Avenue of Thieves

by Sean Black

  They moved the gurney up the steps. The front door opened. Between them Ty, Lock, the other bodyguards and the two cops managed to keep the reporters and a gathering crowd of onlookers at bay.

  At the front door Dimitri Semenov joined his wife. The frenzy of questions ramped up a notch. He and Elizabeth stepped to one side as the EMTs moved the gurney through the door, leaving themselves momentarily together at the top of the stone steps.

  Dimitri went to take his wife’s hand, a gesture of solidarity no doubt intended to redirect the story looming behind the machine-gun staccato of the questions that continued to pour in. Elizabeth shook him off as the driver cut the siren, and a final question came that seemed to catch everyone off guard.

  “Mr. Semenov, are you aware that Interpol just issued a Red Notice for your extradition back to Moscow?”

  27

  An Interpol Red Notice wasn’t exactly an international arrest warrant, but it was pretty damn close. Interpol, which was the shorthand name for the International Criminal Police Organization, was a kind of bureaucratic United Nations for law enforcement. It didn’t have any detectives or police officers of its own. Instead it acted as a kind of central clearing house where different countries could share information as well as seeking and receiving information from police forces in other countries.

  A Red Notice was a communiqué issued by Interpol, which asked law enforcement in every member state to look out for and detain whoever was the subject of the notice. In any given month as many as five to ten thousand Red Notices would be active. They were usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals, particularly terrorists.

  In recent years they had also been open to abuse, mostly by totalitarian regimes who used them to track down and harass dissidents and other opponents who had fled overseas. Interpol often turned them down, but occasionally one would slip through.

  Dimitri Semenov sat at the head of a long mahogany conference table in the office of his hedge fund, surrounded by attorneys, and stared down at the Red Notice with his name on it. One side of him sat Madeline Marshowsky, his personal assistant, on the other Ryan Lock.

  Dimitri took off a pair of reading glasses and looked down the table at his main criminal defense attorney, Richard Bauer, a man with long, slicked-back white hair and over-sized tortoiseshell glasses.

  “Should I be worried?” he asked Bauer.

  “Yeah, you should be worried,” said Bauer. “But not by this. There’s no way you’ll be detained on American soil for this piece of crap. I’m just amazed that Interpol are still letting Russia get away with this kind of horseshit.”

  One of Bauer’s younger associates chipped in: “They apply for maybe a hundred of these every year against people like you.”

  “People like me?” said Dimitri.

  “Dissidents, people they don’t like. Once in a while one slips through and gets issued as a Red Notice. Don’t worry, we’ll crush it.”

  “But for the time being, be careful with international travel,” said Bauer. “Uncle Sam isn’t going to act on it, but that doesn’t mean some other country won’t.”

  “That’s not a concern,” said Dimitri. “I don’t have any travel plans. But there is one thing.”

  “What’s that?” said Bauer.

  “The indictment back in Russia, I’d like to know who’s behind it.”

  Down the conference table, Bauer sighed. “That won’t be easy. I can make some calls, but I’d imagine whoever’s pulling the strings on this is pretty well concealed.”

  Dimitri drummed his fingers on the table. “Anyone have any other good news for me?”

  “It’s not good news, but it’s news,” said Lock.

  “Go ahead, Ryan.”

  “This Red Notice being issued could make replacing your security team more difficult. A lot of the big companies aren’t going to want to be seen to be working for someone with an active Red Notice against them, bullshit or not.”

  “Okay,” said Dimitri. “Then I’ll offer them more money.”

  “You’re paying top dollar as it is,” said Lock. “That might not do it. It’s reputational. A lot of these companies’ work comes from places like Russia and Saudi.”

  “The two countries who abuse the Red Notice system more than any others,” said Bauer.

  “Okay,” said Dimitri. “Then you and your partner stay with me until the stink lifts and I can hire someone else in. And I keep McLennan on as well. That should be enough, right?”

  “It’s not ideal in terms of numbers, but we can make do and mend.”

  “Anything else we should be doing on the security side, Mr. Lock?” asked Madeline.

  “Just what I’ve already raised. I’d like to background-check everyone again. Once we’re confident that everyone’s solid on the inside, that takes away a lot of concern.”

  “You think we have someone who’s working for them?” asked Dimitri.

  “Anything’s possible,” said Lock. “When you have a government involved, especially a government like Russia’s, the tools at its disposal can be a lot more sophisticated.”

  “I still don’t get why they’re going to all this trouble,” said Bauer.

  “You don’t get why someone would go to all this effort for billions of dollars?” said Dimitri.

  “Frankly, no. Wait, let me clarify that. I get why a criminal outfit would. Risk and reward, right? In this case the reward is huge. But there’s no way someone is just going to sign over that kind of money and bankrupt themselves because of all this, no matter how unpleasant it might be.”

  “Then,” said Dimitri, “you don’t understand the Russian mentality. I’ve already explained this to Ryan. This isn’t just about money, it’s about revenge. I’m the one who got away, with the money.”

  He slammed his hands down on the table. “Now, are we done?”

  There were nods and rumbles of agreement around the table.

  “Good. Now you can go justify the enormous retainers and salaries I pay you all.”

  28

  At first Ninel Tarasov had hated every second of it. The heat. How, within minutes, her clothing and hair were soaked with her own sweat. The ridiculous contortions she was expected to perform. The faux-mysticism spouted by the instructor.

  And, above all else, she hated the beautiful young gamine girls and entitled trophy wives who surrounded her in the class. These were women who had, for the most part, won the genetic lottery. They had been born to be slim and attractive but had somehow convinced themselves that it was the magical result of what the Americans euphemistically called “lifestyle choices”.

  They confused beauty with virtue, and appearance with morality, and Ninel hated them for their stupidity. There was only one person in the class, currently lying on a mat a few feet from her, that Ninel had any time for.

  After the first few months of attending the hot yoga class in the studio on the Upper West Side, Ninel had found one part of it that she had come to enjoy. The last section. The part where they would lie quietly, eyes shut, and focus on their breathing, on being in the present.

  She found these precious few minutes soothing. Not that she cleared her mind, far from it. Instead she used this time to think through where they were with Dimitri Semenov.

  The past few months had been frantic. She worried that they had overplayed their hand. The hacking of the vehicles, the killing of Ruta Sirka, and then the Red Notice. Had it been too much? Would it bring too much attention from the Americans?

  The Red Notice hadn’t even been her idea. That had been put into motion by someone back in Moscow, an overzealous member of the FSB who had thought he was helping. When Ninel had first learned of the application she had done her best to have it withdrawn.

  As a way of bringing extra pressure to bear on Semenov it had, she explained, two drawbacks. The first was that it was never likely to be acted upon by the Americans. Even if they had wanted to, and there were some in New York and Washington who would gladly have been
rid of Semenov, detaining him would look bad. The press would spin it as cooperating with the Russians, and that was something politicians didn’t want to be seen to do.

  The second reason she opposed it was that it showed their hand. It came too closely on the heels of the Ruta Sirka murder. Instead of maintaining the pressure on their target, it defused it. Suspicion was now on them rather than him.

  She had comforted herself with the understanding that it was unlikely to be granted, and then, out of the blue, it had been.

  Thankfully, it didn’t appear to have done much damage. Rather than having people rally around Dimitri Semenov it had served to isolate him further. It had served the beauty of the strategy. Sow confusion. Let chaos reign. Put in motion so many conflicting strands that you create an atmosphere so paranoid and poisonous that all people want is to be rid of this oligarch.

  If it looked haphazard and anarchic to the outside world then so much the better. That was the point.

  Now lying here in this rare moment of personal calm she reminded herself that, like a great symphony, the beats of silence were as important as the notes. They had thrown several rocks into the water and now was the time to watch the ripples. Those would dictate the next move.

  A bell chimed, and the yoga instructor signaled an end to the class. All around her people slowly got to their feet, rolling up their mats, sipping water, and heading for the showers.

  Ninel lay there, watching as Madeline Marshowsky walked past her, neither of them acknowledging the other. This was their routine. They attended the class three times a week. Some weeks they made only small-talk, two women from similar backgrounds who had forged what appeared to be a perfectly casual friendship.

  Other times, when Ninel initiated it, they stayed back a little longer. They waited until the other women were gone, and Ninel gathered what she needed.

  No paper trail. No electronic trail. No surreptitious meetings in public places that might be picked up by Semenov or American intelligence. Just good old-fashioned spy work. Locate your target. Study their routine. Insert yourself into their life. Befriend them. Gain some level of trust. Then wait for the moment to present itself.

  In this case it had come a year ago when, having attended the class at the same time for months, Ninel had noticed Madeline crying. She had asked her what was wrong. She already knew what it was, but that was hardly the point.

  Not satisfied with his wife, mistress and girlfriends, Dimitri had engaged in a short affair with Madeline, only to end it abruptly and badly. Ninel had come by this information by more conventional means, namely Madeline’s personal email account, which Alexei had hacked into. He had laughed at the simplicity of the task. It was, he’d told Ninel, like asking a PhD student in applied mathematics to recite their twelve times table.

  Madeline’s emails had been to a friend, detailing the affair, and how, although she was still deeply in love with Dimitri Semenov, and planned on keeping her job, he had shattered her heart. Like an addict, she still wanted to be around the very thing that had caused her so much pain.

  As soon as Ninel had asked her what was wrong, the floodgates had opened. Of course Ninel hadn’t shown her hand then. That would have been stupid. She had waited, listened, gauged, and then, when the moment had presented itself, she had made her approach.

  There were few intelligence assets that were more motivated than a woman scorned. Blackmail, bribery were superficial. But a woman who had been used and then discarded? That was pure gold. And Ninel had more reason than most to understand that.

  29

  The President Hotel

  Moscow

  March 1995

  With a young female companion either side of him, Dimitri Semenov sat in the bar of the President, a bottle of Taittinger champagne in an ice bucket next to him, the table laid with the finest Caspian caviar.

  As the two young models, recent arrivals in Moscow from the provinces, sipped champagne, Dimitri sorted through a file of paperwork. He dug out a small pocket calculator from one of two briefcases at his feet and set to work checking some totals at the bottom of a spreadsheet.

  Later he would take one of the two young women up to his suite, but for now he had work to do and a guest to wait for. She was running late.

  He returned his attention to his spreadsheets. Each detailed the shares he held in various agricultural, manufacturing and service companies. Recently he had started to discover discrepancies between the shares he’d purchased and his total holdings. Several of his employees thought they could shave a little here and a little there, and he wouldn’t notice. Or if he did, he would let it slide.

  They were very wrong.

  Thanks to Yeltsin’s new economic reforms, Dimitri had become a very rich man. It was only a few years ago, but the deals he had done back in the Avenue of Thieves days seemed like something from a past life. Now he didn’t just sell the cars from the production lines, he owned large chunks of the factory, and dozens like it all across the old Soviet Union.

  When the government had brought in the “vouchers for shares” scheme, which gave millions of people almost free vouchers they could use to buy a share in the places they worked, Dimitri had spotted the opportunity. He either bought the vouchers from people who were desperate for his rubles or paid them in vodka and cigarettes.

  It was, he explained to his mother and father on a trip home, like waking up one morning and finding discarded, but winning, lottery tickets littering the streets, like leaves after a late September storm. With no idea of what a share even was, but a keen appreciation of their empty bellies, his countrymen were happy to part with what they saw as worthless pieces of paper.

  Dimitri, and the other oligarchs, gratefully scooped them up. Of course he kept his car-trading business. That gave him the cash he needed. But he had expanded it. Rather than sell Russian models, he imported cars from the West, first second-hand and finally new Mercedes.

  With the money he made, he bought his shares in all these companies. He barely concerned himself with picking which company to invest in. He knew that even if half of them were terribly run, riddled with old Soviet inefficiencies, half would return his investment ten-, maybe twenty-fold.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder. He startled, turning to see Ninel standing behind him.

  “How―” he started to ask, then stopped. He had been glancing up at the bar’s entrance and hadn’t seen her come in until she was directly behind him.

  His bodyguard, a burly Cossack, began to lumber across from his seat at the bar. Dimitri waved him away and equally curtly told the two models to go find something to amuse themselves.

  Ninel took one of their seats next to him.

  “Do you enjoy sneaking up on people?” he said.

  “Old habits, Dimitri.” She nodded toward the Cossack. “You should replace him.”

  “Replace?”

  “Yes. Fire him and hire someone else.” She looked at the ice bucket. “Have you been drinking more than champagne?”

  He smiled. In a country where people went blind and sometimes died from drinking homemade vodka, champagne, wine and beer were regarded as soft drinks. It was common to see workers drinking beer on the Moscow subway on their way to work.

  Like so many of her old KGB counterparts, Ninel had a way of using terms like “replace” when what she really meant was “kill”. Their language was so opaque that it was often hard to tell what she was suggesting. Dimitri did not believe that was a mistake either.

  “I thought you meant replace him like you replaced the Bitch Killer.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. She had never so much as hinted that she’d had anything to do with his death a year ago, but he was positive she had either killed him or, more likely, had him killed.

  Six months before, he had been found riddled with bullets in the front seat of his Italian sports car. Ninel had mentioned to Dimitri that the old system was moving so quickly that he longer had any need for a roof. As Gorbachev and the
n Yeltsin had liberalized the economy, the need for secrecy and the fear of law enforcement had begun to evaporate.

  Over time, the vory―or, rather, certain of their functions―had become surplus to requirements. They had been squeezed out by the oligarchs on one side, and the old KGB on the other. They still had their fiefdoms, and they still had their uses, mainly revolving around the dirtiest of dirty work, but obeying the old criminal niceties now seemed as much of an anachronism as the bronze statues of Lenin that had been torn down all over the country.

  “I had nothing to do with that,” said Ninel, sharply. “Why did you want to see me?”

  “I’ve heard something from one of my contacts here in Moscow.”

  “What?” she said. “Spit it out.”

  “The loans for shares scheme that people are talking about,” he said. “Is it real?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, sinking back into the chair.

  “Oh, come on, you expect me to believe that someone like you hasn’t heard about it?”

  Since their original meeting back in Tagliotti, Dimitri hadn’t been the only one whose star had risen. The money she had received as her cut of his deals, she had carefully disbursed to her superiors and even some of those below her in rank, as well as numerous former Party functionaries. As a result, Ninel’s career had rocketed. Most cops and KGB officers kept their dirty money to themselves. But not Ninel.

  Already established as a capable intelligence officer, almost overnight she had become a strange mixture of Robin Hood and Santa Claus and, as a result, she was now based in the Lubyanka building, the old KGB headquarters near the Kremlin.

  Just as Dimitri had taken the money from the sales of the first ghost cars and reinvested it in vouchers that he could trade for shares, so Ninel had invested in buying influence far beyond her lowly rank. Every ruble she handed over gained interest over the months and years, interest she could reclaim in the form of favors.