Maria placed her SIG-Sauer service automatic on the bed next to the laptop. And then the other gun: a 9mm Glock 26 Compact. Maria had studied law before becoming a police officer, all set for a high-flying career. The law had been everything to her, the thread that held the fabric of society together, that gave order to the world. In obtaining this other gun she had, for the first time in her life, broken the law. Maria was still a police officer. It would be her training and skills that would lead her to Vitrenko. But then … then, if she were to get that far alive, it would be the Glock in her hand. Maria had no intention of arresting him.

She went through the files on her computer again. The Farmers’ Market: that was what the organised sale of humans from Ukraine, Russia, Poland and elsewhere in the East was called. Not a title invented by the investigators, but the name given it by the criminals who organised it. A fitting title for the sale of people as meat. She opened up a spreadsheet document on which she had plotted all the salient points of the investigation. It was a view of a torn spider’s web: as many connections missing as there were present. There was practically nothing for Maria to go on. Vitrenko’s organisation was supremely well constructed: layers of management and production, just like any corporate structure, but engineered in such a way that each level operated without knowledge of who was on the tier above or below. Even on the same organisational level, ‘cells’ often operated without knowledge of each other. Each cell was led by a pakhan, or boss, who took his orders from a ‘brigadier’ who ran as many as ten pakhans. The foot soldiers never knew who the ‘brigadier’ was who transmitted their orders to them through their pakhan. Added to this was the use of freelance specialists who were not full-time members of the organisation and who were often not Ukrainian or Russian. In this way, the Ukrainian Mafia had a completely different form from the Italian Mafia. It was also infinitely more difficult to investigate and prosecute than its Italian counterpart.

But Maria didn’t need to find evidence. She wasn’t interested in building a case. All she wanted to do was find Vitrenko.

Maria laid another file next to the other items. A face looked out from a military service photograph. Colonel Vasyl Vitrenko, formerly of the Berkut counter-terrorist Spetsnaz. Maria had stared at this face so often, so intensely, that it should have lost its power to churn her gut. It hadn’t. Every time she looked at the bright green Ukrainian eyes, the high, broad cheekbones and wide forehead framed by thick butter-blond hair, she felt a twinge in her chest, just below the breastbone. Where her scar was.

Of course, Vitrenko would probably look nothing like that now. Turchenko, the investigator who had been killed on his way to Cologne, had been certain that Vitrenko would have changed his appearance radically, probably by cosmetic surgery.