Chasing the Storm (11 page)

Marin and Lena were drinking cocktails in the ferry lounge, but Rygg wandered up to the front of the ship and looked down into the froth. A dolphin jumped, then another, sleek as polished silver. He envied their freedom. He looked out at the horizon, where at least half a dozen islands lay like fallen clouds. Is this the calm before the storm? What are we moving into now?

Marin joined him at the prow. “All right,” he said. “Tell me what you discovered.”

Rygg related Ann’s tale as best he could. “I don’t know how useful it is,” he said. “I mean, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to go on. Green eyes, hairy hands, maybe a bit of a foreign language …”

“And a license plate number,” Marin murmured, his voice barely audible over the noise of the motor. He looked down at the waves.

“Fydot … No, it can’t be …” Rygg murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing. I need to make a phone call. Could you arrange that for me?”

In Athens, Marin put Lena up in a grotty hotel behind the Acropolis, then led Rygg through some back alleys to a travel agent’s shop. The window was plastered with peeling airline stickers. A sign on the door read, ‘Closed,’ but Marin knocked anyway. A shabby woman opened it. Marin spoke with her in Russian for a minute, and she nodded and called back to someone. After a while, a tall boy with a messy beard and brownish stains on his shirt shambled forward. He nodded to Marin and beckoned. They followed him up some stairs, to a room crammed with computers. Three were already on.

The boy went out of the room, and Rygg leaned across to Marin. “You know this guy?” he asked. Marin shook his head. “This is one of Sasha’s Internet hacker friends. Sasha says he is a good person.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Rygg said.

The boy came back and fiddled with one of the computers, adjusting a plastic egg on the top. A video chat display came up on the screen, with Marin, Rygg, and the boy crowded into a box on the top left. After a moment, Sasha appeared in the screen. He was drinking orange soda, and the greenish tinge of the screen made him look even more sickly than usual.

Rygg went downstairs to borrow a telephone from the receptionist and made a couple of quick phone calls.

When Rygg came back upstairs, Marin briefly told Sasha what Rygg had discovered, giving him the license plate number and the descriptions of the men. They heard sounds of typing. Marin said something, and the screen switched to what Sasha was looking at. He was scrolling through records in some British database. After a while, he highlighted a number with his cursor. The name beside the number was Paul Northam, of King’s Cross.

“Find him,” Marin said. So Sasha did some more searching, bringing up half a dozen tabs. Finally, he came up with an image: a tall man with a brown mustache and a twisted smile. Police records showed that he’d been arrested for public drunkenness once, five years ago. That was it.

“Bank records,” said Marin. And five minutes and three telephone calls later, Sasha had brought Paul Northam’s bank account up on the screen. It seemed fairly straightforward. Marin shook his head. He turned to Rygg. “Can you think of anything else?” he asked.

“Wait,” Rygg said. “What’s this?” He pointed to a couple places on the screen. Once a month, two hundred pounds were placed in the account. And beside each entry were the letters DLA, in a faint gray typeface.

“Bank code, I suppose,” said Marin, but Rygg had already leaned forward and typed the letters into the search box at the top of the screen. He came up with two million results.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s try …” He typed in “british dla,” and pointed to the fourth entry. “Disabilities Living Allowance,” he said.

A little more searching by Sasha showed that Paul Northam had cerebral palsy. “He can’t drive,” Rygg said, sitting back and putting his hands behind his head. “They used his name because he can’t drive. In order to remain incognito.”

Marin nodded slowly. “And who has done this? We cannot search for green eyes and hairy hands.”

“This is a long shot,” said Rygg, “but …”

“What is it?”

“No, there’s no way. I’m crazy.”

“Crazy ideas sometimes work.”

“Well, I was just thinking … when I was in London, they’d started using the CCTV cameras to catch speeding drivers. There’s a chance. Just a chance … I don’t know if Sasha is able to …”

Marin laughed suddenly. He clapped Rygg on the back, then leaned to the screen and explained to Sasha in rapid Russian what he wanted him to do. Sasha seemed reluctant, but finally agreed. A quarter of an hour later, he was in a database with thumbnail pictures of cars, taken head-on.

“We can’t go through all these,” Sasha said.

“There’s a search box at the top of the page,” Rygg told him. “Type the number there.”

And sure enough, up came a black Rover. The face of the driver was obscured in the glare on the windscreen, but Marin pointed to a red rectangle with a dab of gold on the dashboard. “Look,” he said. He clicked on the picture, and was able to zoom in, so the rectangle filled the screen. The dab of gold resolved as wings.

“Holy smokes!” Rygg exclaimed. “A folder from the Russian embassy. This one goes deep, my friend! Quick, Sasha, bring up the embassy employees.”

There were only thirty-six. And the third person on the list was an unsmiling, green-eyed man with a brow that lay in a dark bar across his eyes.

Torgrim drew in his breath. “Fydot Sokolov,” he said.

“You know him?”

“I think I’ve met that green-eyed bastard before, if you catch my drift.”

“Not quite. But I am surprised, I must tell you. Very surprised. Sokolov is a very … cultured man. Very intelligent. I had not even remotely considered him as part of our investigations. This is because he assisted us once, in the past, and we had thought he was one of the good men. In 2006, he was involved in breaking up a major weapons smuggling ring that operated out of East Africa. At that time he was with the FSB. But he is now the number three man in the embassy. Very, very high up, with influence perhaps even greater than the ambassador. He was born in Tanzania in the 1960s, when Nyerere was experimenting with socialism, and went to a British school there.”

“So that’s why he speaks perfect English,” Rygg said.

“Yes. He can pass for an Englishman. He is highly educated, and, as I said, very intelligent.”

Back at the hotel, Marin closed the balcony doors and drew the curtains. He poured ouzo into three glasses and they sat on the beds, sipping the warm, sweet liquor.

“So let’s recap,” Rygg said. “A senior official in the Russian embassy passed himself off as an Englishman, as this Paul Northam person, to register a car. And he’s the one who sent Ann off on the trip to Paros? I just can’t understand why.”

Marin lit a cigarette. “Neither can I at this point. Well, clearly he did not want anyone to question Ann about the whereabouts of the
Alpensturm
. And he did not want to be known as a Russian. But does this mean the Russian government was behind the deal? Or was Sokolov working alone? Or together with criminals? Or was the government simply embarrassed by the theft and trying to cover up … ? Neither of us have the answers to these questions. And I cannot get the answers from here. Even this communication with Sasha was risky. Risky, but necessary.” Marin seemed sad.

“So was the whole Paros excursion just a nice vacation?” Rygg said. “Just a little trip to get a fat girl laid?”

Marin shook his head. He looked down at his smoldering cigarette, then up at Rygg and Lena. “I was hoping with all of my soul that the
Alpensturm
hijacking represented a rather inept attempt at straightforward theft,” he told them. “Some gangsters who saw an opportunity and took it. But with the involvement of Sokolov, the situation changes. Ann Devonshire’s information was necessary. It points us in a new direction.”

“Which is?” Rygg asked.

“Letting us know where we need to look next. Unfortunately, it is not where I wished to go.” Marin sighed deeply, showing signs of weariness and concern.

Lena said something to him in Russian, and he nodded slowly. “
Moskva
,” he said. Then he turned to Rygg. “Moscow,” he said. “We must go into the lion’s den.”

April 30

The commandos kept them in total darkness, except for the meals twice a day, when they would leave the hatch open so they could see to eat. One of the commandos had to feed Jonas and Dmitri didn’t like to watch that procedure. Jonas’s face had been transformed by his madness into the mask of a child. He gibbered and drooled and gave Dmitri strange toothy grins. He screamed in his sleep. Dmitri wondered what it would take to put him over the edge like that.
A couple weeks of this
, he thought.
That would probably do it
.

Once in the morning and once at night they were unshackled and led out to the bathroom. Dmitri’s eyes were so sensitive, after the hours in darkness, that he kept them closed as he stumbled across the deck.

The pain in his abdomen had gotten worse for two days, and his urine was brown and stung when it came out. But then the antibiotic seemed to take effect, though he was still very weak. He was always thirsty.

Vaslav turned out to be a talkative chap, which Dmitri thought was probably why he had gotten in trouble in the first place. He kept apologizing for the incessant chatter, and a dozen times a day made Dmitri promise not to tell anyone what he was saying, but seemed unable to help himself. He just liked to talk.

Over the next days, Dmitri gathered Vaslav’s tale. He’d grown up in a small southern Siberian mining town. He was the youngest of five brothers, and had gotten into drugs early on. There was nothing else to do, he said, and drugs were cheap – they came up from the south: China, the ‘stans. The borders were vast and full of holes, and the guards could be bribed or just done away with if they proved recalcitrant. His town was one of the transfer points, where the drugs were packaged before being shuttled on to Moscow and then the rest of Europe. He’d become a user, then a packager, and then one of the transporters, riding shotgun in a rickety truck supposedly loaded with dried peppers.

He’d gone to prison for the first time at seventeen, for talking back to a policeman. Prison had been good to him. He called his prison-mates his family. They looked out for each other. In prison, he’d learned to read and cook and sew, to fight with his fists and with a knife. He’d learned how to behave toward other human beings. He hadn’t survived school, but prison, he said, was his real school: elementary, high school, and university.

By twenty-two, he’d been in and out of prison five times, mostly in Moscow. Then, two years ago, he was involved in a bungled drug bust. According to Vaslav, it was the fault of the idiot Moscow police. Instead of surrounding the house and ordering them out like normal, the police had decided to do the raid at night. They’d cut the electricity and sent in a sortie. Vaslav thought it was probably something they’d seen in a Hollywood movie. Well, the next thing, there was a massive firefight in the darkness, with everyone firing submachine-guns at random. When someone finally got the lights on, five policemen and six of Vaslav’s friends lay dead or dying on the floor. The walls were sieved by bullet holes and the carpets were soggy with blood. Vaslav and one friend were the only ones to survive the massacre, though the friend lost an arm, and they got the blame for the whole deal. Vaslav was given a life sentence and was packed off to a Siberian prison.

In prison, he’d met a drug baron named Stoy. Stoy lived a life of luxury, with personal bodyguards and his own little makeshift dacha inside the compound. He still operated his drug business, working from nine to five, six days a week, with secretaries and fax machines and dedicated internet lines; the whole shebang. He’d turned half the guards, and the other half were so terrified they’d never say a word against him. One tried, once, sending a letter to the authorities in Moscow. His wife and daughter had been gang-raped in front of him, while Stoy watched.

Stoy worked hard, but in the evening he liked entertainment and Vaslav was a storyteller. So he was invited to Stoy’s dinner table, for vodka and black bread and fresh grilled meat, in return for a few jokes. He even got a prostitute from time to time.

Vaslav had been in the Siberian prison for a year and a half when Stoy disappeared suddenly, without warning. One evening he was gone, and no-one knew where he was. Among the prisoners, there were rumors that he’d split to Cuba, or that he’d finally been taken away and diced up by his enemies.

Stoy was gone for two days. When he returned, he gathered six of the prisoners, including Vaslav, for a meeting behind the closed doors of his makeshift dacha. He said that he had a job offer for them. The pay was a shipload of heroin, market price three million dollars. They could keep the ship and the heroin, and would, of course, win their freedom.

They all agreed, of course – refusal would have meant instant death – and were taken that very day by small plane to St. Petersburg, and then to a location about an hour away by air, for a week of secret training. Vaslav had no idea where the training took place; they had been flown to a fjord, somewhere northeast of Petersburg, he thought, where there was a ship about the size of the
Alpensturm
. The other commandos, whom Vaslav called “the partners,” were already there. The supervisor was the tall man, Aleksey. He communicated with them in Russian, but Vaslav did not think Russian was his first language.

There was no comradeship between the partners and the prisoners. They were housed in separate buildings, and the prisoners were watched at all times by two armed partners. Using small boats, they practiced the landing and boarding of the ship, over and over. What actually happened once they were on board seemed of less importance to the commandos; the initial few minutes were crucial, they said, over and over. Once on board, the prisoners were to keep their mouths shut and follow the lead of the partners.

Everything had gone like clockwork. They’d boarded the ship and subdued the crew. But then the monotony of life on board had started to take its toll, and the Siberians grew restless and suspicious. They had been told that the whole operation would take a week at the most, but the partners said that things would have to play out in their own time, and that they had no control. Four days ago, one of the Siberians had stayed awake until the partners were asleep, and had broken into the hold. He wanted to see the heroin, but there was no heroin. Instead, he’d found a few boxes of machinery. Machinery! Furious, he’d confronted the partners the next day. He didn’t care who heard: they’d been cheated. But he’d barely gotten a couple sentences out when one of the partners rushed over and whacked him over the head, knocking him out. Then he was dumped into the sea. And now the rest of the Siberians were confined to their rooms. Their weapons were removed, and the partners had completely taken over the running of the ship. Vaslav had no idea where they were going, or what was so important about the boxes of machinery. All he knew was that they’d been scammed, that one of his friends was dead, and that things were going wrong – badly wrong – for the partners.