Lensky Connection

Conrad Delacroix

Description

Russia, 1996.In the run up to the Presidential election Major Valeri Grozky of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) is fighting organised crime in St Petersburg, making his own stand against the drug gangs after the death of his older brother from a drug overdose. His fight puts him into an uneasy alliance with Natassja Petrovskaya, a journalist acquaintance determined to expose corruption.Against his wishes, Grozky isselected fora Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) operation investigating an oligarch involved in an oil company privatisation fraud which an American Senate investigation will publicly expose. Unless the growing political scandal can be contained, it threatens to topple the Russian government.Grozky is in a race against time to prove the oligarch's guilt. As Grozky delves into the fraud, he discovers the trail leads outside Russia and dark forces are operating on both sides of the Atlantic.With the Russian election looming,he and Natassja are marked because they know too much. Grozky is forced to reassess his loyalties and confront the real enemy

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803138213
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2021 Conrad Delacroix

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781803138213

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For my grandfather, Ivar Bisgaard Throndsen, and to those who have inspired me on my journey which I hope has been worthy of their creative counsel (aka Stuart Adamson, Joe Strummer, Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Harris, Lucinda Williams, John Sturges, Jean-Pierre Melville, Eric Ambler, Walter Mosley).


Contents
Prologue

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33

Epilogue
Acknowledgements


Prologue
St Petersburg, Russia
Tuesday 20 June 1995
The burial at the Serafimov Cemetery in the Primorsky District was a small gathering, barely a dozen people.
Major Valeri Grozky of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) had not expected to bury his elder brother, Timur. The coffin rested on his left shoulder, Grozky’s left hand braced around the upper arm of his father, Keto, who had made the journey from Batumi, Georgia. Keto had been a soldier before he’d joined the Georgian KGB. Even in retirement, he had lost none of his military bearing, holding his son at arm’s length in a rock-steady grip.
Though Grozky did not know this cemetery he knew the trees, for the maple, pine and cypress surrounding the graves were all to be found in the Batumi Botanical Gardens where he and Timur had played hide-and-seek as boys. Instead of the subtropical plants of the Caucasus, Serafimov’s ranks were filled by silver birches, lime, linden and thickets of black alder.
They reached the burial plot and put the coffin down. Across the ground, a carpet of tousled green plants butted up behind the gravestones as ferns mingled with pilewort and ground elder. Timur’s final resting place resembled a small square of cleared earth in a wooded glade rather than a grave. Grozky took small comfort that Timur would have liked his shaded plot, though it could not ease Grozky’s anger at the manner of his brother’s death.
A fifteen-year veteran of the KGB, Grozky kept his emotions in check. A combat death he could have accepted, but Timur had not died in battle. A decorated soldier, Timur had survived the Afghanistan war unscathed except for his mind. A year ago, with Grozky’s support, Timur’s decline had stabilised and he was fighting his demons to rediscover the man he had been. Grozky did not know when his brother had turned to heroin but the opiate had stripped Timur of his resolve. An overdose was not the inglorious way Timur would have chosen to go. A tarnished veteran was being laid to rest alongside those who had given their lives in a ten-year campaign the Soviet government had never publicly acknowledged. Had Grozky not been serving in the Third Directorate during the war, he might have ended up the same way as Timur.
His brother’s funeral was, Grozky thought, an occasion for the grieving and the angry. For Grozky’s wife, Marisha, now crying uncontrollably into Keto’s chest, it was enough to cherish Timur’s memory. She had loved Timur and mourned him like a sibling. Grozky could not accept Timur had to die.
Grozky walked over to where his father had taken charge of comforting Marisha. Several yards away Dr Anosova, from the clinic, was talking to a pretty girl Grozky didn’t know. In a smart two-piece black suit, she was the best dressed of all of them. Timur had always had an eye for the girls.
“I didn’t raise a son to die a junkie. He should have died in Afghanistan,” Keto said. His sadness could not hide his disgust.
“I remember Timur for the brother he was. You raised a good man. He didn’t deserve this,” Grozky said.
It was harder for Keto, for the son he had nurtured and prepared for life with the soldier’s code had succumbed to despair and died a degenerate. Timur’s death was too raw.
They were joined by Dr Anosova and the pretty girl.
“Valeri, I’m so sorry about Timur. You did everything you could,” Dr Anosova said.
“Perhaps, perhaps not.”
“My sister, Roza, is a recovering addict. There isn’t a day that goes by when I wonder what else I could do,” said the pretty girl. “Trust me. What more could you have done?”
Grozky heard the pain in her voice, the anger too.
“Valeri, have you met Natassja?” Dr Anosova said.
“Natassja Petrovskaya,” Natassja said, extending her hand.
“Valeri Grozky.”
After a firm handshake, Natassja said, “Roza would have come today. She was too upset.”
“It’s very good of you to have taken the time,” Grozky said.
“It’s the least I could do. If it wasn’t for the damned gangs polluting the city with drugs, Timur might still be alive,” Natassja said.
Grozky nodded. Where once the heroin supply had been restricted to the opium crop from the poppy plantations of Kyrgyzstan, St Petersburg was overrun with heroin. The Soviet Union’s decade of occupation in Afghanistan had enabled the country’s drug lords to profit from new supply routes to the West. Farmed opium sold for US$25 a kilo was worth US$1,000 a kilo wholesale by the time the morphine base had been turned into heroin, and US$50,000 a kilo wholesale when it arrived in Western Europe. Grozky felt Natassja take his hand and press something into his palm.
“I work for the Kommersant newspaper. I’m writing a piece demanding the government does more to tackle the drug gangs. I’m very sorry about Timur. If there’s anything I can do to help, please call me,” Natassja said.
“Thank you.”
Grozky looked down at her card. His brother would not have wanted his legacy to be reduced to a drug addict with a criminal record for petty theft. Grozky chose not to recall what Timur had become. He had been found dead on a park bench. The autopsy report highlighted a purity of heroin in his body well beyond the fix he could have afforded. Timur had died of an overdose or perhaps it had been made to look like one. That Grozky doubted he would ever know only added to his anger.
They gathered at the grave’s edge to lower the coffin. Grozky’s face betrayed no emotion as he held the tension on the rope and lowered Timur’s coffin into his grave. It was as the chunks of earth battered the top of the polished wood that the finality of his loss hit him, no longer sadness but fury at his failure to save his brother.
Standing opposite Grozky, one long gaze from Keto was enough to tell his remaining son the account must be settled. Timur might have survived were it not for those who were making millions of dollars from the misery of addicts. There was a debt to be paid for those who had taken his life. Grozky turned to the assembled group.
“Thank you all for coming to say farewell to Timur. He was a good man. I know it would have meant a lot to him to have you here and it means a lot to me and my father. Before we go and toast Timur, I give you my word, he did not die in vain.”
Grozky wasn’t one for empty gestures. In the calm of Serafimov Cemetery, amidst the cover of the trees, he had made his pact with Timur.


1
Yekaterinburg, Russia
Sunday 25 February 1996
The sniper lay on the frozen grating of the metal walkway. It was the fifth day of his vigil. He didn’t know this city. A vantage point, a line of sight and he was set. The faded grey/white camouflage of his thick winter suit might have been aged to match the scuffed paintwork of the abandoned gantry crane. Except for the wind it was a good position, over fifty feet high with a 180-degree view across the railway yard and beyond. He was losing the light. Another hour at most.
He was a late addition, one of eight sharpshooters now spread above the city and supported by two jeeps. Like the others, he was concerned with the practicality of the mission. They could cover the assigned ground, but the chances of spotting the target seemed slim, not that any of them would dare tell Ivan the Surgeon. Ivan told them daily that the longer it took to find the target, the longer it would be before they could all get back to Chechnya. He hadn’t served with the colonel before and he was grateful for that. With Ivan’s reputation for slaughter, he should have been Ivan the Butcher, except he was too clinical a killer. It would be warmer in a jeep, but it was better not to be around Ivan. It must be a big job though, to select a dozen Spetsnaz troops from the Chechen front line. At least in Yekaterinburg he didn’t have to worry about the wretched counter-snipers. Chechnya was becomin