Gulls wheeled over the car park, shrieked and yelled. Away to his right were the sheds for arrivals and departures, and above their roofs were the angles of the cranes and the white-painted superstructure of the cruise ship. The Sea Star was the first of the season, 950 passengers on board, to have returned from a Baltic sea voyage to St Petersburg. A pair of pensioners, probably using an inside cabin, would be bringing with them two large suitcases, and would have told Security on the quayside near the Hermitage that they had been so cheap in a street market they could not pass over the opportunity to purchase them … Not sophisticated but simple. It was the waiting for the mobile call that chewed in him. A gull, flying a few feet above the car, defecated and the windscreen was spattered. Rawlings jolted into action, swearing softly. He leaped out to clean the glass, wiping it furiously.
Through the windscreen, beyond the smears, Josef saw Viktor pushing in front of him a trolley with two suitcases … and then he stopped. He had a mobile phone in his hands, lifted it, had it against his ear — possibly for ten seconds, no more — and then it was back in his pocket, and the trolley was wheeled past the Audi. Goldmann snapped open his door, was out of it and by the boot. If any had watched the parking area, they would have seen a host of cars, large and small, expensive and cheap, into which such suitcases were loaded. At the front of the car Rawlings had finished cleaning the windscreen and was now back in the driver’s seat. The man was suitable because he heard nothing and saw nothing, and could drive at speed with a soft touch. And now Rawlings had introduced his friend, brought him to share the workload, to drive the children and Goldmann’s wife … Waiting to be told of the call’s message, he found that his breath came faster.
He stammered his question: ‘What-what information?’
Viktor said, calm, ‘They have replied to what we sent them. Just one word, difficult to hear, not a good connection, and the one word repeated three times. “Yes … da … da.” I think I heard their car engine.’
‘Just that, nothing more?’
‘Just that.’
‘So, it has begun.’
‘They are on the road,’ Viktor said, ‘and the schedule is one week.’
As if the enormity of it had struck him a powerful hammer blow, Josef Goldmann gasped. It was a moment before he had collected himself. ‘Viktor, tell me, should we have followed this path?’
Viktor said, ‘Too late to forget it. The offer was made, the price indicated, they accepted. Arrangements are in place, people are alerted, and they’re coming. It has begun and can’t be stopped.’
Goldmann winced, then snapped his fingers. He was given the keys to two suitcases. He unlocked two sets of padlocks, unbuckled reinforcing straps, dragged back zips. He rummaged through two thin layers of unwashed clothing, then felt for the catches that released the false bottom of each case. Exposed were hundred-dollar bills. Packages, each bound with elastic bands, of a hundred notes, each package with the value of ten thousand dollars. Fifty packages in the base of each bag. A tidy one million dollars, to be repeated twice a month through April and May, June and July, August and September. He replaced the lids, then the pensioners’ clothing, drew the zips tight, fastened the padlocks and slammed down the boot lid. He sighed.
‘Maybe twelve million comes out of St Petersburg, maybe seven million out of Tallinn, nine million out of Riga on the boats, and twenty on the roads across the frontiers. I take my cut for washing it, and I have four million, and that’s the top of what the market can sustain. Two men are on the road, send a message of one word, repeated three times, and we have negotiated a fee of eleven million.’
‘Your share is five point five — which means that everything coming from the boats, with expenses, is chicken shit.’
‘But what is the danger when you play with chicken shit?’
Viktor had minded Josef Goldmann since 1990. He had been put alongside Josef Goldmann in the city of Perm by Reuven Weissberg. He protected Goldmann on Weissberg’s orders. He heard a grim little cackle of laughter. ‘Where is the excitement in living when there is no danger, where there is only a carpet of chicken shit?’
‘You’ll tell him now?’
‘I’ll call him.’
A call was made. Three or four words. A connection of three or four seconds, and no response gained.
They were driven away at speed, but within the legal limits, to a warehouse in an industrial estate outside the Essex town of Colchester. From habit Simon Rawlings twice employed basic anti-surveillance techniques: circled a roundabout four times on the A12 at Horsley Cross, and slowed on the fast dual carriageway to twenty-five miles per hour. No car had followed them on the roundabout, or slowed to keep pace with them. And the car was clean of tags — it was swept each morning. All routine. Another safe run. Risk minimal. At the warehouse on the industrial estate, the two suitcases containing a million American dollars were to be loaded into a container that would hold, when filled, a cargo of best Staffordshire bone china to be exported to the Greek zone of the island of Cyprus. Reuven Weissberg touted for the business, Josef Goldmann washed the money, and the new millionaires and asset-strippers of the Russian Federation could rest assured that their nest eggs were safe and well protected.
Josef Goldmann laundered cash and made it clean for legitimate investment, was regarded in the Serious Crime Directorate as a major Organized Crime target, and thought himself safe … and wished that time could be turned back, that two old men had not started out on a drive of sixteen hundred kilometres, had stayed in their goddam hovels in the arse-end of Russia. But, and Viktor could have told him this, time was seldom turned back. On the return journey to London, he wondered what progress they had made — two old men and a carload that was worth, to him, a half-share in eleven million dollars — and he knew the clock was ticking.
The departure had been planned with the care and precision expected of former officers. The details of the journey, the route and the distance to be driven each day of that week, had been pored over, analysed, queried, debated and agreed.
But they had left late. Should have been gone as the dawn broke under the low cloud on a spring morning. In two weeks they would be home, his neighbour had said to his wife, with attempts at reassurance: there was enough cut wood for two weeks, they had no need of soup, bread and cheese, bills could wait for two weeks, in the car he would be warm, and what did it matter if he stank in soiled underclothes? It wasn’t a posting to Afghanistan, the Chinese border or the Baltic fog fields … It was two weeks’ journey, there and back.
Then it had struck Igor Molenkov, co-conspirator and neighbour of Oleg Yashkin, that Mother’s prolonged goodbye intimated that she had sensed danger he had not considered, or Yashkin spoken of. Pride, self-esteem, had rejected any acknowledgement of danger — as had anger. They were now on the road, and the car rolled along through the sodden forest of the state park, then past great stagnant lakes.
The anger remained as sharp today as when it had been bred, sharp as the talons of a fish-eating eagle circling over the park, sharp as the claws of the bears in its remotest parts. There had been so many days of anger over the betrayal he had endured, and their accumulation had put him in the Polonez car with the road map on his lap, his neighbour beside him, and a destination almost sixteen hundred kilometres to the west.