The sentence was handed down on a Thursday at 2:30 in the afternoon. I was not in the courtroom. I didn’t need to be there, because I knew the verdict before the judge opened her mouth.
Nine years in a general-regime penal colony. Not special housing for former law enforcement. Not a lighter arrangement for cooperation. General population, where ordinary inmates serve time—thieves, killers, fraudsters, and men who live by their own rules, rules in which a former cop, a sexual predator, and a bully ranks lower than dirt. Denis got seven years. Igor got six.
Maxim, thanks to his cooperation, got four years probation and walked out of court a free man. Zhora’s people watched him board a train that same evening and leave town for good. Sychev got three years for aiding and abetting.
Peshkov was untouched by the trial. His name never appeared in the case file. He sat in his office thinking he had saved himself.
He was wrong, but his time had not yet come. Every piece on the board has its moment, and Peshkov was an endgame I would play later, after the dust settled and public attention moved on to other scandals. After the sentence was read, Volkov was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.
One of Zhora’s men, sitting in the back row, took a picture. In it, Volkov looked as if he had aged twenty years in three months. Hollow cheeks. Dead eyes. A bent back.
He was no longer the cocky lieutenant who put his feet on the desk and blew smoke in people’s faces. He was a broken man heading toward his own private hell, and he still didn’t understand how hot that hell was going to be. Transfer to the colony took two weeks.
Volkov was moved through three transit prisons, and at each one he was met by men who knew who he was, what he had done, and who was waiting for him at the end of the trip. No one touched him. They even gave him tea and cigarettes. But they looked at him the way people look at a dead man who just hasn’t been buried yet.
And from those looks alone, according to the transport officers, Volkov stopped eating and sleeping. He arrived at Penal Colony No. 7 on a Friday evening. In certain circles it was known simply as Seven—a place with strict order and a hard inmate hierarchy.
The man in charge at Seven was someone called Bury, a broad-shouldered, shaved-head convict I had known personally for twenty-five years and with whom I had served my second sentence in the same barracks. Bury had received a note from me a week before Volkov arrived. It was short: Meet him, explain things, let him live a long time.
Volkov was assigned to a unit and given a bunk in the barracks. No one touched him the first day. He lay on his bunk staring at the ceiling, and maybe for the first time in his life he started really thinking about what he had done.
Or maybe he wasn’t thinking at all, just afraid, because fear can crowd out every other thought until there’s no room left for remorse or hope. On the second day, they came for him. Two inmates, calm and silent, walked up to his bunk and said the man in charge wanted a word…
