“No worries,” I told her.
The girls thanked us and kissed both of us on both cheeks before stumbling away.
“I know those girls will spend that money on drugs but I couldn’t help myself,” Ana said as we walked through what was left of the pack.
As we passed them, I glimpsed each girl’s pale, skeletal face, and I felt as though I were looking at the walking dead. Some of them appeared no older than sixteen.
Sixteen, I thought. Sweet sixteen. Hailey’s sixteen. Would be sixteen.
I looked into the eyes of a brunette who appeared to be from the West, and I was rocked by a sudden certainty that I was looking into the face of my only child. The resemblance was too striking for it not to be her.
“Hailey?” I whispered.
The girl looked at me oddly, then muttered something in Russian and turned away.
Ana must have heard me. She placed a cool palm on my cheek and guided my face down to hers.
“Simon,” she said softly.
For a moment the images in my head froze in place. If asked where I was or what I was doing there, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. I’d have drawn a complete blank.
Finally, Ana nudged me forward. “These girls, they are all volunteers,” she said sadly. “Simon, I am afraid we have hit a dead end.”
My head turned back to the brunette, almost of its own accord, and my eyes followed her as she made her way up the beach’s incline to the street.
I continued watching her as she staggered to a waiting car. I was mesmerized, in a complete trance, my thoughts floating back a decade to Georgetown, Washington, D.C., to holding Hailey in my arms while she unwrapped presents on Christmas Eve.
Then a chirping noise smacked me like cold water in the face and returned me to the present. I looked at Ana, lost myself in her eyes again.
“Answer it,” she said, obviously still concerned about me. “It is your phone.”
Chapter 41
An hour later, Ana and I were on an overnight train heading north to Kiev, the country’s capital. The call I’d received was from Ana’s brother, Marek Staszak, back in Warsaw. He said he wasn’t about to leave Lindsay Sorkin’s fate in the hands of the Polish police. So, after Ana and I had left for Ukraine, he had returned to Mikolaj Dabrowski’s office with a private investigator and seized the lawyer’s desktop computer. He and the investigator then took the hard drive to a private company that handled the extraction of encrypted data and personally waited in their office for the final results.
The experts determined from where the images on Dabrowski’s computer originated, and Marek thought it more than a mere coincidence that most of the obscene material came from a so-called children’s modeling agency based in Kiev. Known as Ukrainian Darlings Studios, the alleged agency posted photos and sold images using several domains on the Internet, including UD Models, UD Dreams, UD Holidays, UD Magazine, and UD Island, among others.
Once he gathered this information, Marek contacted a close friend in the Senate, the upper house of Polish parliament. His friend had widespread connections that included the deputy head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Ministry of the Interior in Ukraine. The deputy head quietly confirmed that there was an ongoing investigation involving both the Ukrainian authorities and Interpol. The modeling agency was indeed a front for a hard-core child-pornography ring that had been in operation roughly seven years. More than eighteen hundred girls and boys between the ages of eight and sixteen had allegedly visited the agency voluntarily, though it was clear that the images sold on some of the UD sites depicted children as young as four.
No raids had yet been conducted and none was expected for several months, so authorities had ample time to use surveillance and other techniques to acquire evidence that would result in an airtight case. There was also the issue of rounding up as many users of the sites as possible. The users ranged in age from twenty-two to seventy-eight and spanned at least forty-two countries.
“Who is the leader of this agency?” I had asked Marek after he provided me a location. “I need a name.”
“I can give you two names, Simon. They are brothers. Dmitry and Viktor Podrova of Lviv. At least one of them is thought to be running the day-to-day operations in Kiev.”
Now, as the train rumbled along the flat Ukrainian countryside, Ana dozed with her head on my shoulder. We had a first-class sleeper compartment for two, yet we hadn’t moved to the bed. Wired on espresso, I stared absently out the window at pitch-black fields and thought of the girl at the beach who had resembled Hailey.
You’re out of your mind, Simon. How the hell would you even know what Hailey looked like today? You can barely picture her as a child anymore. You constantly need to pull the photo of her and Tasha from your wallet, or else you’ll risk losing the faces of both forever.
I turned my head for just a second, and when I did, I could have sworn I saw someone’s face, a man staring into our compartment.
Just a trick of the imagination, Fisk. You’re tired, possibly hallucinating. You should go to bed, get some sleep.
But I knew I wouldn’t get any sleep tonight. My adrenaline was pumping, my blood running too hot. I felt as though Odessa had been a big waste of precious time—Lindsay’s precious time.
The kidnappers consistently remained one step ahead of me, and I knew that if this game of cat and mouse continued this way, I’d leave an ugly number of bodies in my wake without ever locating Lindsay Sorkin. As things stood, it would be a hell of a risk to return to Germany. And surely I was now wanted in Poland for questioning. If charges were ultimately brought against me in either country, I’d be red-flagged by Interpol and confined to a nation averse to extradition treaties. Even then I wouldn’t be entirely safe. I’d forever be looking over my shoulder.
But this wasn’t about me, I had to remind myself; it was about Vince and Lori Sorkin and reuniting them with their daughter.
In my years as a U.S. Marshal, then (for lack of a better term) as a private investigator, I’d always known that anticipating my target’s next move was key. Usually you found your subjects because of the research you did before the chase. You learned where your targets had family and friends, what type of jobs they were qualified for, the kind of climate they preferred or at least could endure. But in this case, that essential preparation was impossible.
Again I stared out the window into the night and tried to picture the person or persons capable of pulling off this elaborate kidnapping of Lindsay Sorkin. For a moment, I locked on a reflection coming from the window into our compartment. That face again. I swung my head around but the visage was gone.
Must have been the provodnik.
Each carriage had one: an attendant who collected tickets, distributed sheets and pillows, made morning wake-up calls, served cups of tea. Or maybe it was someone in a second-or third-class sleeper, or even a fourth-class traveler with nothing but a hard bench seat, looking for an empty compartment with a bed so that he could stretch out and catch some z’s before arriving in Kiev.
I thought of lowering the curtain, but I wanted to be able to see out. I hadn’t been having the safest week of my life, after all.
The motion of the train threatened to lull me to sleep, but I knew it wouldn’t keep, that I’d just wake up feeling miserable after eight or ten minutes, so I kept myself awake with a Ukrainian travel guide some previous passenger had left behind.
I opened to the section on Kiev, the birthplace of Eastern Slavic civilization. Somehow, the city had persevered despite having been conquered by the Vikings, captured by the Nazis, and controlled by the Soviet Union. While under the control of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had suffered the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.
After a few minutes, my sore eyes wandered above the guidebook and there in the window I saw that face again. Staring directly into our compartment.
He’s checking to see if I’ve fallen asleep.
I gently moved Ana’s head off my
shoulder and she stirred. I propped her up in the corner and covered her with my suit jacket. Then I made for the door, unlocked it, and slid it open.
I stepped out of the compartment, spun my head around, and scanned the aisle in either direction. To my right, in the distance, I saw the back of a man in a denim jacket walking swiftly toward the front of the train.
I followed.
As I got nearer I noticed he had a small pack swung over his right shoulder. I picked up my pace in order to catch up to him.
I’m being paranoid. I’ve had too little sleep. He’s just a kid backpacking through eastern Europe. Probably heading to a hostel in Kiev for six bucks a night. All he can afford. That’s why he was peeking into our compartment. He’s staying in fourth class. He was simply looking for a place to crash.
I wasn’t convinced. My feet were carrying me almost in a jog, my pulse racing. I saw my arm reaching out to grab the kid. As I put my hand on his shoulder he spun around. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.
“What do you want?” he shouted in awful English.
His lips were trembling, his eyes darting back and forth. He was terrified of me.
Or at least of someone.
Or something.
“Why were you looking into my sleeping compartment?” I said.
“Why do you accuse me of this, you stupid American?” he roared, earning dirty looks from the other passengers.
It was what he said, not how he said it, that bothered me. How did he know I was American? Everyone who met me assumed I was British. I looked British. I sounded British. Hell, I was British, truth be told.
“What’s in your pack?” I said.
He turned his head and glanced at the carriage door. The train was rounding a bend, so we weren’t moving all that fast. The bastard was thinking of making a run for it.
“You want it?” he shouted at me as he removed the pack from his shoulder. “Here, you take it!”
He shoved the pack into my chest, turned, and went straight for the door. As he did, I noticed him reach into his denim jacket and pull out a mobile phone.
I tried to piece it all together. Here was a kid who’d been peeking into our compartment, who’d thrown a fit when I asked him a simple question, who’d somehow known where I was from. I looked down at the bag he’d pushed on me, then glanced at his right hand as his thumb worked the button on the old mobile phone.
Christ. The phone’s a detonator. The kid just handed me a goddamn bomb.
I immediately darted after him through the aisle, the contents of my stomach rising in my throat. I finally caught up with him just as he jumped the four short steps to the door. He pushed the door open and I watched tall brown grass and rail blowing by us. He hesitated for just a second, but a second was all I needed. I tossed the strap of the pack over his head and around his neck.
The kid spun around, trying to remove the pack to toss it back to me.
Meanwhile, I saw green digital numbers decreasing on the phone he now held in his left hand.
Six.
I used the banister as leverage and raised my left leg, throwing a back kick straight into his chest. The kid flew out the door, his back striking the ground with great force.
Five.
Gripping the banister, I jumped down the stairs and watched him tumble away from the train as I counted down in my head.
Four.
I closed the door, bounded back up the four steps, and saw every passenger in the car staring at me.
Three.
I started up the aisle, staring out the side window, looking for the kid.
Two.
At the very last second I spotted him.
One.
The explosion was so powerful that it blew the kid to bits, and very nearly knocked our night train off the bloody rails.
Chapter 42
We arrived at Kiev’s Central Station two hours later than scheduled. Police had come to investigate the scene of the explosion, and explained that no one would be permitted off the train in Kiev until everyone had been questioned.
“That means we will be trapped aboard this train for another three or fours hours,” Ana said in exasperation once we pulled into the station.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “I suspect we’ll be among the first to be questioned. Once they have their information, they will either arrest me or let us both go.”
“Arrest you? Why would they possibly arrest you?”
“Because most of the passengers who witnessed the incident were half asleep, and chances are, most of them don’t speak English. So they’re going to explain to the police not what occurred but how they perceived it. Some of them probably just caught the tail end. Which means the police will have accounts of a larger man wrapping a pack around a skinny kid’s neck before physically kicking him off the train. Followed, of course, by an explosion that rocked the train and blew the kid to kingdom come.”
“And you are certain we were the intended target?” she said.
I nodded without looking at her. “No doubt about it.”
There was a quick rap on our compartment door, then it slid open, revealing a short, completely bald Ukrainian man and a pale, gangly woman.
The man said, “Simon Fisk? Anastazja Staszak?”
We both nodded.
“My name is Martyn Rudnyk,” he said. “I am the deputy head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Ministry of the Interior here in Ukraine. This is Agent Jess Kidman of Interpol. She is from South Africa, currently based in Harare, Zimbabwe.” He looked from me to Ana. “I spoke to your brother, Marek. After putting up a fight and learning of the bomb on the train, he explained the situation and the reason the two of you are presently in Ukraine.”
“Word travels fast,” I said.
Rudnyk ignored me. “It is important that the four of us speak privately. If you wouldn’t mind coming with us, the ministry’s headquarters are here in Kiev.”
“Do we have a choice?” Ana said.
Kidman stepped forward. Her suit was too large for her frame. She’d purchased it off the rack and was either too tall or had recently lost a lot of weight. “We are not the enemy, Ms. Staszak.”
After what we had learned about Chief Inspector Aleksander Gasowski back in Warsaw, it was difficult to trust anyone in authority, especially here in eastern Europe. Just the night before, we’d witnessed firsthand a perfectly fine example of the corruption within Ukraine’s police force down at the pier in Odessa. We had no reason whatsoever to trust these two.
“Given a choice,” I said, “we’d both prefer to provide a statement, then be left alone.”
Kidman appeared unperturbed. “As I am sure you are aware by now, Mr. Fisk, both of your lives are in grave danger. And you cannot possibly complete your objective of finding the American child if both of you are dead.”
*
“One way or the other,” Kidman said in a cramped room at ministry headquarters, “the attempted bombing on the overnight train from Odessa suggests that you have run afoul of Ukrainian organized crime. In such cases, we have no choice but to extract you from the situation.”
“With all due respect, Agent Kidman,” I said, “we don’t require extraction. As you can see, we can take care of ourselves.”
“Perhaps,” Rudnyk piped in. “But our first concern must be for the public at large, and if that bomb had exploded on the train, it would have killed dozens of innocent people. Such risks—such close calls—you must understand, are unacceptable.”
Ana’s face glowed red. “In case you have not noticed, Simon and I did not attempt to bomb anyone. We are victims. Maybe if your police force spent more time investigating and attempting to prevent such crimes—as opposed to, say, taking bribes—this incident would not have occurred.”
Rudnyk nodded affably. Behind the veneer of an agreeable cop, however, I detected a man burning with rage. The lines on his forehead and the hooded eyes reminded me of idealistic cops who’d bee
n bludgeoned by the job. Cops sickened by what they’d seen and heard over too many years on the force, too many rounds of the same fight. Cops who’d taken on too much friendly fire, who’d been blocked by bureaucrats and colleagues who played on both sides of the line. Bitter cops who nevertheless continued to slip into their wrinkled suits each day, cops who’d never bend or break, never surrender their convictions, right up to the moment they slept their last sleep.
“Your point is well taken,” Rudnyk said. “I, of all people, am not blind to the corruption that plagues my country. It is not my intention to make excuses for it. However, it is a plague that presently afflicts all post-Soviet states. I could sit here and list the various academic causes for the corruption, but that will not aid you in finding the young girl you seek. So for now, let us just say that my nation is experiencing, for want of a better term, ‘growing pains.’”
Kidman nodded. She seemed more of a pragmatist. It was a consequence of worldliness, of experiencing enough of humanity to know that change came, if it came at all, in barely perceptible increments, and of accepting the fact that it wouldn’t be you but maybe your great-grandchildren who would reap the benefits of the good you did today.
They made a good match, Kidman and Rudnyk. The world needed both types of cops.
“Back to the matter at hand,” Kidman said. “As I said back on the train, we are not the enemy. We are certainly not here to thwart your attempt at locating the missing American girl. We wish to provide assistance. But there are conditions.”
“Conditions?” Ana said.
“Consideration must be given with respect to our ongoing investigations. Our work over the past several years cannot be jeopardized.”
I said, “We’ve no interest in interfering with your investigations. We just want to find Lindsay Sorkin.”
“Very well,” Kidman said. “Then we understand each other. And our objectives do not conflict.” She turned to Rudnyk. “Let’s proceed.”
We waited as Rudnyk left the room to retrieve a file. I was surprised by all the formality, the mechanical way in which our presence was being received. It was unlike any law enforcement collaboration I had ever seen. There was no yelling, no threats or ultimatums. Just cool heads and an almost frightening air of patience.
Good As Gone (Simon Fisk Novels) Page 18
