Rules of Vengeance (40 page)

He walked directly to the bike and knelt down beside it. The car beside him was close enough to touch. No one in the restaurant could see him. Either the bike’s owner would come or he wouldn’t. It was that simple. Jonathan was done worrying about consequences.

Using his Swiss Army knife, he can-opened the cylindrical ignition housing clear of the chassis, then stripped the green and red wires that led to the spark plugs. A motorcycle’s ignition wasn’t like a car’s. On an older model like this one, the key simply completed the connection between the spark plugs and the magneto. Jonathan twisted the wires together and thumbed the starter button. The bike roared to life. He climbed aboard, backed up the motorcycle, then accelerated down the aisle and turned onto the highway. Total time elapsed: two minutes. Emma would have been proud.

It was twelve-fifteen. The French border was five hundred eighty kilometers away. Jonathan slid into the fast lane, lowered his head, and gave the Ducati a little gas. The bike took off like a bat out of hell.

He planned on making Èze by seven.

   Kate Ford collapsed on a chair outside a sidewalk café. “Impossible,” she said, half to herself. “The man’s not a ghost. He can’t just have disappeared. He came here for a reason. He had to have spoken with someone.”

The lieutenant colonel of the carabinieri took a seat next to her. He was handsome and suave, but she suspected he liked the flashy uniform a bit more than the job that went with it. “We have looked everywhere,” he said, slumping his elegant shoulders.

“Not everywhere,” said Kate. “We missed a few blocks back up that way.”

“This is not a nice area,” he said. “More for sailors. Many bars. It is a rough place. We go afterward. First a coffee.”

Kate took off her jacket and fanned herself. “No, thank you,” she said. “It’s a little too warm for me.” The lieutenant colonel offered a resigned smile, then signaled a waiter and ordered an espresso. Frustrated, Kate rose and started up the street.

Four hours had passed since Ransom had given them the slip. In that time, no fewer than sixty police officers had canvassed the sixteen-square-block area surrounding the address where the ambulance had picked up Emma Ransom. The Italian police were tenacious to a fault. To her eye, they had not missed a single store, hotel, bar, or café. She couldn’t have hoped for more diligent police work in London. She wondered if Ransom had met with the same lack of success.

Reaching the top of the hill, she continued through the ever-narrower cobblestone streets, enjoying the shadows cast by the buildings lining her route. Many were old apartments, worn and unloved. She tried the doors but found them locked. A search of this area would require days, not hours. There were many bars, seedy establishments without names. So early in the day they, too, were locked. Kate stopped inside a small market and showed a picture of Jonathan Ransom, then a grainy photo of Emma taken in London. Time and again she was met with a stony glare.

Kate leaned against a wall and pulled off one of her shoes to massage an aching foot. She sighed. There was little more she could do herself. She would task out the search to the Italian police and wait. She was not optimistic. Memory disintegrated quickly, the sight of an unfamiliar face quickest of all. Replacing her shoe, she began the walk back to the shoreline. But as she did she caught a sign out of the corner of her eye. It hung from a doorway, maybe 30 meters down the alley. Hotel De La Ville.

She shook her head and kept walking. As suddenly she stopped, ashamed of her pessimism. With renewed purpose, she retraced her steps and pushed open the door to the hotel.

At the front desk, she showed the manager the pictures of Jonathan and Emma Ransom and asked if he had seen either of them. The man did not answer immediately, but Kate observed a good deal of activity taking place behind his coffee-brown eyes. “Do you speak English?” she asked.

“Certo,”
he answered in Italian, as if insulted. “Of course.”

“You’ve seen them, yes?” she suggested.

The manager began shaking his head slowly back and forth. His hand cupped his chin as his mouth curled into an expression of disapproval.

“What is it?” she asked. “Do you know this man?”

“Not sure.”

Kate grasped his wrist. “Tell me the truth or I’ll have the carabinieri in here in ten seconds checking the working papers of your staff!”

“He was here this morning.”

Kate’s heart skipped a beat. She nodded, urging him to continue. “Yes…”

The manager slapped the picture down onto the desk. “He is her husband,” he said emphatically, as if correcting her from a misunderstanding. “He is
not
from France!”

   The Aérospatiale Écureuil helicopter took off sixty minutes later from a police base in the hills above Civitavecchia. Kate adjusted the headphones and strapped herself tightly into the passenger seat. She gave the carabinieri a wave as the helicopter lifted into the air. Its nose dipped, the chopper banked over hard to the left, and in seconds they were skipping over the sea.

She looked at the pilot. “How long?”

“We’ll fly a straight course,” he explained. “The distance is six hundred kilometers. I think we can make it in three hours. If the wind is with us, maybe a little less.”

Kate patched herself into the French National Police and requested that discreet surveillance be put on the address in Èze where she was certain that Ransom was headed. She needed their best men. She didn’t want Ransom spooked if he got there ahead of her.

“And if we spot him and afterward he leaves?”

“Then take him down,” said Kate. “But don’t count on it. There’s no way he can get there ahead of me.”

Finished, she raised Graves on her cell phone. “Charles,” she said, with much too much optimism, “we’ve got him.”

   Charles Graves stopped his car at the gate and reached his hand out the window to ring the buzzer. The gate was massive and imposing, with scrolled black iron bars and an ornate crest at its center. It had all the charm of a medieval portcullis. Something fashioned with great care and expertise to keep the Hun out. The gate shuddered and slid open, and he knew that somewhere hidden in the great banks of ivy covering the stone walls was a camera and that he had been identified and duly approved.

Graves accelerated down a well-tended lane surrounded on both sides by blazing flowerbeds and expansive lawns. He rounded a curve and the house came into view. He studied the hulking Palladian structure. “House” was the wrong word. “Palace” was more like it. And indeed, he remembered that the home had once been a summer residence for Queen Victoria. The papers had raised a stink when it was sold to the Russian billionaire three years back. Something about a czar stealing a queen’s property.

Parked in a gravel forecourt was the Rolls-Royce Phantom Graves had glimpsed on the security tapes. And already descending the steps, hand raised in greeting, the trademark thatch of white-blond hair as gloriously unkempt as usual, was the man himself, Peter Chagall.

“Be careful,” the boys on the Russian desk had warned him. “He smiles as wide as a shark and his teeth are every bit as sharp.”

But Graves didn’t need the Russian desk to give him a bio of Chagall. He knew it verbatim and had done ever since the day that Chagall had purchased Arsenal Football Club, the North London side Graves had pledged to every Saturday afternoon between September and May since the age of five.

Born in Siberia fifty-five years earlier, Piotr Chagalinsky was orphaned young and raised by his grandmother. A brilliant student, he obtained a scholarship to Moscow State University and subsequently graduated at the top of his class. After the obligatory stint in military service, he took a job with one of the USSR’s largest oil producers. By twenty-seven he had risen to vice chairman, a rise all the more unbelievable because of his refusal to join the Communist Party. When the Berlin Wall came down and Russia’s ossified government crumbled with it, Chagalinsky—by now rechristened Chagall—was in a perfect position to take advantage of it. He moved to modernize the oil company, boosting production while gobbling up smaller rivals and ensuring that a majority of the newly privatized company’s shares ended up in his pocket. It was this propensity to swallow up his rivals, along with his shock of blond hair, that lent him his nickname. The Great White.

And then, five years ago, Chagall had up and sold the company back to the Russian government for 10 billion pounds. The move was without warning and left many scratching their heads at the real reason for his departure. The next day he was on a plane to Britain. “I am finished with Russia and Russia is finished with me,” he’d announced famously. But like so much else about Chagall, it was a falsehood. Chagall was Russian to the core. He would never be done with the Rodina, and his involvement with Robert Russell proved as much.

“Welcome!” called Chagall in his thick Russian accent, opening the car door before Graves could cut the engine. “Captain Graves. It is a great pleasure.”

“Good of you to see me.” Graves let the intentional demotion go without mention. Already he had his first clue that Chagall was in hot water. Billionaires did not curtsey to the police, not in Russia or in Britain.

“How could I turn down a request from the Security Service? I am a citizen now. A subject of the queen.”

“Congratulations.” Graves wondered how much a UK passport had cost him. The house had gone for 30 million pounds, his football team for 200 million. Whatever it was, Chagall could afford it.

“You’re here about my friend Robert,” said the Russian mournfully. “This I know. To tell you the truth, I had been expecting your call.”

“Does that mean you have something to tell us?” Graves had no legal means of making Chagall cooperate. It was hardly against the law to meet with a man two hours before he was killed. If Graves wanted something out of Chagall, he’d have to trade for it.

“Perhaps,” said Chagall. “But I was hoping that you had something to tell me.”

“I might know a thing or two.”

Chagall gripped his arm and led him around the side of the home. “How did they get to him?”

“Through the basement,” said Graves.

“But he lived on the fifth floor. He had so much security—the alarms, the doormen.”

“They used the building’s old laundry chutes to move around without being detected.”

“Who? This I must know.”

“I can’t share that information with you. The investigation is ongoing.”

“Really?” Chagall shot him an inquiring look that might as well have telegraphed a bribe. How much did Graves want? Ten thousand pounds? Fifty thousand? One hundred?

“You’ll know as soon as we make an arrest,” said Graves.

“So it is soon?”

“We hope so.”

Chagall led the way through immaculately trimmed topiary, the hedges cut in the shapes of circus animals: an elephant, a lion, a dancing bear. Here and there along the perimeter of the tall brick walls that surrounded the property, armed guards lurked in the shadows, cradling submachine guns as they made their rounds. In the space of five minutes, Graves counted three teams of two and six television cameras. The palace wasn’t a home so much as a fortress. He said, “Tell me, Mr. Chagall, had you been friends with Lord Russell a long time?”

“Long enough. He was helpful.”

“How so?”

“He did not believe. He was not fooled like all of you others.”

“Fooled by what?”

“Look around you. You see the guns. My little army. What do you think? He was not fooled by
them.”

They emerged from the topiary. A large farmhouse stood up ahead, with great green doors. The sound of an engine revving came from somewhere inside it.

“We have pictures of your car in front of Lord Russell’s club the night he was murdered. After the two of you met, Russell drove to Victoria Street, the site where the car bomb attack against Interior Minister Ivanov took place. Do you have any idea why he might have felt compelled to go there so late at night?”

“Devils,” said Chagall, with venom. “Evil men. You have no idea. They wear nice suits. They speak English perfectly so you think they are all right. Men you can deal with—like Mrs. Thatcher said about Gorbachev twenty years ago. But you are naive. Not these men. You cannot deal with them. Russia was born out of a swamp. For ten centuries we have struggled. Always the poor man of Europe. Ignorant. Superstitious. And now a miracle has come to save us. Do you know what that miracle is?”

“Oil?” ventured Graves.

“Oil,” said Chagall. “Russia holds the second largest deposits in the world. Two hundred billion barrels. We used to pump over nine million barrels a day. But no longer. The men who control the oil companies would rather keep all the profit for themselves than split it with others. Instead of modernizing our drilling platforms with partners from the West, they allow the rigs to grow rusty. Instead of exploring for new deposits, they guard the old ones like jealous hens. The problem is that the men who have taken control of our country’s natural resources are not businessmen. They are spies, and spies are paranoid and stupid. They look constantly over their shoulders, but never straight ahead. They say that they are patriots who bleed for Mother Russia. I have decided, Captain Graves, that there is nothing scarier than a patriot.”

They had reached the farmhouse. The sound of the engine was louder now. Someone pumped the accelerator as voices called out instructions in Russian. Chagall opened a side door and entered. The farmhouse had been converted into a garage. Graves counted at least twenty automobiles parked under a canopy of heavy-duty floodlights. There was a Ferrari Scaglietti and a Lamborghini Miura. A Maserati Quattroporte and a Mercedes McLaren SLR. A Porsche 911 GT and a Bentley Mulsanne Turbo.

Chagall stopped in front of a sleek gray two-door sports car. “The Bugatti Veyron. The most expensive car in the world. Do you know how much it costs?”