Odessa.txt
A Russian accounting problem
The following report was recovered from the glovebox of an abandoned yellow Lada in southern Odessa, stored on removable media.
The registered owner of the vehicle, a suspected GRU operative, was last seen boarding the Donald Etsk, a cargo vessel heading east. The Lada’s engine was still warm, suggesting a degree of urgency not reflected elsewhere in the file.
Profile: Neo-Tsarist Agricultural Apparatchik (formerly CFO, Wagner Group)
Watch: A. Lange and Söhne, Lange 1 Time Zone
Reference: 136.029
RRP: $52,900When Russia’s premier mercenary outfit Wagner turned against Putin in June 2023, its Chief Financial Officer was in the lush office of his Moscow apartment, blissfully submerged in a 6,000 page Excel spreadsheet.
Utterly consumed by the tide of account numbers and asset values washing across his curved 57-inch monitor, he was oblivious to the scores of messages hammering his phone (”move, blyat”).
He had his favourite noise-cancelling headphones on (Orpheus HE 1s, 9 million roubles) and the sound of two Chechen men blowing his front door off with Semtex and charging into his apartment didn’t pierce the crescendo of Tchaikovsky’s 5th symphony.
It was only when he was hogtied and hauled across Red Square that he realised something was gravely wrong.
The feeling was compounded when they used his head to open the front door of the Kremlin and the headphones came off, the harmony in his ears replaced by the voices of the Chechens (“move, blyat”) and the sound of his heart’s wet thumping.
Hands and feet bound behind his back, they bowled him down an impractically long polished table towards a suited figure sitting silently at its head.
Sliding to a stop inches from impact, the humble accountant rotated his head to find the President of the Russian Federation looking down at him with an arched eyebrow.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin ran his eyes across the trussed prisoner with mild irritation, settling on the Lange at his wrist.
“That’s a nice watch, tovarisch... been fraternizing with the Germans have we? A little inappropriate for these austere times, I must say - there’s a war on, if you haven’t noticed. Ruslan here will furnish you with something more fitting of your station. A Poljot, perhaps… the finest timepiece in all of Russia, once.
“Think of it as a gift, a celebration of your... reassignment. Sergei in the Ministry of Agriculture will give you all the details: You answer to him now. Now move, blyat.”
VVP flicked two fingers in impatient dismissal, barely raising his hand from the table. The minimal gesture had just enough elevation for the spreadsheet commander to glimpse a Patek Philippe Grande Sonnerie under his sleeve.
The doors were still swinging shut behind him when one of the Chechens ripped the Lange from his wrist. Ruslan (presumably) grinned at it for a second, before securing it to his own wrist beside a battered Vostok Komandirskie.
No Poljot replacement was forthcoming. Instead they kicked him down three flights of stairs, though he only remembered the first one.
When he regained consciousness, he was face down on a large coffee table. He craned his neck to find himself in a brightly lit office from the Soviet era, a desk before him piled high with papers. The ancient apparatchik behind it glanced up through spectacles half an inch thick.
“Ah, the prodigy of Prigozhin has graced us with his presence. We have been waiting for you.” He returned to the documents spread before him, signing one page after another. A beige Dell desktop hummed to his left, the Windows 95 ‘3D Maze’ screensaver glaring florid across the convex glass.
After his fifteenth autograph, the apparatchik leaned forward in his chair.
“You are good with numbers, da? Cashflow, leverage, ‘value at risk’..? Well in this ministry tovarisch, there is only one metric we need you to worry about: Crop-yield…”
He was permitted to return to his apartment, to find a department of FSB halfway through his wine cellar and laughing at the photos in his passport collection.
A senior officer, glass in hand, held court at his kitchen worktop.
“...look at this one: Syria. Now that, that is the look of a man who has shat himself. With shit still in his pants. I know this, I looked like that in Afghanistan all the time. He must have been hiding from ISIS in that photo booth.
“And what’s this... the Central African Republic. Would you look at the sunburn- bozhe moy, the sunburn! He’s redder than Lenin!”
They poured him a glass of Kristal to celebrate his new job and ushered him onto an armchair.
The programme for the evening’s events would be simple, they explained. He would be turning over to them all bank accounts, portfolios, contracts, leases and title deeds relating to Wagner tonight. One way or another.
“You want to go waterboarding, tovarisch? Surfing? Well I hate to disappoint you comrade, but we do not follow the American philosophy on extraction here. We are more, how do they say it... avant-garde.
“Here is what we can offer: Facial deconstruction. Enhanced dentistry. Tattoo removal, no tattoos required. We have even discovered a cheap alternative to the vasectomy...”
It didn’t take him long to get the picture. They let him keep his Wirecard account.
A sympathetic junior officer called him a taxi to his new accommodation - a cracking commie block recently deemed habitable by the local authorities.
It took him a month to adjust to his new role at the Ministry of Agriculture. Another to figure out how to escape it.
His whole life had been a struggle to make systems more efficient. Numbers were the easy part. It was always the human factor that was difficult to optimise.
As the wreckage of an Embraer business jet smouldered in a field in Tver Oblast, a package arrived for him.
It was his Lange 1. Surprisingly, Ruslan hadn’t scratched it much.
Both the primary display and the GMT function had been set to Moscow time. He adjusted neither.
“Move, blyat,” he said to himself, and walked out to meet his driver.
Until next time,
Jim Hawkins
The Treasure Island Times