Chapter 35

Georgy Sokolov stood in the darkened doorway of the grand salon that opened out to the pool. He gazed at the crease of sky against sea in the distance, a contrast of black against black, disturbed only by the lights of a cruise ship flickering in the vast void beyond. In a few hours the sun would begin to outline the hill behind him, but for now it truly was the darkest before the dawn.

The massive room was obscured in shadow, all the lights having been extinguished hours ago. Yesterday had been long and tedious, beginning with the disappearance of the girl and the death of one of the guards—a fitting punishment for allowing a fourteen-year-old to outwit him and flee, less than a week after the last one had taken her own life. The fool had just about cost Sokolov his prize doll, whose reserve bid had just increased to a million-five.

Fortunately, the padre at the church had turned her over to Nataliya, and a generous donation in the name of Catedral la Santa Lucía des Cubells would cause him to forget the brief encounter.

Almost as troubling was the news that Alessandro Bortolotti’s attempted revolution had been put down by a joint force of military and local security agencies. According to reporters on the scene, over a thousand nationalist revolutionaries had conspired to attack and kill as many G20 leaders as possible, and might have succeeded had it not been for a counter-intelligence operation that had infiltrated Il Duce’s ultra-right-wing movement. News reports stated that a confidential informant had provided invaluable information of the plot, and the scheme had been quelled almost before it began. Hundreds of insurrectionists had been arrested, troops had been mobilized, the city was under curfew, and Bortolotti himself had plunged to his death.

Such irony, Sokolov thought: the fall of ViValDi.

It almost would have been comical, had he not secretly invested millions of dollars he couldn’t afford into Bortolotti’s jingoistic crusade of conspiracy and violence. Such sweet payback it would have been, watching the crooked globalists who had stripped him of his assets being tortured and killed in a mass execution witnessed by billions of people around the world.

Such a beautiful outcome, however, was not to be. The fates had manipulated destiny and concocted a different result, hence the increased importance of the coming auction, the scrappy American shlyukha in the basement being the ultimate payout.

“Mr. Sokolov.”

The abrupt voice behind him caused him to wheel around, his hand reaching inside his robe for a gun that wasn’t there. He’d left it upstairs when he’d retreated to bed earlier, and had failed to bring it with him when tonight’s bout of insomnia hit. He spotted a figure standing in the doorway that led down a long hallway to the villa’s luxurious guest wing, said, “Kto ty?” in Russian. Who are you?

A man emerged from the shadows, hands out to his side to demonstrate he was not a threat. “I apologize for startling you,” he said in English, with an American accent. “I couldn’t sleep. Jet lag from the flight over. Name’s Thomas Knox, from Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

“Mr. Knox…good to see you,” Sokolov greeted him. Wary, wondering why the guy was up and exploring the house at such an early hour—or late, depending on one’s nocturnal habits. “Please make yourself home. There’s a particularly smooth eighteen-year-old Macallan in the library, if you’d like a nightcap.”

“Eighteen years…old enough to know better,” the man who called himself Knox replied.

“Aren’t we all,” the Russian replied, the glint in his eyes indicating understood the joke.

Knox chuckled, allowing an anxious second or two to pass before asking, “How did they miss this place, when they seized everything else of yours?”

It wasn’t a question Sokolov was expecting, and for a brief moment he didn’t recall inviting anyone from Tulsa to attend the auction—not online, and certainly not in person. This caused him to wonder, just for a fleeting second, if this visitor from America was more than he represented himself to be.

“Not mine,” he said. “Belongs to friend of friend.”

“It’s good to have the right friends,” Knox replied, with a nod. “And I apologize if I awakened you with my insomnia. Time to go to bed.”

“Relax and enjoy. See you tomorrow by pool.”

“I’m afraid I forgot to pack my swim trunks.”

“Is optional,” Sokolov told him with a wink. “Night-night.”

Rōnin Phythian gripped the Russian’s shoulder in a show of camaraderie, then turned and walked back outside to the expansive stone terrazzo.

He’d found the door wide open when he’d arrived a few hours ago, in search of a place to grab a little sleep after his nonstop flight from Paris. The cut-rate airline boasted no frills, but the flight attendant had managed to produce a split of passable Bordeaux that he’d made last from wheels-up to touchdown. He’d then mentally cajoled a cab driver to take him on what turned out to be a bumpy journey up to the villa, plenty of sharp curves and rocky outcroppings that caused the man behind the wheel to ride the brakes and curse a lot.

After being dropped off outside the locked gate, Phythian had worked his way around the eight-foot stone wall to the jagged rocks at the perimeter of the estate. After satisfying himself that there were no surveillance cameras or motion sensors, he slowly picked his way through scrub and cacti at the edge of the cliff. He had only the stars above and a few solar-powered patio lights to guide him, and his eyes easily adjusted to the darkness as he moved in near-silence. Eventually he’d come to the pool, where a few guests were still milling about, after-dinner drinks or glowing blunts in hand, enjoying the remnants of the night. Rather than wait them out, he simply elicited a mental push that gently induced them to retire early, and go to their rooms.

Once they were all gone and the house lights dimmed, he’d found a particularly comfortable chaise lounge that reminded him of the evenings he would sleep under the stars on his elevated deck, only the glow from the Milky Way above disrupting the darkness that stretched out as far as his eyes could take him. He’d already run a quick mental assessment of the villa: sixteen people on the premises, thirteen men and three women, including Sokolov and his lover, a former prostitute named Nataliya. This didn’t include the two armed guards, assigned to protect a valuable asset that was stashed somewhere in the bowels of the building.

Initially, Phythian had come here for one reason only: to terminate the Russian oligarch who had put the hit out on Gabrielle Lamoines, but that was before he’d entered the grounds and realized something was not right about this place. After spending just five minutes inside the confines of the opulent residence, he was convinced that no one was here for virtuous purposes. All of them were possessed of black hearts and Cimmerian souls, except for one person—man or woman he couldn’t yet determine—whose mind was so fogged by medications, that Phythian had no idea where he or she might be.

One thing was certain: nasty shit was about to go down in this den of inequity—something evil that superseded his mission to execute Sokolov, and he vowed to get to the core of it.

Abigail Evans sensed a shift in the air, much the way animals can feel the barometric pressure drop in advance of a storm, or maybe the infinitesimal slip of a fault line just before an earthquake.

The room was black as ebony, so she couldn’t see a thing. Her wrists and ankles—just about everything—were bound to the rails of her bed, so she had nothing to touch. The juice that was dripping through the tube and into her neck kept pain at bay and her brain in a stupefied waltz that just swept her around and around in a dreamless state of paralysis.

Anesthetized as she was, she felt a cloying sense that things in this wretched place were about to change.

She’d seized upon a chance to escape from all this, and had come close…which, as her dad would say, counts only with horseshoes and hand grenades. She could hear the words now, his voice warm and attentive and rich, never condescending or mansplaining. Even when he’d found her making out with Jagger in the garage a week before they’d flown to Rome, and he’d said, “You’re too young to be dating someone his age.”

Abby wished she could flip a time switch and get a re-do. If she could reverse her life to three days ago, close her eyes and click her slippers together, she could be back in a black-and-white world that existed before she’d been tossed into this Technicolor nightmare.

That was not a possibility; the total deprivation of all her senses was sucking any fragment of resolve from her body, and the dispiriting realization of the future that lay ahead was causing her to lose all hope. Never before in her entire life had she felt so empty, so depressed to the point of sheer desolation and sorrow.

All she wanted was to just curl up and die.