‘The results were inconclusive,’ the examiner explained. ‘The sample was corrupted by some type of bleach product that destroyed the DNA.’

‘So no DNA at all?’ Volkov asked.

‘Not on anything that had contact with the bleach,’ the examiner said. ‘But the internal organs may be uncorrupted. I’ve sent brain and heart samples for testing.’

The brain sample yielded some uncorrupted material, allowing the examiner to work out the victim’s genetic code. Volkov struggled to believe that a man in a white coat could extract a sequence of letters like this from a drop of blood, a strand of hair or, in this case, a sliver of brain, and that such a sequence could uniquely identify an individual – dead or alive. But he didn’t have to understand it; all he needed to do was feed the code into the CIB’s DNA database. They’d amassed a huge amount of data over the years, taking samples from every person they questioned, including swabs of nearly every gangster in the city. He’d taken joy on those occasions in pushing the white stick with the cotton tip a little farther down the throat than usual. Volkov was pretty sure this code would belong to a member of one of St Petersburg’s three major crime gangs, maybe even one of the men he had made gag.

He pasted the code into the database program on his PC, then hit search.

No match.

Volkov pondered. Maybe the victim belonged to one of the migrant gangs, of which there were plenty. Over ten percent of all crimes in St Petersburg were committed by foreigners. Ukrainian gangs, Chechen gangs, Serbian gangs, Hungarian gangs – the list went on.

Volkov pasted the same code into an international database run by the CIA, hit ‘Enter’.

Match found.

The result was a surprise. The victim was Australian? He doubled-checked to make sure he hadn’t misread the word ‘Austria’. No, it was Australia.

He would have assumed the dead man was a tourist had it not been for his presence on a CIA database and the way the body had been disposed of. Tourists weren’t chopped up and put into bags. The man was clearly a criminal and had died like a criminal.

Volkov put it down to a deal gone wrong. He had no reason to connect this white Australian man named Timothy Jenkins, previously convicted of theft and assault, with anything else. Let alone the church bombing that had taken place the day before, a terrorist attack that had killed 164 people. The anonymous bomber was dead. Blown to bits. A lone attacker.

Case closed.

CHAPTER 10

Supermax, Goulburn Correctional Centre, Goulburn, NSW, Australia