Someone Elses Daughter (12 page)

III

“It’s here,” Raisa Poda said as Salko drove round the corner. “Vadim Kasharin runs the Swing bar half way along this street. There, on the right. He’s usually at the bar about this time.”

“Brace yourself,” Salko said as he accelerated the Mercedes towards the double doors.

“What are you doing?” she yelled, her feet braced on the dashboard. “Are you crazy?”

“As mad as hell,” he growled as the car smashed through the doors and right into the bar area of the club, hitting a man who had been drinking at one of the tables. A young man, fashionably unshaven, cowered down behind the bar. “Is that Kasharin?”

“No,” Raisa breathed, slumped back with her legs widely-spread, wide-eyed as if in a trance. “You just drove the car into him.”

“Shit!”

Salko took stock of the situation. It seemed there had only been three people in the bar. After a few seconds, a young man raised his head tentatively above the bar counter. Salko took this as his cue to open the door and climb out of the wrecked car.

“Are you hurt?” the bare breasted young woman asked.

“No, no, I’m fine, thank you,” Salko said, kicking aside a broken table and reaching for the man sprawled on the floor. “Mr Kasharin?”

“My fucking leg! I think my knee’s broken.”

“Vadim Kasharin?” Salko asked, grabbing the limp leg by the knee, where the jeans were already soaked in blood..

“Yes, but my leg—” His words broke off with a strangled scream.

“This knee?” Salko asked innocently, twisting the shattered limb and waiting for the ensuing scream to die in the air. He then calmly drew his gun from his inner pocket and pressed the muzzle against Kasharin’s other knee.

“You won’t be dancing at any parties for a while, Vadim.”

Kasharin howled in terror, and this was a cue for the young barman to vault over bar counter and sprint out of the carnage of the bar. Salko glanced over his shoulder briefly and glanced at Raisa Poda who was still sitting numbly in the car. He then returned his attention to his howling victim. “I want some information, Vadim Kasharin,” he said, easing back the safety catch on the pistol. “Otherwise you’ll have two smashed legs. Tell me about the party in Kropotkin Street a few days ago.”

“I don’t know anything about any fucking party, man. Get me to a hospital—.” He cringed back as Salko fired a bullet into the floor. “Fuck!”

“You have a choice, Vadim,” Salko said, and for emphasis he smashed the side of the pistol against Kasharin’s face, smashing his nose and spraying blood. “Give me some information or the next bullet goes in your good knee.”

“Tell him, Vadim,” Raisa suddenly said. Salko looked back and saw that she was standing naked beside the car. “He already knows about your last party and that some girls went missing.”

“I do, I do,” Salko said, wiping the blood and snot from the gun onto Kasharin’s shirt. “But I want to know everything, Vadim. Who takes the girls, where they go, which route... everything. And don’t try to scam a player. I’m prone to violence.”

“Alright, alright... I’ll tell you. The main woman is Tara. She organises the parties and usually just wants pretty students. This time though, she was very particular. She wanted Anna Borzov.”

“Tell me where I can find Tara,” Salko said grimly.

When Vadim Kasharin had spilled everything he knew, Salko put a bullet in the back of his neck. It was an efficient and cold execution, leaving little extra blood and gore. He then turned to point the gun at Raisa Poda.

“I knew you would kill me,” she said calmly.

“No,” he said, “I’m sending you off to Israel.”

IV

A grizzled old man arrived to clean a hotel room. Hs gnarled, heavily tattooed hands carried a large canvas bag, which he dropped to the floor as he glanced in dispassionate appraisal at the corpse, assessing the job in hand. The woman, although in her forties, had probably been beautiful, even a few hours ago. But Tara was no longer beautiful, not in death. Her blood-stained and lacerated body was still tied hand and foot to the bed, and most of her finger nails had been pulled out. Black cigarette burns, like bullet holes, were scattered on the ghastly blue-white flesh of her breasts. The old man reached to take a rolled leather tool case from the canvas bag and he placed it unopened beside the body on the bed. He then reached into the bag again and took out a large polythene sack and shook it open. He collected up the packet of Marlborough cigarettes and cheap cigarette lighter he found on the bedside cabinet, hesitated, and then slipped them into his pocket rather than dropping them into the sack. From that same pocket he pulled a pair of thin latex gloves, snapping them over his tattooed hands before stooping to collect up the items of intimate female clothing that littered the floor round the bed. He carefully placed each frilled and lacy item into the sack, and then worked methodically across the room to the furthest corner, not missing a centimetre, collecting up everything he found and dropping it into the polythene sack. He found a smart designer dress and an outdoor coat hanging in the wardrobe. These too were stuffed into the sack, along with the pair of red Jimmy Choo shoes he found neatly placed on the floor of the wardrobe. The old man then went on his short, bowed-legs to the en suite bathroom and he removed the few things he found there, including emptying the waste basket.

He then went back to the bedroom, dropped the sack beside the canvas bag, and glanced around to check his own handiwork. No handbag! He walked over to where the corpse lay and dropped on his knees, pulling aside the dishevelled blood stained sheets and peering under the bed. There was nothing there. No handbag! The old man rose painfully to his feet and shrugged, glancing round carefully again, and looking in the bedside cabinet. He would have to enquire about the missing handbag. Perhaps Salko had taken it with him? That seemed unwise. With a sigh, he returned to the canvas bag and took out an aerosol spray and a clean cloth, and then proceeded to clean every door handle and surface that might have been touched.

Once that had been done, the old man returned to the bed and unrolled his leather tool case. He selected a sturdy pair of garden secateurs from the array of tools there. Then, pulling a small plastic bag from his pocket, he moved to the head of the bed and grasped Tara’s blue-tinged right hand where it hung limply in the tight rope bond. Then he began to dispassionately snip off her bloodied fingers, one by one, mindless of the sickening crunch of bone, collecting up each grizzly digit and carefully putting it into the bag.

The door opened as he worked, and he glanced sharply over his shoulder at the two men who entered. “Don’t alarm me like that,” the old man said, snipping off the little finger. “I just need to cut off the fingers from her other hand and pull out her teeth. Then you can take her. There’s no sign of a handbag. A woman like this would surely carry a bag.”

“Why worry?” asked one go the men, lighting a cigarette.

V

“You’re sure that Tara had no more information?” Borzov said, turning slightly in his chair and fondling his paper knife and glancing at Sara, who was tightly bound and kneeling on his desk. She kept her legs widely placed, even though the tie allowed her to close them. It just seemed appropriate.

Leo Salko looked out over Moscow stretching behind Viktor Borzov’s head. He gave a thin smile. “Oh, I’m very certain that Tara told me everything.”

Sara was surprised that she had been allowed to remain for this tense meeting, and yet it seemed that Borzov required her presence. Before Nikitin and Salko had arrived, the Boss had personally supervised Sasha as he restrained her arms in a box-tie, passing red rope tightly around her chest and upper arms, keeping her arms folded behind her and preventing her from wriggling her wrists free of the tie at the small of her back. Sasha had attached the end of the red rope to a tight matching crotch rope that separated the lips of her cunt and kept her back arched and breasts sharply thrust out. He had finished off with a frog-tie on her legs, tied to bindings on her thighs and just below her knees and just above her ankles. It was impossible for her to stand up. Sara was unclear why Viktor Borzov required her there, bound like some exotic executive desk ornament.

Borzov spun the seat of his chair to directly face the two men and then he turned his head to stare at Sara as he said, “I have been informed of the death of my good friend Professor Zeldov in America. It happened two weeks ago. The news reached me belatedly. He was tortured before he died, so someone presumably wanted information from him.”

Sara gasped. Zeldov had been her language tutor at Cornell, and he had introduced her to Viktor Borzov. Borzov watched her reaction intently.

“What’s that got to do with Anna’s kidnapping?” Nikitin asked.

“I am asking myself the same question, Georgy,” Borzov said, prodding the tip of Sara’s breast with the knife. “You, my girl, are my only recent connection with the Professor. What do you know about it, little bitch?”

A pinprick of blood emerged on Sara’s teat. She looked at Borzov nonplussed, unable to find coherent words. In the end, all she could say was, “I’ve been locked in the basement for the past three weeks.”

Lev Salko said, “I think I can answer your questions, Viktor.” He placed a dark green handbag between Sara’s thighs on Borzov’s desk. “This belonged to Tamara,” he said.

“I thought her name was Tara?” Georgy said, glancing at the expensive Mulberry bag with its gold trimmings.

“Ukrainian. She changed her name and affected to be English. Your boys’ information was correct, of course: it was Tamara who sold your daughter to the Albanians. She confessed and revealed the contact details.” He tossed a USB Flash Drive Memory Stick to Georgy. “I had my people prepare a report. Plug that into your computer.”

Borzov raised his eyebrows and studied the small plastic stick. “The Vory has changed,” he murmured, leaning over to insert the stick into the console on his desk. As he spoke, a large wall screen flickered into life with a blurred picture of Henry Smithson.

Sara gave a small squeal. “That’s my father,” she spluttered.

Salko glanced at her and smiled thinly.

“Henry Smithson is an Englishman who was officially attached to the British Embassy in Moscow in a minor trade role in the days of the USSR. In reality, he headed up a unit that specialised in infiltrating the murkier side of life, using a network of brothels, call girls and such like to entrap their targets and get information.” The picture changed to show the fuzzy outline of the same man speaking to five naked young women. “That’s a rare picture, taken in 1989, showing Jackson speaking to some of his whores.”

The screen changed and showed a picture of a pretty, smiling young woman, little more than a teenage girl.

“Smithson’s wife, Tamara.”

Borzov poked Sara’s breast with his knife. “Your mother?”

“Yes,” Sara said, almost choking in shock.

“This was Tamara Bondar, sixteen years old at the time and fresh into Moscow from Minsk. Henry Jackson immediately took up with her and she was pregnant within weeks.” The picture changed again to show Tara in her white wedding gown, with Jackson standing beside her in a leafy churchyard. “Incredibly for a man who had his pick of countless women, Henry took Tamara to England and married her. Their daughter Sara was born a few months later.”

Dumbstruck, Sara watched the changing images on the wall screen. Many of them were familiar from her childhood: her mother holding her as a small baby... a little toddler dressed in a short white dress... her father driving a green Jaguar E Type car with Tara sitting laughing beside him...

Salko went on: “The Smithsons separated within a year. Henry returned to Moscow but Tamara went to the USA, changing her name to Tara. She had a brief career in films and modelling, and enjoyed the jet set life for a while after that.”

There were more images of Tara on the wall, some in cheesecake swim suit poses, others in smart designer gowns, and one a tasteful nude study.

“She had quite a body,” Borzov said. “I can see where her daughter gets it from.”

“She kept her figure right to the end. Anyway, by the time Smithson returned to Moscow, the USSR had fallen. It made no difference to him, of course. Like many people, you included, he was well-placed to profit from his previous connections.” The pictures on the screen were now racier, showing night club scenes with topless dancers, working girls soliciting for business on a street corner, and then a series of Internet images advertising escort girl services. “Smithson was involved in all of this.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead.”

Borzov looked up sharply. He said to Sara, “Your father is dead?”

She nodded. “Eight years ago. He died during heart surgery in America.”

Borzov shot a confused glance at Nikitin, who merely shrugged. “So the Englishman couldn’t have commissioned Anna’s kidnapping.”

George Nikitin began to idly look through the contents of the bag, as if keen to avert his gaze. He took out a small red address book and flicked through it. The wall screen showed a recent picture of Tara Jackson dressed in smart, designer clothes, striding through a large, garishly-lit night club.

“Tara reappeared in Moscow a few years ago, taking over the business,” Salko was saying. “She divided her time between Moscow and the USA,managing the network. It suited her to maintain the fiction that her husband was still alive. She became ‘the Englishman’, in effect.

“So she had Anna abducted?”

“In revenge for you taking her daughter, Viktor,” Salko said evenly. He paused for a reaction, but none came. Then he went on: “Tara returned from a trip to the USA shortly before Anna was snatched. She had Zeldov beaten to a pulp to find out what had happened to Sara. Then she arranged the traffickers’ party and commissioned Raisa Poda to make sure Anna attended. Afterwards, she sold Anna to an Albanian trafficker called Ermir.”

“Ermir was another guy you wasted,” Georgy Nikitin said drily. “One problem with your interview style, Lev, is that we can never go back to ask them more questions. I suppose we should be grateful that the whore Nina is still alive.”

Viktor Borzov remained tight-lipped, stroking the razor sharp edge of his paper knife along Sara’s thigh, but he glanced up at Salko. “Continue.”

Salko turned and fixed Nikitin with a steady bead. He chose to ignore the implied criticism and went on, “Ermir sold Anna to another Albanian named Plakici. Unfortunately, somebody ‘interviewed’ Plakico first, before I could get to him, and the trail stops there. All we know for sure is that Anna reached Odessa.”

“Any eye for and eye, a daughter for a daughter,” Borzov said grimly, glancing at Sara. “Do you think you can trace Anna, Lev?”

Salko shook his head. “Odessa is a collecting hub for trafficked women from across the former Soviet Union. From Odessa they are sent west to Europe, or south to Turkey and the Middle East. She could be anywhere now.”