The First Billion (28 page)

Further study revealed several other private airports in the region, but Gavallan liked what Cate had said about a long runway. If they were going to Geneva, they’d require a decent-size jet: a Cessna Citation, an upper-end Lear, a Gulfstream III.

“Boca it is,” he said. “Let’s get moving. We’ve got a few stops to make before we get to the airport.”

Jett Gavallan rolled across the tarmac of the Boca Raton Executive Airport, a bent old man pushed along in a shiny wheelchair by a rather too attractive companion. One stop at the nearest mall had taken care of their requirements. A windbreaker, a broad-visored sun hat, and some dark glasses hid Gavallan’s features. The blanket was Cate’s idea. Old people got cold, she said, even when the thermometer topped eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit and humidity was 90 percent plus. The disguise wasn’t much, but it might keep the Feds off his trail if they were as eager to find him as they said.

He’d taken other precautions as well. He’d chartered the plane under a fictitious name and paid via E-cash, transferring the fees directly from his bank account to the aircraft leasing company—all before setting foot on airport grounds. He wanted as few people as possible to remember seeing them. In this at least he was successful. Their total time in transit from parking lot to tarmac was ten minutes.

Ahead lay their chariot: a white Gulfstream III with a sporty blue pinstripe running the length of the fuselage. A team of mechanics swarmed around the engines. The pilot and copilot circled the tail, completing their preflight walk-around. A fuel truck lumbered alongside, and a hose was extended to the plane’s wing. The sight of the gleaming aircraft did wonders for Gavallan’s bruised morale. Airplanes, of every size and vintage, never ceased to thrill him.

“She’s a beaut,” he said.

“She is,” said Cate. “You thinking of getting behind the controls yourself? Give me a show of the Air Force’s greatest talent?”

“No,” he said coldly. “That part of my life’s over. These days I ride just like any other paying customer.”

“Maybe someday,” suggested Cate.

“Maybe.” Gavallan pulled down the brim of his hat to shadow his features.

They’d spent the hour’s ride to the airport discussing what to do once they reached Geneva, how to approach Kirov if they were able to extract a confession from Jean-Jacques Pillonel or if by God’s grace they got their hands on some material evidence of Silber, Goldi, and Grimm’s fraud.

But their conversation hadn’t ended there. Sometime during the drive the focus had shifted from freeing Grafton Byrnes to making Kirov pay for his crimes.

“Canceling the Mercury offering might hurt Kirov,” Cate had said, “but it’s not nearly enough. Not anymore. I want the man to pay. I want him to suffer for the people he’s killed.”

And for stealing Black Jet,
Gavallan added silently.

Canceling the Mercury IPO would deal his company a swift and severe blow. He could forget about the seventy million in fees. He’d have to write off the bridge loan to Kirov, worth another fifty million. And that would be that.

Two choices would be left him. He could embark on a wholesale restructuring of the firm that would require firing a few hundred employees and shuttering his London and Chicago operations. Or he could sell. He and his top executives would pocket large sums, but they would hardly be compensated for the business’s true worth. And the prospect of working for another firm left him cold. Were he to leave, his core team of executives would follow, willingly or not. Neither Tony, Bruce, nor Meg fit the mold corporate behemoths demanded these days. Meg was too old. Tony’s illness branded him unreliable. And Bruce . . . well, simply put, Bruce was an asshole. It wouldn’t be a week before he’d have called the new managing director a bootlicker or an ass-kisser or God knows what, and that would be the end of Bruce.

“The only way to hurt Kirov is to put him in prison,” Cate said. “Rob him of his power, his money, his position.”

“Easier said than done,” said Gavallan, unable to cloak his pessimism. “He’s a Russian citizen. He’ll never stand before an American judge to answer for Mercury—if, that is, we can even prove he meddled.”

“Oh, he meddled all right. Just like he meddled with Novastar. What we need to do is nail him for stealing the hundred twenty-five million from his own country. Put him in the gulag where he belongs.”

“One thing at a time, Cate. I’d say our plates are full as it is.”

“I can dream, can’t I?”

Cate wheeled the chair to the foot of the stairwell and helped Gavallan board the plane. It wasn’t hard to adopt the gait of an older man. His lower back had stiffened and the throbbing in his head had returned with a vengeance. Still, it was impossible to deny the rush of excitement he felt as he entered the fuselage.

“So, you old codger,” she said. “Where you headed?”

“Geneva. I hear there are a lot of crooks in those parts. Guess you’re coming too?”

Cate stared at him over the top of her sunglasses, but when she spoke the smile had left her voice. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

35

Grafton Byrnes rose at the sound of the approaching engine and shuffled to the wall. It was late afternoon. The sky was cloudy, the air growing cooler. He was sick with fever and painfully hungry. The engine meant dinner, if that was what you called a mess tin half filled with weak broth and a few skimpy vegetables. Twice a day, an old, dented truck lumbered into the clearing, delivering the same meal. Twice a day he both cursed and rejoiced. He’d never imagined how famished a man could grow in two days. How terribly, desperately hungry. The stomach did not accept maltreatment complacently. It howled, it stabbed, it cramped.

Glancing up, Byrnes noticed dark clouds gathering overhead. A drop of rain dodged what was left of the roof and caught him on the cheek. Days tended to be warm, but when the sun fell, the temperature plummeted to freezing, the wind picked up, and his teeth chattered like marble on ice. Wiping away the raindrop, he tried to imagine another night lying huddled like an animal in the corner of the shed, toes dug into the dirt, bandaged hands clenched, tucked close to his chest, left with only his trousers and Ascot Chang’s finest Egyptian cotton dress shirt to fend off the cold. He began to shiver.

He knew men who’d toughed out eight years in the Hanoi Hilton. He told himself he could stand a couple of days at the Moscow Marriott, or as Konstantin Kirov had eloquently christened the place, “the dacha.” Either way, it would be over soon, his freedom granted in one form or another.

He looked down at his bare feet, at the toenails clogged with dirt, at the white, defenseless flesh. “Bastards,” he muttered, the shivering growing worse now. “You could have left me my socks.”

The shed measured six feet by six feet and had been constructed from the slim, round corpus of birch trees. The walls rose eight feet in height. A padlock secured the door. There were no windows, but by peering through the gaps that separated one log from the next, he had a fine view of the compound. A three-room log cabin with a stone chimney and large picture windows stood a hundred feet to his right. Two smaller structures stood farther away, visible among the towering pines. One was a rotted cabin with a rickety antenna attached to its roof, the other a stone sump house with a redbrick smokestack. In his time at the dacha, Byrnes had yet to see a soul anywhere, save the grizzled man who served as his jailer.

To his left, maybe sixty feet, was another shed like his own: a storage shack, if the shards of coal and wood embedded in the dirt floor were anything to go by. A double fence surrounded the compound, twelve feet high, topped with a run of razor wire. Again he wondered why there were no guards. He stared at the fence. He guessed it was electrified. There was no better guard than twenty thousand volts of raw current.

It would be difficult to get out, Byrnes knew. Difficult, but not impossible. The real question was where he’d go once he was free. He had no money, no shoes. His clothes were tattered and bloody, his face a mess. In his present condition, he could hardly expect to walk back to Moscow.

Difficult
. . . but there was a way.

A few rotting signposts stood inside the fences, and Byrnes recognized the place as a military camp of some kind. Though blindfolded during the drive out from Moscow, he’d felt the rise in elevation, especially on the last stretch of road. He could tell by the sun they’d driven north. If he had to guess, he’d say he was in an observation post, something Stalin had built in the paranoid years after the war when the Russians thought every American hiccup presaged a full-scale invasion.

The sound of the approaching motor grew louder. Byrnes’s trained ear was quick to notice the smoother, richer growl of the engine. It wasn’t the run-down pickup that brought him his meals every day. This was a new-model vehicle with a sturdy V-8. He listened closer. Two trucks, one engine pitched lower than the other.

Pressing his cheek to the coarse wood, he found it suddenly very hard to breathe. He’d warned himself it would happen. It was the natural course of events. He’d signaled Jett the deal was rotten. Jett had canceled the IPO. Kirov had sent his men to make good on his promise.

Newton’s Third Law,
barked a strict voice from a long-ago classroom.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Or as the modern world had cynically paraphrased it:
No good deed goes unpunished.

Byrnes stepped away from the wall and brushed the sprinkling of dirt and pine needles from his clothing. He stood a little straighter. This is how they would find him, he decided. With his pride and dignity intact.

A black Chevrolet Suburban pulled into the clearing in front of the main cabin. Doors opened and two of Kirov’s troopers got out, dressed in dark suits, shirts open at the collar. Byrnes wondered whether they minted men like that in a factory. Six-feet-something, two hundred pounds of bone and muscle. The first was stocky, with a Marine’s crew cut and a Slav’s dark scowl. The second, who was taller and had blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, hesitated by the passenger door, then barked out a series of instructions. A moment later, he leaned into the cabin and pulled from it a thin, belligerent man, whom he chucked onto the ground kicking and screaming as if he didn’t weigh anything at all. Not finished, the blond giant leaned right back in and came out with a woman, whom he threw over a shoulder and dumped a few steps away, where she lay among the pine needles, silently gathering herself.

Byrnes slid his eyes to the second SUV, of which only the hood was visible. His worry had shifted from himself to the poor wretches fifty feet away. Above the pained whimpering, he heard more voices—economical, cultured, at ease.

Konstantin Kirov appeared, dressed in a charcoal suit, a topcoat tossed over his shoulders in the manner of an Italian aristocrat to ward off the coming rain. Beside him walked a slim, dark-skinned man sporting a traffic cop’s mustache and wearing a grimy houndstooth jacket. Byrnes caught the eyes—the steady, soulless gaze—and recognized the type if not the man. He was the muscle.

Kirov and his colleague took up position fifteen yards in front of Byrnes, their backs turned toward him. They stood that way for a minute or so, taut, motionless, two general officers waiting for their troops to pass in review. Another man stumbled into sight, clothes torn, nose bloodied, followed by the big-boned clone who’d shoved him.

Kirov addressed the three unfortunates in a formal voice, and Byrnes was able to pick out a phrase here and there.
“Sorry to have disturbed you.” “Over quickly.” “Tell the truth. You have nothing to fear.”
And finally, an absurdly polite,
“Spaseeba bolshoi.”
Thank you very much. As if these people hadn’t been dragged from their homes or offices and driven to a deserted army outpost two hours outside of Moscow to answer to Kirov for their offenses, real or alleged.

Kirov ambled out of sight, and his partner took over. Immediately, the atmosphere changed, and Byrnes knew the exaggerated politeness had been for show. He had a feeling something terrible was about to happen. It was as if nature knew it, too. The soft breeze had stopped altogether. The birds ceased their incessant chatter. An uneasy stillness reigned.

“You!” shouted Kirov’s friend. Byrnes pegged him as an ethnic tribesman, the kind of tough, battle-hardened man you saw on television fighting for his country against the Iraqis or the Slavs or the Russians. From his coloring, Byrnes guessed he was a Chechen.

“Name,” he called.

The first man in line said, “Vyasovsky. Rem Vyasovsky.”

“You are a thief?”

“No.”

“A spy?”

Again, “No.”

“You steal papers and give them to the police?”

The man pulled his jacket tight around him. “Of course not,” he answered defiantly. “I am a clerk. This is a misunderstanding. If you want my job, you can have it. Fifty dollars a week is not enough for—”

The Chechen advanced three paces and clubbed the man viciously in the head with a ball-peen hammer. The man collapsed without a sound. The woman next to him screamed, and kept on screaming as the Chechen fell to a knee and hit him again and again with the hammer.

“Christ Almighty,” murmured Byrnes, something inside him twisting in grief and bewilderment. Somehow he guessed what it was all about, that this was a show for his behalf. Slumping to the ground, he buried his face in the crook of his knees, covering his ears with his hands. Yet, he had to listen. To bear witness. To accord Kirov’s victims a last measure of respect.

“Name.”

“Ludmilla Kovacs.”

“Position?”

“I am a secretary at Mercury Broadband. I work in the finance department for Mr. Kropotkin.”

“Do you know Detective Vassily Skulpin?”

“I do not.”

“Are you stealing papers from Mercury to give to Prosecutor General Baranov?”

“No.” The screams were gone. In their place came crisp emotionless answers. The dialogue went on for some time, and it seemed like the Chechen was pleased with her, that she would not suffer her fellow worker’s fate. Then came the horrible thud, the rushed outflow of breath, the slack, undignified thump of the body as it fell to the ground. The blows continued, merciless and mundane, and Byrnes could hear the Chechen’s labored, rhythmic breathing above them, greedy, excited, ambitious.

“A ghastly business.”

Byrnes jumped at the voice. Looking up, he saw Konstantin Kirov standing at the back of the shed. He was smoking one of his black cigarettes, and he looked pale and unsteady.

“A legal matter,” Kirov explained. “Someone has been slipping information out of our offices, giving them to individuals unfriendly to the cause. We’re adjudicating the matter in-house.”

“Your questioning methods are very efficient.”

“They are hardly my methods, but, yes, they are efficient. We can’t be certain which of the three stole the information, only that it was one of them. People are so adept at lying these days.”

“So you kill them all,” said Byrnes without irony. “Clever.”

Kirov paid the remark no heed and went on smoking. “Would it surprise you to know that I was once in a position similar to yours? Mr. Dashamirov recruited me in the same manner. More roughly, actually. He put a bullet in my best friend’s head, then asked if I wanted the same.”

“Is that why I’m here? For recruitment?”

“We’re long past recruitment. ‘Retirement’ might be a more appropriate word.”

Again, Byrnes was left to wonder why the deal hadn’t been canceled. He was certain Jett had understood his message. He’d heard it in his voice. It came to him that Gavallan had to have a reason not to have canceled the deal, and that he, Grafton Byrnes, might be it. He looked over his shoulder. The woman, Kovacs, lay motionless in the dirt, her blond hair matted with blood. He knew what lay in store, if not today, then soon.

“Doing business in this country’s so damned difficult,” Kirov complained, dropping his cigarette to the ground, grinding it with the tip of his shoe. “You think I
want
to be Mr. Dashamirov’s partner? I have no choice. What do you think would happen if I gave up? Would Mercury exist? No. Two million legitimate subscribers would lose their connection to the world. Thousands of intelligent men and women would be out of a job. And Russia? What about it? Have you thought what might happen to my country if I threw in the towel just because of Mr. Dashamirov’s unsavory methods? Would my country have independent television? Unbiased journalism? The answer is no. It is a question of priorities. Of recognizing what is achievable and doing the necessary to see it through. Of rolling up your sleeves and getting a little dirty in the kitchen.”

“Of the greater good?” Byrnes offered.

“Yes, damn it, the greater . . .” Kirov stopped mid-sentence. His eyes burned with a fervor, an inner fire Byrnes had never seen. More than ever he looked like a crazed monk. “It is too bad you will not see it come to pass.”

The whip-crack explosion of three heavy-caliber bullets fired in close succession snapped Byrnes to attention. Glancing over his shoulder, he made out Dashamirov holstering a pistol as he stepped over the corpses. The coup de grace had been administered. Kirov’s spy was no longer.

Grafton Byrnes watched Kirov rejoin his partner. After a few words, the two disappeared from sight. An engine fired and one of the vehicles departed. Sickened, Byrnes wondered why he was still alive. The answer came at once.
He still needs you.

Time passed in strange fits and spurts, and Byrnes knew his fever was worsening. He sat and watched as one after another the corpses were picked up and carried to the stone sump house across the compound. After a time, he heard the muted, regular fall of an ax. Smoke began to course from the chimney. The scent reached him, and he retched.

Sometime later, the second Suburban drove away.

It was night when the van carrying his food arrived. A steady rain pattered the roof, sliding with ease between the irregular birch boughs and making the floor a muddy hell.

Curled into a ball, Byrnes lay in a corner, moaning. As his jailer opened the door, Byrnes moaned louder. “Doctor,” he said several times. The jailer set the mess tin on the ground and relocked the padlock with nary a second’s hesitation. But Byrnes was sure he’d heard the words, sure he’d noticed him. In the morning when he returned, he would find the prisoner in a similar position. And the next evening, too.

By then, Byrnes would be ready.