“So you expect me to help von break open this story, this news scoop of yours?” Malkovic asked drily. “Out of the pure goodness of my own heart?”
Fiona smiled back at him, intentionally matching the billionaire’s wry expression. “You are famous for vour philanthropy, Mr. Malkovic,” she said.
“But even if you were not, I suspect that you are quite adept at measuring the value of good publicity.”
“And the cost of bad publicity, too,” he said with a brief, sardonic laugh.
Then he shook his large head slowly in a gesture of surrender. “Very well. Ms.
Devin, I will do what I can to pry open a few official doors for you, even if only in my own best interests.”
“Thank you,” she told him, closing her notebook and rising gracefully to her feet. “That would be most kind. Your staff knows how to contact me.”
“No thanks are necessary,” Malkovic said, politely standing up with her. A dour expression settled on his face. “If what von have told me this morning is true, we may both be acting in time to remedy a terrible, almost unforgivable mistake.”
Jon Smith followed a path heading deeper into the quiet, tree-lined square called Patriarch’s Pond. His shoes crunched softly on the icy snow still covering the walkway. There were very few other sounds. This far in among the trees the roar of traffic from the busy Sadovaya Ring road was muted, reduced to a faint hum. In the distance, children laughed and shouted, busy building forts and hurling clumps of snow at each other among the white- covered shapes of playground equipment. Strange sculptures, distorted images of creatures popular in nineteenth- century Russian fables, peered out at him from between tree trunks and bare, twisted branches.
He reached the edge of the large, shallow ice-covered pond at the center of the square and stopped for a moment, standing with his hands in his pockets as some protection against the below-zero temperatures. In the summer, this small, secluded patch of parkland was a favorite picnic spot for Muscovites, full of smiling crowds, sunlight, and singing. On this gray, overcast winter day,
it showed a gloomier, more desolate face.
“The devil appeared here once, you know,” a woman’s voice said lightly from behind him.
Smith turned his head.
Fiona Devin stood not far away, framed between two leafless lime trees.
Her cheeks were flushed in the cold and she wore a stylish fur hat atop her dark hair. She drew nearer.
“The devil?” Smith asked. “Literally or figuratively?”
Amusement glinted in her blue-green eyes. “Fictionally, only. Or so one hopes.” She nodded toward the pond. “The writer Mikhail Bulgakov set the first scene of his classic The Master and Margarita at this place. In it, Satan himself arrives right here, ready for a romp through the atheist Moscow of Stalin’s era.”
Smith shivered suddenly, from the cold seeping through the lining of his black wool coat, or so he hoped. “What a great place for a rendezvous, then,” he said with a quick grin. “Frozen, bleak, and cursed. We’ve hit the perfect Russian trifecta. Now all that’s missing is a sleigh and a pack of howling wolves hot on our trail.”
Fiona chuckled. “Soulful pessimism complete with gallows humor, Colonel? You may fit in here better than I thought.” She moved closer, coming right up to stand beside him at the edge of the snow-covered pavement. The top of her head came up to his shoulder. “My people have finished vetting that list of doctors and scientists you gave me,” she said abruptly, lowering her voice. “Now I’m ready to brief you.”
Surprised, Smith whistled tunelessly under his breath. “And?”
“Tour safest and surest bet is Dr. Elena Vedenskaya,” she said firmly.
Smith nodded slowly. Just as with Petrenko, he had met Vedenskaya at different medical conferences over the past several years. He had a vague memory of a rather plain, prim woman somewhere in her early fifties ?a woman whose skill, dedication, and competence had carried her right to the top of her male-dominated profession. Vedenskaya now headed the Cytol-ogy, Genetics, and Molecular Biology department at the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology. Since that was one of Russia’s top scientific institutions for the study of infectious disease, she was sure to have been involved in trying to identify the mystery illness whose origins they were now tracking.
“Is there any particular reason that you think I can trust her?” he asked.
“There is,” Fiona told him. “Dr. Vedenskaya has a good record as a friend of democracy and political reform,” she said quietly. “Going all the way back to her student days when Brezhnev and the other Communist Party bosses ruled the Kremlin roost.”
Smith looked at her sharply. “Then she must have a KGB/FSB security dossier as long as my arm. With the Kremlin keeping tabs on suspect scientists, she’ll be right at the head of their surveillance list.”
“She would be,” Fiona agreed. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Fortunately, her file no longer reflects reality. As far as the FSB is now aware, Elena
Vedenskaya is a thoroughly reliable and apolitical servant of the State.”
Smith raised an eyebrow. “Somebody cleaned out her dossier? Mind telling me how that little miracle of excision took place?”
“I’m afraid that’s on a strictly need-to-know basis, Colonel,” Fiona told him calmly. “And you do not need to know. For quite obvious reasons.”
He nodded, accepting the mild reproof. “Fair enough,” he said. “How do you suggest I contact her? Through the Institute?”
“Definitely not,” she said. “It’s highly likely that all landline calls into Moscow hospitals and research facilities are being monitored.” She passed him a small slip of paper with a ten-digit number written in a neat, feminine hand. “Fortunately, Vedenskaya has an unlisted cell phone.”
“I’ll call her this afternoon,” Smith decided. “And try to set up a dinner meeting for tonight, at some restaurant well away from her lab. Making this look like a purely social call between old colleagues seems the safest way to approach her.”
“Sensible,” Fiona agreed. “But make the reservation for three.”
“You’re planning on coming?”
“I am,” she said. One side of her mouth tilted upward in an impish smile.
“Unless, that is, you were hoping to woo the good doctor with your masculine charm.”
Smith reddened. “Not exactly.”
Her smile grew wider. “Very wise, Colonel.”
One hundred meters away, two men sat in the front seat of a silver BMW
parked along the side of a narrow street. One, a German named Wegner, leaned forward, taking pictures through the dark, tinted windshield with a digital camera equipped with a high-powered telephoto lens. The other entered a series of commands into the small portable computer perched on his lap.
“I’ve got a connection,” the second man announced. His name was Chernov and he had served as a junior officer in the old KGB. “I can send the images whenever you’re ready.”
“Good,” his companion grunted. He snapped another quick set of pictures and then lowered the camera. “That should do it.”
“Any idea who the man is?”
The cameraman shrugged. “None. But we’ll let someone else puzzle that out. In the meantime, we stick to our orders: Follow the woman Devin and report any and all contacts she makes.”
Chernov nodded sourly. “I know. I know. But this is getting too risky. I thought you’d lost her for good on the Metro this morning. I had to drive like a madman just to pick up your trail and hers.” He frowned. “I don’t like it.
She’s asking too many questions. We should just terminate her.”
“Kill a journalist? An American?” the man with the camera said coldly.
“Herr Brandt will have to make that decision himself?when the time comes.”
Not far away, a tall, barrel-chested man stood, slowly rocking back and forth in the shelter of a doorway. He wrapped his arms around himself, hug-ging his shabby coat tighter for warmth. His pants were faded and patched. At first glance, he seemed to be nothing more than one of the many poverty-stricken old-age pensioners who often wandered Moscow’s streets in an alco-holic daze. But beneath his bushy, silver eyebrows, the tall man’s gaze was
