euro denominations would you like?”
Ten minutes later, Michael was outside the bank. He had to find Rivello. The lake was over two hundred kilometers long. Rivello might not even live by the shore itself. There were six hundred fifty islands on Ladoga. Despondency weighed him down as, for the first time, he calculated the overwhelming odds of finding Tereza alive.
He had to assume that the house would be no more than two hours from the airport, probably closer. Rivello was unlikely to live in a two-bedroom duplex. He would be operating out of a large detached house or estate, isolated, most probably on the shore of the lake itself.
He walked past the antique splendor of the Kempinski on Moyki Street. Michael stopped, made an about turn and walked through the doors into the hotel’s reception area. Natural light shimmered through the frosted glass of the atrium.
He paid the rack rate on a junior suite which was financially ruinous, but included an all-important keyboard that plugged into the digital television screen on the wall. He covered five nights in advance. He hoped to find her long before check-out.
Within two hours, he’d tracked down thirteen real estate agents who claimed to handle exclusive properties in St. Petersburg and the surrounding area. He lifted the phone and started dialing.
After the first eight calls, he was ready to give in to his frustration and grab an early lunch. Two of the companies had gone out of business and when he called three others the staff didn’t speak English, the receptionists slamming the phone down unceremoniously as soon as they heard his voice.
The three companies he did get through to only covered the St. Petersburg area and knew nothing of properties near Ladoga.
He was about to call it a day, or at least a morning, when the second to the last company on the list caught his eye.
Premier Estates
He dialed the number.
“Premier Estates, good morning.”
Whoever it was spoke excellent English. Only the hint of an accent was traceable.
“Good morning, my name’s John Anderson. Do you handle properties for sale or rent outside St. Petersburg? Lake Ladoga.”
“Yes, of course Mr. Anderson, what is it exactly that you’re looking for?”
“Anything close to or bordering the lake. Not a house. Larger. I like a lot of space to move around in. Impressive but not overly ostentatious. Not something that attracts attention.”
“Unfortunately properties like that don’t come onto the market very often. If they do sell, it’s most often done privately. The lake is a national park and a protected area. Few of the type of houses you describe were ever built.”
“I’ll be here for five days. At the Kempinski. Can I see them?”
“Mr. Anderson, as I say, I’m not aware that any of these properties is for sale.”
“Your name …?” said Michael.
“Tyutchev, Kateryna Tyutchev.”
“Kateryna, just because something isn’t for sale doesn’t mean that it can’t be bought. If I see what I’m looking for, money won’t be a problem.”
There was no answer. Michael assumed that she was calculating two percent of a few million euros.
“Okay, Mr. Anderson, but this will take a lot of my colleague’s time and the effort may be entirely wasted. Our fee for handling the project will be two and a half percent. It will take approximately one and a half days to show you appropriate properties. We will handle any negotiations with a potential seller. If that’s satisfactory, I’ll have someone meet you at the hotel at two p.m. You’ll be back by nine. You begin again early tomorrow morning.”
Michael was sure Kateryna would also charge the seller a fee, but for all he cared she could be charging him a thousand percent.
“Deal, Kateryna, but you drive. I need someone with good English and I have a feeling that you know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, Mr. Anderson, you have a deal. I’ll be there at two. In the lobby.”
“Good-bye.” Michael replaced the handset.
It was eleven thirty. He felt pleased to be getting somewhere. Having time to kill, he decided to go for a walk, grab an early lunch in one of the small bistros on the square.
Chapter 65
The scent of pine surrounded her, momentarily transporting her back to another time. She hadn’t been here since she was a young girl, but flashbacks of her childhood stole back into her consciousness from deep, forgotten places within. The entrance to the lumberyard had been left to rot. The giant steel gates that used to tower over her as a child had disappeared, probably pilfered for scrap many years before. The dusty track that wove its way through the Scots Pines was covered with tufts of weed and grass. She doubted if anyone had been along this track since the yard had closed, with the possible exception of the occasional hunter. It suited her purpose perfectly.
Five minutes after passing through the heavy wooden posts from where the gates had once hung, she could make out the first of the outbuildings, through the edge of the dense forest. As the car rounded the corner, she could see the timber yard ahead of her. The roof, twenty meters from the ground, had half collapsed in on itself, rotten wooden beams haphazardly splayed across the yard floor.
The place must have closed down at least three years before, maybe more. Her father brought her here in the summer, with Natasha, when the schools closed. They would run around the forest, build dens with off-cuts of wood lying discarded in the wastage pile and generally amuse themselves in the warm summer sun while their father worked the machines with the other men.
Sergey Sergeyevich Barshai had been one of the best in the business. Until a bad fall, the result of a faulty harness, had crippled one of his legs. Given her father’s excellent coordination and skill with a chainsaw, the mill foreman had put him on the band saw. But the injury and the fact that he couldn’t do what he loved anymore induced depression. He turned to alcohol and beating his wife to placate his frustrations with life. One early afternoon
, he had been sleeping off his usual lunchtime half liter of cheap vodka when twenty tons of log fell from a loading bay. He was crushed to death. Not before exhaling most of his gut.
A tear dropped from the tip of her nose. She rubbed her eyes with her sleeve and wondered whether the reminiscence had been deliberate, helping to emotionally prepare her for the task ahead. She decided that she didn’t care either way. The only thing that mattered to her now was finding her sister’s killer. She needed to find out what had happened. The worst part was not knowing, grisly scenarios churning incessantly though her mind.
Tatianna drove to the back of the main building where off-cuts were shoveled from the warehouse into two large bins. They were then tipped onto a gently sloping conveyor belt that fed an industrial wood chipping machine. The pieces were chewed into nothing significantly bigger than sawdust at approximately twelve hundred revs per minute. The one-time familiar tang of fresh pine resin that would have once assailed her within a ten-meter radius of the machine, long gone.
It had been tough dragging him from the car with one hand, the other holding the gun. She’d had to drag him across the dirt, hauling on the chain that joined his wrists.
Dmitri realized that she wanted him on the conveyor belt. Its end ran to the maw of a rust brown, steel drum lined with inch long, serrated metal teeth. He fell over in his rush to try and get away. On the ground, on his back, hands painfully cuffed behind him, brown packing tape covering his mouth, his manic cursing came out as the babblings of a lunatic.
The gun pointed straight between his eyes.
“Get up. Now. I’ll shoot.” Tatianna shifted her aim to his left eye.
He moved only as she pulled the trigger. Luckily for him, by that time she’d swung the barrel two centimeters to the left. It wasn’t enough to save his left ear though. The ear was obliterated in a splash of red and a shower of sand as the 9mm magnum powered into the ground. His grunts turned to squeals of pain accompanied by a look of unbridled fear. Finally it had dawned on Dmitri that this day might indeed be his last.
The Paper Factory (Michael Berg Book 1) Page 16
