‘I’ve been told that before,’ said Shepherd. He pointed at an unmarked door. ‘What’s in there?’
‘The gun range.’
‘The gun range? You’ve got guns?’
‘Airguns,’ said Popov. ‘Mr Grechko’s children used to like playing with them.’
‘But you’re not armed, are you?’
Popov looked offended. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Handguns are illegal in this country.’
‘I just thought maybe you’d been given special permission.’
Popov shook his head. ‘I think Mr Grechko asked but permission was refused.’ He pushed open the door. The room was about fifteen feet wide and sixty feet long. The walls and ceiling were soundproofed and there was a wall of sandbags at the far end, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. There were three targets in front of the sandbags, figures of terrorists holding AK-47s. By the door was a bench from where the guns could be fired, and there was a wire system that allowed the targets to be run back and forth.
‘This is pretty elaborate for airguns,’ said Shepherd.
Popov walked over to a metal cabinet with a keypad on the door. He tapped out a four-digit code and pressed his thumb against a sensor. The door opened and Popov stepped to the side to show Shepherd a dozen air rifles and half a dozen pistols of various shapes and sizes. All of them seemed to be air-operated. The bigger ones would provide quite a kick but you would have to be very lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – to kill anyone with them. Popov closed the door of the cabinet.
‘So what’s the story with the kids?’ asked Shepherd.
‘They spend most of their time with Mrs Grechko, when they’re not at school,’ said Popov. ‘The first Mrs Grechko. She has a Cypriot passport. So does Mr Grechko and the children. He invested a lot of money in Cyprus many years ago and they were all given passports.’
‘And they’re on good terms?’
Popov frowned, not understanding. ‘Good terms?’
‘The divorce was amicable? Friendly? They’re not fighting?’
‘Mr Grechko is a very generous man,’ he said. ‘Mrs Grechko wants for nothing. They both love their sons. They have nothing to fight about.’ He walked out of the gun range with Shepherd and pushed open another door marked fire exit. It led to a concrete stairwell. ‘This is one of the three stairways that serve as emergency exits in the event of a fire. Also covered by CCTV. There are no locks or keypads on the doors on the outside for obvious reasons, but every inch is covered by CCTV. Once inside the stairwell, you need a thumbprint and code to exit at any level other than the ground floor. So again, we know who is where at any point just by tracking what doors they’ve opened.’
He walked down the stairs and pushed open a door that led to the second basement level. They stepped into a wood-panelled corridor with recessed lighting. ‘This is where the family comes for fun,’ said Popov. He showed Shepherd a full-size bowling alley with two lanes, a billiards room with two tables, a games room packed with video arcade games, pinball machines and two pool tables. He pushed open red double doors that opened into a plush red-velvet-lined cinema with twenty large La-Z-Boy reclining chairs and sofas facing a screen as big as Shepherd had ever seen. ‘Now this I like,’ said Shepherd.
‘Mr Grechko likes to watch movies,’ said Popov. ‘He gets to see a lot of them before they are released. He owns a movie studio in Los Angeles.’
He closed the doors to the cinema and pushed open another door that led to the concrete stairwell. They went down to the third basement level.
Popov nodded at a pair of teak double doors with the omnipresent keypad. ‘That’s Mr Grechko’s gym,’ he said. ‘He has two personal trainers and a Thai man who teaches him Muay Thai. You can box, Tony?’
‘Not really,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’m more of a lover than a fighter.’
‘Pity, if you were any good we could have a bet as to whether you could beat our Thai boxer.’
‘Is he good?’
‘Hard as nails,’ said Popov. ‘Half my size but I wouldn’t go into the ring with him.’
‘How often do the trainers come?’
‘Monday and Thursday. They take it in turns. The boxer is here on Saturdays if Mr Grechko is home.’ From the other side of the doors they heard a loud grunt. Popov grinned. ‘That’s Mr Grechko,’ he said. ‘He’s doing weight training today. He can bench-press more than Leo.’
Popov gestured at frosted double doors at the far end of a tiled corridor. ‘And that’s the pool. That’s out of bounds when Mrs Grechko and the kids are here, but when she’s away Mr Grechko allows us to use the pool. Absolutely no smoking or drinking.’
‘No problem, Dmitry, I won’t be doing either.’ He looked up at the ceiling and caught their reflection in yet another black plastic dome. ‘You’re constantly monitoring the CCTV?’
‘In the security centre on Basement One,’ said Popov. ‘We’ll go there now.’ He took Shepherd along to a lift and they went up two floors. Popov pressed his thumb against the scanner and tapped in his four-digit code on the keypad outside the security centre. The lock clicked and he pushed open the door. There was a large room with three high-backed chairs facing a dozen large LCD screens. Each of the screens was filled with nine camera views from around the mansion and the grounds.
Only one of the chairs was occupied, by a thin man in his twenties who was trying in vain to disguise a receding hairline with a waxed comb-over. Shepherd recognised him from his file picture but said nothing as Popov introduced him as Vlad Molchanov. Molchanov was holding an iPad and he switched it off and placed it on a desk as Popov walked over to the screens. ‘As you can see we have eleven screens each with nine cameras,’ he said. ‘Ninety-nine in all.’ He pointed at the largest of the screens, which showed a view of the main gate. ‘This screen we use for anything of interest, to get a better view. The screens on the left are pre-programmed with the cameras we want to be watching all the time. The grounds, the corridors, the garage. The screens on the right take feeds from the rest of the cameras in a pre-programmed order but that can be overridden if any movement is spotted. The motion detectors take precedence over the timer so if something moves, we see it on one of these screens straight away.’
‘What about recordings?’
‘It all goes straight on to hard discs, but the discs are recycled every seven days,’ said Popov.
‘OK, as of today let’s stop doing any recycling. Keep everything.’ There was a row of transceivers in charging docks on a table against one wall. ‘How does the communication system work?’ he asked.
‘We all speak on the same channel. Channel One. If I need a personal chat we move to another frequency.’
‘Are the conversations recorded?’ Popov shook his head. ‘And you allow conversations in Russian?’
‘Of course.’
‘OK, well, from now on I want all chatter to be in English. All of it. I have to know what’s going on at all times.’
‘I’ll make sure that happens,’ said the Russian. He waved Shepherd to a chair and they both sat down. ‘This is Vlad Molchanov, he’s usually in here.’
Molchanov leaned over and shook hands with Shepherd. His grip was weak and clammy and Shepherd had to resist the urge to wipe his hand on his trousers.
Popov opened a door to reveal a larger room with a table surrounded by a dozen high-backed chairs. In one corner there was a kitchen area.
‘What time can I see Mr Grechko?’
There was a bank of clocks up on the wall above the screens showing the time in six different cities, from Los Angeles to Sydney. ‘He’s in the gym for another half-hour, then he has a massage and then he will shower and rest. He is eating at six and can see you for half an hour before that.’