The Vanishing (32 page)

‘Take the phone off him,’ Barsukov said calmly. ‘Strip him and put him in the bathtub.’

‘Wait!’ Tom shouted. ‘Wait!’ But they weren’t waiting for anything. In a second they had tripped and pushed him, were pinning him to the floor and the phone was out of his hands. He started to struggle, kick out and shout, writhing around while they strained to get their hands on to his arms and legs, to hold him still, muttering instructions to each other in Russian. One of them caught hold of his head and told him to calm down, over and over again, but Tom was frantic now, his heart going crazy. He succeeded in getting a hand free and lashed out wildly. The one holding his head pushed harder, grinding his face into the tiled floor. He started to yell with pain and panic, still thrashing the arm around, blindly trying to hit or grab anything he could feel. He thought he could hear them laughing at him, like it was all some kind of schoolboy bullying prank.

It went on like that for a few seconds more before someone finally hit or kicked him in the upper belly so hard the blow left him prone. After that all he could do was curl into a ball and gasp. He could hear Barsukov talking, then feel them pulling his clothes off. As he got his breath back they picked him up and actually threw him across the room. They gave a shout as they did it. He caught the side of the big bathtub with a hard blow to his hip, then slid over and into it. Immediately he staggered to his feet and tried to get out. But they were right in front of him, blocking him in. As he stepped forward one jabbed into his face. The punch looked almost casual, but Tom’s vision went black, and when it came back he found he was sitting in the tub in a half-collapsed position, sucking in air, a terrible pain radiating out from his left cheekbone. He brought his hand up to his face and held it there, groaning.

One of them pressed buttons on a control panel and water started to gush from two taps. Tom looked down at himself. He was in his underwear with the water swirling around him. Above him Barsukov pushed between the men and sneered. ‘You stupid little man,’ he said. ‘We can drown you in this. Did you think of that? They will just hold you under until you drown.’ He was holding Tom’s jacket in his hands, going through the pockets as he spoke. He found and pulled out the folded paperwork Tom had brought with him, the proof that they really did have the details of thirty-seven addresses belonging to Barsukov. His father had taken it from copied material he had at home, information put together from the 2003 inquiry which had involved surveillance on Maxim Sidurov and Barsukov himself. Other teams had already been working Barsukov, of course, had already compiled masses of material preparatory to getting financial orders against him. Nothing had come of that, but Grenser had taken copies of substantial parts of it.

Tom saw Barsukov looking at some of the paperwork now. He said a silent, useless prayer. It was all old material. How much of it would still be current? His safety in coming here rested on the risk that one of those addresses or details might mean something. If Barsukov had Sara, then, even though she might not be being held at one of those places, she might have been through one, leaving enough traces – in DNA and prints and suchlike – to make it too risky for Barsukov to ignore the threat of the police showing up there looking for her. Or maybe if there was just enough material there to convince him that Tom really wasn’t alone, that there were police resources behind him – maybe that would be enough to make him cautious. Any police inquiry at all would be damaging for him. Even if he had nothing to do with kidnapping Sara, then that prospect might still make him think twice about doing anything further to Tom. That was the idea, anyway. Back at Tom’s father’s place it had seemed like a good idea.

And anyway, in a few minutes his father was going to make the call. He was outside, in the car, waiting. He would make the call. But how long would it then take for help to get up here? Ten minutes, fifteen? He had to stop them for that long. If they tried to kill or seriously injure him that was how long he had to fight for. In a kind of stunned daze, he watched Barsukov frown as he read through the paperwork, then push past the heavies and walk away, back to the door. He heard the door close behind him as he left, without saying anything, without giving any instructions.

Tom looked at the heavies and didn’t know what to do, what to say. They were staring at him, not doing anything. The water crept up around his boxer shorts. It was freezing. He started to shiver. He sat like that for four minutes, panting, his head and heart pounding. He counted the minutes in his head. He calculated that if he didn’t call within the next two minutes then the game was over, the gamble played out. His father would call his friends, the connections would be made. It would start. He tried not to think about what that might mean for Sara.

He didn’t hear the door open again, but suddenly Barsukov was back, saying things in Russian. The water was switched off, towels were held out to him, two of the heavies left. Everyone seemed to relax a little. Barsukov stood in front of him, holding his phone out, still looking very angry. ‘Not so stupid after all,’ he said. ‘You had better make your little call. Then we’ll talk.’

When the call came in, Arisha was sitting in the top study with Freddie, watching it happen, watching her plan unfolding perfectly in front of her, feeling like she might pass out with relief. It had been two hours since Freddie had taken the call from Max and he had been frantic the entire time since then. He was sitting on the phone now, delivering instructions to a broker in Monaco in a desperate, cracking voice.

He hadn’t been off the phone since Max had called. She had thought there would be some hesitation, that she might have to put some effort into persuading him, but he had swallowed it at once, not even querying the amount. Forty million sterling. It was – as she understood it – just about all he would be able to put together in the time frame available. It would clean him out. He wouldn’t look cleaned out, of course. Not yet. He would still live in big houses, still have yachts in harbours all over the world, still enjoy all the trappings of this absurd life, with no concern whatsoever for the price of things. But only for a little while. Because all that was an illusion. None of it belonged to him. Aside from roughly forty million sterling – an amount barely enough to maintain the annual expenditure for even one of his London homes – the reality was everything in his life had belonged to Liz Wellbeck and was destined elsewhere.

And Freddie knew that. Because what had started all this was that he had managed to get his hands on her will. He’d suspected for years that Liz had made some kind of provision for Sara. He assumed that the provision would be held in trust until Sara reached a certain age – probably twenty-one, which was now only two days away. But he had imagined, of course, that the sum would be negligible, that the rest of the staggering Wellbeck fortune would all come to him in due course. Then his contacts had got hold of the will and the mountain of other secret arrangements Liz had put in place to cut him off. He’d discovered that if Liz had her way, he wasn’t going to get a penny. What he had owned when he married her – or what was left of it – was what he would get when she died.

Emergency meetings had followed. Lawyers were found who would examine the stolen documents. But all they told him was that Liz had done nothing more than what he had agreed to before their wedding in New York in 1985. He had signed the paperwork, he had taken advice. He had walked into it with his eyes open. There were no bankable loopholes. Liz had been scrupulous, as ever. She had paid a small fortune to top lawyers to make sure she kept control of her family assets, that
she
decided who it would all go to.

And what she had decided was that every cent of it would go to Sara, on her twenty-first birthday. That was assuming the cancer killed Liz before then. Which it had. Sort of. But even if that hadn’t happened there would have been separate, secret trust provisions to ensure the same result. In that case, she would have retained enough to fund her palliative care in her own private clinic, but the rest would still have gone to Sara. All of it. On Friday this week.

So the money Freddie was desperately trying to transfer now was all he had, all that was actually his to dispose of. And twenty-five million of it was owed to Barsukov, according to Barsukov. That was why Dima was in on this, why his authority and resources were backing the entire enterprise. Freddie had always denied the debt to Dima, always laughed at the idea. There had been an arms deal somewhere in the past, something massive that had gone wrong owing to political issues in the corrupt African states they had been trying to sell to, back in the days before Arisha had sight of Freddie’s accounts. Freddie’s version was that he hadn’t seen a penny of Dima’s millions, he’d been a broker for Dima, nothing more. If it had all worked he would have taken a percentage. He spoke of it like it was a little game he’d played, and lost. Like a night at the casino. But Dima was exceptionally bitter about it, felt betrayed and tricked. The money Freddie had used as some kind of obscene bribery fund had been his. How Dima had got his hands on it wouldn’t bear close scrutiny, she imagined, but Dima had nursed his resentment very carefully, because that was what he was like – he never forgot.

So Dima would take his cut of the forty million, plus the pleasure of cleaning Freddie out. But the rest was for Arisha and Max. Max thought he was getting Arisha as well, she realised – that was really why
he
was so committed – Arisha and a straight half of fifteen million. In fact, she planned to take ten of that. For her and Sasha alone. She wanted them all out of her life, Max and Freddie. She wanted rid of them. Max would have to live with five million as consolation. She would take her fifteen and make do. She would go back to Russia with Dima’s protection. She would take her child and start over. Fifteen million was chicken feed compared to the sums she’d been handling for the Eatons, compared to what it cost to fund the life she’d been leading with Freddie, but there was a lot you could do with fifteen million in modern Russia. Russia wasn’t what it had been when she’d left. She would thrive. She would be free of them all and thrive. Just herself and Sasha.

That was the plan.

And it was working. Max had called him, so Freddie now understood what was happening – Max held Sara. Freddie was doing exactly what was demanded, arranging the transfer of forty million sterling. She was sitting in the room with him watching every move, listening to every word, willing it on. The money was going to come to her, she was going to escape.

And then her mobile was buzzing, Dima’s number on the screen. She stepped out to speak to him and listened in stunned silence to what he told her. He spoke in very rapid Russian: ‘It’s off. I’m cancelling. Can you hear me? Do you get that? It’s all off.’

She managed to grunt something. She could feel her throat closing up on her.

‘We’ll release her,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way there now to do it. No option. I want you to call Max at once, give him the instruction. You understand?’

She couldn’t reply.

‘Do you understand, Arisha?’

‘I … I don’t … what …’

‘No discussion. Call him and warn him. Then I want you there, in case he takes it badly. He will listen to you. I want you there urgently. You understand?’

‘Yes. But …’

‘After all, it was your idea. I always knew it wouldn’t work.’

Then he was gone. She leaned against the wall and felt like she would collapse. Behind her she could hear Freddie shouting at someone, still trying to rake together the needed amount. She gasped and clutched at her throat. What had happened? What had gone wrong?

She thought she would suffocate. The implications came at her all at once, an avalanche of consequences. She would have to remain with this disgusting man, watch his perverse ideas about childhood and humanity corrupt her son. She would have to pretend, lie, act her way through this sickening charade for the rest of her life. She would go insane.

He must have heard her, because the next thing he was at the door, staring down at her. She had sunk to the floor by now and was sitting in a little heap.

‘That won’t fucking help,’ he said harshly. ‘We can’t give in to this. Stand up, for Christ’s sake. I need your assistance in here.’ He didn’t even help her up. Gone was the weepy dependency. There was money involved now, and everything came down to that, in the end. Everything he was. Take away the wealth and he was an utter failure. He was the most despicable man she had ever met. The father of her son. How could it be? How could Sasha be so perfect and still have this man’s miserable genetic material inside him?

She pushed herself up the wall. ‘I had a phone call,’ she muttered, trying desperately to think what she should say. But then it just came out: ‘I know where she is. I know where he’s holding her.’

‘What?’ He took a sudden step backwards, like she’d hit him. ‘You know? How do you know? Are you serious?’

She nodded. ‘I made calls. I told you.’ She had lied to him that she was trying to do just that – to find out where Max was. ‘Now I know.’

For a moment they were staring at each other. She could see him working through it, his brain racing. He started to turn crimson. She thought he might have a heart attack, or explode with anger. His fists clenched and unclenched. He had to lean against the door frame. But her mind was blank. What was she doing?
She was crossing Dima.
For the first time ever, she was going against him, disobeying his instructions.

Because Dima was offering her nothing. But this way she was still in with a chance. Or because she hadn’t even thought it through, more likely. Because she couldn’t. Because the alternative was so desperate. So the words had just come out. And there was no getting them back in now. She had said it, told him, started it. Now she would have to follow through.

She slotted the responses into her brain, adjusted her breathing, let the role slip over her. She could tell as many lies as were necessary, she could look Freddie in the eye and tell the lies and know, for certain, that he would never guess. Because he was stupid. She would take this chance on him. Try it. Find another way to get what she needed from him. There would be a way. As long as there was money, there would be a way. There was nothing else she could do.