The Ismailovo had made a deal. It was a black deal of coexistence and mutual profit between a Mafia mob and the country’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB.
And all that had taken place with the imprimatur of the man who had mattered most in the previous nine years since 2000, Vladimir Putin, himself former head of the FSB, then president, now an eminence grise waiting in the wings for what everyone believed would be a third, fourth, and who knew, indefinite presidential term.
And of the many deals the KGB and the Ismailovo mob struck in this unholy alliance of organised crime and state intelligence agency, the most common was an exchange of personnel, on a job-by-job basis. KGB officers would guarantee the guarding of shipments of drugs from the south, and in return, the Ismailovo would provide the KGB, when asked, with an assassin for the KGB’s own business, in order to keep the intelligence service’s own hands notionally clean. And so the square of mob violence fitted the circle of the Russian state’s needs.
Such a man was Grigory Byko, an Ismailovo mobster who had purchased a law degree, a killer first for the gang and finally for the state. Bykov, Adrian had told Logan, was Finn’s murderer.
On the train northward, Logan surveyed his options. Moscow was the only possibility. Bykov never left Moscow if he could help it. His membership of parliament might protect him and ring-fence his deeds throughout Russia, but he was still, essentially, a small-time city crook at heart. The trip to Paris to end Finn’s life had been the only time he’d ever ventured abroad.
Logan had learned from his Cyprus contact that nowadays Bykov owned a chauffeur business with armoured cars and bodyguards that dovetailed exorbitant rides for the rich with favours for his friends in the mob and in the Kremlin. He also owned a stake in a gold mine out east, somewhere in the Yakutsk region, Logan’s source had thought. But it was a stake bought with the threat of violence or death, not money.
And, most presciently, Bykov owned a nightclub in the Patriarshiye Ponds, a plush area in downtown Moscow, to which the rich and famous flocked for its fashion and its beautiful whores. The club was called the Venus Apollo.
That was where he would have his best chance, Logan decided, if he had any chance at all. It was either that, or meet his own death—and his absolution lay in either outcome.
In Toronto he withdrew $100,000 in cash from an operational account. Then, on the flight to London and again on the three-hour trip to Kiev, he slept. He needed rest after the night before and before the task that lay ahead.
There was no visa requirement to enter Ukraine, and no fingerprint analysis in either stopover. Logan exulted in his plan. And God bless the Europeans.
He took a short internal flight from Kiev to the small Ukrainian town of Sumy up in the northeast of the country, bordering Russia. It was empty land, with fewer people and police than the border areas farther south, in the Donetsk.
In a cheap clothes shop in a backstreet of Sumy, he bought a set of workman’s overalls, boots, and a cap, as well as a fur hat and a thick coat. From Sumy he took a bus in the direction of L’gov on the Russian side, but disembarked a few miles from the border. When night had fallen, around five in the afternoon, he began to walk. With every step he took towards the enemy, he was both a freer and a more marked man.
As he crossed the dark, flat, snow-covered fields, he never thought for a moment whether he would ever retrace these steps. The deed was enough; the deed was the reward. But if he made it back again, then he knew he would be a very lucky man indeed.
Where he walked was bare farmland, bird-watcher’s country—and smuggler’s country too. The FSB’s Russian border checkpoints were strung at longer intervals on this stretch of less important borderland, but the border police, now firmly under the control of the KGB once again, could strike anywhere. What they were looking for was obvious smuggling, however, on a scale that required vehicles. Illegal trade across these borders consisted, in theory, of anything from pork fat to nuclear material. But it was always closer to the former, just petty stuff. The incentives of bribes for the guards along this stretch were not so great.
It was a long and lonely border, and it didn’t suffer from the nervousness of Russia’s borders with the Islamic republics. The villagers on the Ukrainian side were in many cases Russians like the border guards themselves. In Soviet times, Russia’s historic desire for control of Ukraine had resulted in the movement of Russian people west, into Ukrainian lands. Out here, on the eastern borders of Ukraine, it was as much Russian as Ukrainian.
And so the guards were more than content to stay in the warmth of their guardhouses on a freezing winter’s night. They didn’t need much excuse to remain at their fixed posts, rather than roaming the fields on the bleak chance of arresting some poor Ukrainian villagers engaged in petty smuggling who didn’t have any worthwhile bribe money.
Alone, at night, in an icy January fog that descended over the steppe, Logan guessed he stood a good enough chance. He wasn’t sure how far on the Russian side the border zone extended; that was his main concern. It varied from stretch to stretch. He might have to walk a few hundred yards or five miles or more once he was through, in order to be clear.
Under the thick fog he never knew the exact moment when he’d crossed the border into Russia. The fields within his impaired vision were flat and ghostly white. There was no visible moon, no features on the landscape.
Once, he thought he saw a light or lights in the distance, but he didn’t know if his eyes were playing tricks. But in case it was a checkpoint, he skirted away over the rough, frozen, snow-covered fields.
Whatever there was out there he couldn’t see; he knew there was nothing much apart from small, quiet villages, the inhabitants of which had long since retired for the night.
Later he thought he heard the sound of a car, and where the fog had drifted, he made out a copse of skeletal trees to the north of his route. He had no idea of time, or even, in the dark grey fog, of space. In his recklessness he felt immortal.
By the time the sky showed the faintest sign of change from night to day, the fog had begun to thin and he saw the dawn attempt to make an appearance through heavy cloud. By then he knew he was through. And as the dawn came up, a light snow began to fall, which thickened and blanked out the skyline, as well as the footsteps he’d left behind him.
He trudged along the edge of a field behind a high hedge and slowly began to make out the features of the landscape ahead where he could glimpse it through now thicker flakes of tumbling snow. There were a few trees, but it was mainly snow-covered tilled earth, and the new snow was already beginning to cover the frozen crystals of earlier falls.
In the distance, he saw a village, and he felt a soaring belief that nothing could touch him.
As he approached the edge of the village, he saw a farmer spreading seed for some chickens under a low, hay-filled barn. He was still too close to the border, Logan thought. He didn’t trust his accent not to sound foreign.
Skirting the farm, he came up into the village by a small church, its plaster walls crumbling beneath a snow-capped bell tower. There was nobody about. He looked at his watch. It was just after eight in the morning.
He walked on for three hours, until he’d passed two more villages, and at the fourth, slightly larger than the others, he entered by a small road that came into a square. He crossed the square, walked two hundred yards to the route out towards the east, and waited for a car.
Within half an hour he’d picked up a lift and negotiated a price to Voronezh. The driver was about his age and wasn’t going to Voronezh, but for two hundred roubles he’d take him.