“Lord have mercy. What have you done?”
The lights went off in the upper bedroom. As BC watched, the rest of the house went dark. The black-suited man scanned the ground, then got in the car. The engine started, the lights came on. Then a shadow filled the cottage doorway. Another dark suit, but there was something different about this one. It was bigger for one thing. Bulkier. More rumpled.
For some reason BC looked at the feet for confirmation of the man’s identity. There were the sandals. When he looked up at the face, he saw that it was covered by a broad-brimmed fedora and a pair of mirrored sunglasses, as if the man was hiding his identity even from the people he worked with.
He was different now. The clothing was still shabby, ill-fitting, but there was nothing disheveled about the man himself. He was clearly in charge.
“Did you have to kill them? Mr. Forrestal? The girl?”
Melchior descended the steps and walked toward the car.
“Isn’t it bad enough that you dragged them into your experiment? Did you have to shoot them when it went awry?”
A grin flickered over the corner of Melchior’s mouth, and for some reason BC knew it was his use of the word “awry.”
“Was Logan his real name?” he called as Melchior reached for a door handle. “Or Morganthau? His parents will want to know what happened to him. What about the girl? What was her name?”
Melchior pulled the door open. He paused a moment.
“She doesn’t have a name,” he said finally. “Not anymore. Give him back his gun, Charlie,” he threw in, then got in the car.
The agent guarding BC handed him his gun, then the bullets that had been in it. Then he got in the Lincoln with Melchior and the other man, and, almost silently, the car pulled away over the pine needles. More out of instinct than hope, BC glanced at the rear bumper, but black fabric had been draped over the license plate, as though the car itself were in mourning for the three bodies it carried.
Camaguey Province, Cuba
November 5, 1963
Maria Bayo’s uncle had died by the time Ivelitsch reached him, but there were a half dozen other cases of radiation poisoning in the village. The epicenter was a small shed one block off the village’s only paved road. Even without the Geiger counter Ivelitsch would have been able to find it: someone had painted the skull and crossbones on all four sides of the building.
“Readings are incredibly high, comrade,” Sergei Vladimirovich confirmed. “Either the unit was damaged when Vassily Vasilievich stole it, or afterwards, when Raul’s man got it.”
“Is there any other danger? Besides the leak, I mean?”
“You mean an explosion? No, comrade—” Sergei Vladimirovich broke off.
“What?” Ivelitsch demanded.
“Just a premonition. The thieves obviously stored the device here, but they moved it before we arrived. That means they knew we were coming. Next time they won’t just stick it in a shed. They’ll look for something less noticeable.” Sergei Vladimirovich waved a hand, indicating the flat fields stretching beyond the village in every direction. “My guess is they’ll bury it.”
“And?”
“It’s just that the water table’s extremely shallow here, and porous as well. If this thing actually gets into the local supply, you could end up with hundreds sick, perhaps thousands.”
“Your concern for human welfare is touching.” Ivelitsch’s voice would have raised the fur on a cat’s back.
Sergei Vladimirovich surprised Ivelitsch. “I wasn’t thinking of the villagers, comrade.” He looked around the windblown shacks with almost as much distaste as he’d shown the pile of dog carcasses a few days ago. “An outbreak of suspicious cancers and birth defects is going to be hard to keep a secret, even in Cuba. If word gets to the relief agencies, everyone in the world will know what we’re looking for.”
“Well then. We’d better find the device before that happens.”
Most of the sick people in the village didn’t know anything. Ignorance, of course, is the Communist condition—in four years with the Czech secret police, Ivelitsch had been hard-pressed to find a single resident of Prague or Bratislava who knew his brother’s wife’s name, let alone whether his neighbor was an enemy of the proletariat—but even with a little cajoling the villagers stuck to their story. Ivelitsch ordered the sick to be quarantined and given tetracycline to combat the radiation sickness, which in most cases was fairly mild. The quarantine was more for his sake than the villagers’, since it allowed him to interview each of the patients privately. Most of them knew nothing helpful, and Ivelitsch was beginning to lose hope—and patience—when finally he came to the last man. He’d been unconscious the first time Ivelitsch visited him, but was awake now, barely. The skin of his lips and nostrils and eyelids was pocked with blisters, and thin yellow mucus leaked from beneath his fingernails.
There was a cane leaning across the arms of a chair, and Ivelitsch laid it on the floor before sitting down next to the bed. He pulled a pill bottle from his jacket and set it on the bedside table, just out of the patient’s reach.
“I need information.”
Ivelitsch thought the man’s response came too quickly. It wasn’t an answer. It was a denial.
“An American in a truck. Dark like a Cuban, but big.”
