The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [85]
‘Please, no.’
The receiver went limp in his hand. The man on the other end had terminated the phone call.
Nobody could move.
Then, ‘Irina?’ Valery’s voice was hoarse. ‘I spoke to her.’
Tears were running down Irina’s face.
‘She sounds alright.’ He was trying to reassure his wife but the blood had not returned to his face and he wouldn’t meet Irina’s eyes. He looked awful.
Kozkov placed the telephone, the only connection he now had with his daughter, back on the table with heartbreaking gentleness. ‘The man sounded . . . he seemed to be panting for breath . . . asthmatic.’
‘What did he say?’ Stevie tried to control the trembling in her voice.
Kozkov moved to the window and gazed out. ‘He said Anya was unharmed and that nothing would happen to her as long as I did what he asked.’
The ravens were now three, still on the branch outside.
‘He asked me to reverse my banking reforms, re-open the banks, unfreeze the assets.’
But Kozkov still hadn’t answered the question everyone was silently asking. Saskia whimpered and went to him. ‘He said he was going to keep Anya. He was going to keep her as his safeguard.’
‘What do you mean, keep her? For how long?’ Irina was trying hard to pull her voice back from the edge of hysteria.
‘It could take years.’
There would be no bargaining or deals now, just an insidious vice tightening around the family.
It was Vadim who broke the horrified deadlock in the room.
‘What do we do now?’ he asked Constantine.
‘This is now a hostage situation,’ the negotiator’s voice was flat.
‘You’re going to have to mount a search-and-rescue operation. You will need to involve the authorities.’
There was nothing else for it. Waiting was not an option.
‘The authorities?’ Vadim’s voice was high, sarcastic. ‘You mean the police? The secret service? Perhaps the army?’
His father turned back from the window. ‘What else can we do?
We are powerless. The demons have no intention of giving Anya back.
We need to hunt for her and we can’t do that without the cooperation of the FSB.’
He lit a cigarette and turned his gaze back to the window. ‘The matter is out of our hands. It is the right thing to do.’
For a moment no one said a word. Then Vadim exploded.
‘How can you dare even say that? How can you stand there and blow smoke and wash your hands of the matter?! Trust in the authorities— the right thing to do? The right thing to do?! Ha!’ He spat like a viper into the fire.
When he spoke again, his voice was thick, bloody. ‘Let me remind you, Papa, what the authorities think is “the right thing to do”.’ Vadim ripped off his jumper and began unbuttoning his shirt.
‘Vadim,’ Kozkov spoke sharply, but his son took no notice. He opened the left side of his shirt wide.
The young skin of his chest was deformed by a mass of scarred flesh, the kind of mark that is left by a deep burn. The scar was shaped like a ring, about the size of a large grapefruit. The inside was burnt in a pattern of sorts . . . Stevie realised with horror that it was the mark of a brand.
Vadim removed his shirt completely and turned to show his back. It was pocked with dark marks that Stevie immediately recognised as cigarette burns. Other scars were faintly visible on his white skin, around the ribs and kidneys. He had the torso of a prisoner of some horrible war. She reminded herself that Vadim was only eighteen.
‘The military.’ Vadim’s head was bent, his eyes hidden.
‘Which military?’ Stevie swallowed. ‘Were you a prisoner somewhere?’ She tried to think of where Vadim could have fallen into the hands of savage fighters. Chechnya?
‘Military service. I went in with skin as pure as yours and came out—like this.’ His smile was bitter, twisting up the corner of his mouth.
‘Were you sent to Chechnya?’
Kozkov was holding his forehead, his head bowed.
‘I was,’ Vadim replied in a low voice. ‘But it wasn’t the rebels who did this. It was my commanding officer, the officers of the Russian army.’ Vadim shrugged his shirt back on and lit