Read Online The Scioneer by Peter Bouvier - Free Book Online

cars, casinos - so when he
was offered a job working for the Russian acquaintances he had made
in the arms trade, he jumped at the chance to escape the desert
sands and bask instead in the luxurious glow of Moscow’s
underworld. Taloquan was born for the role, using his skills as a
salesman to raise a small three-man operation into an international
trafficking empire. Over time, he turned his hand to drugs,
gambling, protection – he even dabbled in military intelligence –
but his true forte, his love, was still selling women, for he saw
them not as people, but as commodities. He thought nothing of
buying and selling them just as he had with the tanks and missiles
ten years earlier. He had never considered the idea of selling
children, until one of his employees joked about the innocence of
his latest batch of fresh-faced girls. From that moment onwards,
Herat Taloquan saw the future in the bright young eyes of every
child he passed on the street. He cast out his net and waited
patiently for the right deal, without letting his plans affect his
day to day work. In time, word reached him of a reclusive steel
magnate by the name of Vlad Pechev and his wife, who were desperate
to find an heir for their millions, since they couldn’t produce one
of their own.
    Taloquan
had his men set up a meeting which turned out to be nothing more
than a formality. A fee was discussed and agreed upon, as were
Pechev’s stipulations: the child had to be male; Russian, naturally; under the age of
five and in perfect health. Pechev asked for nothing specific with
regard to the boy’s appearance, but he did insist that the child
was highly intelligent: ‘a prodigy’ were his exact
words.
    Taloquan
spent eight months looking for the child and was about to lower his
fee in return for an autistic boy in Tver who was able to draw
entire skylines from memory, until he heard reports of a four year
old in a tiny village near Kazan, regularly playing organ recitals
for the entire village.
    After
some research, Taloquan was happy, and so arranged for two of his
employees to pick the child up and advised the steel tycoon to have
his money ready by the following week. Everything would have gone
to plan, had Pechev not died two days later of a massive coronary
attack, probably brought on by the stress of dealing with a known
sex-trafficker and former arms-dealer.
    The deal
collapsed there and then. It was a problem for Taloquan, and not
one he felt equipped to deal with, never having sold the soul of
one so young before. Had it been a woman, he would simply have had
her killed and the body dumped. Another victim of the Russian
mafia. But the boy, the boy.... it didn’t seem right taking a male
life, and certainly not the life of so gifted a child. Taloquan
resolved to give the boy a week, while he decided on his fate, and
had Aloysha chained in one of the cells in the basement of his
twenty-bedroomed manor-house in the countryside outside
Moscow.
    Weeks
became months. Taloquan renamed him on the first anniversary of his
arrival, and presented him with a framed copy of his new birth
certificate. From that moment on, he was no longer to be referred
to as ‘Aloysha’ or ‘the boy’, but rather Lyubomir Pechev, after
Taloquan’s first borzoi hunting dog when he moved to Russia, and
the boy’s late adoptive father respectively.
    Months
became years, and as Lyubomir grew, so Taloquan grew more attached
to him and treated him more and more like a son of his own. In him
he began to see the future of his company. The boy was smart and
sharp, with an incredible head for names and numbers, and Taloquan
vowed to bring him into the business when he was old enough: ten or
eleven perhaps. Lyubomir played the part of an obedient child,
content to sit at Taloquan’s grand piano and churn out classical
music while his master worked at his computer, capitalising on the
new age of business dawning over the internet. Deep down however,
Lyubomir remembered the cries