“Why didn’t you keep on hunting her once you realized that she was alive?” Colomba persisted.
“When I got back to Moscow, I found out that my name had wound up on Poteyev’s list. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes,” said Dante, but he was the only one, and so he explained. “Aleksandr Poteyev was a CIA mole in the Russian foreign intelligence service. He revealed the identity of several officers who were working under deep cover. Like Anna Chapman, for instance.”
“Not all the names made it into the papers; some of them were kept secret,” said Maksim. “And that meant that there was something much worse than a trial dangling over the heads of those poor wretches. Maybe a cell without a name, or a shallow grave in the woods, with the tacit approval of both sides.”
“And your name was on that list,” said Colomba.
“Exactly. So I ran, and I just hoped I wasn’t worth a serious full-blown hunt by the American or Russian intelligence agencies. If I kept my head down, who was I going to bother? Unfortunately, it was Giltine who was hunting me, not them.”
“And you’re certain that the woman you tried to kill in Shanghai and Giltine are the same person?”
“In Berlin, she was wearing a fireproof jumpsuit and a gas mask, but she has a way of moving you can never forget. You see her thirty feet away, and the next second, she’s already kicking you in the balls.” Maksim’s eyes moved to the ceiling. “And I wasn’t the first name on her list.”
“What do you mean?”
“My ex-colleagues were dropping like flies. Burnt, drowned, tumbling down staircases. It was like watching a documentary about household accidents. But I just assumed it was people from the intelligence agencies tidying up.”
“Why would they have wanted to kill you all? What did you know about that wasn’t supposed to get out?”
“The Box,” said Maksim.
“What’s that?”
“The place where I first met Giltine.” He took another sip of vodka. “A prison. The worst prison there’s ever been.”
2
Maksim had arrived in Kiev aboard a military airplane, and he’d been loaded with five other Spetsnaz onto a truck that had transported them through the night, over snowy roads. It was December, and the temperature was practically zero, just like in Kabul, but at least there you weren’t always worrying about driving over a land mine or taking a hit from a bullet.
The truck had left them at a military compound far from any inhabited towns or villages, buried in the woods. It consisted of several barracks for the soldiers, a cafeteria, and a couple of buildings for officers. Beyond a farther barbed-wire barrier that split the compound in two, there was a cube of gray cement that stood as tall as a three-story building. The cube had only one entrance, in the middle of one of its faces, and not so much as a narrow slit of an aperture, and no windows. Only air vents. No one could come in or out without authorization.
“No doors or windows? You mean the prisoners never saw daylight?” asked Colomba.
“Never. I’ve never been inside, but they told me there was electric light, at least at certain times of the day. That was the very best they could hope for. The prisoners came from other prisons all around the Soviet Union, but we didn’t know whether they were political dissidents or ordinary people because their documents were blank. And then there were the children.”
Dante found himself standing just inches from Maksim, with no real idea how he’d gotten there. “You locked children up in a place like that?”
“It wasn’t up to me. There was a special section devoted to them. In all, the Box housed five hundred prisoners. There were about fifty children and young people.”
“And they never got out, either?”
Maksim said nothing. Dante leaned in even closer, sweating, his one good fist clenched. “Did they get out?” he asked, his voice practically a snarl.
“No, it was a one-way trip,” Maksim said reluctantly, as if that was one thing he was ashamed of.
“And what was their crime?” asked Brigitte.
“I don’t know. Their documents were scrubbed clean, just like all the others’. But I don’t think they came from any prisons. They were dirty and in poor health, and they wore no uniforms.”
“The Box wasn’t the real name, was it?” Dante asked.
“No.”
“What was it?”
“Duga-3.”
Dante had expected that, but still it came as a shock to hear it. “You sons of bitches. You unholy sons of bitches,” he said.
“Do you mind telling us what you’re talking about?” asked Colomba.
“Duga-3 was one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War,” said Dante, opening and closing his good hand. “A military base about sixty miles from Kiev, in the middle of nowhere. The Soviet Union always denied its existence, but NATO identified it because it emitted signals that disturbed radio frequencies with a noise that sounded like a woodpecker. What its function was, no one ever really knew. People said it was a base for an anti-missile system. Or an HAARP—that stands for High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, by the way—installation designed to create man-made earthquakes. But actually, it was a concentration camp. And you stayed there right up to the last day, didn’t you, soldier?”
“Yes.”
“By any chance, was that last day in April 1986?”
Maksim nodded.
Colomba struggled to remember what had happened during that month. She knew that it was something important and horrible, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
“The Duga-3 complex had been set up near Pripyat,” Dante explained. “Which on April 26, 1986, became a ghost town. Actually, on April 27, because on the first day, no one warned the populace what was going on. Only afterward were more than three thousand people evacuated from the area. But by then, many of them had already been contaminated, and so they died anyway.”
At last Colomba realized, but it was Brigitte who spoke first. “Oh, fuck, Chernobyl,” she murmured.
Chernobyl.
The Box had been built next to the epicenter of the worst nuclear disaster in history.
3
Andreas had had to take off his shoe to get to the contents of the secret box in the glove compartment. It had been a move befitting a contortionist, even harder for him with the tree trunks that he had for legs. After dropping it twice, he’d finally managed to get the small cloth package into his lap. It contained a set of five key blanks and five small picklocks. The kit would have raised questions if the police had happened to find it, but it had proved useful on more than one occasion.
As an escape artist, Andreas wasn’t up to Dante’s level, but he knew the fundamentals, and getting out of a pair of handcuffs is easier than you’d think: they were designed to be used on prisoners under constant surveillance, when fiddling around with them is impossible. Andreas, on the other hand, was alone, and he used the most common system: a small tin wedge. He pressed it between the cogged teeth of the handcuff, then wedged it shut a notch, even though that painfully crushed the flesh of his wrist. At that point, the wedge blocked the spring closure mechanism, and the handcuff could be forced open.
Andreas was free. He massaged the crush marks on his wrist and evaluated the situation around him. Outside the rear windshield, the only movement he detected was that of the shadows cast against the windows.
Keeping his eyes on the cottage, Andreas slipped his hand into the secret box in the glove compartment and pulled out the second object it concealed: a black plastic knuckle-duster. At the front of it were two electrodes that could deliver a jolt of more than a million volts at low amperage. Enough to render a large dog helpless or to hurt a human being. Very badly.
Andreas opened the car door an inch at a time and got out.
The sound of voices was confused by the time it reached him from the house. They seemed to be discussing something with great animation. The thought that he wasn’t in there hearing the explana
tions of the supposed dead man made the bile rise to his lips again, but the sensation was softened by the thought of what he was going to do. No one keeps Andreas away from the show, absolutely not. And anyone who tries is bound to come to a bad end. He walked, hunched over, through the patches of darkness. For such a big man, he did have a gift for moving with considerable agility and in complete silence.
He walked around the cottage and studied the windows on the upper floor. They were too high to get up to, and there was always the risk of making noise. Continuing on his way, he found a sash window, shut but not locked. It was the bathroom window. Andreas raised the lower sash as far as it would go, then climbed into the opening. His ass was bigger than the space available between the windowsill and the top sash, and he was jammed tight until his trousers ripped. He fell onto the floor, cutting both lips, and then lay there for a couple of minutes, bleeding on the floor and holding his breath for fear that someone might have heard the thump. But there was no sound of movement from the hall, and in the living room, Dante went on talking in the whiny tone that Andreas so hated.
He carefully got to his feet, wiping his hand over his mouth. Nothing too serious, and they’d pay for that, too. His trousers wouldn’t stay up now, so he took them off, then sat down on the rim of the tub, unable to resist the temptation to release a few sparks from the knuckle-duster, which glittered dazzlingly in the dark.
Soon, he thought.
4
Dante was oozing indignation as he ranted, waving his bad hand in the air. “Thirty-five metric tons of nuclear fuel scattered over a radius of two thousand miles, hundreds of thousands of deaths from the direct consequences of the radiation, and millions more from tumors throughout the world, even though, of course, the real statistics have been concealed. And not only by the Soviet Union but by all the governments that supported the nuclear lobbies.” He turned to look at Maksim. “If there’s a God, He must have quite a sense of humor, seeing that you’re still alive.”
“The Good Lord helps those who help themselves,” said Maksim. “One of the guards knew someone inside the nuclear reactor, and he freaked out and tried to leave without authorization. Panic broke out among the guards, and the patients took advantage of the situation. I saw them start to leave, skinny as twigs and pale, carrying clubs and weapons that they’d seized from the guards inside. They were running toward the gate. My fellow soldiers started to fire, and I fled. Even if we’d killed them all, what good would it have done? We were being exposed to enough radiation to get seriously sick. Maybe we already were sick. But before running away, I saw the girl come out.”
“Giltine,” said Dante.
“Yes. She was the only minor to get away. All the others were locked up again or else killed. Thirty or so, plus the soldiers and staff who’d deserted, like me. Only they offered me an alternative to the firing squad: find the fugitives. And some of them were real hard customers, though no one remotely close to Giltine.”
“Who recruited her?”
“Technically, it was still the army, but the boss was called Belyy. He was in charge of the Box, a military doctor. Aleksander Belyy.” Maksim reflected that the man still scared him, even more than Giltine did. “And when he died . . . the orders still kept coming. It’s hard to explain, but people like me are like so many fish, swimming in schools. We know where to go and what to do, but we never really know why.”
“I saw videos about Chernobyl,” said Brigitte. “And there was no building like the Box.”
“It was demolished by a ‘cleanup crew,’ the same company that worked on breaking down and securing the power plant after the explosion. There were thousands of them working in the area. And most of them died from radiation exposure. Just like the firemen who were the first responders.”
“And you were assigned to hunt down the prisoners who tried to get away,” said Dante grimly.
“I was a soldier, and they were murderers.” Maksim lit another cigarette. “Belyy gave me their dossiers so I’d know who I was going after. They were all multiple murderers. Soviet propaganda forbade talking about people like them, serial killers were an amerikanskiy problem, not something you’d find here. But there were genuine devils even in the workers’ paradise.”
“And just what do you think you are?” asked Brigitte.
“An old wreck. Now, anyway.”
“You read Giltine’s dossier. Who is she? What’s her real name?” asked Colomba.
“No one. She was an exception, and apparently, she remained one. She wasn’t brought to the Box, she was born there.”
“Jesus.” Just when Colomba thought she’d touched bottom, it turned out there was another step down. A little girl born into a prison for murderers and raised among them. It was hardly a surprise that now she’d go around exterminating people, was it?
Brigitte turned pale. “It’s your fault that Giltine killed my brother. It’s because of what you did,” she shouted into Maksim’s face.
“I’m not going to try to deny that, miss.”
“How did she survive all alone?” Colomba went on with the questioning.
Maksim downed a long gulp of vodka before answering. “I don’t know. We lost track of her immediately after the escape. We assumed she was dead. Then, years later, word started circulating of this woman willing to kill for the highest offer, even for the FSB. And like I told you, every time I tracked her down, she always managed to slip through my fingers.”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” said Dante. “The Communist regime had fallen. What did you care whether Giltine was on the loose? Were you worried about the fact that she was killing people?”
“Of course not. We were worried because she was the only one besides me and Belyy who could talk about the Box. My job was to make sure all traces disappeared.”
“Your new bosses could have put all blame on the previous management, the way they did with Stalin’s purges. What was the purpose of this waste of effort?”
Before Maksim had a chance to reply, Andreas made his entrance.
After that, there was no longer any time.
5
It was Brigitte who drew the short straw, even though she didn’t even know there was a lottery she could lose or win. Much more simply, she just couldn’t take any more talk of murders and corpses, conspiracies and mysteries, and so she’d left the room to splash some water on her face. She thought about her brother. About the morning her father had called her to give her the news. He’d been crying so hard that she, half-asleep, couldn’t understand what he was talking about. She’d had to decipher. Absynthe. Gunther.
Fire.
When she’d figured it out, she’d thrown up. She’d projectile-vomited so hard that the spray of half-digested food seemed like a jet from a high-pressure hydrant. It had taken her breath away; she couldn’t even cry.
And that’s how she felt right now. On her feet by some miracle, after discovering that the only reason her brother was dead was because he’d been caught up in a war between a victim and her jailers. When Colomba had explained to her that the fire might have been arson, Brigitte had been overwhelmed by rage and hatred against the unknown perpetrator, but now all she could feel was disgust and pity for everyone involved.
She opened the door to the hallway, leaving behind Maksim and his voice, so chilly as it reeled off daisy chains of monstrosities, and then the bathroom door; she moved by touch to find the light switch in the absolute darkness. The door swung shut behind her, and Brigitte assumed it was a gust of wind. In fact, the window was open. Then, in the faint glow from the garden, she made out the silhouette of a man.
Andreas.
Before she could scream, Andreas hit her in the throat with his knuckle-duster. Brigitte gasped, trying to catch her breath, and her legs gave way when the electric discharge short-circuited her nerves. He put his hand over her mouth and, grabbing her from behind, gave her another jolt to the hip, keeping the jolt button pressed down. The electricity made Bri
gitte’s feet dance as if in a fit of tarantism, while her eyes rolled up and out of sight. She’d never felt such pain in her life, and she couldn’t even shout. She could only moan into the hand that was suffocating her. She tried to bite it, but Andreas grabbed her by the hair and smashed her face against the mirror, which shattered into shards. Brigitte felt something break in her nose, too.
“Fucking slut,” Andreas whispered into her ear, jamming the electric knuckle-duster against her crotch and delivering a full jolt. “Enjoy.”
Brigitte saw black and thought she was about to die.
But when the shadows dispersed, she found herself alive in the dining room, with Andreas’s left arm under her throat and something pricking one side of her neck. It was a piece of the mirror, big as a slice of cake, and Andreas was shoving it against her flesh. “Unless you do as I say, I’ll slice this slut’s throat wide open,” he was saying.
Colomba stood facing them with her pistol leveled, biting her lower lip. Dante stood frozen by the window.
Andreas’s chin was covered with blood. More blood was flowing off the hand that held the piece of mirror, wrapped in a jury-rigged handle of toilet paper. In his underwear, he was grotesque and horrible.
“Let her go,” said Colomba. “Or this is going to end badly.”
“If you’re so sure you can kill me with one shot, go ahead and fire. Because if you’re wrong, I’ll slaughter her like a pig.” He tugged Brigitte even closer to him, and to her disgust, she felt his erection press against her buttocks. “And maybe I’ll even fuck her while she dies. I’ve always wondered what that would be like.”
He ran his tongue over her neck, and Brigitte had a convulsion of horror. “Go fuck yourself,” she said to him.
He rubbed up against her even harder. “Don’t stop. You’re winding me up.”
From the sofa, Maksim looked at Andreas, narrowing his one good eye. “I’ve known plenty just like you.”
Kill the Angel Page 36
