The Samurai Inheritance

XXIV

When the train pulled in at Krasnoyarsk’s immense palace of a station Jamie felt a sense of release, as if he’d been freed after a five-year jail stretch. It wasn’t so much the confinement as a desperate need to get away from his fellow inmates. Boris’s charms had faded with every hour he drank. By the previous night he’d been unable to make the ascent to the top bunk. Instead, he’d sat, an unseen but malevolent presence, at the bottom of his wife’s bed, leaning his head on the small table, alternately muttering curses to himself and emitting enormous farts that filled the cramped berth with their putrid odour.

Now, the Russian stared red-eyed as they packed their travel cases in silence. Jamie said a quick Russian goodbye, but Ludmilla surprised them by jumping to her feet and hugging Magda. ‘Mozhet ostal’noy chasti vashego puteshestviya v bezopasnosti i doroga ustlana lepestkami roz.’

Jamie translated. ‘Ludmilla says may your journey be safe and the road strewn with rose petals.’ From behind her back the little Russian produced a single rose in a plastic pocket, which she pressed into Magda’s hand.

‘I don’t …’

‘I should have remembered, the Russians are very big on gift-giving. Do you have anything small you can give her in return?’

Magda rummaged in her capacious handbag, but found nothing suitable. She exchanged a glance of panic with Jamie before a solution presented itself. Her hands went to her neck and untied the silk scarf she wore. She offered it to Ludmilla, but the Russian woman looked horrified.

‘What have I done?’

‘She thinks it’s too expensive.’

Magda smiled reassuringly. ‘Tell her I would be honoured if she wore it to her son’s wedding.’

Ludmilla listened to Jamie’s explanation with a frown, but gradually her faced relaxed and she stroked the brightly patterned scarf. ‘Spasibo.’ She accepted the gift with a little curtsy.

The bone-chilling Siberian cold hit them the moment they left the train. As the long line of coaches rattled off for Taishet another three hundred miles east, they stood on the platform amongst their luggage and watched with a feeling almost of nostalgia that lasted all of thirty seconds.

Jamie instructed the taxi driver to take them to an internet cafe where they could charge their laptops and phones. He made a mental calculation and decided that, give or take a few hours either way, Fiona would probably be in her bed or just getting out of it, and decided to wait until later to get in touch. It was too early to book into a hotel, so they lingered in the cafe and drank hot coffee and nibbled at the ubiquitous sweet pastries. Magda checked out flights from Krasnoyarsk to Sydney and Tokyo and discovered that the only connections were through Peking or Moscow, but they decided to delay making a decision till later.

Jamie sipped his coffee and pondered their next important step. ‘I was thinking that for security reasons we should book a twin room wherever we end up. After the visit from our Chinese friends and your drunk Russian, it would seem sensible and safer for us to be … together.’

Magda’s eyes narrowed with mock suspicion. ‘I hope you’re not propositioning me, Jamie?’

He rubbed his unshaven chin thoughtfully. ‘For an English gentleman that would naturally be unthinkable and probably a flogging offence into the bargain. I just thought that since we’d shared a six foot by eight foot cell for three days and managed not to intrude too much on each other’s modesty, we could probably manage it in a hotel room for one night.’

She considered for a moment. ‘All right, that’s fine with me, but only as long as I get first chance at the shower.’ She pulled at her blouse. ‘I feel like this thing is part of me. You really think we can get this done in one afternoon?’

‘If we get access to Arkady Berzarin I don’t see why not.’ Jamie finished off another pastry. ‘Either he has the head or he doesn’t. If he has, either he’ll agree a price or he won’t. If he won’t we’ll walk away and leave the negotiating to Devlin.’

‘And what makes you think he’ll see us?’

‘Because I have a message for him from an old friend.’

Guilt froze the smile on his lips, but Magda didn’t seem to notice.

She looked around at the figures hunched over the cafe’s computers. ‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘For all its undoubted charms, Krasnoyarsk isn’t the kind of place I want to hang around in.’

Jamie knew what she meant. The moment they’d stepped off the train he’d sensed that Krasnoyarsk had an atmosphere unlike any European city. It radiated all the confidence and immediacy of a place that was going somewhere fast, a boom town, but with an added element. The only way he could describe it was the feeling a lone cowboy would have had riding into a western frontier town during the Gold Rush: a sense of adventure laced with a considerable dash of vulnerability, if not outright danger.

Once they’d booked into their hotel they searched for a taxi and Jamie handed over the address provided by his new best friend Alexei. They drove out through a mixture of factory districts and thickly wooded suburbs into the hills west of the city centre until they reached a well-paved road unlike most of Russia’s potholed public thoroughfares. It wound upwards through a long, tree-lined valley and ended at a high wall surrounding what appeared to be an enormous country estate. It was only when the driver slowed well short of the wall and he noticed the sweat on the man’s brow that Jamie realized this might be just as hazardous as his experience in Moscow.

‘Impressive,’ Magda said.

‘Mmmmh.’ Jamie’s eyes were on the barrier outside the estate’s main gate a hundred metres ahead. The last time he’d seen anything like it had been in a TV documentary about the Green Zone in Baghdad, where it had been designed to stop suicide bombers. Excessive was the word that came to mind. Then you noticed the gun-toting guards whose eyes never left the approaching taxi, and the little towers where you could almost feel the dark eyes of the rifle muzzles on you. Camouflage parkas, combat trousers and boots. Not military. Not with the array of designer sunglasses on display and the sophisticated communications equipment normally only seen riding shotgun for presidential cavalcades.

The taxi braked sharply as one of the men stepped into the road and raised a hand that was as effective a stop sign as any red light.

‘Here we go again.’ Magda gave Jamie a familiar look, the one that said: What have you got me into this time?

The guard held his rifle — it looked like the latest variant of Kalashnikov — pointed almost carelessly in their direction. While they waited Jamie noticed a tiny red light in the shadow of one of the watchtower openings. Some kind of high-tech camera was analysing the car and its number. ‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured her. ‘They’re just checking us out.’

Two or three minutes passed before the guard waved the car up to the barrier. As they reached it the driver lowered his window. ‘Your business?’ the man in camouflage demanded. The driver nodded to Jamie and Magda and the guard backed away slightly to give himself some rifle room. The barrel of the AK twitched. Jamie took it as a signal to get out of the car and Magda emerged behind him.

‘Your business?’ the guard repeated.

‘We would like to talk with Mr Berzarin on a personal matter,’ Jamie said. Beside him, Magda gave a little hiss of exasperation and he realized how lame it sounded.

The guard thought so too. His lips twitched into a smile. ‘I do not believe Mr Berzarin is receiving today,’ he said solemnly. ‘Not to discuss personal matters.’

‘His old friend Sergei from university sent his regards and assured me he would be pleased to see us.’

‘I don’t think so.’

They stared at each other for a few moments, Jamie’s image bright and clear in the lens of the sunglasses, his breath misting the chill air. A Mexican stand-off — in the middle of Siberia. The other guards stood chatting to each other and he sensed the man’s patience waning. He looked back, ready to return to the taxi, only to hear the engine rev and the tyres squeal as it reversed and drove away up the long road between the trees.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Magda groaned.

‘Enjoy your walk,’ the guard dismissed them and turned away.

Magda waited till they were out of sight of the barriers before she exploded. ‘That was it? We would like to talk to Mr Berzarin on a personal matter. That was Jamie Saintclair’s grand plan to bust into Siberia’s answer to Fort Knox?’

‘I was assured that mentioning Sergei would get us inside,’ he said defensively.

‘Only if you’d warned me in advance I’d have faked a ladylike faint and distracted their attention while you slipped past all the machine guns and cameras and God knows what else.’

‘I don’t think you’re taking this seriously, Magda.’

‘Seriously?’ She stood with her hands on her hips. ‘We spent days on that miserable train only to drive half a dozen miles and just walk away because of one little setback?’

‘I wouldn’t call a dozen men with machine guns a little setback. What else do you expect us to do?’

‘I thought you might at least try to climb the wall.’

Jamie noticed that when action was required ‘we’ had suddenly become ‘you’. ‘I have an allergy to machine guns,’ he said. ‘There will be at least fifty more inside those walls, and that’s without the infrared beams and the noise sensors and those hidden cameras you mentioned. Oh, and seeing this is Russia, the anti-personnel mines.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We walk. It’s about six or seven miles back to the city if we don’t freeze to death first.’

‘And?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

She cocked her head to one side and he stared at her. ‘I think you’d better do it fast,’ she said.

Jamie heard the sound that had alerted her, the rumble of a car’s engine. They stepped off the tarmac as a large green Jeep emerged from the trees and drew up beside them. Jamie tensed as the mirror window slowly descended.

‘Mr Berzarin will see you now.’