and horseradish. It bore a scent of family and of coziness that couldn’t soften the strained faces of isolation that greeted Gage.
Tears of a sailor daydreaming of home came to Tolenko’s eyes when Pavel introduced Gage and said in Ukrainian, “Ekaterina, we’re here about Ekaterina.”
And after a long, uncertain moment, Tolenko glanced back at Olena and then invited them inside.
“You know,” Tolenko said, after they’d sat down and Olena had brought out tea, “I was a mining engineer in Ukraine-”
“No one wants to hear about Ukraine,” Olena interrupted. “Ukraine is dead.”
Pavel, caught in the crossfire, cast Gage a weak look as he translated.
“Ukraine is not yet dead,” Tolenko said, sullenly repeating the title of the national anthem. “As long as there’s corruption and gangster capitalism, it will live. When there’s nothing left to steal, then it will die.”
“It’s dead for us,” Olena said.
Gage knew it was a conversation they had before. Unlike Tolenko, Olena had apparently resolved that if you’re never going home, don’t look back.
“Where are you from in Ukraine?” Gage asked.
“Lugansk,” Tolenko answered, then glanced at Olena. “We agree about Lugansk. It’s dead. Rotting. Flooded coal mines, slag heaps, sickness.”
“Is that where you worked?”
“As if they listened to me.” Tolenko jammed his fist into his chest, then pointed at a phantom. “They just dug tunnels. Tunnels and tunnels and tunnels. The government didn’t care if miners died as long as they got the coal out before the tunnels collapsed.” Tolenko spoke quickly, almost too quickly for Pavel to keep up. “They only hired engineers so there would be someone to blame.”
Tolenko gritted his teeth and shook his head, a sign of the fury that boiled within, that drove him to flee with bitterness as the lasting taste of home.
“Tell me about Ekaterina.”
“Ekaterina…she…” The grief in Tolenko’s heart choked off his voice.
“She was everything to us,” Olena said. “So kind. So smart. She studied economics and English at Kiev University and enrolled in business administration courses as soon as she got here.” The pride in her voice shone even through Pavel’s even-voiced translation. “She was taking classes in asset analysis. She wanted to work at one of the big investment firms, specializing in Central Europe.”
“Did she sponsor you to the U.S.?”
Olena nodded. “She married an American she worked with in the trade section of the U.S. embassy in Kiev. We came after they divorced. He was a good boy but he wanted adventure and travel, Ekaterina wanted predictability. She’d lived her whole life in uncertainty. We all did.”
“Where’s her husband?”
“He’s been posted to St. Petersburg for the last two years. He came to San Jose for Ekaterina’s funeral.”
“Was he here when Ekaterina was killed?”
Tolenko’s eyes locked on Gage. “What are you saying?”
“I’m wondering if Ekaterina’s death wasn’t an accident.”
“I know it wasn’t her husband,” Olena said quickly, her voice edgy. “I called him in Russia an hour after the police came.”
“But you’ve thought about this, haven’t you?” Gage asked Olena.
She turned toward her husband and answered, “Yes.” She then looked down at her tightly gripped hands. “Every day.”
“Have you tried to find out?”
“How?” She looked up, face red, voice rising. “From whom? We’re two foreigners who speak little English. When you don’t speak good English, you’re treated like a child. And when you’re a parent and you say your child was murdered and the police won’t listen, people think you’re crazy. At the bakery where I work, they think I’m paranoid-at best. So I don’t talk about it anymore.”
Gage leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs, trying to look smaller, less threatening. “What do you think happened?”
Tolenko cut in again. “You haven’t explained why you want to know.”
Olena squirmed, on the verge of not caring who Gage was and why he was asking, just wanting to blurt out the story to anyone who would listen.
Gage turned his head toward Tolenko. “I think SatTek was involved in illegal activities and your daughter may have figured it out.”
Olena nodded vigorously, then opened her mouth to speak. Tolenko held up his palm toward her.
“What illegal activities?” Tolenko asked.
“Something involving a company called TeleTron Ukraina.”
Tolenko’s palm failed to hold back Olena’s defense of her daughter. “But she didn’t know until afterwards. Please believe us, she didn’t know.”
“That’s what I thought. But did she have proof?”
Olena looked at her husband as if to say that Gage was the only person who would ever listen to them. It was Tolenko’s turn to nod.
She hurried from the living room, returning less than a minute later gripping a soiled SatTek envelope, an English-Ukrainian dictionary, and a laptop computer. She sat down, pulled out the papers, then began to search through the dictionary. She looked up at Pavel. An embarrassed smile came over her face. She didn’t need the book now. Pavel was a walking dictionary. She handed the papers to Gage, who slowly thumbed through them.
“I tried to translate the sheets,” Olena said. “But they didn’t make sense. A word here and word there. Too technical.” She wrung her hands, eyes searching Gage’s face, then Pavel’s. “Please tell me what they say. Please.”
Gage finally reached out and took her hands in his. “They say that Olena Palchinsky isn’t paranoid.”
Gage called Alex Z as he was driving away.
“I checked everywhere,” Alex Z said. “There were no sales of exactly twenty Model STV-18 video amplifiers after August last year. There were sales of twenty Model STV-04s to a company called Kiev Industries. The 04 means that it was 4 gigahertz. It didn’t need U.S. government approval since 04s are low power and don’t have military applications-”
“But you couldn’t find any resource planning records showing that twenty STV-04s were ever manufactured for Kiev Industries.”
“Jeez, boss, how’d you know?”
Gage glanced down at Katie’s file and her laptop resting on the seat next to him. A graceful hand had made checkmarks next to the STV-04 serial numbers.
“Katie Palan figured out that serial numbers on the 18s and 4s were the same,” Gage said. “SatTek must’ve sent the same 18-gigahertz devices back to Ukraine, pretending that they were the 4s.”
“No shit!” Alex Z voice rose, hitting a pitch somewhere between incredulity and outrage. “Isn’t that like treason or something? You know what those are used for? Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, like on Cobra helicopters and Predator drones. And Ukraine will sell them to anybody. Man, wasn’t Matson making enough money off the stock scam?”
CHAPTER 41
L et me get this straight,” Peterson said, his sarcasm reverberating through the phone line the following morning. “You knew you were going to lose on the facts of what Burch did, so you decided to take a shot at impeaching Matson instead? I thought you had more self-respect than that.”
“You don’t know what the facts are, only what Matson is telling you.”
Peterson laughed. “If that’s what Granger-may he rest in hell-planned to trade for a ticket out of jail, he was sadly mistaken. SatTek self-disclosed.”
