‘I’m not a fucking butler,’ said Popov, but he put up a hand in apology when Shepherd glared at him. ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you tea and water.’
He left the room and Shepherd watched as Lee assembled his equipment. Shepherd wasn’t sure what to expect – he’d seen polygraphs in movies and they always had lots of needles moving across graph paper, but Lee’s kit seemed to be a regular laptop, albeit in a brushed stainless steel case. Lee connected two rubber straps to the computer, and several other attachments, which he laid out on the second table.
Popov returned with a tray on which there was a bottle of water and a glass of ice, and a handleless cup with steaming green tea. He put the tray on the table and sat down. ‘You can do me first,’ he said.
‘I have a list to work through,’ said Lee as he tapped on his keyboard.
‘If you are to question any members of my team, you will do me first,’ said Popov.
Lee looked over at Shepherd, and Shepherd nodded. Lee fastened the rubber straps around Popov’s barrel-like chest, attached a white clip to his left index finger and asked him to remove his tie and open his shirt. Popov did as asked and Lee dabbed two electrodes with gel and placed them on his shoulder blades.
‘OK?’ said Popov, as Lee went to sit in the chair and looked at his computer. ‘Right? I did not steal Mr Grechko’s fucking watch. I have never stolen a fucking watch. I will never steal a fucking watch.’ He scowled at Lee. ‘Are we done?’
Lee looked at him over the top of his glasses. ‘I’m afraid it isn’t quite as simple as that,’ he said.
Monotok woke with a start, his heart racing. He stared up at the ceiling and took slow deep breaths. He’d always had bad dreams but the nightmares were visiting him more often now and he didn’t understand why that would be. Three of the men were dead and the fourth would be dead soon and he had always believed that killing them would end the nightmares.
The dreams were never the same, not exactly. But they always involved the death of his parents, or the man who had taken care of him after they had died – Boronin, the farmer.
Monotok was six years old when the Berlin Wall had fallen. He’d watched it happen on television with his mother and father, and his father had told him then that the world – their world – was about to change for ever. Monotok wasn’t called the Hammer back then, of course, he was little Kirill, a sickly child who caught every bug going, with pale skin and spindly arms and legs that never seemed to get any stronger no matter how much food his mother forced down him. ‘Kirill, soon the world will open up to us Russians, and we must be ready to take advantage of it.’ Monotok’s father was the manager of a steel factory some two hundred miles east of Moscow, a huge hellish place of flames and smoke that always filled Monotok with a mixture of dread and awe whenever his father took him to visit.
It seemed to the young boy that the factory was staffed by giants, big men stained with soot and sweat with bulging muscles and rippling chests who communicated with nods and grunts but who smiled whenever they saw how scared he was, hiding from them behind his father’s legs.
Monotok was eight when the Soviet Union fell apart, and again his father had tried to explain the significance of the monumental event. He had chosen his words carefully, because even as the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB were still everywhere and the state came down heavily on dissenters. Monotok remembered little about what his father had said, other than that he was excited about the prospect of being given more responsibility at work and that the government would let him run the factory the way he wanted to. His father had big plans, he wanted to expand the factory, seek out export markets, and increase the wages of his staff. All of it would happen in time, he promised his son, all they had to do was to wait and see.
What Mark Luchenko didn’t know was that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union would result not in a capitalist boost for his factory but in his own death and the death of his wife, Monotok’s mother.
Monotok was orphaned shortly after his ninth birthday. His uncle took him away from the house and they never returned. By the age of ten, Monotok had been ‘adopted’ by a farmer, Sergei Boronin, a widower who bought Monotok from his uncle for fifty roubles, as if he was mere livestock.
Boronin’s farm, little more than a smallholding, was in a remote area, beyond the Ural Mountains, a thousand miles east of Moscow. He proved to be a vodka-sodden, petty tyrant who beat Monotok, kept him out of school and used him as virtual slave labour on his farm. If Monotok complained or didn’t work fast enough, or if Boronin was angry or hung over from one of the vodka-fuelled binges that followed his weekly visits to the small town where he sold his animals and bought his supplies, Monotok would get another brutal beating.
There was worse to come. One night Boronin returned drunk as usual from a trip to town. Monotok was already in bed, and when he heard his bedroom door open, he pretended to be asleep, fearing another beating. There was the shuffling sound of Boronin’s footsteps and then a creak as he sat down on the edge of the bed. He spent some time looking down at the boy and then the blanket was pulled aside and Monotok felt the farmer’s calloused hand on his thigh. He lay motionless, still trying to feign sleep, though his heart was pounding. He heard the rustle of fabric as Boronin fumbled with his trousers and then the farmer’s weight was on him, crushing him and pinning him down, and a moment later the boy felt a burning, agonising pain.
That brutal ritual became such a regular part of his life that he grew to dread the sky darkening into evening because he knew what the night would bring. At first it was just Boronin himself, but after a few weeks, other men began to appear at the isolated cabin in the forest, bringing a bottle of vodka and perhaps a couple of roubles for the farmer. Monotok would hear voices and the clink of glasses, and then his door would open and a figure would be outlined against the glow of light from the kitchen where Boronin still sat, pouring himself another drink.
Monotok ran away twice but both times was found by the police, who ignored his tearful pleas and protests and returned him to his guardian. Each time, after the police had drunk Boronin’s vodka and gone, Boronin would wrap the end of his belt around his fist and beat the boy almost senseless.
In the end Monotok became numbed to everything that happened to him. The beatings and the nightly abuse became just another part of his life, as hard, unvarying and predictable as the work of feeding and mucking out the animals that he had to carry out. But, although now outwardly calm and resigned to his fate, inside he burned with dreams of revenge.
He was patient – he had to be – but every day he schemed, planned and prepared for his opportunity. Although Boronin worked him like a dog, Monotok used what little spare time he had to further build his strength and stamina, taking long runs through the taiga – the forest that spread unbroken across northern Russia, spanning nine time zones – and using logs, buckets of water and large stones as primitive weights.
On the rare occasions when Boronin took Monotok with him to town, he grabbed the chance to toughen himself and hone his fighting skills by picking fights with much bigger boys. Inevitably he took a few beatings at first but kicks and blows were too familiar to him to be a concern, and before long, he was flattening any boy who got in his way, landing his blows with a cold, cruel calculation, his pulse rate barely rising above normal as he beat them into submission and then laid them out with a final brutal punch or kick.
When he was fourteen years old, he felt he was ready. He chose his moment welclass="underline" a midwinter night so bitterly cold that his footsteps rang like struck metal on the ice-bound ground as he crossed the yard from the barn where the animals were housed. He waited for Boronin to return home from the town that night, stumbling drunk through the snow, clutching yet another bottle of vodka. Monotok watched him struggle out of his coat and make his unsteady way to his seat by the fire, but as Boronin turned his baleful, bloodshot gaze towards him Monotok spat in his face and then rained blows and kicks on him, beating him relentlessly to a bloody pulp.