Avenue of Thieves

by Sean Black

  “If you can talk her round then, by all means, go ahead.”

  “You know, when the crime scene people were doing their work the word is that those three men had Russian Mafia tattoos,” said Lock.

  “Why is that surprising? Those are the people they use for their dirty work.”

  It was time for Lock to be more direct. Dancing around the nature of the threat wasn’t getting them anywhere. This would go on until they could work out who was directing this campaign of terror.

  “Are you sure this is political and not something else?”

  “What do you mean exactly?”

  “Well, maybe it’s someone in organized crime looking to shake you down and not the Kremlin.”

  Dimitri smiled. “Are you familiar with the phrase ‘a distinction without a difference’?”

  “I can follow what it means, but that still doesn’t answer my question. I know the Russian state can do some crazy stuff. We all know that. Poisonings. Political assassinations. Openly interfering in other countries. Running assets at the very highest levels of politics and business. Sowing as much confusion as they can.”

  “And you don’t think they’re capable of this?” asked Dimitri. “That seems quite a puzzling conclusion you’ve come to.”

  “I dunno. It just seems over the top. Even by their standards. One of these incidents. The cars. Or killing that model. Maybe even pulling two stunts like that to up the pressure, but this seems to go way beyond.”

  Dimitri folded his hands onto his lap and gave a little shrug. “I agree. But how does that help us?”

  “You must still have contacts back home,” said Lock. “Is there any way you could reach out to them? See if you can’t find out who’s driving this?”

  “I’ve tried. But to talk to me, especially about this, would mark someone as a traitor. The only reason I’m a free man right now is because I’m here, in a country that respects the rule of law. If I were back home I’d either be dead, or in prison.”

  45

  Lock was waiting for Ty as he returned from his interview with the NYPD. Together they walked through into the kitchen where the housekeeper was speaking with Madeline. From what Lock was hearing, Elizabeth Semenov was still dead set on moving the family out to their house in the Hamptons.

  Lock would do his best to talk her out of it, but he wasn’t optimistic. His sense was that they’d move out there, for a time anyway. They would have to deal with the security implications and make do as best they could.

  “How’d that go?” Lock asked his partner, filling a glass with water from a cooler in one corner of the vast kitchen. He handed it to Ty and filled another for himself.

  “Truth be told, I kind of enjoyed it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” said Ty. “I mean, how many times can a black man shoot a white man in this country and not have to lie about it to the cops?”

  Lock paused mid-sip, almost spluttering water down his shirt. “I hope you didn’t say that to them.”

  “What you think I am? A fool? No, I gave them the play-by-play as it went down. They seemed kind of excited about the hardware we had, but that was about it. I definitely got an NHI vibe off them when they were talking about us smoking Larry, Curly and Moe.”

  NHI was shorthand for No Humans Involved, a term often used by law enforcement when people with no respect for human decency lost their lives, either during the commission of a crime or after that. Lock wasn’t a fan of the term, but he wasn’t a hypocrite either. Faced with the same situation, he would have taken exactly the same actions as he had done in the early hours of that morning.

  “Yeah. I don’t see the DA being overly keen to do too much. If they hadn’t had the kid, and it had just been three assholes looking for a score when they got shot, then maybe, but not the way they went out,” said Lock.

  “Frontier justice, baby,” said Ty, raising his glass.

  46

  Dimitri couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he saw a personal horror reel from the last few weeks: the men drowning in shallow water as they tried to claw their way out of a steel tomb; Ruta’s broken body lying on the sidewalk like a doll; the haunted look in his daughter’s eyes when they had put her back to bed after the home invasion.

  It was all too much. The truth was that, if he could, he would happily sign over his vast fortune if he could erase the past few months and weeks. No amount of money was worth this kind of torment.

  Elizabeth had taken several sleeping tablets. As she slept next to him, huddled, knees to chest, in a fetal position, he had got up, thrown on a robe and slippers and slipped out into the hallway.

  He waved up at the tiny lens of the security camera, making it clear that it was him, and not an intruder, and quietly made his way downstairs to his office.

  Work had always been his sanctuary. That hadn’t changed.

  It had brought his life turbulence, but it was where he had found peace. As he switched on his computer the USB drive that Lock had given him caught his eye. He slid it into the USB port, and clicked open the main folder.

  Rows of sub folders opened on the screen in front of him. They were broken down by employee and each employee folder into various categories. The main categories with deep dives were financial, friends, family and lifestyle.

  Financial involved looking for unexpected money that could suggest bribery, or lack of money or debt that might suggest someone would be susceptible to a bribe. Friends and family was aimed at seeking out dubious connections. In lifestyle, investigators generally tried to see if someone was involved in anything that might open them up to blackmail. That fell into two categories, something illegal or something immoral or embarrassing.

  Curiosity getting the better of him, he clicked on Madeline’s folder, and opened up her financial information. There was a pang of guilt he felt at spying on her private financial affairs. He opened a few of her bank statements and scanned quickly through them. He could see why the investigators had drawn the conclusion they had. She was well but not extravagantly paid. Through his company he paid her a salary of just under quarter of a million dollars before tax, and her outgoings were fairly basic.

  He stopped halfway down one of the statements and looked at a charge for Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie store. Something stirred in him as he studied the date. Long after they had concluded their brief affair. He wondered whom she had bought the lingerie for, if anyone. Maybe it hadn’t been lingerie, simply underwear.

  Feeling guilt he closed that folder and moved to another. This one seemed to contain pictures taken of Madeline going about her life outside work. At the grocery store. Jogging in a park near her apartment. Eating lunch alone. That one got to him a little. She had never married that he knew of. She didn’t have children. He closed the images of her eating by herself.

  He clicked on the next set of images. They were taken as she visited a yoga class. She had mentioned it to him a few times. She had even encouraged him to try it. He had found the idea laughable, a man like him sweating among a bunch of women. He couldn’t imagine any self-respecting Russian male pursuing such an activity.

  As he went to close the picture folder, something in one of the thumbnail images caught his eye. Absentmindedly he opened it.

  He looked at it casually. Then he looked again, and froze, his stomach turning over, and his heart racing faster than it had done back on the bridge as he’d watched the vehicles careen out of control.

  With his right hand trembling, he moved the computer mouse to the image, and enlarged it so that it filled his computer screen.

  No. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible.

  He looked at the woman sitting across from Madeline. She was older, a little heavier, but her features were unmistakable. Her eyes were the giveaway. Her eyes and the look they held.

  Dimitri swallowed hard. He felt suddenly lightheaded, as if he might just pass out at his desk.

  Maybe it was some kind of a mirage, induced by
the immense amount of stress he had been under.

  That must be it, he told himself. It was the middle of the night. He was exhausted. His mind had reacted by conjuring the image of a nightmare.

  He would close his eyes. He would count down from ten, and then when he opened them he would see someone else sitting across from his personal assistant.

  He did it. At the count of three he could take it no more. He had to see. He had to be sure.

  Opening his eyes, she was still there. A woman he had been sure must be dead by now.

  How was this even possible? She wasn’t only alive, she was here and, by the look of it, her presence in New York was only one tiny part of the puzzle.

  Everything that had happened to him over the past months, all the horror, all the chaos, all the death and destruction, suddenly came into very sharp relief, and settled in front of him. Who would not only want to create this kind of chaos, but be capable of conjuring it?

  He had his answer, and it made him sick in his bones.

  47

  Moscow

  September 2000

  Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, had famously said, “There are decades in which nothing happens, and there are weeks in which decades happen.”

  All through the summer those words had rolled around Ninel’s head as she tried desperately to convince Dimitri Semenov to take what was happening seriously.

  The problem was that even as things shifted they looked the same. Unless, like Ninel, you knew what you were looking for―or, rather, looking at. She had spent enough time in what was now the FSB to recognize the warning signs.

  Dimitri’s destiny was now her destiny, and the things that she had admired in him back in Tagliotti―his love of risk, his lack of fear, his ability to take bold action and seize opportunities―now threatened everything. His fortune, his freedom, and their lives.

  Wealth had made him reckless, although wealth seemed an inadequate word for the riches he had amassed. In the blink of an eye Dimitri Semenov had gone from a glorified tsekhoviki (black marketeer) to minigarch to full-blown oligarch, and one of the richest men in Russia. He owned substantial holdings in Russia’s vast natural energy resources as well as a booming import business.

  He had also achieved his long-term ambition of owning not one but two banks. He used them to fund his acquisitions, providing his other companies, and by extension himself, with very generous terms. The money he had taken from his businesses ran through a bewildering maze of international companies and trusts that went all the way from Moscow to London and into shell companies in places like the Cayman Islands and Jersey.

  In some ways, Ninel believed, Dimitri’s fortune, and how it had been acquired, was not the root of their current problems. The Russian attitude to money, and to life in general, was that it could be here today and gone tomorrow, so it was best to enjoy it, which Dimitri most certainly had.

  He’d begun by buying, mostly through his tax-shielded trusts, a string of properties. A mansion in Moscow, and a dacha outside the city were followed by trips abroad to buy a house overlooking Hyde Park in London, a condo in Trump Tower in Manhattan, plus apartments in Paris, Vienna, and Zürich, where much of his personal money rested in one of the famed Swiss bank accounts.

  Along with the houses and apartments had come, unsurprisingly for a man who had begun by selling cars, a string of high-end vehicles. Everything from Italian sports cars to German sedans and a specially imported armored American Humvee that was used to ferry him around Moscow. The last vehicle was bought partly for show and partly for its utility. The vory still circled men like Dimitri, although now the true threat came from Russia’s thrusting new leader, Vladimir Putin.

  Installed, or at least bolstered by, men like Semenov, the oligarchs had thought Putin would be someone they could control, a man to secure and protect their gains. They had been very, very wrong. Putin had taken power, looked at the nation’s accounts and discovered a state in financial free-fall. Someone had to help pay the bills, and who better than the men who had made vast fortunes plundering the country’s assets?

  Not that Dimitri or the others saw it that way. They hadn’t taken the risks they had only to hand it all back to the Kremlin. They were starting to enjoy their new-found riches and the lifestyle it gave them. Dimitri had just purchased a super-yacht, naming the 150-foot craft after his mother, The Lady Yelena. He was planning to spend the winter on his new acquisition, sailing around the Caribbean, soaking up the sun with a number of his “girlfriends,” whose ages stayed remarkably constant even as Dimitri grew older.

  The signs of trouble from Putin had been rumbling in the background for a while. Then had come the infamous meeting in late June where he had summoned the oligarchs to a meeting and laid down the law, telling them to stay out of politics and start paying their fair share, or else.

  The reactions inside and outside had varied. For most of the oligarchs the reaction had been one of shock, and no small amount of fear. One or two, the richest ones, had challenged him. They had put him there so they could remove him: that had seemed to be their attitude.

  Dimitri had reacted like it was business as usual. He shrugged it off, like it was nothing, as if Putin wasn’t being serious. He even told Ninel that it was all an act for the cameras, a piece of theater designed to quell the rumbles of discontent in the country. “Men like me are easy targets,” he told her. “Of course people hate us. We have everything while they have nothing. If I was poor I’d hate me too. But where were they when I was facing down the Bitch Killer? I’ll tell you where. They were cowering in the shadows, pissing in their pants, too afraid to stand up for themselves.”

  Ninel had smiled at his little outburst. “The difference between you and him, Dimitri, was that you were a far cleverer thief than he would ever be. If you hadn’t been, I never would have saved you.”

  He’d laughed. A year or two before he might have flown into a rage at what she’d said. But not now. Now he found it amusing. It was another sign to Ninel that they were in dangerous territory, that her partner thought he was somehow untouchable.

  “You? Save me?” He smirked.

  “I didn’t?”

  “You certainly warned me, and I appreciated it. But save me? Isn’t that a little dramatic, Ninel? You think I wouldn’t have been able to deal with that little street thing myself? And, in any case, you have been paid back a hundredfold.”

  It was a recurring theme in their rare conversations, these days. He resented the fact that Ninel still took her chunk of the profits from many of his deals. He saw it as paying in perpetuity for a one-time piece of work and Ninel saw it as ongoing, which it was, no matter how hard Dimitri denied it.

  “And I’m warning you again,” she said. “Only this time it’s not some small-time thief coming after you but the president.”

  Dimitri threw up his hands. “He’s all bluster. He’s playing to the crowd. He can’t be seen to be too friendly to people like me, even though we’re the ones who put him where he is.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, Dimitri.”

  “Oh?” he said. “And why is that?”

  “There’s an active investigation into you, that’s why.”

  “Tell me something new. There’s always investigations. If there weren’t investigations, how would all these petty bureaucrats justify their jobs?”

  “This one is serious,” said Ninel. “They want your banks. Both of them.”

  “What do you mean, they want them? I own them. They’re private businesses. They can want all they like, but they are my property.”

  Property. The word that had plagued Russia. What was private? What was public? Who was allowed it? Who wasn’t? Was there even such a thing or was it a concept dreamed up by capitalists?

  Ninel had always believed that, when you boiled it down, property had cost more people their lives in the Motherland than anything else. It was not something to take lightly. “Things are changing, Dimitri. You need t
o start taking this seriously.”

  He sat forward. “So what would you like me to do?”

  It was a question to which Ninel had given a lot of thought. She knew he wouldn’t like the answer. That was too bad.

  “I think you should get out. Gather what you can, sell what you can, leave and don’t come back.”

  She was deadly serious, but Dimitri thought this was even funnier. He started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He laughed so hard he started to cough uncontrollably. “But this is my country,” he said.

  “You asked me what you should do, and I’ve told you. If you stay they’ll take it anyway and throw you in prison. When you come out, you’ll have been stripped clean. If you come out.”

  “For what? What would they throw me in prison for?” he asked her.

  “Now who’s being naive?” she said.

  He was starting to get annoyed. Ninel was happy to see it. If he was angry, perhaps he might begin to treat this with the seriousness it deserved.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You really need me to tell you?”

  “Yes, yes, I do.”

  “You think that every deal you’ve done has been legal and above board? That bribes haven’t been paid, wheels greased, people pushed out of the way even?”

  “Of course not,” Dimitri scoffed. “You can’t do business here without bribes. Any fool knows that.”

  “And everyone knowing it won’t save you,” she said.

  A week passed. Then another. She didn’t hear any more from Dimitri. She tried to contact him through the usual channels they had established, but he was dodging her. She knew he was in Moscow, which made it even more galling.

  Meanwhile the rumors she was hearing about the coming storm only intensified. The prosecutor general, no doubt under Putin’s instructions, had become one of the busiest men in Moscow. Slowly but surely the beast of the state was waking. Some of Russia’s richest men were being arrested. Others were fleeing the country. And some, like Dimitri, were carrying on as if nothing had changed.