The Metronome (The Counterpoint Trilogy Book 1) by D. R. Bell

Author:D. R. Bell [Bell, D. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: D. R. Bell
Published: 2014-08-18T22:00:00+00:00

The waiter interrupts Bezginovich’s monologue with plates of food. Bezginovich does not seem to worry about his weight, he gets a bloody ribeye steak with a large roast potato and a beet salad on the side. I opt for a boring Caesar salad with chicken.

After taking a few bites, I try to direct the conversation a bit. “Did she make enemies with her reporting?”

“Of course. She exposed an oligarch who was siphoning money from a company that he did not own by charging enormous fees for simple transactions. She deposed a minister who was angling to give away a state company to his son-in-law in a phony privatization…”

“Could any of them have taken revenge?”

“Three years later in a faraway country? Possibly, but I doubt it. Her last and biggest case was about the 1999 bombings, and that was the one that I thought may have put the price on her head. Do you remember the details?”

“No, not the details.”

“In September of 1999, there were a series of apartment buildings explosions in Moscow and two other cities. Hundreds had been killed, and many more injured. The explosions had been blamed on the Chechen terrorists, and Russia launched a war against Chechnya. But some people, including people in the Duma, the Russian parliament, were questioning who was really behind the bombings. Attempts at independent investigations had been squashed until the TV station Telenovostiy launched a series of investigative reports led by my sister, focusing on the incident in the city of Ryazan. In Ryazan, a bomb was found on September 22, 1999. This time, the suspects were arrested. Except that they turned out to work for the FSB, the KGB’s successor. The FSB claimed that this was a test designed to check anti-terror preparedness, but not many believed it.”

“What happened after that?”

“The new government put the 1990’s oligarchs under its thumb. The oligarch that owned the TV station where Natalya worked ended up on the wrong side, was forced to sell the station and leave Russia. Natalya was let go. She tried to continue investigative reporting with one of the newspapers, but she was not popular with the new regime and had trouble getting access. John Brockton was still calling her, and in late 2001 she picked up and moved to California. After that, she came back to Moscow only once, for two weeks in 2003.”

“Rozen told me you were at the trial?”

“Yes, I was there. You know, most of my clients are guilty. Jeff Kron did not strike me as the person who committed the crime. At least not the way they’d been killed.”

“So you wanted someone to investigate?”

“Yes. Your father was not my first or second choice. I have my stable of private investigators in Moscow. I asked one of them and he took the case, but two days later called and declined without comment. I went to another one, same story, only this one told me that someone put a word on the street that this case would be ‘bad for business’ and that I won’t find anyone legitimate in Moscow to take it.

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