Sammie began pulling the bags from the cars; then helped Andre struggle with a large duffle. As it was, the Frenchman gasped for breath as he trudged up the steep incline to the hotel.
Following behind, Charlie became curious about a clinking noise coming from the duffle. He finally concluded that it must be some kind of special instruments the mining expert required for the project.
The hotel’s office was on the second floor. A slender woman, apparently the hotel manager, looked down on them from the top of the stairs. After a perfunctory greeting, she took their names, entering them into an empty register. Charlie received his key, and began to search the narrow hallway for his assigned room.
A single low wattage bulb cast a pallid glow creating distorted shadows as he walked. The flooring creaked from unaccustomed weight until he was able to make out his room number on a partially ajar door.
The room was small, but adequate. A musty odor permeated the area, but he was used to that from his travels in SE Asia. A bulb, hanging by a bare black cord from the ceiling, provided faint light to the room. There was also a small reading lamp on the desk, squeezed alongside a large black and white television set. After making room for his laptop, he adjusted the lamp’s faded shade. The ancient springs groaned their defiance, as he tossed his travel bag on the bed.
The manager had informed the group that the staff would be serving dinner shortly. He washed in the chipped porcelain sink, attempting to get the red dust from his hands, arms, and face.
Entering the combination kitchen/dining room, he was surprised to see his traveling companions already seated around a long table. The hotel manager introduced herself once more before launching on a series of introductions that included the two female Kazakh cooks with unpronounceable names, and a houseboy of uncertain origin.
“Tonight,” the manager explained, “we plan to welcome our international guests with a true Kazakh dinner.” After a nod to her staff, they obediently began taking large plates of food from an iron oven, and distributing them to the waiting guests.
It became apparent what Andre had been carrying in his duffle as he reached under the table and brought up the first of what ultimately seemed to be an almost inexhaustible supply of Chilean wine.
“Salud,” Andre roared, raising his glass in a toast to his companions.
Henry responded with “Cheers,” wearing a thin smile.
“Buena suerte!” Charlie offered in response.
"Nostrovia!" chorused Nadia and Elaina.
“Hopefully we won’t need good luck,” Andre replied with a grin. “But more realistically, we probably will,” he added more seriously.
All the diners were pleased with the wine, except Sammie. He had already taken the cap off a large bottle of white liquid in preparation of passing it around the table. “Its koumiss,” he exclaimed with pleasure. “Fermented mares milk,” he added as further explanation. “It’s the staple of the Kazakh nomads, and the Kazakh national drink.”
Charlie recalled the statues of golden maidens in the lobby of the hotel. He was once told that koumiss was what they were supposedly offering in welcome to the newly arriving guests.
As the bottle made its way around the table, the two women interpreters poured a small sampling into their glasses.
Upset by the unenthusiastic response, Sammie added, “It is said that Tolstoy drank eight liters a day, and recommended it to all of his friends as a cure for depression.”
“Eight liters a day, that’s preposterous,” Dave Dieter exclaimed without thinking. In spite of his placid appearance, he had a quick tongue, which was often the cause of some regret. This was not one of those times. He proceeded unabashed. “If the old boy did drink that much, it sure as hell would eliminate any depression he might have. Along with his liver,” he added in a failed attempt at mollifying Sammie.
By now, each of the diners had received their plates, along with a large serving bowl, placed in the center of the table. The woman interpreters began eating rapidly. It had been a long trip, and they were hungry.
The men, on the other hand, stared quizzically at their overflowing plates, and then at each another.
The silence was finally broken by Andre, “What in the bloody hell is this?” he asked making a face.
“It is beshbarmak” Nadia explained. In English, the word sounds like besh-bahr-mahk. It is the national dish of Kazakhstan and it is made of boiled mutton, beef, horseflesh, and noodles.”
“Horseflesh?” the men chorused in dismay.
Dave turned toward Charlie with a rictus grin. “I guess we ain’t in Kansas any longer Toto,” he announced with a giggle. Dave may have had more wine than he was accustomed to.
“What did he say? What did he say?” Henry inquired. “What the hell does that mean?” Everyone ignored his question. “This looks like a bloody shepherd’s pie,” he added with finality.
“We usually serve it along with dumplings or bread,” Nadia continued. “Tonight the manager is serving it with Kazakhstan Rice. She has made it especially for you with ground beef, almonds, dates, prunes and some other things to add to the taste.”
That sounded less offensive, and the men ate the rice dish, while poking cautiously at whatever it was the manager had called the other dish.
Charlie made a mental note to ask Nadia to speak to the staff about their future meals. He also chuckled to himself wondering if a wine enthusiast would consider the Chilean Sauvignon Blanc to be the proper choice to complement horsemeat.
Dinner was drawing to a close, and everyone was in good spirits. The rapport had not come immediately. They were a strange mixture of nationalities representing a variety of professional backgrounds. In spite of their different personalities, they began to talk with each other with more relaxed familiarity as the meal progressed,
Dessert that night consisted of bright red apples. “Apples are originally from Kazakhstan,” Sammie explained. An assortment of strange looking candies and figs surrounded the apples in an attempt, by the kitchen staff, to make the simple fare more appealing. After dessert, one of the local women serenaded the guests by playing the dombra and singing Kazakh folk songs in a high-pitched, but oddly appealing voice.
“It is a lot of sound from a two-string guitar,” Dave said leaning toward Nadia.
“It is a lute,“ She explained.
Dave roared with laughter. “That’s exactly what I said. It’s a lot.”
Nadia exchanged glances with Elaina. Henry tried to slide Dave’s wine glass away from him. Charlie concentrated on his plate.
Following dinner, the discussion centered on the next day’s meeting. The men were all aware they would be speaking to a hostile audience of Russian mine managers who were opposed to them being there, and were reluctant to cooperate. The men were aware that the miners feared the project would end in a recommendation for their mine to be placed on the international market. If that did occur, the workers were worried they could end up working for the Chinese, the Swiss, or some other organization less sympathetic than their fellow Russians.
The men decided that Charlie would begin tomorrow’s meeting, followed by Henry who would describe the type of data he needed. The mining experts would summarize their backgrounds, and discuss their plans for the project.
Charlie would close out the discussion, and then open it to questions and comments from the assembled managers. The purpose of the meeting was to try to acquire as much cooperation as possible from the assembled group so they would provide the required operating information.
Nadia would serve as the translator, and the informal conversation that evening provided an opportunity for her to become accustomed to the pronunciation and cadence of each of the men.
Returning to his room, Charlie began the job of unpacking, and trying to find a place for his clothes. When he finished, he took a large tube of Colgate toothpaste from his ditty bag and carefully inserted a small penknife to apply pressure under the top rim. It flipped off easily before
falling to the floor. He then turned the tube upside down and shook it vigorously. A slender blue barrel of a 22-caliber pistol slid out. Before leaving Chicago, he had taped the gun’s small cartridge cylinder to his electric razor, making it slightly longer than the Norelco Company had initially intended.
Placing the barrel and cylinder on the table, Charlie foraged inside his bag and removed a pair of English wingtips. Taped inside the right shoe, just above the leather heel, was the gun’s small bone grip. He was well aware of the consequences of hiding a gun in checked luggage, but decided the airport inspectors were not that attentive and the contents of his bag could probably get by without detection.
Charlie abruptly returned to the doorway peering down the hallway. Relieved by its emptiness he returned to his task of assembling the small Beretta.
Real gun owners derisively referred to a small caliber revolver as a pussy pistol. Not at all like the Glock 19, currently in favor among handgun enthusiasts. Charlie didn’t care. This one was easy to conceal, and would be powerful enough to wound a person, and possibly kill at close quarters.
He had scattered the cartridges throughout his bag, carefully tucking them among different items of clothing. He soon found them all, and inserted each into the cylinder before spinning it. Satisfied with the sound of the action, he carefully set the safety.
The next thing was to find an acceptable hiding place. The room was bare—monastically so—not many places to conceal a weapon. Finally, he stood on the chair, and stretching, positioned the gun carefully on top of the armoire. Judging from the thickness of the dust, there was little worry the housekeeper would find it while cleaning his room.
Charlie had never carried a gun on his trips. It had never occurred to him that he might need one. Now he felt rather foolish about his precautions, but the last project in Ukraine had changed his mind about many things.
9
Kiev
It began peacefully enough, Charlie recalled. Everything happened accidently, seemingly driven by a series of weird coincidences, as such things often occur. After he retired, and became bored with his humdrum existence, Charlie began sending out resumes to organizations that were looking for part-time consultants with special skills. The Soviet system had imploded. The Berlin Wall had decayed, physically and morally, and then finally collapsed. Torn down by the East Germans who for many years had longed for the type of freedom their relatives on the other side in West Berlin enjoyed. Afterwards, the remaining countries that had been contained within the Soviet bloc began to fall like dominoes. Russia, no longer had the economic strength, or perhaps the will, to enforce themselves on their far-flung empire that encompassed a wide range of nationalities and ethnic groups.
Once these countries regained their political independence, it became vital for them to acquire a level of economic independence as well. Many were attempting to achieve this by converting their government owned industries to privately held companies, referring to this as privatization. Along the way, these industries were finding it necessary to become familiar with operating in a free market society instead of a communist controlled economy. As a result, nongovernmental organizations in the West were employing consultants to assist these new governments and their businesses to make the difficult conversion.
With Charlie’s background in the private sector, he was able to get assignments with the World Bank, and agencies of the UN in Lithuania, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan. The General Bank Corp was looking for someone to work in Ukraine, and picked-up on Charlie’s resume.
Ukraine was like the other former Soviet countries he had been to--only more so. The country, through the centuries, had lived under the thumb of a number of foreign governments, with only a brief taste of independence, lasting about as long as a hiccup, after WWII. Russian apparatchiks had controlled the entire government structure with Ukrainian nationals relegated to only the more subservient roles. As a result, there was no cadre of experienced Ukrainians to take control when the time came.
John Perryman, GBC’s man in Kiev, told Charlie when he checked in, “The country is like a giant matryoshka doll. When you take out each doll they get smaller and smaller. After you finally get to the center there is nothing left but corruption. Either you learn to deal with it or you fail.”
His assignment was in a small city in southwestern Ukraine by the name of Ivano Frankivsk. It was what was previously described as a “closed city.” For years, the Russians had isolated the town because of a concentration of ICBMs concealed in the surrounding Carpathian Mountains. There were also a number of secret military electronic factories within the town itself.
Charlie’s assignment was to assist one of these plants in converting their military offerings to a more market oriented consumer products line.
When he arrived, he was the first person from the “outside” most of the people had ever met, and certainly the first from their former enemy the United States. The assignment was a difficult one. There was considerable resistance by the factory management to his recommendations. Most of them were looking forward to the improbable return of the Russians in order to regain their previous position of power. Not unlike the situation he expected to find tomorrow among the management of mine.
It was after he finished his project and returned to Kiev that he ran into Karen. Fall was in the air, about the same time of year it was now in Kazakhstan he recalled with surprise. The chestnut trees that lined the avenues were beginning to lose their leaves, and they swirled aimlessly in the air.
The Orange Revolution was in full gear, and the Ukrainian students had been demonstrating daily against the corrupt government. As his cab passed Mayden Square, he could see an island of pitched tents and young men and women standing on discarded egg cartons attempting to protect their thinly soled sneakers from the concrete. He could see them singing and waving their orange banners in noisy defiance of the Kuchma government.
After several weeks of eating in the factory cafeteria, he was looking forward to a leisurely dinner before spending the next few days finishing his report, and writing his recommendations for the GBC.
Like all single diners, he was led to the restaurant’s most obscure table, next to the clatter of the kitchen. At the far end of the dining room, he noticed a woman who appeared surprisingly familiar. She sat among a large group of men, some of whom looked to be Ukrainian, while others were dark complected, wearing gray business suits with black and white checked Kaffiyehs over their heads. Occasionally, one of them would turn to her as if they were seeking an explanation or advice.
He would recognize her anywhere, even though it had been several years since they last met. She was still a striking woman, tall and angular, always in command of her surroundings. Her dark brown hair was now blond, more fitting for a woman in Ukraine. She was well occupied, devoting her attentions as evenly as possible between the two groups—who seemed almost to be competing for her attention.
Charlie’s table was some distance from hers, surrounded by a group of Japanese tourists, almost obscured by their large party.
He had first met Karen Kinkaid when he was a traveling Vice President of International at Apex Electronics in Chicago, and she was the local CIA representative there. She had come to the office and suggested that his knowledge could be helpful to the Agency and that she would like to “pick his brain” so to speak from time to time.
He had been agreeable, and they met from time to time. One day, she contacted him and asked if he would do the Agency a few small favors, occasionally during his travels. Nothing much. A meeting with a contact here, or an envelope dropped there. It would “of course never interfere with his job,” she assured him. They wanted someone with no traceable ties to the CIA, and Charlie was perfect for the job. He did as Karen asked. No harm. No foul.
After awhile, Karen faded from the picture, and he was dealing more directly with the people in Washington. Charlie never heard from her again.
He learned later from Emmett that som
e people at the Agency believed she was turning over secrets to the Russians. When they went to pick her up, she vanished without a trace. Now here she was in Ukraine. He never believed that she would betray her country. Emmett had told him that he did not think so either.
He decided to see what she was up to before contacting the Agency. When the party broke-up, he followed her. Apparently, she had been away from the business long enough to become complacent, and she was easy to follow through the dark cobblestone streets of Kiev. He recalled that it had begun to rain, which made it easier. Everyone walked with their collar turned up or were hidden behind their umbrella.
Karen turned into an old apartment building, and Charlie watched from across the street. He soon saw lights go on up on the third floor, and decided to see what she was doing in Kiev. After going to her room, it turned out that she was working for the Ukrainian Government. She was of Ukrainian decent and had studied Russian at Sarah Lawrence. With her knowledge of armaments, she was perfect for them. They didn’t ask any questions about her past, other than to know she had previously worked for the American Government before returning home—as she told them.
Death on the Silk Road Page 8
