Death in Siberia f-4

by Alex Dryden

  Petrov remained, squatting on his haunches by the body now. If they’d left the passport, it was surely certain they would have stolen any cash the German had in his pockets. Petrov dug around in the opposite inside pocket of the jacket and came out with a well-worn money wallet. He flicked it open and, sure enough, there was nothing, not a euro, not a kopeck, not a sou. The credit cards were gone too, but there was no sign of torture on the body in order to gain the pin numbers. Perhaps fear had been enough, and the promise of life, if he’d cooperated. Evidently, someone – the killer – had been through the pockets, but it seemed he was just a petty thief – perhaps even the anonymous caller himself. At any rate, it must have been someone so low in the local order of criminality that they hadn’t known what to do with a passport, and were too afraid to take it.

  But Petrov still crouched by the corpse. He began to run his hand across and around the other areas of the coat and jacket, lapels first. In doing so, he noticed the jacket had been apparently expertly slit to reveal the lining. After checking the lapels, he then traced the sleeves of the jacket, then the shoulders, the front and around the lower edges. All were slit with something very sharp, a razor most likely. He turned his attention to the man’s trousers and ran his hand up and down the legs until he was clutching the man’s genitals through the material. The trousers, too, had been expertly slit, he noted. They were lined with something like silk. All of this was odd too.

  Petrov pursed his lips and summed up what he had before him: a foreigner who had arrived the previous afternoon from Norilsk on a return ticket to Krasnoyarsk: whose passport had not been stolen, but whose money and credit cards had been; a bullet hole at point-blank range in the back of the neck, execution-style; and the mysterious slits in the man’s clothing. Whoever had killed Bachman was, it seemed, looking for something expertly concealed, something far more valuable or important than a passport. Had the killer or killers found what they were looking for? Or had they missed whatever it was? Petrov’s second diagnosis, of an opportunistic killing by an addict and a thief, began to fade like the first mafiya one had.

  He paused, looked behind him again. Still no one was watching him.

  He now noted the professor’s shoes were unlaced. They were very expensive shoes, he guessed. He slipped them off, checking the inside of the socks first, feeling around with his hand. Finding nothing inside the socks, he looked the shoes over carefully, turning them one by one in his hands, scraping off the dirt. They were covered with the street filth, muddied almost beyond recognition as a once fine pair of shoes, in fact. But something caught his eye, nevertheless – and only when he scraped the filth away from the soles with his fingers. One shoe, the left one, had clearly been re-soled. And despite the wear and tear it had undergone on the vile night before – the night of Bachman’s death – the stitching work on the left shoe looked like it was very recent and not particularly expert. A cheap Russian job, by the look of it, not one done by a professional German shoemaker.

  Petrov checked down the alley behind him again and, finding the coast clear, slid a knife from the pocket of his uniform and began to cut the tight, thick thread that bound the sole to the inner leather and the shoe itself. It was a difficult task even though the re-soling stitches weren’t particularly good. By the time he’d prised the sole away, from the toe down to the instep, he was sweating, but more from anxiety that he’d be caught interfering with the evidence than from the effort. For this was no longer a job for a humble militsiya operativnik. It was a job for the higher-ups, the spook departments of the law. The MVD. The victim was a foreigner.

  Between the two pieces of leather, the sole of which he’d bent back as far as he could, and tightly wrapped in thin, transparent plastic, he found a closely folded wad of paper. Maybe it had been folded six or eight times, he guessed, into a wedge – as many times as it could have been folded, anyway. The wedge would have made it uncomfortable for the man to walk perhaps. But the packet was invisible, even when looking directly at the shoe’s sole, until he had prised the sole away.

  Something made Petrov still pause, now in the kneeling position again. Finally his mind cleared. He clutched the folded papers in their plastic protection into the ball of his large fist, unbuttoned his jacket with the other hand, and slipped the wedge of papers into the pocket of his immaculate militsiya jacket, now stained by the dirt on his hand, before buttoning it up again.

  He didn’t think about what he was doing. Indeed he had never done such a thing before, tamper with evidence. Perhaps it was some thought of an imminent cover-up that flickered across his mind; he didn’t know, later, and he couldn’t explain it to himself now.

  And perhaps the cover-up that followed his wife’s death from a radiation leak had something to do with that. Never again, he thought. If there was one thing you could rely on in Russia’s law enforcement bodies, it was a corrupt disregard for the truth. And if he’d failed with his wife, he wasn’t going to fail Bachman. No cover-ups. Never again.

  Now at last he stood, still alone in the alley. He was back to being Lieutenant Petrov again. One last thing he mentally noted; Bachman had no suitcase with him, neither an overnight bag nor a briefcase. Stolen, presumably, like the cash and credit cards. He filed away that fact for later.

  Finally he looked down at the victim and thought about his early morning musings at his apartment, about the dead, whose bones littered Siberia. Against the millions – the tens of millions – of unnatural deaths meted out in this vast empty land over the previous decades, what was significant about this one? For, to Alexei Petrov, every death was significant, indeed important and individual. As well as his imperviousness to bribery, that was one other thing that distinguished him from his masters. Everyone was someone. A death in Siberia might, to them, be as insignificant as a snowflake in Siberia – lost, surplus, irrelevant. But not to Petrov.

  But now he knew he had to act quickly like militsiya Lieutenant Petrov should do.

  That the victim was a foreigner changed everything, he’d known that from the moment he’d seen the man’s foreign passport. This was now a job for others, not for him, not for the ordinary militsiya. He would have to report it immediately to other state organs, the high-ups. The MVD people must be informed without delay or it would be his neck on the block. It was they who would deal with such a murder. And these Ministry of Interior police wouldn’t conscience a wait of any time at all before they were handed the job of dealing with it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ANNA RESNIKOV STOOD in the shuffling line of the unemployed that snaked along the quays of Krasnoyarsk’s riverside docks. It was 2 June, three days after her arrival in the city. In the cold air at six in the morning she waited – sullenly, in imitation of the others – to be at the head of the line where the hiring office was taking on workers for the lumber mills downriver in Igarka.

  But in her mind she was troubled, unusually, uncharacteristically so. And it wasn’t the prospect of going through the next stage of her mission – the hiring for Igarka’s lumber mills – that was worrying her. It was her own conduct at the border four nights before. She went back in her mind over the previous three days – and that particular moment at the border – with a mixture of surprise, almost shock, but most of all with a fiercely analytical self-criticism.

  She’d made it to the city on schedule and so the mission was on track – that much was true, certainly. But her own reactions as she’d crossed the border and had heard the arming of the automatic weapon were deeply out of character, way outside her normal, instinctive ruthlessness in the face of impending danger. That was what was bothering her now as she stood in the dejected line, as it had done ever since the incident itself. It was a needling anxiety that hadn’t gone away.

  When she’d heard the gun and the sound of the ammunition clip ratcheting into place, she’d frozen. Exactly as she should have done, her training inch perfect. Then she’d rolled away from any risk of immediate gunfire in her direction and had du
cked down further behind the rock she was using as cover. So far so good. It was then that she’d heard the voice.

  ‘Kto etu?’ The nervous, young male voice that rang out in the predawn darkness at the border had spoken in Russian. ‘Who goes there?’

  From that, she’d known that she hadn’t been seen and was not in the cross hairs of the man’s weapon.

  She’d drawn the Thompson Contender from behind her back where the long, eighteen-inch barrel had greater freedom of movement when she was climbing. Then she’d removed her gloves and silently fitted the ice-cold, metal silencer taken from her breast pocket over the barrel, easing it tight. Now she was deadly. Again, so far so good.

  She’d waited then. Let him make a move. The man with the weapon was in the dark, both literally and figuratively, and she had the advantage. Soon she would be able to pinpoint the direction of the voice, once she’d worked out the sound shadow and the echoes from the surrounding rock formations.

  The unearthly quiet that followed at the top of the gorge where the old Czarist border post was crumbling to dust stretched out for a long time and then she’d heard the arming of another, second automatic. She’d realised she would have to kill two of them. More than two, perhaps. Well, surprise was on her side, that was okay. She would have to kill them. That was how it would be. How it had always been, ever since her training at the SVR’s headquarters, from the age of seventeen.

  ‘Te haanaas irsen be?’ This time the challenge had been in Mongolian. The same young voice, she judged.

  He, or they – she knew there were at least two of them now – were close, but not behind her as she’d feared. Somewhere up ahead down the slope behind the rock. From the sound shadow, she estimated they were, in fact, just beyond the rock which she’d hidden behind. So that fact, along with the interrogatory challenge, assured her further that they hadn’t actually seen her.

  She’d then off-loaded the mountaineering gear she was carrying, careful not to let the metal parts clash against each other, and crept upwards away from where she guessed they were standing. She followed the line of the rock until she could look around its upper edge, nearest to the fort.

  What she’d seen from her cover were two young Russian border guards of tribal ancestry, Buryats, most likely. They were standing below her. They were in their twenties, she’d thought, maybe even younger, recruits still just in their teens, and they’d been stationed out here where the danger of incursion was at a low level and where any encounter was most likely only to be with an illegal Mongolian trader. She could see they were nervous, under-trained rather than tensed for action, and they were facing down the gorge from where she’d come. Facing away from her. She was now well above them. On the declining slope from where she’d come, their heads were just lower than her feet.

  The shot was easy, two shots, to be exact. She could drop them both without either of them knowing what hit them. And it would be done, thanks to the silencer, without anyone else knowing, either. Then dispose of the bodies. The snow would cover her tracks.

  She took aim along the long barrel of the handgun. Her index finger closed on the trigger, a light, delicate, almost loving touch, the touch of a long familiarity with an instrument of death. She felt its resistance and steadied her aim.

  But it was then that she’d hesitated. The back of the first brown-skinned boy’s head was fixed in the sight, just below the cranium. A dead shot, an instant end. He wouldn’t even know what happened. But still she’d hesitated and that was what was bothering her now as she stood in the line of unemployed leading to the hiring office at Krasnoyarsk.

  Why had she paused? They were two quick and easy shots for a person of her high calibre and skills. One for each of them, in the backs of their heads. Down, gone. She could be on her way, relentless in the pursuit of her mission. Just as she’d always been.

  The reason she’d hesitated, as she thought about it now – for the hundredth time since she’d made the border crossing – was a sudden and unfamiliar surge of doubt. Thoughts had entered her mind that had nothing to do with the mission, nothing to do with her training, or even with her own personal safety and survival. She’d suddenly seen the two guards for what they were, that was what had happened. She’d felt an eerie feeling that she was in a theatre, she onstage, the youths across the boards from her. But on top of that, she’d felt she was also watching herself, as if from the audience, levelling a deadly weapon at two defenceless kids. This vision of herself, this self-reflection, had deeply unnerved her.

  What she’d seen in her mind’s eye was the humanity of her intended victims, the flesh and blood, the mothers, brothers and sisters of the two nervous guards who fingered their too-heavy weapons as if they might go off in their hands. In this mental scenario, they were not border guards per se, but just two innocent local boys, forced into conscripted service against their will. In short, they were human, and that was not a thought that should intrude before a killing. She was trained to think about, to concentrate on, the action of killing, not the death itself. An immediate death would now come from the slightest increase of pressure.

  Her rational mind had tried to reassert itself. It was just a double killing, two shots where necessary. That was the game she was in, wasn’t it, and had always been in since she’d graduated from the KGB’s training school at Balashiha outside Moscow. Kill or be killed, that was the bottom line. That was the lesson which was relentlessly drummed into the new intelligence recruit as she had once been. Or more than that, even – just kill to make life a bit easier. In this case, her crossing at the border four nights before would have been eased considerably by the simple pressure on the trigger. It was routine, a necessary act in her world, in order to be sure of avoiding detection. After all, they would have killed her if they’d had the chance, or out of fear, perhaps. It didn’t matter. That was their job too.

  But the unfamiliar, and potentially suicidal, doubts had proliferated, upsetting the normal, smooth mechanism of her mind. Was she really anything more than a killer? It seemed to her then that the dead bodies which had steadily mounted in her lethal career were becoming a dead end. In her sudden, unprecedented doubt, she had lain there in the steadily falling snow and listened. And as she did so, she’d wondered if she’d reached her breaking point; if she could no longer trust herself to kill – to kill anyone who was in her way – in order to make herself safe. As she lay there in mental confusion, she’d lowered the gun.

  The thought of her father had crossed her mind again then. Had his death removed her killer instinct? She felt a clamminess on her hands. Then she heard a shuffle on the terrain below her and was immediately alert again.

  ‘It must have been a rock or a stone falling,’ one of the kids had said, in Russian again this time. But as she’d watched them, she noted that he’d kept the automatic trained down the gorge while the other boy slung his over his shoulder.

  ‘Come on,’ the second boy had said. ‘It’s nothing. Let’s get some breakfast.’

  Anna had watched them slowly retreat after that, one walking backwards at first, training his weapon down the gorge, as if he were in some safe-training session. She could have taken them both down at any moment. That had been the obvious thing to do, the thing she would normally have done in the circumstances. But she hadn’t done it and now she felt a deep misgiving that she’d endangered herself and the whole mission in the process.

  She’d waited for them to go, watching them all the time. Then she’d crept up past and behind the old fort and left a wide berth around a concrete pillbox further into the high valley which Larry’s men hadn’t been able to see from their line of surveillance in the previous weeks. The pillbox was the new border post, and where the boys had gone and had begun to brew some tea in the freezing morning. As the first dull beginning of the dawn began to tint the upper edges of the mountains with a grey light muffled by the snow clouds, she saw a fire they’d lit.

  They could have spotted her at any time as she passed. S
he must have been mad not to kill them. They could have radioed to others, for reinforcements, in order to make sure there really was no one coming across the border. She’d put her life at risk. She’d betrayed a ruthlessness that had always kept her alive.

  After she’d left the pillbox behind her, her head had cleared at last. Things had become more straightforward, though no less dangerous. She tried to put her doubt out of her mind. She dumped the climbing equipment into the ravine and then she looked at the gun. Larry’s instructions came back to her. But she unscrewed the silencer and hid it and the gun deep inside her clothing with the three hundred rounds of ammunition. Any strip search would reveal it. It was a deeply risky thing to do.

  On the day that followed the crossing, she’d walked for some thirty miles into Russia. The only people she’d seen were a few Buryat horsemen in the distance. The empty landscape. There were similar endless grasslands on this side of the border and the mountains to the grasslands of northern Mongolia which she’d crossed with Larry and the others the day before. The journey northwards across the emptiness was a relief, arduous certainly, but a respite from her tangled thoughts at that time of crisis.

  She had rested up in a stone kurgan during the night after her crossing, then walked on in the hours before the second dawn to the hamlet of Erzin. She’d seen a few yurts and some more native Buryat horsemen, but there were no Russians in evidence. And no more border guards until she’d reached the first proper roads.

  At Erzin she’d bought two large string sacks of apples from a Buryat family at the side of the road, which had been stored and preserved underground over the winter. And then she’d found some old clothes at a market stall, changing her appearance to that of a peasant farm worker, before boarding the bus to Kyzyl.

  The old bus crawled slowly across the same wilderness landscape. Here, still close enough to the border to attract attention from Interior Ministry troops, the bus was stopped several times by border patrols and by the local police. Their methods were simple. Huge iron chains with spikes were dragged across the road to stop all traffic. Abrupt questions, long looks at her papers, snapped remarks, and the occasional gloating, lustful look at her body. But her papers had worked, the forgers at Cougar had done their job well. She had the two sacks of apples, in which the gun and ammunition were now concealed. She was going to the market in Abakan to sell the apples – that was her story. She must have repeated it eight times or more on the interrupted journey.