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  A Wild Justice

  Craig Thomas

  In the Russian Federation, Novyy Urengoy, Siberia, an American gas company executive is found dead, the apparent victim of a casual robbery or the local mafia. Whatever the truth, Alexei Vorontsyev, chief of detectives, is unlikely to solve the crime, confronted as he is by a town awash with immigrant labour, cheap heroin, organized crime and the uncaring multinationals.

  In Washington, the chief executive of the gas company and his wife are murdered in their opulent mansion during an interrupted robbery. John Lock, State Department expert on Russia and former CIA agent, vows revenge on the killers of his beloved sister, Beth, and his brother-in-law Billy Grainger.

  There is no possible connection between the two crimes; they are merely two eruptions of modern lawlessness — or are they? Vorontsyev is inexorably forced to explore a connection between the executive's murder and heroin smuggling. Lock, in his search for the wild justice of revenge, finds himself pursued and challenged at every turn as he moves closer to the heart of darkness and the motives for his sister's death. Both men seek justice, the price of which, for each of them, becomes almost impossible to pay.

  Craig Thomas's new novel confronts the plague of the modern Russian mafia an its international expansion in an enthralling story of the struggle for justice in an increasingly dangerous and lawless world. Employing all his customary skills of characterisation, narrative and evocation of place he dramatizes a more serious menace to the security of the West than was ever posed by the Soviet Union and its armies — the threat of organized crime in Russia.

  Craig Thomas

  A Wild Justice

  For Terry and Angela with love and thanks for 25 years of friendship

  The first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is, that it is an age of transition … when almost every nation on the continent of Europe has achieved, or is in the course of rapidly achieving, a change in its form of government …

  Mankind will not be led by their old maxims, nor by their old guides.

  J. S. Mill: The Spirit of she Age

  PRELUDE

  ‘It must occur to every person, on reflection, that those lands are too distant to be within the government of any of the present states.’

  Thomas Paine: Public Good

  ‘Nice overcoat — I wonder why his killer left it behind?’ Alcxei Vorontsyev muttered, his cheek turned into the hood of his parka against the chilling slap of the wind.

  Behind Vorontsyev, Bakunin, the GRU colonel who had also received an anonymous telephone call summoning him to the scene of a murder, stamped clumsily back and forth on the rutted snow. Smoke from his cigarette whipped past Vorontsyev.

  ‘I like the suit he’s still wearing,’ he continued, calling out to Bakunin over his shoulder. The GRU officer appeared profoundly indifferent, as ff all he desired was to return to whichever warm room he had come from. ‘By rights, this corpse ought to be stripped naked.’

  He tugged the body away from its bed of stiff grass, his hand behind it as if he were about to commence some ventriloquial act with the corpse. The body had been reported as having been accidentally discovered. There was nothing in the pockets, he’d already checked. Cleaned out by whoever had found it, or the killer.

  He turned on his haunches and glowered at Bakunin — who paused in his patrol to attend to him, lighting another cigarette as he did so.

  ‘American tailor — Washington.’ He let the head of the corpse loll. ‘One wound — ‘ His words were repeated into a small Japanese recorder by his inspector, Dmitri Gorov. ‘- straight into the base of the skull and thrust upwards, from behind.’ The pathologist would, in all probability, be able to tell them little more, just the approximate time of death. There were two explosions of a camera’s flashgun. ‘Do you have to do that at this time of the morning?’ he growled, letting the corpse fall back much as the murderer must have done, hours before. ‘What’s this?’

  It looked very much like a professional killing. They’d had a few of them recently, one gang of drug-dealers or black marketeers sorting out another gang; a territorial or profit-based dispute — newly imported capitalist crimes. Here, one stranger had approached another, unsuspecting, stranger for no more than a moment, ending a life. The wind numbed him through the parka. Nothing in the pockets, except … He held it up.

  ‘Recognize that, Colonel?’ he asked, then added with sour humour: ‘Yours the same colour?’

  Bakunin snatched away the slip of stiff plastic. The labels had been left in the suit, and perhaps the card had, too, as a statement.

  If it belonged to the dead man.

  ‘Is this him?’ the military intelligence officer snapped, his voice husky with a lifetime’s cigarettes.

  ‘If it is, then he must be from one of the American companies — oil or gas, or one of their suppliers.’ Vorontsyev looked at the rimed soles and uppers of the dead man’s shoes. Small, fringed leather tags, once-soft leather. Expensive, and hardly broken in.

  No thief had found this body, or he or she would have been away with everything here, including the underwear. So, the killer must have been the one who called the station — and who had called Bakunin, too. The murder was some kind of statement that required publicity.

  Bakunin handed back the single, unwalleted credit card with gloved fingers. It had appeared to be trapped in a back trouser pocket, as if overlooked. Allan Rawls, it claimed. An Amex Gold Card. A lot of Russians carried them these days — waved them like badges. Especially in front of babushkas and the other endlessly queuing poor. Gold Cards had all the power and credence the red KGB cards had once had.

  The body had a youngish face, early thirties — maybe as much as ten years younger than himself. Snuffed out.

  Vorontsyev climbed to his feet and stamped them to rid them of the icy cold, grunting at the numb ache in his legs. Bakunin, arms folded, confronted him like an implacable machine, or an assertion that nothing had changed. Military intelligence was as it had always been, dim and certain and eternal; all’s right with the world, Lenin’s still in his heaven. Behind Bakunin, Dmitri Gorov hovered, his round features pale with cold. Uniformed men waited as awkwardly as if it was the funeral, not merely the discovery of the body. Their cars and the morgue wagon were parked like abandoned toys.

  There were rutted wheel tracks everywhere, leading from the road that ran past this shrivelled little copse of stunted firs. He rubbed pine-mould from his gloves. The red dawn was coming up behind the group of men and vehicles like a wound. Frost sparkled in the headlights of the parked cars, the frozen snow blued and reddened alternately by their slowly flashing lights.

  Late autumn, Novyy Urengoy, Siberia.

  The first of the MiL helicopters droned along the flat horizon of the snowbound marshes, making itself a black spot on the sun’s curled lip as it ferried the first of the day shift out to one of the gas rigs that were skeletally all around them in the day’s earliest light. Rigs topped with needles of flame and thin, desperate smoke signals lay across the landscape like preliminary sketches for sites of human habitation. Vorontsyev shivered.

  ‘Well, Major?’ Bakunin asked peremptorily. Vorontsyev wondered why whoever had murdered Rawls had wanted the GRU here. Security wasn’t involved, this was no more than a crime; his jurisdiction as chief of detectives.

  ‘Ask a doctor if you want a diagnosis.’

  ‘I’m asking you. Why are we both here to inspect a corpse?

  He’s been murdered by one of your economic criminals … hasn’t he?’

  ‘It’s likely, Colonel.’ But possibly not the case.

  Bakunin was just another military intelligence officer whose superiority over him resided entirely in their distance from Moscow.

  His
own authority as chief of detectives for the gasfield town of Novyy Urengoy was civilian and insignificant. Not that the military ran things — that was done by the entrepreneurs and the gangsters and the foreign investors — there were merely more of them. In reality, people like Bakunin no longer even irritated him. He was just one of many of the hundreds he vaguely disliked and without whom he attempted to get by; creatures called other people.

  There were lights from the town and, scattered and pitiful, from its surrounding villages and dachas, lodges and peasant smallholdings. Novyy Urengoy was on the southern edge of the tundra, where the forest petered out into marsh before the northern barrenness and the Kara Sea. His responsibility except that the police were the district’s three fabled monkeys who had no ears, eyes or voice for any serious wrongdoing.

  More like traffic wardens. The local bigwigs and his own chief saw to the effective castration of the force. No one should interfere with the holy mission of getting gas and oil out from beneath the permafrost.

  ‘It’s saying to us that it’s professional,’ he murmured, as if to Dmitri rather than Bakunin. Gorov was nodding in agreement.

  ‘It’s screaming the fact out loud.’

  ‘Yes?’ Bakunin snapped, as if the temperature was still the only matter to which he could give his attention.

  ‘But then there’s a credit card so clean it must have been kept in a wallet or billfold — which tells us exactly who he is. It’s there as if it’s been overlooked.’

  ‘But why was / telephoned?’ Bakunin asked angrily.

  It might have been drink, more than lack of sleep, that rendered Bakunin’s chilly, broad features as coarse and brutal as they appeared; it was neither. The man was brutal, the reddened eyes like those of some malevolent boar glaring at a hostile world.

  ‘I don’t know. Colonel,’ Vorontsyev replied. ‘Someone evidently requested your presence. You’d be involved eventually though, wouldn’t you, with the murder of an American? Perhaps our mysterious caller was just saving time.’

  Another big helicopter transporting workers out to the wellheads and rigs passed low over them. He waited until the rotor noise began to fade, watching the ugly, tenement-like blocks of apartments and offices that were Novyy Urengoy, as if puzzled by his location. The streetlighting was fading as the day lightened. The near-tundra of the frozen marshland stretched shadowy and empty to the horizon in every direction. The town was sitting in the landscape like a spilt box of building-blocks, isolated and bleak, ringed by the watchtowers of the gas rigs.

  ‘Someone wanted both of us to know about this death. I don’t know why. Does the name mean anything to you. Colonel? You move in more exalted circles than myself, after all.’ Dmitri’s mouth cracked like a cold sore for an instant, behind Bakunin’s shoulder.

  ‘Not immediately. I’ll have it checked.’

  ‘Are you assuming control of the investigation?’

  Bakunin shook his brutal head. ‘You’re the detective. It’s just a murder — for the moment. The motive was probably robbery ‘

  ‘He didn’t walk all the way from town in those shoes. If he was brought, then he knew his murderer … at least, knew who he was coming to meet or who drove him here.’ Bakunin nodded like a pedagogue, lighting another cigarette, cupping his hands around a gold lighter.

  ‘How long has he been dead?’

  ‘Who knows? I doubt the pathologist could be accurate. I’d say three hours, roughly.’

  ‘My call came two hours ago — yours, too?’ Vorontsyev nodded. ‘Whoever wanted us to find him was keen we should get on with it. He wouldn’t wait, just in case someone found the body and …’ He paused, then added softly:

  ‘In case someone walked off with the clothes and the Amex card.’ He glanced again at the makeshift town hunched in aggressive defence on the frozen land. Lights on in the tower blocks, unlit streetlights straggling out towards larger homes and to scattered copses sheltering new hotels. Rawls would have been booked into one of them, probably the best, the Gogol. Hyatt part-owned it, had part-paid for its construction. It had the biggest lobby and the best whores. The Japanese, the Germans, the Americans, all had bought into Novyy Urengoy … flats, hotels, company offices. The town had trebled in size in four years. There were dozens of companies involved in leasing, owning, exploring and exploiting the gasfield, some with Russian partners, some not.

  Rawls had belonged to one of them.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he announced.

  ‘What?’ Bakunin returned.

  ‘People like him are normally sacrosanct. Remember — no, you wouldn’t, it was a small matter. An oil company executive got mugged in the summer, outside his hotel. The culprit was knee-capped by one of the local mafiosi, just to enforce the holiness of golden geese like Rawls. So why has he been murdered?

  It’s usually the gangsters and racketeers and the drug dealers who execute each other.’

  ‘You’re suggesting he was a gangster? All the best ones were American, weren’t they?’ Even the smile was sadistic, leering with command.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Addressing the corpse, he added: ‘Who are you, Mr Rawls? Why are we supposed to take special notice of you, dead as you are?’

  Bakunin stamped his feet, as if bringing a royal audience to an end. He turned away, waving one gloved hand and calling:

  ‘I leave it up to you, Vorontsyev. You’re the policeman.’

  Dmitri Gorov grinned as Bakunin all but lost his footing on the rutted snow as he walked towards his limousine. The driver flung away a cigarette and snapped open the rear passenger door.

  Vorontsyev turned back to the body as Bakunin’s ZiL lurched out of the slight depression where it had been parked and onto th^ main highway. A car tooted its intrusion into the fast lane, but the horn was muted, as if the military insignia had suddenly been recognized.

  Rawls’ hands, even with the nails blued, were soft and manicured.

  The man, when alive, would have reeked of power and money. The wind rattled the leafless birches and swayed the firs of the copse. Novyy Urengoy seemed more alien than a minute before, and the landscape that tolerated it more vast than ever.

  Someone had ordered this corpse, and demanded it be made to look like a professional hit. Was it intelligence work? He glanced towards the highway but Bakunin’s car was already out of sight. Gangsterism, or something else …?

  We were meant to notice — but who is being warned?

  PART ONE

  THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

  ‘Their market is not confined to the countries in the neighbourhood of the mine, but extends to the whole world.’

  Adam Smiih: The Wealth of Nations

  ONE

  Family Portrait

  He had walked through the last sunshine of the brief afternoon, the leaves brown and crackling beneath his shoes. John Lock’s cheeks were chilly, then almost at once stingingly warm as he entered the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, shrugging himself out of his overcoat. It had been an invigorating walk from the State Department, pleasant even as the early autumn dark closed on Washington and the streetlights glared out. Aircraft, navigation lights winking, had thundered overhead, but he had been able to hear and see then impassively. He wouldn’t be travelling again for a good while. The city had begun to fit itself comfortably around him, just as his office had already done; as the whole of the State Department had agreeably done.

  The barman recognized Lock with the slightest lifting of heavy eyebrows and his favourite drink was silently remembered and served. The olive fell into the martini like a small bird’s egg into clear oil. He toasted himself, then glanced at his watch, smiling.

  Just time for two drinks, then back to the apartment to change.

  He felt a reluctance that he wouldn’t have time to play even one of the batch of new CDs he had bought during the lunch break. The latest Marriage of Figaro, a new Handel recording, something special in the way of a Beethoven cycle — all very promising. He grinned. It was, after
all, Beth’s birthday. Anyway, he no longer had to snatch at hours with the hi-fi or novels or the book he was trying to write. And wouldn’t a while yet. State had given him a tour of duty at his desk in the East Europe Office. Definitely a minimum of travel involved.

  Even his answerphone messages, each evening, possessed an unexpected, comforting charm. Fred with tickets for a basketball game; the prim, severe lady who was secretary for the early music group in which he occasionally sang baritone — he was supposed to be editing a performing version of an obscure seventeenth-century opera for them; his dry cleaning ready for collection, which was a statement of intent rather than just a message. He was staying home, staying put. He grinned, shrugging his shoulders as if into an old and comfortable jacket.

  The mobile phone bleated in the pocket of his topcoat as it lay across his knees, ruffling his mood like a brief wind. The barman passed him, ice like Latin percussion in his cocktail shaker. He unfolded the phone’s mouthpiece.

  ‘John Lock.’

  ‘John-Boy!’ It was Billy, his brother-in-law.

  ‘Hi, Billy. I haven’t forgotten the party, if that’s what’

  ‘Your sister wouldn’t let you, John-Boy.’

  ‘I remember her birthday, anyway.’

  ‘Sure. Say, is that the second or third martini?’

  Lock smiled. ‘So you guessed. But it’s the first.’

  ‘OK. Look, Beth — me, too — we want you to come out to the house as soon as you can — there’s nothing wrong, by the way.

  We just want to see something of you before the guests arrive.

  So, drink up fast and get over here. Beth’s orders.’

  ‘Right. Thanks, Billy.’ He slipped the cellular phone into his topcoat. At once, a hand fell on his shoulder, its grip almost immediately doubtful, as if the hand’s owner wondered whether he would be recognized.