Volkov grabbed the desk sergeant by the shirt, shouted, threatened, demanded answers, but the sergeant just spread his hands and muttered about old equipment and power issues. Volkov let him go and ran to his office—the same office where the night before he had smoked, laughed, and felt like king of the world.
Now he was pacing that room like a rat in a box, trying to call Peshkov, the one man he thought might still protect him. Peshkov didn’t answer. He already knew.
My contact in the prosecutor’s office told me that Peshkov had been pale and jumpy all morning, had stepped out twice to take personal calls, then shut himself in his office and told his secretary not to let anyone in. The rat smelled danger and was trying to figure out whether he could still save himself. Peshkov was smarter than Volkov.
He understood that the young lieutenant had become a toxic asset, something that needed to be cut loose fast before it dragged everyone else down with it. By five in the evening, things sped up. Internal Affairs sent an inspection team to the station.
Four plainclothes officers came in and demanded access to records, detention logs, and the offices of the operational staff. Volkov saw them from the second-floor window and his legs nearly gave out. He didn’t wait for them to come upstairs. He ran out the back door, got in his car, and drove off.
Igor, who had arrived at the station by then, tried to do the same thing, but my men blocked his exit from the parking lot. Nothing dramatic—just two SUVs that happened to stop in exactly the wrong place. Igor abandoned the car and ran.
He made it two blocks before he was stopped. Not by my men. By Internal Affairs officers, whom the colonel had wisely positioned around the perimeter.
They detained Igor, put him in a car, and took him away. One piece off the board. Maxim didn’t run.
He sat in his office and waited. When the officers came in, he stood up, placed his service weapon on the desk, and said he was ready to give a statement voluntarily. He turned out not just to be cautious, but to be a coward.
And in this case, cowardice was a survival skill. He was betting that cooperation would reduce the damage. Maybe it would. That was no longer my concern.
My concern was Volkov. Volkov was running. He was tearing across town in his black sedan, and my men were behind him, not closing in, not forcing him over.
Just following him, like a shadow you can’t shake. Volkov wasn’t going home. He knew they’d be waiting there.
He wasn’t going to friends, because men like him don’t have friends. He was going to the one person he believed could save him. He was going to Peshkov.
And that was exactly what I had been waiting for. Because Peshkov lived in a large house outside town, and the road to that house ran through an industrial stretch with no cameras, no witnesses, and nothing but concrete, rusted steel, and silence. But I gave no order to intercept him there.
Let him get there. Let him walk into Peshkov’s house. Let them both be in the same place.
Because I had written the ending of this story the night before. And in that ending, every actor needed to be on stage at the same time. Volkov reached Peshkov’s house at seven that evening.
The sun was going down, and the sky over the industrial district had that dirty red color you get before dark, as if someone had smeared blood across glass. My men reported that Volkov left his car at the gate with the engine still running, jumped out, and hammered the intercom button as if his life depended on it. In a way, it did.
He just didn’t yet understand that the life he knew had ended the night before, when he blew cigarette smoke in the face of the wrong man. Peshkov didn’t let him in right away. Five minutes passed before the gate opened, and Volkov practically ran inside.
Peshkov’s house suited its owner. From the front it looked respectable and substantial, with columns and wrought-iron fencing. But if you looked closely, you could see the cracks in the stucco, the rust on the gutters, and how the whole polished image held together by little more than habit—just like Peshkov himself.
Zhora’s men took positions around the property. Two at the gate, two behind the back fence, one on the roof of an abandoned warehouse across the road, where he had a clear view of the yard and the first-floor windows. I sat in my car about two hundred yards away and listened through a directional microphone my men had placed near Peshkov’s office window earlier that day while he was at work…
