She was sure the storm had kept her alive for a few hours more. They had been talking, almost normally, and she had asked Kirill about his life, especially his childhood, which, in her experience, was a sure way of inducing someone to talk. Kirill was reluctant at first but then she asked about his mother and he began to loosen up, however not before observing, with his usual casual brutality, that he knew she was only trying to make herself seem more human to him and therefore less easy to kill.
‘No,’ she fired back, ‘I am trying to make you more human, Kirill.’
They had lived on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Kirill was the eldest of three. His father was mostly absent then vanished for good when he was thirteen. His mother was pretty but, unlike many of the women in the huge apartment blocks around them, she didn’t seek to supplement the family’s income by selling herself, although she had many offers. She had worked in a government office and was of an austere nature that became cold and punitive as the years went by. Kirill’s youth was spent outside the apartment with young thugs on the street. Reading between the lines, Anastasia guessed he hadn’t been a particularly impressive boy to look at and that he had learned to survive with brains as well as cunning, qualities that after a few brushes with the law eventually recommended him to a nameless secret agency. The pleasure of Kirill’s boyhood was in outsmarting his peers, seeing the strong boys bend unwittingly to his will, manipulating everyone around him. It became a game at which he excelled. And of course, Kirill told her with some pride, he had always known that he was destined for great things, which his contemporaries didn’t have the capacity to imagine, let alone achieve.
They talked on, and he gave her brandy and she hinted that sex with him was not out of the question, but he curled his lip and said she looked like a diseased hooker and, besides, she smelled like a pig.
He kept checking his phone while stamping about on the concrete. Around midnight, he received the text he had been expecting and issued orders to two men in parkas who had been hanging around in the dark smoking. He became distant and removed himself from her. Then the rain came and the wind tore through the massive structures around them. Kirill ordered the men to break the padlocks on a sliding steel door to the building nearest them. They cut the ties that bound her leg, marched her inside and at the entrance made a fire out of old tables and chairs, for it was clear the storm was going to last some time. Trying to rekindle the conversation, she asked if he might get into trouble breaking into a state facility, and Kirill replied, ‘I am the state.’
The rain eased off a couple of hours later. The fire was put out and the embers kicked from the doorway to fizzle in the water still gushing from the buildings. No one said anything. They dragged her from the shelter and she began to weep. They went about three hundred metres into the trees, where arc lights had been set up around a pit. She struggled to escape but the men held her fast and placed her at the side of a deep grave that had been dug with shovels which now lay on a mound of earth ready to fill the hole. She was shaking and weeping and pleading with them. Kirill took out a gun and held it to her head.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Now I have better idea.’ And he brought out his phone and gave it to one of the men with some instructions. ‘We show Samson how you die,’ he said.
The only things Anastasia was now aware of was her utter disbelief that this was happening and an awful, crushing sorrow. She was barely conscious of Kirill fussing about the angle of the camera shot and insisting that only his hand must be in the frame. He kept going over to the man to look at the screen and check for himself that he would be able to see Samson’s face when he made the call on FaceTime. Finally, he was satisfied and ordered the man to dial the number.
Harland’s Volvo and Samson’s pick-up had pulled up on a grassy track that led to Johannes’s cabin. The ground was sodden and they decided not to push their luck by parking right by the cabin, because Harland said there was every chance they would get stuck. Beyond the cabin, they heard the roar of a river in full spate; water was everywhere. Vuk threaded his way between large pools with a torch to break into the cabin while Samson got Crane out and stood him against the pick-up with a gun to his chest.
Samson’s phone sounded with the FaceTime ringtone, but he didn’t immediately register it. He pulled the phone awkwardly out of his pocket with his left hand, pressed to answer and was bringing it up to his face when he saw the pathetic image of Anastasia with a gun at the back of her head.
A voice said, ‘Now you must say goodbye, Anastasia.’ For a second, Samson didn’t react. ‘Say goodbye to lover!’ demanded the voice.
‘Wait!’ shouted Samson. He dragged Crane into the headlights, forced him to the ground and held the gun to his temple in front of the phone. Harland didn’t see what was happening but Naji understood straight away and rushed over to take the phone from Samson.
Samson yanked Crane’s head up. ‘You know who this is. If you harm her, I will execute this man.’ He thrust the gun into Crane’s eye and said, ‘Talk!’
Crane looked into the camera and said, ‘He will kill me.’ Then he mumbled something in Russian.
‘Speak English,’ Samson ordered.
He placed himself in the frame with Crane and looked at the phone. ‘Get her out of the damn mud! Pick her up! Help her up!’
Nothing happened for a few seconds then two pairs of hands seized Anastasia under her arms and lifted her from her kneeling position in the mud. ‘Now, keep the phone trained on her so I know she’s all right. And show yourself or I will kill him. Now!’
A man wearing a hat and a cravat appeared next to Anastasia and raised a gun to her head.
Samson allowed himself no emotion. He had to control the situation. ‘If you do everything I say, Chumak, or Crane, or whatever you call this bastard, may live. Now, give her something to cover herself – she’s cold.’ The face vanished. And someone put a jacket around her shoulders. ‘Show her my face and let her hear what I say. One false move and I will kill this man.’
Anastasia stared blankly at the phone. She looked as though she hadn’t eaten for days. Her face was drained of life, her lower lip trembled and her eyes did not focus, but she began to free herself from the dread and, in a few seconds, recognition dawned. ‘Is that you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, it’s me. I want you to keep it together and we’ll get through this.’
‘I’m here,’ she said. What that meant to him was that the woman who had fought so hard to survive was still there.
‘I want to speak to the man with you,’ Samson said.
‘What do you want?’ asked Anastasia’s executioner.
‘You will give her food and warm clothing. That is to happen now. Any divergence from my instructions and I will kill Crane. You are in Russia. We are in Estonia. We will exchange Crane for Anastasia at the border.’
Crane said something rapidly in Russian. Samson cuffed him on the side of the face. ‘What did he say?’ he shouted to Harland, a fluent Russian-speaker.
‘The iPad has to be included in the swap,’ replied Harland.
‘We want device also. No device, no deal,’ added the Russian in the hat, who had now passed out of the frame.
‘Okay,’ said Samson. ‘Where on the border?’
‘Narva,’ suggested Harland. ‘The bridge at Narva.’
‘You hear that? The bridge at Narva in two hours.’
‘Two bridges at Narva – we will go to bridge for trains.’
‘Right, the rail bridge at Narva,’ said Samson. Harland nodded.
‘Now you’re going to give me a number and I will call you to arrange the exchange. If you don’t text me, he dies.’
‘Then beautiful girlfriend dies also.’
‘Text me the number,’ said Samson.
‘Three hours. You bring my friend and his device. Then we talk,’ said the Russian.
‘Two and a half hours – a hundred and fifty minutes. If I don’t have Anastasia alive with me on the Estonian side of the border by that time, I will execute this man and throw his body into the river.’ He hung up and, a few seconds later, a text message arrived with a number.
It was on.
Samson moved quickly to put Crane in the pick-up and was joined by Vuk, who had returned to fetch a tyre iron to break into the shed. As they took Crane to the open rear door, Samson said in his ear, ‘That was dumb, to mention the iPad. Now we know how important it is to you. If things go wrong and I have to kill you, I get to walk away with valuable material. British intelligence will be grateful.’
Crane looked up as they bundled him into the back seat. ‘You’ll never win. The world is …’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Samson, slamming the door shut before he could finish. He went round to stand by Harland, who was looking out into the night. A pair of headlights was moving slowly along the road they’d taken from the motorway and which passed the end of the track. They turned off the lights of the pick-up and the Volvo and watched. The vehicle paused at the junction with the track then continued along the road until the lights vanished to the south. ‘Could be someone wondering about Johannes’s place, but I’m not confident of that,’ said Harland. ‘We need to recce the bridge at Narva as soon as we can. They may call for help on this side of the border, which will be inconvenient, to say the least. This isn’t going to be easy.’
Samson called out to Naji, who was standing in the same spot, engrossed in his phone. He stirred and came over, holding the phone up to show Samson that the CNN news site was leading with a story headlined, JAILED BILLIONAIRE’S WIFE KIDNAPPED IN ITALY. The piece was short and had little information but carried a quotation from the State Department which confirmed that State officials were coordinating efforts with the Italian authorities to find Mrs Hisami.
Then Naji handed Samson his own phone. ‘Look, the kidnapper!’
While holding the phone up to Samson and Crane during the FaceTime exchange, he had had the presence of mind to take video grabs and had captured two images of the Russian with Anastasia in the frame as well as a series of close-ups of the man on his own.
Samson laid a hand across his shoulder. ‘That’s great, Naji! We can probably identify the bastard. He’s almost certainly on a database somewhere.’
He emailed an image of the Russian to Zillah Dee. ‘Can you ID this Russian hood?’
Robbed of the pleasure of killing her in front of Samson, Kirill replaced sadism with a display of high dudgeon and strode off up the incline towards the buildings to make several phone calls in Russian. She assumed he was consulting his masters about what to do with her but, judging by his gestures, he was also defending himself. That call to Samson would have to be explained to his superiors. She was cold and terrified, yet alert enough to recognise that the iPad was probably more important to Kirill and his friends than any single life, even that of the man whom Samson had taken hostage. This might just save her.
She stared down into the hole and, for the first time, she noticed that the pungent chemical smell she’d noticed clinging to the buildings was much sharper here. It occurred to her that the whole facility had been abandoned because of some sort of contamination.
She moved away, aiming a defiant look at the three men who, just minutes before, had been content to watch her murdered then fill her grave. The sudden reprieve seemed to embarrass them. They had written her off as good as dead but now she had acquired a little agency and they avoided meeting her eyes. She took a few more steps before one of them lazily waved a gun at her and she stopped. But when they weren’t paying attention a few seconds later she shuffled a few more steps. The further away she got from that stinking ditch, the better chance she had of surviving.
She knew her life depended on the outcome of Kirill’s calls. They seemed to take for ever, but at length he returned and made a scene about her not being ready for execution. She squared up to him. ‘How dare you treat me like this! How dare you!’ He grabbed her by her arm, but then the man who had waved the gun at her and also, she thought, had whispered to her in the truck that the journey would not take much longer, protested. From his tone, it was obvious he was telling him to let her be and wait for instructions. A ray of decency had shown itself – so rare in the men who, in the history of Eastern Europe, had executed hundreds of thousands of innocent people at the edge of hurriedly dug trenches like this. Tiny though the gesture was, it stayed Kirill’s hand and she remained rooted to the spot.
Eventually, a text pinged on Kirill’s phone and he walked off up the incline towards the buildings and the vehicles. She was saved! The men seemed relieved. One even took her arm to help her on the slippery ground, and when they arrived at the cars to find Kirill with a cheroot in his hand and his flask being shaken empty into his mouth, they quietly supported her next display of defiance. As she was manhandled towards the rear of one of the SUVs, she told Kirill that she would not be bundled into the boot. She demanded a seat in the back of the car.
He shook his head.
‘If you think about it for one moment, escape is the last thing on my mind. I need you like you need me, you fucking moron.’ She spat the words out.
The men around her understood quite enough English to find this highly amusing and, without asking Kirill’s permission, one of them steered her to the rear door and helped her into the seat, his eyes never leaving Kirill’s indignant face. If Kirill hadn’t lost all their respect when he was found locked in her room as fire ripped through the hunting lodge, he had with that business of trying to film her death. Besides being cruel and unnecessary, it was also a security risk. She read it in their faces and she knew they loathed him almost as much as she did.