David Duffy - In for a Ruble

About the time I got there, two more Mercedes roared up Tverskaya from the opposite direction, traveling too fast, not uncommon in Moscow, but something about them flashed trouble. I ducked behind a parked Lada as they screeched to a stop. Four men leapt out, fire spurting from the muzzles of their machine guns.

The bodyguards were slow. Three fell in the first barrage. Others got their guns up, and a firefight was on. I heard more than I saw as I knelt behind the parked car, hoping thin Russian steel was up to the task of stopping lead Russian bullets. The RATTA-TAT-TATTA-TAT-TATTA of gunfire filled the night. Slugs ricocheted off stone. The street shook as a car exploded. Flaming metal flew overhead and bounced off the building behind. Cars skidded and crashed. The gunfire ebbed, then resumed in intensity. When it finally stopped, as suddenly as it had started, I didn’t move for a minute before peeking through the Lada’s blown-out windows.

Carnage everywhere. A dozen cars sprawled across the avenue at all angles, riddled with bullet holes. Few had window glass left. The bodies of three drivers lay collapsed over their steering wheels. A lone horn blared under the weight of one, a heavyset woman in a blue coat. She could no longer hear it. She was missing the back of her head. On the far sidewalk, where I’d been walking a few minutes before, fallen fighters sprawled across pockmarked metal and concrete. I counted six, there were probably more. The exploded car burned full bore. The first police sirens whined in the distance.

In the center of the slaughter sat one Mercedes, fatter and heavier than the rest, the paint peppered but the glass intact. Armored. As I came around, the back door opened. A dark-haired young woman in a backless dress emerged from the car, as if stepping out. Except she wasn’t stepping. She wasn’t moving. She was supported by the man behind her. Three ugly red holes perforated her pretty skin. Her torso straightened for a moment before he let her drop on the pavement. She’d been attractive in life—fine skin, good figure—but the heavy makeup she’d applied for her evening out now functioned as a death mask, freezing her last instant of fear and pain. It also froze her age, which couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

The man who dropped the corpse climbed out after her. He was tall, in his fifties. He wore a suit and was the only person or thing unmarked by the attack. They must have just been exiting the car when it started. She’d been first and taken the bullets meant for him.

The man looked straight at me as I approached. He blinked once, and I had the sense of a mental photograph being recorded.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said, the voice calm, annoyed and full of authority, as if I were trespassing on his property.

“A passerby. I saw…”

“What did you see?”

I pointed around. “Hard to miss.”

“Forget all about it,” he said. “Walk away and forget it.”

“But there may be wounded…”

“Everyone will be taken care of. I will make sure of that. Go now.”

The next question was a mistake, but curiosity is a lifelong affliction.

“Who are you?”

He blinked again, another photo taken, before reaching inside his jacket. I thought he was going for a gun. Instead he came out with a wallet and held out a wad of ruble notes.

“Beat it.”

“I don’t need money.”

I left him there and picked my way through the wreckage still looking for anyone who needed help. I found only corpses. The body count pushed a dozen.

The sirens grew louder. Another rule—don’t get involved with Russian police unless you’re still an active Chekist. I hustled down Tverskaya, passing a posse of police cars headed to the scene. At the bottom of the street, the cops sealed off the street at Manege Square. No one stopped me, no one tried to ask questions. As horrific as the massacre had been, it was far from a rarity in the New Russia—Ivanov’s Ibansk. It would be dealt with accordingly.

I walked the last block to the Metropole and went up to my room, where I logged on to Ibansk.com. Not half an hour had passed since the shooting. The sirens still whined. Ivanov was on the case. And he had the name of the target of the attack, the one man left standing, the man I had spoken to.

Efim Konychev.

Ibansk Alert! Warfare erupts! A calculated attack this very night outside Tverskaya’s White Nights Club. The target? One of Ibansk’s biggest oligarchs and one of the powers—some say, the power —behind the Baltic Enterprise Commission, the scourge of the Internet, the hoster of choice for evil online.

Efim Konychev survived. How is surely an Ibanskian miracle. A dozen others did not. Who organized the hit? What was the reason? Who’s the shapely number who bought the agricultural cooperative someone had picked out for Konychev to purchase?

Rumors have reached Ivanov in recent weeks of dissention in the ranks of BEC management. It’s never been a comfortable partnership, more an amalgamation of headstrong hoods. The riches that rolled in during the boom years helped paper over differences and dislikes. Setbacks in recent months—Ivanov hears rumors of system crashes, cash flow interruptions and client defections—may have turned up the heat under already simmering tensions. Accusations of cheating and double-cross ensued. Surprise! This is Ibansk. Ivanov surmises one BEC power decides another is to blame—and goes about settling the score in the one way Ibansk knows best.

It appeared I’d witnessed an opening salvo in a battle over the future of the Baltic Enterprise Commission, a shadowy network of Web-hosting servers across the old Soviet Bloc, the go-to resource for anyone looking for a safe place on the Net from which to spam, scam, phish, hack, steal, or purvey porn, especially porn featuring kids.

Konychev was a favorite subject for the chronicler of Ibansk, probably because he was as good a personification as one could find of the unbridled capitalism, Kremlin control, and often crooked undertakings that define the New Russia. I’d been following the news via Ivanov’s posts since returning to New York, which mostly dealt with growing clashes within the BEC and the unknown whereabouts of its boss. According to the latest post, earlier today:

Once thought impregnable, the BEC is in disarray. Disagreements over expansion into new, higher risk lines of business—hacking for hire, industrial espionage, anyone?—have opened fissures among the already fractured federation. Ivanov hears the premier hoster of hackers has itself been hacked—although whether this was simple vandalism or invaders with more insidious purposes is thus far unclear.

The big question is Efim Konychev. Where has he been fiddling while his empire burns? He hasn’t been heard from since the attack on Tverskaya. Reports of infighting among the bosses and beneficiaries of web sleaze abound. That’s one reason he may be lying low. Another could be the identity of the young—and Ivanov does mean young —lovely who was with Konychev the night of the Tverskaya attack. She took three slugs in the back, cut down in her pre-prime. Her identity is a mystery even Ivanov cannot unravel. He can only presume that’s because Konychev wants it that way.

Foos called just as I was finishing breakfast.

“That weird shit on Leitz’s network I saw last night? I spent some more time looking around after you went home. He’s got someone inside working something outside. Guy, maybe gal, goes out through a couple of zombies, accesses data, brings it back, but only to his hard drive, doesn’t touch the servers, and he covers the route pretty well—though not quite well enough.”

Zombies are sleeping computers left online that cyber-crooks borrow when they don’t want to leave a trail, usually for spamming or denial of service attacks, but no reason they can’t obscure other trails.