The Paper Factory (Michael Berg Book 1)

by Norrie Sinclair

  He lurched unsteadily to the conveyor, sat on the edge, lay back and swiveled his legs onto its steel surface.

  “Did you kill my sister?” she said evenly.

  She waited. He remained silent.

  Tatianna, the gun trained on Dmitri’s torso, edged backwards to a coiled length of baled wire sitting on top of the loading bay. The wire was about five meters in length, rusted. She moved parallel to Dmitri, took one end of the wire and fed it across the outer rail of the conveyor belt and down through one of the gaps between the slats adjacent to Dmitri’s head. She led the wire back on itself and then, before he knew what was happening, flung the remainder of the coil across Dmitri’s steroid enhanced neck, reached underneath and pulled what remained through on her side. He winced in pain as the joints in his upper arm were stretched to dislocation point in their sockets.

  “What do you think you’re doing? If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make sure you pay for this. And I’ll make sure I take my time. Bitch.”

  She had enough free wire to take one more turn across Dmitri and then under the conveyor. When it was through, she pulled tight, not tight enough to choke him. She twisted the end of the wire through on itself, then over the rail and through the slats for good measure.

  Tatianna went to the trunk of the car, removed a five-gallon jerry can of diesel and carried it across to the machine. The refueling cap was caked with dust and hard to remove. She reached down and picked up a rock, flat, the size of her palm. She pressed it firmly against the nozzle cover, levering it upwards until it sprang off.

  She emptied the diesel into the tank, replaced the cover and searched for the long black cable that ran from the engine and fed into a grey rectangular box, two buttons protruding from its upper side. Having located the cable, Tatianna reached out for the starter button to the left of the revolving drum. The engine spluttered into action on the fifth attempt. She made her way along the side of the conveyor belt, stopping parallel to Dmitri. His head lay at a point below her shoulders.

  When she looked into his eyes, even when she thought about what he had probably done to her beautiful sister, Tatianna did not feel red hot with anger. Her fury and hatred, although emotions that she was ashamed to say she was not always a stranger to, had escalated to another level. Her loathing of this man was controlled, deliberate. Her feelings towards him cold to the degree that she felt numb, strangely distant from him, although only inches apart.

  “Look at me.” His head swiveled until his reddened, swollen eyes met hers. Tatianna took a knife from her pocket, cupped the hilt in her fist and drew the blade across his mouth, separating the tape enough for the man to breath relatively freely and speak, albeit awkwardly.

  “This is the last time. Did you kill Natasha?”

  Dmitri didn’t answer. Tatianna reached for the grey box which lay at her feet and firmly pressed her thumb down on the green button. The idling engine of the wood-chipper kicked into life. Simultaneously, the steel drum whirled round with startling speed as the conveyor lurched into action. His face went sheet white.

  “Stop. Stop. Stop. I’ll tell you. I’LL TELL YOU.”

  Tatianna waited until Dmitri’s feet were about a meter and a half from the spinning teeth before she hit red.

  “The banker. The fat pervert. August Goodfriend. He gave her bad drugs. He hurt her and gave her drugs to kill the pain. He enjoyed it, part of his game. He gave her too many and she overdosed. It was over in seconds. We couldn’t help her.”

  She put the gun to his left temple.

  “You think I’m some kind of cretin, Dmitri? I’m a police sergeant. I know how you people operate. You wouldn’t let a trick give an aspirin to one of your girls without your knowing about it. Besides, why put up with this shit for a lousy banker? You’re not telling me something.” She hit it again. In under three seconds, Dmitri was half a meter away from spending the rest of his life in prosthetics.

  “Don’t. Don’t. STOP.”

  “Dmitri, I’m a policewoman. I don’t kill people unless I have no choice. I only want to find out what happened and why. If it was you, I need you to tell me. You’ll go to jail. Better than ending up as a slushy pile of bird food, no?”

  Dmitri opened his mouth to speak then chose to nod his head.

  “Speak. I need to hear you say it.”

  “I gave the drugs to the banker. Horse tranquilizer. Enough to knock out a stable.”

  “Why?”’

  He held up his right arm, opened his hand and showed her the gap where his finger should have been.

  “Who?” she said.

  “They’ll kill me.”

  Tatianna lifted the box and lowered her thumb.

  “Okay, okay, they were blackmailing the banker. Videos, photographs, usual stuff. But they needed something special, something big. It’s on tape.”

  “Who?” she shouted. “This is the last time I ask.” Part of Tatianna wanted him to say no. Part of her wanted to hear him scream as his body was ripped into a million bloody pieces.

  “I only know the messenger. His name is Konstantin Rykov. Not Moscow. St. Petersburg, somewhere near Ladoga. I don’t know where exactly. He works for someone powerful, who has a lot of money. Rykov’s ex-Spetznaz, not just a killer, a psychopath.” Dmitri gestured with his eyes towards his incomplete hand.

  “Where’s her body?”

  Dmitri said nothing. His blue, puffy eyes stared straight into hers and Tatianna knew immediately that her sister’s body would never be found in one piece.

  But she had a name now. She knew where to look for him, the man who had ordered Natasha to be killed. She would need to take the bastard beside her into the station to be questioned and charged. There was no way he’d confess. His friends would ensure his freedom with a few favors here, a few rubles there. It could be done in forty-eight hours.

  She switched the box to her left hand and drew the gun. If she didn’t stop this here she’d be consigning dozens of other young girls, some who’d probably not even been born yet, to lives of drugged-up misery and, in some cases, death. She took the barrel of the gun and placed it against Dmitri’s temple.

  “You fucking bitch. I hope you and your whore of a sister rot in hell.”

  He closed his eyes. His jaw tensed up, lips pressed together in expectation and fear. Tatianna pulled on the trigger. The barrel shook. She released. She couldn’t do it. Not even to an animal like this. He knew it too. The gun dropped to her side. She placed the box on the ground. Killing him would solve nothing. Another would take his place. She would be scarred forever, become an animal like him. Tatianna trudged towards the car. Defeated. She would drive back into the city and arrange for someone to pick him up. She needed a drink and a long hot shower.

  “She squealed like a pig.”

  Tatianna stood stock still, barely taking in what she’d just heard.

  “She died like a whore. Spineless. No guts, your sister.” Dmitri’s voice was hoarse, but this just added to the menace and hatred with which he said his words.

  “We took her out to the lake, your sister the whore, and carved her up. By the time we’d finished with her, there was barely a piece bigger than a ten ruble note. Probably about the most useful thing she ever did. Feed the fish.”

  She reached him as the venom ceased to pour from his lips. Tears streamed from her eyes.

  “You don’t have the balls to kill me, you bitch. Look at you, sniveling there like some pathetic child. I’m going to come after you, and when I do, you’ll think your slag sister was the lucky one.”

  The tears that flowed freely from her eyes were for her sister, for the way in which she had died. But not only that. She shed tears for herself. For what she was about to become. Tainted forever. For the second time, the blood drained from Dmitri’s face. The box lay in her hand. She raised it, thumb poised in readiness.

  With something to chew on, the drum revolved with less ferocity than before. Not that this would mean much to Dmitri. Even over
the noise of the diesel engine and with hands pressed painfully hard against her ears, the visceral scream still reached her. A high-pitched keening sound, an edge of disbelief. The stomach churning, high octave howling would ring in her ears for a great deal longer than the twenty seconds that it took for Dmitri to be fed into the rotating blades of the machine.

  She got into the car, without looking back. If they found his remains, if they took a DNA sample, almost certainly identifying him as minor league Moscow mafia, her colleagues would merely assume that he had done something to upset his bastard friends.

  Tatianna drove back down the dusty trail and took a left, back onto the main road. The M10 was thirty minutes away, then another nine hours to St. Petersburg. She would make the city before midnight.

  Chapter 66

  Friday morning. Elisabeth shut the door on the townhouse she inhabited in a quiet street off Glover Park. Her cell phone rang. She answered immediately, knew it wasn’t Ralph even before she heard the voice on the other end.

  “They know you’re being blackmailed. Bilderberg will try to have you suspended. They’re going to set you up for insider dealing. Or worse. Today. If you’re suspended or dead, you can’t help your son. Believe me, he needs your help.”

  “How can you possibly know this? This is just part of the sick game that you’re playing. Even if it was true, what the hell could I do about it? I make the decision on Beirsdorf Klein on Monday afternoon. They can’t do anything to get me out before then.”

  “Elisabeth, Elisabeth, you really have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? These people aren’t a bunch of Fortune 500 CEOs trying to ingratiate themselves with has-been politicians. These people have had a major impact on just about every key decision governing world affairs since the Second World War. Ralph still has nine fingers left. You’re not in a position to be making assumptions. Fix it or your son’s worst nightmare is about to begin.”

  Elisabeth lowered herself onto the first of the red brick steps that led to the pavement below. She let the phone roll to the ground. She could have sat there, easily, for the rest of the day. Frozen, helpless, lost. But the only time Elisabeth Kennedy remembered feeling sorry for herself, she was ten years old and her father had berated her so strongly for being selfish and petty minded that it was a habit she had never formed.

  She lifted the phone off the ground, stood, brushed off the back of her skirt, walked back into the house and called an old friend.

  Chapter 67

  The bolt made a dull metallic thud as it was drawn. She assumed it would be the same man as before. It wasn’t. When the door swung open, she recognized the thug who had almost killed her and Michael at Visegrad. Tereza’s gut response was to shrink back onto the bed and curl up. She stopped herself. A show of fear was what a man like this lived for and expected.

  She took in his steel blue, lethally intelligent eyes, flat uneven features and the sheer mass of his shoulders and chest. The piercing eyes seemed completely out of place in such a ludicrous face. His resemblance was as close to a living breathing giant as she believed she would ever see.

  “Follow me.” His mouth moved imperceptibly, his face not at all.

  The giant stood at the door until Tereza was able to stand without clutching onto the bed for support. She’d eaten once in three days and had not been upright since they had taken her off the street in London.

  She followed him from the barren, brightly lit room into an ornately decorated corridor. Expensive-looking wallpaper hung from the walls which were dotted at intervals with lantern candelabras. She glanced to the right. One door stood on the same side of the corridor as her own. From there had come the blood curdling scream that had petrified her the day before.

  She turned to the left and followed him. There had been no windows in her room. There was no natural lighting in the corridor. The reason for this became clear. They passed two doors and ascended a narrow flight of stone covered steps to the corner of a spacious, sunlit vestibule. She’d been kept in the cellar.

  Tereza followed the man across the high-ceilinged hallway, a sweeping staircase descending the rear wall to her left and a formidable looking doorway, presumably leading outside, to her right. Where was outside, she thought. To Tereza, the echo of the heels of her shoes clattering against the mosaic tiling only added to the sensation that she was the headline act in someone else’s nightmare.

  The giant, rather cautiously, pushed on one of the double doors and peered inside the room. A moment later, he flung both doors inwards, with seeming disdain, and stood to the side.

  “Wait in here,” he said. “Security is everywhere. You will not live through any attempt to escape.” As Tereza passed by, he exited the room, pulling both doors noisily shut as he did so.

  The room itself was spacious and grandly decorated, the sweeping bay windows that stood directly facing her drew Tereza’s immediate attention. Without hesitation, she crossed the room and stood marveling at the contrast between the untamed scenery before her and the warm comfortable luxury within which she stood. The water glowed in the embrace of the setting sun, the color of the dying embers of a fire. Islands drifted in an early evening mist.

  She stood stock still, absorbing the peacefulness of the scene, struck by a tranquility and calmness that she hadn’t known for a long time. She had forgotten what it was to feel this way. The splendor of the moment was interrupted. At first she did not know by what. Tereza turned, drew her dark hair behind her ear, and listened.

  Voices were raised in whispered argument. She walked towards the sound of the lowered, yet angry voices, drifting through the wall to her left. No, not a wall. A doorway. Difficult to make out given that it was hung with the same wallpaper as the rest of the room. Not having taken the time earlier to get her bearings, she narrowly avoided walking into a wooden desk, so oversized she was surprised that she hadn’t noticed it before.

  About to resume her journey toward the voices, she hesitated. Something caught her eye. The desk was not cluttered. A silver pen sitting atop a black leather writing pad. A laptop computer, closed, to the left-hand side. An amber handled paper knife positioned parallel to the writing pad.

  The photograph. Enclosed within a plain, silver Tiffany frame. The same frame that had held it for more than twenty-five years, perched on a handmade cedar wood coffee table in a corner of her parents’ bedroom. Her father stood in the background, one hand on her brother’s shoulder, the other poised on her mother’s upper arm. Her mother, face slightly upturned, smiling, sat on a plain wooden chair holding a four-year-old Tereza in her arms.

  Her heartbeat and her breathing quickened. The blood drained from her face as shivers ran along her arms and down her back. She could not move as her mind forlornly scrabbled to undertake the task of making sense of what her intuition was screaming at her.

  The hidden door, not two meters from where she stood, was thrust open and for the first time in more than thirty years Tereza Vass came face to face with her brother.

  Chapter 68

  Elisabeth only once before had occasion to visit Nine Six Five Pennsylvania Avenue. Three years previously, the Federal Reserve had been assisting the FBI with a multi-jurisdictional investor fraud. On this occasion, as soon as Elisabeth had passed through security, she was escorted, not to the fourth, but to the tenth floor.

  She sat in a spacious, but sparse, inwardly facing corner office in front of the desk of Grant Edward Douglas, for five years now the bureau’s notoriously shy, yet pragmatic, director.

  The door clicked open behind her. Elisabeth placed her coffee onto the coaster on the desk. She stood and turned to appraise her old friend.

  “Elisabeth, Elisabeth, it’s so good to see you. As usual, it’s been far too long.” Grant took two steps forward on the plain blue carpet, took her arm and kissed her once on the cheek, a smile beaming from a broad mouth set in a rounded face dappled with red blotches. Elisabeth smiled warmly to herself, fondly remembering Grant’s instantaneous r
eaction to exchanging even a peck on the cheek with a woman.

  Without giving her an opportunity to answer, he guided her back to the chair.

  “Sit, sit, please make yourself comfortable. I was delighted to hear of your recent promotion. America’s money couldn’t be in safer hands. Now tell me, your call this morning sounded urgent. What can I do?”

  Grant and Elisabeth had been at Georgetown together. They’d been firm friends, although in different faculties, she in finance and he in law. Although many friendships struck in the surreal world of university life fade quickly soon after graduation, Elisabeth and Grant had stayed in touch and met at least once every year or so to catch up on each other’s lives and to reminisce over a shared history.

  Elisabeth tried to respond. Before she could emit a sound, she could feel her teeth grind down on each other and her lips clamp shut. She had never experienced such a sensation before and realized that she couldn’t utter a word because she had no idea what to say. She’d held everything in for so long. No one to talk to, no one to turn to. This was her only chance to fix the mess she was in. Elisabeth suddenly felt herself opening up, her jaw unclenched.

  “Grant,” her voice was shaking, she couldn’t control it, “I’m in terrible trouble. I … I just don’t know what to do.” Tears rolled down her cheeks as she bowed her head forward and cupped it in her hands.

  The sound of sobbing seemed to be coming from someone else, but when she recognized it as her own, it struck her that she no longer cared. Grant, without saying a word, came around the side of his desk and pulled the second chair close to her own. He put his hand over her shoulder and waited for whatever pain she was feeling to drain away.