Snow Storm (8 page)

He abandoned
ship again just in time for whatever was left in his stomach to
come up. He stood, leaning over the fence for a few minutes, just
listening to the rattle of the diesel engine trying to quiet the
jumbled up thoughts going through his head. Something that should
be so simple was now nigh on impossible. He gave up after the
second attempt, after realising he would never make it out of the
junction. He couldn't move his head to check for oncoming
traffic.

He phoned
Davie who jumped straight into the car and headed down to get him.
He’d abandoned the tractor, hightailed it and ever since he'd been
drinking tea in an effort to feel something like normal.

He felt
ashamed if he was honest. He'd been taken by surprise, yes, but the
Polish guy would have had the better of him anyway. The feeling of
helplessness was not a feeling he thought he would ever be able to
shake. He shivered thinking about it.

"I say we all
head down and sort them," Davie announced.

"You would," his brother
Colin snapped.

"Aye, I would," Davie
replied. "You've got to put your foot down. Cannae let people walk
all over you bro.”

"I never do. Sounds like
it was a bit of an accident. Saying that, it's a bit full on
though."

"You're not kidding, is
not like they even phoned an ambulance or anything. His head could
be vegetable soup for all they knew and they just him left to choke
on his own puke or something.”

"Aye, but what are you
really gonna do?"

"I don't know, bunch of
boys, pickup truck, baseball bats, job done."

"Yeee haw! We're not in
the deep south now Jim Bob."

Andy laughed and then
regretted it, wondering if he was about to see those cups of tea
again. "Technically, we are if you think about it." He
groaned.

The other two laughed and
Colin poured more tea, spooning more sugar in, to the point where
the spoon was liable to stand up on its own.

"What do you want us to
do?" Davie finally asked. "Surely you don't want to let them get
away with it?"

"I think all I want is my
bed. Besides, isn’t looking for trouble what got me into this
position in the first place?"

"They started it." Davie
said, was a petulant look on his face. "But I'll finish
it."

"I think you just wanted
to say that," Colin chimed in, slowly turning the screw in the back
of his brother's head. Why did brothers seem to enjoy winding each
other up so much? Andy didn't have brothers, though at times he
thought it could be handy. They wound each other up these two, but
they always had each other's back.

"In any case." Davie
said, his face hardening suddenly, "Something's got to be
done."

It was a face Andy had
seen pull only once before, and that had ended in tears.

The offices
of the SCDEA were hardly in the most salubrious of locations.
Opposite a branch of a car rental firm, they looked like an
up-to-date version of Gayfield Square; a testament to the
architect’s lack of imagination or the lack of available options
maybe.

They
announced their arrival at the front desk and waited. The waiting
must have been Edwards making a point. It went on for about ten
minutes while Burke checked his phone messages and Facebook
updates, eyed some managerial looking portraits of senior officers
in the lobby and finally settled on looking at a pamphlet for Crime
Stoppers.

It was DC
Wilson who finally arrived, looking gregarious as ever. She
escorted them to the lift where they made way up to the second
floor. The office had a constant hum about it, the noise of
activity, several brains processing information; analysts and
coppers engaged in a constant struggle to stay one step ahead, or
probably more accurately no more than a step behind the criminal
fraternity.

They made their way
towards a glassed off room at the back of the office, eyed by a
stressed looking figure in an office to the side Burke presumed was
Edwards. The man spoke into his phone in an animated fashion,
gesticulating redundantly with his right hand.

Wilson took
coffee orders and went in search of some biscuits as they sat one
end of a long conference table. A plasma screen complete with
camera hung from the wall at one end of the room for conferencing.
On the opposite wall a drop down screen was positioned to take
projections from above their heads.

They could see Edwards as
he made his way across the floor towards the conference room. He
was tall, around 6’2, fair hair and looked as though he kept fit,
probably mid 40s Burke thought. In stark contrast to himself,
Edwards was what you might realistically expect a Detective
Inspector to look like.

"I have to apologise for
my lateness, duty calls and all that," he began, shaking Burke's
hand with a grip which was surprisingly limp.

"Not at all,"
Burke lied, "we're grateful for your time," he lied again. “Nice
offices.”

"Well, it keeps the rain
off our heads," Edwards replied, "But I'm sure you didn't come here
to appreciate the interior architecture."

"No, quite right," Burke
confirmed. "Thought it'd be a good idea to call in person, seeing
as I was through here anyway." Lie number three.

"Good, well
I'm glad you could fit us in," Edwards grunted, through gritted
whitened gnashers.

"Likewise."

"Obviously, this has
caused a bit of a stir."

"Really?"

Edwards raised his
eyebrows in a way that clearly said sarcy bastard.
"Really."

Burke lowered
his in a way that clearly communicated mock empathy, with just the
right amount of
ha ha fuck you
thrown in for good measure. "Well I'm sure we all
want to inconvenience each other as little as possible. So what
have you got for us?"

"I'd like to say not a
lot. It would mean we hadn't wasted hundreds of man-hours on this
only for it to go straight down the swanny."

Burke noted the way he
used the expression. There was a hint of the wrong vowel in the way
he tailed off with the Y; suggested Edwards was not a man
predisposed to using such expressions, would rarely do so socially
and probably only did here in a misguided attempt to buy himself
some kind of social currency. Not Paisley boy then, or at least not
educated here.

"I'd appreciate it if
you’d take care of this. I can't afford any more expensive
losses."

"Of course." Burke
replied.

"Good."
Edwards said, in the manner of a teacher who has just reprimanded a
slightly disruptive pupil. "So, Vlad the Inhaler, AKA Vladimir
Petrovsky." He passed them a single paper copy of Vlad’s rap sheet.
If it was possible, he looked even more unhealthy with the body
attached, going on the evidence of his mug shots. Edwards fired up
the projector and hooked in his laptop as Burke and DC Jones leafed
through the deceased’s rap sheet and MO. Burke had accessed this
already. That was the easy bit, a matter of public or at least
police record and so readily available on the database. Edwards ran
through the rap sheet as he flicked through the file the projector.
Vlad’s bloodhound face looked down at them from the stat covered
screen, like the world's most unlikely sportsman.

"He's been on
our radar for the past ten years, which is when he appeared in the
country. Lithuanian national, did some serious time back home after
running a crew of thieving scumbags and trying to pull off a daring
armed robbery. Who'd have thought there was anything worth robbing
in the former Eastern Bloc? Turns out someone was storing diamonds
in Vilnius. More fool them. Seems our boy got wind of it. Anyway,
he went away for five years, got involved with a bad crowd, or
maybe just a worse crowd. Know anything about Russian prison gangs
Burke?" He asked this in a way that suggested it was a
challenge.

"Not especially. Thought
you said he was Lithuanian?"

"Okay, former
Soviet Union prison gangs then. He’s ethnic Russian, hence the
name. You get the picture. He got involved with those boys before
coming out with more fingers just itching to get into more pies
than most men would be capable of. You name it, our boy was into
it. As I say, he appeared on these sunny shores some ten years
back, by way of London. It looks like some of the brotherhood were
already fully installed there, but ever the opportunist, Vlad
stepped on more than a few toes. They dispatched him to the great
undiscovered northern frontier. He settled in like the parasite he
is, flitting between the two cities until he got a proper foothold
in the capital. He started up with some light people trafficking
taking advantage of your fair city’s lenient attitude to saunas
slash massage parlours to cash in on his..." He coughed and
pantomime fashion, "imports, before throwing in some extras for his
clientele, mainly coke. Then about five years ago he got all
technological and discovered the merits of internet fraud. This is
the latest information we have on his activities." Edwards opened
an Excel spreadsheet. There were different tabs for each of Vlad’s
income streams and the names of various contacts, phone numbers and
addresses.

"Of course,
he got the name due to his love of the hard stuff. He obviously got
bored of snorting coke and took up smoking crack. And that's when
things really went nuts. Around a year ago he seems to have cleaned
up his act. Edwards pulled out a dongle like object and plugged it
into the side of his laptop. He opened the visualisation program
and dumped all the data from the spreadsheet into it. As it
updated, they were presented with a selection of graphics,
structures that looked like snowflakes forming. Names linked to
names, linked to addresses, linked to crimes. Vlad's life in one
continuous all-encompassing graphic; this was what they had come
for.

Victor
checked into the Balmoral, where, as previously planned, Sacha and
Boris were waiting for his arrival. It was good to see his sons,
though he was wary of showing this too much. Odd that being the
product of a useless bastard father, he should then be so
standoffish with them, packing them off to the west for an
expensive education on the quiet. The wife had been upset of
course, but what did she know of the lives of men. The distance
would toughen them up, give them skills that would be useful when
the time came. She would wrap them in cotton wool, safe from the
outside world but this was not realistic. This was not how the
business worked.

Things changed however.
Business evolved and moved on. They were learning how to network;
indeed it could be said were ready networking with their future
peers, ready to move things to the next level when their chance
arrived.

Sacha had run towards him
when he entered the suite, throwing his arms round him. Victor had
patted the boy on the head. He wore his heart on his sleeve, the
younger of his two sons. Boris was more composed, accepted his
father’s hand with a manly grip and a confident expression. The
west agreed with both. They had filled out with good food but kept
trim on the rugby pitch.

“
So what’s
new boys?” he asked, unable to find a suitable opener. That was
always a source of some awkwardness. They were, when all was said
and done, from different backgrounds, different worlds. At Boris’s
age he had been in the gulag, working on some networking of his
own. He was not well fed and did not look like a rugby player, or
for that matter know what the game was. The way things had been
back then, he would probably have eaten a rugby player.

“
I’ve started
doing Italian and I made it into the first team at fullback.” Sacha
began, as his father nodded his approval while watching Boris in
his peripheral vision as he shrugged his shoulders and went back to
doing something with that tablet they were all so interested in
these days.

“…
and if you
mix hydrogen and oxygen in the correct amount you can make it
explode with the mother of all bangs.” Sacha was saying now. It
wasn’t that Victor had no interest in what his son was saying, more
just that he was content to listen to the boy’s voice. It gave him
the sensation all was well, with this part of his world at least.
They were out of harm’s way. At least for now.

The rage was there again
at this thought. He knew this could be channelled, could be the
very thing that ensured the status quo remained, but that his
thoughts must be marshalled in such a way that they did not
overtake him.

They ordered
dinner and the boys watched the new Bond film on pay per view while
he attempted to clear his mind of all obstructions. Soon this would
all be resolved. And then, all being well it would all be his. All
of it.
Just keep one eye on the
prize
he told himself.

He looked again at the
boys. They had no idea what they were to inherit.

********************

Sam Jones
hadn’t really known what to expect through in Glasgow, at the hub
of all things drug related. If she was honest, she hadn’t expected
the home of the SCDEA to be quite such a hole in the ground. Maybe
she’d expected too much, watched too many cop shows set in the good
ole U S of A but a slightly more up market location and a building
with a bit more presence wasn’t much to ask, was it? A carbuncle
opposite a car hire depot on an industrial estate was hardly a
shining beacon of law enforcement worthy of a forward thinking
country was it?