Once Upon a Time in Russia Read Free Page B

wasn’t visible, but he could see his driver, still sitting behind what was left of the steering wheel. The man looked strange, hunched forward at an odd angle, smoke rising from his jacket. Berezovsky was about to call out to him—when he came to a sudden realization.
    The man no longer had a head.
    Berezovsky collapsed to his knees, as sirens sang in the distance.

CHAPTER THREE
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    June 8, 1994, 2:00 a.m.,
    Logovaz Club
    â€œW ELL, THIS IS NEW.”
    Alexander Litvinenko ran his fingers through his hair, as he watched Igor Davny, a junior agent under his command, trying to pry what appeared to be a piece of a leather seat cushion from the base of a partially melted, steel trash can. The leather had fused to the steel, making the task nearly impossible, but Davny wasn’t going to give up so easily. The young man cursed as his gloved hands slipped off the material, then he bent at the waist for another go.
    â€œNow they’re blowing each other up,” Davny continued, with a grunt of effort, as he worked on the leather. “Less efficient than a bullet, but I guess it makes a statement.”
    Litvinenko grimaced, refusing to see the humor in the situation. It was the middle of the night, and he had much better things to do than pick through a still-smoldering crime scene. As a newly promoted officer on the central staff of the FSB, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, specializing in counterterrorism and organized crime, he had thought he was beyond thissort of menial task. When he had gotten the emergency call, he had just crawled into bed with his new girlfriend—Marina, a ballroom dancer, twice as beautiful as he deserved—after a long dinner at a friend’s house.
    He took great care as he stepped over a piece of wood from the nearby destroyed fruit stand. They were still a good ten yards from the center of the blast radius, but even here, the air was thick with the scent of ash, burning pavement, and melted rubber.
    He shifted his gaze toward the spot next to the mangled Mercedes limousine at the direct center of the crime scene, where the most senior investigators were crawling through a pile of rubble and shrapnel—the remains of the parked Opel, or ground zero, as the inevitable report would declare. Litvinenko was already certain what the investigators would find; he’d surveyed the blast area when he’d first arrived on the scene. A fairly sophisticated explosive device, hidden in a parked car. The bomb had been detonated by remote, and despite what the younger agent might have thought, this wasn’t a unique crime scene at all. Litvinenko was well aware, from his latest officer’s briefing, that over the past few days, there had been at least two other bombings in Moscow—one of them right in front of the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. Both had been “business related”—and considering the most likely target of this evening’s attack, this incident was of a similar nature.
    If anything, this explosion was the mildest of the three. There had been surprisingly few casualties, considering the size of the bomb, and the brazen location and timing of the detonation—the middle of the afternoon, just a few doors down from the Logovaz Club.
    â€œHe’s one lucky bastard,” Davny said, finally giving up on the strip of leather. The young agent moved next to Litvinenko, likewisescanning the crime scene in front of them. “Burns to his hands and face, some shrapnel wounds, but other than that, nothing serious.”
    â€œHis driver wasn’t quite as lucky,” Litvinenko noted.
    The man’s head had been sheared right off by a chunk of the Opel’s trunk. The force of the explosion had been severe; aside from the mangled Mercedes, at least five other cars had been utterly destroyed, along with the fruit stand and eight stories of windows of an office building across the street. Amazingly, only six