Avenue of Thieves Read online

  Avenue of Thieves

  A Ryan Lock & Ty Johnson Thriller

  Sean Black

  SBD

  Contents

  About the Book

  Praise for Sean Black

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Epilogue

  Also by Sean Black

  About the Author

  About the Book

  What would you do for a million dollars?

  Now what would you do for a billion?

  Back in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, Dimitri Semenov battled Russia's fearsome mafia, and the KGB, to amass a vast fortune.

  Then, as his enemies circled, he fled to America, taking his billions with him.

  Now someone wants all that money back, with interest, and they'll go to any lengths to get it.

  Praise for Sean Black

  Winner of the 2018 International Thriller Writers Award in New York for Second Chance

  Nominated for the 2020 International Thriller Writers award for The Deep Abiding

  "This series is ace. There are deservedly strong Lee Child comparisons as the author is a Brit (Scottish), his novels US-based, his character appealing, and his publisher the same. "

  Sarah Broadhurst, The Bookseller

  "Black drives his hero into the tightest spots with a force and energy that jump off the page. This is a writer, and a hero, to watch."

  Geoffrey Wansell, The Daily Mail

  "Sean Black writes with the pace of Lee Child, and the heart of Harlan Coben. "

  Joseph Finder, New York Times Bestselling Author of Buried Secrets

  Copyright Sean Black 2020

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction, and except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  1

  Togliatti, Samara Oblast, Russia

  May 1989

  Years later, long after he’d fled Russia, Dimitri Semenov would discover that Americans had a name for the decision that kickstarted his empire: a choice so blindingly obvious there was no real decision to make, because the likely upside was so vast in comparison to the alternative.

  They called such a decision a “no-brainer”.

  In Russia in 1989 there were tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of business deals that would, by any normal standard, have been considered no-brainers. Some were small. Some were large. Some could make you a year’s wages in the space of a few days. Some went far beyond that. These were deals that could make you not just rich but wealthy.

  But, as with everything else in life, there was often a snag.

  Back then the snag was that no-brainers, deals so extravagantly rewarding that you would have to be a fool to ignore them, attracted plenty of people with no brains but lots of muscle.

  That was why you needed a krysha, which translated into English as a “roof”.

  A roof scowled. A roof broke bones. A roof would stab, shoot or throw someone from the top of a building. If required, a roof would murder.

  A roof was the person who made sure you could do business. A protector. A criminal to protect you from the other criminals. A shakedown artist who would stop you being shaken down.

  The old Communist system had teetered on the edge for decades until, almost overnight, it collapsed. The collapse had offered unimaginable opportunity. Everything was up for grabs. But those opportunities came with risks.

  In a regular business deal, as people in America understood it, the greatest risk, the so-called downside, was losing your money. In Russia, it was losing your life.

  With the old structures gone, it was a lawless land. People had feared the police and the KGB in a way that most Americans would never understand. As the Soviet system fell apart, those fears evaporated, like a morning mist, replaced with a new, less predictable, force.

  Now they feared the vory, the hundreds of criminal gangs that had survived the worst the old system had thrown at them. The vory: the thieves in law. Men who had no fear of the gulag. No fear of Stalin, a man who had killed tens of millions. No fear of death. Criminals who displayed their contempt for authority on their flesh, in elaborate but lurid tattoos that might depict Lenin buggering Stalin, or something equally obscene.

  When he came to America, Dimitri had smiled at what Americans believed constituted rebellion. On television, gangster rappers would curse the police, knowing full well they were protected by the US Constitution. Shout something similar under Stalin or Brezhnev, or any of the old Soviet leaders, and not only might they ship you off to a freezing gulag in Siberia, they could send your entire family along for the ride. To rebel openly when that was the price? That was a real gangster.

  These were men who, when they attempted an escape from the remote prison camps where they were sent, befriended and took another prisoner, usually a so-called 58er, a political prisoner, with them. If they ran out of food, they would kill and eat their fellow escapee.

  The vory. Men, and sometimes women, of your worst nightmares. Criminals to be feared.

  And nowhere were they feared them more than on the Avenue of Thieves, which was where Dimitri now stood, waiting for the delivery of something he knew deep in his bones could transform his life.

  2

  The Avenue of Thieves was the grand name given to a less than grand alleyway situated close to the end of the Zhiguli assembly line. Zhigulis were at the luxury end of the market. Luxury being a relative term for cars produced in the Soviet Union where quality control, like so many things, was more of an ideal than a reality.

  Cars, any kind, were highly sought after, and usually reserved for senior Party officials, union bosses, their families and friends. Even then the average waiting time stretched to years rather than months. Unless, of course, you knew someone. Someone like Dimitri Semenov.

  Dimitri had grown up around the factory. His father had come to work there as a supply manager shortly after it had been built in 1967, along with the large town that had been constructed at the same time to house all the workers the factory would need.

  Since the collapse of Communism
, what had been small-scale corruption, the odd car diverted here, another shipped there, had descended into a violent free-for-all. Criminal gangs roamed the factory floor and the assembly lines, arguing over who would take delivery of each vehicle.

  Sometimes the arguments escalated. Full-blown fights would erupt. Fists gave way to bottles. Bottles to knives, and when a gang of Afghani (combat veterans fresh from fighting the Taliban) were prevented from taking a shipment they believed earmarked for them, bullets flew.

  After that a truce was brokered. The senior vory, the vor v zakone, sat down and agreed to bring an end to the razbroki, as the violent showdowns were known. At least on the assembly line.

  Instead, cars whose new ownership was disputed were driven off the line and into the alleyway, where any disputes could be settled without bringing production to a halt. Like everyone else, the vory were learning the principles of good business. First production, then distribution.

  Dimitri checked the time on his wristwatch. A little after six in the morning. Still dark and freezing cold. He stamped his feet, trying to drive some warmth into them. He rubbed his hands together, the gloves a present from his mother. Through a friend of his father, he had heard of a number of ‘ghost’ cars. Vehicles that didn’t show on any official or unofficial production schedule. Vehicles that even the vory were unaware of. They were produced after the factory was closed for the evening, the assembly lines manned by a second shift of workers who had been promised double their usual pay, and a case of vodka at the end of the month.

  The second ‘ghost’ shift been going on for weeks now without anyone getting wind of it. A minor miracle, helped by the fact that in the evenings most members of the criminal gangs were so drunk in the town’s bars that they could barely stand, never mind keep tabs on what was happening inside the vast industrial complex with its twenty-one entrance and exit points.

  His father’s friend had the cars. But now he needed someone to spirit them out of the plant and sell them on.

  The selling part would be easy. Demand outstripped supply by such a huge margin that a car ‘bought’ with the requisite vouchers, which were required for the paper trail, could be sold on the black market for fifty, a hundred times what had been paid.

  The tricky part was getting them out of the Volga plant without any of the vultures knowing about it, and either demanding their cut of the profit or, more likely, simply taking them, with force if necessary.

  That was why Dimitri had suggested six o’clock: the ghost shift were leaving, yet it was an hour before most of the day workers would arrive. And a good four or five hours before any hung-over vory would appear on the scene to see anything that might pique their interest.

  Dimitri hoped that by the time the gangs discovered the subterfuge he would have enough money saved to be able to hire muscle of his own. But he wanted them on a salary rather than shaking him down for an ever-increasing cut of the profits. He planned on asking around, and cherry-picking the most hardened Afghan veterans he could find. Then, once they had scared off the shakedown artists and vory, he could begin his expansion. Through his family he already had all the contacts he needed within the vast car plant. What he needed now was what they referred to in the west as working capital, and this morning’s car would provide that.

  And the best part of all of this? When you lived in a state that had abolished the idea of private property, and that state no longer existed, it wasn’t even theft. How could you steal something when no one knew who owned it?

  It was like being back in feudal times when whole kingdoms were there for the taking. If you had the nerve.

  The throaty rumble of a car engine behind him. He turned to see the manager he’d brokered the deal with behind the wheel of the fresh-from-the-assembly-line car. It had been painted a revolting shade of brown, but that hardly mattered. In Moscow or Leningrad, or anywhere else for that matter, a new car was a new car. No matter how it looked, it symbolized prestige and, most of all, freedom. It would sell.

  The car stopped. The manager got out. He held up the ignition key.

  Dimitri motioned for him to wait. He walked to the side of the alley, picked up a cardboard box that held six bottles of vodka and handed it to him. “A gesture of my thanks,” he said. “Give it to the boys who’ve been working tonight.”

  “Of course. They’ll appreciate it,” said the manager, taking the box and laying it down at his feet.

  Dimitri knew the workers inside would never see the vodka. But it was the little dance that people did.

  Under the Communist regime you lied to survive. You lied to the Party. To the police. To your family. To your friends. To yourself. Telling the truth would see you dead, sooner or later.

  “And the money?” said the manager.

  “As soon as I have it. Don’t worry, you’ll see your cut,” Dimitri reassured him. “Keep the cars coming and before you know it you’ll be driving one of your own.”

  The manager gave a curt nod, bent down, picked up the vodka and walked back down the alleyway. Dimitri knew that he’d barricade himself into his office and be blackout drunk by lunchtime.

  Dimitri ran his hand over the hood of the car. The paint was still tacky. He opened the driver’s door, put the key into the ignition and took a second to savor the grumble of the little engine.

  He had already scoped out the exit through which he would drive out. The guard had already been bribed to look the other way. It was all taken care of.

  As he pressed down on the clutch pedal and put the car into gear, Dimitri looked up. His stomach lurched.

  At the far end of the alleyway stood three men in heavy wool overcoats. The smaller of the three stood in the center, flanked by two younger, larger men.

  Dimitri glanced back over his shoulder. The manager was long gone.

  Had he informed on him? Or had someone else told them?

  It hardly mattered.

  The smaller man, the leader, a vor v zakone, was familiar to Dimitri. By reputation if nothing else.

  Dimitri didn’t know his real name, only his kilchka, the criminal nickname given to him when he had been granted the official status of a thief in law. He was known to everyone in Tagliotti as the Bitch Killer.

  It was a name with rich meaning in the criminal underworld. It referred to a war that had taken place, first in the gulags and then the streets, between the vory and the so-called bitches, those inmates and criminals who went against the ancient thieves’ code by working with and for the state.

  The Bitch Killer was only a few years older than Dimitri, but he had already acquired a reputation for extreme violence and a long memory. He was smart, ruthless and psychotic, in the clinical sense of term.

  He stood, staring at Dimitri. Then he did something more unnerving than pulling out a machine-gun.

  It was something that almost no one did: a simple act that, in this society, marked someone as either simpleton or lunatic. And the Bitch Killer was very far from a simpleton.

  3

  The Bitch Killer looked directly at Dimitri through the windshield and smiled. It wouldn’t have seemed more threatening if he’d tilted his head back and drawn his finger across his throat.

  It hardly mattered whether someone had tipped them off or they had worked out Dimitri’s plan another way.

  Eventually the Bitch Killer’s smile faded. His face could have belonged to someone twenty years older. A few years in the gulag would do that. He stood just over five feet seven inches tall, with penetrating blue eyes and cropped blond hair. His face was a mosaic of blue ink tattoos and scars. There were so many of both that it was hard to tell what was scar and what was artwork.

  Dimitri had always been a tough kid. His father had made him box and do martial arts. Both had given him physical confidence and the ability not to shy away from confrontation. This was different. He wasn’t afraid of dying. It was what would come before that concerned him.

  If the stories were to be believed, the Bitch Killer was
beyond sadistic when it came to meting out punishment. He wasn’t just creative, he also appeared to be a historian of torture.

  One rumor was that he had reintroduced one of the vory’s most dramatic, and theatrical punishments: they would place their victim in a box and saw it in half. There was no glamorous assistant, they used a chainsaw rather than a prop, and the gasps were real.

  With all that, Dimitri knew that the worst thing he could do now was show fear. Fear was an aphrodisiac to men like the Bitch Killer.

  He sat there for a moment, trying to calculate his next move.

  The obvious action was to get out, offer his apologies, take a beating, and surrender whatever profit he’d make on the car. They’d let him continue with his scheme. In fact, they’d make sure he did. But he would see a pittance of the revenue.