Chasing the Storm (15 page)

Chapter 14

The Resort

Back at the
hotel, Marin wasn’t lurking in the lobby as he usually was. Rygg glanced around, then shrugged and went up to his room. He took a bath and read another chapter of
Anna Karenina
, then got out and dressed slowly. Two o’clock came and went with no one arriving to collect his rubbish. He ordered some coffee and sat on the balcony. The book was on his lap, but he wasn’t reading, just staring out at the passing crowds and the Moscow mix of BMWs and crappy Ladas.

A movement in a window across the way caught his eye, and he looked up. White lace curtains were drawn almost the whole way across the window, leaving just a smear of darkness down the center. And in the smear was a little sickle-shaped sparkle, which vanished as soon as it appeared: the glint of light reflected off glass. A lens? Someone was watching him. He glanced at his watch. Three o’clock. He was starting to feel uneasy, the little tickle that had been with him since they landed in Moscow now grown to fingers clutching his gut. Okay, what now? He wished Marin had stuck around, even in his Alex guise.

He didn’t feel that alarmed – it was full daylight, after all: what were they going to do? But he thought he should maybe signal that something had happened.
If you feel in any danger
, Marin had said. I’ll wait half an hour, he thought. But half an hour passed, and still no knock. So he put on his shoes and went out. In the elevator, he turned the latch of the briefcase in, toward his thigh. He walked into the lobby. Marin was still nowhere to be seen, so he passed through the revolving doors into the street.

The sun was cool, and the canted row of flags above the entrance cast writhing purple shadows on the sidewalk. He stood for a moment outside the hotel, turning this way and that to ensure that every angle got a good view of his turned-in briefcase. Then he set off diagonally across the street to a café on the far side, swinging the briefcase perhaps a little more widely than he normally would. He ordered a beer and drank it standing up, still holding the briefcase and watching the passersby. Nothing unusual. Then a girl went by and glanced in at him. She was wearing a kerchief and huge glamour-mag glasses, but he recognized her plump cheeks. It was Valentina, the girl from the dacha, and he was sure she’d seen the briefcase. Relieved, he drank down his beer, wiped the foam from his lips, and sallied out, heading back to the hotel.

In the lobby, he asked at the reception for his guide. “Little guy, round glasses, bit of a beard.” He held his hand up at shoulder height. “About so tall. You seen me with him, I’m sure.” The receptionist shook his head, looking down at his ledger, and Rygg was suddenly anxious again. He looked back at the revolving door. A figure was standing in the well of the door across the street, but the panes of glass contorted the shape so it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman.

“All right, thanks,” he said to the receptionist and walked toward the elevator. Halfway there, he made a sudden turn, entering a hallway to his right. He glanced back. No one. He ran, fast, landing on the sides of his feet so he made as little sound on the carpet as possible, and rounded the next turn. Stopping, he looked around quickly. The next door was the men’s toilet. On the wall beside the door hung a painted portrait of a full-lipped woman in décolletage. The frame was a thick, gilt contraption. He dashed up to the portrait, stood on tiptoe, and placed the glasses case on top of the frame. Then he entered the toilets.

As soon as he’d locked the door of the stall, the door to the toilets opened. He heard someone taking a piss, and then washing his hands. Rygg flushed and went out. The man was still washing his hands: tall, with smoothly brushed hair and a gray suit. It might have been the figure across the street; Rygg couldn’t be sure. The man didn’t look at him, but waited until Rygg was heading to the door before turning off the tap. They walked down the hallway together, the man a dozen paces behind. Rygg didn’t look behind him, though he felt the man’s stare on his back like the heat of a flame.

In the lobby, he stopped by a bank of brochures and leafed through one. Where the fuck was Marin? He couldn’t just hang out in the lobby forever, and he didn’t want to go back out into the streets, in case the watchers lost track of him
. I’ll head up to my room
, he thought.
I’ll just wait there, order room service if I need to. Maybe not the best solution, but at any rate, Marin’s people will know where I am
.

He waited until someone came down in the elevator, then walked swiftly in through the open doors. The doors were almost shut when a hand snuck between them. Rygg leaned against the “close doors” button, but the hand slowly pried the doors apart and the man from the bathroom stepped into the elevator. He nodded at Rygg and they stood side by side facing the lobby as the doors shut.

Rygg’s room was on the fourth floor. The man pressed the button for the seventh floor. He remembered the voice of his hand-to-hand combat instructor:
You will always have a weapon. Stay calm, stay relaxed, but strike without warning
. When the elevator stopped at the fourth floor, Rygg stepped forward, but the man put an arm out, across his chest. “Please accompany me,” he said and smiled at Rygg. Rygg smiled back. Then, with all his might, he swung the briefcase up into the man’s nose, simultaneously elbowing him in the gut. The man sank to his knees and, as a grand finale, Rygg stomped him in the face with his right heel. Seconds later, Rygg was off and running. The man was yelling something. Glancing back, Rygg saw his torso sandwiched between the closing elevator doors. He was bearded in blood, and was shouting into a cell phone that he held up to his bleeding mouth.

Rygg took the stairs, bounding down them four and five at a time, swinging around the landings with one hand on the guard rail. He burst out into the lobby and sprinted for the doors. An elderly, heavily made-up woman was just entering from the outside. Hurling himself into his quadrant, Rygg shoved at the glass. He heard the old woman being expelled into the lobby and clatter to the ground, and hoped she was all right.

He set off running – it didn’t matter where. He just wanted to get as far away as possible. He had a stitch in his side, and the briefcase forced him to run with a lopsided, staggering motion. The recent beer sloshed around in his belly. He ran across the street, amid the sound of horns and screeching tires, then across a square, down an alley, and across another street. The stitch had grown worse and he slowed to a fast walk. Keep moving, he told himself. Just keep moving.

A silver BMW slid alongside him, halting just in front of him. The door opened. He was about to veer away when he saw a girl’s face peer back at him. It was Valentina. She took off her huge glasses and beckoned. “Come quickly,” she said.

“Oh, thank God,” said Rygg. He trotted up to the car. Valentina slid over and he toppled onto the back seat beside her. She reached across him and pulled the door shut, and he felt the car pull smoothly away. Leaned back, eyes shut, he tried to quiet his breathing.

When he had his heartbeat down to a patter rather than a drum roll and the agony in his side had begun to abate, he opened his eyes and looked at Valentina. She smiled at him and laid a hand on his thigh. “We are happy to have you with us, Mr. Rygg,” she said. And from the front seat beside the driver, a man peered around. “Yes. You are welcome, Mr. Rygg.” The man’s English was flawless. Even within the shadowed interior, Rygg noticed that he had very green eyes.

May 8

After a week in the hold, Dmitri was better. Still weak, but the antibiotic had relieved the pain in his groin, and his urine was clear. Ilya came to help him back to his room, and could not quell his shock. “I look bad, don’t I?” Dmitri asked.

“No, no. You look good, you look fine. Don’t worry. You lost a bit of weight, that’s all. But we’ll soon put it back on you. I’ll make you a special rice pudding. If the masters will allow it, of course.” He peered across to the commando supporting Dmitri on the other side. “Is it all right, sir?”

“Shut up,” the commando said. “You talk too much.”

But Ilya must have wheedled his way into the confidences of one of the commandos, because that evening, when he arrived with a bowl of thin noodle soup, there was also a little covered container of rice pudding. “Don’t tell anyone,” Ilya said. “It’s special. Just for you, little Dmitri, okay?”

It took Dmitri a long time to eat the soup and the pudding. Ilya sat by him. “Take it slowly, that’s right,” he said. Dmitri gave a wan smile. “I feel like an old man,” he told Ilya. “I’m only nineteen and I feel like I’m seventy.”

“You’ll be better. This recipe is from my mother. She used to give this to me when I was sick and it always made me better.”

The commando who had brought Ilya seemed to trust him. He poked his head around the door and told Ilya to come back to the galley when he was through. Ilya nodded.

Quickly, in a whisper barely audible over the throb of the engines, and with his mouth concealed by the bowl, Dmitri told Ilya the outlines of Vaslav’s story: the elite prisoner Stoy, the training of the Siberian prisoners, the promise of a drug haul, and the discovery that the hold contained nothing but machinery. “Ludo was right,” Dmitri said. “He told me he could smell if something was up, and he said this wasn’t a drug run. I wasn’t sure if I believed him.”

Ilya, for once, was speechless. He shook his head repeatedly. Finally he replied. “Machinery? What kind of machinery?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“And why are we taking it into the middle of the Atlantic?”

And again Dmitri had to shake his head.

May 9

Rygg immediately tried to open the door, intending to just throw himself onto the street, but the driver must have hit the locks. Turning back to Valentina, Rygg found himself facing the muzzle of a little pistol. She was sitting as far away from him as possible, one foot up on the seat between them, and she held the pistol in both hands. It looked like a toy.

“If you try to attack me, Mr. Rygg, I will shoot you in the testicles,” she said. He had no reason to doubt her either. She had an icy expression, one drained of all warmth.

“
Jævla drittkjærring
! Fuck you!”

She laughed merrily.

The green-eyed man spoke. “So we met again, my friend. Unfortunately, I don’t think I introduced myself properly the last time we met. My name is Fydot Sokolov. I am the deputy ambassador in Moscow’s London embassy now. Valentina you have already met.”

“Where’s Marko?” Rygg inquired.

“Mr. Marin and Miss Lorincozová were rounded up this afternoon. As well as the traitors Oleg and Yonas and Mikhail, whom you met at the dacha. It’s finished, as you can see, Mr. Rygg. It’s all over.”

“And what are you doing here?” He was very angry. At Marin, at Lena, at Valentina, at himself. Keep playing dumb, he told himself. For as long as you can.

“I am here to see you, of course.”

“And how the fuck did you know I was here?”

“Ah. An excellent question. You did very well, covering your tracks, you and Marko Marin. Not surprising. You have always been good at covering your tracks, Rygg. Until I heard about your involvement with Marin and his criminal friends, I actually thought you were dead. I heard rumors about a burning yacht in the Mediterranean, you know.” Sokolov laughed as if someone had just told him a joke.

“Screw you!” Rygg said furiously.

“That’s not a very polite way to address an old friend, Torgrim, so please calm down. I just want to ask you some questions. You see, we can’t quite figure out how you uncovered certain elements. But to answer your question: it was, of course, Ann Devonshire who led us to you. We’d been keeping tabs on her friend Millicent Fisher in the British Ministry of Defense. After you so rudely abandoned Miss Devonshire on Paros, she called up Miss Fisher and poured out her soul. Well, of course we were listening, and soon gathered the whole story. It must have been rather enjoyable, the Paros mission. Shame it had to lead to this messy ending.”

“And this bitch?” He jerked a thumb at the muzzle of the gun.

“Valentina only recently joined Mr. Marin’s organization, if you can call it that. She is a girlfriend to Yonas. Well, a ‘girlfriend’, as you were a ‘boyfriend’ to Miss Devonshire. Yonas is, however, rather less obese.”

“Fuck you, Sokolov. Ann Devonshire is a better person than you’ll ever be.”

“I appreciate the sentiment.”

“And where are we going now?”

“We are on our way to a little – how shall we call it – a little resort where you can relax. We will be having some conversations. And, if all goes well, you should be on your way back to Oslo within a day or two.”

“Will Marko be there?”

“Mr. Marin is already there. But you will not see him, I’m afraid. He has a private suite.” Sokolov chuckled a little at this.

Rygg had assumed that ‘resort’ was a euphemism, but it was, in a sense, the truth. After an hour or so, they entered a vast complex of lawns gone to seed and shaggy flowerbeds and dozens of gray buildings, most with smashed windows. Sokolov turned to him. “This was once a spa, with
banya
s, which are like saunas. The water, it turned out, was not so healthy, after a spillage of nuclear waste nearby. It is now derelict, as you see, and welcomes only select visitors. VIPs such as yourself, Mr. Rygg.”

They got out of the car, and Rygg followed Sokolov into one of the buildings. Valentina was behind him. He thought about just taking off running, but knew he’d be shot in a second. And anyway, he didn’t feel his lungs could take another run. Not just yet. Then he toyed with pulling the knife from the briefcase handle, but knew that was a death sentence. He might be able to stab one or the other of his captors, but he wouldn’t have long to live after that.

Inside the building, it was damp and musty. The ceiling dripped and the roots of some plant hung from a crack like rotting lace. They walked through pools of water on the raw concrete floor. He spotted a cluster of mushrooms in a corner and wondered distractedly whether they were edible. At one point a bird clattered up in front of Sokolov, flapping through a window.