Avenue of Thieves Read online

  That was how they had found him. He had staged one of the first deep fake robberies. Capturing the voice of a Russian CEO, he had used sophisticated artificial intelligence software to mimic the man’s voice in a call to his bank, which had released several million dollars into an account Alexei had set up in the CEO’s name. The money had been quickly whisked offshore. The FSB had found him but decided it would be a waste to let him rot in jail when he could be working for them.

  “Are you hungry?” Ninel asked Alexei, as she got into the car.

  “Huh?”

  “We could go to a drive-thru. Save you getting you out of the car in those pants,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah,” he stuttered.

  They got in and she lowered the window. It didn’t smell too bad now, but it would.

  “At least you didn’t have asparagus,” she said, sniffing the air.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” said Ninel.

  She watched through the windshield as the sniper and his spotter picked up the groundsheet with Grigor, and carried him to the trees, headed for the quarry.

  14

  Togliatti, Samara Oblast, Russia

  March 1990

  The bad news was that the Bitch Killer was still alive. He had suffered serious injuries but, week by week, month by month, slowly but surely, he was recovering. Perhaps not well enough to do something himself, but well enough that he could have someone else exact revenge on his behalf. The vory were fiercely tribal. That was why they had survived for so long.

  It was a lesson that would be reinforced in Dimitri’s mind over the years. Bad people didn’t just survive, they thrived. You knocked them down, and somehow they popped up stronger than before.

  The good news was that by running him over, Dimitri had bought himself the time he needed to make some money and marshal his forces. He now had a dozen security personnel, all battle-hardened former military Afghani.

  He made sure they were paid well, and on time. “Well paid” being a relative term: what was considered starvation wages in the West was a king’s ransom in Russia.

  And the money Dimitri was making selling the cars from the plant? Even in the West those were unimaginable sums. He had even refined his scheme. He paid several factory managers and other local bureaucrats to falsify export orders, then had the cars driven to Moscow where they were sold not for vouchers but for cash. Hard currency. Mostly American dollars. Even with the economy on the verge of collapse, enough people in the cities were making money on the black market to be able to pay for a car.

  Within a matter of weeks, and with Dimitri having secured a reputation as someone not to be messed with, he was moving dozens of vehicles from Togliatti to Moscow. On the return journey he had his drivers use the money they were being paid to buy all manner of goods that were only easily available in Moscow. That way he could double, and in some cases triple, what was already a colossal profit.

  He reinvested most of the money, at the same time making sure it wasn’t just his bodyguards who were properly compensated. Everyone made money, from the men who came in to work the night shift to those who opened the gates and studied the newspaper while the cars were spirited out of the factory.

  Then, just as he was beginning to worry that it was all too perfect, too easy, it happened.

  15

  Ninel had been deemed not sufficiently attractive to be sent to State School 4. Even if she had been there was no way on earth that her father would have allowed it. State School 4 was for the so-called swallows, young female KGB operators who were trained to seduce, establish relationships with, and in some cases marry men the state deemed important.

  Instead she had undergone training at the famed Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB located on Michurinsky Prospekt in Moscow. One of only two women in her class, she had graduated just ahead of the collapse and the academy’s temporary closure before it became the main training center for the KGB’s replacement, the FSB.

  It was by pure chance that she had been assigned as a young officer in Togliatti. The vast Avtovaz car plant was seen as a strategic asset. It was also, as it turned out, the best place to go if you wanted to learn the ways of the vory. Since perestroika, the old enemies of the state had infested the surrounding area like cockroaches. They understood the black market better than most.

  Then there were men like Dimitri Semenov. Not vory, but hardly law-abiding. Not so much corrupt as corrupters. He, and those like him, saw themselves as vanguards of the free market.

  Where many saw chaos, Ninel saw a conundrum. If under the old system all property was owned, in theory, by everyone, then now, with the reforms, no one could claim ownership, which men like Semenov took to mean that they could.

  And what was happening here was repeated across the land. In Moscow the theft was off the charts. It was a pure kleptocracy, a government of thieves, by thieves, and for thieves. Entire state enterprises were being taken over wholesale and carved up by the politicians and their cronies.

  Like a good KGB officer, Ninel kept her own counsel. She waited, she watched, observing the shifting sands, and when the opportunity arose, she took it, with both hands.

  16

  Dimitri was smoking a cigarette and making Turkish coffee in a copper cezve on the tiny gas stove when he heard the knock at the door. The power was out for the third time that week. The apartment was a tiny one-bed in a crumbling tower block that had been hastily thrown up to house factory workers.

  He’d been so busy that he hadn’t got around to finding somewhere new. In any case, he was hardly ever there. Life kept him working, either here or in Moscow, or on the road between the two. That was how he liked it. He’d quickly found that wheeling and dealing was something he never got bored of. It had become like a drug.

  Whoever it was knocked again. None of the Afghanis were here. They usually collected him and escorted him to work. During the night one of them was posted outside keeping watch. As an extra measure they had given him a pistol and shown him how to use it. Now he wished he’d paid more attention but, truth be told, he’d always had a Russian’s fatalistic view when it came to his own death.

  If his number was up, it was up.

  He picked up the pistol from a table in the living room as he made his way to the front door. He knew it didn’t have a safety and that it was loaded so he presumed it would simply be a matter of pointing it and pulling the trigger.

  The knocking came again. This time it was a lot more insistent.

  “Police!” shouted a man on the other side of the door. “Open up!”

  Dimitri’s hand was shaking. Either way this couldn’t be good. There was a decades-old fear of the police coming to your door. And if it was vory pretending to be police, which was one of their new tricks, it was even worse.

  For the most part, the police were easy to bribe. They were paid even worse than the factory workers. But usually when they wanted to shake someone down so they could buy vodka you were stopped on the street or, in Dimitri’s case, pulled over in your car. That was a weekly occurrence.

  On the off-chance it was the police, Dimitri wasn’t going to open the door to them waving a gun. He stood back.

  “If you’re with the police then push your ID under the door and I’ll open up.”

  On the other side of the door there was a hushed conversation between two men. “Open up right now, or this will be a lot worse for you, Comrade.”

  Comrade, thought Dimitri. People still used that term. It was ironic: here they were, fighting like rats in the bottom of a barrel, as they had been for years, but still everyone spoke like they were brothers in arms.

  He walked over to the table, grabbed his wallet, pulled out a fistful of rubles, and slid them under the door. The money was grabbed before it had even fully cleared the other side.

  More hushed discussions in the corridor, then two ID cards appeared. Dimitri picked them up and studied them. The longer this went on the less likely they were vory, who
were not noted for their patience. They would have kicked the door in by this point, or at least made the attempt.

  He picked up the IDs and studied them. They looked genuine enough. If they were forgeries they were good ones.

  Quickly he hid the gun under a cushion, walked back, opened the door and hoped he’d made the right decision.

  17

  As the two police officers escorted him to their car, Dimitri glimpsed the Afghani who’d been posted outside being released from his handcuffs by two other cops. He kept his eyes down but looked sheepish. Dimitri didn’t blame him. He would speak with the head of his security later and make sure he knew this kid had no alternative. Assuming there was a later.

  They put him into the back of their car. It reeked of stale smoke and even staler urine. They had cuffed his hands in front of him so he could get to his cigarettes. He lit one, using the fresh smoke to cover the noxious odor.

  They pulled out onto Leninskiy Prospekt. They drove for a mile, the vast car plant on their left. The main regional police station was on Frunze Past, but they drove by the turn for it and kept going.

  Dimitri tried not to show the panic bubbling inside him as they kept moving, making a right turn onto Yubileinaya Street and a left onto Primorskiy Boulevard. Finally they stopped outside a large gray building near the local government offices.

  Everyone in Tagliotti knew and feared this place. People avoided it like the plague. If they had to walk down this section of the street they usually crossed to the opposite side and picked up their pace, lest some invisible force would draw them inside, and they’d never be seen again.

  This was the local headquarters of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB, Russia’s less than secret police. A metal gate was pulled open and the police car bounced down a ramp, and into an underground car park.

  Dimitri closed his eyes and took a drag on a freshly lit Ziganov cigarette as the gate clanged ominously behind them. Now he was firmly inside the belly of the beast.

  It wasn’t the same fearsome beast that it had been before. Like every other part of the state it had been weakened by economic collapse. But, like a badly injured animal, this was when an organization such as this could be at its most dangerous―when it was in its death throes.

  They pulled into a parking space near an elevator. The two regular police officers got out. They both looked nervous. Dimitri didn’t blame them. Normal cops were terrified of the KGB, and with good reason. Corruption was endemic. You might not be the most corrupt, but you were likely guilty of something, and that was all the KGB needed.

  He noticed there was no call button on the elevator. It opened automatically and they all shuffled inside. The door closed, again with no one touching any buttons, and they began their ascent.

  The doors opened into a windowless corridor. The walls were bare. No pictures. Every door looked the same. None was numbered.

  Dimitri was led down the corridor until they stopped at a door that had a sign outside. One word: Interrogation.

  The cops hesitated at the door until one said, “Go on. Open it.”

  “Why don’t you?” said his partner.

  “Let him,” said the first cop, reaching down, and unlocking the cuffs. “Go on,” he said, with a nod to the door handle.

  Dimitri turned it. The door opened into a large room, twenty feet long by twelve wide. No windows. Tiled flooring that was easy to wipe blood from. In Russia, floor coverings were usually a good indicator of how bad things might get. No one beat the hell out of someone in an office with a carpet.

  There was a bench that ran along one wall. In the middle of the room, a metal table had been fixed to the floor. Two chairs on either side were also bolted in.

  The cops led him to one of the chairs, pushed him onto it, and cuffed him to the leg of the table. Like he would have been able to go anywhere anyway.

  So far the most unnerving part of this was the absence of anyone else, the lack of natural light, and the almost total silence. He assumed the place was soundproofed, not so much to exclude noise from elsewhere as to make sure that no one outside could hear the screams coming from within. That was the local wisdom.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said the cop.

  “My handcuffs?”

  “Okay, you stay with him, then.”

  That did the trick. They walked out of the room, closing the door behind them.

  Dimitri was alone. Cuffed to the table. He tried to run through what he could say if they asked him about his operation. There really wasn’t anything. The paperwork gave the appearance of order, but that was about all.

  He could deny, but it wouldn’t work. It might buy him some time, but no more than that. He would have to resort to the classic solution in a situation like this. Bribery. Even the KGB had their price, especially in these straitened times when inflation was rampant and a public servant’s salary had been barely enough to live on before.

  The wait seemed to go on endlessly. He was grateful for his wristwatch, a Czech Pobeda chronograph that his parents had bought him as a high-school graduation present. He had a half packet of cigarettes left, and a lighter.

  He was thirsty, his mouth dry. He should have slugged down some of that coffee before he had opened the door at home.

  Minutes went by. Then an hour.

  He tried to make some calculations as to how much it would take to pay them off. Would a one-off payment be enough?

  Unlikely.

  A single bribe would get you out of a speeding ticket, but not something like this. It would have to be an ongoing arrangement.

  That meant thinking about two things. How much he could get away with paying them, and establishing what they could provide in return.

  Not beating him to death was hardly adding value to his business.

  This would have to be a negotiation like any other. That was how he would have to approach it. He could give them something, but they would have to provide something in return.

  Having focused on his predicament in this way, he immediately felt better. He lit a fresh cigarette and took a puff as the door finally opened and two people walked in. One was a middle-aged man with a big belly and a red face, and the other, to Dimitri’s surprise, a plain-looking mouse of a girl around his age.

  She had greasy brown hair, cut short, and was wearing a long gray skirt, white blouse, and gray jacket. Under her arm she held a series of files. She didn’t look at him as she took a seat opposite. Instead, she arranged the files next to her in a neat pile, took one from the top and began to flip through it.

  He couldn’t think of anyone who looked less like a KGB officer. Which made what happened in the next few hours all the more surprising.

  18

  The man introduced himself as a colonel. The woman didn’t say anything. Her mousy appearance belied an unflinching gaze that, on first viewing, didn’t seem to fit with the rest of her. She looked directly across the table at Dimitri, eyes narrowed, as if studying something under a microscope.

  It was a stare that didn’t seek to intimidate. Dimitri found that made it all the more unnerving.

  “We have some questions for you,” said the colonel.

  Dimitri’s response was a curt nod.

  The woman passed the first file to the colonel, who opened it to reveal a set of black-and-white photographs. He placed them on the table and slid them one by one over the surface to Dimitri.

  The first print showed Dimitri with the manager who’d been supervising the night shift. They were standing in the alleyway, a crate of vodka at Dimitri’s feet.

  Dimitri moved through the photographs looking at each one turn. He said nothing.

  “This is you,” said the colonel.

  “Yes,” said Dimitri.

  There was no pleading the fifth amendment. No invoking one’s right to remain silent. No demanding that one have a lawyer present.

  The first two didn’t exist, and the third wouldn’t help. Even now, with all the reforms, t
he KGB had sweeping powers. There was only one way out of this, money, and it was way too early in the game to play that hand.

  With his blood pounding in his ears, he did his best to stay calm.

  “Who is this?” said the colonel jabbing a meaty finger at the manager.

  Dimitri gave them the man’s name.

  “Why are you giving him vodka?”

  “He’s a friend of mine. I don’t drink very much. He does,” said Dimitri.

  The colonel nodded. The woman gathered up the photographs from the table, tamped them into a neat pile, the edges lined up, and put them back in the file. She moved that file off to one side and continued with the show-and-tell.

  File after file, photograph by photograph, purchase order by purchase order, Dimitri’s scheme was laid out in front of him in meticulous detail. It was impressive. They had pieces of paper that even Dimitri hadn’t been aware of.

  On and on it went. They had more than enough evidence to bury him several times over. A half-hour in, he gave up any denials. There was no point. The only thing it would have achieved was aggravating them.

  One last file remained, unopened. Dimitri couldn’t help but look at it. The woman pointedly ignored it as she gathered the files he had already seen.

  She and the colonel pushed back their chairs and got up.

  “It’s lunchtime,” said the colonel. “Ninel here will bring you something to eat later.”

  They walked to the door, leaving the unopened file lying on the table, easily within Dimitri’s reach.

  A mind game.

  Did they want him to open it? Did they not? Did it matter?

  He left it where it was and lit another cigarette. He should have asked them for a fresh pack. He was almost out. Maybe he’d ask the woman when she brought him food. Not that he had an appetite.