whether that was truly a distinction or just a rationalization. If you danced with the devil for a very good reason, have you not still danced with the devil?
Of all the cities in his homeland, Saint Petersburg was Yuriy’s favorite. The city’s own history was a near-perfect reflection of Russia’s history. In 1703 Peter the Great had founded the city during the Great Northern War with the Swedes; during World War One, Saint Petersburg’s name, deemed excessively Teutonic by the powers-that-be, was changed to Petrograd; in 1924, seven years after the Bolshevik Revolution and a few days after the death of Vladimir Lenin, it was dubbed Leningrad; and finally, in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was renamed once again—reverted to—Saint Petersburg.
Saint Petersburg, a Time Capsule of Russian History. Not a bad title for a book, he thought. Too bad he had no literary aspirations. The tsars, the Bolsheviks, the fall of the empire, then finally democracy—though perhaps democracy tainted with a bit of totalitarianism.
Tonight was especially chilly, with a brisk wind blowing off the Neva River and whistling through the branches of the trees. Unseen in the darkness, bits of litter skittered across concrete and cobblestones. Down a nearby alley came the clink of a bottle on brick, then a slurred curse. Another bic had either run out of vodka or spilled his last bit of it. For all his love for Saint Petersburg, Yuriy knew she’d fallen far from her zenith. This was true of the whole country.
The collapse of the Union had been tough on everyone but had been especially tumultuous for his former employer, the KGB, now known dually as the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). These were only the latest in a long string of acronyms under which the Russian intelligence services had operated, starting with the dreaded Cheka. Arguably, though, the KGB—the Committee for State Security—had been the most effective and the most feared of all its alphabet-soup predecessors and descendants alike.
Before taking retirement at a fractional pension in 1993, Yuriy had worked for the cream of the KGB crop, Directorate S—Illegals—of the First Chief Directorate. The real spies. No diplomatic cover, no embassy to which you can run, no deportation if caught but rather imprisonment or death. He’d had some successes, but nothing that had cast him into the stratosphere of the KGB’s upper echelons, and so at forty-five years of age he’d found himself unemployed on the streets of Moscow with a set of skills that left him few career paths: contract intelligence and security or crime. He’d chosen the former, opening up a consultation firm that catered to the hordes of Western investors that had in the early days of post-Soviet rule flooded Russia. Yuriy owed, at least obliquely, many of his early successes to the Krasnaya Mafiya, the Red Mafia, and its biggest gangs, the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the Dolgoprudnenskaya, and the Izmailovskaya, all of which had wasted even less time than had foreign investors in pillaging Russia’s chaotic economy. Of course, the Krasnaya Mafiya was unconcerned with the subtle niceties of business conduct, and investors from Europe and America were only too aware of this, a circumstance Yuriy was only too happy to exploit himself. That was the operative word back then—exploit—and the only difference among himself, the Mafia, and the common street hood was the methods each employed to obtain the desired ends. For Yuriy, the method was simple: protection. Keep visiting businessmen alive and out of the hands of kidnappers. Some of the lesser gangs, too small to run their own sophisticated protection and extortion games, had taken to kidnapping well-dressed Europeans or Americans staying in Moscow’s finest hotels, then sending a ransom note along with a severed ear or a finger or toe—or worse. The local militia, underpaid and overwhelmed, was of little help, and more often than not the victim was killed, ransom paid or unpaid. There was no honor among kidnappers. Only brutal pragmatism.
Yuriy had hired former KGB colleagues and paramilitary types—mostly former Spetsnaz commandos who’d been similarly disenfranchised—to escort clients to and from their meetings and make sure they left the country alive and still in possession of all their parts. The money had been good, but as Moscow’s economy (both official and underground) had burgeoned, so too had the cost of living soared, and while many entrepreneurs like Yuriy were seeing more money than they ever thought