In Monte Carlo on the weekend of the Monaco Grand Prix even the super-rich sometimes struggled to find a berth for their yachts in Port Hercules, the tiny principality’s main harbour. First priority was notionally given to citizens and permanent residents of Monaco, and there were such long waiting lists that applications from non-residents were supposedly not even considered, yet somehow Russian oligarchs and other billionaires always found a way to secure a berth for their yachts, while the eye-watering cost of such rentals, like the revenues from the casino, disappeared into the capacious pockets of officials serving ‘His Serene Highness, the Prince of Monaco’.
The marinas were packed with scores of super-yachts, moored at right angles to the quayside. The multi-millionaire and billionaire owners and their privileged friends and guests had watched the race from the decks in the afternoon and now, as night was falling, the after-race parties were beginning on almost all of them. Like Hollywood stars at Oscar night parties, the grand prix drivers could pick and choose from dozens of invitations, and their diminutive figures, head and shoulders shorter than the tall, willowy models clustered around them, strolled the decks of many of the super-yachts like deities. On others there were gangsters, money launderers and traffickers in everything from guns and drugs to women rubbing shoulders with an array of fixers, wheelers, dealers, tax exiles, princes and titled paupers, descendants of obscure European royal houses. Monaco had not changed an iota since the 1920s, when Somerset Maugham witheringly dismissed it as ‘a sunny place for shady people’.
One of the largest yachts of all, its name picked out in Cyrillic script, was moored to a small pontoon covered with an awning and separating the yacht from the quay. The yacht was decked out with bunting, flags and lights, Eurotrash music was playing and beautiful young women and rather older and less beautiful men were drinking, dancing and partying. Others paired up and disappeared together below decks.
There was a small marquee at the quay end of the jetty and inside it, a security team was very carefully screening the invitations of the guests – most of them yet more beautiful young women – as they arrived, and confiscating any cameras or mobile phones. Those would not be returned to the guests until they left. The owner valued his privacy and could afford to ensure that it was maintained. The covered walkway had its own security system, and as the guests walked through it, they were scanned by concealed machines to ensure that they were not carrying anything that the security guards had missed. Cocaine or ecstasy were fine, but knives, guns or other weapons were not. The yacht owner, Oleg Zakharov, was a Russian oligarch and billionaire, and like most of his kind he had attracted more than his fair share of enemies over the years.
Those monitoring the security system could see the guests’ bodies under their clothes – one of the perks of the job for the two men monitoring the screens, who got to see some of the most beautiful women they’d ever come across stark naked. As usual, Zakharov himself had joined them, moistening his lips with his tongue as he leaned over the screen, seeing what would be available for his pleasure later that night.
The man they called Monotok had already been to Genoa to visit the shipyard where Zakharov’s yacht was built. Posing as the fixer and right-hand man of yet another Russian billionaire looking for a super-yacht, he was given a tour of the yard and shown a model of Zakharov’s yacht. The Genoese boat-builders were so proud of it that they even showed him the plans. If not quite the biggest yacht in the world – an American software billionaire had one a few feet longer, they said, grinding their teeth – it was ‘definitely the most beautiful and luxurious’. Monotok had smiled and nodded sympathetically, keeping them talking, and then sending them off in search of more information while he memorised the lay-out of the yacht and took a few discreet photographs with his iPhone while they were distracted.
Getting the yacht’s schedule had been harder, but he had that and a copy of Zakharov’s diary showing him when he’d be on board. Even as he toured the boatyard he had decided that Monte Carlo was the place to strike. After he left the boatyard, he went to a workshop, once a manufacturer of beautifully crafted sextants but now specialising in making one-off gadgets for rich men. Monotok commissioned an extending climbing-pole, sketching what he wanted on a piece of paper. He told the technician who took his order that he was going rock and ice climbing in the Alps and would be using the pole to bridge crevasses and ‘unclimbable’ sections of rock face. The device was a telescoping aluminium tube made up of six sections, four inches at its widest and tapering down to half that in the final section. Pressing a lever broke the seal on a small gas bottle and the released gas caused the pole to extend swiftly and silently to its full length. A four-pronged grapple covered with sprayed-on rubber was fixed to the top, and when extended, each section also had a couple of narrow footholds along its sides that sprang out as it extended and retracted when it was collapsed again.
From a diving shop he bought a neoprene scuba drysuit that clamped tight around his neck, wrists and ankles, giving a watertight seal, but leaving his hands, feet and face exposed. In the prolonged immersion in the sea that he was planning, they would get very cold, so he also bought gloves, boots and a hood, as well as a spear gun and a diving knife.
On the night of the grand prix, he waited for nightfall and then made his way down through the Japanese Gardens, near Larvotto Beach, a mile east of the marina. He climbed down the short, rocky cliff and slipped into the sea, then swam and finned his way along to the marina, using a slow but powerful stroke. He moved along the lines of yachts, a dark shape barely distinguishable from the darkness of the sea itself, and eventually slipped under the pontoon, next to Zakharov’s super-yacht.
He watched and waited for several hours while the party was still in full swing on the yacht. All the security was focused on those walking on to the yacht from the jetty, and there was only the most cursory surveillance of the yacht itself and even less of its seaward side. Eventually, in the early hours, the music and noise from the yacht died down and the cabin lights were extinguished one by one. There were still two bored security men standing on the quayside, but the yacht itself was quiet.
He finned his way across to the seaward side of the yacht. He popped the seal on the gas bottle to extend the climbing pole and hooked the rubber grapple over the deck rail of the yacht, then removed his fins, attached them to his belt with a karabiner, and then began to climb the pole. Monotok’s heart was not even beating fast as he swung himself over the rail and began to pad silently along the deck, the spear gun on a strap over his shoulder and the knife held ready in his hand. The spear gun made little noise but it could not be guaranteed to kill instantly, and it would be a last resort, to be used only if a target was too far from him to be dealt with by a swift, silent kill with the knife. But the spear gun and the knife were there only in case something went wrong and he was discovered. If all went to plan only one man would die, and that would be Zakharov. And Monotok wouldn’t be using the spear or the knife to take the oligarch’s life.
As he reached the midpoint of the deck in the shadow of the main mast, he heard a noise from the far side of the yacht. He froze and turned to look down the deck. One of the beautiful young women, out of her head on cocaine and alcohol and barely aware of what was happening, had been pinned to the deck and was being screwed by one of the crewmen, while a line of four or five others waited their turn, all eyes fixed on her naked body, oblivious to the black-clad figure ghosting between the shadows on the other side of the yacht.
As Monotok watched, the crewman got up, wiped himself down with the woman’s torn and discarded designer silk blouse and was at once replaced by the next man in the queue. As the crewman lowered himself on to the woman, her head rolled sideways, her blond hair matted and her vacant, drugged eyes staring straight at Monotok. She looked no more than sixteen or seventeen, but Monotok merely made certain that she had not registered his presence before moving on along the deck. He was coldly indifferent to what was happening to her, and even grateful for the distraction she was providing for the crew and security men awaiting their turn.