Anna shook her head. ‘This place depresses me so much. It’s like the Wild West. There are no international aid agencies here. Why would they risk their people? It’s bandit country.’
With one hand on the wheel she flipped open a cigarette pack, lit two and passed one back to Irina. ‘Have you heard of Viktor Bout?’
‘The world’s biggest arms trafficker? He still in jail in Thailand?’ I powered down my window to lose the smoke. She smiled and did the same.
‘He operated out of Tiraspol. Same as the Russian and Ukrainian Mafia. They come here to hide. The police are a joke. Even when families are afraid their daughters may have been trafficked they don’t report it. They just don’t trust them.’
For the next two kilometres, we passed factory after factory. Even at night, some were still online and belching fumes. Minging cars filled the parking lots, along with the occasional Merc. There was plenty of foot traffic. The young lads sported cheap tracksuit tops, jeans and trainers and wore their hair white-walled around the sides. The occasional whore patrolled a street corner. Ancient Trabants kerb-crawled alongside them. I could almost see the hot breath on their windows.
‘Whatever they manufacture here, they do it away from the prying eyes of the international community.’ Anna flicked her butt out into the darkness. An old guy at the roadside looked tempted to go and pick it up. ‘The border with Ukraine is only a kilometre or two away. It’s unmarked and unguarded. All sorts of goods are smuggled across, from cigarettes and alcohol to serious weapons.’
Irina nodded. ‘Smugglers load up and head for Odessa. From there they can ship whatever they have to the rest of the world. This place is—’
‘Anna! Stop!’
She braked hard and pulled over to the side of the road.
‘Over there …’
I stuck my hand through the open window and pointed. The tank was mounted on a ramp in front of the factory.
‘That’s the building.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’ve seen a picture of it.’
She tilted her head to get a better look at the sign on the wall. ‘Well, he isn’t making tanks.’
14
I reached for the door handle. Anna grabbed my arm. She knew exactly what was on my mind. ‘We only have twenty minutes.’
Irina’s head reappeared between our seats. She looked confused.
I smiled. ‘This is where one of the girls used to work. Maybe they can help. I’ll pop in and find out.’
‘At this time of night? There won’t be—’
‘Do a circuit and I’ll meet you here in fifteen, OK?’ I fastened my jacket and stepped out into the drizzle. I didn’t want Irina to get rattled, or Anna asking what she should do if I wasn’t here when they got back.
Light leaked through the narrow slit windows that ran the length of the building. Trucks were parked up in what looked like a large loading bay to my right. Apart from one slowmoving vehicle in the distance, there was very little sign of life. The main entrance, to the right of the tank, was a gate in the chain-link fence. I approached the security area. A body, fat and bored, sat reading a paper. I veered away to the left.
Fuck knew what I was going to achieve in the time. I wanted to find out what Tarasov was making in there. Tresillian might have sounded like a straight talker, but that didn’t mean what he was saying was straight.
I climbed the three-metre fence. It was simple enough. I was soon kneeling on the wet verge the other side. The factory didn’t have high security or cameras. Crimes against property would be almost non-existent in a place like this. Thousands of Russian troops were based in this narrow strip. If they couldn’t catch a thief and deal with him, the local Mafia would. Anybody intent on doing some nicking probably drove across the border for the night.
The building had large steel air ducts. Steam escaped from a jumble of smaller pipes that looked like a gang of eels clinging to the blockwork. Two cars were nosy-parked against the wall. I rattled in between them for cover.
One of the windows above me was open. I gripped the brackets holding the air ducts. The steel was cold and slippery. An uncomfortable film of sweat gathered on my back as I climbed. I checked my G-Shock. I had less than ten minutes left. I had to get a move on.
A vehicle turned the corner below me. In a couple more seconds its headlights would catch me in their glare. I hauled myself up level with the window and scrambled through.
The corridor had a glass wall that ran the length of the building and overlooked the works area. There was movement down there: three or four people in blue nylon boiler-suits, with hoods and gloves and white wellies. They all had full-face masks attached to a filter hanging from their belts. The place was quiet, apart from the hum of the heaters. There was no clunking of machinery, and not a spot of oil in sight. You don’t need oil when you’re soldering microprocessors onto motherboards.
Further along, the rectangles of silicon and pressed steel were being packed into green, foam-lined aluminium boxes. White stencilling on the sides probably indicated wherever they were bound. I couldn’t be sure - it was all Greek to me.
I pulled the BlackBerry from my jacket, checked the flash was off and activated the zoom. Then I inched forward until I could hold it against the glass. I angled it downwards, and took five shots in a panoramic sequence.
A third vehicle had pulled up beneath the window. Its lights were off. I pulled myself over the sill and onto an air duct, then scrambled back down the pipes to the ground. It was a 3 Series Beamer. That wasn’t a big deal. We’d seen plenty of them. But this one had the low-rider trim. And its registration was C VS 911.
15
Tiraspol
20.15 hrs
The Cold War had never stopped in this city. I’d seen more government propaganda billboards than in Cuba and North Korea combined. There were still more statues of Lenin than you could shake a Red Flag at. Yet another tank was mounted on a ramp beside me, the third T55 I’d seen as a monument to Communist glories since we’d crossed the border.
Heavily armed police loitered on every street corner, twiddling batons and pushing up their peaked caps. Old women in headscarves and long, threadbare coats shuffled past. Rainwater dripped from gutter pipes that disgorged their contents straight into the street.
Irina and I sat double-parked on Constitution Street, staking out Manik. Anna had gone in to check if Slobo was already at the bar. The right-hand side of the road was pulsating with life. On the left was the inky blackness of the graveyard where some of the fifteen thousand dead from the USSR’s eight-year war in Afghanistan lay. A massive billboard hung above the gates. This one featured the hard-line president, Igor Smirnov, shaking hands with Dmitry Medvedev, the president of the Federation. It looked like an ad for a sci-fi convention. With his big eyebrows and bald head, Smirnov was the spitting image of Ming the Merciless, Flash Gordon’s nemesis, and Medvedev was a ringer for Captain Kirk.
Neon lights splashed the bar’s name across the night. It was one of dozens along this stretch. Tinted-glass frontage had fucked over the ground floors of the faded ex-Soviet stucco buildings. It sounded like each bar was trying to out-music the last. The noise poured out onto the cobbled street like a demonic DJ’s mix.
