The Samurai Inheritance

XVI

Jamie was so focused on Kaganovich’s testimony that the issue of his lack of transport didn’t occur to him until he walked through the doors into the open air. He reached into his jacket for his mobile phone, thinking that at least the hotel would send a car. In the meantime he had the choice of standing in the open under the wolfish and no doubt acquisitive eyes of the teenage gangsters he’d seen earlier or returning to the sweet-scented corridors of the care home, neither of which was terribly appealing. It wasn’t until he punched in the hotel’s number that he realized he was alone in the open space between the flats. Where there had been fifteen or twenty youths and four or five older men under the trees, all that remained were empty beer cans and fast food wrappers blowing in the breeze like tumbleweed.

Was the stillness in the air, or inside him? As he saw it, there were two possibilities. Either they were waiting for him somewhere, alerted by Mikhail who had been so impressed by the fistful of rubles, or something had scared them. And if something had scared the locals, self-preservation suggested that maybe Jamie Saintclair should make himself scarce too. He scanned the area for the threat he was certain was out there and he didn’t have to wait for long. A big Mercedes SUV slid round the corner where it had been shielded by the trees and drove slowly towards him. He backed towards the doorway, but the sharp snick of a lock being engaged told him he’d find no sanctuary there. He looked to his left, in the opposite direction to the approaching Mercedes and cursed as a second car emerged from a car park between the blocks of flats.

On one level the big Mercs provided a certain reassurance. Nobody driving a quarter-of-a-million-ruble car was going to cut his throat for the contents of his wallet. On the other hand, in his experience, big cars meant big trouble. Just because they were wearing Moscow number plates didn’t guarantee they contained Russians, even if, on balance, it was the most likely probability. That left one of two possibilities.

The first Mercedes drew up in front of him and two men didn’t so much step from the car as flow from it; one from the front passenger door and the other from the rear. Hard men in smart suits, confident in their ability to deal with any situation, but alert just the same, the suits cut just so to accommodate the pistol of choice in a neat little holster under the left armpit. They stopped in front of Jamie, one a little to the right, the other to the left, pausing only to glare at the driver of an ancient rust-bucket of a Lada that cruised past.

‘Mr Saintclair? You will come with us please.’

The words were in English with a distinct Russian accent, and they came from behind him. He must be losing it. He hadn’t even heard them get out of the other car. The man on his left moved aside and nodded towards the rear door of the Mercedes, but Jamie stood his ground.

‘Perhaps you’d care to identify yourselves first. My mother warned me about getting into cars with strange men.’

Just the right tone. Polite, but firm, with a little bit of humour to keep the situation from turning rough. A miscalculation as it turned out. The fist that caught him in the right kidney sent a bolt of lightning into his brain and paralysed him in the same instant. With an ease that said they’d done it a hundred times, the two men in front caught him as he fell, taking an arm each and dragging him towards the car, the toes of his shoes scraping across the concrete. Another man was waiting inside the back of the Mercedes with two pairs of manacles. Before Jamie knew what was happening, his wrists and ankles had been shackled. The manacles were linked by a chain and the man hauled it tight until the prisoner’s hands were between his knees and fixed it to a bolt on the floor of the car. Black leather seats, he noticed through the waves of pain that still flowed outwards from his lower back, ever so handy for cleaning up after an accident.

Someone pulled a hood over his head and he felt a moment of claustrophobic panic. It wasn’t as if he was in a position to see where he was going, looking at his toecaps as he was, but that wasn’t why they’d done it. It was part of the softening-up process. And that was what made it all the more frightening. Softening up for what?

Two options. In Russia that meant the State or the Mafia, which was actually a combination of options each more unpleasant than the one that went before. But the chilling monosyllabic professionalism and, let’s face it, relative restraint, told him he was in the hands of the State. And that meant, for the moment at least, there was no point in howling indignation or demanding to see the British consul, even if he’d been foolish enough to risk another kidney punch. The men in dark suits were just low-level functionaries doing a job and it didn’t matter to them who he was. Smart hotel or not he was part of the state system now, the same system that had swallowed Dimitri Kaganovich, chewed him up and, unlike several million less fortunate Russians, spat him back out again. OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, KGB were just a series of bland initials if you weren’t aware of the brutal reality behind them. Now they had been succeeded by the FSB, the Federal Security Service. For the people who’d lived under the old Soviet Union they were, and always had been the Cheka, the faceless secret police. Even now a knock at the door at the wrong time of the night triggered a moment of terrifying uncertainty.

Just to make sure you got the point, the FSB continued to use the old KGB headquarters complex at Lubyanka Square where tens of thousands of men and women, many of them innocent of any crime, had screamed their guilt to their torturers before walking the long basement corridors anticipating the bullet that would end their lives. To most tourists the Lubyanka meant the big honey-stoned edifice facing the square, but the true functional hub of the FSB was an anonymous grey lump of Stalinist concrete on the north-west side and Jamie guessed that was where he would eventually be taken. He hoped they’d get there soon.

The worst of it was the pain in his wrists and ankles where the metal edges of the manacles rubbed against bone with every turn of the steering wheel. He heard one of the men grunt something about a tail, and he was puzzled until another joked that it would save them a lot of trouble if it followed them all the way home. Eventually the familiar stop-start rhythm of inner-city transportation told him they’d left the ring system. A few minutes later the car descended what felt like a steep ramp and came to a halt, before the squeal of another set of tyres confirmed the arrival of the second Mercedes.

Someone unshackled him from the bolt and the ankle irons were removed, but the hood stayed. Hands that were almost considerate guided him from the car and along a series of corridors, a bewildering maze of lefts and rights, until he heard the sound of a metal door opening. The hands guided him four steps forward and worked at his wrists to remove the cuffs, making him gasp as the circulation began to return. His watch and the contents of his pockets were removed. Another pair of hands lifted the hood from his head and he almost staggered as the light blinded him. It took a few moments for his surroundings to swim into vision: a bare cell, perhaps eight feet by six, the floor and walls of flaking grey concrete. To one side stood a metal bed with a thin mattress and a single sheet. The toilet in the corner and the tiny sink attached to the wall told him he must be in the VIP wing, which was a relief for several reasons. A single bulb in the ceiling provided light, set behind inch-thick glass so you couldn’t break the bulb and use the shards to cut your wrists. One of the dark-suited men from the Mercedes stood watching him, beside a stocky figure dressed in black uniform trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The second man gestured to Jamie’s jacket.

‘I would like to protest at this totally unwarranted arrest and detention,’ Jamie said as he removed the coat and handed it over. A finger pointed to the belt of his tan trousers and he repeated the process. ‘I am a British citizen and I demand to speak to my country’s consul.’

The word ‘demand’ provoked the faintest shadow of a smile before dark suit led the other man from the cell. A shiver went through Jamie’s heart as the door shut with a clang that reverberated along the corridor. He stood for a moment staring at the bare steel with its single spy hole and felt very alone. He removed his shoes and lay down on the bed. The sheet smelled of damp. He’d been in worse fixes, of course. The Obergruppenführershalle in Wewelsburg Castle for one, where the Neanderthal foot soldiers of the Vril Society had tried to kick him to death. A certain mansion on the shores of Lake Zurich where a team of East European mercenaries had done their best to incinerate him. But this cell, naked of even the obscene graffiti that livened up such places, had an air of permanence not dissimilar to a marble tomb.

Why? That didn’t really matter, he’d find out soon enough. It couldn’t be about the Bougainville head, which had no value to anyone but Keith Devlin. He was fairly certain it had nothing to do with Kaganovich — an almost-centenarian former gulag inmate was hardly a threat — and Berzarin was dead, so his reputation didn’t require protection. On second thoughts, the past had ways of catching up with Jamie Saintclair. If Berzarin had clout then perhaps Berzarin’s offspring had clout too, and were protecting their father’s memory. The only other Russian he’d had any contact with had been a late-lamented billionaire oligarch. The fact that he’d already been dead when they met seemed to rule out that particular line of inquiry.

His thoughts turned to Magda Ross. She’d be puzzled when he didn’t return in mid-afternoon as he’d intended, but she wouldn’t become truly alarmed for a few more hours. He’d left her Daniel’s number, so Devlin would find out soon enough. The first places they’d look were hospitals and the morgue, because that’s what sometimes happened to tourists in Moscow, especially people silly enough to visit places like Kapotnya. Jamie had a feeling that the Devlin Foundation would have the kind of contacts to be able to track him down eventually. What mattered then was whether Devlin had the influence to get him out. And that depended on why he was here, and probably more pertinently, who’d put him here.

He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He’d always had the facility to put his immediate concerns aside when no amount of thought was going to solve them. In these circumstances the only thing you could do was conserve your energy for the tests to come. Within three minutes he was asleep.