Russia Del Sol

Chapter 01 - RUSSIA 2100-2230hrs: St. Petersburg, Russia

The car must have been huge, because the boot I was in was nice and roomy at the moment. The section along my ribs where they had hit me with the stun wand really stung, but neither the sting nor sore muscles were serious. I was breathing, I was alive, my hands and feet were not bound, and I was in the boot of a big car.

Only a big official, executive, secret police officer, or top gangster could afford a car this big around here. The boot was bare – not even a road flare (the rental I’d paid far too much for was crammed full of safety gear and other kit, in case the cops tried to get some tourist tickets written to help fund the local government).

This was all very well prepared.

I wasn’t working for anyone officially, so I wasn’t anyone’s agent, but I was known as a very low level intelligence source for criminal activities. The authorities never entirely trusted me, although certain police, military, INTERPOL officers and former mission handlers still took me at my word most of the time (and I kept it vague for them, which certainly helped). It was criminals and their many activities which had kept me afloat in euros – not enough to swim in, but I covered my expenses. When I wasn’t mediating against them as a civilian’s negotiations agent, I took specific jobs from them to build up my accounts for my university fees. But I wasn’t formally in any organization, group, or family business.

I was a specialist, an expert in everything from obtaining things from somewhere to moving things from here to there to removing things, sometimes from everywhere and forever after – including people. People aren’t things, but some things I had obtained or moved or removed were people. Those were the high pay jobs I once traveled for, arriving on scene as a third party no one local would know.

I was the sort of tourist passing through that everyone who met me above the line was neutral about. I was a good tourist, patient with demeaning travel events or those cock-ups involving accommodations, a quiet guest, on vacation after a break-up. That was why I was alone, that was why I went out at night or was away all hours, and it was why I might find companionship along the way now and then.

When the boot opened, I thought for a moment I was getting out, but they simply opened it, cut a man’s throat, and threw him in with me. Then they shut the boot and walked off, laughing.

This was not what I had in mind for companionship.

The man was not very tall or heavy, but the boot was a lot smaller now, and his throat was cut open, so he was moving around a lot. His hands had not been bound either, so in addition to kicking me, he was grabbing his throat and punching out at me as he tried to breathe in and tried to stop the blood from going out.

Blood was getting all over me. I always did my best to avoid getting scratched or cut when I travel, even in a boot; luckily, he wasn’t near enough to my face to spray or splatter me there as I tried to block his thrashing blows. I had to hope all my medical shots would work once more, and I was still at risk here from the nasties you couldn’t get shots for yet, like H.I.V.

It did not take long before he stopped struggling and went limp. Now that the blood was no longer spraying out of him, it was simply draining out, and when I shifted him over, he stayed where I put him – although he rolled when the car moved forward once more with a turn, and I had to push him off me.

Chapter 02 - 2230-2300hrs: December in St. Petersburg

I was lucky to have been awake when the second leg of this trip began, because waking up in a boot when already out on the road would have prevented any calculation of elapsed time for a guess at distance. Waking up in a boot while out on the road would be disorienting to most everyone to start; add a dead man right next to you, and that might even have had me disoriented… until I concluded someone was fucking with me, and I had better get my own fucking head straight on before the next time the lid to this boot went up.

That was just common sense.

Of course, I’d been awake when they killed the dead man now next to me, but as a technique of terror, seeing them cut a man’s throat would badly disorient the average conscious civilian. I wasn’t thrilled with it, but I’ve seen battle and death in Iraq while I was with the Regiment.

This was not the worst thing I’d ever seen, or something that could disorient me from psychic shock.

In my case, could it stimulate me into a tactical response of some type? Yes. Make me annoyed and ready to do a good job getting myself through whatever this was? Yes. But I was not disoriented, and I wasn’t even very annoyed – I was looking forward to how annoyed I’d feel later on, once I was out of this boot, and whoever put me inside it was in here instead.

I was a bit annoyed. A bit. Some people would erupt out of this boot enraged by the experience and die right then and there. I was a professional, only there on the scene to get a job offer.

I wasn’t being paid yet for whatever the hell this now was, but I now had a job working for myself, until I got out of here, and being too annoyed was always unhelpful in my line of work. The job here now was: why show me that, and do this to me, this way? Answer those three first, then get the next questions cooking. Until then, I counted off time (my watch was gone).

I had come to St. Petersburg to attend an annual archaeology conference, and ended up making the rounds of the all hours clubs and skin joints because I was curious what the climate might be like for my old sort of work. The types who needed those dangerous skillsets tended to be the patrons or owners there. I was hardly starving, but university course work is very expensive – this trip was one example.

I had hopes of learning something useful for my dissertation topic at the conference (New Finds in St. Petersburg), and had gleaned one or two slivers, but heard nothing yet about riverine structures in the Ohkta river region or implications of trade route travel in 7000 BCE. It was expensive to get here, stay over four nights, and rent a car, for very little in return; I had fees coming due in the New Year if I wanted to continue my studies.

My skillsets outside of archaeology were not easily shopped for a legal job paying me enough part time to cover the university fees as well as food and shelter. I love archaeology, but I wasn’t going to bivvy in the woods near Leicester and hunt my food down between classes in order to learn it. I had managed to avoid killing for pay for over a year now, and I had only five months remaining before the formal classwork ended and it was just the dissertation and arguments process left.

I didn’t need a huge amount, but I needed more cash than I expected I would. Offsetting this trip would help, to start. I also had wondered if there was other talent in town.

The New Russia has meant some of the worst bits of the Old Russia, kept repressed in the days of the Soviet Union, had resurfaced – criminals, racist organizations, religious persecution – for profit, and sport, and had been accepted by many. Money ruled, and money greased the law whenever cruel excess was revealed.

In this stormy atmosphere there was money to be made, and sometimes killings occurred. It was usually one organization against another, over their territory of operations, or in retribution for a past event, or to start a fresh onslaught. As some of my old skillsets are used to kill people, in the past that was where I had always come in.

I first worked as a soldier for my country, but I was no longer as keen on being paid for killing people as I had been back then, when it was always because of a mission, duty, and orders. I was an effective and well adjusted soldier before a command-ordered early retirement led to a change in careers. Even if I was no longer killing people for pay, it was valuable to have had both that past service and those early private jobs as records when someone local wanted an experienced spare bodyguard or an escort-type who was not from the local scene.

And they needed bodyguards. The New Russia now faces actual anti-Russian violence from a radicalized minority sharing a common religion that reinforces all their other beliefs. They had tended to attack government targets, but were equally content with horrific actions against simple local people – taking over a theatre, a school – targets chosen for their soft security and maximum shock, supposedly to demonstrate the government’s inability to defend the population from these actions. In reply, the government always tended to demonstrate extreme punishment, so they were very bloody affairs at the end.

Although I would suspect that anti-Russian terrorists were probably getting certain supplies through at least one local criminal organization, they could get them all more securely from across a border by themselves. I didn’t think any of the local criminals felt they were on any terrorist hit lists, but it was hard to say if that would change.

Old school political terrorists might rationalize the need to have limited contact with some of the enemy in order to obtain their guns and kit – would that hold true with the new religious terrorists? I did not think so. They did not need these local crime bosses or corrupt military or government insiders for any of their weapons, although they very well might use them when it was convenient. I had no doubts the newest rebels saw each transaction as a one off and would not hesitate one second to kill a crime boss if that publicity would further their own cause.

It meant all of the wealthy and powerful in bigger cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg were all just slightly more on edge. That was possible money for me if they needed an extra hard case character in a suit as an escort for a party or event, or just to show off their new wealth by hiring a big security team to take them out shopping.

I had done that a few times while I was on a Scythian field dig on the Black Sea last summer, where I ran into an old warrior I once served in combat with. He had heard about my unexpected early retirement from the Regiment, and wondered what I’d been doing the past two years. He commiserated with the expenses I faced, now that my Service education benefits had run out, and he offered me a security job at a party – and then I’d gone on with that sideline, until the field season ended, and a bit beyond.

At the moment, I was paid through the fall session, but now I needed enough to complete my classwork this spring.

I would need money for dissertation fees, but not for ten months, perhaps a year… Well, perhaps never, the way it was looking after this conference. If no one in Russia was even out looking for evidence of riverine trade networks to the northwest (to explain the Scythian and other artifacts from the southern steppes found near St.Petersburg), it would be very hard for me to prove them. A bold assertion was a good start only if the actual evidence sustained it over time.

Maybe I wouldn’t need the dissertation fee money, then.

Maybe what I had learned at this St. Petersburg conference was that I was up against it on this one, and another path might be needed to get there at last, another topic to be tackled instead.

I was determined to finish the classwork part, at least. I would not be bested in this endeavour, as my doctoral advisor had put it once. He seemed to understand the nebulous nature of my funding and difficulty I had in paying up for what all my old SAS friends thought was the daft pursuit of a luxury I could not afford. They did not pressure me to return to my old line of work, but most of them implied I was an idiot savant, emphasis on the idiot, and I should get back to real work.

My resolve to finish the classwork was still unshaken; now I had the feeling that would be as far as I got. That made me more determined to finish what I could, and that left me tempted to at least see what the local demand was like for ex-military types and their particular skillsets…

Evidently the demand for me was high enough that not only was I offered an audition for a job, I was then zapped with a stun wand and thrown in this boot to make absolutely certain I would be available for an exclusive interview.

Following the last stop, the car took seven nevers (a mental counting timekeeping technique) to get where we were going, on surprisingly good roads. At five forevers per never, that was about thirty five minutes or so. Good roads meant higher speeds – but I wasn’t two hundred kilometers away from our last stop, I was thirty or forty, maybe fifty at the very most.

I felt the car slow, then turn.

This new road was not quite as even.

Then we turned again, then there was a slow, sharp turn, and then the car stopped. After a moment the boot lid opened.

The car I was in was idling, with its now open boot facing a tall, gloomy stone wall. Another car drove up, passed mine, and stopped.

Get Major Bayrskat, while I deal with this cowardly, unnatural pervert! The man yelling that in Russian as he walked to the other car was a tall, husky lad in an expensive looking overcoat with a lot of joy for his job at the moment, I could tell.

The four squaddies with him, all dressed in very sharp private militia uniform coats, accessorized with AK-47 assault rifles they pointed at both cars, had no expressions at all.

The other car’s boot was opened, and a moaning older man was dragged out.

He looked like a businessman (his suit was much finer than my student ensemble sport jacket, shirt and jeans), was covered in blood as well, and the young man they had killed and thrown into his boot looked like a hustler, part of someone’s street stable.

The tall man cleared his throat and addressed the older businessman, now seated on the ground and leaning against the rear bumper: "So – you and he have been enjoying an affair you have been paying him to be in, every week for the last six. He wanted to raise the prices, he threatened to leave you, he called you names, and then you cut his throat."

The businessman managed to feel outraged and look it.

The tall man casually ticked off some points. His blood now covers you, his body is in the trunk of your own car, and because you were drinking, you passed out along the road on your way to bury the body. You were found behind the wheel with him in the trunk, you are covered in his blood – which we can even find on the steering wheel and seats, if we have to go looking there for a report. Maybe the seat and floormats too, depending on what you say now about working with us, cooperating more. Tall, dark, and happy was one of those Battleship Potemkin poster-boy types: broad shouldered, dark haired, a good looking Russian, so he could be fairly charming when he wanted to be. What shall we do, Krupov? he asked, as if really concerned.

What – What do you m-mean? babbled the businessman. He was now just a beaten, desperate man, glazed and hypnotized by the factual, droning delivery.

I had to admit, that was quite a frame they had set up; these days, simply exposing a sex affair with a hustle boy wasn’t quite going to generate the blackmail leverage it used to… Murder, though, was always worth hiding, and then adding in a way so that Krupov could feel as if his family still wasn’t sure about his secret life – well, the way he sagged and sighed, Krupov’s relief was palpable. Yes, I think I see, he said quietly.

Do you? Cross us, and next time your car trunk gets two of you that way.

No, no, I understand, Mister Foolev.

Good, because you might even find there are nicer places to go looking for drinks than where you go now. The tall, dark Mr. Foolev gave a half smile and shrugged. Cleaner, safer places. You’re a good friend now, so you can have a drink at one of our clubs, yes? We already know all about you anyway. Why even risk the metro station again? While Foolev was giving the man dating advice, two flunkies had dragged the body out of the car boot, so the businessman and the young man’s dead body were now both sitting next to each other against the rear bumper of the businessman’s luxury car.

Yes, yes, babbled the businessman.

Another bored man walked up, uncoiling a long hose, since any water taps outside were long dry for the winter.

Good, said Foolev. So, as we are friends, we will take care of this mess in your trunk and will even donate to you a very nice suit, from a very good friend of ours. You should think about doing all your tailoring and cleaning business with him, you will like your new suit so much.

The businessman looked at Foolev. Yes. Yes. Thank you, Mister Foolev!

Yes – oh, Alexei, please give Mister Krupov a hand to his feet and see to all of his needs tonight, will you?

The businessman was now stunned by the stud muffin in a snug militia uniform who popped right over, offering him a hand, looking both friendly and pleased about the job ahead.

Dating Game over, Foolev turned and walked to my car.

You! he yelled at me, giving his very best gritted-teeth-and-sneer. You can lie there and rot!

Until tonight, I had never seen Foolev before in my life, and I laughed. You don’t even fucking know why I’m here, man. Do you?

Foolev sneered in frustration, then hid it. After a very long and careful deliberation he said, Better than you. He went for silky and dangerous, and he pulled the delivery off, so it was a good thing he didn’t add a "nyahh-nyahh-nyahh" to really give me something to think about.

Foolev seemed to realize he was losing ground just standing here, so he turned and stomped off, his steps crackling the frozen earth here and there.

I looked at the four well bundled guards still pointing assault rifles at me and just didn’t feel like getting out yet, not without somebody senior around that we could all hear give them specific orders not to shoot me. They even had special mittens on, with a separate wool forefinger hole with gloved finger attached, so they could easily get their trigger fingers free to pull on their triggers and shoot me while keeping their hands warm.

That was from a design that went all the way back to