Detonator (17 page)

Stefan’s picture had been taken from the shot I’d pinged on the wall of the green room. Everyone around him had been cropped, but you could still see the BG’s hand on his shoulder.

I felt myself relax a fraction; it was at least eighteen months out of date. His features had thinned out since then. His nose seemed sharper now, his cheekbones more pronounced, his eyes darker. And a trip to the mini-market on the ground floor, followed by a session upstairs, would help me make him even more difficult to recognize.

I ran through a few of the story links and found some footage of a hillside farm I recognized. A couple of big lads in dungarees were being interviewed by a French news crew. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but that wasn’t a problem. They were so fired up that they mimed the highlights of their recent experience – the fight, the theft of the ATV – vividly enough to leave no need for subtitles.

The piece was followed by an e-fit of the fucker who had ruined their day. Apart from the stubble and the head wound – which Claude or the artist had transposed from right to left – it didn’t look remotely like me. Or I hoped it didn’t. The shadowy figure staring at us from the screen looked like he’d be completely at home on the Planet of the Apes.

Neither of them would have pinged Stefan, and the authorities didn’t seem to have joined the dots between the gangfuck in the barn, the events further up the mountain and the chalet in Courchevel. I guessed they would at some point. I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

Next came an update on the investigation into last night’s fatality at a marina in Aix-les-Bains. The text for this one was in English. The police were looking for two men who had been seen entering the victim’s suite. There was no mention of a Brit in a green Polo.

I didn’t expect to find much on the Net about Lyubova Timis, and I was right. When you’ve had a child kidnapped and not quite ransomed, you didn’t advertise your wealth and your whereabouts in
Hello!
magazine. And Frank had always done his best to keep in the shadows, even when he was up to something legal. All I learnt was that she divided her time between Russia and Switzerland, and had once been an air stewardess.

I sparked up Google Earth to see what was on file for the chateau. The shots had been taken a couple of years ago, and told a slightly different story from the estate agent’s brochure: holes in the roof; a major damp problem in one wing; crumbling outbuildings; a lawn that hadn’t seen a mower for a while. But it gave me a heads-up on the layout.

I also scanned the surrounding area, on the lookout for approach routes, places I could safely leave the wagon, areas of dead and open ground, and to get a more detailed sense of the overall lie of the land.

I already knew Lyubova was no pushover. Now I needed to find out how well protected she was, whether there were points of vulnerability I could exploit, whether I’d have to go in or just wait for her to come out and do a spot of shopping.

I’d have to do a recce before deciding on my next move, but this was a good place to start. I zoomed in on the road that ran along the edge of Lake Konstanz and followed it up to Kreuzlingen and beyond. Before closing down I also checked out some of the mapping and picture-postcard imagery of the Swiss shore. If I had to lift her, I’d need somewhere quiet to read the ex-Mrs Timis her horoscope.

I steered Stefan down the escalator and on to the pharmacy section in the mini-market. I bought a hand towel – I couldn’t be arsed to go outside and get the one he had in his rucksack – a pair of barber’s scissors and a plastic bottle of overpriced hair dye. I’d stick with the hood or the baseball cap until Claude came up with a sharper e-fit, but I needed to treat Stefan to a makeover before the police techies realized that they should fire up the age-progression software on his photograph and bring it up to date.

The toilets were on the top floor of the mall, which suited me fine. It meant that nobody bothered to go up there unless they were desperate for a leak. I locked us inside the parent-and-baby room and lifted the boy on to the mat alongside the sink.

I switched on the mood lighting and the soothing music. I could still hear the occasional footstep and waffle in the corridor outside, but no one hammered on the door, desperate for a nappy change.

The two of us had the place to ourselves for long enough to turn him into a crewcut, peroxide-blond hipster. I managed not to turn myself or my kit the same colour, and took the polythene gloves, packaging, towel and hair trimmings away with us in the pharmacy bag.

He grinned when he checked out his new look in the mirror, and I spotted him admiring his reflection in the plate-glass window by the main exit, so I knew he was pleased with the result. It was blindingly obvious that Frank had never encouraged his boy to take a walk on the wild side. To set the seal on his new relationship with the world he asked me if he could borrow thirty francs and disappeared into a record store. He emerged almost immediately, waving a Pitbull CD.

The central post office in St Gallen was across the road from the main train station. There was plenty of glass for Stefan to admire himself in there too. I found a phone booth and placed a call to Moscow. Pasha picked up after three rings.

‘Mate, I’ve got a couple of names. Could you possibly run them through the system? The first is Zac Uran. Yup. U-R-A-N. I don’t know for certain, but he wears a ring with an Albanian double eagle. He’s the security chief of a construction company that Frank had a big slice of. Adler Gesellschaft. Based in St Gallen, Switzerland. If he wasn’t responsible for the death in Aix-les-Bains yesterday, he certainly had a ringside seat.

‘The second is Dijani. Adel Dijani. Same outfit. Head of logistics. Sounds Lebanese to me.’

I could almost hear Pasha’s pencil lead scratching its way across his notepad.

‘Any news on the other thing?’

‘The Crimea crisis is very complicated, Nick. I don’t need to tell you this. The battle lines have been redrawn. And it is very possible that Frank found himself on the wrong side of one. And you won’t be surprised to hear that the supreme leader does not like oligarchs to be confused about who is the boss.’

I didn’t need a lecture on the state of the former Soviet Union, so I asked him to zero in on any possible connections between Putin, Uran and Dijani, and I’d take it from there.

Then I thanked him, and said I’d call back at some point in the next thirty-six hours.

The hostel was heaving with kids and mums and dads who wanted to show them a fun time without paying a fortune for it. Stefan and I went into waffle mode as we approached the front desk and did all the stuff you don’t do if one of you is a kidnap victim and the other an abductor. That was stage two of hiding in plain sight.

I’d smuggled Stefan into the motel in Albertville because we were still uncomfortably close to the killing zone, but I couldn’t keep doing that. Hiding in the shadows was sometimes the best way to raise people’s suspicions, and the Swiss didn’t like bending the rules. Someone was bound to spot the kid at some point, and even if they just thought I was trying to avoid paying in full, they’d call in the local cops.

I asked the receptionist if they had a spare ground-floor room and Stefan swung into action. ‘He gets vertigo.’ He gave me a cheeky schoolboy grin. ‘Don’t you, Dad?’

She gave him the kind of smile that Lyubova wouldn’t have understood, and said we could have the last one going.

We checked in as Nick and Steven Saunders. I peeled off enough Swiss francs to cover a two-night stay and handed them over with our passports.

As she flicked through Stefan’s he moved closer to the counter. ‘Please don’t look at the photograph. Not cool.’ He pointed at me. ‘I blame him.’

She was loving this. Handed his passport back and barely glanced at mine.

Our ground-floor room was a twin. The window didn’t offer much of a view, but it opened fully, with a bit of encouragement, and was close enough to the nearest patch of cover to give us a chance of legging it if we got any unwelcome visitors.

‘ERV, Dad?’

I ran through our escape and evasion drills. They were boring as shit, but he seemed to enjoy them. We switched off the lights, checked the all-clear and slid out over the sill. Then we hugged the wall, staying under the shadow of the fire escape, and made our way to the corner of the building. From there we paralleled the edge of the car park, the far side of the lamps that ran along it, and disappeared into the trees.

I was hoping for a shed or a lean-to or a log pile, but we did better than that. Ten paces in there was a Native American camp with a joke totem pole and three tepees that looked like they’d been built especially for not very tall seven-year-olds. They were filled with blankets and cushions.

I told him to go inside the middle one and cover himself up. It worked a treat. I knocked three times on the wicker door frame, then three more. ‘Raskolnikov.’

He lifted the blanket so slowly I couldn’t see it move. Checked me out with one eye. Then we looped round behind the coppice and went back to the room.

The decor wasn’t quite as basic as it had been in Albertville, and the en-suite even had a bath. I told Stefan to get into it and give himself a good soak while I went off and did a bit of a recce. The swelling on his ankle had retreated but he still wasn’t going to break any sprinting records.

His expression changed again as I shut the window, drew the curtains and prepared to leave. He gave me the same look he’d worn on the way there. I chose to ignore it.

‘Do you know her BGs?’

He shook his head. ‘They came and went.’

‘How many does she have?’

‘Three. Perhaps four.’

‘Who else might be there? Does she have maids?’

‘I only know two of her maids. One was very kind to me. Natasha. She’s from Kiev.’ He brightened. ‘She taught me to swim. She loves to swim. I also like to swim, Nick. Very much.’

‘Yup, you told me. Any others?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Rula. She wasn’t kind at all.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if they came here to Switzerland.’

‘Do they usually live in?’

‘It’s possible … When the girls are there, maybe.’

‘Girls?’

‘My two sisters. Half-sisters.’

The pink and fluffy room in the chalet. I’d wondered who that belonged to.

‘They are in Moscow. Until the house is finished.’

I stuck the hair and saliva tell-tales in place before I left, in case the receptionist had been paying us more attention than she appeared to have done. I didn’t plan to be away for more than a couple of hours – long enough to get my bearings in the area immediately surrounding Lyubova’s hideaway – but precautions like that were never wasted.

On the way out of town I passed a bunch of dossers on a stretch of waste-ground, gathered around a flaming oil drum and sipping extra strong lager. I handed them a fistful of coins and bunged in the pharmacy bag with the empty peroxide bottle and the offcuts of Stefan’s hair. I hadn’t bothered to wipe down everything he’d touched in the motel and the hostel, but leaving a gift pack of his DNA lying around was asking for trouble.

The chateau commanded a chunk of high ground between St Gallen and Konstanz. It was surrounded by walls you couldn’t leap over, but enough of its floodlit façade was visible through the entrance to confirm that the estate agent’s brochure hadn’t needed to fuck around. One wing was covered with scaffolding and tarpaulin, but it still looked like something out of a fairy tale. You’d need a really good reason not to want to live there.

I was increasingly sure that Lyubova was the reason, and not only because of what Stefan had told me. When I’d originally thought of hiding him here, I’d reckoned a telephone call and a cup of tea would crack it. Now it was high on my list of hostile environments.

I slowed as I drove past, but didn’t stop immediately. Lights glowed in a number of the upstairs windows to my left. I took that as a good sign. However much you wanted to show off the place, I didn’t think you’d bother to leave them on if no one was home.

There was a patch of woodland to my right, split by a formal avenue that led down towards the lake. I guessed it must once have been part of the estate. The massive trees on either side of it looked like lindens. They might not have been, but they reminded me of the things that lined the main that ran towards the Brandenburg Gate. I’d had a few beers in the bars there when I was a young soldier stationed in Berlin.

I pulled up a couple of hundred further on and walked back, hood up, keeping to the shadows on the far side of the road. The CCTV cameras fixed on each side of the main gates told me to keep my distance, and the pair of Dobermanns that banged against their wrought-iron railings sent the same message, only louder. Someone yelled at them from behind the wall and I decided it was a good moment to fuck off back to the wagon. I was never at my best with furry animals that growled and bit.

I turned left at the first opportunity and circled the plot, looking out for a vantage-point I could employ in daylight without breaking cover. Unless something else presented itself after first light, I was either going to get eyes on the rear, from the top of the hill, or climb one of the lindens and recce it from the front.

I pinpointed the Adler HQ on my way back. It was a much simpler target. The security set-up was bound to be high-end, but those guys weren’t hiding from anybody. Lights blazed on every floor. Everything about the building yelled global domination. And there was a multi-storey car park on the opposite side of the street.

I drove up to the barrier and took a ticket. The Adler executives clearly put in the hours for their top-of-the-range Audis. It was well past the end of the working day, but at least half their marked spaces on the third level were still taken. I followed the arrows to the top, registering the CCTV set-up as I went, then worked my way down and out.

Stefan was channel-hopping between the rolling news and the Russian Premier League on the TV when I returned to the hostel. He hadn’t legged it to the ERV to do his Sitting Bull impression, so I assumed he hadn’t seen anything that put the shits up him, but I asked anyway.