saw the cleanup, and no one's heard a word since. So far, that is.'
'Good,' said the President. 'Very good. Please congratulate your Commander on a very skillful job, very well executed.'
'I'll make a point of it,' said the Russian General, kicking the heels of his jackboots together with an exaggerated, sharp crack.
'No word from inside the oil industry, I trust?'
'Nothing, sir,' replied Oleg Kuts. 'But that's understandable, since it seems no one has any idea who was in that room. I don't suppose anyone will realize they're missing for another twenty-four hours at least.'
He turned to the sallow-faced, fortyish head of the FSB. 'Your men found out anything?'
'Not really, sir. Except that at least six of the men in the basement traveled to Yekaterinburg by completely different routes. None of them traveled together, and they used private aircraft and helicopters, cars, and two of them at least finished the journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, one from the east, one from the west.'
'A very secret meeting, eh?'
'Yessir. Highly classified.'
'We were certainly on the right lines then?'
'Most definitely, sir.'
'But in my view this all leads to one inevitable conclusion, gentlemen…we can't go on doing this sort of thing. And I truly do not know how long we can keep the lid on Siberia. In the end they are going to try again, because the temptation of riches from China is simply too great. And we cannot go on putting people in jail whenever they become too powerful, as we have done in the past, eh?'
'Or…er…eliminating them, sir.'
'Exactly so. The fact is, we need to home in on at least one major foreign oil supplier who is not in Siberia. We cannot have all our eggs in that one huge basket.'
'I know, sir. But these days, everyone who has any oil whatsoever is desperate to hang on to it and reap the reward. Yes, we may have to use our powers of persuasion.'
The President smiled. 'Perhaps, Minister, you should conduct an immediate study…and find a new supplier, with substantial reserves, who might be…shall we say…vulnerable?'
CHAPTER TWO
Jaan Valuev, for the past six years, had led something of a double life. As the hard-driving boss of OJSC he was the very picture of a New Russian industrialist, a suave, well-tailored chief executive, presiding over the fortunes of an oil giant with income of more than $6 billion a year, annual growth of 17 percent, and 100,000 employees.
His wife had died four years earlier, and at fifty-two Jaan still lived in the grand mansion on the edge of the city of Surgut where they had brought up their two children. Both boys were now studying engineering at the Urals State Technical University in Yekaterinburg, the alma mater of Russia's first President, Boris Yeltsin, and his long- suffering wife, Naya.
This university is the largest east of the Ural Mountains. It once boasted twelve graduates on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Jaan Valuev was its biggest private benefactor, and unlike all of the other Russian oil chiefs, he also heavily supported social programs in his hometown of Surgut. Generally speaking, Jaan Valuev had been a pillar of Siberian society.
But there was another side to him. Instead of the traditional lavish dacha on one of the more scenic coastlines of the Black Sea, Jaan preferred western Europe. He owned a spectacular beachfront estate two miles east of the Marbella Club in Andalusia, southern Spain, and kept a permanent $300-a-night suite at the superb Hotel Colon on Cathedral Avenue in the heart of Barcelona.
He owned an opulent white-fronted Georgian house in The Boltons, off London's pricey Brompton Road, and a twenty-acre country estate in the hills above the Thameside village of Pangbourne in Berkshire. He had found his way into this glorious English countryside through his great friend, the urbane multimillionaire publisher, hotelier, and soccer fanatic John Madejski, the Chairman of Reading Football Club and owner of the towering modern stadium on the borders of the M4 motorway.
It was this love of soccer that hurled the two men together. In 2009, upstart little Reading had fought their way into the upper echelons of the English Premier League and ended up playing mighty Barcelona in front of 60,000 people in the European Champions League at the Noucamp Stadium in Spain's second city.
And who should emerge that day, almost shyly, as the great new power in the Barcelona club? The billionaire behind some of the biggest player transfer deals in the history of Spanish football — Jaan Valuev. Barcelona beat Reading 4–1, but the Siberian and the English tycoon became instant pals, and Jaan bought a house just a couple of miles from the imposing Madejski estate in Berkshire.
By 2010, Jaan Valuev was Chairman of Barcelona FC, following in the footsteps of another Russian oil tycoon, Roman Abramovich, who famously bought and recharged the batteries of Chelsea Football Club, in West London, with close to half a billion dollars, which purchased some of the best players in the world.
And tonight, Tuesday, September 28, Barcelona were in London, for their European Champions League game against England's greatest football club, Arsenal, founded in 1883 and a byword for excellence and sportsmanship in a sometimes tarnished world game.
Barcelona versus the Gunners, in the ultramodern new Emirates Stadium, in the heart of North London. Here was a game to be savored by aficionados all over the world. And 60,000 fans, 8,000 from Spain, were already making their way across London by taxi, bus, and train to watch this clash of titans, the Champions of the Spanish League against the Champions of England's Premiership.
Inside the marble halls of the Emirates Stadium, arrangements had been made for a sumptuous VIP dinner at 8:45 p.m., immediately after the game. The Arsenal Chairman would host it, and among his guests would be the Barcelona Chairman, and his buddy John Madejski, who was rumored to be preparing a sensational bid to buy Arsenal Football Club in partnership with Jaan Valuev.
But these awesome financial shenanigans were all taken in good heart, and the game was under way right on time, with the stadium packed and both teams free of injury. There was only one blight on the big game landscape: Jaan Valuev, whose body was currently lying burned in a mass grave deep in the icy wastes of the arctic tundra in northern Siberia, naturally had not turned up.
The seat next to John Madejski was empty, and it was still empty when Barcelona scored, and still empty when the teams came in for halftime. The Barcelona Deputy Chairman, Andre di Stefano, was absolutely mystified.
'I have an e-mail from his secretary, dated yesterday. He was flying in today directly from Yekaterinburg in a private jet owned by Emirates Airlines. I have the flight arrival time, but the airline guys say he never boarded the plane.'
'Well, where the hell is he?' asked the Reading Chairman.
'Tell you the truth, we thought you'd probably know.'
'I haven't spoken to him since Sunday, and he said he'd see me here for a glass of wine before the kickoff.'
'So unlike him,' said Andre. 'To have informed no one he wasn't coming. Something must have happened.'
'Well, it's close to midnight in Russia,' replied John Madejski. 'His office is shut, and I tried his mobile twenty minutes ago and it was switched off…so perhaps he had to fly somewhere else first, and will get here for the second half. That's a huge business he runs.'
'I still think it's totally unlike him to vanish without informing anyone…but…maybe a girlfriend?' di Stefano chuckled.
'What! Instead of watching the game against Arsenal? No chance,' replied Madejski.
And the second half kicked off without Jaan Valuev. And Arsenal scored three times to thunderous roars that could have been heard in Piccadilly Circus six underground stops away.
The game ended and the dinner began, with places rearranged to close the gap left by the absent Siberian
