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.
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.’
‘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.’