by Chad Huskins
Rideaus’s Interpol papers accelerated her way through security and Customs. Two men were waiting on her at the gate. They exchanged only introductions and then stepped outside into the storm. Rideau knew that Russians, in particularly Russian police, weren’t overly eager to prolong greetings or goodbyes. It was always straight to business.
On the way out to the car, Rideau was nearly blown sideways by a wind that felt almost gale-force. Snow was coming down in great clumps, and by the time they got to the car they were all covered in it, shaking it off their shoulders and coats. Once inside, Rideau sent a short text to Patricia, telling her she had landed safely; her wife was a worrier.
The short, fat man was Lieutenant Konstantin Tattar, and his partner was Detective Nestor Yudin. So far, Tattar was the only one to have spoken, having introduced both himself and Yudin and waved her on. “We’ve arranged a room for you at the Grand Hotel Vidgof,” he said, taking a seat with her in the back. “Room 412. I think you’ll like it.”
He handed her a thick folder filled with profiles of some of the higher-end HVTs, or high-value targets, coupled with photos of each, usually taken from a database, or, wherever a photo wasn’t available, computer-generated sketches made from various templates and made into a composite.
Rideau’s Russian was more than passable, both speaking and reading it, and she was glad to see that Chelyabinsk Police had gotten their collective act together since her last visit two years ago. She’d been part of REACHOUT, a kind of law enforcement foreign-exchange program, arranged by Interpol, where LEOs (law enforcement officers) in various fields went to other countries to swap techniques, ideas, and methods with fellow LEOs. Chelyabinsk’s police force had been overwhelmed by the influx of organized crime, its investigations coming in very piecemeal, with no standardized system for collating and categorizing. They had also had a tendency to blame any other Western police agency for not yielding real information, and when that didn’t work they would toss the blame on each other. With so many aspersions being cast around, it had been a major task just to locate the central problem to their disorganization.
For over half a century now, Russian policy in regards to international cooperation had largely been to ask for very little help, and when they did require help, they tended to make brazen demands rather than a polite exchange of information. Russian police and politicians shared the view that cooperation insinuated need, and that need insinuated weakness only on their part. But demanding showed strength. One of the great accomplishments Rideau felt she could be proud of was that she had helped to melt that block of ice around Russian policy a little, and ever since she had seen nothing but improvement.
Lieutenant Tattar’s phone buzzed. He answered it and told whoever it was on the other end that he had picked Rideau up and they were headed to the hotel. When he hung up, he looked at her and said, “Do you have something to add to any of these profiles?”
A little direct, she thought. But still better than years ago when the sentence would have been, “Tell me what you know about these people.” Rideau flipped through a few more pages. “These are very detailed,” she said approvingly, testing out her Russian. “I see you’ve put Matvei Tsaritsyn back in the picture. That’s new. You no longer think he’s dead?”
“No,” Tattar sighed. “We’ve had enough informants tell us that they’ve seen him at various backroom poker games at casinos run by the vory. We’re almost positive he and the family faked his drowning—no body was ever found, after all—and they even arranged that damn funeral and memorial service to throw us off. We still weren’t sure, but we found a plastic surgeon in Saint Petersburg who identified him by photograph and said Tsaritsyn came to him six months ago looking to have major changes done to his appearance, so…” He shrugged.
“I would have thought they would have handled that by now. That’s a little sloppy of them. Maybe that’s a good sign for us.”
“They’re not too sloppy,” Tattar advised with a severe look. “They moved into the city very slowly over the last five years. They opened up plenty of legitimate businesses, nothing illegal about them whatsoever, not even any laundering. They were very careful when they came into Chelyabinsk.” He shrugged again. “But, I believe we have finally pinned down the two major factions.”
Rideau looked up from the file. She was a little surprised to hear this. “You’ve identified the ruling families?” This was a major boon, considering the Russian Mafia was a vast network of families, with occasional bloody feuds that shuffled around the title of “ruling family.” As it was with most countries, the syndicates had their various territories. No one group could claim an entire city, but there was always one that had greater power than the others. The power always measured by how many public officials a family had in its fold.
Discerning exactly which of the families in a region was dominant was critical to breaking down the structure of the syndicates, isolating each one, and then picking them off one at a time. The United States had gone far with the RICO Act, which allowed the government to charge mass groups of criminals in one giant criminal conspiracy, but so far Russia hadn’t created any laws or legislation that gave law enforcement here such teeth as the Americans had.
It was always incredibly difficult to figure out which families were in control. Some families had a strict policy of silence, while others actually boasted of their power. Therefore, following the narrative of each city’s crime saga was problematical. Rideau found herself feeling a little proud of how far the Chelyabinsk Police had come.
“We’ve whittled it down to the basic two, yes, I think so,” said Tattar. He leaned forward, patted Detective Yudin on the shoulder and pointed for him to take another street. There were lights and roadwork up ahead, as well as two lanes closed for snow and ice. It was getting bad out there, and the traffic was building up. Yudin nodded wordlessly and took Tattar’s advice. “You have the Ankundinovs and the Zverevs,” he told Rideau. “We don’t know exactly who the officially recognized head-of-family is, but the highest-ranking lieutenant we’ve identified, and the titular boss, is a man named Vitaly Zverev. We are unable to locate this man at this time, he moves around a great deal, as is their custom, and we think he had his face altered much like Tsaritsyn did, but we believe he may be in Chelyabinsk now under an alias.”
“What about the Dolgorukovs?” she said. “Weren’t they a lead family?”
“The Dolgorukovs were a priority target of ours for a time, but many of their businesses have failed and they’ve married into either the Ankundinov family or the Ogorodnikovs. Most of their businesses went with the Ankundinovs.”
Rideau nodded. “The primary family in Derbent.”
“Correct, the ones that most suffered from the killings.”
The killings. Rideau knew he was referring to the sudden string of hits that had happened over the last few months. Several theories abounded concerning the motives behind the killings, including revenge for a hit that had happened in Volgograd a year ago, and a small girl that had been abducted from the Dolgorukov family who still hadn’t been returned. Spencer Pelletier’s name had even come up once or twice, since a couple of informants for the Derbent Police had sworn to seeing him, even describing the scar on the side of his face that he’d earned that night in Atlanta, but that was all conjecture at the moment. No one knew what grudge Pelletier might have against the Derbent families since all intelligence indicated he was somehow involved with them, both in Atlanta and in Derbent, and nobody in the crime families wanted to release the names of those that had worked for them, not even if they wanted revenge—Best to keep everything in the family, she supposed—so it was not yet confirmed that he had been in Derbent during that time.
Still, this highlighted many more convergences; it could not all be total coincidence. Rideau flipped through the files and was a little surprised that she did not see a file on Pelletier. What surprised her more, though, was another file that was missing. “I don’t see anything here on
Shcherbakov.”
Tattar sniffed, and looked at his phone as if to send a text, but only fiddled with it.
Rideau set the file on the seat between them. “Listen, I know Shcherbakov is an open wound with FSB and all Russian police agencies, and I know you’d all like to pretend that he doesn’t exist or at the very least that you have control over his movements. But let’s cut the crap. He exists. And he’s tied into this new string of abductions, as well as these new dealings with At-ta Biral.”
The lieutenant glanced at her sidelong, gave her an inscrutable look. “What does Interpol know about At-ta Biral in Chelyabinsk?”
“I thought Ambassador Metveyev would’ve explained.”
“He mentioned it, but he did not go into detail.”
Rideau assumed it was a lie, designed to get her to talk more about it so that Tattar could perhaps glean more than he was already told. The police here in Chelyabinsk were leagues better than years before, and she knew that there were quality detectives working these cases now, but they still had trust issues dating back to the Cold War. “I know that At-ta Biral’s leader, Shakib Rahman, has been looking to move here, and that he’s opened discussions with some of the families here to slowly sell off his businesses in Bangladesh to them, in exchange for safe haven and semi-retirement here.”
“You know that because we told you that.”
“Partially. But Bangladesh’s Special Branch also gave us a few banking transactions to follow.” That was stretching the truth a little, but only a little. The SB was as tight-lipped as Russian FSB, but could be persuaded if approached the right way. Rideau had often likened a career in Interpol as the life of a parent of a dozen children: distinguishing the innocent and sharing ones from the aggressive and stingy ones, oftentimes having to assuage two feuding siblings by giving neither one of them what they wanted, and satisfying one side only by making them believe that the other side hadn’t got as many balloons as they had, either. “I’d like to know what your people have accomplished in the last twenty-four hours with Shcherbakov and At-ta Biral.”
He shrugged again, a habit of his. “There has been a development, but we don’t know anything for certain right now, and I have been instructed not to fill you in unless we have verification on one or two other items.”
“Like I said, let’s cut the crap. Our information is as up-to-date as yours for the most part, and we know that you know about Shcherbakov’s sighting at Sadarghat Port, in Bangladesh. That was a deal arranged and carried out by the At-ta Biral, and Shcherbakov was there. But Shcherbakov only works for the Russian mob families, so we need to know what he was doing there. Is the Grey Wolf on loan to Rahman, for example? Or has he gone lone wolf? These are things we need to know.”
“Grey Wolf,” Tattar snorted. Like most in Russian agencies, he would loathe such titles given to the men who evaded him and his people regularly. “You say your information is as up-to-date as ours, yet you obviously don’t know—”
She cut him off. “What’s this development you mentioned? What ‘verification’ are you waiting for?”
“I have been instructed by my chief not to divulge that information at this time.”
“Would it happen to be that Vasilisa Rubashkin was found murdered in her apartment thirty minutes ago, strangled and with a tube up her anus and a few sewer rats eating their way out of her?” The lieutenant looked at her. She took out her phone, showed it to him. “My people are very quick about informing me about such developments. It was the first text message waiting on me when I touched down, and I was wondering if you’d withhold it or trust me with the information.” She raised an eyebrow. “It seems we still have barriers to break down, comrade.”
“Who told your people?” Tattar wanted to know at once.
“I couldn’t say, but I imagine it was someone inside Chelyabinsk Police more interested in cooperation and collaboration than you and your superiors.” Rideau put her phone away. “It’s good to know someone is interested in open communication.” The car slid a bit. Outside, the world was an angrily-shaken snow globe. “Now, if you please, Lieutenant, take me to the crime scene.”
“I was told—”
“You were told not to tell me anything. You were never told not to take me anywhere. I already happen to know where it is and if you won’t take me there, I can easily step out of this car and find a taxi that will. There’s no law against showing up to a crime scene, and my credentials should still get me inside since international law is not suspended just because your chief is feeling territorial. This is still a member nation of Interpol, and, unless you can get the Director or Deputy Director of FSB on the line, for the time being my authority supersedes all other police agencies in this city.” That was only technically true if Rubashkin’s murder could be proven to be part of a recognized priority one case involving an investigation between two or more agencies in two or more member nations of Interpol, but it was true enough.
As it turned out, it was a serviceable bluff, and Tattar leaned forward and murmured to Yudin, “Take the off-ramp here.” Yudin looked a question at him. Tattar nodded curtly, and Yudin turned around in a kind of you’re-taking-the-fall-for-this-and-not-me kind of way, and put on his blinker.
Rideau glanced out the window. Since they were crawling through slow-moving traffic, she could see a number of scrofulous homeless huddled around a barrel at the side of the road, flames leaping out of it as they tossed more wood on. As folks drove by, they reached their arms out their windows, handing them change. Rideau smiled. Her job at Interpol had forced her to look at a great many atrocities; she took any signs of humanity where she could find them.
The snow looked so lovely. It was deceptive, though. The snow and ice would also kill a few people before this night was over, maybe more than a few. Snow and ice did that. Such beauty, such unrelenting cold. Funny how some of the most gorgeous things in Nature could be so destructive.
While watching the city slide by, Rideau blinked in astonishment at something. A pair of dogs—they looked to be stark black and with slick bodies and thick fur. “Are those…?” She trailed off.
Tattar looked where she was looking. He sighed. “Wolves, da. Or mutts. Lots of homeless dogs all around here, almost as many as in Moscow.” Rideau had heard about the stray dog problems in Moscow—it had been a consistent menace every since the Olympics came through in 1980. Having forced many people out of their homes to build the new stadiums or else to make the tenements look more presentable on TV, thousands of dogs and cats had suddenly been left homeless. Those strays had multiplied, and had since become kind of a symbol for the troubles facing modern Russia: left out in the cold, making their own way against all odds. “It seems like the packs are spreading,” Tattar said, “and some are breeding with the wolves on the outskirts of the city, and then encroaching further and further into the city.”
She nodded, and looked back out the window.
Watching the snowflakes swirl and drop and rise, it took Rideau back a few years. Christmas in Saint-Malo. She had been there with a few colleagues at a meeting, holiday party, and an end-of-the-year review. It was there that she believed she had last seen Detective-Inspector Jacques Dubois. Tall and ruggedly handsome, recently married, often playing with the wedding band around his finger (as she was presently playing with hers, though she didn’t know it). They had bumped into one another at the salad bar, talked about kitchens—Dubois and his wife had just moved into a new house, and he had asked Rideau for his opinion on flooring for kitchens, wooden or tile, since he swore he had poor taste and couldn’t be trusted, and his wife was flip-flopping between the two. Then they had discussed soccer; she was a fan and he had once played all through school.
Later, there had been a short meeting of the various detective-inspectors, a few closed-door talks and lectures in small auditoriums rented out, where they discussed the headway they had made over the year, some of the bumps they had hit in the road, and the challenges ahead. Rideau had been ask
ed to speak on liaising between multiple agencies remotely, and how emerging technologies were helping to facilitate this. If memory served, Dubois had given a terrific speech on new cyber crime detection techniques the American FBI was working on, something already used effectively to help them trace a few members of the elusive hacker group Activ-8 after they crashed some server or other.
And then she remembered how Amsterdam police found him, in the back of an out-of-business butcher’s shop. Pieces in garbage bags. An operating table nearby, complete with IV drip, saline, blood packets to match Dubois’s own (A+), and used adrenaline shots. The working theory was that whoever got a hold of him had wanted him to remain alive, right until the very end. It was confirmed a week later when a DVD was sent to Lyon, to Interpol HQ, complete with a menu screen and chapter selection—chapters labeled “TOE REMOVAL” and “PLUCKING OUT THE EYES.” No one had ever seen anything like it, never in the history of law enforcement. The camera used to do the filming was a high-grade Sony PMW-EX3, with quality sound and image, priced nearly $10,000 US. There was a boom mike—a God damn boom mike, like they used in Hollywood movies and TV shows—to capture the screams even better. And, according to the tech guys, the smoothness of zooms and overhead shots indicated they had used a camera jib and steady-cam. Money, time, effort, and skill had been used in the torture and death of Detective-Inspector Jacques Dubois.
And Rideau had had to watch it. Again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Like any video left by a criminal, it had to be studied and analyzed by various experts, all looking for clues that might lead them to the monsters that did it. Anything from the video timestamp, to the color of the paint on the walls, to the clothing the masked doctors were wearing in the video, to the kind of clock hanging on the wall; all of it had been analyzed. Rideau had no choice but to watch. Dubois’s screams had been…