I didn’t want noise. I wanted silence, followed by a collapse that would look not like a gangster’s revenge but like the inevitable downfall of a criminal ring inside law enforcement. So I kept waiting and kept placing pieces.
At eleven in the morning, I made the first public move. My contact in Internal Affairs—the colonel—received an anonymous packet of documents. Timur had prepared them overnight using data from Denis’s cloud archive.
We removed everything related to Alina, scrubbed it clean, but left the recordings of the other girls, the ones Volkov and his crew had abused over the previous six months. Along with the recordings came bank statements for Volkov, Denis, Igor, and Maxim, which Timur had pulled from their accounts, plus messages showing their connection to Major Sychev. We left Peshkov out for the moment. He was a bigger fish, and I was saving a different hook for him.
The colonel in Internal Affairs got the packet and, exactly as I expected, didn’t sit on it. He knew the information had come from me, even if technically it was anonymous. He also knew that if he ignored it, I would find another route, and then the damage would spread beyond Volkov to everyone who had looked the other way.
The colonel was a smart man. He called his superiors, got authorization for an inquiry, and by noon had launched the official process. The machine was moving.
At the same time, I pulled another lever. There was a journalist in town, Natalia Sergeyevna, who worked for a local paper and specialized in corruption inside law enforcement. She was one of the few genuinely honest people in the city, and I respected her courage, even though our worlds had never crossed directly.
Through an intermediary, she was given part of the material—no videos, just documents and bank records, enough to make her start digging. I knew press coverage would create public pressure that would make it harder to bury the case through an internal review. When the system tries to protect its own, the only thing that stops it is light.
And in this case, light meant publicity. By one in the afternoon, Volkov still had no idea how large the disaster heading toward him really was. He went home, ate lunch, and according to the location data, lay down for a nap.
He slept while his world was coming apart. Igor went to the gym. Maxim—the cautious one—didn’t go home or to the gym. He went to see Major Sychev. That was interesting, and I told Zhora to put extra eyes on that direction.
Maxim stayed with Sychev for about an hour. When he came out, his face was gray. One of Zhora’s men took a photo and sent it to me.
I looked at the picture and understood that Sychev had told Maxim the truth. The old cop, unlike the younger ones, understood exactly what kind of hole they had fallen into. He had recognized me the night before, and I’m sure he had spent the entire night awake, knowing what was coming.
And when Maxim showed up asking questions about Denis, Sychev didn’t bother lying. He told the truth, because the truth was his only chance that the younger men would panic and start saving themselves while he tried to slip into the background. At three in the afternoon, Maxim called Volkov and woke him up.
I didn’t hear the conversation, but I saw what it did. Ten minutes after the call, Volkov came tearing out of his building in gym shorts and a T-shirt, eyes wild, hands shaking. He jumped into his car, peeled out hard enough to make the tires squeal, and tore across town toward the station.
He had finally learned who I was. Maxim had told him everything Sychev had said, and Volkov—the same man who that morning had taken me for a frightened old nobody—suddenly understood that he had blown smoke in the face of a man whose word could make people disappear, businesses close, and verdicts change. At the station, Volkov stormed up to the desk and demanded the surveillance footage from the previous night.
He wanted to see who had taken Denis, but the footage was gone. Zhora had taken care of that early that morning. Our man in the station’s tech office had wiped the archive and blamed it on an equipment failure…
