Moscow Noir

They dropped, one after the other, no sound, just like that, all three, like a row of dominoes. Kostik and Mishanya died before they hit the ground—the former got a bullet in the eye and the latter bcv fb’s nose was obliterated—but the thug in the coat, after he crashed forward, suddenly answered fire. Stumbling, Veltsev dropped back around the corner. He tried to count the shots, but immediately realized that was impossible. He probably wasn’t firing an ordinary silenced piece but a gun with noiseless ammo, which meant you could only distinguish a shot after the bullets had ricocheted off something. Regardless, there was no time to waste. The thug could call in reinforcements over his walkie-talkie at any second. Veltsev caught his breath, emerged from his cover again, and, moving along the wall, started shooting at the mustached man’s twitching back. He held the trigger down until he’d emptied what was left in his magazine, all eleven cartridges.

Even though his face had blossomed like an onion and was smoking like a pot, the thug nonetheless kept squeezing his gun, which had its safety engaged. Propping one elbow on the ground, he aimed up at someone in front of him. When his arm dropped, sapped, Veltsev picked the gun up delicately with two fingers.

It was a silent, six-round Vul, a special make for special agents like this. Before this Veltsev had only seen one in pictures. You couldn’t get the gun or ammo for it on the black market for any amount of money. Now, after firing, the open chamber didn’t even smell of powder. Actually, examining his trophy, Veltsev wasn’t thinking about its unique characteristics anymore but about how he no longer needed to search the dead man for documents because his identity was obvious. An agent of the special services—whether GRU or FSB was irrelevant—had just given up the ghost.

After dragging the bodies around the corner and stacking them next to Double Jack, he drove the Geländewagen on, into the rear yard, and parked it next to the Land Cruiser. The blizzard was not abating. Veltsev tried to warm himself for a couple of minutes behind the wheel. Even though he was soaked with sweat from dealing with the bodies, he was still chilled to the bone. “We’re rolling, rolling, rolling,” he intoned, holding his palms over the humming heating vents. He stared at the thug’s loaded gun in front of him.

The Uzbek’s gang showed up at Lana’s entrance like clockwork, at exactly 11:30. Three men came out of their SUV, which differed from the Land Cruiser parked out back only by its license number. Veltsev was waiting for them to go through the door, but after conferencing at the lobby threshold, the trio returned to the car. Veltsev blinked away his frost-induced tears. There was a weak crimson glow spreading behind the Land Cruiser—probably from the taillights, but broad enough that it lit up the whole section of the apartment building spread out behind the car, as well as the buildings in the rear of the courtyard, about 150 meters away.

When it became clear to him that the SUV was headed down the track blazed by the Geländewagen around the building, the Land Cruiser had already driven into the rear courtyard, rocking over the potholes. Veltsev removed his gun from its holster. “Rolling, rolling, rolling …”

After hurrying to the abandoned cars, the trio moved around them in single file, and then—obviously following Veltsev’s tracks—came upon the bodies heaped in the front garden. Veltsev, whose teeth were now chattering from the cold, leaned his shoulder into the edge of the back wall. The blizzard was seething all around, but a silence fell over the front garden such that when mustache guy’s walkie-talkie started talking in the snowdrift behind it—“Five, where’d you go? Over”—Veltsev nearly pulled the trigger. Disjointedly, reluctantly almost, the trio turned toward the sound. Seeing their vacant young faces animated by death, he shot them calmly and methodically, like targets at a shooting range. Only the gunman at the far right had time to throw up his arm before falling onto the powdered bodies. “Five, are you asleep?” he heard behind him.