They brought Volkov to a corner of the barracks where Bury sat at a makeshift table. Broad-shouldered, tattooed fingers, stars on his knees. Bury was drinking strong prison tea from a metal mug and looking at Volkov the way a tired school principal looks at a boy who has done something unforgivable.
Bury didn’t waste words. He took out a pack of cigarettes and set it on the table in front of Volkov. A cheap pack. Prison issue.
Volkov looked at the cigarettes and didn’t understand. Bury said the Queen had sent his regards. “Go ahead. Smoke one. It’s the last pleasure you’re likely to get in here.”
Volkov stared at the pack, and then it began to click. Smoke. Cigarettes. The office. The face of the man he had blown smoke at and mocked. The circle closed, and it tightened around him so hard he could barely breathe.
Volkov started shaking. The same small tremor my daughter had in the corner of his office. Then he began talking fast, stumbling over himself, offering money, information, anything.
Bury quietly finished his tea, stood up, and walked away. He had said all he needed to say. After that, Seven did the talking.
And that conversation would last not minutes or hours, but years. Nine years in which every day would remind him of the night he decided he could destroy other people’s lives without consequences. I did not order that he be killed.
Death is a period. I wanted an ellipsis. He would live a long time. And every day of that life would be worse than the one before.
A week after Volkov was transferred, I turned back to Peshkov. Not in person. There was no need anymore. The Internal Affairs colonel received a second packet of documents, one laying out Peshkov’s connection to Volkov’s group in such detail that not even the devil could have talked his way out of it.
Included with the documents was the same photograph I had shown Peshkov in his office. The colonel passed the packet to the central office, and a month later Peshkov was arrested as he walked out of the prosecutor’s building. Natalia Sergeyevna devoted a separate article to it, and it drew three million views online.
Cleaning up the town took six months. During that time, eighteen employees from the police, prosecutor’s office, and city administration either resigned or were pushed out. Some left on their own when they sensed the wind had shifted. Others were quietly shown the door by my people—no blood, just leverage, pressure, and calm conversations in the right offices…
