Snow Storm (23 page)

“
All I need
to do is get my name out there, you know, make some connections and
I’ll be in. I’ll be playing on a whole other field. The same with
Europol. Europe is just such a bigger thing to get my teeth into.
There are so many opportunities there. I just need a starting
point.”

“
Didn’t
Hitler have a similar idea?”

“
Very
droll.”

“
So you need
to stand out.”

“
Exactly. If
I can put away a suitably big name, such as our boy Andreyevich,
well that’s an impressive scalp. People take notice of a catch like
that. Then…” he said, taking a seat on the other side of the desk
and leaning back in Burke’s chair. “Then I’ll be a shoe in. And
don’t think I won’t remember my friends.” He nodded at Burke, who
felt as though someone had poured a bucket of ice water down his
back. He sincerely hoped Edwards would not remember him.

“
The problem
we have right now is the bugger isn’t saying very much is
he.”

“
No indeed,”
Burke agreed. “The Bratva don’t.”

“
How so?”
Edwards asked, not knowing quite what he was being told.

“
The Bratva
or the brotherhood…”

“
I know what
it is roughly. I’ve even played the video game.”

Did people
still play video games? Burke wondered if Edwards also liked to
hang out at the local discotheque, while trying to chat up the
local dolly birds or crumpet or some other seventies-ism for women.
“Well, you’ll know who they are,” he replied.

“
Of course.
Russian Mafia. I’ve only been looking into their activities for the
past year.”

“
Well, yes.
In this case Lithuanian of course but on the right
track.”

“
So he’s not
talking because he swore some kind of oath to his Mafia chums and
they might come and do him in on that basis. Seems fairly obvious.
There are a good many of these shady business types who claim some
kind of tenuous connection on the basis it gives them some kind of
associated kudos. It’s no secret Andreyevich is in deeper than that
and connected to something big. Honour among thieves is a myth
though in my somewhat vast experience. Clearly there’s a war going
on out there; first Vlad, then the body down in Leith and now
Karpov all of which points in Andreyevich’s direction, given that
that he’s connected to and probably owns Karpov’s holding company
and Vlad was definitely linked to Karpov, who, let’s face it, was a
total fucking enigma, there is a connection there. He just may turn
out to be the kingpin and I want to take him down. It’s a
fortuitous wind that blew him in our direction. I doubt he’s
actually connected to the murders directly and frankly that’s not
my issue, but if we can use what he’s in for and the murders as
leverage, maybe offer him some kind of protection, we can certainly
have a go at twisting his arm. If he knows, or at least thinks he
knows he’s going down, and let’s face it, he has no way of knowing
we don’t do wild-west justice over here, he might lift the lid on
the whole shooting match. All we have to do is make him feel at
home and think that the same standards apply here. Do you know how
much coke there is on the streets right now?”

Burke shook his
head.

“
Well I do
and let me tell you it’s not a trifling matter and not just
something that’s gonna blow over at any moment. And do you know
where it’s all coming from?”

Again Burke shook his
head.

“
Well neither
does anyone else and that’s the point. While it’s good for business
so to speak in the sense that it keeps all of us in a job, it’s one
that seems more and more like treading water in a bog on a daily
basis. I want out. I want to catch the big fish and Andreyevich has
the look of the prize Marlin about him. We have to convince him to
talk while we have him here.”

“
That might
be your problem.”

“
How
so?”

“
I don’t
think he’ll ever talk.”

“
Why the
defeatist attitude? There’s always a way. We just need to push the
right buttons. As I say, fear must be the best motivation we have;
fear of the unknown. If we can convince him we can protect him from
the bigger players back home we’re in. And the lawyer didn’t look
much cop. He’s never even been in this situation before. Just keep
plugging away Jim. That’s all we have to do.”

“
He’s not
keeping schtum because he’s scared.”

“
Then why
else? An oath? I don’t buy it.” He scoffed and then inhaled deeply
before letting out the sigh of a man frustrated by a lack of
cooperation.

“
It doesn’t
matter whether you buy into it or not. What matters is what he buys
into.”

“
Ok,” Edwards
sighed, “I’ll humour you. Go on.”

“
We’ve, or
rather you’ve established that Andreyevich and Karpov are involved
in some way.”

“
Undoubtedly.
I’m certain Andreyevich owns the majority of the venture capitalist
firm who own Karpov’s portfolio of companies. It’s a murky trail I
grant you but we have had some forensic accountants look into it
and the paper trail so far as I can tell, or more importantly as
far as they can tell, looks to lead back to Lithuania and
Andreyevich.”

“
And what do
you know about Andreyevich’s background?”

“
Businessman.” Edwards coughed conveying his thoughts on this.
“Known to have been involved in some fairly ropey property deals
back in the mother country, where local officials who got in the
way then got vanished, that kind of thing. Further back, known to
have been someone who could get his hands on things. Had a
reputation as a top class thief. Records are not quite what they
might be. He goes off grid for some time in his late teens and
early twenties, thought to have been doing time. Hazard of the job
in the tea leaf trade. On the surface there’s nothing to link him
to anything, but there are always stories, intelligence from the
ground that hasn’t been officially documented. Things he’s ordered
done to people’s families. One official tried to block a
development in Vilnius, our boy’s home town. His whole family went
missing for a month. When they did begin to show up, it was in
instalments and I mean small instalments, in the mail. As a warning
to others I’d say that was fairly effective, especially when no
ransom note was ever attached and no demands were ever
communicated.”

“
Ok, so we
know he spent time in prison.”

“
We’re pretty
much certain of that.”

“
Well, going
on Karpov it looks likely, and again I know what you mean about the
murky records situation, believe me, I find it hard to trace very
much on him without probably sending someone out there, and frankly
we don’t have the funds. The surgeon’s coming back in here this
afternoon with a solicitor of his choosing. Let’s hope he’s not
doing any nervous boob jobs or face lifts and that no one gets
stabbed in the eye with a wayward Botox needle in the mean-time.
You could just about peel the Karpov’s skin off and stick it to the
wall to get the edited highlights of his life story in
hieroglyphics.”

“
Really?”
Edwards asked. “Into Egyptology was he?”

“
A more local
form of artwork. Russian or at least eastern bloc prison tattoos,
all of which tell a story.”

“
The fact he
has them surely tells a story all of its own.”

“
It does, but
more specifically, each of the symbols has a different meaning.”
Burke switched on his laptop and waited as it powered up and tried
to connect to the internet via a dongle that had to wage a war with
the pub’s thick stone walls.

“
And what’s
to stop the wannabe just inking himself with whatever symbol they
feel the need to display, assuming they wanted to get a step
further up the hierarchy without doing the leg work? It’d be a
quick way to do it.”

“
It’s
strictly enforced by the prison gangs. They’ve been known to cut
out the piece of flesh containing the tattoo or even beat people to
death for less.”

He waited some more.
Finally when the net was accessible again and he was able to read
his emails he saw the one from Doc Brown with around fifty attached
Jpegs, each showing a different chapter in Karpov’s extensively
inked back story, reading to the trained eye like an odyssey of
crime.

As Edwards
flicked through the grim reel of photographs Burke gave a running
commentary as best he could. “If we start with the neck, we can see
that there is a dagger here with various drops of blood which are,
well, dripping as they do. The knife indicates that Oleg was an
assassin available for hire. That’s apparently one of the older
ones, so possibly one of the ways he got his start in the business
if you like. The drops of blood indicate that he has managed to off
thirteen people at that stage. Perhaps he thought it was lucky to
stop there.”

“
I suppose on
the upside they were thirteen criminals.”

“
Our local
friendly pathologist suggests that this one is over thirty years
old, meaning Karpov was probably only in his late teens when he got
it done. Moving on, the cat on his chest tells us that he was a
thief and clearly proud of it, possibly why he was inside in the
first place. The church with the multiple onion domes, rather than
being a souvenir from St Basil’s Square actually symbolises time
spent in the clink. The number of spires, in this case ten,
indicates the number of years spent inside. Interestingly here
there’s a rose on the left calf. If it was a white one it would
symbolise the superiority of death over a loss of virtue, but the
red one, with thorns indicates coming of age in the big house. The
orthodox cross on his chest shows that he was eventually a high
ranking criminal as does the epaulette on his shoulder and the star
underneath. He has similar stars here.” Burke moved the slide show
on to show two eight pointed stars geometrically stylised as
asymmetrical images on each knee. “These tell the world that he
will kneel before no one.”

“
Top dog
then,” Edwards said, shuffling through some more slides and coming
to an abrupt halt at Karpov’s groin which, due to the surrounding
artwork, with eyes, gave that part of his body the look of an
elephant. “Cheeky one there.”

“
Also the
thing that led us to the surgeon,” Burke added. “There’s a tattoo
for everything in the joint.” He flicked through to one last image.
In gothic script, over the heart, the letters V O R were inscribed.
“Recognise those?” he asked a clearly confused Edwards.

“
Should
I?”

“
Not
especially. Does the phrase Vori V Zakone hold any meaning for
you?”

Edwards’ blank expression
gave away the depths of his knowledge on this. Should have studied
harder, thought Burke.

“
Thieves in
law. A fairly serious bunch.”

“
Well if
they’re anything like my in-laws they probably do.”

“
Vory V
Zakone or the Vori as they tend to be known, are a society all of
their own. They originally sprung up out of the destitution in the
wake of the communist revolution; prisoners who vowed to fight
authority and orthodoxy of any kind. These guys are no mere Russian
mafia, they’re a religious order almost. They’ve been around a
hundred years or so and they’ve scaled the ranks of society in that
part of the world during that time.”

“
I hate a
social climber,” Edwards chimed in.

“
Well, these
guys controlled the prisons in what was the Soviet Union, probably
not the yacht club cocktail parties you were thinking of. With the
collapse of communism they’ve managed to infiltrate other facets of
life. Yeltsin had one of them as his minister for human rights
until they discovered he’d helped a good few souls shuffle their
way off this mortal coil in a previous incarnation. Some of them
are pretty peaceful on the outside world now and of course, some of
them or at least one of them, until very recently, was running a
holding company here in our own capital city.”

“
So you don’t
think he’ll be easily broken then?”

“
Not so
much.”

Jones phoned
the barracks of 42 Commando in Plymouth before lunch and received a
swift return call in the way on the military knew how. In the time
it took her to check her texts (totally dissatisfying), check her
emails (too many) and scoff a cheese sandwich she had an officer on
the line.

Captain
Saville was well spoken; clipped in the way the military liked
their officers to be she supposed. She wondered if that was
something they trained into them directly, if it was merely a
by-product of their environment or actually something they selected
for at interview stage. She also wondered if he had a moustache,
but then reminded herself that as this wasn’t 1956 that was fairly
unlikely. He could have been a hipster she thought, but they all
worked in marketing and lived in whatever part of whatever city was
about to become up and coming, not a military base just outside
Plymouth.

“
So, you
wanted to know about Leon Williams?” he asked.

“
I do
indeed,” she replied. “Obviously we got his name from University
Hospitals Birmingham in relation to some reconstructive surgery he
had done.”