Pudovkin uttered ‘Oh shit’ aloud to his empty office.
Even thinking about Vadim Kondratiev as a suspect made Pudovkin nervous – let alone the prospect of actually having to investigate him. To the police colonel's knowledge, no one had ever got close to investigating the man before – not successfully, at any rate. The last two to try had each paid a heavy price: Messrs Magnitsky and Nemtsov.
Christ, thought Pudovkin.
Do I really want to start bandying around any sort of accusation?
The rumours alone were troubling. Most of them had Kondratiev down as exceptionally dangerous – a brutal, vicious thug. Who knew what reprisals could be possible if word got out that he had even considered him as a suspect?
Pudovkin was desperate to draw a conclusion that Kondratiev couldn’t have had anything to do with the bombing.
In an effort to be methodical, he set about stress-testing his suspicions. First, the police colonel needed to challenge whether Kondratiev would have known about the court case.
How could he not?
Why else would Kondratiev have picked up Kosygin, taken him to Butyrka Prison – and paid him one of his late-night visits. Strak-er's interest in tracing the money behind the Autodrom would have clearly indicated the Britisher's danger to the prosecution. How, then, could Kondratiev have known about Straker's movements? Would the crime boss have had Straker watched? Certainly not impossible, but how could Pudovkin ever know for sure? His own surveillance teams had not mentioned being aware of other watchers during their surveillance. But then Pudovkin grimaced: who knew what secretive or specialist units Kondratiev or the FSB operated or could call upon? Would his own policemen and their techniques have been good enough to spot the sort of men from the shadows that Kondratiev could deploy? The idea that Kondratiev had arranged to have Straker watched and followed was, clearly, not impossible.
Could Kondratiev have bugged Straker's room, car, office or phone to keep tabs on him? Perfectly easily. Except Pudovkin could have no way of knowing whether he had done that, either.
A related thought then struck him.
What had Gazdanov said about Straker giving his police watchers the slip on his way to Helsinki? Hadn’t Gazdanov told him that Straker had ordered a taxi to pick him up from a side entrance of his hotel? How the hell had Gazdanov known that? Didn’t that mean someone had bugged Straker's room or phone? Again, instigating that kind of surveillance would represent little challenge to Kondratiev. But if it was Kondratiev, how did Gazdanov come to know what Straker was up to? Didn’t that tie Gazdanov to Kondratiev in some way?
Oh crap, thought Pudovkin. How murky is this?
Even if Kondratiev hadn’t tailed Straker, Pudovkin considered the likelihood of the man having informers within any of the organizations that Straker had visited. Would Kondratiev have a big enough network of sources to build up a picture of Straker and McMahon's movements that way? Of course he could; after all, Pudovkin had used the exact same technique himself to run a mole inside one of those organizations. Pudovkin went through what he knew of Straker's contacts and whereabouts: Ptarmigan, the firm of solicitors, the hotel he was staying at, the hospital where Sabatino was being treated and the meeting with Kosygin. Finally, there was Straker's meeting at City Hall.
Pudovkin rang his former mole inside Brandeis, Anatoly Pokrovsky. ‘Come and see me next week,’ said the police colonel to the sacked middle-aged lawyer. ‘I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve got you into. I’ll set up a meeting with our legal department here in the police force: see if we can’t put matters right?’
‘Thank you, Mr Pudovkin.’
‘Least I can do. Tell me something else, though, would you? Was there any sense at Brandeis of an influence from Vadim Kondratiev?’
The phone suddenly went silent.
Not an uncommon reaction when the man's name was mentioned.
After a pause, the legal analyst said: ‘I heard some talk of protection money, krysha, several times. But nothing specific.’
‘And that was generally thought to be connected to Kondratiev?’
‘Yes.’
‘But there was no other involvement that you heard about between Kondratiev and Brandeis Gertner?’
‘Not that I know off.’
Pudovkin groaned. That was hardly conclusive.
Pudovkin moved on to the next – and possibly last – of Straker's interactions: Straker's and McMahon's private audience with the mayor of Moscow. If that hadn’t alerted Kondratiev to Straker's rate of progress, Pudovkin wondered, what would have?
The police colonel soon realized that even this flimsy line of thinking had left him both blessed and cursed. His attempts to stress-test his hunch that Vadim Kondratiev might have been involved in the car bomb was a long way from being scientific, but these “deductions” made Pudovkin curse for an entirely different reason. Nothing in his flimsy challenges had come remotely close to dispelling the basis of that hunch, either.
Oh fuck, thought Pudovkin.
I can’t rule out Vadim Kondratiev as a suspect for the car bomb, after all.
SEVENTY
Pudovkin needed another cup of coffee and some fresh air to calm himself. He took a troubled leg stretch along Petrovka Ulitsa. How the hell could he make any sort of enquiries into Kondratiev, when the man's presence was ubiquitous? Any indication of Pudovkin's enquiry taking that direction could easily land him in deeply unpleasant trouble.
Before Pudovkin had even thought of a way forward, he received a call from Police Major Kuprin.
‘Colonel, I’ve just sent you the CCTV footage of the car bomb you wanted.’
Pudovkin picked up his pace, walking straight back to Police HQ. ‘Good work, Mikael – well done for tracking that down.’
‘After its first airing on the morning of the blast, it was then blacked out. I had to get it from abroad, from a friend of mine in the diplomatic service with uncensored access to the web. The footage had something like 35 million hits. I’ve managed to source a copy of the original. Fox News had it.’
‘You’re kidding?’ replied Pudovkin. ‘How the hell did they have the original?’
‘You’d have thought it would have been one of the local TV stations or news outlets, wouldn’t you? I’ve also found some clips of the initial news bulletin on Russia-1 – before they too were censored, just in case they might be of help?’
‘Thank you.’
‘By the way,’ added Police Major Kuprin, ‘I still have all the pictures we snapped of Straker and McMahon on their travels round Moscow.’
Pudovkin asked: ‘Are they likely to be of any use? You haven’t mentioned anything significant in them before?’
