“The Fargos. It has to be. How would they do that?”
“I’m looking into it. It doesn’t matter. If they leave, I’ll know it.”
“How?”
Kholkov explained, and Bondaruk said, “What about the book?”
“I had a man watching their house, but Fargo wasn’t bluffing: They’ve got security. I think it would cause more trouble than it’s worth. And since we’ll know where they’re going and when, we can let them do the hard work for us.”
“Agreed.”
Bondaruk hung up, strode to his window, and forced himself to take a calming breath. Kholkov was right: There was still time. The Fargos were ahead, but they had a long way to go and many hurdles to clear before they reached the end. Sooner or later they would make a mistake. When they did, Kholkov would be there.
CHAPTER 34
SEVASTOPOL
Sam pulled their rented Opel coupe off the dirt road and coasted to a stop a few feet from the cliff’s edge. Sunset was an hour away and the sun was already dropping toward the western horizon, cast ing the surface of the Black Sea in tones of gold and red. Directly below them the palisades of Cape Fiolent plunged directly into the blue-green water and just offshore dozens of spires of jagged rock jutted from the water, each surrounded by a whirlpool of churning surf.
In the distance, a gull cawed, then went silent, leaving only the sound of wind rushing through Sam’s open window.
“A little foreboding,” Remi murmured.
“Just a tad,” Sam agreed. “Then again, it does suit his reputation.”
The “he” in question was Hadeon Bondaruk. Knowing that without another bottle with which to complete the next lines of the cipher, Sam and Remi had chosen the only course open to them: stealing Bondaruk’s bottle.
It was a dangerous if not foolish idea, but their adventures had taught them a number of things, one of which Sam had dubbed the Inverse Law of Power and Assumption of Invulnerability. Given Bondaruk’s power and notoriety, who in their right mind would try to steal from him? Having reigned as Ukraine’s mafia kingpin for so many years, Bondaruk, like many powerful men, had likely begun to believe his own press. Certainly he and his property were well guarded, but, like muscles that haven’t been exercised for many years, there was a fair chance his security had grown lax—or at least that was the theory.
Of course, neither of them were ready to risk such a venture on guesswork alone, so they had asked Selma to do a feasibility study: Were there any exploitable weaknesses in Bondaruk’s home security? There were, she found. One, he kept his antique collection on display at the estate, along with a small team of experts who maintained and supervised the pieces. Two, the estate itself was sprawling and steeped in history, a piece of which Selma felt certain might offer them a way in.
They climbed out of the car, walked to the edge, and gazed north. A mile away along the undulating coast, perched before a rock bridge jutting from the cliff face, was Bondaruk’s hundred-acre estate, officially named Khotyn. The bridge, undercut by millennia of erosion, extended to a pillar of rock that rose from the ocean like a skyscraper.
Bondaruk’s home was a five-story, thirty-thousand-square-foot Kievan Rus-style castle, complete with steeply pitched slate roofs, deep-set gabled windows, and onion-domed copper minarets, all surrounded by a low white-stuccoed stone wall and serpentine groves of evergreen trees.
Khotyn began its life in the mid-eighteenth century as home to a Crimean Khanate chieftain whose line had split from the Mongol Golden Horde in the sixteenth century to settle in the area. After a hundred years the chieftain’s clan was ousted by Muscovite Russian forces led by a Zaporozhian Cossack hetman who claimed it as a spoil of war only to have it taken from him thirty years later by a yet more powerful hetman.
During the Crimean War, Khotyn was commandeered by Tsar Nicholas II’s most prominent Black Sea Fleet admiral, Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov, to serve as a retreat, after which its role changed four times, first as a museum dedicated t
o the Siege of Sevastopol; then as a Wehrmacht headquarters during World War II; then again as a military summer house for Soviet high commanders after the city was liberated. From 1948 to the fall of the Soviet Union Khotyn fell again into ruin, sitting mostly abandoned until Bondaruk purchased it from the money-starved Ukrainian government in 1997.
Given the estate’s rich history, Selma had had little trouble finding plenty of tantalizing research trails to follow, but in the end it was one of the basest of human motivations—greed—that gave away the chink in Khotyn’s armor.
“Give me the story again,” Sam told Remi as he stared at the estate through his binoculars.
“His name was Bogdan Abdank,” Remi replied. “He was the Zaporozhian Cossack who took it over from the Mongols.”
“Right.”
“Seems Abdank was only a part-time Cossack. The rest of the time he was a smuggler—fur, gems, liquor, slaves—anything he thought he could sell on the black market, he trafficked. Problem was, there were plenty of other Cossack clans and Kievan Rus warlords who wanted to take over Abdank’s action.”
“But old Bogdan was crafty,” Sam replied, warming to the subject.
“And industrious.”
According to the online archives Selma was able to unearth in the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev, Abdank had used slave labor to dig into the cliffs and hills surrounding Khotyn a series of tunnels in which to hide his illicit goods. Cargo ships laden with Romanian sable or Turkish diamonds or Georgian prostitutes bound for the West would weigh anchor in the waters below Khotyn for off-loading into launches, which would then disappear into the night, ostensibly for further off-loading into the smuggler’s tunnels beneath the mansion.
“So, more caves in our future,” Remi said now.