Seated in a booth in a far corner of the main room, Smith saw Fiona Devin come through the front door. She stood poised there for a moment, brushing the snow off her coat while gracefully turning her head, first in one direction and then another, obviously looking for him. Relieved, he rose to his feet.
With a casual nod, she headed in his direction, striding nimbly through the crowded, smoke-filled restaurant.
“I presume this is your companion, at long last,” Flena Vedenskaya said calmly, watching this attractive, elegantly dressed woman approach with dark, expressionless eyes. She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and stood up to greet Fiona just as she joined them.
In appearance, the Russian research scientist was as plain as Smith had remembered. Her narrow, lined face, pallid skin, and stiff, iron-gray hair pinned up in a tight bun made her look at least ten years older than she really was.
Her drab skirt and blouse were clearly chosen more for comfort and convenience than for style. Still, her mind was just as sharp and incisive as he had recalled, and here in her home city she showed few traces of the reserved shy-ness he had observed at their last encounter?a molecular biology conference in Madrid.
“Ms. Devin, this is Dr. Elena Borisovna Vedenskaya,” Smith said, carefully introducing them formally.
The two women nodded to each other coolly, but politely, and then sat down, choosing opposite ends of the semicircular booth. After a brief hesitation, Smith slid into the side closest to Vedenskaya. Without demur she moved over to the middle, making room for him.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Jon,” Fiona said quietly. “I ran into a few … complications. Somewhere along the way I picked up a pair of unwelcome guests? door-to-door salesmen, I think?that I wanted to avoid.”
Smith raised an eyebrow. In Covert-One voice code the term “door-to-door salesmen” was used to describe a hostile surveillance operation aimed at the agent. “These guys weren’t selling anything you were interested in?” he asked, choosing his words carefully to avoid spooking the Russian doctor sitting beside him.
“No. At least, I don’t think so,” Fiona told him. Her voice betrayed just the slightest hint of uncertainty. “It’s possible they were only paying me a routine visit. There are a lot of pushy salesmen around Moscow these days.”
Smith nodded his understanding. As Dudarev and his cronies tightened their control over Russia, journalists, especially foreign journalists, were increasingly subject to random, and often painfully obvious, police and FSB surveillance. It was a method the authorities used to distract and intimidate the media without imposing more overt restrictions that might draw protests from the outside world.
They all fell silent as a youthful pair of smiling waiters arrived, each bearing a tray of plates and bowls heaped with food. Working with practiced efficiency, the servers set these dishes out across the table and departed. A third waiter, older than the others, followed right on his companions’ heels bringing their drinks: a bottle of slightly fizzy Moskovskaya vodka and another containing sweetened apple juice.
“To save time, we ordered before you arrived,” Dr. Vedenskaya told Fiona.
The gray-haired woman raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I hope this was all right?”
“Quite all right,” Fiona replied with an answering smile. “I don’t know about anyone else, but personally I’m absolutely famished.”
Delicious aromas wafted up from the array of dishes laid before them. Suddenly ferociously hungry, the three of them took turns serving themselves, choosing from a wide assortment of Azeri specialties. Some plates held steaming slivers of satsivi, chicken breasts marinated in a creamy garlic sauce. Others were piled with sweet peppers stuffed with a mixture of minced lamb, mint, fennel, and cinnamon. There were also small bowls of dovgra, a thick, hot soup made with yogurt, rice, and spinach. While they were finishing these starters, more dishes arrived, mostly various shasliks, skewers of lamb, veal, and chicken soaked in onion, vinegar, and pomegranate juice, grilled over glowing embers, and served with thin sheets of lavash, a form of unleavened bread.
With the edge taken off their appetites, Elena Vedenskaya held up a glass of vodka. “Za vashe zdarov’e! Your health!” she said and downed the clear, cold liquor in one large gulp, following it immediately with a chaser of apple juice.
Smith ami Fiona followed her example, savoring a combination oi sharply contrasting flavors that perfectly complemented the highly spiced food they were eating.
“So now,” the Russian scientist said quietly when they set their empty glasses down. “To business.” She looked narrowly at Fiona. “Our mutual friend here,” she nodded at Jon, “tells me that you are a journalist.”
“I am.”
“Then let us understand one another, Ms. Devin,” Vedenskaya said firmly.
“I do not wish my name to appear splashed across the front pages of some lurid tabloid.” She smiled thinly. “Or even a respectable newspaper.”
Fiona nodded easily. “That’s perfectly reasonable.”
“Although I do not like the government that pays my salary, I am very good at my job,” the gray-haired woman continued. “And it is important work. Work that saves lives. So I have no great desire to lose my position unnecessarily.”
Fiona looked across the table at the scientist. “Then I give you my word that I will leave your name out of any story I write,” she said seriously.
“Believe me, Dr. Vedenskaya, I’m far more interested in learning the truth about this mysterious disease than I am in selling the story to a newspaper or magazine.”
“If so, we have at least one thing in common,” the Russian woman said drily. She turned back to Smith. “On the telephone you said that you believed this same illness was now spreading outside Russia.”
He nodded grimly. “Without more data on the first outbreak here, I can’t be absolutely sure, but the symptoms appear identical. And if it is the same unidentified disease, this news blackout ordered by the Kremlin is essentially killing people.”
“Fools! Dolts!” Vedenskaya swore acidly. She pushed her half-filled plate to the side and lit another cigarette, plainly trying to buy a few moments to regain her composure. “This cover-up is an act of criminal folly. I warned the government about the dangers of its decision to keep these strange deaths a secret. So did my colleagues.”
She scowled. “We should have been allowed to consult with the other international health authorities as soon as the first four cases were recognized.”
Her narrow shoulders slumped. “And I should have said something, or done something, to pass the warning on myself. But, then, as weeks passed without anyone else falling ill, I allowed myself to hope that my initial fears of a larger epidemic had been exaggerated.”
“There haven’t been any new cases here in Moscow?” Fiona asked.
The Russian research scientist shook her head firmly. “None.”
“You’re sure?” Smith asked, surprised.
“Quite sure, Jonathan,” Vedenskaya said. “True, the government has forbidden us to reveal the facts of the outbreak to the outside world. But we remain under explicit instructions to continue our own research. The Kremlin is still deeply interested in learning more about this disease: what causes it, how it is transmitted, the methods by which it kills its victims, and for some way to slow or reverse its cruel and inexorable progression.”
“But Valentin Petrenko told me that he’d been ordered to call off his probe into those first four deaths,” Smith said with a frown.
“Yes, that is so,” Vedenskaya agreed. “The hospital investigative teams were shut down, probably to control the flow of information. Instead, all research work surrounding this illness is being conducted in other, higher-level facilities, my BIO-CGM section at the Institute among them.”
“Including the Bioaparat labs?” Smith asked quietly, referring to the collection of heavily guarded science complexes that were said to be the center of Russia’s top-secret biological weapons research. If, as Klein and President Castilla suspected, the Russians were using this strange disease as a weapon, the scientists and technicians working for Bioaparat had to be involved in some way.
The gray-haired woman shook her head gravely. “I do not know what goes on behind the barbed wire at Yekaterinburg, Kirov, Sergiyev Posad, or Strizhi.” Her mouth tightened. “My security clearances do not reach that high.”
Smith nodded his understanding. He frowned, trying vainly to make these new pieces of information fit into the puzzle. If this new illness was a Russian-made weapon, and it was already being used against important people
