1
Moscow, 2014
Dima opened his eyes, a second of blankness before he remembered where he was and why. The call could come at any time, they’d said. It was just after three. Bulganov’s voice was thick with fatigue. He told him when and where. He started to give directions, but Dima shut him up.
‘I know where it is.’
‘Just don’t fuck up, okay?’
‘I don’t fuck up. That’s why you hired me.’ Dima hung up.
Four-thirty, a stupid time to choose to swap a girl for a suitcase of money, but he wasn’t making the decisions. ‘Remember: you’re just the courier,’ Bulganov had said, trying to swallow his pain.
Dima called Kroll, told him twenty minutes. He took a cold shower, forcing himself to stay under until the last traces of sleep were gone. He dried, dressed, gunned a Red Bull. Breakfast could wait. He gave the case one last check. The money looked good: US dollars, five million, shrink-wrapped. The price of oligarchs’ daughters was going up. Bulganov had wanted to use counterfeit, but Dima had insisted — no tricks or else no deal. Barely a dent in the man’s fortune — not that it stopped him trying to beat them down. The rich could be very mean, he’d learned — especially the old ones, the former Soviets. But the Chechens had set their price. And when a fingernail arrived in the post, Bulganov caved.
Dima put on his quilted coat. No body armour: he couldn’t see the point. It weighed you down and if they were going to kill you they’d aim for the head. No firearm either, and no blades. Trust was everything in these exchanges.
He handed in the key cards at reception. The pretty brunette on the desk didn’t smile, glanced at the bag.
‘Going far?’
‘Hope not.’
‘Come back soon,’ she said, without conviction.
The street, still dark, was empty except for clumps of old snow. Moscow under new snow he liked: it rounded off the sharp edges, covered up the grime and the litter, and sometimes the drunks. But it was April, and the frozen remnants clung to the pavements in long, winding fortifications, like the ones they’d been made to dig at military school. The tall, grey buildings disappeared into low cloud. Maybe winter wasn’t over just yet.
A battered BMW swung into view, weak lights bouncing off the glaze of ice. The tyres slid a little as it shuddered to a halt in front of him. It looked like it had been rebuilt from several unwilling donors, a Frankenstein’s monster of a car.
Kroll grinned up at him. ‘Thought it would remind you of your lost youth.’
‘Which part?’
Dima didn’t need any reminders: any idle moment and the old times crowded in — which was why he did his best never to be idle. Kroll got out, popped the trunk lid and hefted in the bag, while Dima took his place at the wheel. The interior smelled of sauerkraut and smoke — Troikas. You wouldn’t catch Kroll with a Marlboro. He preferred those extra carcinogens that came in Russian tobacco. Dima glanced at the ripped back seat: a bed roll, some fast food boxes and an AK: all the essentials of life.
Kroll slid in, saw the expression on Dima’s face.
‘You living in this crate?’
Kroll shrugged. ‘She threw me out.’
‘Again? I thought you’d got the message by now.’
‘My ancestors lived in yurts: see, we’re going up in the world.’
Dima said it was Kroll’s nomadic Mongol blood that got in the way of his domestic life, but they both knew that it was something else, a legacy of having lived too much, seen too much, killed too much. Spetsnaz had trained them to be ready for anything — except normality.
He nodded at the back seat. ‘Katya has standards, you know. One look in here and she might decide to stick with her captors.’
He shoved the shift into drive and they took off, fishtailing in the slush.
Katya Bulganova had been snatched in broad daylight from her metallic lemon Maserati, a vehicle that might as well have had ‘My Daddy’s rich! Come and get me!’ embossed on the hood. The bodyguard got one in the temple before he even saw what was happening. One onlooker said it had been a teenage girl brandishing an AK. Another described two men in black. So much for witnesses. Dima had little sympathy for Katya or her father. But Bulganov didn’t want sympathy and he didn’t just want his daughter back. He wanted his daughter back and revenge: ‘A message to the underworld: no one fucks with me. And who better to deliver it than Dima Mayakovsky?’
Bulganov had been at Spetsnaz too, one of the generation that bided its time then cut loose in the free-for-all Yeltsin years, to grab its share. Dima despised them, but not as much as those who came after, the grey, lifeless micromanagers. Kushchen, his last boss, told him, ‘You played the wrong game Dima: you should have shown some restraint.’
Dima didn’t do restraint. On his first posting, in Paris as a student spy in ’81, he discovered that his own station chief was preparing to defect to Britain. Dima took the initiative and the man was found floating in the Seine. The police settled for suicide. But initiative wasn’t always appreciated. Enough people higher up thought he had done too well, too soon, which was how he ended up in Iran training Revolutionary Guards. In Tabriz, near the Azeri border, two recruits on his watch raped the daughter of a Kazakh migrant worker. They were only seventeen years old, but the victim was four years younger. Dima got the whole troop out of their bunks to witness proceedings, then made them stand close enough to see the look on the boys’ faces. Two shots each in the temple. The troop excelled in discipline after that. Then in Afghanistan, during the dying months of the occupation, he witnessed a Russian regular soldier open up on a car full of French nurses. No reason — out of his head on local junk. Dima put a bullet in the corporal’s neck while he was still firing, tracer rounds arcing into the sky as he fell.
Perhaps if he had shown more restraint he would at least still be at Spetsnaz, in a civilised posting where he could use his languages, a reward for the years of dedication and ruthlessness, not to mention the chance to reclaim a bit of humanity. But Solomon’s defection in ’94 had done for Dima’s reputation. Someone had to take the rap. Could he have seen it coming? At the time, no. With hindsight, maybe. The only consolation — he’d packed in the drinking and that had been the toughest mission.
The streets at this hour were almost empty, just as they used to be all day long in his childhood. Under the throngs of imported SUVs, Moscow’s vast avenues lost their grandeur. There was a queue to get on to the Krymsky Bridge, where a beat-up Lada had been rammed by a Buick. Doors open, two men shouting, one wielding a crowbar. No police in sight. Two drunks staggered along the pavement, joined at the head like Siamese twins, plumes of vapour rising from them into the frozen air. When they reached the BMW they paused and stared. They were men from the past, probably no more than fifty years old, but with faces so ravaged by drink and bad diet they looked much older. Soviet faces. Dima felt an unwelcome sense of kinship, not that they would have known. One spoke, inaudible through the glass, but Dima lip-read: ‘Immigrants’.
Kroll tapped him on the shoulder — the lights had changed.
‘Where are we going, anyway?’
He told him. Kroll snorted.
‘Nice. Residents sold the window glass so the authorities put up plywood instead.’
‘Capitalism. Everyone’s an entrepreneur.’
Kroll was off. ‘Fact: There are more billionaires in Moscow than any other city in the world. Twenty years ago there weren’t even any millionaires.’
‘Yeah, but probably not round here.’
They passed rows of identical blocks of flats, monuments to the workers’ paradise, now filled with the drugged and the dying.
‘Tombstones in a giants’ graveyard,’ said Kroll.
‘Easy on the poetry: it’s a bit early for me.’
They parked between an inverted Volga, stranded on its roof like an upturned beetle, and a Merc, the passenger compartment burned out. The BMW blended right in.
They got out. Kroll lifted the trunk lid and reached in. Dima moved him aside.
‘Careful with your back.’
He lifted the bag out of the trunk and set it on its wheels.
‘Big bag.’
‘Big money.’
Dima handed Kroll his phone. Kroll tapped his shoulder where his Baghira was holstered.
‘Sure you want to go in naked?’