hips, and her pale blue eyes had a no-nonsense glare about them. Her smock and rubber gloves were smeared with shockingly red streaks of fresh blood.
“Ah, no, actually,” he told her. “I’m with … a different unit. The 201st. I came along to get some photographs.”
“You have authorization, I suppose?”
“Um … no, actually. Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev has it.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”
“Of course.” Akulinin glanced up at a large clock hanging on one concrete block wall. It was just past 7:10. “You’re here awfully late. Are you the night shift?”
“I’m working late, actually,” she said. “Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev phoned me from Ayni and said he was on the way.”
He gave her his most radiant smile. “Really? So what time do you get off?”
“You can turn off the charm, Major,” she told him. “It won’t work. You still haven’t told me who you are or given me your authorization to be here.”
He cocked his head to one side. “That is an interesting accent there.”
“What about it?”
“It sounds American, actually.”
She sighed, took a step back, and began peeling off her gloves. “That’s because I
Akulinin started. “Really?” He hesitated. He could get into serious trouble dropping his cover, but he couldn’t simply ignore what the woman had just said. “Then you and I might be neighbors,” he said, shifting to Brooklyn- accented English.
It was the woman’s turn to look startled. “Brighton Beach?
“My parents emigrated to the United States in ’82. I was born two years later.”
“My God!” She shook her head. “What are you doing
“I could ask you the same question.”
“How can I believe you? This is impossible!”
“Unlikely, yes,” he said, grinning. “Not impossible. Brighton Beach is probably the largest colony of transplanted Russians in the U.S. You know the intersection of Brighton and Coney Island Avenue?”
Her eyes opened wider. She nodded.
“Remember the subway/el tracks? They come down in a big curve overhead, right above the intersection … right? Q train for local service, the B train for weekday express. And when the train comes through, it sounds like thunder!”
“I used to walk under that overpass on my way to school!”
“Public School 253.”
“
“I went to the same school …”
For several more minutes, Akulinin dredged up memories of his own childhood in Brighton Beach, enough to convince the woman that they had indeed grown up in the same neighborhood. He wondered if he’d ever seen her; she looked to be a couple of years younger, but they might well have attended the same school during the same years, just a few classes apart.
What were the chances of running into her
He asked her what had brought her back to Russia — and Tajikistan.
“My … my parents moved back to Russia when I was thirteen,” she told him. There obviously was some pain associated with the memory. “A business opportunity for my father. There was … some trouble. Financial trouble. My mother was sick. He got into debt with some very bad people.”
She nodded. “After my mother died, my father sent me to work with a man he knew, a friend, Dr. Shmatko. He is a pathologist with the Science Academy here in Dushanbe.”
“Why?”
“Those men, the ones he owed money? They offered to settle some of his debt if I would go to work for them. Photographs … movies … to be posted on the Internet, you know?”
Akulinin nodded. He
“So I came here and trained as a
“
She nodded.
“That’s horrible!”
“It’s not so bad.” She shrugged. “My … clients don’t talk back, and never give me trouble. The pay is … not too bad, and Dr. Shmatko is teaching me a lot, so that I can go to school and be a doctor myself one day. But first I hope to save enough to get back to the United States someday. It’s … life is hard, here.”
“What about your father? Where is he?”
She shrugged. The expression on her face, behind her eyes, was heart-wrenching. “I don’t know. It’s been two years now. I stopped getting letters, oh, two or three months after he sent me away. I think … I think …”
She was trembling, on the verge of tears.
“It’s okay. What’s your name?”
“Maria. Maria Alekseyevna. My friends … my friends call me Masha.”
It was, Akulinin knew, a common Russian nickname for Maria. “I’m Ilya,” he told her. “I might be able to help you.”
“You still haven’t told me what
“Not exactly.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re a spy! Who do you work for?”
“I really can’t—”
“You’re with the American CIA! Right?”
“Something like that.” He looked at the corpses on the nearby tables. “I
“Of course not! It isn’t every day a girl gets to meet a real-life James Bond! Especially one who grew up in her old neighborhood!”
He pulled out his mini camera and walked over to one of the stainless steel tables. He’d managed to get a shot of one of the bodies earlier, while Charlie was sparring with the Russian officer, but not the others. One of them, in fact, was still anonymously wrapped up in an olive green body bag. He took several more photos of the first two from different angles. The two bodies already removed from the body bags were male Caucasians, still dressed in civilian clothing. Both were heavily tattooed on their arms. One sported a bushy Stalinesque mustache; the other was clean-shaven, his wide-open eyes pale gray against a bright red mask. There was a
“This one had a bullet wound,” Masha pointed out, touching the skull of the mustached man and turning it so he could see. “Left temple. Definitely fatal.”
“I … see.” Akulinin wasn’t particularly bothered by death, but the young woman’s casual attitude was a bit disturbing.
“Did Vasilyev tell you anything about these guys?”
“No. Just that he wanted complete path workups, and for them to be checked for radiation. I don’t know why.”
“Well, I can help with that much.” Pocketing the camera, he reached down and pulled up the cuff of his uniform trousers, revealing the small radiation counter strapped to his ankle. Unfastening the chrome-colored device, he held it up, peered closely at a switch on the side, and flicked it.
“It was set to transmit data … somewhere else. Now it will play what it picks up for us, and record it for
