The Scioneer (17 page)

‘He said
you were a beauty,’ said Cesar, with a half smile.

‘He said you
were a beast,’ she replied, ‘and his best friend’.

‘Yes. I
am. Both
, I suppose. I
wish I could stay and help you, but I’ve just... done something.
Vidmar’s dead.’

‘How did
you know
where to find
us?’

‘I’ve
been keeping my eye on Lek all day, on and off, but I should
probably make myself scarce now. You should too. You’ve got to get
to the station. Get out of this place.’

‘I’ve got
to wake him up
first.’

‘Give him
a whiff of this,’ Cesar
said, handing over a tiny brown bottle from his pocket.
‘It’s Animal - amyl nitrite. It’ll perk him right up, chica. You
should get some ice on that shiner too. It’s doing nothing for your
image.’

‘Thank you.
Really, thank you.’

‘You’re
welcome, beauty.’

And with
that, Cesar turned and padded off across the Common. Crystal
watched him go. As she looked out of the smashed window, she
realised there were other people out there in the darkness,
and not just the odd stranger
in the night, intent on walking the dog, or loved-up couples taking
an evening stroll. There were groups of people loitering in the
shadows. Gangs of young people. In a flash, it hit her - full moon.
And only fifteen minutes to electricurfew.

Chapter
25

Self
preservation. It was a concept that Lyubomir Pechev understood
completely
. He looked at
the myriad lights across the city and thought about Lek Gorski.
‘Where are you Doctor?’ he asked aloud. ‘Trying to make your
getaway, no doubt’.

In the
weeks following his own attempted
escape from the tyranny of Taloquan, Pechev was
forced to learn how to play the piano again without the use of his
middle finger. He sat for many hours in the company of his
kidnapper, awkwardly stretching his right hand across chords which
had once come so naturally to him. And while he struggled to
consciously override his muscle memory, he fought to hold on to his
memories of the past, of his time in Kalinovka, and of his
identity. Burdened by the tide of new information his young brain
was absorbing, he found in time that the mental images of his place
of birth, his home, his parents, even the memory of his real name
were proving harder to recall. By the time he was ten, these things
had slipped from his grasp entirely and it seemed on the surface
that he had accepted his fate and succumbed to Stockholm
Syndrome,
mistaking a lack of abuse from his captor as
an act of kindness.

In truth,
a fire still burned within him, and Lyubomir Pechev refused to let
it go out, such was his desire to escape. Though he lived a life of
relative luxury, a life which many children in Russia could only
have dreamed of in 1997, he dedicated his days and nights, locked
in his room, to meticulously planning his next flight, dismissing
schemes which would require too many leaps of faith. Fleeing from
the house was one thing, surviving on the outside was another. In
six years, he had never been off the estate grounds, but he placed
enough faith in his own intelligence and instincts to believe he
could stay alive on the streets of Moscow. Whenever he had the
chance, he studied roadmaps, Metro-plans, and even read guides to
the city. He also made a point of committing to memory every
telephone conversation, every scrap of written information, name
and number which Taloquan in his ignorance let slip while in
Pechev’s company. He watched how ruthlessly Taloquan did business,
listened to him hammering down the price he paid for Latvian and
Lithuanian girls, and squeezing every cent from the men who bought
them. Pechev soaked up his captor’s mannerisms and the language he
used.

On the
sixth anniversary of his kidnapping, Taloquan presented Pechev with
an antique chess set and over their first game, informed the boy
that his true parents were dead, confirming that his mother had
indeed died of hypothermia in a snow bank on the day he had been
taken. As for his father, he had devoted the rest of his life to
alcoholism following his wife’s death and his precious Aloysha’s
abduction, until three years later when he was found floating in
the Volga, twenty miles from his hometown. Pechev neither showed
nor felt emotion, so far removed was he from his own past, but the
glint of humour in Taloquan’s eyes as he imparted the news only
served to steel his resolve.

His plan
was simple. He needed only to wait for the right circumstances.
Like all criminals who had reached a certain level of success,
Taloquan was paranoid and employed as few staff as possible through
fear of being killed in his sleep by an unknown chambermaid, or
hacked to death on the croquet lawn by a junior gardener. As it
was, there were only three loyal employees who lived on site: the
chef, the housekeeper, and a man named Boris who seemed to do
everything else, from feeding the hunting dogs to slopping out the
prostitutes’ cells. They knew Taloquan’s background and business,
and were clearly paid enough to keep their mouths shut.

On a hot
afternoon in August, when both the chef and housekeeper were
shopping in the city, Pechev decided he could wait no longer and
seized the best opportunity he had been given in months. From his
piano stool, he could see Boris chopping firewood near the stables.
Taloquan was tapping away at his computer when Pechev began to
purposely hit wrong chords in his interpretation of Schuman’s Trout
Quintet. He feigned annoyance at the piano and stomped on the
foot-pedals in a petulant manner. Taloquan eventually looked up
from his work.

‘What’s the
matter?’

‘I think
the pedals have become disconnected. The notes are dying off. Can’t
you hear it?’ and again, Pechev hit a couple of disharmonious
chords, knowing that his master knew nothing about the workings of
his own musical instrument. He bent down and began hammering the
pedals with his fist.

‘In the
name of Allah,’ cried Taloquan, ‘Be careful boy! That thing is
worth more to me than you are!’ and with a sigh of exasperation, he
stepped away from his stinkwood desk and knelt down to examine the
problem for himself.

In a
flash, Pechev picked up the bronze bust of Lenin from the
bookshelves and brought it down with a sickening crack on the back
of Taloquan’s head. When he checked for a pulse and found none, his
own heart rate didn’t change. With precise movements, he ticked off
the items he needed from the room and from about Taloquan’s person
- wallet, cash-clip, keys, revolver. His own bag was in his cell,
already packed with clothes and his all important birth
certificate. Pechev took a moment to set a CD of ‘The Greatest
Piano Concertos EVER’ playing on the stereo and left the office,
remembering to lock the door behind him. He retrieved his bag,
moved silently through the house and opened the front door, only to
find Boris stamping the mud from his workman’s boots on the gravel
of the driveway. He stared at Pechev with simple eyes, but the boy
could take no chances: he drew the revolver from his pocket and
shot Boris through the forehead. In for a penny, in for a
pound.

Pechev
had resigned himself to the idea of surviving alone. Even if
Taloquan had been lying and his parents
were
still alive, he had no means of finding them.
Besides, he had just killed two men and for all he knew, he was a
fugitive from the law. His plan was to make his way to Moscow and
go to ground.

He spent
his first night of freedom sleeping in Taloquan’s stolen Mercedes,
which he had managed to bump along the thirty miles between the
estate and the suburbs of Moscow, peering over the steering wheel
the whole way. In the morning, Pechev wiped off all the surfaces he
had touched: the door handle, the steering wheel, the stereo,
before handing the keys to a tramp begging on the corner of a
street.

Pechev
caught his first ever subway train into the city centre of the
Russian capital.

For a
week, he lived the life of a tourist, sleeping in the shared
dormitory of a youth hostel near the Kremlin, where he managed to
blend in with a touring college choir. In the daytime, there was
business to attend to and many obstacles for a boy of his age to
overcome in the process, but Pechev found that whenever his
pre-pubescent body and reedy voice failed him, money talked loud.
With a fifty rouble note, he managed to open a young-saver’s
current account in the Zenit Bank using his faked birth certificate
and a false address as identification. He was given a small ceramic
piggy bank as a welcome gift, which he carried with him to the
nearest internet café.

He handed
a single rouble to the pretty purple-haired assistant with a
nose-ring, who in turn gave him a five minute lesson in logging on,
navigating the web and even showed him how to open his own email
account. In over six years, he had never once been allowed near
Taloquan’s computer, but he found he understood in seconds. Pechev
thanked the girl, and began surfing. He found the website he was
looking for – Montserrat Financial Offshore Accounting. In 1995,
Herat Taloquan had seen the potential of online banking when it was
still in its infancy and actively sought out a bank which enabled
him to launder his money across a number of dotcom companies from
the comfort of his office. When the governments of the world
finally scrambled to police this new wave of criminal activity,
Herat was way ahead of the curve. So much the better, thought
Pechev, as he pulled up the personal internet banking page on the
screen. He closed his eyes and searched through all the information
he had stored in his brain regarding Taloquan’s finances. His
fingers flew across the keys like he was playing the Minute Waltz,
as he called to mind every account number, sort code and password
which he had ever consigned to memory while sitting at the piano in
Taloquan’s office.

Before
his allotted hour was up, Lyubomir Pechev had managed to transfer
forty-eight million dollars of Herat Taloquan’s offshore holdings
into his own young saver’s account. He picked up his piggy bank and
walked back to the youth hostel, treating himself to a Big Mac on
the way.

Four
days later,
when the funds had cleared, he paid cash for a small flat in
Basmannyy, a depressed but not unsafe area of the city. The estate
agent who had initially thought she was being secretly filmed for a
television show, had played along until Pechev innocently opened
his backpack, pulled out a stack of crisp bills and asked her if
she handled the money.

Pechev
was free: to all intents and purposes, an eleven year old orphan,
trying to make his way in the world. He had no need for education,
at least not in the academic sense. He was financially secure and
apart from his bank account and utility bills, he lived off the
net. Within a week, he had arranged for a telephone line to be
fitted, and bought an American personal computer for ‘good price’.
It was the age of the internet, and even in the backstreets of late
90’s Moscow, it was possible to pay for virtually anything online.
He found the website of a top-end security company and had his
cheap plywood door replaced with one made of reinforced steel, had
closed-circuit cameras mounted around the flat and finally had
bulletproof windows fitted. He knew full well he had paid over the
odds for this state of the art security but this was to be more
than his home. It was base camp and from here, he intended to climb
to the top of the criminal world, and take back from it everything
he felt was rightfully his.

And so it
was, that with a fortune in the bank and a Naudia voice distorter
attached to his telephone handset, Lyubomir Pechev rebuilt
Taloquan’s lost empire. Out of some kind of respect for those girls
who had shared the basement cells in the mansion house, he moved
his business away from sex-trafficking, preferring to plough his
money into drugs. He had an inherent interest in science and
medicine and it seemed like the logical move. He forged new
contacts in Colombia and rekindled Taloquan’s old partnerships in
Afghanistan, importing huge quantities of pure cocaine and heroin
at St Petersburg and distributing it domestically and throughout
Europe. He had enough sense to stay behind the scenes, choosing
instead to permanently employ those people who over time had proved
themselves to be loyal.

At the
tender age of 13, Pechev
rang in the new millennium alone in his apartment, watching
hour by hour images from around the world of people celebrating in
the streets. Two hours after Moscow erupted into song, Pechev was
struck by a
real sense of confidence and optimism as
he saw the fireworks exploding on the Thames in London. Never
before had he considered leaving Mother Russia, but there was
something about London that caught his attention. ‘Maybe in a few
years’ time,’ he whispered to himself.

Forty years later, looking out over the same
dirty old river, Lyubomir Pechev remembered that moment as though
it were only yesterday. Since that time his drugs cartel had
prospered and his nameless, faceless company had evolved into areas
of protection, illegal gambling, and with a certain amount of
chagrin on Pechev’s part, prostitution. He told himself it had to
be done – business was business. Scionised medicines had taken the
company in a whole new direction in the twenties and despite his
appearance: the shabby suit, the receding hairline and greying
beard, he felt like a boy again. He had become one of the richest
men on the planet, with more legitimate fronts spread across Europa
than even he knew about. Pechev preferred to leave all that to the
accountants and solicitors. Above all, he liked to consider himself
a man of the people, for the people. He still liked to get his
hands dirty, so this business with Gorski wasn’t entirely
unpleasant. Of the employees that he had taken on over the years,
some had died of natural causes, some had been killed, but no one
had ever simply left the company of his own volition. Pechev
understood that there was a natural ebb and flow in all things, and
that Gorski’s time must eventually come to an end, but he wasn’t
ready to let him go just yet.