The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [53]
‘I’ve never been to Istanbul,’ Stevie said wistfully. ‘They say the most romantic sight in the world is the Bosphorous by moonlight.’
‘By moonlight, from the water, when the city is covered in snow.
It would break your heart.’
Stevie sighed. ‘Are you going then, tonight, with raki bottles and daggers, to raid the other boats?’
Henning harrumphed in amusement. ‘Perhaps another night. It’s not something I would want to do alone. Perhaps if you were here with me, the adventure would hold more charm.’
His words stirred in Stevie something tiny, a butterfly wing of undefined emotion. Was it sorrow?
Stevie sat at the table by the window in her bathrobe and pearls. There was nothing to see outside. A freezing fog was hovering over the boulevards, cloaking everything in a dove-grey tinged with dirty yellow. Out in the nothingness, it was –40 degrees. She had been chewing away at the Moscow situation report for Hazard since the night before.
The headlines of the morning papers carried news of the murder of the programming head of the largest state-run news agency, Itar-–Tass— stabbed multiple times in his flat while his driver waited outside for three hours before anyone was called.
Regular situation reports kept Hazard at peak readiness to meet whatever challenges their clients’ operating environments presented.
Stevie had started from the ground up. Lawlessness was the problems on the Moscow street—skinhead gangs attacking foreign students of Asian, African or Indian descent was big. Fifteen thugs had attacked an African-American student only the other day, screaming, ‘Blacks out of Russia.’ The boy was bashed in broad daylight, in the centre of town, with hundreds of bystanders. No one stopped them. The Russian security services were so unable (or unwilling) to deal with incidents like this that they were becoming diplomatic incidents. It was a symptom of the greater rot.
These gangs had initially stepped in to provide protection in the vacuum left when the judicial and police institutions of Russia had crumbled. Skinheads had allegedly been called to a town three time zones away to punish a man who had raped a girl. The gang flayed the man alive with razor blades.
Tiger kidnappings were also on the rise: bank managers, truck drivers moving precious cargos, jewellers—anyone who had access to valuables—were snatched and ‘persuaded’ to hand over the goods. Kidnap for ransom was a real risk for anyone who was prominent, and executed by professionals and opportunists alike. Companies doing business in Russia faced the conundrum of bribes—to pay or not to pay—and the risk of violence. Organised crime favoured assassinations as a negotiating tool in their ‘business’.
By 1995, after the fall of the Soviet Union, murder figures had tripled. Organised crime gangs became the most stable, most powerful organisations in Russia. As the country privatised, these groups had the cash to snap up properties. This gave them great economic and political clout.
Forty per cent of KGB members left the organisation and many joined criminal groups, or offered personal protection to oligarchs. They took with them their sophisticated training, specialist knowledge, and powerful weaponry and connections. Organised crime gangs were transformed. By this time, crushing them would have destabilised the fragile nation.
As the country slowly stabilised under the iron grip of the government of the new millennium, the crackdown on the criminal gangs had begun.
The ex-USSR had plenty of other security issues. Military-grade radioactive material had become a hot commodity. The moment the Soviet Union had collapsed, criminal gangs of all persuasions had descended like hungry maggots on the abandoned nuclear facilities and research labs dotted around the vast territory and stripped them bare. The high levels of secrecy that had surrounded these projects meant that no one quite knew what was taken.
The Americans spent millions trying to help the