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CHAPTER 3 : AN UNEXPECTED RE-LOCATION
AN ARRIVAL
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Anatoly’s private jet glides down the ILS beam (1) out of a dark and snowy winter sky, to land at the Chkalovsky military airstrip, near Shchyolkovo, north east of Moscow.
Anatoly still has contact with his old colleagues. It makes it possible to use military facilities when he needs them. His colleagues know that he is still available to undertake ‘official’ duties on some occasions. As a result they make sure that the airfield officials are as helpful as they can be.
When the party disembarks and one of the passengers - still sedated - is taken away, nobody seems so notice. More important, no one asks why and no one asks where; they are used to that sort of thing here, and besides the less you ask, the less you know, and the less you know, the less you will be accountable for.
The formal record of the flight arrival merely states that Anatoly’s jet had been chartered by a returning Russian family who journeyed on to Moscow.
Jenny also travels onwards in the general direction of Moscow, but her journey ends at the Kustensky Dacha, in the countryside some 100km outside the capital.
“Dacha” is perhaps a misleading term. For most Russians, a dacha is a small country cottage where city dwellers might spend the weekend in the peace and quiet of the countryside, grow vegetables and enjoy time out from the city. In contrast, the Kustensky Dacha it takes its style from the comfortable retreats enjoyed by pre-revolutionary magnates and aristocrats (and that of some of their revolutionary successors). The Kustensky dacha is a grand country house set within a large estate and covering many square kilometres. Indeed, the scale of the Dacha ensures that the residents can enjoy the peace of the country side, enjoy a retreat from the bustle of the city and in particular, can avoid the scrutiny of prying eyes.
One of Anatoly’s reasons for buying the estate, was the space it provided to enjoy slaves both inside and out, with no realistic danger of being disturbed. There is nowhere for the slaves to run, unless they are prepared to eke out an existence in the forest and attempt to avoid the hunters that Anatoly would surely send to fetch them back. From time to time an optimistic un-broken slave tries their luck. Anatoly enjoys it when they do!
Jenny remembers nothing of her journey. Nothing of the aircraft bumping and skidding through the cold turbulent air as it landed, nothing of the icy wind blowing sleet and snow flurries over her as she was lifted from the aircraft and into the ambulance and nothing of her transfer from the ambulance to the Dacha. In the grip of her sedation, she is barely conscious, hardly even aware of light or dark, indoors or out. She is still asleep as she is wheeled into a cell in the basement of the mansion, still strapped to the medical trolley.
Heidi checks her patient’s fluid balance: saline-in and urine-out, concerned as ever, for the well being of the one in her charge. Successful anaesthesia and sedation requires careful monitoring of the patient. Just as a hangman seals the fate of their victim by careful attention to their weight and build, so Heidi has to take account of similar factors and knows that her patient must be observed and treated with care.
She disconnects the syringe driver from the intravenous infusion and settles down to wait for the cloud of sedation to disperse and for Jenny to awaken to her new life. Experience has taught Heidi that it’s best for a nurse or for one of the trainers to be with a new slave at this point.
Heidi looks at her watch. She will stay with Jenny until she is able to take fluids unaided and is free from nausea and any risk of vomiting. Then she will take down the intravenous infusion, remove her urinary catheter, and remove the ECG leads from her chest. Only then will she be content to hand over responsibility for the new girl to Neena, and afterwards, she can leave ‘Vyera’ to take stock of her situation as best she can.
I wake up. I feel quite wide awake and yet, not quite right.
I am lying on a hospital trolley. I’m strapped down; not really able to move much, let alone sit up, even if I wanted to. There’s a drip feeding into my arm. I am in a white room. The light is not too bright. A nurse is sitting on a chair reading a magazine next to me. My vision seems to be disturbed and I can’t really see properly. While I can see the nurse clearly, I can’t make any sense of the magazine she is reading. None of the letters look right …
I try to look around the room. I can turn my head, even if I cannot move my body much. The floor has blue sparkly non-slip vinyl covering. The walls are white tiled. There is one door, also white. There is no window. There is a high ceiling. I feel as if I am at the bottom of a deep hole.
It looks like a hospital but somehow it’s too quiet for a hospital. No noise of other patients, no sign of any visitors. None of the bustle of a hospital ward.
I have woken enough to realise that I feel slightly drunk. My mouth is dry. I flop my head back on to the pillow, confused. I try to remember how I got here? What is the last thing I remember? Walking down a street in London, talking on my mobile to Joe …. Joe! What must he be thinking? Then there was a girl who asked me for help …. What happened after that?
The stab of anxiety when I think of Joe brings me round further. I call out …..
The nurse looks up. She smiles and says nothing but checks the drip …
“Look can you tell me? ….who are you? … where?”
The nurse smiles again, ignores my questions and loosens the straps around my arms a little. Then she elevates the head of the trolley and offers me a drink from a plastic cup.
“Here: try this”, is all she says.
It tastes like a dilute sports drink, cool in my sticky mouth.
Suddenly, I feel the need to pee and then I can feels urine flowing out of me. I tense my sphincter muscles but the flow persists. Nothing I do seems to make a difference.
“Help me please! I am wetting the bed!”
The nurse crouches down beside me, peering at a urine bag hanging on the side of the trolley. She glances at me, smiles and pats my arm – a reassuring explanation of why I have not wet the bed. It is only then that I realise I am naked. Fortunately the room is pleasantly warm ….
“Look, can you tell me what’s happened?”
Again the nurse ignores me. She measures the amount I have drunk and the amount in the urine bag. She looks at some figures on a chart. Perhaps the amount which has gone into me, from the infusion?
Then she asks: “How is your tummy?”
“Er, fine I think … how do you mean?”
“Do you feel sick?”
“No, not at all. Should I?”
“Good”, is all the reply I get.
However, she seems satisfied because then she takes down the drip. (2) It stings as the plastic canula is drawn from my arm. She straps a band-aid across the exit wound. She disconnects me from the ECG leads and the coloured lines on a monitor all go flat. She peels the sticky electrode pads from my skin and wipes the sticky residue away and then goes to the foot of the trolley. She fiddles with the catheter and gently pulls. It comes away. She wipes some drops of urine onto a pad. She drops the pad, catheter, urine bag and intravenous infuser into an orange sack inside large red pedal bin marked with the international “biohazard” sign.
The nurse turns and smiles at me and then kisses me on my forehead! Then without a further word or gesture, she scoots the bin out of the room and leaves me all alone. There is a “click” as the door locks and the lights dim.
I try to sit up properly but the straps prevent me. I shout out, but no one comes. The effort of trying seems to leave me overcome by weakness. I sink back against the pillow and drift off into a fitful sleep.
It’s early in the morning of Wednesday11th of November. Winter is advancing fast on Moscow and the wind casts a mixture of hail and snow against the windows of Sveta and Anatoly’s bedroom, scratching and tapping at the glass. Today, Sveta is taking time to wake up. It’s uncharacteristic. Early mornings are one of the things you get used to, when you work in the Media and in her previous career, early mornings were something the staff of the KGB all took for granted.
Tolya – that’s Anatoly, her husband is also stirring. He has something to tell Sveta. He is - having slept on the problem - increasingly anxious about what he has done and anxious about how Sveta might take the news. He knows things about Sveta which she has never been able to confide to him. Sveta thinks they lie buried deep in her past and even deeper in the archives of her former employer. Anatoly knows different. Secrets are always dangerous things in a marriage. But sometimes truth can be a brutal animal, tearing old wounds open, laying bare an intimate history, re-igniting the fears and terrors of past years. For a moment he gazes at her sleeping face, calm peaceful in the early morning. Anatoly has a tender side. From somewhere he is conscious of a half remembered quotation from the Bible ‘and he gives to his beloved, rest’ – or was it ‘peace’?(3) If only he could bring about some peace and healing for his wife …
“Sveta?”
“Hmmm?”
“I think I have someone for you and Alana …..”
“Oh? Who? Where did you find her?”
“She is from England.”
“Working in Moscow?”
“Well, no not exactly.”
“Not exactly? Tolya, (4) does this mean that you have lifted her from somewhere?” Sveta is propelled quickly from sleep to wakefulness by the trend of the conversation.
“Yes: I’m sure she will shape up to be just the person you need, Sveta …..”
“Tolya!” After what Anatoly has just said, Sveta is now wide awake, sitting up and looking down on him, still sprawled out under the quilt.
“For goodness sake Tolya, we need a Nanny. There are specific things you look for in a Nanny. Things you try to gauge in an interview, to see if the girl has them within her in the first place. They are not things you can just programme in. No wonder they kept you in Operations and I was in Strategic Planning!” Anatoly looks abashed for a moment at this barb, but Sveta continues: “Tolya: in a Nanny you look for someone who is, gentle, kind, thoughtful, reliable, fun, authoritative, responsible, forgiving, patient, understanding. Which of these qualities are shared with your sex slave abductees? Is this the sort of thing your training schemes can achieve now? I would have thought that someone with half a brain would realise that and instead would approach an Agency or ask friends or even just put an ad in the Gazyeta ……” (5)
Anatoly has turned over to look at Sveta properly. She likes him to sleep naked, so he is always available for her. Now the sight of him in the raw, half out from under the quilt, with a pained expression on his face is would usually melt her irritation but not on this occasion. How dare he just go ahead with a hare-brained idea like this without discussing it with her?
“Sveta, will you just look at this girl? I’m sure she will be just fine. I mean I have done some homework,” he adds, plaintively. Inside, Sveta’s reaction is provoking all his worst fears for the situation. Should he just get rid of the girl quietly? Or even just debrief her and send her straight back?
Sveta sighs. She knows there will be no good to come from confrontation if Anatoly feels he hasn’t had the chance to say his piece. “OK Tolya. Just tell me the whole story. I just know there is definitely a story here.”
“Well, you remember when Clegg took Alana …..” (6)
“Yes of course I remember”
‘Remember’ is a word that hardly does justice to Sveta’s feelings of dismay and desperation when her only child vanished without trace and without explanation in a foreign country. The little child she had borne, nurtured, cared for. The little girl who, by her very existence, salved so many deep and painful wounds for Sveta
“Well, he was supposed to send us the girl responsible for her abduction but when she was being sent over to us the British police received information that the Chechens were planning to bomb the Aeroflot flight to Moscow?”
“And they found this girl of Clegg’s? Yes, of course I remember the whole thing. Clegg never came properly through with compensation did he?”
“No he did not. Then, last year, when I met him in London he was at pains to warn me away from taking an interest in some sort of consensual operation he has either set up or bought into – I couldn’t quite work out which.”
“Hmmmm, go on ….” Sveta thinks Anatoly is too concerned about the man Clegg. She knows he is Tolya’s competitor and they both trade in flesh - the slave trading business. Why Anatoly gets so concerned, though, is beyond her. Anatoly has always made a point of trading at the “top end” of the market and from what Tolya says, Clegg’s operation is just not in the same class. So why does Tolya bother about him?
“Well, when I had dinner with Angela”
“Ah, Angela ….” Sveta runs her hand over Anatoly’s bum, remembering the birching she gave him as his punishment for bedding Angela. That was a good evening! Yes: she must find a reason for Anatoly to be given another birching – soon! This Nanny fiasco could be it.
“Well, Angela had this cock and bull story about being arrested by the CIA and interrogated. She said, they wanted to know what she knew about me and if I had been asking about some research being done by one of her students.”
“Are you sure that Angela was telling the truth. Sure she had not just made this all up?”
“No. The times corresponded to my meeting with Clegg. It is just in his muddling style.”
“OK, so let me guess the rest. You have tracked down Angela’s student who may or may not be a particular protégé of Clegg’s and brought her to Russia for debriefing and you thought she just might do for a Nanny for Alana …..”
“Well, yes that’s about it.”
“Tolya: full marks for trying but I’m not optimistic at the moment.”
“Well, will you just see her?”
Sveta heaves a sigh: “OK I’ll see her but I want to see her first, before anything else happens to her. Where is she?”
“At the Dacha.”
“How long?”
“She arrived … er … early this morning.”
“OK, OK. I’ll speak to her today.”
“Thank you Sveta. I think she could be just fine.”
“Well Tolya, if she’s not …..” She rubs Anatoly’s bum, gently scratching his skin with her nails. The message seems to strike home to him……
“I know: I will be at your disposal ……”
“Ha! You are anyway! Who would have guessed that the great Anatoly Kustensky is really slave to his wife …?”
Anatoly smiles and kisses her tenderly – but he knows she is right, but just at the moment he is not interested in games. It’s reality – actually, history – he is trying to put right.
………………………………………………………………………………………….
Footnotes:
(1) ILS beam. Instrument Landing System, navigational radio beam used to guide an aircraft down to a runway.
(2) Drip. Colloquial British term for intra-venous infusion
(3) Anatoly has a hazy memory of Psalm 127, verse 2
(4) Tolya. Familiar diminutive form of Anatoly
(5) Gazyeta. Russian word for newspaper
(6) See Market Forces by Freddie Clegg, Chapter 73,
© 2011 Phil Lane & Freddie Clegg
All characters fictitious.
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