Cold Black. Alex Shaw

       Chapter 3

       Maidan Nezalejsnosti, Kyiv, Ukraine

      Dudka stood with his dog on the edge of Maidan Nezalejsnosti and watched as Kyivites went about their daily routines of shopping, drinking, and falling in love. A hot August lunchtime on Kyiv’s Independence Square, and all those who could manage it were away on holiday or at their dachas. Those who stayed behind, however, enjoyed the sunshine.

      Maidan Nezalejsnosti was the heart of the city and had been home to innumerable national celebrations. Every New Year’s Eve it was crammed with over a hundred thousand people waiting for the clock to strike midnight. Dudka had been at the festivities in London once, and been most unimpressed. Independence Day was another great celebration, as was Victory Day, the only hangover from the Soviet Union he enjoyed. In recent years, however, the square had been home to many political gatherings.

      As the home of the Orange Revolution in 2004, well over two hundred thousand Ukrainians had camped and protested until they caused a rerun of the presidential election. One year later it became the home of those wishing to cause a rerun of the parliamentary elections. The ironic aspect to Dudka was that in the first event the then Prime Minister had illegally won the election while in the second he claimed he had illegally lost. And now? Well, now he was the President of Ukraine.

      Such were the politics of Ukraine. In the past Dudka had tried to keep out of it all and had ‘supported’ the right person, regardless of his personal preferences. He had initially been appointed by Ukraine’s first President in 1992, and again kept his views to himself when promoted by his successor to the position of Deputy Head of the SBU, head of the Main Directorate for Combating Corruption and Organised Crime (Director). However his boss – he hated to think of him as that – Yuri Zlotnik, was a highly political beast.

      Zlotnik’s position as head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was a parliamentary appointment, upon recommendation by the President. Directly under Zlotnik were deputies who were appointed, in turn, on his recommendation, again by the President of Ukraine. In normal circumstances this process would have resulted in a fair, impartial, and dedicated security service; however, in a government where the President and Prime Minister had been at war, problems arose.

      Zlotnik was a compromise candidate, the President’s initial recommendation having been boycotted by the parliament, led by the then Prime Minister. It had been a bitter time as the two sides played a game of chess. Finally, as a ‘compromise’, Dudka took delight in remembering, Zlotnik had been confirmed as head of the SBU. Zlotnik then attempted to clean house by putting pressure on the President to appoint men close to him who were, no surprise to anyone, supporters of his sponsor, the Kremlin-favoured Prime Minister. Now, two years later, the former Prime Minister, originally a mechanic from the eastern city of Donetsk, had finally become the President of Ukraine. Zlotnik and his pro-Russian cronies were now cemented in power, the President’s men.

      Zlotnik had decided to keep Dudka in place. Dudka was the oldest and most respected Director in the SBU, with years of distinguished service prior to that with the Soviet KGB. With age, however, Dudka had become less subtle and it was no secret that he wasn’t a fan of the new President and his men from Donetsk. If asked, Dudka no longer held back with his honest and sometimes blunt views.

      Dudka reached down to stroke his dog, a grin on his face. He remembered how Zlotnik had turned red when, at an office party, Dudka had shared these views with him. Zlotnik had slammed his vodka glass down on the table and stormed off. As such, Dudka was, in essence, the enemy within. He was constantly butting heads with his boss but he had got results, more so than Zlotnik’s cronies. He was, as Zlotnik had told him to his face, ‘an oxymoron – a convenient inconvenience’.

      Dudka turned and headed home, back up Karl Marx Street, or Horodetskoho Street as it had now been renamed, to his flat two minutes away on Zankovetskaya Street. Both streets, the first named after a political activist, the second after an apolitical actress, were busy with locals and tourists alike, shopping at the overpriced boutiques. No doubt his colleague and head of the SBU’s Anti-terrorist Centre, Pavel Utkin, would be looking at the summer crowds and worrying. He saw danger in everything.

      Dudka and Utkin also did not see eye to eye. They were constantly colliding with each other over who had jurisdiction, his own Directorate for Combating Corruption and Organised Crime or Utkin’s Anti-terrorist Centre. Nowadays the distinction wasn’t clear; organised crime seemed to be increasingly carried out to fund terrorism. For his part, Dudka wanted things to be smooth. It was Utkin, the younger man by twenty years, with an eye on the top job, who wanted to take over. The problem was that Utkin, too, was one of the President’s men.

      Dudka found himself working with the ‘Bandits from Donetsk’ – as the press, not he, had labelled them. The consensus had been that January’s presidential elections would oust the bandits. Consensus had been wrong. The election had given them the most powerful position of all, that of President of Ukraine.

      Dudka reached his building, entered the lift, and rose to the third floor. His official lunch hour over, he settled his dog back down and left for his office. He would walk, not bothering to use his car, an advantage of living in the very heart of the city. He’d be there within sixteen minutes, taking a circuitous route to bypass the crowds on the central square. He put his tie and jacket back on, both bought from the state-owned central store, Tzum, and shut the front door.

      Since secession from the Soviet Union, Ukraine had changed greatly and yet not at all, he mused as he journeyed back down Zankovetskaya. The shops lining the capital’s streets were full of expensive imported goods and the city bustled with a tenfold increase in traffic, but beneath the surface many of the same people were running the country. They might have renounced communism but they were still Soviet in mentality. The faces hadn’t changed either. It was the new generation that would really change the place and he feared that, at seventy-two, he wouldn’t live long enough to see his dear country become fully grown. His day had gone and all he could do now was ensure his homeland didn’t implode before he could hand it over. His own protégé, Blazhevich, was one of the people who would shape the future of the SBU. He was young, not yet thirty-five, and untarnished by the Soviet past. He had first proved himself to be a worthy officer two years before, when, working together, they had halted an international arms trading network. If Dudka had to name one good man in the nest of vipers that the SBU had become, it would be Vitaly Blazhevich.

      Dudka crossed Kyiv’s main boulevard, Khreshatik, by means of the underpass and puffed as he walked up Prorizna Street. The hills kept him trim. He thought of himself as solid. Certainly not fat. Yet his late wife, the ballerina, had always been putting him on a diet! Two American businessmen passed him walking downhill. One was gesticulating to the other, who was nodding and looking serious. Dudka took this in his stride. Fifteen years ago all foreigners would have been stared at, but today, although still undiscovered by international tourism, more and more foreign businessmen were in Ukraine.

      The criminal element, too, seemed to understand the value of ‘foreign business diversity’. In the early days his caseload had been heavy with instances of attempted or actual extortion on and against foreign business interests. Now these were few and far between as the criminals themselves tried to expand abroad. This, however, caused new headaches as he laboured to improve ties with foreign agencies and Interpol. But Dudka’s current caseload was surprisingly