The Hunted, page 40
The photos fell on the floor when he pulled the tapes out, and he let them lie there until he knew what this was about. He selected the first tape and inserted it into the cassette player on his desk, sat back into his desk chair, and sipped quickly from his vodka.
It whirred quietly for a moment before a petulant male voice he didn’t recognize said, “Who was it?”
“Just some idiot law enforcement administrator from America.” This would be Tatyana: no doubt about it. He reached over and turned up the volume.
“Oh, you’re screwing him, too?”
“You’re cute when you’re mad. Come on and screw me now.” A loud laugh. Definitely Tatyana’s throaty laugh.
“Don’t joke. I’m tired of sharing you.”
“You’re a fool. You’ve seen my boss. He’s bald and fat and not the least bit interesting. He’s so terrible in bed I have to pinch myself just to stay awake. He’s so disgusting, I become nauseated afterward. I’m only doing this for us, Sasha.”
“You’ve been saying that for years.”
“And it’s true. Listen, we’re moving in on a huge fortune right now. Billions, Sasha, billions. My cut will be hundreds of millions, and as soon as I have it, I’ll dump that old moron and quit my job. You and I will buy a big yacht and sail around the world. We’ll never be able to spend it all. We’ll die rich and happy.”
By then the chief of staff was choking and coughing violently. The vodka popped out his nostrils, dribbled out his mouth, and spilled down his double chin. He clutched his chest and thought he was having a heart attack.
He lurched from his chair and rushed to the cassette player. He punched stop, rewind, then listened again, and then repeated the sequence three more times.
He put the machine on pause and sat back and rubbed his temples. He felt the onset of a crushing brain-splitter. “Nauseated.” “Terrible in bed.” “Bald and fat, and not the least bit interesting.” The torrent of nasty words kept tumbling in his mind. The headache quickly progressed from a five to a ten on the Richter scale.
That bitch. That lying, deceitful, two-timing, impertinent bitch.
Settle down, he told himself. He actually voiced it, out loud in the big, empty room—relax, take a few deep breaths. Get a grip, for God’s sake. He walked over and refilled his glass with vodka, then sloppily filled a second and third glass; it never hurt to be on the safe side. He carried them back to his desk, positioned them carefully and in order, freshest to least freshest, pushed start on the cassette player, then settled back to hear everything. It was going to be horrible, he knew. And he swore he would endure every last word.
Halfway through, he rushed to the trash can and picked up the photos from the floor. The first showed a smiling, handsome young man dressed in the uniform of the national soccer team. He had no idea who he was, just a strong suspicion that it was his whiny voice on the first tape. The second showed the justice minister accepting a fistful of dollars from a man whose face he thought he recognized.
An hour later, after listening to the second tape, after repeating it once, as he had with the first tape, he knew more than he had ever cared to about Tatyana Lukin. The sheer stereotypicality of it was hard enough to swallow; he was just one more old, middle-aged, cuckolded fool, stewing with anger, self-pity, and regret. Worse, she had used him from the very start. There she was bragging to her boyfriend, Sasha, about how she was running the entire machinery of the Kremlin while her fat, drunken bore buddied up to his big pal Boris. There simply were too many barbs to remember; but also too many to forget.
“Well, guess what, bitch,” he grumbled, lumbering drunkenly up the stairs for bed. “Tomorrow, the fun will begin.”
The girl was tall and blonde with skinny legs that stretched from the ground to the sky, pretty blue eyes, and she was at least forty years younger than him. She was even younger than his two granddaughters. If it didn’t matter to her, sure as hell it made no difference to him. She gripped his arm and squished her ample breasts against its soft plumpness.
“You are so funny, General, I just can’t get enough of you.”
“I’ll bet,” Golitsin slurred as they staggered and swayed, holding each other up, in the direction of his shiny little Beemer in the rear parking lot. The Lido was behind them, the newest city hot spot where the big-deal millionaires gathered in their relentless quest for the best orgy in town. Somewhere between his fifth and eighth scotch—such a blur that he lost count—the girl had become attached to his arm. Between his tenth or twelfth scotch, at some now indeterminate point, he decided they were deeply in love.
“What did you say your name was again?” he asked her.
“Nadya. Please remember it, General. I’ve told you ten times already. I really don’t want you to ever forget me.”
Golitsin was again admiring the streamlined legs that seemed to stretch up to her armpits, when three men stepped out of a dark alley. Two lunged straight for him. One banged his arms behind his back, the other shoved a filthy rag in his mouth and then, very quickly, a coarse dark hood over his head. The girl started to step back and scream before the third man clamped a hand over her mouth. “Shut your trap, tramp,” he growled, and flashed a knife to show her the request was serious.
A black sedan pulled up, seemingly from nowhere, and squealed to a jarring stop three feet away. Golitsin was bundled roughly into the rear seat before two of the men spilled in beside him. The other man released Nadya. She stepped back and winked at him. He winked back, before she disappeared into the night. He climbed into the front passenger seat and they sped away.
Twenty minutes and ten miles later, Golitsin was shoved through a large doorway, dragged about forty steps, then shoved down hard onto a stiff wooden chair. His hands were tied, quickly and roughly, behind his back, and his chubby legs were roped to the legs of the chair.
The hood was removed and tossed onto the floor. With a loud spit, the filthy gag flew out of his lips, though it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Another moment before he realized there were five of them in all. They were gathered in the middle of a large, empty warehouse with a high, corrugated ceiling and an oil-stained concrete floor. They wore dark jeans and black leather jackets. Rough faces all around. There were more tattoos and earrings and facial scars than he cared to count. A few misshapen noses.
Syndicate thugs, that’s all, nothing to be overly alarmed about, Golitsin told himself.
And they had made a mistake, a big one. They were nothing more than common, everyday kidnappers who threw out a random net and stupidly dragged in the meanest shark in town. Oh yes, this was a real boner, one they would deeply regret, and he decided to inform them of this right away. He worked up his most scary sneer. “Do you punks know who you’re messing with?”
“Punks,” one of them answered. Whack!—Golitsin’s head bounced to the side. A spray of blood shot out his nose.
“Don’t you dare strike me again. You—”
Whack, whack, whack.
“All right, all right. Enough,” Golitsin insisted.
Whack, whack.
“Please… I… I said that’s enough.”
One of them pulled over another wooden chair, reversed it, then eased into it. Their faces were three feet apart. He looked about fifty, older than the others, and carried himself like he was in charge. A hard, weathered face. Dark, piercing eyes. “Listen up, Sergei. This can be hard or it can be easy. Understand?”
The punk had called him Sergei. He knew his name! It wasn’t a random kidnapping after all. Golitsin even, very briefly, entertained the notion of reminding this scum of his proper title: General. But maybe flexing his muscles at this instant wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe it was a terrible idea, in fact. That last whack had left him with a splitting headache.
“Can we talk?” Golitsin asked, trying his best to sound reasonable and unctuous.
“Sure, Sergei.” He leaned closer. “But it works like this. I’ll talk and you’ll listen.”
The other four men slapped their thighs and roared with laughter. This was funny? This wasn’t the least bit humorous. These punks were just begging for it. “Can I at least have your name?”
The man in the chair, said, “For tonight, Vladimir. Let’s not worry about what to call me tomorrow. First, you have to give us a reason to let you live that long, Sergei.”
“There’s no need for these threats. What do you want?”
“Let’s start with the easy one. Where’s the money?”
“What money?”
A long sigh. “Do we really have to go through this, Sergei?”
“I’m a simple retired officer with a family. I am struggling to survive off my pension. It’s not much. Perhaps we can work something out.”
From somewhere behind his head, whack, whack, whack.
“Enough! That’s enough!” he wailed.
“The money, Sergei. Where’s the money?”
“What money?”
“Two hundred and fifty million. The money you stole, where is it?”
How did he know the exact amount? Golitsin briefly wondered. Only a handful knew: Tatyana, Nicky, and of course, the victim knew, not that it mattered. He was rotting in prison, after all, counting the days until his return to Russia.
“Maybe,” Golitsin suggested—he squeezed his neck down, hunching his shoulders, trying to avoid another whack—“maybe if you told me who you’re working for we can work something out.”
Whack—the ducked head and bunched shoulders were a wasted defense. It felt like six hands were slapping the back of his head. He heard his own voice whining and pleading for them to stop.
And eventually the slaps did subside. But Vladimir allowed him no time to recover his wits. “Pay attention, Sergei. This is invaluable advice. You’ve never been on this side of the torture rack, always the other side, watching and enjoying the show. Fifty years of screaming victims begging for quick deaths. Are you listening, Sergei? Do you understand?”
The voice was so very cold, so flat, so casually captivating; amazing how mesmerizing a voice becomes when it controls the pain.
How many times had Sergei heard that same droll pattern over the years as he watched one victim after another suffer and scream their guts out, until they eventually snapped, until they signed whatever was put before them, signed anything to make the pain stop—accusing their own mothers, sentencing their own children, confessing sins they never came within ten miles of committing. Oh yes, he definitely understood.
He slowly nodded.
“You know how bad this can get, don’t you?”
Another nod—yes, yes, of course he remembered. Tears were now rolling down his fat cheeks.
“The pain is going to become intense, Sergei. I don’t want you surprised by it. You’re going to wish you were dead. You’ll beg us to end it. We won’t kill you, though. You can’t feel the pain unless you’re alive. Sorry, but we need you to feel everything.”
“Wait!” Something was bothering him. All this talk about torture, and the name of this cruel man. There was a connection there, he was sure of it.
“Why wait? Do you want to tell me where the money is?”
“Vladimir? Yes, Vladimir. Like the Vladimir who worked for me, right?”
A quick shift of the eyes to the floor. “I have no idea who or what you’re talking about.”
Golitsin stretched as far forward as he could. “He a friend of yours? Is that what this is about? I am so sorry for what happened to poor Vladimir. He killed himself, you know. Suicide. How tragic.”
The interrogator jumped out of his chair. Turning to the other four men, he directed a finger at one and said, “Get the BP cuff and monitor his blood pressure. He’s old and fat. We don’t want him slipping away on us.”
The man dashed off.
“Get the tools,” he barked at another, who also disappeared into the darkness. To the other two, he said, “You look bored. Work on him while we wait.”
They moved up and the slapping began again. No punches, everything open-handed, a relentless fusillade of girly slaps obviously meant to add shame to his pain. Golitsin wailed and screamed, all to no avail.
Vladimir walked to a corner of the large warehouse, yanked a cell phone out of a pocket, punched a number, then cradled it to his ear.
Golitsin was being slapped silly. His cheeks, the back of his head, occasionally his ears, which really stung. He howled and moaned, begging them to stop. Eventually, his chin sank to his chest. His head began lolling wildly with each smack.
He bit down hard on his tongue, choked back his screams, and played opossum for all he was worth. Just stop those infernal slaps, he prayed with all his might. And after a moment, the prayers were answered. They did stop. One yelled out, “Vladimir, he’s out cold.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Vladimir replied, sounding distracted, then returned to his phone conversation.
Golitsin fought to control his breathing and prayed they didn’t catch on. He could overhear Vladimir speaking louder now, unconcerned about his ability to eavesdrop.
“No, don’t worry. We’ve only gotten started.” A long pause. “Look, I’ve done this before. I—” Another pause. “Nicky, you have my guarantee, he’ll tell us everything. Everybody does. We start ripping off the body parts, and they all—” Pause, then a nasty laugh. “I know, I know, Nicky. Look, by the time he’s got no fingers or toes, his kneecaps are pulp, he’ll spill… Yeah, okay, you, too.”
Vladimir flipped the phone shut and returned to the scene of torture. A scream was going off inside Golitsin’s head. Nicky! That rotten son of a bitch. That lying, thieving, betraying bastard. These were his people, he realized, and he fought the urge not to scream and threaten these people, to unleash all the rage he could muster.
One of the boys returned a moment later with the BP monitor. He quickly slapped it around Golitsin’s right arm and tightened it up. Then the other fellow reappeared lugging a large dark suitcase, which he set down on the floor.
“Open it. Get the tools ready,” Vladimir told him.
Golitsin heard the locks snap open and the noise of the lid hitting the cement. He didn’t want to look—he had no desire at all to see what terrible ghoulish instruments were inside that damned case—he tried to fight it, just squeeze his eyes shut, he told himself; ignore them and ignore it. But it couldn’t be helped. The curiosity was just too irresistible; he had to know, had to see what they had in store for him. Slowly, ever so slowly, he cracked open his right eyelid, just a hair. A tiny, tiny sliver, and he peeked.
Vladimir and two of his boys were bent over the now open case, rummaging through the contents, apparently deciding which tool should lead off.
Oh, Christ. Oh, no. The bastards had bought out the entire torture store. Three or four razor-sharp saws of various sizes and types, wicked things, so sharp and shiny. A small blowtorch. An iron, just like the one Vladimir used to scorch the hammer and sickle on Konevitch. A slew of gleaming surgical instruments employable for everything from eyeball gouging to nut-crunching. Golitsin could put a name and use to every instrument: a vivid picture of their exact use.
How many nights had he spent watching with sick fascination as the boys in the basement at Dzerzhinsky Square found all sorts of inspired uses for these things? Every instrument in that case, he knew them all like a mechanic knows his shop tools.
He squeezed his eyes shut and bit his lip, but it just slipped out. A moan of fear just clawed its way up his throat, into his mouth, and it popped right through his lips.
Five sets of eyes instantly snapped in his direction.
Vladimir smiled. “Ah, Sergei, you’re back.” With a befuddled expression, he asked, sounding mildly frustrated, “Listen, I can’t seem to make up my mind. How would you like us to start?”
“You keep those damned things away from me.”
“Well, you see, we’re a little past that point. Come on, Sergei, I’m trying to be generous here.” He laughed and the others joined him. “So, what will it be?”
“I swear I don’t have any more of the money.”
“None?”
“It’s gone.”
“All of it? Two hundred and fifty million?” Vladimir asked, dripping skepticism.
“Yes, it’s spent, every penny. I swear it.” Golitsin wasn’t about to hand over his fortune to Nicky, no matter what. They could cut and slice and dice him however they wanted—not a red cent.
Vladimir bent over, studied the contents inside the case for a moment, then made up his mind and picked up a saw. “Well, that’s too bad,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“Please, you have to believe me. I was stupid and greedy. I wasted it all on idiotic things. It’s all gone.”
Vladimir was now ten feet away. With a finger, he was testing the sharpness of the blade as he moved closer. Two of the boys were now hovering directly behind Golitsin. They pinned his arms and squeezed his neck. He squealed but their grips only tightened.
“Where to start, where to start, that’s the big issue now,” Vladimir said. The piercing, hard, dark eyes began searching Golitsin’s body. “Why not toes?” he asked very reasonably. “Start at the bottom, start with the little things, and slowly work our way up.”
He bent down and pulled off Golitsin’s shoes, then yanked off his socks. The plump white toes were wiggling, trying to curl under his feet. Vladimir carefully selected the big toe on the right foot. Using two strong fingers, he clamped the toe, poised the saw, then looked up. “I should warn you that I get a little carried away. Once I take one, I generally get all ten. You can answer everything, and I just can’t stop,” he warned, looking slightly remorseful. “It’s, oh, I don’t know, something wrong inside my head.”
“Okay, okay, I have the money. Don’t… oh, please, don’t touch that toe.”
Vladimir gave the toe a little pinch. Golitsin nearly bucked out of the chair. “Switzerland. A Swiss bank,” he muttered in a fast rush.
