patron has a special contact in Cologne, a man who should prove most useful in this matter.”
Chapter Thirty
Huge housing projects lined Moscow’s Outer Ring Road, surrounding the city with row after row of drab gray blocks ?soulless hives built by Communist bureaucrats as lodging for the faceless masses drawn to the Soviet capital in search of work. Nearly two decades after the death of the system that created them, these housing projects were still home to hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s poorest citizens.
Jon Smith and Fiona Devin made their way carefully up the interior stair-well of one of these apartment buildings. A few bare lightbulbs dangled from wiring, providing small, irregularly spaced patches of wavering light in the darkness. The concrete stairs were cracked and chipped and horribly stained.
In several places along the staircase, whole sections of rusty iron railing had sheared away from their supports.
The air was thick with unpleasant smells?the eye-stinging odor of cheap disinfectant, the scent of boiled cabbage from apartment kitchens, and the odor of urine and dirty diapers from darker corners piled high with sacks of uncollected garbage. Over everything there hung the sour reek of far too many people forced to live cheek-by- jowl without enough hot water to stay truly clean.
The tiny two-room flat they were seeking was on the fourth floor, at the far end of the building, past row upon row of identically grimy and battered doors. Smith and Fiona were here to visit the parents of Mikhail Voronov, the seven-year-old boy who had first contracted the terrible disease they were tracking.
At first glance, Jon found it difficult to believe that the silent, withdrawn woman who opened the door at their knock could possibly be the boy’s real mother. She seemed far too old, more a grandmother than the comparatively young woman she must be. Her hair had gone gray. Her face, probably already thin, was now horribly gaunt and deeply lined. But then he saw her eves, full of ever-renewed sorrow and left raw and red by constant weeping. They were the eyes of a woman, always poor, who had now been robbed of her one real treasure ?her only child. Even two months later, she was still clad all in black, still in mourning.
“Yes?” she asked, plainly surprised to find two well-dressed foreigners standing on her doorstep. “How can I help you?”
“Please accept our deepest sympathies on your tragic loss, Mrs. Voronova.
And please accept our most sincere apologies for intruding in this difficult time,” Smith said quietly. “If it were not absolutely necessary, we would not dream of bothering you this way.”
He showed her his forged UN identity card. “My name is Strand, Dr. Kalle Strand. I’m with the World Health Organization. And this is Ms. Lindkvist.”
He indicated Fiona. “My assistant.”
“I do not understand,” the woman said, still puzzled. “Why are you here?”
“We’re investigating the illness that killed your son,” Fiona explained gently. “We’re trying to find out exactly what happened to Mikhail, so that others may someday be saved.”
Slowly, comprehension dawned on the woman’s grief-ravaged face. “Oh!
Of course. Come in! Come in! Please, enter my home.” She stepped back from the door and motioned them inside.
It was a bright winter morning outside, but the outer room she showed them into was only dimly lit, illuminated by a single, overhead fixture. Thick drapes blocked the lone window. A single-burner electric stove and a wash-basin occupied one corner of the tiny room, while a threadbare sofa, a pair of battered wooden chairs, and a low table took up most of the rest.
“Please, sit down,” the woman said, indicating the sofa. “I will bring my husband, Yuri.” She reddened. “He is trying to sleep. You must excuse him.
He is not fully himself. Not since our son ? “
Clearly unable to say anything more without weeping, she turned and bustled away through a door into the flat’s only other room.
Fiona silently nudged Smith, indicating the framed picture of a small, smiling bov propped up on the low table. It was wreathed in black ribbon.
Two small candles flickered on either side of it.
He nodded tightly, regretting the need to deceive these poor, sad people in any way?even for a good cause. But it was necessary. From what Fred Klein had said last night, it was more urgent than ever that they obtain hard evidence about the origins of this cruel disease. One by one, the props were being knocked out from under the West’s intelligence services right at a time when their best work was most needed. And one by one, the new republics surrounding Russia were being fatally weakened by the loss of their most talented political and military leaders.
The dead boy’s mother came back into the room, now accompanied by her husband. Like his wife, Yuri Voronov was more a shambling grief-ridden shadow than a living being. His bloodshot eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and his hands trembled constantly. His clothes, smelling of stale sweat and alcohol, hung loose on a stooped frame that seemed to be visibly wasting away.
Seeing Smith and Fiona waiting for them, Voronov slowly straightened up.
With an embarrassed smile, he smoothed down his sparse, spiky hair and made a painfully correct and polite effort to welcome these two foreigners to his home, offering them tea in lieu of anything stronger. While his wife began heating water in a kettle on their small stove, he sat down across from them.
“Tatvana has told me you are scientists,” Voronov said slowly. “With the United Nations? And that you are studying the illness that took our little boy?”
Smith nodded. “That’s right, sir. If possible, we would very much like to ask you and your wife questions about your son’s life and about his overall health. Your answers may help us learn how to fight this disease before it kills other children in other parts of the world.”
“Da,” the other man said simply. “We will do whatever we can.” He blinked back tears and then went on. “No one else should have to suffer as Mischka did.”
“Thank you,” Smith said quietly.
Then, while Fiona took detailed notes, Jon led the two Russians through a painstaking inquiry into their son’s past medical history and theirs, trying to find some angle that Petrenko, Vedenskaya, and the others might have missed.
For their part, the hov’s parents answered patiently, even when most of Smith’s questions turned out to duplicate those they had already been asked a dozen times.
Yes, Mikhail had suffered the usual childhood ailments in Russia, measles, mumps, and occasional bouts of the common flu. For the most part, though, he had been a healthy, reasonably happy child. Neither of his parents had ever used illegal drugs, although his father shamefacedly admitted to drinking too much “now and then.” No, no one in the Voronov’s immediate or extended family had a history of serious chronic illness ?no strange cancers or birth defects or other crippling disorders. One grandfather had died relatively young in a tractor accident on a collective farm. But the other grandparents had lived well into their late seventies before finally succumbing to a mixture of common, garden-variety ailments among the elderly ?a heart attack, a stroke, and a case of severe pneumonia.
At length, Smith sat back feeling completely frustrated. So far, he could see nothing that might explain how or why Mikhail Voronov had contracted the previously unknown disease that had killed him. What linked this boy to the others who had also fallen ill in Moscow?
Jon frowned. He strongly suspected that the answer, if there was one, lay buried somewhere in their genetic makeup or in their biochemistry. Checking his theory meant obtaining DNA, blood, and tissue samples from the victims’ surviving relatives. It would require unfettered access to sophisticated science labs capable of running the necessary tests. Although Oleg Kirov was sure he could safely smuggle anything they collected back to the United States, doing so would take time. And conducting those tests would require even more time ?time they might not be given.
Smith sighed. If you’ve only got one shot left, he told himself, you’d better take it while you can and hope for
