Rebecca was laughing and crying at the same time, and Evan knew she had made the right decision to hold off on telling them of Bobbi’s death.
“They had a difficult upbringing,” Evan said now. Her mind was still buzzing. “At some point, it became clear to me that Bobbi—Robin—never wanted children. She didn’t know how to be a mother and had no patience to learn. We had many fights over that, I’m ashamed to say.”
“Don’t be.” Rebecca squeezed her hand briefly.
“And their father?” Kostya continued, always the analytical scientist.
“Indifferent at best. At his worst he was downright cold.” She spread her hands. “To tell you the truth I don’t know why my sister ever got pregnant.”
Reveshvili and Rebecca exchanged a glance. “It was mandated, I’m sure,” Reveshvili said. “Another layer for her cover.”
“So she had been contacted by then.”
“Very early on, so we were given to understand.”
Evan felt a blanket of depression settling on her shoulders. “I am not like her, you know,” she said after a time.
“We do,” her mother said, rubbing the back of her hand reassuringly. “Of course we do.”
“Really?” She turned to Reveshvili. “Then why do you still speak to me as if I’m a patient or a client?”
Kostya seemed momentarily taken aback, but the abashed look vanished as quickly as it appeared. “We didn’t … that is, I did not want to presume.”
“Presume?”
“On your memories of your other parents—the couple who raised you as their own.”
Rebecca nodded. “It was a tragedy what happened to them.”
“A distinctly American tragedy,” Kostya added.
“Mary and Joe Ryder were nice people,” her mother said. “Sympathetic and empathetic. We would never have left you girls with them if they had been anything but so very kind.”
“Mary had been trying to conceive for two years when we were directed to them,” her father continued. “They were overjoyed, didn’t ask questions.”
Rebecca smiled. “They fell in love with both of you on first sight.”
Evan took her time digesting this. Her eyes filled, but the tears refused to spill over. Perhaps she was all cried out, possibly she was simply in shock. “I saw …” She cleared her throat, began again, “I saw the photo of your other daughters,” she said after another silent interval.
Kostya’s cup was almost to his lips when he stopped, set it down. “The twins,” he said.
Evan nodded. “Ana and …”
“Ana and Luzida.”
“Is Ana’s last name really Helm?” Evan asked.
Reveshvili sighed. “Yes. Ana changed her name to Helm when they—”
“Broke away,” Rebecca said bitterly. “When they renounced us.”
“Ana did work here, as I said.” Kostya’s shoulders were hunched as tension rode through his large frame. “I threw her out nearly three years ago.”
“Not soon enough!” Rebecca cried.
Reveshvili gave her a look before turning back to Evan. “What she was working on—in secret—was not in the clinic’s best interest.”
“She was experimenting on his indigent patients,” Rebecca cried. “Three of them died. She killed them! Our own daughter!”
“With drugs,” Evan said to Reveshvili, “right?”
“With drugs?” Rebecca said. “No, not at all.”
“Then what … ?”
Kostya took up a knife, sliced off a pat of butter, ran it over the top of a scone. Rebecca said nothing more. When Evan glanced over, she saw that her mother was staring at Reveshvili. It was only when her gaze returned to her father that Rebecca continued.
“They ruined me, those two.”
“Now, Becca.”
Her eyes were blazing. “Well, it’s true. You know it is. It’s because of them I’m in here.”
“That’s not—”
“But it is, Kostya. I told Evan no more secrets and I mean it.”
He stared at his scone, sighed, and set it down. “All right, Becca. As you wish.”
“You should wish it, too,” Rebecca said quietly but firmly.
Evan paused for a moment to allow emotions to settle, then she said, “What was Ana really working on?”
Reveshvili’s face twisted. “She was experimenting specifically on the patients’ reproductive organs.”
Evan could see the horror in her mother’s eyes.
Kostya nodded. “What she was doing was … yes, horrific. At first I couldn’t believe it.”
“But I could,” Rebecca said. “She’s become a demon.”
Now Evan was as horrified as her mother. “Did you contact the authorities?” she asked.
“Of course not.” Kostya gave her a sharp look. “Bringing outsiders in would have started a wholesale investigation. The authorities would have shut us down. Where would my patients go? They all have serious conditions that can only be treated here, under my supervision.” He shook his head. “She left us in an entirely untenable position.”
“The bitch,” Rebecca spat out with considerable venom. “I curse the day I gave birth to those two. There must have been something rotten in my womb.”
“Becca, stop it,” Kostya said in an anguished tone. “I beg you.”
She subsided, head bowed, hands in her lap.
Evan looked from her mother to her father. “But … what is she planning … ?”
“I have no idea,” Kostya said.
“Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she and her sister cannot reproduce. Maybe she’s trying to find a way—”
“Becca, that’s insane,” Kostya said with a tremor of fear in his voice. “You’re talking Eduard Wirths—Auschwitz abominations.”
“Kostya, you must face the fact that Ana is a psychopath,” Rebecca spat out. “She and her sister. They hate the world and everyone in it.”
“It’s true Ana has a messiah complex,” Kostya said. “They both do. But especially Ana.”
“Ever since she was a child,” Rebecca continued, “in her twisted mind she was obsessed with the biblical flood, God’s promise to Noah that humankind would start anew.” Her voice filled with anguish now. “Messiah! She is no messiah, she is a destroyer, babbling about the end of the world, the Omega of humankind she’d say, obsessing over her foolish symbols!”
Evan froze. She could practically feel and hear gears turning and grinding in her brain. “Symbols? Omega?!” A sudden terror gripped her. “Oh my God, Mama … I don’t know how to say this to you … Bobbi’s children—your grandchildren, they were abducted several days ago. I am sure now it was Ana who took them. That’s why I’m here, I’m trying to find them. Up to now I assumed it was revenge for Bobbi infiltrating an organization called Omega, but in light of what you’ve just told me it’s clear that Ana is Omega, and a much uglier reason for her taking the children rears its head.”
Rebecca’s eyes opened wide. “What?” She nearly screamed. “What are you saying? You can’t mean she might be using them as subjects?” She gasped. “No, it can’t be.”
Kostya wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “From what we saw of her work here, Becca, she had no success on adults.”
Rebecca closed her eyes. “Please refrain from defining this in strictly scientific terms.”
He spread his hands. “But the scientific method is the only way to get to the underlying cause of what is happening.”
Evan nodded. “I’m sorry, Mama, but he’s right.” Her voice was none too steady.
Rebecca flinched, let loose with a tiny whimper. “God help us all! This is a nightmare.”
Evan took a breath. She and Ben needed to get going. She rose, went to her mother, put her arms around her shoulders. “This will be taken care of, Mama. I promise you.”
Rebecca looked up at her, eyes clouded with tears. “Death,” she whispered hoarsely. “Death is all I see.”
Evan kissed the top of
her head. “It’s all right.”
“I won’t lose you, Evan. Not after you’ve come back to us. I won’t allow—”
“Becca.” Kostya’s voice was soft, gentling. “Nothing is going to—”
“Ana will kill Evan if she gets the chance!” Rebecca’s eyes blazed through her tears. “You know that, Kostya.”
“There is much more at stake,” Evan said. “I have to stop her.”
Rebecca was sobbing, her thin shoulders shaking.
Unconsciously, Evan ran her fingers through the hair on the crown of her mother’s head, just as her mother had done to her moments before. “If I don’t, who will?”
Reveshvili nodded. “She’s right. Becca. You know her training as well as I do.”
Evan’s head snapped up. “How do you know about my training?”
“We’ve been following your progress and—”
“Oh, Kostya, can’t you ever stop lying to her?”
“Wait a minute,” Evan said to Reveshvili, “you knew who I was all along?”
“You’re my daughter,” he said simply.
Kostya then spoke to his wife. “I made a promise, Becca.”
“But I didn’t.” Her mother turned to her. “It was Lyudmila Alexeyevna who informed us about Robin being successfully recruited. And she has kept us informed about you as well.”
Lyudmila! she thought. She’s the reason I’m here now. Lyudmila must have shown them pictures of me as an adult, no? Did he know who I was all along? But perhaps not, because it occurred to her that Lyudmila hadn’t told them about Wendy and Michael, and had kept them in the dark about Bobbi’s death.
“You and Lyudmila Alexeyevna are friends,” Rebecca said. It wasn’t a question.
Evan nodded. “But it seems even friends have secrets from each other.” Still, Evan trusted Lyudmila, trusted that whatever secrets surrounded her orchestration of this meeting were being kept for Evan’s benefit. And for that of the Reveshvilis.
Rebecca eyed her. “Do you not have secrets from her?”
Of course I do, Evan thought.
“We are very proud of you, of what you have accomplished. Of the fear you have struck into the heart of the FSB,” Rebecca said with a fierce pride.
“Indeed we are, moya doch’.” My daughter.
Something in Evan’s core melted. At last, she thought. At last! And she said, “Tell me, Otets.” Father. “Tell me everything I need to know.”
43
ROMANIA/BERGISCH GLADBACH
“Experiments.”
“Yes.”
“On her own people.”
“People who no longer believed in their leader’s methodology.” Kobalt’s lips pursed. “Zherov and I saw the hideous results in the Omega compound.”
Lyudmila nodded. She and Kobalt were standing on the deck of her yacht, along with Zherov. The seas had calmed, the day was clear, the sky directly above cobalt blue, but it would be bleached white by noontime. It was already hot.
“Which means we’ve got to find and neutralize Omega quickly.” This from Zherov, who was looking better since getting eight hours of sleep. He knew nothing of the two women’s trip to the cemetery; there was no need.
They were interrupted by the buzzing of Lyudmila’s mobile. She excused herself, stepping away toward the bow. The call was sandboxed. Her pulse accelerated. She heard Evan’s voice on the other end of the encrypted line.
“I met my parents—my birth parents,” Evan said.
“How?”
“You know how,” Evan said. “You sent me to them.”
Lyudmila nodded. “Well, at last you were better prepared to meet them.”
“I owe you, bitch.”
Lyudmila gave a low laugh. “I’ll bank it.”
“You know what Ana is up to?”
“Yes. She’s been experimenting on humans,” Lyudmila said, preparing to lie to Evan again, for her own good. “I went to Omega’s compound in Odessa. There were people she shot, but others looked as if they had been victims of medical experiments.”
“That’s what she was doing at the clinic. And my parents are terrified of what she might be doing now. But, Lyudmila … some good news … they discovered where Omega’s headquarters is.”
Lyudmila’s eyes opened wide. “At last!”
Evan told her. “Meet there?”
“Back to you with an ETA. You have transport?”
“My father is arranging it.”
“It must feel odd saying that, no?”
Too loaded a question for her to answer now. “I’ll send you my ETA when I know.” Evan cut the connection.
Well, Lyudmila thought, pocketing her mobile, perhaps sometimes, against all odds, the plans of mice and women do have a chance to turn out the way they were meant to.
Kobalt and Zherov were waiting for her.
“Kobalt,” she said, “call your pilot. Tell him to get over to Constanta Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport as quickly as he can.”
Kobalt’s eyes lit up like the inside of a circus tent. “You found Omega’s location?” she asked even while she was punching in the direct code. She spoke briefly, verified a flight plan being filed, and severed the connection. “Forty minutes to an hour,” she said.
“We’d better get going, then.” Lyudmila was already at the port side. She started her climb down to the waiting launch, and one by one they all followed.
*
Ben drained his glass of tea. “Can you not tell me what’s going on?”
“Alas, events occur without us,” Leonard Pine said in his proper tone.
They were sitting in the clinic’s kitchens, which were vast, clad in stainless steel and, at this time of the morning, all but deserted. Several lonely figures in smocks were at work on the other side prepping breakfast. The atmosphere was clean and bright.
Ben decided to switch topics. “Tell me about your brother.”
“Mm. Jon and I were like oil and water, we always were.” Pine’s eyes had a faraway look as he peered into the past. “Where I thought white, he thought black. We fell right in line with Herr Doktor Reveshvili’s theories on twins. Jon was born bad. I, on the other hand, absorbed my parents’ ethical and moral values.” He paused for a moment to wet his lips. “Personally, I believe Jon’s life could have been salvaged, but then he met Ana here at the clinic. He fell head over heels under her spell. She dazzled him, ravished him. He did whatever she said. He said he’d follow her anywhere, and he did. She had that effect on many people.” Pine blinked, his eyes refocusing on Ben. “And now he’s dead.” He sighed. “The sad truth is I miss him.”
“Why sad?” Ben said. “He was your twin brother.”
Pine waved an elegant hand. “Oh, we were never like that, thinking each other’s thoughts, finishing each other’s sentences. Jon’s mind was a complete mystery to me. I found Ana terrifying rather than mesmerizing, and I would never be tempted to join her end-of-the-world cult, what did she call it, her Omega group.”
Ben’s jaw nearly fell open as the pieces of the puzzle fell together. Ana was Omega. “What can you tell me about this Omega?”
Pine shrugged. “I can tell you about Ana.” He refilled Ben’s glass, then his own. “She is certifiable.”
Ben cocked his head. “In what way?”
Pine made a small sound. “In what way is she not? In my opinion she’s a narcissist, a megalomaniac in the grip of a vicious psychosis. She is convinced the world needs to be scourged, that humankind needs to die in order to be born again.”
“Under her leadership.”
Pine pursed his lips, as close as he ever got to showing distaste. “And all Caucasians, the superior race, in her twisted opinion. According to Omega doctrine, which is, of course, Ana’s doctrine, the mixing of races, of colors, has caused a rift in mankind’s evolution, a branching down a wrong path. It must be stopped in its tracks because it is already on the brink of going too far.”
“Nazism taken to its illogical extreme.”
/> “Precisely so.” Pine’s hands swept over the top of the stainless-steel counter at which they were seated. “Another thing. Ana’s also bipolar, which is why her grip on Jon was so unshakable.”
“He was also bipolar?”
Pine nodded. “She took him off the medication protocol prescribed by the Herr Doktor. She told him he didn’t need it and he believed her.”
“He wanted to believe her.”
“Precisely. She took him with her when the Herr Doktor kicked her out.”
“It seems to me that she should have been a patient here.”
“Oh, we all thought so.” Pine shrugged. “But there was no holding her back. To be brutally honest, she could become quite violent. She would have hurt someone—or worse—without a shred of remorse. The Herr Doktor could not take that chance. Ana is their daughter, you see.” He shook his head. “She hates her mother with a venom that is frankly terrifying.”
Ben frowned. “Why does Ana hate her mother so?”
Pine shrugged. “Perhaps because her mother is the only person who can see right down to the core of her. Ana fears her mother as much as she despises her.”
“It seems to me you’re describing a creature, not a human being.”
“That is one way of putting it.” Pine leaned forward, his voice lowering. “Listen, Herr Butler—”
“Call me Ben, please.”
Pine produced his professional winning smile. “It’s my training.” He drew his glass of tea closer to him but did not drink from it. “I feel compelled to tell you something I have not shared even with the Reveshvilis.”
“Keeping secrets from your employers. Is that also your training?” Ben said this last in a semi-bantering tone, in order not to cause offense.
“Ah, no. Absolutely no. But when I confide in you, you will understand.” He bit his lip as if, at the last minute, he was having second thoughts. Then, with a rush, he plunged ahead. “Ana knows about your companion, Fraulein Ryder, and her sister.”
Ben’s brows drew together. “Meaning?”
“Ana was the one who engineered the abduction of the sister’s two children.”
A chill ran down Ben’s spine. “We suspected as much. It was the only possibility we found that made sense. A long-held grudge, revenge for Bobbi’s mission against Omega.”
The Kobalt Dossier Page 30
