patch tend to stand out.”
“FSB agents or informers, you mean?” he asked, using the acronym for the Russian Federal Security Service.
Fiona Devin nodded again. “The hard-faced lads up at Lubyanka Square are not yet quite so active and all- powerful as when they called themselves the KGB, but they do get around all the same.”
“And now President Dudarev is doing his best to restore the bad old order,”
Smith commented.
“Too true,” she agreed somberly. “Czar Viktor has certainly surrounded himself with a very nasty bunch of cronies. The Russians call them the siloviki, the men of power. Like Dudarev himself, they’re all ex-KGB with a taste for absolute control and a real knack for putting the fear of Stalin into anyone foolish enough to get in their way.”
“No kidding,” Smith said grimly, thinking back to the bridge in Prague and Valentin Petrenko’s murder. “Plus, they use surrogates like this so-called Brandt Group for some of their dirty work.”
“So it seems, Colonel,” she said coolly. “But keep in mind that the Brandt Group also works for the highest bidder, not just the Kremlin.”
“Oh?”
Her eyes grew colder. “I’ve done a bit of investigative work on the Group.
Oh, I admit that they’re a fine match for Dudarev and his siloviki. Mostly ex-Stasi, like their boss, a vicious creature named Erich Brandt?with a smatter-ing of Romanian Securitate and Serbian secret police thugs thrown in for good measure. But they’ll take any assignment, no matter how dirtv, if the fee is big enough.”
Her mouth tightened into a thin line. “Rumor has it that the Brandt Group provides security for some of the biggest drug lords and Mafiya crime bosses in Moscow. One set of parasites guarding another. The Group’s ties to the Kremlin keep the police conveniently looking the other way, no matter how many innocents are murdered by the Mafiya bosses they protect.”
Smith heard the deep anger and pain in her voice. “Including someone you knew?” he guessed.
“My husband,” Fiona said simply. “Sergei was a Russian. One of the optimistic entrepreneurs who believed this country could remake itself as a prosperous democracy. He worked hard, built up his business?and then the hard men arrived, demanding the lion’s share of his profits. When he refused, the Mafiya bastards shot him down in the street.”
She fell silent, plainly unwilling to say more now.
Smith nodded, recognizing a boundary he should not cross. Not yet. To fill the silence, he stopped a passing waitress to order a glass of shampanskae, a sweet sparkling wine from Moldova, for Fiona and another beer for himself and then turned back to her. He hesitated briefly, not knowing quite how to proceed. “I’m assuming Fred Klein told you why I’m here, Ms. Devin,” he said at last, and then winced inwardly, hearing suddenly how pompous that sounded.
“I’ve been thoroughly briefed by Mr. Klein,” she confirmed easily, choosing to show mercy by ignoring this second gaffe. “Besides, I’ve had my own brush with the news of these mysterious deaths. Three nights ago, Dr. Nikolai Kiryanov was on his way to meet me when he disappeared. Now I suspect he was trying to pass on the same sort of information your friend Petrenko brought to Prague.”
“And I understand that Kiryanov turned up in the morgue the next morning?” he asked, recovering.
Fiona frowned. “Not quite. I never saw his body. The poor man had already been cremated.”
Smith raised an eyebrow. “That quickly?”
She nodded. “Well now, the cause of death was listed as ‘heart attack.’ I suppose cremation must have seemed a convenient way to make sure no one could check up on that.”
“And since then?”
“I’ve been poking and prying and asking pointed questions wherever and whenever I can,” she told him.
“Sounds pretty dangerous ?in the present circumstances,” he commented.
One side of Fiona Devin’s generous mouth ticked upward in a lopsided smile. “The authorities here may not like it much,” she said. “But remember that asking awkward questions is precisely what they expect a Western reporter like me to do. And they know that Kiryanov could have told me at least a tiny bit of what happened with those poor people. If I got wind of a juicy story like those deaths and then simply sat back on my hands, they’d grow more suspicious still.”
“Have you had any luck?” Jon asked.
She shook her head disgustedly. “Not a bit. I’ve haunted the corridors of the Central Clinical Hospital until I can smell the disinfectant they use in my sleep, and all to no avail. I’ve run straight into a solid wall of obstruction and evasion. Naturally, the staff there all deny that any mysterious disease outbreak ever took place.”
“Naturally,” Smith said drily. “What about prowling through their medical records?”
“Strictly forbidden,” Fiona Devin said flatly. “The hospital director insists that the medical records of all current or former patients are strictly off-limits.
Going over his head to get the necessary authorizations from the Ministry of Health could take weeks.”
“Or forever.”
She nodded. “Far more likely. One thing is quite clear, though: The doctors and nurses there are all utterly on edge. You can sense the fear rolling off them under all that horrid carbolic soap. Believe me, they aren’t going to talk to a foreigner or anyone else about what happened, no matter what kind of in-ducement is offered to them.”
Smith thought that over. If the hospital was a dead end, he was going to have to explore other angles. From what Petrenko had said, it sounded as though the Kremlin orders quashing talk about the strange deaths came later?after the mini-epidemic had run its lethal course. Before then, the hospital’s doctors had been trying everything in their power to diagnose and treat their sick patients. Even though the Russian hadn’t explicitly mentioned doing so, he was willing to bet that Petrenko and his colleagues had shared the data they had gathered with other medical professionals. At least until the Kremlin clamped a lid on the situation. One of the first principles for anyone fighting an unknown disease was to spread the information across a wide spec-trum, bringing as much competent brainpower and lab time as possible to bear on solving its deadly mysteries.
Well, Smith knew people in some of the leading Russian medical and scientific institutions?top-notch scientists who were sure to have been consulted about this illness. Sure, they would have received the same cease-and-desist orders from on high, but with luck he might be able to persuade one or more of them to give him access to their case records or lab test results.
Fiona Devin nodded slowly when he ran that idea past her. “Approaching them could be risky, though,” she pointed out. “You’re masquerading as John Martin, a harmless and inconsequential Canadian social scientist. But you won’t be able to use your cover when dealing with people who already know you by sight and reputation. If just one of them panics and runs off screaming about being approached by Colonel Jonathan Smith, the American military disease specialist, some very loud alarm bells will start ringing inside the Kremlin.”
“True,” Smith agreed quietly. “But I don’t see many other real options, Ms.
Devin.” He pushed his untouched second beer to the side. “You’ve seen the lists of those who’ve been hit with this illness. We really don’t have time for anything subtle or indirect. Somehow I must find a way to make contact with the Russian experts who are likely to have the information we need.”
“Then at least let us run some quick checks on these possible sources first,” she said. “My team and I know the ground here better than you do. Maybe we can weed out those who are too close to Dudarev’s regime?or too openly frightened by it?to be worth questioning.”
“How long will you need for this vetting process?” he asked.
“Several hours, starting from the moment you give me the names and institutional affiliations of those you’re interested in,” Fiona said firmly.
Smith raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That fast?”
She grinned at him. “I really am very good at my job, Colonel. And I’ve got some decent sources, both inside the government and out of it.”
Almost against his will, he found himself grinning back at her. Now that her earlier mood of tightly repressed anger and sorrow had faded, her natural air of buoyant self-confidence had come bubbling back to the surface. It was infectious. “So, how do I get in touch with you again?”
Fiona pulled a business card out of her small handbag and quickly jotted down a telephone number on the
