Page 126 of The Oligarch's Daughter

Paul noticed that Ilya Bondarenko wasn’t eating or drinking anything. His filet lay untouched. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Not hungry,” Ilya said. “Also a little queasy. Will you excuse me?” He got up and left the table.

Paul decided it was a good moment to take a break, so he got up from the table and looked for the bathroom. The day head, the bathroom, was inside the deck they were on, conveniently located close by. But he bypassed it and kept going down the corridor to the elevator. He took that up two floors to where Tatyana’s and his suite was located. As he walked down the wide hall, which was paneled in a light tropical wood, he saw the door to their suite suddenly swing open and several men emerge from it. Two of the men were wearing the gray suits that all Galkin’s security seemed to be wearing.

Paul froze. The third man was Berzin, and he was carrying a brown leather briefcase. Up close, Paul could see that the ginger-and-gray-haired Berzin’s face was lined with wrinkles. Prematurely: the man was said to be only in his forties. Then there was that scar.

As he approached, and before Paul could say anything, Berzin spoke: “Apologies. I thought it was the WC.” He gave Paul a thin, taunting smile and walked away.

83

Paul’s immediate thought was that Berzin had seized his laptop to search it while he was at dinner. But it was still there on the mahogany desk in the room he was using as an office. Paul had left it closed and turned off. Now it was open and on.

So Berzin and his crew had at least tried to search it, he assumed. It was password-protected. Maybe that had defeated them. What else was there to search? Not Tatyana’s stuff, certainly. The boss’s daughter.

Paul returned to the dinner table just as dessert was being served. It was something made of molten chocolate. Everyone was conversing normally and laughing. The wine and vodka flowed freely.

After dinner, Paul and Tatyana returned to their suite. “For some reason, being at sea always makes me sleepy,” she said. “I’m going to bed early. What happened to that guy sitting next to you?”

“He said he wasn’t feeling well.”

“Seasick, maybe?”

“On this boat?” Paul said. “You don’t even feel the swells.”

She shrugged again. She didn’t appear truly interested. “I don’t even know why he’s on board. Papa normally likes to keep business and social life separate.” She yawned. “I need to sleep.”

*

But Paul was too wired to go to sleep. He wanted to explore the yacht. He loved boats and knew them, thanks to Uncle Thomas, and he wondered if he would ever see this one again. Maybe not.

With dread, he reminded himself that he had a job to do: he had to look for the ship’s manifest. The passenger list.

The corridors, he noticed, were wider than in most yachts, with higher deck head heights, nearly eight feet. He noticed concealed watertight doors, behind panels in the halls, as well as fire doors. He passed the central staircase, which wound around the stainless-steel-and-glass elevator. He took the stairs down two floors to the main deck, where a couple of glass doors slid open, and he found himself outside, on the foredeck. There was a full moon, meaning great visibility, and the seas were calm. He saw the polished chrome anchoring mechanism. It was spotless. The crew worked hard.

He passed a couple of security guards strolling along the railing. He heard them speaking English, with English accents, and realized that a fair number of the guards onboard were probably British. The Russians liked to hire British bodyguards. Most of them had done time in the Sandbox, as they called Afghanistan and Iraq, and later went into close-protection work.

One of the guards glanced at him, then looked at the other guard. A paranoid thought occurred to Paul: what if they were to grab him and just toss him over the side of the ship?

No one would know what had happened to him. The guards didn’t need a weapon.

He knew that, on most ships, if someone witnessed a passenger or crew member going overboard, there was a whole elaborate drill required by maritime law. The captain had to put out emergency radio calls to nearby vessels, reporting a man overboard. They had to send a digital alert to all ships in the area via the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System. Then all vessels in the region were required to assist in a search.

He thought of Uncle Thomas, lying in a nursing home, and the remark he’d made years ago:If you want to kill someone, do it on the high seas.

He turned around and returned to the ship’s interior, where he saw, coming toward him, Leonid, the Russian he’d met on the flight over.

Leonid’s eyes lit up. “Nice, eh? What I tell you?”

“Sort of mind-blowing, actually.”

“There’s a freezer just for ice cream. And a mini-submersible on the lowest level—a submarine!”

“That right?”

“What room are you in? We’re in the de Kooning Suite.”

“I’m in the Rothko.”

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