Cat O'Nine Tales and Other Stories - Jeffrey Archer [20]
I always used the 45-minute escape to power-walk, for two reasons: one, I needed the exercise because on the outside I attend a local gym five days a week, and, two, not many prisoners bothered to try and keep up with me. Karl was the exception.
Karl was a Russian by birth who hailed from that beautiful city of St. Petersburg. He was a contract killer who had just begun a 22-year sentence for disposing of a fellow countryman who was proving tiresome to one of the Mafia gangs back home. He cut his victims up into small pieces, and put what was left of them into an incinerator. Incidentally, his fee—should you want someone disposed of—was five thousand pounds.
Karl was a bear of a man, six foot two and built like a weight-lifter. He was covered in tattoos and never stopped talking. On balance, I didn’t consider it wise to interrupt his flow. Like so many prisoners, Karl didn’t talk about his own crime, and the golden rule—should you ever end up inside—is never ask what a prisoner is in for, unless they raise the subject. However, Karl did tell me a tale about an Englishman he’d come across in St. Petersburg, which he claimed to have witnessed in the days when he’d been a driver for a government minister.
Although Karl and I were resident on different blocks, we met up regularly for Association. But it still took several perambulations of the yard before I squeezed out of him the story of Richard Barnsley.
DON’T DRINK THE WATER. Richard Barnsley stared at the little plastic card that had been placed on the washbasin in his bathroom. Not the kind of warning you expect to find when you’re staying in a five-star hotel, unless, of course, you’re in St. Petersburg. By the side of the notice stood two bottles of Evian water. When Dick strolled back into his spacious bedroom, he found two more bottles had been placed on each side of the double bed, and another two on a table by the window. The management weren’t taking any chances.
Dick had flown into St. Petersburg to close a deal with the Russians. His company had been selected to build a pipeline that would stretch from the Urals to the Red Sea, a project that several other, more established, companies had tendered for. Dicks firm had been awarded the contract, against considerable odds, but those odds had shortened once he guaranteed Anatol Chenkov, the Minister for Energy and close personal friend of the President, two million dollars a year for the rest of his life—the only currencies the Russians trade in are dollars and death—especially when the money is going to be deposited in a numbered account.
Before Dick had started up his own company, Barnsley Construction, he had learned his trade working in Nigeria for Bechtel, in Brazil for McAlpine and in Saudi Arabia for Hanover, so along the way he had picked up a trick or two about bribery. Most international companies treat the practice simply as another form of tax, and make the necessary provision for it whenever they present their tender. The secret is always to know how much to offer the minister, and how little to dispose of among his acolytes.
Anatol Chenkov, a Putin appointee, was a tough negotiator, but then under a former regime he had been a major in the KGB. However, when it came to setting up a bank account in Switzerland, the minister was clearly a novice. Dick took full advantage of this; after all, Chenkov had never traveled beyond the Russian border before he was appointed to the Politburo. Dick flew him to Geneva for the weekend, while he was on an official visit to London for trade