Dead Centre (10 page)

There were two sofas. Two men sat on each. A fifth, the youngest, was on the unmade king-sized bed. They all wore brand new shell-suits. Their faces were red and blotchy from exposure to the sun. And they all had cigarettes on the go. There was so much smoke you couldn’t even see the No Smoking signs.

They eyed me apprehensively, like I was a cop who suspected them all of murder and the grilling was about to begin. Maybe it was the environment. Not many crew normally got to stay in a twelve-hundred-dollar suite in the Ararat Park Hyatt.

The Nigerian didn’t even bother to greet them. He just redialled and helped himself to one of the armchairs that sat each side of a small coffee-table next to the triple-glazed window.

The oldest of the crew got to his feet. ‘I am Rudy.’ He stretched out his hand. He was in his early fifties, with tight grey hair and a beard. ‘I am the captain.’

He was about to start a round of introductions.

‘No time for that, mate. Let’s crack on.’

I threw my parka onto the armchair opposite Mr Lover Man, then drew back the curtain. I was looking out of the front of the hotel. The rooftops of Moscow were covered with snow. It was like a still from
Doctor Zhivago
. The onion-shaped domes of the Kremlin were so close we could have watched Putin pumping iron.

Mr Lover Man wasn’t impressed. He was too busy looking inwards, locking eyes with the crew. He might have been whispering sweet nothings into his phone, but he wanted them to know he’d be hanging on their every word.

Below me, the Range Rover was parked at the front of a line of half a dozen vehicles immediately outside the hotel entrance. Genghis did his bit for the Moscow smog by keeping the engine running. An Audi estate about four wagons down was doing the same. A couple of half-moons had been carved out of the dirt on the windscreen. It was two up. I admired the view for longer than I needed to.

Mr Lover Man closed down his mobile. Was he staying or going?

The vibe I was picking up from the crew was that it would be better if he left. You could have cut the tension between them with a knife. The atmosphere couldn’t have been more at odds with the comfortable world of suede-upholstered headboards and Egyptian cotton sheets.

Mr Lover Man wasn’t moving one inch.

‘Does anybody else speak English?’

‘I do.’

I turned back into the room.

16

HE WAS JUST a kid, really, low twenties at the most. His nose was already peeling. He looked even more nervous than Rudy, maybe because he was right at the bottom of the food chain and the only other crew member I’d be able to talk to. There was definitely something wrong with this lot.

He added, ‘A little.’ He had the kind of American accent that foreigners pick up from
Friends
.

‘You know I’m here to help, don’t you? I’m trying to get the three of them back, nothing more.’

I got a sort of nod from the boy. He sat back on the bed, but he was about as relaxed as a high-tensile wire.

Rudy looked as though he’d be a serious candidate for the job of Cap’n Birdseye in a few years’ time. Right now, though, the smile beneath his closely cropped beard was so rigid I thought his face might crack.

‘So what happened, Rudy?’

‘We were attacked by Somalis. It was so far from the African coast, I never thought—’ He was still on his feet. His eyes darted involuntarily in the direction of Mr Lover Man.

‘It’s OK, mate, you don’t have to stand for me. Go on.’

He sat down on the bed.

‘The
Maria Feodorovna
—’

‘The yacht?’

‘Yes.’

‘What sort is it? A motor yacht? Sailing?’

‘Motor yacht. Forty metres. We were cruising, and then from nowhere two skiffs were coming towards us from the port side.’

The rest of the crew sucked at their cigarettes and kept their eyes down. Either the carpet was really interesting or they didn’t want me to read their expressions.

‘They were travelling very fast – twin seventy-fives on the back. I knew they were pirates even before they attacked. Skiffs so far from the coast. They had to be.

‘We started to make speed and tried to change direction, make it harder for them to board. I shouted for Jez and—’

‘The bodyguard?’

Rudy’s eyes shot across to Mr Lover Man once more. No one else moved, but I knew they were even more uncomfortable at the mention of the BG’s name.

‘Yes, yes. He came up on deck, and he looked, but then he went down below with Stefan and Madame.’

‘Where did he take them? Was there some kind of panic room? Was he armed – did the yacht have any weapons?’

He shook his head. ‘They went into the main cabin. He told me to make more speed. I was trying, but we could not outrun them. They fired a rocket across our bows. Then they aimed the rocket launcher straight at the bridge. I had no choice. I had to come off the power. The other skiff was closing behind. They had grappling hooks.’

I raised a hand. ‘But did you have weapons? Did the BG take them on?’

The boy jumped in: ‘If we had, I would have killed them all.’

Rudy glared at him to stand down. ‘They climbed on the back, maybe five, six, I don’t really know. All with rifles and big knives. I tried to make a mayday call but they must have jammed the radio.’

He sounded close to tears. ‘They got everyone on the bridge. We were on our knees. There was a lot of shouting. They were kicking us, pointing their rifles into the back of our heads. They were high, chewing that drug they like. I could hear Stefan crying behind me. Madame trying so hard to comfort him.’

The crew nodded when they heard the boy’s name. Their expressions seemed to soften.

‘He was scared … so scared.’

A lad with thick dark-brown hair mumbled to the skipper and pointed at me, cigarette in hand.

‘He wants to know that you will get Stefan back home safe.’

‘I’m going to try. But you need to tell me everything you know.
Everything
.’ I nodded at the questioner. ‘Tell him, of course. I’ll get all three of them back.’

Rudy translated. I caught ‘Stefan’ a couple of times.

I shifted position so I could keep Mr Lover Man in sight. He hadn’t spoken a word of English so far, but he clearly understood every word.

‘You all have watches. Are they new? Didn’t they take money, valuables?’

The boy answered: ‘No, they didn’t let us take anything with us, but also didn’t take anything from us. They didn’t care about us. It was Madame and Stefan they wanted.’

He was quivering with anxiety. He reached suddenly into a red nylon holdall, then had second thoughts and pushed it further under the bed with his heel.

Mr Lover Man said something in Russian. He wanted to know what the fuck was going on. Rudy seemed to be begging him to keep things nice and calm. He turned to me, hands clasped together like he was about to pray. ‘I’m sorry. He has had a terrible time …’

‘What happened next, Rudy?’

He took a deep breath as the boy sat back down. ‘We were all on the bridge, on the floor. They stood over us, shouting and chewing. And then they made me steer a new course west.

‘Maybe half an hour later, we saw their mother-ship, an old fishing trawler with another two skiffs tied up alongside it. They were hundreds of kilometres from home.’ There was a note of profound sadness in his voice. ‘They took us off the
Maria Feodorovna
. They placed us in the tender and just left us.
They took my ship
.’ He finally broke down. ‘
They took Stefan and his mother
…’

The young one sparked up. ‘And Jez …’

The captain shot the boy a warning glance.

‘But, Papa …’

I looked at him. ‘What about the bodyguard? Did he do something? Did he say something?’

His father answered for him: ‘He stayed with Stefan and Madame. Trying to protect them. Please. I’ve spoken to my crew. They know nothing more than I have told you. I wish we knew more, but it was so quick. They came, they took. And then they left us. We never saw the three of them again. I do not even know if they had a plan.’

Of course they had a plan. This was business. There were even established pay differentials for the pirate crew members. The first guy to board a ship got paid more than anyone else. He usually picked up a couple of thousand dollars extra once the ransom money came in. Relative risk and reward, just like any other line of work.

‘I need to know anything at all that anyone can remember, no matter how insignificant. It may help me find them.’ I fixed on the captain. ‘Can you tell them that?’

Mr Lover Man had had enough. He packed away his mobile and got out of his seat. ‘We are done here.’

His English was just as it should have been. Deep and growly.

‘That is all they know. That is all you need to know to make a plan and rescue them. Come.’

As he headed out of the room, the crew looked up at me with a mixture of embarrassment, fear and relief.

I glanced at the door handle and the electronic lock. It looked like the Russian equivalent of a VingCard Classic, the magnetic card reader used in most European and American hotels. If so, the locksets would be high security, with a full one-inch steel deadbolt and three-quarter-inch anti-pick latch for added strength. The electronics worked off standard AA batteries. Their flash memory allowed the lock to be accessed and reprogrammed directly at the hotel-room door.

I followed my escort to the lift. ‘Are you giving me a ride back to my flat? The Metro’s a fucking nightmare around here.’

Mr Lover Man had been with Mr T too long. He didn’t give it a nanosecond’s thought. ‘No.’

We headed down. At the main door, I zipped my parka up to my chin and adjusted the hood to hide my face from the cold. Then Mr Lover Man and I stepped outside. He took a pace or two towards the Range Rover, then spun on his heel.

‘Go now and bring back Stefan.’

The Audi was still two-up. The engine stopped as soon as I turned towards the Metro. A guy in a dark overcoat and beanie stepped out of the car and his mate, in sheepskin, followed suit. Mr T had obviously tuned into Comedy Central. These boys were the spitting image of Ant and Dec. Dec hit the key fob to lock up.

I crossed the road, heading the couple of hundred metres towards the sign with the large red M. I didn’t bother to check if Frank’s new celebrity couple were still with me. I took it as given. He clearly liked to keep a tight rein on all his people.

17

LUBYANKA WAS ONE of the first stations to be built in Moscow’s underground system in the mid-1930s. Because of the city’s unstable subsoil, it also turned out to be one of the world’s deepest. It took passengers more than five minutes to get from the concourse to the platforms. That was just what I wanted today. I wanted to lose my new best mates, but I didn’t want them to know I’d done it on purpose.

I reached the bottom of the stairs. This subway wouldn’t have got Crazy Dave’s seal of approval. There were no lifts anywhere. Most stations didn’t even have ramps. So even if he got down here, there’d be no guarantee Crazy Dave would ever resurface.

Another thing that was going to work in my favour was the fact that you could stay down here all day. You could interchange at will, and I might have to.

Ant and Dec wouldn’t find that strange. Visitors to Moscow who don’t speak or read Russian can find the Metro very intimidating. It’s a hub-and-spoke system, with the majority of lines running from downtown Moscow to the peripheral districts.

The Koltsevaya Line (No. 5) forms a twenty-kilometre ring that connects the spokes. There are twelve lines, each identified by a number, a name and a colour, and 182 stations. The locals often identified the lines just by colour, except for the very similar shades of green assigned to 2, 10, 11, and L1 – and at Kievskaya, where the light blue and dark blue lines converged and were almost impossible to tell apart.

It got worse. The colours on the platform signs weren’t always the same as the colours on the maps, and one station could be called two or three different names depending on the line on which one was travelling.

Out-of-towners and foreigners like me had to change platforms and retrace their steps every ten minutes. I quite liked fucking about down here for a couple of hours when I’d had enough of Dostoevsky and Gunslingers. It was a great place to see the wildlife. It also reminded me of the few fun times I used to have as a kid, bunking on the Underground all day, not having a clue where me and my mates would surface. Anywhere north of the river was the Outback, as far as we were concerned.

The entry gates looked like a series of turnstiles, but without the turnstiles. They were a row of card readers, with little gates between them. Some stations had futuristic glass panels that swung open once your card had been given the green light. Most, however, had nothing – until you tried to step through without scanning your card. At that point the mechanical gates would slam shut and do their best to crush you.

I brushed my card across the sensor and went through without losing any limbs.

The Moscow Metro was designed to double up as an underground shelter in case of attack. The masses might have to spend long spells down there, but were sure not to miss out on the joys of the Communist system. There were sculptures, reliefs and mosaics aplenty to glorify the achievements of the squaddie and the tractor-driver.

Above all, it looked good, it worked, and it was cheap. A single trip – which translated as ‘race’ – cost 60p. My sixty-race card made it even cheaper.

All the tourist guides recommended at least one trip. But not many sightseers took in Lubyanka this year, even though it was on the doorstep of Red Square and the Kremlin. All the murals and engravings had gone from the ceilings and walls, leaving shiny cream tiles. It had been targeted by a Chechen suicide bomber a year ago. Forty people were killed.

Less than an hour later, another device had gone off at Park Kultury, also on the red line, raising the death toll by a further fourteen. A couple of hundred were injured.