Garry Abson - Motherland - A Gripping Crime Thriller Set in the Dark Heart of Putin's Russia

Back at home, she made herself a coffee using instant granules before switching on the computer in the study. The email from Leo Primakov was already waiting for her; it had no title or contents except for a single executable file. She was relieved to note that their anti-virus software was a free download Mikhail had obtained from the internet and it had no Spyware option unless, it suggested, she pay fourteen hundred roubles to upgrade it to the Elite version.

The front door creaked as it opened and her hand flashed to the mouse to minimise the window on the screen. There was silence, then the sound of shoes being kicked off. Her hand hovered over the ‘off’ switch.

‘Hello?’ she called out.

There was a girl’s voice; lively and giggling, then a hiss of “Shh!”

The door to the study opened. ‘Natasha? You’re home.’

She noticed Anton’s glistening eyes and red lips; he rocked on his heels with his hands behind his back. A smile creased the corners of his mouth.

‘Anton, have you been drinking?’ Her eyes flashed to the clock on the computer. ‘It’s not even six.’

‘Sorry, I—’

A younger, moon-face appeared and a bare arm grasped the door frame for support. ‘You must be Tanya.’

‘Hello, Mrs Ivanova.’ The girl grinned.

‘You can call me Natalya, I’m not his mother.’

‘Please don’t send her home, Natasha, it’s my fault.’ Anton tapped his chest and nearly lost his balance.

‘Just drink lots of water and make sure you’re quiet when your father gets back.’ She spoke to Tanya and the girl blushed, ‘And come over for dinner. Don’t worry about last time. Just let me know,’ she smiled, ‘and don’t listen to Anton if he tells you I’m an awful cook – he’s lying.’

The two teenagers left and she heard Anton’s bedroom door close. She hoped they were being sensible but girls were rarely on the pill, and boys with condoms were regarded with suspicion as if they had a sexually transmitted disease. Despite improvements in the last few decades, abortions were still one of the main methods of birth control. She would speak with Anton when he was alone, Mikhail couldn’t be relied on: the first time they tried to have sex, she had insisted on him using a prophylactic and it had ended in an argument when he questioned her on her sexual health.

Now she was alone, she heaved a sigh and felt her chest shake. The questions ran through her mind. What could she do if Mikhail was corrupt? Was the offence serious enough to leave him for? In her mind an affair deserved an automatic disqualification but money in a secret account? Numbers stored electronically didn’t carry the weight of a lipstick smear or a hotel receipt. What the hell was she supposed to do with it? And what of Anton, the boy-not-yet-a-man? If she left Mikhail could they still have a relationship?

She took a deep breath and returned to the computer, re-opened Primakov’s email then clicked on the attachment. The computer asked for permission to install the software he had sent. She tapped “OK”, then again to run it. A box appeared requesting a new password. She typed in “Heidelberg” remembering it as the last place she had seen her own parents truly happy. She confirmed the password then closed the box, The keylogger flashed a message to confirm it was now running invisibly in the background. A pang of guilt came from nowhere. Why didn’t she just ask Mikhail about it? She was accusing him of being secretive and yet was doing exactly the same thing herself.

Her phone started buzzing. She deleted Primakov’s email, then emptied her virtual waste bin to remove all trace of it. She glanced at her iPhone and tapped the green circle to take the call. Instantly there was the urgent wail of a police siren.

‘Mikhail?’

‘Just a minute, Angel… Hey, get out of the way, shit-for-brains!’

She heard him let loose more obscenities. As a senior officer, he was entitled to use a blue light on his own car but it didn’t always help when many of the ancient streets were narrow and there were traffic lights and crossings at every intersection.

The siren stopped. ‘Drop everything,’ he shouted. ‘Get to the Maritime Victory Park on Krestovsky Island.’

‘What is it?’

‘I said “Get out the fucking way!”’

She was deafened by the simultaneous blast of a car horn and the wail of the siren through the phone’s earpiece; they stopped abruptly.

‘There’s a body.’

She sat up straight. ‘Zena?’

The siren started again and she heard him fumble with his phone. ‘No idea. I’ll see you there.’

She ran down the stairs, taking several steps at a time. At the entrance hall, she burst through the block door and ran to her Volvo. She stopped. To get there quickly she needed a car with emergency lights but that meant going back to headquarters. Then, it was painfully time consuming to wait in line to be breathalysed. Instead, she could travel to Krestovsky Island in her Volvo, or get there even quicker if she took the Metro.

The gun tapped against her hip as she ran towards the entrance of Admiralteyskaya station, pausing to swipe her Podorozhnik card on the barrier. Feeling the warm air envelop her, she descended on a ribbon of steel into the city’s underground station; one of many built deeper than normal so Piter ’s population could survive a nuclear attack. She switched to the left of the escalator and started jogging down it. After a hundred metres, a young family of four, each with a suitcase proportional to their size, blocked her way and she observed a booth at the bottom where a guard, stupefied by boredom, was monitoring the CCTV cameras fixed to the sloping ceiling. She heard a commotion and turned to see a group of four OMON in their grey-blue uniforms pushing their way down and coming to a halt a few steps above her. At the bottom, she passed the woman in the booth then took another escalator, this time shorter, and she came out in a wide, marble corridor with arches on both sides and a nautical-themed mural at the end.

The family were slow to get off and the travellers disgorged around them; a stream circumventing a rock. A uniformed sleeve went to brush her aside, and she quickly identified the owner as a major in the National Guard. It was a new army of four hundred thousand with the authority to shoot into crowds in the event that people stopped believing the propaganda on TV and decided to get rid of the president. The man would be a pauper or a millionaire, depending on his honesty, and the stony face and neat brown hair gave nothing away.

The train was already at the platform and she rushed for the doors, feeling a momentary panic for not checking which direction she was heading. A sign on the train told her she was on the Frunzensko-Primorskaya line, but that was hardly a surprise when it was the only one serving the station. She saw a diagram, a line dotted with locations, and after the first stop she knew it was heading for Krestovsky Island.

Outside the Metro station, she was momentarily blinded by the bright sun. A distant siren cut through the sounds of traffic and tourists and made her wonder if it was Mikhail. She jogged down the steps and crossed the road where two empty police cars were parked on the pavement at the open gates of the Maritime Victory Park. She skirted between them and then resumed her running pace, soon drawing alongside Divo Ostrov , the Miracle Island amusement park. A child’s electric car darted in front of her, nearly tripping her up; inside its single seat was a capuchin monkey clinging to the doors, its teeth bared and eyes wide in terror. The animal’s owner twisted the tiny steering wheel on the miniature BMW’s remote control, and the monkey shrieked as it sped towards a group of teenage girls. Natalya jogged on and heard screams as a crude rocket ship arced above her, supporting wires fixed to a massive metal arm like a spinning crane. There were more screams and she glanced up to see a couple being catapulted fifty metres in the air by a human slingshot.