antibiotic drip.
“We have to operate,” he told them. “She’s bleeding internally. If we don’t act immediately, she’ll go into shock. Who did this to her?” he snapped.
“Black Armbands,” Iryna said. “An aide to Oleksandr Gorobets.”
“I don’t believe you.” He looked at Iryna and Scorpion. “By law, I should notify the politsiy.”
“If you do, they’ll kill her,” Scorpion said. “Probably you too. They don’t want witnesses.”
“So you say,” the doctor replied, examining Alyona’s external wounds. “These are less serious. If you didn’t do anything, why are the politsiy after you?”
“If you know who I am,” Iryna said, “you know there are people who would do anything to stop me. Anything. Ask her. She knows it wasn’t us who killed Cherkesov.”
“Is this true?” he asked Alyona.
She looked at him as if from a far distance, but finally nodded.
“Here’s a thousand,” Scorpion said, handing him money. “Be a doctor. We’ll keep you and your staff out of this. If we’re in danger, so are you.”
“You really think-” Dr. Yakovenko started. “ Hivno, shit,” he said, rushing to Alyona, whose eyes were turning up. “Medsestra!” he shouted. Nurse! “She’s going into shock.”
The first nurse rushed into the room, followed by two more nurses with a gurney. In seconds they had moved Alyona onto the gurney and were rushing her to the operating room.
Scorpion and Iryna settled down to wait in a small waiting room by the nurses’ station. The TV was on. It showed movements of soldiers and tanks, then cut to a conference room and a reporter outside a government building. The reporter was talking rapidly and there was a news crawl at the bottom.
“What’s it say?” Scorpion asked.
“ ‘NATO warns Russia not to violate Ukrainian sovereignty. Ukraine mobilizes for war. American forces in Europe are on full alert,’ ” she read. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re at a dead end,” Scorpion said. “She says she doesn’t know where Shelayev is. If he didn’t tell her, he didn’t tell anyone. Without him, we have nothing.”
“Actually, she did tell us,” Iryna said, lighting a cigarette. “I think I know where Shelayev is.”
Chapter Thirty
Chernobyl
Chernobylska Exclusion Zone
“Damy i gospoda takzhe, ladies and also dear gentlemen, on night of twenty-six April of 1986, at one hour and twenty-three in morning,” the InterInform guide, a bulky man with a reddish-brown goatee, Denys-Call me Dennis-said, “under supervise of Alexandr Akimov, chief engineer night shift, is starting safety test of shutting down of reactor chetyre number four.”
Scorpion was sitting in a classroomlike conference room in the Tourist Office in Chernobyl, a village at the second or inner checkpoint, some ten kilometers out from the nuclear reactor site. With him were three couples-a pair of male backpackers from Munich; two British women, Sarah and Millicent from East Putney; and an American couple, the Dowds, retirees from Maryland-who were set to take the tour.
In the early hours of the morning, while it was still dark, he had left the clinic. Dr. Yakovenko had managed to stop Alyona’s abdominal bleeding. Iryna stayed with her, registering Alyona under a false name. As soon as she knew Alyona was stable, Iryna would be meeting with Viktor Kozhanovskiy. They would try to buy some time for Scorpion to find Shelayev. No more than forty-eight hours, Iryna had insisted. Even trying to negotiate that much time with Gorobets and the Russians was going to be nearly impossible.
Overnight, Russia’s president, Evgeni Brabov, had reacted to what he called the “NATO ultimatum and Ukrainian provocations,” by declaring Russia would protect Russian “nationals” and Russian borders, even if it meant war. “Russia is not intimidated and will not be intimidated. Russia will defend her people,” he had declared in a televised speech to the Duma in a rare night session, a clip of which was being replayed around the world.
The UN Security Council was meeting in emergency session, where Russia had threatened to veto any action that did not support the legitimate right of Russia to defend itself and her people, including ethnic Russians in the former Soviet Union. In reaction to what was happening in Europe, China had raised the readiness level of the People’s Army. Other nations were beginning to react as well. Iran sent warships into the Persian Gulf.
Before he left Kyiv, Scorpion decided to try the dead drop in Pechersk Landscape Park one last time. The Company had written him off, but all hell was breaking loose and there was a chance they were trying to reach him.
The park was deserted in the icy darkness. When he got to the top of the steps down to the amphitheatre, he saw it: a ribbon tied on the lamppost. He released the ribbon, tossed it away, and dug through the frozen earth under the bench to retrieve a cell phone left in the spike.
Sheltering in the trees from the bone-chilling wind, he called the cell phone’s only preset number. Someone picked up on the second ring.
“Are you still GTG?” someone said, meaning good to go, operational. It was Shaefer, and despite the early hour, he didn’t sound sleepy. Something was up. The CIA needed him again.
“Didn’t know you still cared,” Scorpion said, pulling his collar closer around him against the wind. The Company had cut him loose, and he wasn’t about to let them forget it.
“Who says I care?” Shaefer said. Then with a different tone: “Mucho has changed, bro. You still dealing with our Asian amigos?”
Akhnetzov must’ve forwarded his earlier suspicions about Li Qiang and the Guoanbu to Rabinowich, Scorpion realized. The CIA was a couple of critical steps behind.
“It was a surkh fish. You five by five?” he said, using the Urdu word for red that he knew Shaefer would know from their time in Pakistan, meaning the Chinese were a false trail, a “red herring,” and asking if Shaefer copied.
“Romeo that,” Shaefer said, meaning he got it. “So who killed JR? Do you know?” asking who was really behind the assassination of Cherkesov.
“Yes.”
“I’m all ears,” Shaefer said. Scorpion pictured him sitting up ramrod straight in bed, fingers hitting his keyboard to connect to Langley.
“It was an inside job.”
“Inside as in inside Freedom?” The name in English of the Svoboda party.
“You’re getting warmer.”
“Can you prove it? Maybe get us off the hook?” Shaefer asked, and Scorpion could hear the tension in his voice. Washington must be going ballistic over the crisis.
“I need forty-eight hours.”
“Man, don’t you watch TV? We don’t have forty-eight hours,” Shaefer said.
“Find it,” Scorpion said, and hung up. They’d hung him out to dry, and now he was telling them he knew who the real assassin was and there was a chance he could stop the war if they could delay forty-eight hours. They could try, he thought grimly. If there was one thing Washington knew how to do, it was delay.
Leaving the park, he drove north on the P2 highway from Kyiv. Along the way, he got rid of the cell phone and SIM he had used to call Shaefer, tossing them separately in empty fields miles apart. Shaefer had sounded desperate. That could mean only one thing. Washington had decided to call Russia’s bluff.
The day broke cold and gray. By the time he reached the small town of Sukachi, some eighty kilometers north of Kyiv, the road was a beat-up two-lane and traffic had disappeared. The landscape was like the Arctic, an endless expanse of white, the road bordered by rusty fences and dead grasses sticking out of the snow.
He stopped for breakfast at a roadside trailer that doubled as the town’s only restaurant. Breakfast was hrechany, a chicken soup thick with buckwheat, plus tea and black bread. The woman behind the counter told him she had been born in Pripyat, but her family had moved down to Sukachi when she was a teenager because of the radiation. On an impulse, Scorpion bought a bottle of Nemiroff horilka to take with him.
