Private Moscow

Chapter 39

When Dinara left her apartment building, she found Leonid using the EMF detector to sweep his car for bugs. A steady flow of morning traffic rolled though the gray snow and swerved round Leonid’s Lada, which had two wheels propped on the pavement.

“Anything?” Dinara asked as she approached.

Leonid shook his head. “And no eyes on us either,” he said, glancing round the frozen square in front of Dinara’s building.

“At least none you can see,” Dinara remarked playfully as she climbed in the passenger seat.

Leonid put the EMF detector in the boot and got behind the wheel.

“Any word on what brings Jack Morgan to Moscow?” he asked as he started the engine.

“No,” Dinara said.

Maybe this was it. The final visit to thank her for her efforts and shut down the office.

“Don’t look so nervous,” Leonid said, pulling into traffic. “If it was bad news, he would have emailed.”

Dinara smiled as the Lada headed north toward the Garden Ring. A few minutes later, they were crawling along the wide beltway with hundreds of other slow-moving vehicles.

“I checked with an old friend,” Leonid said. “Grom Boxing is paying for police protection.”

“How high up does it go?” Dinara asked.

“My friend doesn’t know.”

“Then it’s high.”

“You’re as smart as you are beautiful,” Leonid quipped.

“And you’re as condescending as you are arrogant,” Dinara replied. “Why would a boxing gym need high-level police protection?”

“We could be finding out, if we weren’t busy taxiing the big American,” Leonid muttered.

“Otherwise known as our boss.”

“If you want to get technical,” Leonid scoffed.

They drove north toward Sheremetyevo International Airport, and passed the time discussing what little they knew about Yana Petrova. Dinara had spent much of the night going through the blogger’s computer, trawling Yana’s extensive background research for each of her published articles for anything that might point them toward a suspect.

“She was unremarkable in school,” Leonid said. He’d dug into Yana’s background. “Her reports say she showed no aptitude for anything, and she took a mundane job with Moesk after graduating with a degree in economics from St. Petersburg Polytechnic. Nothing about her says enemy of the state.”

“Which is why she went undetected for so long,” Dinara observed.

They continued discussing Yana and speculating about her fight-fixing investigation. After forty minutes, they reached the MKAD, the outer beltway, and joined it heading west. The rush-hour traffic had eased up, but the highway was one of the main routes to the airport, and was always busy. The winter storm had only made things worse.

They turned off at junction 79, and drove along a narrow furrow that had been plowed between two cliffs of frozen snow to join the slip road.

Out of nowhere, a truck appeared alongside them, tearing through the snow, spraying it everywhere.

“Hold on,” Leonid said, the instant before the truck side-swiped them.

The Lada spun into the drift to their right and careened wildly out of control before coming to a sudden halt when it crashed into the metal safety barrier. The airbags popped and Dinara’s training kicked in.

Move, she thought, keep moving.

Everything was white, and her head was pounding, but she reached for the handle and pushed the door open. Her senses returned and she saw a gang of men in ski masks emerge from the back of the truck that had hit them. The men ran toward her, and one held a gun, but it wasn’t pointed at Dinara. She turned to see Leonid emerge from the battered driver’s side of the Lada, and realized he was the target. His head was bloody and he took two faltering steps before the masked gunman shot him three times in the chest.

Leonid fell back into the thick snowdrift and Dinara’s world spun as she registered the full horror of what was happening.

Gloved hands grabbed her and she tried to fight them off. As she struggled against the three men who were dragging her away, she caught the cuff of one of their gloves and saw a tattoo she recognized. It was a snake wrapped around a dagger, and she had last seen it on the wrist of one of the fighters who’d been sparring in the ring at Grom Boxing.

“Help! Help me!” Dinara shouted to the onlookers, who’d started to emerge from the line of cars backed up behind the crash.

The gunman brandished his pistol. “Stay back,” he yelled, and no one argued with him.

How had I not noticed the truck? Dinara asked herself as the strong men dragged her toward the waiting vehicle. The gunman jogged behind her, and she stared into his eyes, swearing they would witness her revenge.