Payback (16 page)

‘Perhaps there was an emergency, something that meant everyone had to leave. You told us that your horse’ – the inspector referred to his notes – ‘yes, your horse
Shaf is missing. Suppose the horse bolted,’ he waved his arm in a vague gesture, ‘and they’ve all gone off to fetch it back.’

Sheikh Qabandi frowned impatiently. ‘That’s a most unlikely scenario. The horses here may be thoroughbreds, all highly strung animals, but they seldom bolt, as you put it. Whenever
they are outside their stalls, they always wear a bridle, and are attended by one of the staff.’

‘But supposing an insect bit one, or something like that—’

‘Inspector’ – Qabandi was starting to get annoyed – ‘let’s assume your scenario might be correct, and that the staff here failed to obey the simplest and most
basic procedures they follow every single day, and that my horse did manage to run off. At most, it might need half a dozen people to recapture it. Where’s everyone else? Or are you
suggesting that literally everybody, even Osman bin Mahmoud’s
wife
, went rushing off into the desert to search for it? And that they’re still out there now, at least twenty-four
hours later?’

‘How do you know there’s been no one here for twenty-four hours?’

‘By deduction, Inspector. When we arrived, none of the stalls had water and most had no fodder. I know the routine here. The water troughs are filled every morning and evening as a matter
of course, and checked during the day. If they had been filled this morning, they would all be over half-full. And if they’d been filled last night, most of them would still have some water
left. So the last time they could possibly have been filled was yesterday morning.’

‘Right,’ the inspector said, closing his notebook. He didn’t like the arrogant tone of the sheikh standing in front of him, but he had to concede that the man seemed to know
what he was talking about. ‘We’ll search the farmhouse next.’

‘And then what will you do?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s see what we find in the house first.’

Adler, Russia

‘Are you feeling unwell, sir?’ the waiter asked.

The question was ridiculous. It was perfectly obvious to even the most untrained observer that Edward Dawson was sick. He was lying on a couch in the hotel lounge, his tie loosened and his shirt
unbuttoned at the neck. His skin had an unhealthy pallor, almost grey, and he was breathing in short, painful gasps. His companion had opened a small black bag and was now extracting a stethoscope
and blood-pressure cuff.

‘Stand back, please,’ Wilson ordered in Russian. He listened to Dawson’s heartbeat for half a minute or so, checked his blood pressure, tested the reaction of his pupils with a
small pocket torch, and gently felt his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘This man needs immediate specialist hospital treatment,’ he said. ‘That means he’ll have to be
flown to Moscow or Kiev. Do you have an air ambulance here?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘We need to find out, and quickly. Fetch the manager, please.’

As the waiter hurried away, Dawson sat upright and vomited copiously onto the patterned carpet. The waiter looked back in alarm at the sound, then left the lounge at a run.

Less than a minute later a middle-aged man wearing a dark suit walked over to the couch. He looked with distaste at the splatter of vomit, then at Wilson.

‘I’m the hotel manager, so how—’ he began, but Wilson cut him off almost immediately.

‘My colleague requires urgent medical attention,’ Wilson repeated. ‘I’m a doctor, and I suspect he may be suffering from encephalitis or meningitis. We need an air
ambulance immediately.’

‘We have doctors and a hospital here in Adler. I’m not sure we need to—’

‘Listen,’ Wilson interrupted, ‘if my diagnosis is correct, we have to get this man into a specialist hospital as soon as possible. We’ll need complex laboratory tests to
determine whether he’s suffering from a viral or a bacterial infection, and then use specific antiviral or antibacterial drugs to cope with it. We’ll also need sedatives and
anticonvulsants, and probably corticosteroids to reduce the inflammation of his brain. I know that this scale of treatment is completely beyond the facilities likely to be available in any local
hospital. The nearest major centres are Kiev and Moscow, so that’s where he’s got to be taken. If he doesn’t get emergency treatment very soon he could die, possibly within hours.
Now, I’ll ask you again. Is there an air ambulance available here in Adler?’

The manager stared down at the sick man, then looked up. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said abruptly, then turned to leave. ‘You’ – he gestured to a waiter
– ‘find one of the cleaners and get that mess cleared up.’

Volgograd, Russia

Litvinoff had at least received one piece of good news. He’d ordered a check of all hotels and vehicle-hire firms in Volgograd, but had assumed that the search would
be fruitless because his quarry would have gone somewhere else. But it turned out that luck was on his side, and Litvinoff and two of his men had immediately driven south to follow up the new
lead.

A hotel located near the main railway station had reported that two men carrying American passports had checked in that morning. That was unremarkable in itself, but what had caused the staff to
remember them was the short duration of their stay. They’d arrived early in the morning, taken a twin-bedded room, but left the hotel that same afternoon. That meant they’d had to pay
for two nights’ accommodation, despite having spent only six hours in the hotel – none of them during the night – because the hotel’s ‘day’ started at twelve
noon.

‘What were their names?’ Litvinoff demanded, standing in the lobby.

The hotel manager opened the register. ‘Johnson and Hughes.’

‘I assume you made a note of their passport numbers?’

‘No. It’s far simpler to just photocopy the documents.’

Litvinoff couldn’t believe his luck, as the manager retrieved a loose-leaf folder from a slot below the reception desk and extracted two sheets of paper.

The passports would certainly be fake, Litvinoff knew, because only idiots would use their real identity documents in Russia if they were engaged in criminal activity, but he now had two things
he hadn’t possessed three minutes earlier – a pair of poor-quality photographs and two of the false names the Americans had been using. All he had to do now was find out where
‘Johnson’ and ‘Hughes’ had gone when they walked out of the hotel.

And the main railway station, just down the road, seemed the obvious place to start.

Al-Shahrood Stables, Ad Dahnā, Saudi Arabia

‘The house is deserted,’ the inspector announced, stepping out of the rear doorway of the large property.

‘Any signs of a struggle?’

‘No, nothing at all. Several of the beds are still unmade, as if everyone just got up and walked out of the house at the same time.’

‘Shades of the
Marie Celeste
,’ Qabandi murmured bitterly. ‘So what now?’

‘We can issue a missing-persons report, but that won’t be easy because we don’t know
who
is missing, or even how many people. Obviously you’ll be able to help, at
least with the names and descriptions of the owner and his immediate family.’

Qabandi nodded. ‘Of course, Inspector, but there’s something else. While you were checking the house, my associates and I took another look around the stable block.’

‘We specifically told you not to go inside the accommodation,’ the police officer snapped, his voice growing decidedly angry.

‘I know you did – and we didn’t. We looked only in the outbuildings.’

‘We searched those already.’

‘Yes, but
we
knew what we were looking for.’

‘Which was what, exactly?’

‘In the garage, each car has an allocated parking space, clearly marked with its registration number and the type of vehicle. A Range Rover is missing.’

‘Perhaps it’s being serviced.’

‘I don’t think so, because a horse transporter is also missing. It’s an easy deduction that my horse could have been taken away in that transporter, towed behind the Range
Rover.’

‘That might explain the missing horse, but not the missing staff. That many people couldn’t all have been crammed into a horsebox, especially not if there was a horse already in it.
Something else must have happened to them.’

‘Exactly.’ Qabandi nodded. ‘It seems to me that there are only two possibilities. Everybody could have been kidnapped and taken away from here in whatever vehicles the
attackers arrived in. It could hardly be for a ransom demand, otherwise there would have been some contact already. And the horses stabled here are far more valuable than the people employed to
look after them. That means any reasonably intelligent kidnapper would have taken the horses instead of the staff.’

That thought had not occurred to the inspector. ‘How much are these horses worth?’

Qabandi thought for a few moments. ‘Altogether, I don’t know for sure. Maybe forty to fifty million dollars. Shaf alone is worth over three million, and there are at least another
fifteen thoroughbreds stabled here at the moment.’

‘That does suggest other possibilities,’ the inspector agreed, glancing thoughtfully towards the stable block. ‘How many horses should be here?’

‘I’ve no idea, but most of the stalls seem to be occupied, so my guess is they took only Shaf and maybe one or two others. And there’s only one transporter missing, so if they
took more than two horses they must also have used a horsebox of their own. The other possibility is that bin Mahmoud and his staff have been taken away somewhere and killed just to eliminate any
witnesses. Inspector, I think you should stop treating this as simply a missing-persons case, and start seriously considering the possibility everyone here was murdered.’

Volgograd, Russia

None of the station staff remembered seeing the Americans, but it still made sense to Litvinoff that they would have left Volgograd by rail.

It was also most likely that they would have caught a train shortly after leaving the hotel. Litvinoff was certain they’d head south for the nearest Russian border, and that limited their
possible destinations. The FSB man quickly came up with a shortlist of three possibilities – Astrakhan, Groznyy and Adler – and he ordered checks on every hotel, restaurant, taxi firm
and vehicle-hire company both in and around these three locations.

He also reinforced the watch order he’d issued to the Border Guards, responsible for the physical security of the frontiers of the CIS. Following his interviews with Borisov, his first
instruction had been rather vague, simply because the administrator had been too traumatized to provide him with accurate descriptions. Now he knew that the device was no longer in the crate but
was probably, he guessed, inside a large suitcase – that was, after all, the concept behind the design of the weapon – the watch order could be much more specific. Both the Border
Guards and the police now had the names and photographs of the Americans, so all Litvinoff could do was wait for somebody to provide him with the sighting he needed.

Adler, Russia

Dawson looked even worse than before. His skin was ashen and he’d vomited several times, though a relay of basins provided by the hotel staff had saved further
damage to the carpet.

Wilson had told the manager that Dawson was running a high fever, and that he increasingly feared for his life. His obvious concern had finally produced the result he was hoping for.

‘I’ve made some calls, Mr Johnson,’ the manager said, entering the closed-off lounge – Wilson had refused to let the hotel staff move his colleague. ‘An air
ambulance is on its way to the airport at Sochi and should arrive here in about thirty minutes. There’s no medical attendant on board, just the pilot, but that shouldn’t be a problem as
you’re a doctor.’

The manager paused, looking almost embarrassed, as if troubled by some new concern.

‘Yes?’ Wilson asked.

‘The ambulance company will require a cash payment in advance, specifically in US dollars, before they will embark your friend.’

‘That’s not a problem. What’s the total cost of the flight?’

‘Three thousand five hundred dollars.’

Wilson nodded agreement. ‘Can you arrange an ambulance to take us to Sochi Airport? Obviously I’ll pay for your time as well as the appropriate fee.’

‘Thank you.’ The manager’s face cleared instantly. ‘Shall we say five hundred dollars in cash for everything? Payment for your room is already covered by your credit
card.’

‘That’s fine,’ Wilson said. ‘Please stay here with Mr Hughes while I fetch down our cases.’

Ten minutes later, the manager was back in his office, carefully counting the dollar bills Wilson had just given him. Dawson was lying on a stretcher in the back of an elderly but perfectly
serviceable ambulance, with Wilson and a Russian paramedic sitting beside him, as the vehicle headed north out of Adler, headlights on and siren wailing, a police car in front.

Cessna 340 air ambulance, callsign Romeo Charlie Three Six

The aircraft was already waiting. Because they were flying to a destination within the CIS, there were no passport or customs checks, and the only concern of the airport
staff was to get the sick man airborne and on his way to hospital as quickly as they could manage.

With Dawson safely strapped on the narrow cot in the rear compartment of the twin-engine aircraft, Wilson walked forward to the cockpit and handed over the fee agreed for the flight.
‘Three thousand five hundred dollars. Is that correct?’ he asked in Russian.

‘Yes,’ the man replied. ‘I understand you want to go to either Moscow or Kiev. I suggest we wait until we’re airborne before checking which hospital is best prepared to
take care of him.’

Wilson nodded. ‘That’s just what I was going to suggest.’

The pilot slid the envelope into his jacket pocket, glanced back into the Cessna’s cabin to check that everything was properly secured, then turned again to Wilson. ‘If you’d
like to take your seat back there, Mr Johnson, we’ll get moving now. My name, by the way, is Vassily.’