The baker started up the rackety engine once again and they headed up the hill, around the building to the parking area at the rear. There, the baker got out and walked toward the kitchen door, carrying a couple of shopping bags filled with provisions. He glanced nervously at the two dogs, standing by the wire cage, growling and barking at his approach as he knocked on the door. It opened and the brunette woman, Yoko, stuck her head out. She shouted at the dogs, who lowered their barking to a mean, resentful grumbling and backed away a few paces from the wire. Then she let the baker into the building.
Carver hung back, as if waiting his turn to say his piece. He was standing about fifteen feet away from the kitchen door, by the pile of firewood, under its wooden shelter. He looked around. There was no one watching him. He crouched down at the back of the log pile by the wall of the house and opened up his bag.
Over the next few seconds, he carried out a series of quick, precise actions. First, he took out the small packet of sandwiches and placed them in his pocket. Then he gently slid out a small log at the back of the pile, as if he were removing a brick from a Jenga tower, and shoved the bag of chips and the bottle of orange juice into the gap where the log had been. The canvas bag was tucked out of sight on the ground, in the shade of the shelter, right by the wall of the house. Carver left the bag open, with the can of paint placed across the top of the used paint can stuffed with rags.
Then he walked past the kitchen door. Inside, the baker was holding out a tray of pastries for Yoko to inspect. Again making sure that no one could see him, Carver opened his packet and lobbed the two sandwiches into the dogs’ cage, where they were instantly devoured. He turned back again and hovered outside the kitchen door while the woman made her selection and the baker noted it down on a pad before picking up his tray again and going back to his van.
When it was his turn to speak, Carver stepped into the doorway and launched into the same garbled explanation of his presence that he had given the guard at the gate. Yoko looked puzzled at first, then anxious. She looked behind her, into the house, clearly trying to decide whether it was worth waking her boss. To Carver’s relief, she concluded that it was not and started shooing him away, gabbling indignantly as she did so.
He took the hint and walked back to the van, where the baker was waiting with a grin plastered all over his face-the delighted smile of a man who has just seen another male getting it in the neck from an angry woman. As he got into the passenger seat, Carver shook his head ruefully and blew out his cheeks.
“Les femmes, hein? ” he sighed.
The baker laughed, then started up the van, and they rattled away down the hill.
66
Ivan Sergeyevich Platonov, commonly known as Platon, was the man entrusted with expanding the Podolskaya crime clan’s activities in Western Europe. He had been in bed in his Paris apartment with one of the women whose bodies provided so much of his gang’s revenues when Olga Zhukovskaya called.
“How are you, Ivan Sergeyevich?” asked Olga Zhukovskaya.
“Very well, thank you, and you?”
“Also well. You know, my husband always spoke very warmly of you…”
“He was a great man. My condolences. You received my wreath, I hope.”
“Yes, thank you, very impressive. I’m not disturbing you?”
The girl had woken up, yawned, and then dutifully started running her fingers down Platon’s stomach. He shooed her away.
“Of course not. What can I do for you?”
“I need something collected, or perhaps retrieved would be a better word…”
While Platon listened, occasionally breaking in with specific, practical questions, the deputy director explained about a missing document, the property of the Russian people, that was currently sitting in a safe in a house in the South of France, about 550 miles from where he now lay. It was currently guarded by four Georgians, led by a low-rank gang leader named Bagrat Baladze. Within the next twenty-four hours, it would be either sold to a filthy Arab terrorist or stolen by the agents of an even more despicable American, unless Platon and his men could get to it first.
“You have fought for the Motherland in the past,” said Zhukovskaya. “Now she calls you for one more mission.”
There was something almost seductive in her voice; it was less the command of a senior officer than the request of a vulnerable woman made to a mighty warrior.
Platon wasn’t falling for it.
“Naturally, I am a patriot,” he said. “Even now, when I live as a peaceful businessman, I am willing to do my duty. But there will be costs. Men may die. Their families must be considered.”
He had never paid a single ruble to a widow or orphan in his life, a fact of which Zhukovskaya was fully aware.
“Of course, you must be compensated,” she agreed. “I was thinking, you may be aware that my late husband was involved in the production and sale of certain munitions, on behalf of the state.”
Platon knew that, all right. Zhukovski had made a fortune flogging land mines until that English princess had stuck her interfering nose in his business. That had been the death of her… and of him, too. Since then, as political pressure against them grew, the mines had been rotting in warehouses all over Russia. But the illicit demand for them was unabated. Mines sold by the tens of thousands, and each one was worth three hundred U.S. dollars in pure profit. If he could secure the concession, there was a massive fortune to be made.
“I would be proud to assist my country, but it will not be easy,” he said. “I must take my best men away from their current assignments. They will need equipment. And of course we must all get to the property as fast as possible. A helicopter will be the fastest method. The French make one called a Dauphin. It will easily seat six men and take us all the way there, right to the front door, with just one refueling stop. If I can charter one this morning, I can be at this place by early afternoon.”
As it turned out, Platon’s takeoff was delayed. The chopper he hired had technical problems. It was not until lunchtime that the Eurocopter Dauphin left the Paris heliport and began the three-hour flight south.
67
There had been a number of problems confronting Carver as he tried to work out how to get the document Vermulen wanted from the house where Bagrat Baladze was keeping it. For a start, he was not a professional thief, unlike Kenny Wynter, the man he was impersonating. He did not know where in the building the document was hidden, and the only method he knew of opening a safe was blowing it up: not such a smart idea if you wanted to preserve a flimsy cardboard folder filled with bits of paper. And, of course, there were six potential opponents-because he couldn’t assume that the women would be useless in combat-and only one of him.
Of these considerations, the last was the least significant. Given the element of surprise and a properly planned assault, he could soon even the odds. He’d done it often enough before. But he wasn’t there to kill people. He was there to steal. So he worked through the problem logically, considering all the possible permutations, until he came to a solution that made sense. Which was why he needed his shopping list. That, and a working knowledge of basic chemistry as it applied to the art of sabotage.
The logic was simple. The simplest way of getting the document out of the house was to make Bagrat Baladze do the work for him. Pondering that led Craver inexorably to the chemical properties of the substances on his list.
Linseed oil, for example, is prone to spontaneous combustion, as painters and decorators-not to mention their clients-sometimes learn, at their own cost. When the oil is exposed to air, it oxidizes and releases heat. The greater the exposure, the greater the heat generated. If the linseed is spread thinly across a relatively large area of cotton rag, that maximizes exposure, and so the heat rises. Over a period of approximately six hours, the rags can reach a temperature of more than 430 degrees Centigrade, some 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is enough to produce a flame.