Absolute Money: Part I: An Oliver Holmes Caribbean Thriller Read online

  Absolute Money: Part I

  An Oliver Holmes Caribbean Thriller

  C B Wilson

  Graf Books

  Thanks Niall.

  * * *

  Everybody needs somebody to believe in them.

  What Putin said

  “Надо исполнять закон всегда, а не только тогда, когда схватили за одно место.”

  * * *

  “You must obey the law, always, not only when they grab you in your special place.”

  * * *

  President Vladimir Putin.

  Puerto Plata

  Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic

  * * *

  Sunrise was at 6.24, but by then the day was already ruined for Beatriz Contreras.

  One of the Russians stayed with her in the car. The other one hammered on the door of Jerry’s bungalow until he woke up. There were a dozen similar buildings scattered in the hotel grounds, hidden from each other by bushes and trees. The more expensive bungalows had a view of the sea from their verandah. Jerry’s had its own private beach.

  He yelled that he was awake, but the Russian had found the bell and kept his thumb on it until Jerry opened the door a crack and growled.

  The Russian said something.

  Jerry’s employer preferred it that he didn’t speak Russian, which was OK by Jerry because he had no interest in learning the language. He said, “When are you guys going to get it? I don’t speak Russian. Russki nyet.”

  The Russian had a thick accent when he spoke English. “Girl. Car. You come now.”

  The security guys were always being rotated from one of Mr Volkov’s yachts to another, so Jerry never saw the same people twice. To keep himself amused, he called all of them Bukarov.

  Jerry said, “OK, Bukarov. Give me two minutes,” and shut the door in his face.

  Jerry sniffed yesterday’s shirt and judged it was OK for what he had to do. He dressed quickly, swigged water, ignored the ache behind his eyes and was out of the room in a little less than two minutes. The Russian had already turned and started walking along the path towards the car park, expecting Jerry to follow. Jerry stopped for a second to look at the sun pulling itself out of the Caribbean Sea because he was trying to live in the moment a little more.

  The Russian, who had obviously never read The Art of Now, came back and shouted at him to hurry up.

  The girl was on the back seat of the car under a blanket. Jerry didn’t know she was called Beatriz until he read the police report much later. She was crying and sobbing, and pulling and scratching at her clothes. Jerry tugged the blanket away from her as much as he could and looked her over. She didn’t seem too badly hurt, on the outside. He took an envelope from the larger of the two Russians and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket without counting the cash inside it, then got into the front seat of the Range Rover. The big Russian drove away in another car.

  The driver wanted to chat about the directions but Jerry told him to just get on with it. He’d been drinking with the helicopter pilots until 3 a.m. and his headache was sharpening into something special and he wanted to close his eyes.

  They drove along the coast looking for road signs. There weren’t any. The driver wanted to stop and ask for the way to the village but Jerry told him not to. A black Range Rover with tinted windows and the full protection package stuck out enough in that part of the world, and Jerry was concerned the girl might make a fuss if she saw someone she knew.

  A little further on, they drove into mobile phone coverage. The Russian’s phone beeped a couple of times and a map came through. He turned inland and drove into the hills where the coffee grew and the road flowered into potholes that quickly ganged up to become dirt tracks.

  The girl had cried her tears out. She was in that place where sobbing becomes some kind of low moaning. It didn’t bother Jerry, but it was obviously getting to the driver from the way he was moving around in his seat.

  “Make her stop” he said. Jerry was disappointed with the guy. Malkin’s security people were all ex-special forces from one country or another and this Bukarov was probably some kind of Spetsnaz. Their boast was, that to get your purple beret in that outfit, the final task is to survive being beaten with metal bars and then set on fire. Yet here he was, a trained killer, getting all twitchy over a woman who should have known better.

  Jerry ignored them both.

  The girl’s home was on the edge of a cluster of a couple of dozen houses in the middle of a coffee plantation. It was breeze blocks and corrugated roofs and goats everywhere. The air was cooler than on the coast, so Jerry stood in the sun by the car and waited out the fuss of sisters and cousins taking the girl inside.

  He told them he wanted to speak to the man of the house and left it at that. He only ever wanted to have this kind of conversation with one other person present. It was best if it was the father. In Jerry’s experience, mothers were much trickier in that kind of situation.

  An old man, with a deeply lined brown face under a baseball cap that sat too high on his forehead, led him to a jumble of plastic chairs behind the house. He was way too old to be the girl’s father, so Jerry assumed he was the grandfather, but it didn’t matter either way. He looked like a man who knew that anger would get them nowhere.

  Jerry settled himself in his chair, put his hat across his knees and got right down to it in Spanish.

  He said, “You have two options, señor. Your daughter’s hurt. Not badly, but not good either. So, you can call the police and have this whole mess dragged out in public. Maybe it would even get to court in a couple of years. But if you go that way, I have to tell you, the people I represent, they are not nice people. They would make you look bad, make your daughter look bad. That is, if it ever got to court.”

  The old man didn’t react.

  Jerry said, “You know she was on a yacht, right?”

  The old man chewed on the inside of his cheek and nodded.

  “Do you think they’re going to stick around waiting for you? Or do you want to bet, that right now, that yacht is sailing away from here and nothing you can do, nothing your government can do, will make it come back?”

  Jerry pulled the envelope from his inside pocket and weighed it in his hand.

  “Or…there is this…”

  From the heft of the envelope, Jerry guessed it contained something like two years’ income for a coffee farmer in the Dominican Republic, that is, if you figure they make around $10,000 a year and aren’t too pushy about paying taxes.

  “Maybe this can pay for an education for your daughter, her sisters, some food, some new clothes…They have a good university in Santo Domingo, right?”

  Jerry was sensitive to the local etiquette about not handing over the money directly. He laid the envelope down on the seat next to the old man.

  The man didn’t move. He said, “You are a very cold man.”

  Jerry replied, “Would it help you if I pretended to be sad?”

  The old man’s jaw began to work. Jerry saw the blush of anger in his face, as though it was someone else’s fault that they had let the girl go to a party on a yacht with a bunch of Russian thugs.

  “Maybe I take your money and call the police anyway.”

  Jerry said, “I didn’t come here to threaten you, señor. I came to make things better. But I only come once. I understand that maybe you don’t like me, but you really won’t like the men they send the second time.”

  The old man said, “What am I supposed to say to my wife? To my family?”

  Jerry didn’t make a h
abit of unloading his thoughts about life on the people he ended up dealing with, but he sensed the man in front of him needed a little something to help him over the line. He said, “You can try and have some big philosophy about life but it’s actually really simple: one thing happens, then another thing happens. That’s all. A bad thing happened to your daughter. Now a good thing happened. Don’t try to understand it. Take the money. Do something right with it.”

  The old man looked down, avoiding Jerry’s eye, cursed a little under his breath, and Jerry knew the deal was done.

  He took one of the standard waivers from his jacket pocket and got the old guy to sign away any claims he might have against the Bluestone Corporation or its employees.

  Then Jerry put his Panama hat on and walked away. From the corner of his eye, he saw the guy take a wedge of dollars out of the envelope and stuff them in his pocket, to keep it from his wife most probably. Because that’s the way it is. Everybody’s corrupt. Everybody’s got a price.

  Thinking things like that about the people he had to deal with kept Jerry’s sleep patterns regular.

  A few neighbours had gathered on the street, talking and pointing at the car where the Russian sat with the air-con blasting. Jerry felt a wash of annoyance about the stationary vehicle with its engine running. He had tried to talk about it with the security people, but they never seemed to share the same urgency about protecting the planet. He figured that most of them were so damaged by steroid abuse that they probably couldn’t have children anyway, but Jerry didn’t buy that as an excuse.

  A kid ran across the street shouting. He looked about fifteen, stringy and underfed. Jerry thought at the time he must have been a brother or a cousin. Later, he got his name from the police report. Jose Empanilla was nineteen years old and sweet on Beatriz since forever. In his hand he held a machete and he ran straight at Jerry.

  Jerry froze. He saw the kid’s arm come up in a swing. The metal blade of the machete was worn and pitted apart from the bright edge where it had been sharpened. But still Jerry couldn’t move. He saw the boy’s face contort with hatred as the blade started down towards him.

  The Russian hit the boy sideways on like a flanker hitting a scrum half from the back of the scrum. They both went down, hard, the boy underneath.

  The Russian rolled to his feet, pulled the boy up and across his bent knee and snapped his neck like a stick, with a crack you could hear across the village.

  Jerry admired the technique. It was some kind of Systema move and he thought it was cool. The Russian dropped the boy to the ground where he lay with his body twisted in a way that bodies shouldn’t.

  Jerry didn’t need to be told to get in the car, but the Russian did it anyway. In seconds they were surrounded by shrieking women, and Jerry saw a couple of men running towards them, and they had machetes in their hands too. The Russian flicked the switch that ran electric current through the door handles. He pushed another button that sent a smoke bomb out of the exhaust pipe. The villagers backed away, still screaming, but coughing now in a way that made Jerry think it was tear gas, not smoke. The Russian accelerated hard out of the village.

  Jerry thought the whole evasive action manoeuvre was too much for a bunch of coffee farmers. “Slow down, Bukarov, before you kill a chicken or a goat and cause some real trouble,” he said. They both laughed at that.

  Jerry took a couple of deep breaths, calmed himself down and started working his phone. It was still early Saturday morning but he had found in the past that it is never too early to start bribing politicians.

  1

  Montego Bay, Jamaica

  * * *

  It’s no big secret: having parties on yachts makes people lose their inhibitions. And the bigger the yacht, the wilder the party.

  At 167 metres long, Plutus was one of the largest yachts in the world, and the parties they had on board were obscene. There were always naked girls, semi-naked girls and even some girls with clothes on. Music thumped, strippers stripped, and ice sculptures melted into troughs of vodka designed to look like arctic rivers in the spring thaw.

  Fireworks lit up the sky over the yacht and dancers gyrated; the theme of their costumes long ago ripped off and trampled into the decks. Russian hookers, jacked up on six-inch heels, slim, blonde beauties, with cheekbones that could slice bread, worked the crowd of mainly Russian men.

  From the blue-lit bars, topless barmen served every kind of drink; drugs were a click of the fingers away and gorgeous masseuses offered any massage you wanted.

  If he had lived long enough to reflect on his choices, Vincent Henin might have admitted that inviting Nadia and her friends to a party on Plutus was not a good idea. But then again, he was a weaselly little guy who always blamed other people for his mistakes, so maybe not.

  Henin had met Nadia at one of the bars in St Lucia the year before when he was scouting for local talent to invite to a party and scooping up whatever he could for himself. Although he was not an attractive man, being the gatekeeper for parties on a super yacht gave Henin some fringe benefits, and he abused his position whenever he could.

  Nadia had been busy that night, but they kept in touch and he gave her an open invitation to come to one of their parties, any time. He might not have been specific about who the other guests were, or what they expected. He had just assumed from her wild-child attitude that Nadia was a hooker and that she knew what she was doing.

  When she finally got to a party on Plutus, the yacht was moored off Montego Bay, Jamaica, on a Friday night. Henin checked Nadia and her friends into the party. They looked the part - three beautiful blondes and a stunning redhead. High heels, lot of cleavage, short skirts, groomed to perfection. That was enough to get them the A-list treatment: a helicopter ride out to the yacht, arcing over the sea to give them the best view of Plutus, lit up like a million sparkling diamonds in the Caribbean.

  After 10 minutes on the yacht, Nikki, the most outspoken of the four women, hated it.

  “It’s like we’ve been greased up and thrown over the fence into a prison for sex offenders,” she said to Ellie and Charlotte when they had found themselves a quiet corner on one of the lower decks.

  “Relax,” said Ellie, who was younger than Nikki and had her judgement skewed by the vintage champagne that the burlesque waitresses were serving on trays. “How often do you get to party on one of the biggest yachts in the world?”

  Nikki didn’t answer. A couple of men staggered over. They had obviously been drinking all day. They looked in a bad way. The older guy at the front with the comb-over put his hands on Charlotte’s shoulder. He slurred something in Russian and he couldn’t stop himself swaying, even though the yacht was completely still.

  Charlotte was a nice girl. She tried polite. That didn’t work. She wriggled her shoulders to be free of him but that just encouraged him. Ellie tried to freeze him with a look but the man was too far gone for that to have any effect.

  Nikki said, “Would you mind leaving us alone.”

  The Russian said something that might have been English or Russian. A couple of his mates caught up with him. They held each other up and laughed at their friend trying it on with the three women.

  Nikki stood. Her body language was apologetic. She wanted to guide the Russians away from the table. With her hair and heels, she wasn’t much less than six foot tall and she towered over the Russian. He faced her. His head was chest height. He grabbed at her breasts.

  She pushed his hands away and said, “Hey! I’m not the Ukraine. You can’t just grab what you want.”

  Maybe the guy understood more English than it appeared, maybe he was a true Russian patriot, or maybe he wasn’t used to women speaking back to him. He slapped her.

  Nikki kept her body in fantastic shape with hours at the gym every day. To keep from being bored, she had enrolled in different classes based on martial arts, moving from one fad to another – Boxercise to Brazilian jujitsu to Krav Maga.

  Instinctively, she rolled with the slap,
absorbing its energy with the movement of her head and neck. At the apex of the slap, the Russian’s hand was stationary for a split second. Nikki grabbed it and pulled him forward and down.

  She’d never done the move before in a real situation and she was… enthusiastic.

  The Russian fell, shattering glass as he crashed onto the table. Blood spurted from a vicious slit across his cheek. He hit the deck hard, stemware smashing all around him, and the screams started.

  Nikki was horrified. She hadn’t meant to hurt the man, but there was no time for apologies. Within seconds, the three women were surrounded by security guards and stewards, everybody yelling and shoving. A couple of the stewardesses made an escape route for the women through the crowd and they hurried off the deck.

  Ellie looked back and saw a man look up from the bloodied figure on the floor. He met Ellie’s eye and drew a finger across his neck.

  2

  The yacht was big enough to have two helipads. The one at the back of the boat had been converted into a swimming pool for the party and it was full of men in shorts and naked girls splashing and shrieking. Nikki, Ellie and Charlotte were led up to the smaller helipad on the top deck where the head of security was waiting for them. The sounds of the party were faint beneath them, whisked away by the soft sea breezes. The yacht was cruising along the coast out of sight of the shore.

  “We have to get you off the yacht. Now.”

  Charlotte was furious. “Why? This isn’t fair!”

  Once a wiry man, the security guy’s features were beginning to soften with the easy life on Plutus. He said, “The man whom you assaulted is from Moscow. He’s old school and he’s not happy about being humiliated by a woman.”