Morgan Stone - The Russian Factor

Galina walked into the apartment through the wide-open doorway to find me showing evidence to Anna. “Ah, good. I see you have told her.”

“Ach you bastards!” Anna shouted, red faced, pounding the sofa arm and raising a cloud of dust.

“You’re better off knowing about all this, Anna.” I stood up.

“But this is my family. My mother, my own mother!”

“We are not after your family.” Galina said. “Or your mother. We only want information. We want to find out who is making deals with whom. Nothing will happen to your mother.”

“We aren’t? It won’t?” Galina’s declaration took me entirely by surprise. I turned to Anna, “There you have it. Nothing is going to happen.

“It already has happened. Now what is there for me?”

“If you want to go home I can help you with that. You might even make it back before she does. At least you know enough about what’s going on to keep yourself safe.” What could I say? I was trying to come across rational and all grown-up.

“My mother is at home. She told me she is there waiting for me.” Anna said.

Galina broke in. “Well, she isn’t. In fact, she’s right here in Kiev with Sergei. His car has been circling this very block for the last twenty minutes. It is why we have set up in this apartment, Anna, to watch things like that.” Then in English to me, “I hear information. There will be exchange very soon. This is why I come. Equipment is ready?”

“I need to see my mother.” Anna blurted.

“You what?” I hadn’t seen that coming.

“I cannot believe all this. If she is here, down on the street with Sergei in the car, I want to talk with her. To let her explain what is going on.”

“Holy crap! Have you any idea how dangerous that would be for us and for you? I thought you wanted to get out from under her!” I said.

Galina tried to diffuse the situation. “You cannot see her now. She will not be alone. If you appear from nowhere, when something like what is about to happen down there is going on, it will put us all, including your mother, in danger. These are dangerous people. We must think clearly and calmly. You should talk to your mother, yes, but not here and not right now.”

“Perhaps back home in Nizhny Novgorod.” I added, “After I’ve had time to get out of Ukraine.”

Anna deflated. “I can not go back! I explained it to you, Jess. I will not. It would be the end of my life.”

“But it is your home, your parents.” Galina said.

“They simply will never let me live the way I need to for me. I want to live like you. I want to travel. I do not want to be forced to marry my boyfriend. I can not bear being with him, being his possession, another second.” She locked eyes with Galina, “Where is your husband? I think he lets you do what you want.”

“I have no husband.”

“But you are pregnant!”

Galina patted her belly. “I want to be a mother. I don’t want to be a wife. In fact, I am lesbian, if you must know. I am also active in gay rights and exposing political and official corruption. In this country, living like this is hard and dangerous, but this is what I am doing. I know what I am doing.”

“You are lesbian, and you are speaking about it, just like that? Maybe it is different in Ukraine, maybe more European. In Russia, not a word is spoken about it otherwise… You can be killed, and your baby.” Anna stopped and slowly shook her head. “I do want to stay here with Jess. I have never been as free as I am with you now. I can not, I will not, go back.”

Galina tapped her watch. We needed to be ready to view and record the upcoming exchange below the windows. “I am going down to street,” she said to me in English. “I want to clearly see Prokuratura doors for photograph and be close to maybe record voices. You ready up here?”

“Uh, yeah, sure. Let me reload and check the eyes and ears.”

“I will watch this too!” Anna sprang from the sofa. “I must see for myself that my mother really is doing such things. This is so hard to believe… My mother…”

“Anna, this is very serious. You can’t have your head in the window, out the window, over the balcony, whatever. They look for that kind of thing.” I glanced at Galina, hoping for back up.

“Nyet, I am going down to the street with Galina!”

Galina took a deep breath. “Crazy girl. It will be cold and I will be crouching down for a long time. You absolutely must not move or make a noise. You must not be seen because you, they will surely recognize.”

“I will do everything you say. Anyhow, I can go where I want, unless I am your prisoner.” Anna had a point.

From the window I saw a handful of old women carrying cellophane wrapped icons and a megaphone. They were shuffling away from the Prokuratura. Lulls in the protests were when the pricey sedans pulled up and deals were made. We had to get cracking. There was no time left to argue.

Considering her backache, Anna pulled on her heavy coat and boots with surprising ease. She intended to go and there was nothing we could do to stop her. I didn’t blame her, but the timing for this collision with reality couldn’t have been worse. Galina briefed her and then checked her own digital equipment. I loaded Tri-X into the Leicaflex. I needed a fast, forgiving film. Shooting with a telephoto when things get going doesn’t always leave a lot of time for fussing with exposure and aperture. Galina shot me a look of concern from the vestibule, hauled open the inner, wooden door, slammed back the bolt on the steel outer door and, kneeing it open, moved into the stairwell. Anna followed right behind.

Nothing much happened for the first hour. Cellular network traffic was light and I watched the street through Gavin’s peephole cameras. Every now and then I stuck my head above a windowsill to see Anna and Galina changing positions. Sergei’s Mercedes cruised past the Prokuratura, but by the time I crawled to the balcony, it was gone. It was all just adrenaline poisoned boredom until a cellular-band signal started approaching. That one was joined a few seconds later by a stationary signal coming from the Prokuratura. I gestured from the balcony door, hoping Galina would catch it. She did, I watched the two of them, on a peephole camera feed, emerge from a residential building and crouch behind a parked car.

If I’d checked the numbers on the cellular signals, I would have known the approaching target wasn’t Sergei. I wouldn’t have signaled Galina into action and wouldn’t have been shocked when a black Lexus pulled into the apartment’s parking lot. “Idiot!” I muttered. The Lexus did a one-eighty in the lot and stopped in the apartment’s driveway, facing the Prokuratura. Pounding the license number into my laptop and seeing that the car belonged to Vladimir Ambalov wasn’t my biggest concern; that Anna and Galina were plainly visible to the occupants of the Lexus while they crouched behind a parked car, was.

Galina, thinking on her feet, pawed through the snow beside the parked car where she and Anna were crouched. She patted her pockets, hiding her digital camera in the process, making a show of looking for dropped keys. Before retreating back into a neighboring building to the east, Galina tried the doors on the parked car, shrugged her shoulders apologetically and gestured Anna back inside. At least, that’s what it looked like from my hide on the balcony. I breathed a sigh of relief, seeing Anna and Galina enter the other building without being followed.

A laptop signaled that a cellular number it recognized had joined the network. I heard it faintly from the balcony. The black Mercedes pulling up in front of the Prokuratura had to be Sergei’s. Anna’s mother, the Skater, was probably in the car. A couple of Prokuratura guards wandered by the big wooden doors in opposite directions. Then Sergei himself stepped out of the Mercedes, stretched, and stood in front of the car. He lit a cigarette and took a long slow drag. The driver of the Lexus, in a weird sort of ballet, did the same thing. He got out, took a casual stroll around the car, then stood in front of it lighting his cigarette.