TEN BABUSHKA DOLLS

By SAM YARNEY

It was the end of June 2007. In Los Angeles, reclusive British stock speculator and billionaire Robert Darroch, who had a few days earlier quietly wrapped up the greatest deal of his life, boarded a private jet for the Caymans, and his life as he knew it changed-forever.

 

A little over a decade earlier, a close friend had made

• Language: English
• Publisher: TEN DECADES MEDIA
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739502904

Book preview

Ten

Babushka

Dolls

By

Sam Yarney

Copyright © 2023 Sam Yarney

The right of Sam Yarney to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2023 by

TEN DECADES MEDIA

[e-mail]

First printed in the United Kingdom in 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Russian doll icon created by Oly Ozi from the Noun Project

Print ISBN: 978-1-7395029-1-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-7395029-0-4

A Special Thanks to M

The Girl from Świętokrzyskie

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Epilogue

A wise old owl lived in an oak

The more he saw the less he spoke

The less he spoke the more he heard

Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?

Doll_ebook

PART ONE

Chapter One

It was a Saturday morning—the last day of June 2007. The chauffeured black Range Rover left a five-star hotel on Wilshire Boulevard at 6.40am. Dawn had just broken, and a slight haze hung in the Los Angeles air. Sitting in the back seats were a male and a female passenger. In the trunk were two pieces of luggage and a very precious cargo of six cardboard storage boxes of confidential documents. Recently released hit Makes Me Wonder, by local LA band Maroon 5, played almost inaudibly on the car stereo. Traffic at that time of the morning was light and the driver made steady progress along Wilshire Boulevard and joined Interstate 405 North in a little over ten minutes. The male passenger was dressed smart casual and was trying to get the hang of his new mobile phone. Trimmed stubble and near shoulder-length hair gave the impression that he was some sort of well-groomed rock star—he was not. The attractive brunette nestled close by him was half-asleep, her head resting gently on his shoulder. She still clutched the gift the man had given her the night before. It was an iPhone.

The previous day, Cupertino-based technology company Apple had released its first ever iPhone to tumultuous fanfare. Through amply compensated surrogates, who had spent a considerable time standing in line at the Apple Store on the Third Street Promenade in nearby Santa Monica, the man had purchased three of the newfangled devices.

Twenty-five minutes after leaving the hotel, the Range Rover arrived at Van Nuys Airport. Waiting for the two passengers was a Gulfstream G450 executive jet—all fuelled up and ready for take-off. A few minutes earlier, the two-man cockpit crew had completed pre-flight checks. In the cabin, a lone female flight attendant welcomed the man and woman on board. The man made a brief detour into the cockpit to chat with the two pilots before taking a seat in the cabin.

The male passenger was publicity-averse British international financier, investor and stock speculator Robert Darroch. The attractive female passenger was Cassandra Bergmann, Darroch’s close investment advisor and unofficial PA of three and a half years. Hailing from the rural equine-centric Loudoun County in Virginia, Bergmann was a Wharton alumna and former hedge fund manager. She now split her time mainly between London and New York, and sometimes other places more far flung, overseeing Darroch’s notoriously secretive but very agile investment operations.

The previous morning, Darroch and Bergmann had flown into Los Angeles, on the same private jet, from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. They had come to Los Angeles for two reasons. The first was straightforward—to take custody of a large trove of sensitive investment documents held on Darroch’s behalf by specialist West Coast law firm W Wahlum and Co. The second reason for them being in southern California was trickier. Over the last few months, Los Angeles-based venture capitalist David Blose had assiduously courted Darroch to diversify and invest US$250 million in Blose’s well-run and profitable investment operation. Darroch had come to personally break the news to the canny venture capitalist that, after much soul-searching, he had decided to take a pass on the investment opportunity—for now.

At 7.32am PST the jet took off from Van Nuys with its two passengers. Cruising at an altitude of 41,000 feet and having kept a general east-south-easterly course, the private jet left the continental United States and entered the airspace over the Gulf of Mexico high above the small Texan community of Lamar. Just under five hours after taking off from Van Nuys, the Gulfstream landed at Owen Roberts International Airport, Grand Cayman. The local time was 2.25pm. The afternoon weather was characteristic for that time of the year. An hour earlier, there had been a heavy downpour, but the rain clouds were now clearing fast.

Soon after they landed, a porter loaded the luggage and boxed documents into the back of a chauffeur-driven SUV. Unlike during the car ride in Los Angeles, Darroch sat in the front passenger seat and chatted effortlessly with the local driver, who he knew well from his frequent previous visits. Snippet by snippet, Darroch was brought up to speed on local news and gossip—the kind that does not make it into the local and foreign press. Cassandra Bergmann sat in the back seat, still toying with her new iPhone. They were soon driving through little towns and settlements that Darroch had become familiar with—Prospect, Spotts, Savannah, Bodden Town and Breakers.

Three-quarters of an hour after leaving the airport, the SUV pulled into the driveway of a fabulous contemporary beachside villa in the exclusive enclave of Cayman Kai, on the north side of the island. The afternoon sun was now out in force.

Lucy Bodden, the live-in janitor, cook and all-round woman Friday, who lived in a small annex attached to the main house, came out to welcome them and relieve the car of its contents. Darroch could never figure out why Lucy Bodden was always referred to by her full name instead of only plain Lucy. It was a convention that had stuck from the very beginning and that was what it was—as fixed as Polaris in the heavens.

Once they were all indoors, Lucy Bodden addressed Darroch. ‘Everything is stocked up,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’ll be okay without me being around for the next few days?’

Darroch’s smile was friendly and conspiratorial. ‘Off you go. Enjoy yourself for the next five days. As always, I have your mobile number, just in case.’ He discreetly pressed a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills into Lucy Bodden’s hand. Although never discussed, the generous side income was part thank you and part hush money. It had started nearly two years earlier, ever since Darroch had begun making semi-secret trips with Cassandra Bergmann to Cayman Kai. Ten minutes later, Lucy Bodden and the driver, also well-compensated, pulled away from the villa, in the SUV.

Darroch went upstairs to the master bedroom and changed into a T-shirt, cargo shorts and flip-flops. He came downstairs, poured himself a glass of freshly made fruit punch in the kitchen and walked into the ultra-spacious open-plan living area. Glass sliding doors separated the living area from an equally impressive porch overlooking a hundred-foot strip of private beach. Darroch switched on the television to catch up with the news. Two things piqued his interest: Hong Kong was celebrating the tenth anniversary of the handover of the island from the United Kingdom to China and a car on fire had crashed into the main terminal building at Glasgow Airport in Scotland.

He switched off the television and went through the doors that led into a porch area. Nestled between the porch and the private beach was a fifteen-metre-long swimming pool. Darroch settled into an outdoor sofa on the porch and opened the book he had been reading on the plane. It had been a birthday present from his wife of ten years—moneyed Russian uber-networker and shrewd businessperson in her own right Irina Gondorova.

Nearly three years earlier, in September 2004, Hurricane Ivan had struck and wreaked devastation on ninety percent of Grand Cayman. A few months later, with most of the island still in the clearing-up and rebuilding phase, Irina had bought the still-damaged villa for a discounted multi-million-dollar figure. The restoration work to a size and opulence way higher than the villa’s pre-Hurricane Ivan glory had cost a further $2 million.

Since Darroch’s forty-second birthday, nine weeks earlier, Irina’s birthday gift had never left his side. The book was The Great Crash, 1929, written by John Kenneth Galbraith. In Darroch’s opinion, Irina could not have bought him a timelier present. For him, it was akin to a contemporary prophetic scroll. This was the end of his second major rodeo—and it felt incredibly good.

Ten years previously, in mid-1997, Darroch had gingerly entered the dotcom market as a stock speculator with US$50 million in cash—nearly half of his then fortune. It had been his first ever foray into investing in stocks and shares. Like a canny rodeo cowboy, Darroch had ridden the wild dotcom bull market and part-fortuitously jumped off the seemingly unstoppable crazy jaunt nearly three years later, at the beginning of March 2000—just as the NASDAQ composite’s stratospheric rise was breaking through 5000 for the first time. Darroch had walked away from what he had then called Kool-Aid Hysteria with US$300 million in cash. In pure speculation terms, he had made a six-fold return on investment. Other investors were not so lucky. A few months later, the dotcom bubble had spectacularly burst, and high-flying tech stocks were trading at values abysmally lower than when Darroch had sold his.

Darroch had then sat on that cash pile for two years, doing nothing. Then, in late 2002, he had, over a graduated period, jumped back into the equities speculation game. A year later he had most of his money invested once again, mostly in technology stocks. Then, a few months ago, at the beginning of 2007, he started having the jitters. It was the same gut feeling that he had seven years earlier—in 2000, before jumping out of the infamous dotcom bubble.

Now, in mid-2007, the trends and long-term forecasts prophesied a sustained bull market. For him, John Kenneth Galbraith’s book was like a predictive harbinger. It was the final confirmation that had led him to a monumental decision—that he had to get out of the greatest bull market surge in history while he was still ahead.

A little over four weeks earlier, at the beginning of June 2007, Darroch had quietly begun to liquidate his various stock investments. It took nearly a month to divest all his equity positions, held through about a dozen offshore investment entities and corporations. Everything had been done below the radar in blocks that had attracted little to no interest. Now Darroch was sitting on a US$2 billion cash pile. All that cash had been funnelled from his various offshore investment vehicles into the bank account of his main umbrella offshore entity registered in Grand Cayman—Pagoda 30 Investment Trust. He had come to Cayman Kai for a short time of reflection and also to decide on the way forward. The gambler in him whispered in his ear that he should have maybe waited a few more months before liquidating his entire stock position. However, the deed was now done. It would be left to history to judge whether he had left the market at the right time—or not.

Cassandra sauntered into the porch after taking a shower. She had a large beach towel wrapped around her damp body. It was very apparent that her relationship with Darroch far exceeded her investment advisor remit. ‘I’m going for a dip in the pool,’ she announced. ‘Interested?’

Darroch lifted his gaze from the book and gave her a kiss. ‘You go ahead. I’ll sit here and cheer you from the sidelines,’ he said as he approvingly scanned her from head to toe.

Cassandra smiled. ‘Looking at me—it’s your favourite sport.’

Darroch smiled knowingly. ‘Never has a statement been so true. Maybe I might join you in there a bit later, but right now, I must call Irina.’

‘Is she in New York yet?’

Darroch nodded. ‘She flew in from London a few hours ago. You know her fixation with expensive modernist art. There are a couple of pieces she has set her eye on coming up for auction at LeBarron in the Upper West Side on Monday.’

Cassandra rolled her eyes almost imperceptibly and disappeared back inside the villa. She reappeared a few minutes later in a tiny red bikini that left extraordinarily little to the imagination. Darroch was already on the phone with Irina. Cassandra kissed him on the forehead and dived smoothly into the deep end of the pool.

‘How was your flight?’ Irina asked Darroch.

‘Routine, but quick. Apart from the fact that I left LA a bit early for my liking. How was yours?’

‘Same as yours—routine. Did you manage to keep David Blose close, even though you are not investing in his outfit for now?’

‘I think I did a good job explaining to him that my investment instincts were that there was a downturn on the horizon, so I wanted to keep my powder dry. He thought I was barking mad and making a big mistake but appreciated my candour and my coming to tell him in person. I think I’m still in his good books.’

‘Good. I’m glad you’ve managed a smooth untangling of your assets. How is Lucy Bodden doing?’

‘She’s fine—as always. Everything here is immaculate and in tip-top shape. She had the finest fruit punch ready by the time I got here. She’s an absolute conjuring genius with things like that.’

‘Can I speak to her after we’re done?’

‘She’s not in. I think she has gone to George Town. You can call her on her mobile.’

‘Okay. Still re-reading your birthday present?’

‘What do you think? It is with me all the time. I’ve literally lost count of how many times I have read it over and over in these last few months. I cannot thank you enough. I just wish you were here.’

‘Hmmm… I don’t know. It’s an especially important time in our lives. I do not want to be a distraction—especially now that you’ve liquidated all your investment positions. You need a few days of quiet solitude to plan what to do next.’

‘Thanks for being so considerate. It’s genuinely nice here, but lonely without you.’

‘Stop whining like a lovesick puppy. You will be in New York on Wednesday.’

‘That’s the plan. And I come bearing a special Fourth of July gift for you.’

‘What is it?’

‘Something incredibly special.’

‘Please tell me.’

‘Nope. Not saying nothing, save I bought it in Santa Monica.’

‘Robert, stop playing hard to get. What is it?’

‘Nope.’

‘I give up. I can tell from your voice that you’re excited about it.’

‘I am.’

‘Well, I’m now really looking forward to Wednesday.’ Irina yawned loudly over the phone. ‘Can I call you tomorrow? I’m feeling quite drowsy.’

‘I think you’ve got to slow down, Irina. I’m a bit concerned about these repeated bouts of tiredness.’

‘I’ll be fine. It must be accumulated jet lag. Talk to you later.’

‘Okay.’ Darroch ended the call and tossed the handset onto the sofa. Most of the time, he and Irina split their lives between their two main homes, a massive Georgian town house in London’s Knightsbridge and a sprawling apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York, overlooking Central Park. Then there were the not-so-regular visits to the Cayman Kai bolthole and a fabulous condo in Singapore. There was a subtler reason why Darroch was almost always on the move—tax. How many days in the year he spent in a particular jurisdiction, especially the United Kingdom, had a bearing on what he ultimately paid out to the tax authorities. His long-time philosophy had been to pay little or no tax.

The natural division of labour between Darroch and Irina, when it came to investment preferences, was remarkably simple. Darroch dealt with stocks and shares, and Irina invested in luxury property and art. For now, Irina’s investments would remain untouched.

Not for the first time, he had lied to Irina. He had given the unspoken impression that he had been the only passenger on the oft-leased business jet from Los Angeles to Grand Cayman. What if Irina knew about his affair with Cassandra? Normally Irina would stealthily ask about Cassandra’s whereabouts in a roundabout sort of way, without appearing to do so. There had been something off with the way his just-finished conversation with Irina had gone. Darroch could not put a finger on exactly what it was. It was almost like Irina was being knowingly cagey. He could feel it in the timbre of her voice. It was a very subtle vocal tell. It made him slightly uncomfortable. Darroch stretched out on the sofa and closed his eyes. No! Irina could not possibly know. He and Cassandra had been very discreet.

Darroch opened his eyes and beheld a most beautiful sight—Cassandra floating effortlessly on her back in the swimming pool. ‘Wow!’ he gently murmured to himself. He knew why he was so attracted to Cassandra in such an exhilarating, yet potentially toxic way. It was the combination of her deep and perceptive understanding of his investment philosophy and her great physical beauty. That was awfully hard for a man like him to resist.

His mind drifted to a previous time in his life when things were comparatively simpler and less complicated. He suddenly felt tired and sleepy. It must be Lucy Bodden’s fruit punch, he thought. Maybe a tad too much Tortuga rum. He closed his eyes again and fell asleep.

Chapter Two

Seventeen years earlier, in 1990, few people knew who Robert Darroch was. He was twenty-five years old, bright and highly driven. For four years in a row, he had been the top advertising salesman for a North London-based magazine publisher, Paper Mountain Media—rather known, catchily, as PM2 by its clients and rivals alike. Darroch drove a Range Rover and earned over £100,000 a year in salary and commissions. He had a smart bachelor’s pad in the nearby Hertfordshire town of Potters Bar and had the stunningly beautiful Bella for a girlfriend. Bella was the sassy blonde bombshell of a saleswoman who had sold him his latest incarnation of Range Rover, fourteen months earlier.

To the passive observer, Darroch had it all—the high-paying job, the car, the nice bachelor’s pad and, of course, the beautiful girlfriend. Yet Darroch was dissatisfied and felt a man of his persuasive calibre and outstanding sales talents deserved something far north of 100k a year.

In 1991, two things happened independently to alter the course of Darroch’s life. In a rather symmetrical way, they bookended the year—one happening at the beginning and the other happening at the very end. At the beginning of 1991, PM2 launched a new quarterly magazine aimed at Western European companies interested in doing business in Russia, as the country transitioned from communism to market capitalism. Darroch had sole responsibility for the advertising account for the new publication. Normally, he rarely read the content in the magazines that he sold advertising for, but the articles in the magazine hooked him in a way that the other PM2 titles had not. He started to be extremely interested in post-Soviet Russia.

Then at the very end of 1991, the second landmark event happened. Darroch and Bella jetted off to warmer climes for the Christmas holidays. They ended up in a luxury resort on the island of Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. It took a couple of days for Darroch to notice one group of guests who, among the moneyed show-offs at the resort, stood out for partying and flashing cash, more than anyone else. He soon found out that they were a group of nouveau riche Russians from St Petersburg, Russia, and the leader of the posse was a flamboyant thirty-year-old called Gennady. Darroch assiduously worked his affable charm on Gennady, and they were soon vacation buddies. He even managed a day-long cruise on Gennady’s reasonably sized rented yacht.

‘Come to St Petersburg,’ Gennady said as he and his group of buddies and insanely attractive party girls prepared to hop to another Caribbean island. ‘We do business together.’ He gave Darroch his St Petersburg phone number.

For Darroch, that was confirmation that there was serious money to be made in Russia. In his casual observation, Gennady and his friends were spending serious cash like there was no tomorrow. It was obvious that the money well they were drawing from ran very deep. By the time Darroch and Bella flew back to England after their holiday, they were no longer an item. Bella had felt a bit left out, with the whole Darroch and Gennady bromance. They amicably parted ways.

At the end of February 1992, Darroch took a week’s holiday from PM2, after bringing in a record haul in advertising revenue. He flew into St Petersburg and contacted Gennady. Barely eight months earlier, the city’s people had voted to change its name from Leningrad back to the tsarist St Petersburg. They also elected a new mayor, who would indirectly have a part to play in Darroch’s fortunes. That mayor’s name was Anatoly Sobchak. In Moscow, one-and-a- half-hours’ flight time south of St Petersburg, Boris Yeltsin ruled over the new Russia. Two of his loyalists, Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, presided over a multi-billion-dollar privatisation process that would ultimately give birth to a group of men who would later become known as the oligarchs.

Darroch quickly found out that Gennady specialised in the black market—smuggling stolen luxury cars from Western Europe into Russia and reselling them in Russia for a massive profit. That kind of business required a skill set Darroch did not possess. Darroch flew back to London disappointed, but it was not all together a wasted trip. He made a couple of good contacts while in St Petersburg and one mid-level chancer pointed him forwards. The go-to man he recommended Darroch contact was a forty-year-old ex-KGB officer, who was an Anatoly Sobchak acolyte. His full official title was Head of the Committee for External Relations of the Saint Petersburg Mayor’s Office. That man was responsible for promoting international relations and foreign investments and registering business ventures in St Petersburg. The man’s name was Vladimir Putin.

Back at his desk at PM2, Darroch returned to selling advertising with a new zeal. It had nothing to do with his love for PM2. He simply needed the money—and lots of it. Meanwhile, in St Petersburg, his contacts were trying to get him an appointment with Mr Putin. That prized appointment was finally scheduled for the end of April 1992, at Mr Putin’s office inside the Smolny Institute. Darroch decided to take the plunge. He quit PM2 and rearranged his finances, taking a loan against his bachelor pad to top up money from his savings and investments. Altogether, he had access to the equivalent of US$200,000 in liquid funds. In the grand scheme of things, it was not a lot of money for a business start-up of the scale he imagined, but Darroch figured his gift of the gab multiplied that figure many times over.

Darroch flew into St Petersburg a day before his meeting with Mr Putin and set up stall in an upmarket hotel, off Kutuzov Embankment. His arrival in the former imperial capital of tsarist Russia coincided with the funeral of Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich Romanov. The funeral, fit for a king, would have been unthinkable in the Soviet Union a few years earlier, but times had changed. Seventy-five years after the Bolsheviks violently overthrew the Russian imperial family, the late scion of the Romanovs and head of the dynastic house was brought back to St Petersburg for a funeral mass in the ornate malachite marble and gilded vastness of St Isaac’s Cathedral. Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich Romanov had died in Florida a week earlier while assiduously networking to encourage American businessmen to invest in the evolving post-communist Russia.

President Boris Yeltsin and St Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak swiftly swept aside all bureaucracy to enable his burial in a special vault for the Romanovs. Russia, labouring under painful transformation, was reaching out—back into the past, for a distant and magnificent heritage.

On the afternoon that Darroch was leaving the hotel for his appointment with Mr Putin, an off-chance event occurred at the hotel lobby that would change the course of his rollercoaster Russian odyssey. Darroch saw her for the first time. He would later describe the whole encounter as a surreal out-of-body experience—like seeing an amazingly beautiful brunette goddess in the flesh—and his actions that afternoon would be inspired by hidden impulse.

Darroch quickly found out that this striking apparition-made-flesh was an exceedingly irate damsel in extreme distress. She had come to the hotel hoping to catch her then boyfriend in the throes of passion with another woman. However, the hotel front desk was obstinately stalling her. Darroch walked up to her and confidently said, in his finest broken Russian, a version of ‘Come with me. I can fix this.’ He instantly got her attention.

Darroch gestured for her to follow him. As if hypnotised, she did exactly that. They ended up in one of the hotel’s two café lounges, which was discreetly tucked away from the front desk. Seated at a private corner table, he slowly calmed her down. They had strong black coffee and then more coffee laced with vodka. He quickly found out that her name was Irina Gondorova and, for a Russian, she spoke exceptionally good English. Suffice to say, Robert Darroch missed his appointment with Mr Putin that day. A few years later, that same Vladimir Putin would leave St Petersburg and seek his ambitious fortunes in Moscow. Soon he would be the master of all he surveyed.

If, on that late April afternoon in St Petersburg, Darroch had known the entire backstory of why the fiery Irina Gondorova was looking for her wayward boyfriend in the hotel, he would most probably have let sleeping dogs lie and gone on to meet Mr Putin. However, ignorance is bliss and Darroch the smooth salesman had acted on instinct.

How was he to know that Irina’s boyfriend was Viktor Patrushin, a fast-rising businessman with big plans and close contacts to Mayor Sobchak and his acolytes in St Petersburg City Hall? How was Darroch to know that Viktor Patrushin had more than loose ties to the St Petersburg underworld and organised crime? How was he also to know, at that time, that the hot-tempered but beautiful woman he was trying to assuage and subconsciously woo, over coffee laced with strong alcohol, had connections that went up the Russian food chain all the way to the Kremlin in Moscow?

An hour after they met at the hotel front desk, Darroch escorted a much calmer Irina from the café lounge to the front of the hotel, where a chauffeur-driven Mercedes with tinted windows picked her up.

Darroch gave her his business card. It read: Robert Darroch, International Investor and Facilitator. Embossed on it was a posh address and phone number in Mayfair, Central London. For that faux exclusivity, he paid a monthly fee. If you had called the phone number, a pleasant female voice, for which Darroch paid a phone-answering service, would answer the call and explain that Mr Darroch was abroad on business, but she could pass on any messages.

Unbeknownst to Darroch, while he was using his formidable powers of persuasion on Irina Gondorova in the café lounge, Viktor Patrushin had made good his escape from the hotel via a service lift and then through a Staff Only door at the rear of the building. Mr Patrushin had been reliably informed, by a hotel employee in the know, that a quick-thinking British hotel guest had correctly appraised the potentially embarrassing situation involving his girlfriend and coolly dissolved it with some panache.

The next morning, Darroch made increasingly desperate, but unsuccessful, phone calls to various contacts in the hope of resurrecting a new meeting with Mr Putin, after his no-show the previous day. He was half-rueing his chance meeting with Irina Gondorova the previous afternoon. Darroch already knew that he had one glaring weakness—a feebleness for off-the-scale beautiful women. He seemed to lose his subjective senses and sometimes took reckless decisions in their presence. Thankfully, his encounters with women of that kind were rare.

At midday, increasingly exasperated and still unable to get a reappointment with Mr Putin, Darroch got an internal phone call from the hotel front desk. A note had just arrived for him and had been placed in his pigeonhole. He quickly went downstairs to retrieve it. It was brief and straight to the point. It read: Driver will pick you up at 2pm. Be ready. Irina.

Darroch was stunned. He had visions of himself standing at a junction where the road he was travelling on forked into two. One road led to Mr Putin and the high possibility of a business start-up or collaboration with an ambitious Russian company. The other road led to Irina Gondorova and what else? He felt himself being inexorably drawn towards the heady wiles of Ms Gondorova, with little power to resist.

At 2pm prompt, Darroch stepped out of the hotel and climbed into the back of the same chauffeur-driven Mercedes with tinted windows that had picked up Irina a day earlier. His geography of St Petersburg was spotty at best, but he noticed that they were travelling in a generally northerly direction. After a drive of a little over half an hour, they stopped in front of the closed gates of a well-appointed mansion in the quiet suburb of Sestroretsk. A security guard opened the grilled wrought-iron gates to let them through. The mansion was set on impressive, well-manicured grounds.

Irina, sultry and incredibly beautiful as ever, was at the front door to welcome him. ‘I would like you to meet my boyfriend,’ she said, as she led Darroch inside.

Darroch kept his silence. He suddenly felt way out of his depth. Everything inside the mansion suggested serious money. Irina led Darroch up a curved flight of steps and entered a luxurious lounge, with a flamboyant display of expensive wall art and sculpture. Darroch was momentarily stunned and gazed in awe at the sheer opulence of the room. Waiting inside the lounge was a stocky man, just under six foot with a rough stubble. He sported an expensive Breitling watch on his wrist.

Irina addressed the man in Russian and then spoke to Darroch. ‘What I just told my boyfriend was, This is the Englishman who thinks he can solve other people’s problems.’ There was the faintest hint of a smile on Irina’s face. ‘Trust me, it does sound better

Reviews for TEN BABUSHKA DOLLS

[Edan Asomani · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another thriller by Sam Yarney. Just love how Zac Pullman resurfaced from süberitude.