disregard for the sovereignty of the Ukraine. He again demanded that NATO fulfill its obligations under the Membership Action Plan agreement.
“Mr. Davydenko, speaking through his spokesman, Mr. Oleksandr Gorobets, declared that Mr. Kozhanovskiy has no legitimacy because the crisis was caused by Iryna Shevchenko, Mr. Kozhanovskiy’s campaign manager, who is accused of murdering the late Svoboda presidential candidate, Yuriy Cherkesov, whose assassination sparked the crisis. He demanded that Mr. Kozhanovskiy stop protecting her and that she and the accused assassin, a Canadian national named Michael Kilbane, be turned over to the authorities before the Russian deadline.
“In Moscow, the American, British, and French ambassadors have presented a jointly sponsored note to the Russian Foreign Ministry stating that if Russian troops cross the Ukrainian border, NATO will regard it as an act of aggression upon a NATO member country. In London, the prime minister stated in a televised speech to the people of Great Britain that ‘all eyes are now turned to the Ukrainian border. We hope and pray that Europe, which knows well the devastation of war, will not see it revisited upon us.’ ”
At Dytyatky, Scorpion stopped at the checkpoint and stepped into a telephone-booth-like radiation detector. He placed his hands and feet on metal pads. The machine buzzed.
“ Tse ne dobre,” the soldier said, shaking his head. It is not good. “What you are doing in Exclusion Zone?”
“How bad is it?” Scorpion asked.
“You should wash clothes, body. Scrub good,” the soldier said, making a fist to indicate strong.
“Very bad?”
“ Tse ne tak uzhe y pohano,” the soldier said. Is not so bad. “Like maybe two X rays. But you wash good, yes?”
“ Tak,” Scorpion said, nodding.
On the road back to Kyiv, he stopped again at the trailer-restaurant in Sukachi. The same woman, Olena, was behind the counter. He had some borscht and salo, strips of pork fat on black bread. He told her he needed to shower and change clothes.
“Too much radioactivnist?” she said. “What did you do there in zona?”
“I am a scientist. We like to get dirty,” he said.
“There is no hotel or banya bathhouse here,” she said. She looked at him. “My late husband. You’re almost the same size. Come.”
She led him to a house behind the trailer. While he took a shower-ice cold, of course-she laid out a workman’s clothes. He put them on and went back to the trailer to pay her. She waved the money away and poured glasses of horilka for both of them at the counter.
“They don’t fit bad,” she said, sizing him up. “May you have better luck with them than my Hryhoriy had, Tsarstvo yomu nebesne.” God rest his soul.
“He had a bad time?” Scorpion said.
She shrugged. “They were a bad luck family. It started with his grandfather in the Holodomor. He gave his son-Hryhoriy’s father-to a Russian woman, a party official. It was to save him. They were starving. This was when the Bolsheviks deliberately starved millions to death. If the Komsomol brigades found you with even a single grain of wheat, they would shoot you. Cannibalism was widespread. Some say four million died, some say seven, some ten.” She shook her head. “No one knows. The Bolsheviks said it was part of Stalin’s war against the kulaks, but,” motioning him closer, “many believe it was to wipe out the Ukrainians. Hryhoriy’s father was the only member of his family to survive, but it did no good.”
“More bad luck?”
“You could say so. Hryhoriy’s father was a partisan in the war, but he was captured by Germans. They took him to Syrets, the concentration camp they make at Babi Yar, where they killed the Jews. When he got out, he weighed thirty-six kilos. But he was only free for not even a year before he was arrested and executed by KGB.”
“Why?”
“Who knows?” She shrugged again. “In those days they didn’t need a reason. So then comes my husband, my Hryhoriy. All his life he tried to avoid trouble, but it did no good. He was killed in the riots against President Kuchma. He wasn’t on any side. They mistook him for someone else. Like I said,” she drained her glass, “a hard luck family. You look tired,” she said.
Scorpion nodded. The horilka was beginning to effect him. Before he knew it, he was back in the house behind the trailer. He fell asleep sprawled on the bed in the dead man’s clothes.
In the morning, he drove to Kyiv, where he bought a new set of clothes, overcoat, and fur hat at the Metrograd mall. He thought about calling Iryna. But first he needed to deal with the video of Shelayev. They were almost out of time. The Russian ultimatum expired at midnight.
At the Internet cafe on Chokolovsky Avenue he loaded the murky video from the button camera to his laptop. He used Wax, a shareware software video editor, to brighten it so Shelayev was clearly visible. He transferred the video from the laptop to the Internet cafe’s PC and uploaded it to YouTube with a fake new account, putting in Ukraine and Cherkesov as keywords. It was his fail-safe in case something happened to him or if what he was planning didn’t work. He made a DVD of the video and deleted it and all evidence that he had ever been on the cafe’s PC. When he was done, he made the call that would decide everything.
T he Mercedes limousine was parked up on the sidewalk in front of the Benetton store on Khreshchatyk Street. Two workers were taping the store’s windows. All along Khreshchatyk, crowds rushed past merchants boarding up their windows. In the twenty-four hours Scorpion had been away, Kyiv had been transformed into a city at war. Military checkpoints had been set up at major intersections and at roads leading into and out of the city, and air raid sirens were sounding; practicing for the real thing.
Ukrainian Army bivouacs and tents had sprung up in parks, churning the snow to dark frozen slush. SAM antiaircraft missile launchers were parked in front of government buildings, many of them surrounded by walls of sandbags. Everywhere, there were soldiers and a general feeling of fear. People were leaving town or stocking up on food and other essentials as if expecting the missiles to hit any second. It was surreal, Scorpion thought, like a World War Two movie.
A shaven-headed man stood beside the Mercedes limousine, an obvious bulge under his leather overcoat. Scorpion recognized him from Villefranche and the yacht. There was a flicker of acknowledgment in the man’s eyes as well. He held the limousine door open for Scorpion, then climbed into the front.
Akhnetzov was alone in the backseat. Seated on the side toward the front of the limousine was the other shaven-headed man, his hand inside his coat, and Evgeniya, the blond woman from the yacht. As soon as Scorpion was seated, Akhnetzov indicated to the driver to start driving. The limousine swung off the sidewalk and into heavy traffic on Khreshchatyk Street, much of it militsiyu and military, the driver honking his horn to try to get them to move out of his way.
“Where are we going?” Scorpion asked.
“There is a helipad near the Verkhovna Rada,” Akhnetzov said. “The road to the airport is completely jammed. Everyone is trying to get out. I have my plane, a Gulfstream, waiting at Boryspil. Thanks to you,” he growled, “I have to go to Moskva to see what we can salvage.”
Scorpion didn’t say anything. He looked at the blond woman, who avoided looking back.
“I do not see the point of this meeting. You failed,” Akhnetzov said.
“I was set up,” Scorpion said.
“People who fail always have excuses. Our business is done, you and me. Finished,” and Akhnetzov made a sideways cutting gesture with his hand.
“We can stop this.”
“Don’t talk stupidity.” He looked at Scorpion in a way that made the shaven-headed man take out his gun.
“I can stop it, damn it.”
Akhnetzov regarded him curiously.
“How?”
“With this,” Scorpion said, tapping his pocket where he had the flash drive from the button camera.
“Too late. The Russian deadline is midnight. Look at them,” gesturing at the people on Khreshchatyk, many carrying plastic bags, rushing from store to store. “They know what is coming.”
