The Mystery of the Russian Ransom Page 8

  But it wasn’t enough just to help. He had to control the situation. He announced in the papers that, with his support and guidance, the Russian women’s hockey team would dethrone the United States and Canada in the next Winter Olympics. He would pour as much money into the team as it took to get it to that level. He would use the best coaches, the best science – and this is where it began to spin out of control for him.

  His plans were so complicated they fit together like a matryoshka doll – each one opening up to reveal another. The capturing of Sarah was just the first of many layers of his plan. He knew about Sarah’s skill at hockey because he and another Russian had watched the Owls play in a tournament at Lake Placid. He had decided Sarah’s ability to skate and pass made her the perfect model for Russian girls playing the game. He would have Sarah studied to a point where scientists could apply the best training and nutrition, and the coaches could give the best coaching to the top ten-to twelve-year-old girl players in the country. None of the girls themselves, or anyone connected with their team, needed to know that Sarah had been kidnapped.

  That was his plan for women’s hockey. Illegal – kidnapping a twelve-year-old girl – and a bit mad, but there was never any intention to harm Sarah in any way.

  And this was where his plan for himself came in. He had her kidnapped. He then had the kidnappers (really himself) demand an outrageous ransom of ten million rubles – and he would come out of it a hero by paying off the ransom and getting Sarah back. It wouldn’t cost him a cent.

  But it all had blown up in his face after the Screech Owls stumbled upon his hockey rink laboratory and Pavel decided that he couldn’t be part of it any longer and helped the Owls spring Sarah free. Petrov still might have succeeded in his plan had Sarah not been able to take that sneak photograph that allowed police and others to positively identify him.

  It was such an incredible story that people all over Russia were shocked and horrified that one man’s ambitions could take such a turn.

  He was front-page news. Travis had grabbed a newspaper from the front desk of the Hotel Astoria, and he planned to keep it as a souvenir. It had a huge photograph of Ivan Petrov being hauled away by the police.

  “What’s the headline say?” he asked Dmitri, shoving the newspaper across a coffee table.

  Dmitri looked down and smiled.

  “It says, ‘The New Ivan the Terrible.’ ”

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  ROY MACGREGOR was named a media inductee to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2012, when he was given the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award for excellence in hockey journalism. He has been involved in hockey all his life, from playing all-star hockey in Huntsville, Ontario, against the likes of Bobby Orr from nearby Parry Sound, to coaching, and he is still playing old-timers hockey in Ottawa, where he lives with his wife Ellen. They have four grown children. He was inspired to write The Highest Number in the World, illustrated by Geneviève Després, when his now grown-up daughter started playing hockey as a young girl. Roy is also the author of several classics in hockey literature. Home Team: Fathers, Sons and Hockey was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature. Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada (written with Ken Dryden) was a bestseller, as were Road Games: A Year in the Life of the NHL, The Seven A.M. Practice, and his latest, Wayne Gretzky’s Ghost: And Other Tales from a Lifetime in Hockey. He wrote Mystery at Lake Placid, the first book in the bestselling, internationally successful Screech Owls series in 1995. In 2005, Roy was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.