Christopher Reich - The First Billion

He knew men who’d toughed out eight years in the Hanoi Hilton. He told himself he could stand a couple of days at the Moscow Marriott, or as Konstantin Kirov had eloquently christened the place, “the dacha.” Either way, it would be over soon, his freedom granted in one form or another.

He looked down at his bare feet, at the toenails clogged with dirt, at the white, defenseless flesh. “Bastards,” he muttered, the shivering growing worse now. “You could have left me my socks.”

The shed measured six feet by six feet and had been constructed from the slim, round corpus of birch trees. The walls rose eight feet in height. A padlock secured the door. There were no windows, but by peering through the gaps that separated one log from the next, he had a fine view of the compound. A three-room log cabin with a stone chimney and large picture windows stood a hundred feet to his right. Two smaller structures stood farther away, visible among the towering pines. One was a rotted cabin with a rickety antenna attached to its roof, the other a stone sump house with a redbrick smokestack. In his time at the dacha, Byrnes had yet to see a soul anywhere, save the grizzled man who served as his jailer.

To his left, maybe sixty feet, was another shed like his own: a storage shack, if the shards of coal and wood embedded in the dirt floor were anything to go by. A double fence surrounded the compound, twelve feet high, topped with a run of razor wire. Again he wondered why there were no guards. He stared at the fence. He guessed it was electrified. There was no better guard than twenty thousand volts of raw current.

It would be difficult to get out, Byrnes knew. Difficult, but not impossible. The real question was where he’d go once he was free. He had no money, no shoes. His clothes were tattered and bloody, his face a mess. In his present condition, he could hardly expect to walk back to Moscow.

Difficult… but there was a way.

A few rotting signposts stood inside the fences, and Byrnes recognized the place as a military camp of some kind. Though blindfolded during the drive out from Moscow, he’d felt the rise in elevation, especially on the last stretch of road. He could tell by the sun they’d driven north. If he had to guess, he’d say he was in an observation post, something Stalin had built in the paranoid years after the war when the Russians thought every American hiccup presaged a full-scale invasion.

The sound of the approaching motor grew louder. Byrnes’s trained ear was quick to notice the smoother, richer growl of the engine. It wasn’t the run-down pickup that brought him his meals every day. This was a new-model vehicle with a sturdy V-8. He listened closer. Two trucks, one engine pitched lower than the other.

Pressing his cheek to the coarse wood, he found it suddenly very hard to breathe. He’d warned himself it would happen. It was the natural course of events. He’d signaled Jett the deal was rotten. Jett had canceled the IPO. Kirov had sent his men to make good on his promise.

Newton’s Third Law, barked a strict voice from a long-ago classroom. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Or as the modern world had cynically paraphrased it: No good deed goes unpunished.

Byrnes stepped away from the wall and brushed the sprinkling of dirt and pine needles from his clothing. He stood a little straighter. This is how they would find him, he decided. With his pride and dignity intact.

A black Chevrolet Suburban pulled into the clearing in front of the main cabin. Doors opened and two of Kirov’s troopers got out, dressed in dark suits, shirts open at the collar. Byrnes wondered whether they minted men like that in a factory. Six-feet-something, two hundred pounds of bone and muscle. The first was stocky, with a Marine’s crew cut and a Slav’s dark scowl. The second, who was taller and had blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, hesitated by the passenger door, then barked out a series of instructions. A moment later, he leaned into the cabin and pulled from it a thin, belligerent man, whom he chucked onto the ground kicking and screaming as if he didn’t weigh anything at all. Not finished, the blond giant leaned right back in and came out with a woman, whom he threw over a shoulder and dumped a few steps away, where she lay among the pine needles, silently gathering herself.

Byrnes slid his eyes to the second SUV, of which only the hood was visible. His worry had shifted from himself to the poor wretches fifty feet away. Above the pained whimpering, he heard more voices—economical, cultured, at ease.

Konstantin Kirov appeared, dressed in a charcoal suit, a topcoat tossed over his shoulders in the manner of an Italian aristocrat to ward off the coming rain. Beside him walked a slim, dark-skinned man sporting a traffic cop’s mustache and wearing a grimy houndstooth jacket. Byrnes caught the eyes—the steady, soulless gaze—and recognized the type if not the man. He was the muscle.

Kirov and his colleague took up position fifteen yards in front of Byrnes, their backs turned toward him. They stood that way for a minute or so, taut, motionless, two general officers waiting for their troops to pass in review. Another man stumbled into sight, clothes torn, nose bloodied, followed by the big-boned clone who’d shoved him.

Kirov addressed the three unfortunates in a formal voice, and Byrnes was able to pick out a phrase here and there. “Sorry to have disturbed you.” “Over quickly.” “Tell the truth. You have nothing to fear.” And finally, an absurdly polite, “Spaseeba bolshoi.” Thank you very much. As if these people hadn’t been dragged from their homes or offices and driven to a deserted army outpost two hours outside of Moscow to answer to Kirov for their offenses, real or alleged.

Kirov ambled out of sight, and his partner took over. Immediately, the atmosphere changed, and Byrnes knew the exaggerated politeness had been for show. He had a feeling something terrible was about to happen. It was as if nature knew it, too. The soft breeze had stopped altogether. The birds ceased their incessant chatter. An uneasy stillness reigned.

“You!” shouted Kirov’s friend. Byrnes pegged him as an ethnic tribesman, the kind of tough, battle-hardened man you saw on television fighting for his country against the Iraqis or the Slavs or the Russians. From his coloring, Byrnes guessed he was a Chechen.

“Name,” he called.

The first man in line said, “Vyasovsky. Rem Vyasovsky.”

“You are a thief?”

“No.”

“A spy?”

Again, “No.”

“You steal papers and give them to the police?”

The man pulled his jacket tight around him. “Of course not,” he answered defiantly. “I am a clerk. This is a misunderstanding. If you want my job, you can have it. Fifty dollars a week is not enough for—”

The Chechen advanced three paces and clubbed the man viciously in the head with a ball-peen hammer. The man collapsed without a sound. The woman next to him screamed, and kept on screaming as the Chechen fell to a knee and hit him again and again with the hammer.

“Christ Almighty,” murmured Byrnes, something inside him twisting in grief and bewilderment. Somehow he guessed what it was all about, that this was a show for his behalf. Slumping to the ground, he buried his face in the crook of his knees, covering his ears with his hands. Yet, he had to listen. To bear witness. To accord Kirov’s victims a last measure of respect.

“Name.”

“Ludmilla Kovacs.”

“Position?”

“I am a secretary at Mercury Broadband. I work in the finance department for Mr. Kropotkin.”

“Do you know Detective Vassily Skulpin?”

“I do not.”

“Are you stealing papers from Mercury to give to Prosecutor General Baranov?”