‘I guess that depends on what you’re looking for, now.’
‘Good point. I’d better take a look. Send them over too, would you?’
Pudovkin arrived back at his desk and set about rewatching the CCTV clip of the car bomb.
Its footage of the explosion was no less sensational than the first time he’d seen it on the television news.
A slightly grainy shot, in black and white. Shown in a CCTV-like format.
An empty bridge.
The car emerging from the top right.
And then – kaboom – the explosion going off smack bang in the middle of the screen.
Pudovkin ran it again and again, trying to see if there was anything about it that could tell him anything new.
Nothing.
He switched to the international bulletin within which it had been first broadcast. An attractive newsreader was projecting directly into the camera, announcing the bomb – and the names of the people killed – almost as if they were nominees for a set of film awards. Soon came the portraits Pudovkin remembered of Colonel Straker, in military uniform, and the elegant face of Sandy McMahon.
Pudovkin suddenly noticed something.
Something he ought to have thought about before, except that the eye too readily accepts what it sees in a moving image for whatever it appears to be. Pudovkin's attention drifted to the bottom left-hand corner of the screen – to the digital clock above the channel's logo. It was showing: 9:15 p.m. – where, though: presumably somewhere in America?
That suddenly triggered a series of thoughts about timings. And then about logistics.
He checked the time code and date on the original CCTV footage of the blast. It did tally with what he remembered. It had been that early in the morning. The explosion on the bridge was clocked at 00:21 a.m. Moscow time.
Just to be sure, Pudovkin ran through the clip of the subsequently censored press conference given by the mayor. He remembered it being very early in the day, having drawn Gazdanov's attention to it while they’d been on the telephone with each other. Pudovkin found not only the date but, more significantly, the time of the mayor's press conference – 6:00 a.m. – that same morning.
Pudovkin hadn’t been wrong.
It all tallied.
What the hell was he to make of this? What was his conclusion? It was this, wasn’t it: the news dissemination of the blast had been fantastically quick…
How had that happened?
The bomb had gone off in the middle of the night. And yet, fewer than five hours later – during the dog hours of the night – Fox News had managed to secure the CCTV footage, as well as source a formal portrait of the two occupants killed in the blast and they had procured more than headline biographies of both Straker and McMahon.
Then Pudovkin realized that this was not the only indication of extraordinarily fast news dissemination.
What about the mayor of Moscow? How quickly had she been informed? In the same limited timeframe, she had managed to call a press conference – with enough advance warning to ensure that all the press and TV were there – and she’d managed to have enough material to present her own statement, live, at six o’clock that same morning.
How could all of this news have been gathered – and all the journalists been present – that quickly?
Pudovkin's pulse was now racing.
Questions were bouncing round his head. How had the mayor of Moscow been so prepared? Didn’t that indicate that she must have known in advance?
Couldn’t that mean, then, that the mayor was connected in some way to the perpetrators?
SEVENTY-ONE
Pudovkin was so engrossed that he flinched when one of his phones rang. It was the one on his desk.
‘Colonel Pudovkin? Igor Sorokin at the Forensic Service,’ said the director of the RFCFS. ‘Just to let you know, we’ve received the samples of residue from the site of the explosion. I gather you were concerned about the quantity available. I’m pleased to say we should have enough for our programme of testing: we’ve got about a tennis-ball's worth. It's ready to be examined.’
‘That's good news, professor.’
‘You might like to know that we’ve also been sent a reasonable sample of blood recovered from the road beside the car. There's not much point in running a DNA test, though, unless we have data records to match it against.’
‘We do know who was on board,’ said Pudovkin. ‘But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to confirm it.’
‘What about comparative DNA records or samples – do you have any of those?’
Pudovkin thought. ‘I might just have. If I do, I’ll send them over. By the way, professor, how long will it take you to run all your tests?’
‘A day or two.’
‘That's too long. I need to speed this up.’
‘I could do it in a matter of hours, but I’d have to deprioritize other work already in hand. Without being difficult, that's only possible with some meaty authorization.’
‘Consider it given,’ said the police colonel busking his response. ‘I’ll let you have whatever permission you need to accelerate these tests. Expect to hear confirmation from me within the hour. If you haven’t within that time, please feel free to put everything on hold.’
Professor Sorokin seemed impressed. ‘I’ll hear from you shortly, then.’
