The First Billion

Two choices would be left him. He could embark on a wholesale restructuring of the firm that would require firing a few hundred employees and shuttering his London and Chicago operations. Or he could sell. He and his top executives would pocket large sums, but they would hardly be compensated for the business's true worth. And the prospect of working for another firm left him cold. Were he to leave, his core team of executives would follow, willingly or not. Neither Tony, Bruce, nor Meg fit the mold corporate behemoths demanded these days. Meg was too old. Tony's illness branded him unreliable. And Bruce… well, simply put, Bruce was an asshole. It wouldn't be a week before he'd have called the new managing director a bootlicker or an ass-kisser or God knows what, and that would be the end of Bruce.

"The only way to hurt Kirov is to put him in prison," Cate said. "Rob him of his power, his money, his position."

"Easier said than done," said Gavallan, unable to cloak his pessimism. "He's a Russian citizen. He'll never stand before an American judge to answer for Mercury- if, that is, we can even prove he meddled."

"Oh, he meddled all right. Just like he meddled with Novastar. What we need to do is nail him for stealing the hundred twenty-five million from his own country. Put him in the gulag where he belongs."

"One thing at a time, Cate. I'd say our plates are full as it is."

"I can dream, can't I?"

Cate wheeled the chair to the foot of the stairwell and helped Gavallan board the plane. It wasn't hard to adopt the gait of an older man. His lower back had stiffened and the throbbing in his head had returned with a vengeance. Still, it was impossible to deny the rush of excitement he felt as he entered the fuselage.

"So, you old codger," she said. "Where you headed?"

"Geneva. I hear there are a lot of crooks in those parts. Guess you're coming too?"

Cate stared at him over the top of her sunglasses, but when she spoke the smile had left her voice. "Wouldn't miss it for the world."

35

Grafton Byrnes rose at the sound of the approaching engine and shuffled to the wall. It was late afternoon. The sky was cloudy, the air growing cooler. He was sick with fever and painfully hungry. The engine meant dinner, if that was what you called a mess tin half filled with weak broth and a few skimpy vegetables. Twice a day, an old, dented truck lumbered into the clearing, delivering the same meal. Twice a day he both cursed and rejoiced. He'd never imagined how famished a man could grow in two days. How terribly, desperately hungry. The stomach did not accept maltreatment complacently. It howled, it stabbed, it cramped.

Glancing up, Byrnes noticed dark clouds gathering overhead. A drop of rain dodged what was left of the roof and caught him on the cheek. Days tended to be warm, but when the sun fell, the temperature plummeted to freezing, the wind picked up, and his teeth chattered like marble on ice. Wiping away the raindrop, he tried to imagine another night lying huddled like an animal in the corner of the shed, toes dug into the dirt, bandaged hands clenched, tucked close to his chest, left with only his trousers and Ascot Chang's finest Egyptian cotton dress shirt to fend off the cold. He began to shiver.

He knew men who'd toughed out eight years in the Hanoi Hilton. He told himself he could stand a couple of days at the Moscow Marriott, or as Konstantin Kirov had eloquently christened the place, "the dacha." Either way, it would be over soon, his freedom granted in one form or another.

He looked down at his bare feet, at the toenails clogged with dirt, at the white, defenseless flesh. "Bastards," he muttered, the shivering growing worse now. "You could have left me my socks."

The shed measured six feet by six feet and had been constructed from the slim, round corpus of birch trees. The walls rose eight feet in height. A padlock secured the door. There were no windows, but by peering through the gaps that separated one log from the next, he had a fine view of the compound. A three-room log cabin with a stone chimney and large picture windows stood a hundred feet to his right. Two smaller structures stood farther away, visible among the towering pines. One was a rotted cabin with a rickety antenna attached to its roof, the other a stone sump house with a redbrick smokestack. In his time at the dacha, Byrnes had yet to see a soul anywhere, save the grizzled man who served as his jailer.

To his left, maybe sixty feet, was another shed like his own: a storage shack, if the shards of coal and wood embedded in the dirt floor were anything to go by. A double fence surrounded the compound, twelve feet high, topped with a run of razor wire. Again he wondered why there were no guards. He stared at the fence. He guessed it was electrified. There was no better guard than twenty thousand volts of raw current.