Pudovkin looked at his watch.
Seven o’clock in the evening.
With Straker still inside, it looked like it was going to be a long night. Even so, the police chief was not prepared to leave anything to chance.
At ten past midnight the police watchers were suddenly on alert.
Kuprin declared: ‘We’ve just spotted the Brandeis Mercedes, sir. It's pulling out of the underground car park, right now. There are two people in the back; their descriptions tally with Straker and McMahon, the female lawyer.’
Pudovkin quickly called in one of the unmarked cars, parked in a staging area a few streets away. It soon pulled up. Pudovkin climbed in and gave an instruction to the driver to move off. Edging forward, the car reached a junction with the main drag beside the Brandeis office, the same road that Straker and McMahon had just turned into. There was virtually no traffic; further down to his left, Pudovkin could easily see the back of the Brandeis limousine driving away. Responding to a hand signal, Pudovkin's driver pulled out – over to the far side of the road – crossing several lanes to follow Straker, from some distance behind.
A light rain was falling from a moonless sky with low cloud. Pudovkin watched the Brandeis car closely through the swipe of the windscreen wipers. It turned right into Shmitovskiy Proezd, and then ran east for over a mile before indicating right into Krasnaya Presnya Ulitsa. Pudovkin sensed where they were heading: straight for the centre of Moscow.
Over the radio to his team, he said: ‘All stations, it looks like they’re making for Straker's hotel.’
Several other radios on the net acknowledged the call. One call sign said it would go on ahead and be ready to spot them, from the far side of the bridge as they crossed the river.
Pudovkin told his own driver not to get too close.
Seven minutes later the target car reached the edge of Red Square. Here, too, there was no traffic. Moscow seemed deserted. The rain – the hour – appeared to have driven everyone from the streets.
Pudovkin continued to watch the car in front as it turned left at the end of Ilyinka Ulitsa. Surprisingly, despite the low levels of traffic, it wasn’t travelling that quickly.
The Brandeis car ran down the side of the square, heading towards Saint Basil's. The cathedral's floodlit bauble-like domes loomed above it to the right.
Pudovkin watched the car disappear from view as the street descended gently round the back of the cathedral. He issued an instruction to the driver. In response, his own car accelerated slightly, and, as he rounded the corner, visual contact was quickly restored. He was able to watch the target car head down the slight ramp and then out onto the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge.
There was no traffic here, either. The six lanes across the top of the bridge were completely deserted. The two cars drove out into the middle of the river.
Pudovkin happened to be looking down at his radio when it happened.
There was a flash of light.
His driver stabbed at the brakes; Pudovkin was hurled forwards against his seat belt. He quickly tried to look up.
Pudovkin suddenly felt that everything was happening around him in slow motion.
Another blinding flash came an instant later, whiting out his vision.
Pudovkin blinked, trying to focus on the car in front.
There was a ground-shaking boom.
The rear of the Brandeis Mercedes was being heaved off the surface of the road.
His view of the car disappeared in the explosion.
A second charge had gone off somewhere in the Brandeis car.
Pudovkin's own windshield shattered. His ears screamed with a stabbing pain, overwhelmed by a terrifying noise. Pudovkin was soon fighting to breathe, the air having been sucked out of his lungs.
A hail of debris rained down on the bridge, some of which banged onto the roof of his car.
Then nothing seemed to happen.
Had he not been deafened, Pudovkin would have become aware of an eerie silence.
He couldn’t concentrate, though. He was shaking.
Uncontrollably.
He tried to open the car door.
Managing to stand – in the middle of the bridge – Pudovkin staggered forward. He looked out over the devastation.
Moscow was dark, lit only by the floodlights bathing the occasional landmark up and down the river.
Hardly anything remained of the Brandeis car.
There was nothing left of Straker or of McMahon, or of whoever had been unfortunate enough to have been driving them. Everything inside had been incinerated in an instant.
The blast had all but obliterated or scattered its components; what was left of the car was little more than a buckled, bare frame slumped in a thirty-foot bowl in the road where the asphalt surface had ruptured in the force of the explosion. To one side of the car, Pudovkin noticed a pool of blood. To the other, he saw a six-foot-wide hole, blasted right through the solid structure of the bridge – giving a clear view of the river below.
With his hand – his whole body – still shaking, Pudovkin pulled out his phone.
He had to keep blinking – bright swirling worms were distorting his vision. It took several attempts to hit the right contact.
Pudovkin spoke with the duty officer in the Moscow police headquarters and reported the explosion. The incident was now in someone else's hands.
