By two in the morning, Timur checked in with the first results. He had gotten into Denis’s cloud storage and found things that made my jaw lock so hard it hurt. The video of Alina was not the only one.
There were dozens of files in there. Dozens of girls. Dozens of wrecked lives, neatly sorted into folders by date. The bastard kept an archive like a collector proud of his collection. Timur said the video of Alina had uploaded automatically, but only to 92 percent, because the signal in the basement part of the station was weak.
Eight percent stood between my daughter and catastrophe. Eight percent that hadn’t finished uploading because the concrete walls of that old building blocked the signal. Sometimes fate hangs by threads so thin it makes you afraid to breathe. I told Timur to destroy everything—not just Alina’s video, but all of it. Every file, every recording, every trace.
He warned me that for complete certainty, the phone itself would have to be physically destroyed, because data can still be recovered from a device even after it’s deleted from the cloud. I told him the phone would be destroyed and that part was not his concern. He sent me the details—the model, the IMEI, and the last known geolocation.
The phone was still inside the station, which meant Denis was still there too. By three in the morning, the cloud was wiped clean. Timur used a method he called scorched earth.
He didn’t just delete the files. He overwrote the storage sectors with random data several times and then destroyed the account itself. Recovering anything from the cloud was no longer physically possible. But the phone remained, and I knew Denis could have copied the video somewhere else, sent it to someone, moved it to another device.
We had to get the phone and make sure not one byte had gone anywhere. At 3:30, I gathered Zhora and four of my most trusted men at my house. These were not street punks or hotheaded kids. They were men over forty, each of them prison-tested, each loyal to me not for money but out of principle, and each one familiar with the old rules not from movies but from life.
I explained the situation briefly, without emotion, the way you explain a job. Four cops at the station, one phone with the video, one deputy prosecutor protecting them. Task one: get the phone and destroy it physically.
Task two: make sure neither Volkov nor his men leave town. Task three: find out whether they sent the video to anyone else or told anyone else about my daughter. Zhora listened and asked the only smart question there was—how hard do we go?
I looked him in the eye and answered: no limits, but be smart. I don’t want a war with the system. I want the system to eat these animals alive. Zhora nodded, and I saw the faintest smile on his face, because he understood exactly what I meant.
We were not going to kill cops in the street or start a shootout. We were going to arrange things so they destroyed themselves, and we would simply help the process along. By four in the morning, the first moves were underway.
Zhora contacted our people in city government and in the court system. Not every official and judge was ours, but enough were to get the machine moving. At the same time, I called an old acquaintance, a colonel in Internal Affairs, a man with whom I had maintained a relationship of mutual respect and mutual benefit for the last ten years.
I didn’t tell him about Alina. That was personal, and I don’t put personal matters on public display. I simply told him that a group of officers at the city station had been systematically committing sexual crimes against detained young women, and that I had information to back it up.
The colonel listened in silence and said he would open a file, but he needed evidence. I told him the evidence would come, and hung up. Between four and five in the morning, the thing I had been waiting for finally happened.
Zhora’s men, who were watching the station, reported that Denis came out of the building and got into his car. He was alone, drunk, and pleased with himself. My people didn’t touch him on the street…
