The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

CHAPTER 23

Simmy picked up on the third ring.

“I need your help and I need it now,” I said.

He didn’t answer right away and I knew why. I hadn’t started the conversation by trying to be clever. I was purposefully blunt and direct. Based on our experiences in Siberia tracking my cousin, I knew he’d read me correctly.

“I’m listening,” he said.

“I need to get to Bruges now. I need someone serious to go with me. I’m not one hundred percent sure but I think it’s a matter of life and death.”

“Whose life and death?”

“The girl. Iskra’s lover. Sarah Dumont.”

This time there was a slightly longer pause.

“I’ll drive you myself,” he said. “No bodyguards. Just you and me. We’ll be less conspicuous.”

I’d never seen Simmy drive a car let alone travel without his bodyguards. “You know how to drive a car?”

He sighed. “I’ve driven in the 24 Hour Le Mans three times under a different name. In case you don’t know, that’s the most prestigious endurance race in the world.”

“That’s incredible… Wait, why under a different name?”

“To hide the results… Because I’m no good at it and I don’t want my weaknesses to give confidence to my adversaries… To protect my business and my ego… To serve my vanity as in all matters.”

His confession was so obviously real and true, no further words were needed.

“Where am I picking you up?” he said.

“At my hotel,” I said. “And I have another request, Simmy. But I’m hesitant because I don’t want to offend you.”

“When you put it like that, there’s not much chance I’ll say no, is there?”

“Bring the bodyguards,” I said, and hung up.

I wanted the bodyguards to accompany us because I could smell his testosterone over the phone. There was no reason to worry about being conspicuous. We were going to one and only one house and it was secluded. And I didn’t need Simmy to be my hero. I wanted us to survive the trip.

Afterwards, I called Sarah Dumont. She answered on the second ring. I identified myself and she sounded understandably surprised to hear from me.

We exchanged hellos.

“I don’t want to alarm you.” I said, “but I think the person who killed Iskra is coming to Bruges.”

“You know who killed her?” she said.

“Not for certain. But I think I do.”

She chuckled like a supervisor criticizing an overly confident subordinate. “You think you do?”

“Thinking usually precedes certainty. Yes, I think I do, and when I have this kind of conviction, I’m usually right. If I’m right, the killer is a very resourceful and dangerous person.”

“And you think the killer’s coming here? For what reason?”

I stayed quiet, knowing she’d answer her own question.

“To kill me, too?”

I remained mute.

“No one would dare try to kill me,” she said.

Sarah Dumont had seemed a bit entitled and aloof when I’d met her, but never this arrogant or delusional.

“Why wouldn’t anyone dare to kill you?” I said.

“Because… because I have the best security service in Amsterdam.” She sounded as though she’d searched for a convenient answer and found one at the last second.

“Are your men there now?” I said.

“Of course they’re here. If they weren’t here, they wouldn’t be the best service in Amsterdam, would they?”

“How many are there? Is it just the two men at the gate? Or is there a third one?”

She chuckled again. “Talking to you is like talking to my mirror. You’re a bit of a control freak, aren’t you? Now, are you going to answer my question or should I just hang up?”

I backtracked, remembered her question, and told her why I thought Iskra’s killer was going to try to kill her. In doing so, I identified the killer.

She didn’t chuckle this time. “You cannot be serious.”

“If talking to me is like talking to a mirror, do I even need to answer that?”

She considered my comment. “And you think he’s coming here today?”

“He may already be there. I think you should consider calling the police—”

“No police.”

Her firmness suggested she had other reasons she didn’t want the police involved. I wondered what they were.

“I won’t be intimidated on my own property,” she said. “I worked too hard for it. My father worked too hard for it. I have my security guards. There’s two of them. They’re trained. Highly trained. I’ll tell them what you told me.”

I told her I was on my way to Bruges and that I’d call when I got there. In the meantime, I asked her to call me if any visitors arrived, even if they were people she knew. She ended the call without promising to do so.

Simmy and his bodyguards met me in front of my hotel an hour later at 11:30 A.M. They came in two Mercedes Benz vehicles. One was the conservative-looking black sedan that I’d found waiting for me outside of jail. The other was a steroid-injected beast in gunmetal gray. The wheels filled their wells, the front bumper looked ravenous, and steam poured from four tail pipes in the rear.

Simmy arrived driving the latter.

“And you wanted to be less conspicuous?” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Simmy said. “This is a masquerade. A sports car disguised as a sedan. If I wasn’t behind the wheel, you wouldn’t have looked twice at this car.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Not an automobile enthusiast? How can that be when you drive that old 911?”

“I wasn’t talking about the car. I meant you’re right. This is a masquerade. It’s about a person pretending to be one thing but actually being another.”

I tried to enter Sarah Dumont’s address into Simmy’s navigation system, but her home had been built after the map in his system had been designed. Instead, I found the address for the City Center under tourist sites, entered it, and we took off for Bruges.

“Why are you driving yourself?” I said.

“Because I want to prove that I can still do the small things. That I can be a hands-on kind-of guy. Is it working?”

“You bet,” I said.

We stopped once to get gas, use the restrooms and buy food. I chose a protein bar, the bodyguards opted for ham and cheese sandwiches, and Simmy stuck with coffee. We hustled through our stop with a minimum of conversation and were back on the road in less than fifteen minutes. I called Sarah Dumont from the car after we left the rest stop. She’d warned the guards to be careful, told me to stop being paranoid, and once again hung up on me. We arrived in Bruges’ City Center in the early afternoon, covering the entire one hundred and fifty miles in less than three hours.

I’d taken the taxi to Sarah Dumont’s house twice, so I thought I’d have no problem navigating us to her house.

I was wrong.

I made two blunders, including sending us down a narrow one-way street. I could feel Simmy tense when he had to come to a stop, call his boys on the mobile phone, and tell them to back-up. There wasn’t enough room to execute a K-turn. He took a few audible breaths as though to calm himself down, but sounded serene as spring.

“What looks like a disaster is actually an opportunity,” he said, as he gunned the engine in reverse.

“It is?” I said.

“Certainly. It’s an opportunity for us to prove to ourselves that we’re mentally strong, that we’re invulnerable, and that we’re fully composed and prepared to capture this killer.”

I glanced at him twice to make sure some spirit hadn’t inhabited his body. “We are?”

“I know you’re just having fun with me when you say that. After all, you’re the warrior and I’m the spoiled rich man. Am I right?”

Once he’d backed out of the alley, he whipped the car around and passed the bodyguards.

I corrected my mistakes and got us to the familiar fork in the road.

“That way,” I said, pointing up the hill.

I dialed Sarah Dumont’s number to let her know we were a mile away. My call rolled over to voice mail. As I listened to her recorded message telling me to be sure I really needed to talk to her and only then to leave my name, number and a brief message, I suspected she’d recognized my digits and simply didn’t want to speak to me anymore.

But when the gate came into view I feared otherwise. I feared otherwise because there was no one in sight.

“Where are the guards?” Simmy said. “You said there’d be guards.”

“Maybe one of them is in the guardhouse. It’s kind of big. There might be a bathroom in there.”

Simmy called the bodyguards and barked some clipped instructions that consisted of the kind of shorthand people who work closely develop over time. I didn’t fully comprehend it all, but I knew they were going to check the guardhouse.

Simmy pulled up to the gate. The bodyguards turned their car around and backed-up with their trunk facing the house.

“What are they doing?” I said.

“Preparing for a quick departure, just in case. This way we’re ready to go in either direction. Just like American politics. In Russia it would be much easier. If you want to live, there is only one direction to go and that is forward. Outside of Russia, you can never be sure. Wait in the car.”

He exited the vehicle. I flung the door open and followed him to the guardhouse. Simmy stopped and glared at me but knew better than to waste his energy trying to stop me.

The forest obscured the sunlight from above. The glass house stood beyond the gate surrounded by trees. Both of Sarah Dumont’s cars were parked in front of the entrance in the same places, except their locations were reversed from the previous night. There was no sign of life. The entire property appeared to be taking a nap.

Inside the guardhouse, a tall chair faced the window with a view of the road. The chair was empty. A computer rested on a narrow desktop between the chair and the window. The monitor displayed an article written in Dutch and included a picture of two soccer players vying for the ball. Vanilla crème cookies spilled from an open bag onto the desk. Steam rose from a mug of coffee. Someone had been here a moment ago, I thought, but I didn’t share my observation with anyone for fear of making any unnecessary noise.

A door led to a back room. I could tell from the structure’s exterior dimensions that the space was a small one, no bigger than a pantry or a small bathroom.

Simmy looked beyond me and nodded.

I turned. The bodyguards had arrived. One stood on my heels hulking over me like a giant human Pez dispenser ready to gobble me up. A glint of metal caught my eyes. I looked down and saw the stainless steel gun in his hand. The other bodyguard stood outside, scanning the house and the road. He held an assault rifle. It looked slick, terrifying and seductive.

It was when I turned back that I got the biggest shock of all.

Simmy was knocking on the door to the back room. His knock sounded like banging on a hollow drum because the door appeared to be a cheap empty shell. What astonished me was that his fingers were wrapped around his own gun.

No one answered. He glanced at me as he waited.

“You have a gun?” I said.

He answered me by holding my eyes for an extra second. Then he knocked once more, waited for a count of three, and grabbed the doorknob.

It rattled but didn’t turn completely. It was locked.

Simmy nodded at the bodyguard closest to him again. Then he stepped back toward me and let the bodyguard slide past us.

I leaned into his ear. “Why do you have a gun?”

He gave me a puzzled look. “Because I’m prepared. Why don’t you have one?”

“Because I don’t want to shoot myself.”

He nodded. “I was with the military police in the army. You weren’t. With my men and me at your disposal your arsenal is complete. All is as it should be.”

The bodyguard rammed the door with his shoulder. The door frame cracked. He rammed it twice more.

The door caved in. The bodyguard stood in the doorway obscuring the interior of the room. Simmy stepped up beside him and looked inside.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” he said, in a clipped and breathless manner.

The bodyguard thrust his gun into his left hand and stepped further into the room. When he bent over to check for pulses, Sarah Dumont’s guards were revealed.

They were both dead.