“Aren’t you done yet?” Charlie asked.
Fisher snorted. “Three seconds . . .”
“Sam, you’d better make this quick. Looks like a police car has just pulled up behind Uncle Harry. Maybe they think he’s a drunk fallen asleep in his car. Either way, you gotta move quickly.”
The lock clicked. “I’m in.”
Fisher pushed in the door and quietly shut it after himself. He switched on his penlight and moved through a hallway lined with tropical plants and into a broad living room with white leather furniture and an adjoining dining room with a black marble table. The décor was, indeed, rich and imported, and the paintings on the wall—all landscapes of Switzerland—were signed oil on canvas originals. Very mature furnishings for a twenty-year-old girl, and again, Fisher wondered how much her father had a say in this.
He crossed over to the spacious kitchen with ornate backsplashes of expensive glass and porcelain tiles. Every drawer had been pulled open and searched, every cabinet rifled through. He opened the refrigerator. Well stocked.
“How’s it looking out there, Briggs?”
“The cops are knocking on Harry’s door, but he’s not responding. Rest of the zone looks clear.”
“Roger.”
Fisher left the kitchen and shifted across the living room. He reached a pair of sliding glass doors leading to a broad balcony with seating for four around an ornate wicker table set. The city and lake views were incredible. Hell, Fisher wouldn’t mind retiring here himself. He shifted away, down another hall, then neared the bedroom, which looked a bit more like a traditional college girl’s dorm with dozens of stuffed animals thrown off the bed and lying across the rug. The king-size bed itself had been wrenched apart, the sheets removed, the mattress slid aside to allow inspection beneath it. The nightstand’s drawers were empty, their contents—books, pieces of jewelry, hair ties, and a few grooming products—splayed across the floor. He found the long dresser with attached vanity mirror equally torn apart, some of the drawers removed and sitting on the bed.
Fisher hurriedly inspected the items—tickets from concerts she’d attended, old ID cards from school, and a plethora of receipts from bars, restaurants, and cafés. She was big on saving her receipts. Nothing unusual or interesting caught his eye. He took a peek inside the walk-in closet. Her clothes had been shuffled apart, but most still hung from the hangers.
He moved on to the adjoining bathroom with the large garden tub and stall shower. Her medicine cabinet and drawers had also been emptied, with makeup strewn across the white tile floor.
“What’re we doing here, Sam?” Grim asked, her tone implying that they were, indeed, wasting their time.
“Details, Grim. Details.”
“I hope so. The cops can’t wake up Harry, so they’re trying to pry open the door.”
Fisher was about to leave when something flashed off his penlight. He crossed to the sink, where he found a very odd pendant on a gold chain. It was a glass orb encapsulating a bolus of clay-like material, and it reminded him of those once-popular sealed glass baubles containing mustard seeds. It was not the kind of fancy, stunning, ornate, or otherwise “flashy” jewelry he imagined a co-ed might wear. In fact, it appeared handmade, a souvenir from some vacation somewhere, perhaps. Fisher tugged open a Velcro pouch on his belt and slid the necklace and pendant inside. He left the bathroom and noticed Nadia’s desk on the other side of the room. The monitor was there but the computer was gone. No surprise.
With no more time to waste, Fisher gathered up a few more items of mild interest—those receipts and tickets, and lo and behold, a diary she’d kept in the nightstand that had been wedged inside the drawer. He hustled out to check the other two bedrooms. One was entirely empty, no furniture prints on the carpet, just never used. The other, a guest room, had been searched as well, but the nightstand and dresser drawers were empty. He checked the second guest bath, then the adjoining closets. Nothing.
He returned to the front door, stood there for a moment, and sighed. Maybe the diary or the jewelry would give them something. “All right, I’m coming out,” he said.
“Cops got Harry’s door open. They’ve called for an ambulance and are trying to revive him,” Grim reported.
“Well, that’s a nice diversion,” Fisher said. “Briggs, you there?”
“I’m here, Sam. Packing up my rifle, getting ready to head down.”
“Meet you at the rally point.”
“Will do.”
“Hey, Sam, we just got a call from Kobin back on the plane,” said Charlie. “Says he’s got a good lead on Kestrel’s whereabouts in Russia.”
“Oh, yeah. Where is he?”
“Kobin’s not saying. Says he wants to talk to you and only you.”
Fisher snickered. “You tell him he’ll be spilling his guts figuratively. And if not? Then literally.”
“Nice. I’d buy tickets to see that.”
Fisher returned to the roof, rappelled down the back of the building, then took off running to link up with Grim and Charlie.
* * *
WHILE in the SUV en route back to the airport, Fisher showed Grim the diary and necklace.
“We’ll have everything checked for DNA. Could even be a clue there, someone who was in her apartment, a friend we don’t know about who’s offering them a place.”
Fisher lifted the pendant toward the window for better light. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. What’s inside the glass?”
“That’s for you to figure out.”
“Hey, I picked up another piece of evidence at the café,” said Charlie from the driver’s seat.
“What’s that?” asked Fisher.
“The cute barista’s phone number.” Charlie wriggled his brows as he held up a slip of paper.
“You idiot,” said Grim, shaking her head.
Charlie seemed unfazed. “I have a Swiss girlfriend now. That’s the way I roll.”
Fisher turned to Briggs, who’d been deathly silent since entering the vehicle. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Just replaying that shot in my head.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. Like you said, the wind shifted. You still got him.”
Briggs sighed in disgust. “Not good enough.”
“All right, then, make it up to us next time—don’t miss.”
Briggs’s tone hardened. “I won’t.”
12
ACCORDING to Grim, Oliver “Ollie” Fenton, twenty-seven, was a graduate of North Carolina State’s analytics program and the first member of his family to attend college. He’d assumed he was headed for a career in “big data,” but after a rather serendipitous meeting with a CIA recruiter, he was quickly drafted into the ranks of the agency’s young “quants.” His analysis of the Arab Spring’s effects on the nation of Qatar had caught Grim’s eye, and his conclusions concurred with a recent report she’d read produced by the Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States, a program based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Of the handful of young analysts on board Paladin, he was the best, and Fisher felt comfortable with Grim giving Ollie the pendant and diary for analysis.
Meanwhile, she would go through the NSA’s most recent report of comm intercepts, analyzing calls made by Kasperov prior to the man’s disappearance, along with those received or placed by his girlfriend, by Nadia, and by a branching tree of dozens of others related to them.
Fisher took a seat beside Kobin, who was studying a map of Russia from one of Charlie’s computer stations.
“Hey, asshole,” Kobin said without looking up.
Fisher spun the man’s chair around and leaned forward, getting squarely in Kobin’s face. “I heard you got something for me.”
; “I’ll need some guarantees.”
“Guarantees?”
“I’m a businessman.”
“Well, all right,” Fisher began slowly, lowering his voice. “I guarantee that if you don’t give me what I need, there’s going to be pain in your future. A lot of pain.”
“Come on, Fisher, you know what I’m saying . . . I’m just talking about him, Kestrel. I don’t want him brought back here. I don’t want to see him . . . ever . . . again.”
“Because you shot him in the head?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Hard to tell anymore, right? Good guys . . . bad guys . . .”
“So, you’re not planning to bring him back here, right?” A tremor had worked its way into his voice.
“Actually, my plan was to put the two of you in your cell, stand back, and watch the smackdown. We could take bets on how long you’d last.”
Kobin drew his head back. “Give me some fucking credit. Where Chuck Norris ends, I begin . . .”
Fisher couldn’t help but grin.
“See, see, I made you laugh. Now you’re amused and we can strike a deal.”
“Tell me where Kestrel is, otherwise—”
“All right, all right!”
Fisher stood back and folded his arms over his chest. “Talk.”
“He’s not coming here, right?”
“I doubt it. But if he does, you won’t have to see him.”
“You promise?”
Fisher raised one brow. “Does a promise mean anything to a scumbag like you?”
“Coming from you it does.”
“I’m flattered. Now . . . talk.”
“Okay. Two of Kestrel’s old army buddies used to work for me. Point is I hired a lot of those old Russian spec ops boys. The government doesn’t pay ’em shit and then fucks ’em over in retirement, so they used to do a lot of freelance work for me once they got out. I even recruited a few of them right out of the exclusion zone.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Fisher. “Been there before. Long time ago.”
Kobin turned and pointed to the map. “It hasn’t changed. Twenty-six hundred square kilometers around Chernobyl—where the nuclear reactor blew and they have three-eyed fish and trees that glow in the dark.”
“What the hell were they doing there?”
“If these guys couldn’t find work in private security or something else, a lot of ’em got really desperate, turned to game poaching, illegal logging, and metal salvage operations inside the zone. Some of them got legit jobs giving tours, but a lot of them became criminals—especially the ones with a disability like a limp or something. They’d get help from the samosely—the people who refused to evacuate, like a lot of old people, or the ones who resettled illegally. You wouldn’t believe how many people are still going in there, looking for a quick score.”
“Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“Yep, some of ’em are that desperate. If you’ve been there, you might remember the place is controlled by the State Agency of Ukraine on the Exclusion Zone Management. They call it S-A-E-Z. Of course yours truly—being a Ukrainian American—has friends in the agency. Good friends.”
“So you picked up Kestrel there? I can’t believe he’s that desperate.”
“He’s not. I just talked to one of his army buddies, actually an old mentor who got him into special forces in the first place. He told me that before Kestrel moved to St. Petersburg, he spent some time as a kid with his foster parents in a little town called Vilcha; it’s right there in the exclusion zone.”
“So he’s gone back to a contaminated town to what, reminisce?”
“No, here’s where it gets good. Security’s tight, like I said. You don’t get past the checkpoint without papers. So I talked to my friends at SAEZ, and they issued a temporary contractor’s clearance pass to a man named . . . wait for it . . . Glib Lakeev.”
“That’s one of Kestrel’s aliases.”
“Bingo. And according to my contacts at SAEZ, he hasn’t entered the zone yet. But the pass is only good for three days, so that Russian fucker is planning something— and we know where he’s gonna be.”
“And you think it’s Vilcha?”
“Tell you why. He never worked in the exclusion zone like his buddies. Vilcha is his only connection to it. If he’s going into the zone, I bet everything that he’s going there.”
“To do what?”
Kobin laughed through his big nose. “What the fuck do I look like? A mind reader? Maybe he’s going in there for a beer with a radioactive corpse.”
Fisher turned to Grim, who’d been eavesdropping on the conversation. “What do you think?”
“I think we can be in Kiev in less than three hours.” She faced Charlie. “Can you get us into the SVR’s comm network in less than three hours?”
“Are you crazy? I’m still sifting through Kannonball’s code—it’s slow going . . .”
“I thought so. Flight deck, prepare for departure. We’re heading to Kiev.”
Fisher crossed to the SMI table and frowned at Grim. “No argument?”
Her voice turned grave. “None—because I think I know why Kestrel’s going to Vilcha.”
13
TWO hours and fifty-one minutes later, Paladin touched down at Kiev’s Zhuliany Airport, where Fisher and Briggs rented Suzuki C90T touring bikes for the trip over to Vilcha, with plans to arrive before sunset. The irradiated ghost town lay about seventy-nine miles northwest of Kiev and twenty-five miles east of Chernobyl in Ukraine.
Since its 1991 breakaway from the old Soviet Union, Ukraine remained a country vacillating between its past and uncertain future. The official language was Ukrainian, although Russian was the native tongue of a quarter of the country’s forty-five million citizens and was designated an official language in thirteen of its twenty-seven regions. The country had a working partnership with NATO yet remained home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Inside the exclusion zone, where all time had ceased in 1986, everything that was unequivocally Ukraine said so—only in Russian. The photos Fisher had reviewed during the flight over left a hollow feeling in his gut. Vilcha had been ripped straight from some postapocalyptic novel like I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. The place would make them feel like the last men on earth.
They reached the main checkpoint—a meager striped pole barrier along with a ramshackle guardhouse that had a familiar red stop sign in English hanging crookedly from its side wall. They slowed, then came to a halt, and Fisher lifted the visor on his helmet, wincing slightly at the frigid air. He handed the old man smoking an unfiltered Camel an envelope stuffed with greenbacks.
The man narrowed his gaze on Fisher before accepting the envelope.
Fisher returned a hard gaze of his own and said curtly in Russian, “Andriy Kobin sends his regards.”
The guard seemed unimpressed—meaning he’d probably met Kobin before. He counted the money, turned back to his younger partner, then nodded. He faced Fisher and asked in broken English, “Why you go into zone?”
Fisher answered in Russian and without hesitation: “We’re on vacation.”
The old guard rubbed the corners of his eyes, removed his cigarette from his chapped lips, and revealed to Fisher the ugliest missing-toothed grin this side of Siberia. He turned back to his partner, then began to chuckle so violently that he broke into a fit of coughing. Once he finally cleared his throat, he beamed and cried, “Send postcard. Have fun! Good times!” He waved them on.
Fisher gave a quick nod to Briggs, the barrier lifted, and they sped on through.
The Suzuki was a far cry from the bike Fisher had stolen back in Bolivia, and the road, while glistening here and there with streaks of ice, had certainly not claimed more than two hundred lives this past year. However, it did p
resent a different kind of danger.
They cut through a heavily forested area, the barren limbs already suggesting the lifelessness of the towns to come. Grim had gained them access into one of the satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, and while they’d only had the Keyhole on target for a few minutes, she’d been able to photograph a 2009 Renault Kangoo minivan heading into Vilcha less than an hour ago. Grim had photographed the tag; it was a rental signed out to one Glib Lakeev. Moreover, Kobin had confirmed that, yes indeed, Kestrel had gone through the checkpoint and was heading home.
Consequently, they were losing precious time. Fisher had planned to arrive at the town before Kestrel in order to stage an ambush, but maybe it was better they didn’t spend additional time here. During the first five years after the catastrophe, the level of radioactive isotopes of cesium had reached 60 curies per square kilometer, with plutonium at 0.7 curies and strontium at 15 curies. Such radiation levels were deadly for humans; however, Grim had assured Fisher that while some of the radioactive isotopes, such as strontium-90 and cesium-137, still lingered, they were at tolerable exposure levels for limited periods of time.
The narrow road began showing signs of serious neglect as they left the forest and passed through several fields. Larger cracks and ruts rattled Fisher’s bones, and weeds heavily encroached up from the embankments. Leaves and branches booted by high winds were strewn everywhere, cleared only by more winds, and in some sections Fisher found himself leaning hard into turns to navigate around a branch and even a few fallen trees. Soon the fields surrendered back to the more dense woods, with trees beginning to tower over roofless houses and barns whose pale white walls were streaked in heavy layers of rust visible even in the dim headlights. A few signs written in Cyrillic and English proclaimed: DANGER.
Fisher’s skin began to crawl. He imagined he could feel the radioactive particles entering his lungs, then flowing into his bloodstream. He shuddered off the thought and checked his rearview mirror.