The Troika Dolls (34 page)

Something wasn’t right . . .

A text message arrived. Josie.

Sergei Lazarev: nothing known. Searched all, hence delay. Files most

likely sanitised. Prob. ex-KGB if not active FSB or like.

And suddenly it became utterly clear.

From under the snow, she dialled David Rice in London. Her fingers were trembling.

‘Stevie Duveen.’ The way David said her name always made it sound like an affirmation that she existed. ‘I hear you saved the Hammer-Belle bacon up in St Moritz. Well done.’

‘David, they were never in any danger.’

‘It didn’t sound like that from Dovetail’s report: attempted kidnapping.’

‘The man wasn’t a kidnapper.’ Stevie tried to keep her voice calm. ‘He was an assassin—’

‘Why would the Romanians want to kill the Hammer-Belles?’ Rice asked, the pleasure gone from his voice.

‘He was Russian, name: Lazarev—ex-KGB.’ Stevie took a breath and let it out slowly. ‘He wasn’t after Sandy, he was after me.’

‘What?!’

Stevie heard his paces echoing on a marble floor—most likely the foyer in his club.

‘David, someone got Kozkov tonight—he’s dead. I think the same people are after me. My guess is they think I know something I don’t: the names of the members of the
siloviki.
Kozkov had compiled a secret list. He was going to use it to get Anya back. The attacker who was shot in the leg this afternoon died in custody. Sounds like poison—death by respiratory failure, blue-tinged skin—the venom of the
Heloderma
suspectum
, or Gila monster, would match the symptoms. It makes sense.’

‘Hell,’ David cursed. ‘Stevie, get down from those mountains immediately. I want you in London and safely behind a desk.’

Stevie bit her lip. ‘I don’t think I can, David. I can’t stop thinking of Anya. How can I abandon her? With Kozkov dead—’ ‘I don’t care!’ Rice’s fury could be felt through the phone. ‘It is not your job. This is exactly why I didn’t want you getting mixed up in the Kozkov affair. You’ll get yourself killed, you stupid girl.’

Stevie’s boss paused; when he spoke again his voice was calmer. ‘Is that Henning with you?’ he demanded.

‘No. I think he’s in Moscow.’ Stevie suddenly missed her friend terribly. ‘It’s not his fault,’ she whispered.

‘It damn well is. I’m going to tear that man to pieces. There’s a chopper taking the Hammer-Belles to London tomorrow afternoon. You’ll be on it, Stevie.’

The line went dead. Stevie felt suddenly very alone. It was cold and dark in the snow. Exhaustion overwhelmed her and she fought back tears. She had to get out of the pit.

Practical concerns required she start digging some steps into the side of the snow hole with her boot. It took some effort and was a welcome distraction. Finally, she managed to drag herself free.

Muffled music was coming from the chalet behind her and the lights looked warm and inviting. Stevie’s eyes glanced over the balcony, but Joss and the girl had gone. She set off for the front door, allowing the prickling on her neck to turn to fear as she thought of Lazarev. It fitted with what Stevie knew of the mysterious
siloviki
and their fearsome reputation for getting things done.

An ex-KGB officer would also have access to unusual weaponry and poisons. And Stevie was now certain it had been Lazarev who had rifled through her room at the Suvretta House. It was also unlikely that he had been acting alone. Others would certainly come.

Stevie had narrowly escaped the horrific death that had been planned for her. Would she be as fortunate next time?

By tomorrow night, she would be in London. But would it be soon enough? And could she just give up on Anya? She had never heard David Rice so angry, but should she simply leave a young girl to die? Stevie felt torn between impossibilities.

Inside the chalet, the party
was raging, with dancing girls perched on sofas and coffee tables. Stevie needed information. Where was the young fawn?

She caught sight of her by the DJ booth, dancing in hotpants, knee-high boots and a large cowboy hat, one eye firmly on Douglas Hammer across the room. Her top seemed to have been lost in the fray, along with Joss Carey.

Stevie advanced, refusing to be put off by beautiful undulating bodies, and blocked her into a corner.

‘I’ll make you a deal, my kitten,’ Stevie said to her in Russian. The girl tried to push past her but Stevie held firm. ‘I see you recognise Douglas Hammer. I can tell you, he is a friend of mine.’

The girl stopped struggling and started to listen.

‘I can also tell you that the man he is talking to is Arik Joel, the biggest movie producer in the world. I’m going to ask you some questions and if you answer them truthfully, I will introduce you to him and tell him he should put you in a movie.’

The girl’s eyes widened. Stevie’s instincts had been correct. This was not a girl who would scare easily—she had been threatened too many times in her young life for that—but she would respond to incentive.

Stevie played her final card. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go to Hollywood?’

The girl crumbled completely and Stevie pulled her into the butler’s pantry, away from curious eyes.

‘Who are the men you came with?’

‘We only know they are called Sascha and Yuri.’ The fawn’s eyes flickered nervously. ‘We don’t know their last names but they are very rich.’

Never mind, thought Stevie, she could get their names from Paul at the Palace.

‘So, how did you get to be here with them? Where did you meet them?’ she fired at the foul-mouthed fawn.

‘We are a gift from Yudorov.’

‘A gift?’ Stevie asked, unsure she had heard correctly.

The girl shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘Some men talked to us in Moscow at a club and then said did we want to meet rich men and so we said yes and then they took us on a private plane and we arrived in this place. They took us to a big hotel and told Sascha and Yuri that we were a gift from Yudorov.’

‘You don’t even know where you are, do you?’

The girl blew a thick stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Does it matter?’

‘You’re in Switzerland,’ Stevie told her. ‘Just for the record. Now, there are three men staying in the suites on the eighth floor. Was the third man—Sergei Lazarev—a friend of the other two?’

The girl scowled—suspicion was at war with Stevie’s promise of stardom. Then her forehead cleared: the fantasy had prevailed. There was nothing more powerful than The Dream.

‘They didn’t speak,’ she said quietly. ‘Only one time I heard Yuri. Your man left and Yuri spat on the floor. I don’t think they were friends.’

Stevie shook her head. ‘Does that happen often—men come up to you and invite you to a party and you just go?’

The fawn made a face, rolled her eyes. ‘Men always invite us, promise things, offer money or a trip overseas to work as a model. It is the way it is at this club.’

It was all sounding familiar . . .

‘Wait a minute,’ Stevie put a hand on the girl’s arm, ‘Which club were you in, when the men came?’

‘Zima.’

The same club Anya and Petra had gone to the night before Anya disappeared. She was sure she still had . . . there it was. Stevie pulled the photo she had stolen from the nightclub wall from her back pocket. Pretty girls always remembered the faces of other pretty girls. She unfolded it and held it up for the fawn to see.

‘Recognise her?’

The girl barely glanced at it. ‘No.’

Stevie stepped in closer, her hand gripping the girl’s arm tightly. ‘Don’t mess with me,
devochka
. I am not in the mood. Look at her face. She is fifteen years old.’

Something in Stevie’s eyes must have changed the fawn’s mind. She shrugged. ‘She won the competition one week. I don’t even know her name. But I was at the club that night.’

Stevie relaxed her grip. ‘Who owns the club?’

The girl was getting impatient with Stevie’s questions. ‘Look, lady, I don’t know why you want to know all this. There’s nothing to tell. It’s simple. We want to find rich boyfriends and you have to go to parties like this to find them. The men buy us expensive presents, we dance for them, sometimes we sleep with them—it’s better than stripping in the clubs. Does it matter where we are, or who the men are? They’re all the same. They want sex and we want money.’

The girl eyed Stevie defiantly. She would have been all of eighteen.

‘And the other girls?’ pressed Stevie. ‘Do they feel the same way?’

‘We look out for each other a bit: word gets around who’s bad news, who the traffickers are . . .’ The girl exhaled a plume of smoke from the side of her mouth. ‘Some girls don’t even care about that they want to get out so bad.’

‘What do you mean “traffickers”?’ Stevie said quickly. ‘People traffickers?’

The girl stopped fidgeting and suddenly looked frightened. Had she said too much?

Stevie watched her face closely and decided to take a gamble: ‘Dragoman?’

The girl shook her head and squeezed her lips tight. Stevie wouldn’t get another word.

Out they popped from the butler’s pantry. Stevie led the now-quiet girl over to Douglas and Arik, introducing her as Olga Brolga because she realised she didn’t know the fawn’s name.

Douglas smiled politely, his eyes primly on her face, not her chest. He had, after all, cast himself as a family man and he took his role seriously. Arik, however, was quite taken with Olga Brolga.

‘Olga is an actress and a friend,’ Stevie beamed. ‘She’s been very helpful to me so be good to her. She’s not a toy.’ Then she left a very happy Olga to the grins of Arik Joel.

Dragoman.
Stevie rolled the name
around in her mind as she soaked in a hot bath. Her best thinking was usually done in the bath and, in any case, she was frozen to the bone. The right track was always clear and simple when you came across it. She hunted for it now.

Kozkov had made the existence of his secret list known. This made him too dangerous to keep alive, for the
siloviki
. Stevie doubted Dragoman would have as much to fear by being linked to Kremlin power players as they to him.

The order to assassinate him would have needed approval from the top. Kozkov was too important to be annihilated without it, something they had avoided doing up until now.

The
siloviki
must have assumed that Kozkov had shared that valuable information with Stevie, and now the shadows had come after her. What was another body to them? Better to be safe than sorry. The only reason they hadn’t just shot her dead was because they were in Switzerland, not Russia, and a point-blank assassination in this peaceful country would cause a massive stir.

A thought occurred: had Kirril given her away? It was a possibility. She would probably never know. It didn’t really matter. What did was that the assassins would certainly try again.

Stevie would not be safe until the
siloviki
decided she no longer mattered, or until they simply forgot about her. Trouble was, they had long memories and a wide reach. The mysterious deaths of prominent Russian émigrés who criticised various prominent politicians were evidence of that, no matter what the official line was.

But you couldn’t just go charging up against the red walls. Kozkov must have been on the right track or the
siloviki
—it had to have been them—wouldn’t have suddenly had him killed after all this time.

Cui bono?
she asked herself. Who benefits from his murder? Not Dragoman. If he had wanted Kozkov dead, he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of holding Kozkov’s daughter hostage.

Stevie needed to find Anya. She was hoping that Dragoman would want to keep Kozkov’s daughter close, savour the satisfaction of his revenge. Holding Anya hostage was more than business to him: it was pleasure. And he would want to feel that every day.

Stevie also needed to get the wolves off her tail, but the trouble was, she didn’t know who the wolves were. And if she found them . . . well, she didn’t think she was the sort of girl who could kill a man.

She slid her head under the warm water and listened to the blood rushing in her ears. Then it came to her:

Set a thief to catch a thief
.

It was the only way.

She couldn’t unveil the identity of the
siloviki
. It would be close to impossible without seeing the list—wherever it was. Hunting for it would take more time and resources than she had, and it wouldn’t help get Anya back. But Felix Dragoman would have to know who the
siloviki
were. He would no doubt already be annoyed that they had killed Kozkov under his nose and possibly already suspicious of their motives. If he thought his friends in the Kremlin had turned on him, he would go after them himself. Stevie would never have to show her hand.

She lathered her hair with chamomile shampoo. Didi used to wash her hair with it when she was a child and Stevie still used it. How bad could things be when the world still smelled of chamomile?

Once Dragoman started hunting them down, the
siloviki
would be certain to retaliate in kind. There was a good chance they would kill each other . . .

It wasn’t the most sophisticated of plans, it was vague, it was uncertain, but it could just work. With everyone at each other’s throats, hopefully she and Anya would become the least of either side’s concerns.

Stevie was, however, due on the helicopter out that afternoon. What could she do in a day? And if she refused to leave, would she be brave enough to carry out a plan on her own? To risk losing her job—losing David Rice? She decided to find out what she could in the meantime and let fate decide.

Stevie rang London and asked
for Josie Wang in Confidential Investigations.

‘What is it now, Stevie?’ Her voice, as ever, was sharp and impatient.

Stevie worked closely with Josephine because of the woman’s uncanny recall of the predilections and peccadillos of the continent’s most notorious faces, from politicians to arms dealers to B-grade pop stars. Her ‘greenhouse of human nature’ she called it, collecting new specimens like orchids or ferns.

It had been Josie’s recall of the Romanian crime boss and his harridan wife’s obsession with Swarovski crystals that had rung alarm bells for Stevie when Mr and Mrs Boldo Balan and the Swarovski heiress had been holidaying in the same resort.