Page 123 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“Not everyone does,” Paul replied. “That’s true.”

“Moscow is crawling with Porsches and Aston Martins and Bentleys and Lamborghinis. But how many have boats like that one?”

“True.”

The helicopter hovered above the yacht and then landed on one of her two visible helipads, this one on the foredeck, right atop a big brownH.

Paul had been on a yacht once before, Bernie Kovan’s, which was quite spacious and elegant but less than a quarter the size of this one. He had been brought up to Bernie’s yacht, anchored offshore, on a small boat, a yacht tender. Galkin must have thought that landing by helicopter would be more impressive.

He was right. It was.

Tatyana did not seem impressed, but then, she was used to it all. As they clambered out of the chopper, Paul noticed that the brownHwas made of stained teak.

ThePechorinwas built by the German shipbuilders Blohm and Voss. She was enormous—164 meters long, or 540 feet, yet she was not the largest yacht in the world. A few other oligarchs and sheiks, competitively inclined, had recently commissioned larger ones. This one had seven decks. Two helipads. There were berths for seventy crew, forty staff, and twenty guest cabins. Paul knew thePechorinhad two swimming pools, a steam room, a library for the guests, an IMAX movie theater, a submarine, an underwater observation deck, and a lot of toys like jet skis and speedboats. And abanya, a traditional Russian sauna stocked with birch twigs and eucalyptus. She was a floating palace.

They were greeted by a uniformed server bearing a tray of champagne flutes. Paul took a sip and was pretty sure it was Dom. Maybe Krug. Something expensive, anyway.

*

They hadn’t given a single thought to their luggage. It had been taken care of, shuttled from helicopter to plane to helicopter to their room on the yacht. A security guard, a male in his thirties who looked Russian, escorted them and the two other couples into a saloon, where they were asked to sit down before a machine of some sort that Paul didn’t recognize.

“What’s this for?”

The guard replied in a bored voice, “Security.”

Paul looked at Tatyana, who said, “Your palm print. Mine’s already in the system.”

“For what?”

She said something to the guard, who answered with a chuckle. She laughed, then said, “They used to use fingerprint readers to open doors on thePechorin. But he says the fingerprint reader is bullshit—an intruder can cut off your finger and use it to open any door.”

“Hadn’t thought of that.”

“This system scans the veins in your palm. So it can only open the door while you’re alive, because your veins are readable only when you’re alive.”

The guard pantomimed chopping into his arm.

“Right,” she went on, “once someone cuts off your arm, it’s useless.”

Then they were led to their stateroom. Only, it wasn’t a room. It was a suite of several rooms on an upper deck. A sign on the door read,MARKROTHKO. It was the Rothko Suite. All the rooms were named after modernist painters. Paul was expecting gold-encrusted everything aboard the yacht, like Galkin’s East Side town house, but thePechorinwas both extravagant and tasteful. And she still had plenty of gold.

“The yacht’s interior was designed by François Zuretti,” Tatyana said.

Paul shrugged. The name meant nothing to him.

“He’s the hot designer among the Russians.” The oligarchs, she meant.

Everywhere in the Rothko Suite was marble and onyx and mahogany and teak and custom-made carpeting. Subtle LED lighting. A walk-in closet about the size of Tatyana’s old apartment. The bedsheets were Frette. There was a six-foot-wide movie screen in one of the sitting rooms and one almost as big in the master bedroom. That one was hidden behind a huge painting. You pushed a button, and the painting slid down to reveal the TV screen. The painting, of orange and yellow rectangles, was by Mark Rothko.

Perched on the front table was a bottle of Dom Perignon on ice and an arrangement of orchids. Paul realized that a mega-yacht like thePechorinwas meant never to be seen by the general public, yet her art and design features were recognizable to her owner’s very wealthy private guests, who would appreciate the value of these details.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Tatyana said. “Care to join me?”

“We’d better not,” he said. “I don’t think we have time for that. We have to dress for dinner.” The truth was, ever since he’d agreed to cooperate with the FBI, his and Tatyana’s sex had been almost nonexistent. And he knew it was all on him: the guilt had dampened his ardor. To make love to her felt somehow dishonest. Traitorous.

While she showered, Paul wrote down the names of the Russian couples they’d met on the Gulfstream, as best as he could remember them. (He’d brought along a little black Moleskine.) Then he inspected the suite more closely. Its walls were paneled in mahogany. The bathroom had a floor made of onyx and a vanity, counter, and walls made of marble. The fixtures were gold. Gold-plated? He wondered. Maybe. Probably. The hand towels were all monogrammed with a capitalGintertwined with a Russian one, a?.

“Who else is on board?” he called to Tatyana as she stood under the rain-head shower. “Besides the folks I met on the jet.”

---