June 8, 1994, 2:00 a.m.,
Logovaz Club
“WELL, THIS IS NEW.”
Alexander Litvinenko ran his fingers through his hair, as he watched Igor Davny, a junior agent under his command, trying to pry what appeared to be a piece of a leather seat cushion from the base of a partially melted, steel trash can. The leather had fused to the steel, making the task nearly impossible, but Davny wasn’t going to give up so easily. The young man cursed as his gloved hands slipped off the material, then he bent at the waist for another go.
“Now they’re blowing each other up,” Davny continued, with a grunt of effort, as he worked on the leather. “Less efficient than a bullet, but I guess it makes a statement.”
Litvinenko grimaced, refusing to see the humor in the situation. It was the middle of the night, and he had much better things to do than pick through a still-smoldering crime scene. As a newly promoted officer on the central staff of the FSB, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, specializing in counterterrorism and organized crime, he had thought he was beyond this sort of menial task. When he had gotten the emergency call, he had just crawled into bed with his new girlfriend—Marina, a ballroom dancer, twice as beautiful as he deserved—after a long dinner at a friend’s house.
He took great care as he stepped over a piece of wood from the nearby destroyed fruit stand. They were still a good ten yards from the center of the blast radius, but even here, the air was thick with the scent of ash, burning pavement, and melted rubber.
He shifted his gaze toward the spot next to the mangled Mercedes limousine at the direct center of the crime scene, where the most senior investigators were crawling through a pile of rubble and shrapnel—the remains of the parked Opel, or ground zero, as the inevitable report would declare. Litvinenko was already certain what the investigators would find; he’d surveyed the blast area when he’d first arrived on the scene. A fairly sophisticated explosive device, hidden in a parked car. The bomb had been detonated by remote, and despite what the younger agent might have thought, this wasn’t a unique crime scene at all. Litvinenko was well aware, from his latest officer’s briefing, that over the past few days, there had been at least two other bombings in Moscow—one of them right in front of the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. Both had been “business related”—and considering the most likely target of this evening’s attack, this incident was of a similar nature.
If anything, this explosion was the mildest of the three. There had been surprisingly few casualties, considering the size of the bomb, and the brazen location and timing of the detonation—the middle of the afternoon, just a few doors down from the Logovaz Club.
“He’s one lucky bastard,” Davny said, finally giving up on the strip of leather. The young agent moved next to Litvinenko, likewise scanning the crime scene in front of them. “Burns to his hands and face, some shrapnel wounds, but other than that, nothing serious.”
“His driver wasn’t quite as lucky,” Litvinenko noted.
The man’s head had been sheared right off by a chunk of the Opel’s trunk. The force of the explosion had been severe; aside from the mangled Mercedes, at least five other cars had been utterly destroyed, along with the fruit stand and eight stories of windows of an office building across the street. Amazingly, only six pedestrians had been injured, and only the decapitated driver had left the scene in a body bag.
Well, two body bags.
Davny was right, Berezovsky had been damn lucky. The burns would heal, the shrapnel would be removed. According to Litvinenko’s higher-ups, the auto mogul was planning on heading to a sanitarium in Switzerland to recoup and recover. LogoVAZ had already released a statement to the press about the attack, which Litvinenko had read on the ride over to the crime scene:
“There are simply very powerful forces in this society which seek to hinder the creation of civilized business and the revival of the economy. And they will use barbarian, criminal methods to get what they want. It is hard to fight.”
Succinct, accurate—and more than a little hypocritical. Civilized business. Three years of FSB work investigating organized crime, three years before that working under the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB, the main security service of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991: Litvinenko had become an expert on the way business was usually conducted in his home country, and civilized was about the last word he would have chosen to describe what he’d seen. Then again, the security services—not to mention the military bureaucracy, and, hell, the entire goddamn government—weren’t exactly bastions of virtue, and never had been. The KGB, the pre-Gorbachev Soviet machinery—at least back then, you knew what to expect. You kept your head down, did what you were supposed to do, and usually you came out okay. Now? Often, Litvinenko felt as lost as the youngest of his underlings.
In his opinion, the FSB was a shadow of its precursor. Certainly, if his dwindling paycheck was any indication, the “revival of the economy” was going a lot better for the “civilized businessmen” blowing each other up in Mercedes limousines than for the men charged with keeping tabs on the mayhem.
Litvinenko knew that many of his colleagues had been taking things into their own hands—moonlighting for companies and wealthy businessmen, heading up security organizations, using their specific skills to take part in the new economy. Technically, it was illegal, and an agent could get fired—or even arrested—for taking part in after-hours corporate work. But usually, the higher-ups looked the other way. For the most part, turning a blind eye to indiscretions had become a way of life for the bureaucrats who were, themselves, trying to navigate through a world that now seemed constantly in flux. It was only under very special circumstances that the people in power focused their attention on any one individual or incident. Usually, that sort of focus could only mean trouble—for everyone involved.
Litvinenko concentrated on the scene in front of him, shifting his gaze outward from the center—the mangled limousine, hunched forward like a dying jungle beast on two broken axles, surrounded by a lake of broken glass and melted asphalt—to the outer rings of the shock wave, nearly twenty yards in every direction. Across the scene, he counted at least a dozen investigators, working their way through the rubble with plastic evidence bags and shiny forceps.
Davny waved a gloved hand.
“All this because someone tried to murder a car salesman.”
This time, Litvinenko laughed. He didn’t know if his young charge was serious or not, but Boris Berezovsky was obviously much more than a car salesman. The very fact that Litvinenko had been dragged out here in the middle of the night to personally take part in the investigation was evidence of that. Although Litvinenko was hazy on the details, he had heard that the request for special attention had come all the way from the top. Apparently, this Berezovsky had some sort of connection to Yeltsin himself. Litvinenko hadn’t asked any questions when the assignment had come down, and he certainly wouldn’t have gotten any answers from his direct superiors at the FSB.
“It isn’t murder when you blow up an entire street to try to kill one man.”
“So that’s what happened here?” Davny asked. “An assassination attempt?”
Litvinenko gently kicked with his leather boot at a piece of singed wood from the destroyed fruit stand.
“What happened here, comrade, is Mr. Berezovsky’s roof fell in.”
Davny looked at him, then finally nodded, because he understood. Litvinenko wasn’t talking about the fruit stand.
Krysha—literally, roof—was a uniquely Russian concept. Originally, the term had its roots in the world of organized crime; gangsters were only as powerful as their “roof”—the person or organization that protected them in case things went awry. The form of protection a “roof” might offer could be physical, economic, political, or even personal; although the concept was often loaded with the threat of real violence, the most effective forms of krysha never had to resort to guns and bombs. An implication of threat was often far more chilling than when pressure was applied.
In the realm of business, the concept of krysha—a protective roof—was no different. The Red Directors who had at first inherited the newly privatized companies of the ex-Soviet regime had, some might argue, the ultimate roof—a government that would protect them as long as they stayed in favor. Private businessmen—men like Berezovsky—needed a different sort of roof to protect them as they chased their ambitions. Increasingly, these businessmen were turning to the very organizations that had coined the term, with varying results.
“Chechens?” Davny asked. “Russians? Georgians?”
Litvinenko shrugged. Of course, it could have been either. All three territories had extensive networks of organized crime. All of them had a reputation for being particularly vicious and violent; but for the right price, there were plenty of gangs willing to take up the cause of “civilized business.”
Lately there had been a rash of business-related incidents: numerous gun battles in city streets, shootouts in restaurants and office buildings. Even a case of chemical poisoning, involving the toxic heavy metal cadmium, placed on the rim of a banker’s coffee cup. And now, apparently, car bombs.
Litvinenko had no idea who Boris Berezovsky had pissed off to get himself on someone’s shit list, but he was certain that the crime scene in front of them was the result of a business disagreement. Someone was testing the strength of Berezovsky’s roof. From the files Litvinenko’s superiors had given him on the way over to the site, he knew that Berezovsky had an associate, a partner in his LogoVAZ corporation, a Georgian strongman named Badri Patarkatsishvili, who, if not connected to the types of people who could provide a roof for a growing business, could talk the sort of language such people would understand. But it was obvious that Berezovsky and his Georgian strongman didn’t have access to the kind of roof that kept you safe forever.
“Whoever it was, I think they got their point across.”
Litvinenko kicked at the heat-darkened pavement beneath his boots. He wasn’t concerned with keeping the crime scene pristine; he knew full well that he wasn’t going to find any answers picking through the smoldering dirt. Besides, he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted answers, no matter how connected this Berezovsky might be. Look too hard, he thought to himself, and you ran the risk of finding something.
In the world he was living in now, wasn’t it better to simply turn a blind eye?
He exhaled, thinking about his beautiful ballroom dancer. Then his gaze shifted back to the mangled Mercedes limousine.
What sort of life could a man like him make for himself in this new Russia?