‘Ah …’ said Wagner. ‘What you’re looking at are the remains of an elite task force made up of Ukrainian Spetsnaz specialists. Operation Achilles. The official story from the Ukrainian government was that they were going to approach us about liaison and try to nail Vitrenko in Ukraine. Our guess is that this was a last desperate attempt to take Vitrenko out of the picture by illegal assassination inside the Federal Republic.’

‘Is this in Germany?’ Fabel looked at the forest in the background of the photographs.

‘No. It’s outside a place called Korostyshev, to the west of Kiev. They were assembled there for a pre-mission briefing. At a hunting lodge. Get it?’

Fabel looked at the photographs again. ‘Very ironic. And very Vitrenko. No survivors.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Wagner with a knowing smile. ‘Like you said, it was all very Vitrenko. The bodies you see there were more than likely taken out by the other members of the team. All of whom have disappeared from sight. It took the Ukrainians a few days to put it all together, but they reckon they know who the infiltration-team leader was. There had been an attempt to grab Vitrenko a few days before on one of his rare trips to Kiev. The Ukrainian government had an inside man on the job, a Sokil Spetsnaz commander called Peotr Samolyuk who was playing triple agent. He pinpointed where and when Vitrenko would appear. But Vitrenko’s mole betrayed Samolyuk and he ended up castrated. And when this task force was assembled, the chief mole and two other infiltrators were in place. It looks like a couple of the team nearly made it to Korostyshev and safety before they were killed and dragged back to the lodge and … well, you can see.’

Fabel examined a picture of a man in his thirties who, like the others, had been stripped, gutted and hung outside the hunting lodge on the frame used for hanging the deer and boar killed by hunters. There was something painted in red, it looked like blood, on the wall behind the gutted corpse. It was written in Cyrillic.

‘What does that say?’ Fabel tilted the photograph towards Wagner.

‘Hmm … I wondered about that too. Very esoteric. “Satan has craft to be in two places at once.” Obviously Vitrenko being whimsical. I’m guessing it had some significance for the poor schmuck they ended up gutting.’

‘Who was he?’

‘He was in charge of Operation Achilles. A good man by all accounts,’ said Wagner. ‘Vitrenko’s chief mole in the operation is thought to have been a female Kiev militia officer called Olga Sarapenko. She probably had orders to give this guy really special treatment before he died. He’d been after Vitrenko for years.’

‘What was his name?’ asked Fabel.

‘Buslenko.’ Wagner sipped his drink. ‘Taras Buslenko.’

11.