Alexei Ren climbed the fantail stairs to the landing pad and gazed north. Two hours after the Solange had raised anchor and left Entre les Îles, she was making twenty knots on a course due east, cruising past the Port de Toulon. Numerous warships crowded the harbor. Several destroyers were anchored nearby, sailors moving purposefully about the deck. He’d given the Solange over to his top executives for the week. Tonight’s port of call was Saint-Tropez, with a gala dinner arranged at the Hôtel Byblos. The voyage would continue onward to Villefranche-sur-Mer, Monaco, and San Remo, across the Italian frontier. Ren, however, would not be joining them. A pressing matter demanded his attention.
Ren lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sun and searched the sky. He’d exchanged his linen shorts and long-sleeved shirt for a pair of dark work pants and a black T-shirt. For once, he didn’t care if his body art was on full view. In fact, he preferred it. Today he was no longer Alexei Ren, business tycoon, philanthropist, and owner of the Olympique de Marseille football club. He was prisoner 887776, an unfairly convicted political refugee seeking his long-overdue revenge.
He heard the helicopter before he spotted it. He narrowed his eyes, and there it was, flying low over the water, nose dipped, an Aérospatiale Écureuil, built to carry five passengers and pilot with a top speed of two hundred knots.
What better symbol of his success than this sleek aircraft descending out of the sky like Apollo’s chariot. Twenty years had passed since he’d arrived in France, a savagely ambitious man without a kopek in his pockets, the wounds from his last prison yard fight yet to heal. For the first while, he relied on his criminal skills to earn a living, but his time in the gulag had reformed him. He was determined to seek another, less fraught path. Once a profligate drinker and spender, he reined in his baser appetites and saved his ill-gotten gains. It was his goal to become a businessman, and if not a pillar of the community, then at least a law-abiding one. He kept his eyes open for the right opportunity, and when it came along, he acted. In this case, it was an investment of one hundred thousand euros in a fledgling software company operated by the son of his bookkeeper. The company flourished. Ren took his profit, bided his time, and when another promising venture presented itself, he acted once again.
In five years, his net worth reached ten million euros. Five years after that, it was one hundred million.
In time, he found a woman to marry. He raised a family. He purchased a mansion on the coast, vacation properties in exotic destinations, and of course the Solange, helicopter included. In short, he had it all. Success, the admiration of his peers, a healthy, loving family, and a level of wealth he’d never dreamed of. And all of it—or nearly all—earned from old-fashioned, honest labor. If he’d known that a life on the right side of the law could be so profitable, he would never have picked up a gun all those years ago.
The chopper came in to land, the rotor wash forcing him to step back, the wind playing havoc with his long hair. Ren waved in greeting. The pilot was another Russian who had escaped the frosty, unwelcoming climes of Moscow for the unfettered opportunities and sunshine to be had in the South of France.
The skids touched down. The boat swayed ever so gently.
Yet there, at that very moment, standing on the deck of his one-hundred-million-euro yacht, waiting to board his very own helicopter, the sun on his face, his prospects bright, his future secure by any reasonable definition, Ren was determined to embark on a course of action that risked it all.
But why? demanded a sober, somewhat incredulous voice from his newly polished soul.
Ren’s phone buzzed in his pocket, saving him from answering. “Yes?” he said.
“The boys will be at your office in an hour,” said a man speaking his mother tongue.
“Are they ready?”
“Ready for what? To take on the entire fucking Russian army?”
“Not the entire army,” said Ren. “Just one man.”
With that, he ended the call and climbed into the helicopter. Any lingering doubts about what he should or should not do vanished as the helicopter rose into the air and its nose turned toward land.
It was all very simple, he thought, enjoying the sweep of ocean below him, the exhilarating pulse of rushing into the breach, of once more saying “What the hell?”
A man cannot escape his past.
The best he can hope for is to outrun it for a while.