Without going through any of these normal steps, the guard took up his stamp, leafed through each passport, and stamped the pages with his exit stamp in red ink. He then handed everything back to Vladimir. «Next!» he shouted.
Vladimir looped his hand through his son’s arm, and together the three of them hustled away. They reached the plane with only fifteen minutes to spare. They boarded, strapped in, and said prayers of thanks. The plane pulled away and took off, and within hours they were in Italy.
He called me as soon as he landed, late that night. «Bill — we’re in Milan!» he exclaimed.
Vladimir was safe, and I couldn’t have been more relieved.
28. Khabarovsk
But while Vladimir was safe, Eduard was still somewhere in Russia, and we had no idea where.
Not even his wife knew. After he left her on Universitetsky Prospekt, Eduard was taken to a friend’s apartment on the eastern side of the city, just outside the Garden Ring. He stayed there that night and the next. He never went out, never made a phone call. He just paced the apartment and, when his friend was home, discussed his situation and considered his options. He still wasn’t prepared to leave the country. Not yet.
Just before dawn on the third day, Eduard got into a different friend’s car and was taken to another apartment. They took a circuitous route. Eduard lay in the backseat, and only after they were sure they weren’t being followed did they go to the next location.
Eduard spent two nights there. The moving around was getting to him. Eduard was used to getting things done on his own, and now all of a sudden he was completely dependent on others. He couldn’t use his phone or send emails. All he could do was scan the news and pace the apartment like a caged animal, feeling more and more stressed.
Toward the end of the first week, Eduard received a message from one of his friends. It was grim. The number of men searching for Eduard had increased.
The people after him were closing in and Moscow was getting too hot.
He wasn’t ready to leave Russia and admit defeat, so he needed to find another city in which to hide. He considered going to Voronezh or Nizhny Novgorod, which were both overnight train rides away. But in either place he would be on his own. He was a skilled lawyer, not a skilled fugitive, and he probably wouldn’t have lasted a week. He realized that he needed two things: a location far from Moscow, and someone trustworthy with the resources to hide him.
He looked through his contacts, and one stood out: a man named Mikhail who lived in the city of Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. A decade earlier, Eduard had gotten Mikhail out of a major legal jam and saved him from a long prison sentence.
He called Mikhail on a prepaid mobile phone and explained the situation. When he was finished, Mikhail said, «If you can find a way to get to Khabarovsk, I can keep you hidden for as long as you need».
Khabarovsk certainly satisfied the requirement of being far away. It was more than 3,800 miles from Moscow, nearly 500 miles farther than the distance between New York City and Anchorage, Alaska. The problem was getting there. Driving would take too long, and Eduard would likely get pulled over at some point along the way and shaken down by some corrupt local cops, which could end in disaster. The train was also problematic because he would have to buy a ticket and put his name into the system, then sit in a moving metal box for a week while the bad guys put two and two together.
The best option by far was to fly. Even though this would also put his name into the system, the trip would be over in eight hours, giving the people who were after him little time to react.
To increase his chances of doing this safely, Eduard decided to travel late on a Friday night. He hoped that the people who were monitoring him would already have started their weekend drinking, making it unlikely that they would receive the information, process it, and then act on it before he landed.
He arrived at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, from where most regional flights operated, ninety minutes before the flight and went to the counter to buy a ticket. The desk agent told him the price — 56,890 rubles, about $2,350 — and Eduard got out his wallet and counted out the amount in cash. He handed it to the woman as nonchalantly as he could, his heart pounding fast. It was a large amount of cash to be handing over, but she took it without any reaction, continued typing, handed him his ticket with a smile, and said, «Have a good trip».
First hurdle cleared.
Next was security, then check-in at the gate, and then just getting off the ground. All of these hurdles were cleared too, but there was one more. The purchase of this ticket could have tripped a wire, and it was entirely possible that some of the bad guys would be waiting for him at the Khabarovsk airport when he landed. He tried to sleep on the overnight flight that crossed seven time zones, but it was impossible.
Finally, exhausted and frayed, Eduard landed in Khabarovsk. The plane taxied to a stop. A stairway on a truck was driven to the side of the plane. The door opened, and the few passengers got off and made their way into the terminal. When Eduard ducked his tall frame under the plane’s door, he saw a car waiting right there on the tarmac. His heart skipped a beat, but then he saw Mikhail standing next to it, a welcoming smile on his face.
Eduard walked down the stairway, his small carry-on in hand and, without ever setting foot in the terminal, was whisked to a nondescript hotel in a suburb where Mikhail checked him in under an assumed name.
We had no idea where Eduard was, what he was doing, or if he was safe. But while we were powerless to help him in Russia, that didn’t mean we couldn’t find out more about what was being used to frame him.
In early September, we received copies of materials from the court in Kazan. The most ominous document was a witness statement from Viktor Markelov, the convicted killer who’d stolen our companies. He’d sworn he’d done everything at the direction of a man named Oktai Gasanov, who’d died of a heart attack two months before the theft. Furthermore, Markelov claimed that Gasanov took all of his instructions from Eduard Khayretdinov, and that Eduard received all of his orders from me.
We now understood exactly what would happen if Eduard stayed in Russia. The corrupt officers at the Interior Ministry would eventually find him and arrest him. Once in custody, he would be tortured until he gave testimony implicating both of us in the theft of the $230 million. If he complied, they might go easy on him and make him serve only a few years in a penal colony. If he refused, they would kill him, and everything Markelov, the convicted killer who stole our companies, claimed would be accepted as the official «truth» in Russia.
We had to find a way to get this information to him. Vadim gave some of Eduard’s contacts in Moscow a simple message in case they were in touch with him: «New information has come to light. Your life is in danger. Please leave as soon as possible».
Unbeknownst to us, Eduard eventually received this message. But even then, he was not ready to give in. He thought that if our complaints about the theft of the $230 million were reviewed by someone high enough in the government, then everything could still be resolved.
But even Mikhail, his host, was getting nervous and thought that it was becoming too dangerous for Eduard to stay in Khabarovsk. He assigned Eduard two armed bodyguards, who moved him to Mikhail’s dacha in the woods, a hundred miles from town. There, Eduard had electricity from a generator, a satellite phone, and a car. It was picturesque country, blanketed by softwoods and birch, and dotted with fish ponds.