The IDFM was a Chechen group, and as a journalist during the
Chechnya war, Politska had established links with its leader. The group were
certainly no saints, but the mass murder of children was not their style
either. Something smelt wrong. Using her contacts, Politska had succeeded
yesterday in talking to the group's leader, who'd vehemently denied any
involvement with the school bombing. It's all a set-up, he'd told her, and she
believed him.
Her next move had been to arrange a meeting with her FSB informant.
A reliable source - at a price - in the past, on this occasion he'd refused
point-blank to discuss the subject.
"You're walking on quicksand, Anya," he'd warned.
"Let this one drop."
"I can't, you know better than that," she'd replied. She'd
experienced more than her fair share of threats and intimidation over the years
- beatings, poisoning, electric shocks, days of confinement in a pit, even a
mock execution. But these were the occupational hazards of investigative
journalism in Karpev's Russia, and if you weren't prepared to risk them, then
you needed to change your job.
When she'd got back to the office, though, she'd felt despondent.
All she had was the denial of the IDFM's leader, but on its own this meant
nothing. No one would believe him without independent evidence supporting his
claim, yet she was running out of leads. Then, this morning, everything had
changed.
When she'd arrived in the office, she'd found an email sent to her
anonymously overnight. Nothing in the body of the text, just an attachment and
a heading 'Look at the date'. Opening
the attachment, she'd found a draft press release on FSB-headed paper
describing the terrorist attack on the school. As she'd started to read
through, she'd felt her professional instincts take hold.
The press release summarised an incident at School No 86 in
Pechatniki. It detailed how terrorists had taken over the building during
school hours, rigged it with explosives and held children and teachers captive.
But in this version there was no actual explosion, no death toll, and the
terrorists had escaped. Politska scrolled up and down the text, confused.
Suddenly her eyes fixed on the top line - the draft press release was dated the
day before the actual incident
occurred.
She
swiveled in her chair to stare out of the window as the implications fell into
place. The school bombing, as she'd suspected from the outset, was no
straightforward terrorist incident. Now she had solid evidence that the FSB had
themselves been responsible. The appalling consequences might not have been
their intended outcome, but they had always been a possibility. As her father
used to say, if you play with fire, there's always a chance you'll get burned.
Of
course, she acknowledged, this was not the
first time the FSB had stage-managed terrorist incidents. All the evidence
pointed to the apartment bombings in 1999 being perpetrated by the FSB in order to legitimise the
subsequent invasion of Chechnya and the assumption of power by one of its own. Almost simultaneously, an
unexploded bomb had been found
and defused in Ryazan, and
subsequent police investigations identified the three men responsible as FSB
agents. Even these were not isolated examples: it was now clear that the FSB
were complicit in bomb explosions in the marketplace in the southern
Russian city of Astrakhan in 2001, at the bus stops in Voronezh in 2004 and on
the Moscow-Grozny train in 2005. And, as
Politska herself knew well, during the Chechnya conflicts, the
FSB organised numerous kidnappings of journalists and foreign NGO
workers, pretending to be Chechen terrorists, in order to build up
international support for the Russian invasion.
Nonetheless the mass murder of
children . . . well, that was in another league altogether. She'd got President
Karpev now.
George Eccles, writing as G W Eccles,
graduated from the London School of Economics with a law degree and subsequently became a partner in one of the major
international financial advisory firms.
In 1994, George left London to move to Russia
and Central Asia during the tumultuous period that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. His work involved extensive travel
throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan
and Turkmenistan
- often to places with restricted access to foreigners. During his time there,
he advised a number of real-life oligarchs how best to take advantage of the
opportunities that became available as regulation crumbled and government
became increasingly corrupt. Against this background, while his novels are
fiction, many of the anecdotes and scenes are inspired by actual events.
His first thriller: The
Oligarch, was awarded a Silver Medal both at the Global E-book Awards 2013 and
at the Independent Publishers Book Awards 2013, as well as being selected as
IPPY Book of the Day.
George is married and now
lives with his wife in a hilltop village not far from Cannes in the South of France.
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