Peter took a deep breath. “I won’t bore you with all the details, but let’s just say we were able to track the money to that compound.”
Victor noticed a faint humming in the distance, like the rumble of a small engine. It was the same sound he had heard from Peter’s wine cellar.
“If you were suspicious about how they were using your money,” he asked, “why didn’t you take this to the police?”
Peter laughed. “They weren’t doing anything illegal—nothing we could prove, anyway. That was the whole point. All I had were theories and suspicions. So I watched and I waited. Imagine my surprise when armed men raided the compound in the middle of the night.”
“Why not just pull your funding and walk away?”
Peter stopped in front of a metal door and smiled. “Why didn’t you get into that car with Razorback?”
“Touché.”
Peter pulled the door open. He snapped his fingers, bringing a pair of overhead fluorescent lamps to life. They revealed a stone room empty except for a table and two chairs. A woman was sitting in one of the chairs, her wrists handcuffed to the metal arms.
It was the scientist Victor had noticed in the courtyard of the castle last night: the woman with coal-black hair.
Chapter 18
She looked pale and sickly beneath the lifeless glow of the fluorescents. The flesh beneath her eyes drooped. Her lab coat lay bundled in the corner, leaving her with a brown blouse and designer jeans. One glance at her told Victor she had probably spent the night in that chair. In the dark.
“What are you doing to her?” he asked Peter, feeling an instinctive sense of indignation at the mistreatment of another person. According to Peter, she had nothing to do with the attack on Prievska, which made her innocent in Victor’s eyes. And though Victor’s knowledge of Kerovian law was rather fuzzy (he’d had more important things to concentrate on while preparing for the raid on the laboratory), he was fairly certain that kidnapping her and confining her against her will was illegal.
“Talking,” Peter replied. “Nothing more.”
“Talking? Peter, this is illegal.”
“This is necessary.”
Victor wanted to ask why Peter cared so much, why he could not simply let it go. The same question, however, applied to him. Why had he convinced Peter to take him on the helicopter? Why had he attacked Razorback, refusing to let Peter dismiss him?
Because something’s going on here, he told himself. I may have stumbled on this completely by chance, but I’d never forgive myself if I looked the other way.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “We’ll talk to her. But as soon as we learn what they were working on, the scientists go free and we walk away. I don’t care if they were weaponizing wasps or making a glow-in-the-dark butterfly. We walk away.”
Peter stared at him until he had finished. Peter’s eyes were grave, and he nodded solemnly as if they had just sworn to a sacred pact. He passed a manila envelope to Victor.
“What’s this?” Victor asked.
“Everything I have gathered so far.” He stepped aside and gestured for Victor to enter the room.
“You want me to talk to her?”
“Please. I will be listening just outside. You want answers, don’t you?”
Yes, Victor thought. God help me, I do.
Victor stepped into the room, taking a deep breath and summoning everything he had learned over the years and seen on cop shows and legal dramas. The irony was that the law was not on his side, but against him. He was the criminal—if they were in America, he could have been charged as an accessory to kidnapping, just for being there and not helping her. It would be a jail sentence back home. What kind of sentence would a Kerovian court hand him?
He cleared his throat and sat down at the table as the door whined shut behind him. A red light blinked from a security camera perched in the corner of the room. Victor imagined Peter sitting in an adjacent room, hands folded in his lap, watching intently to see what Victor would do.
Victor opened the folder and bent over the notes. Sophia Kucera Dvorak, thirty-three years old. Ph.D in molecular biology from Yale. No children. Married to Marcus Dvorak, an attorney-at-law in Lublin.
Fantastic, Victor thought.
The notes went on, describing what type of coffee she drank, what gym she liked to visit, her movie preferences, the items on her Amazon wishlist. Peter wasn’t lying when he said he’d been watching the laboratory for a while.
But how did he gather all this information? Victor wondered. The answer, however, was as obvious as it was vague. Peter knew people. He had resources. When money was not an issue, a smart man could find ways to learn just about anything he wished.
“I want a lawyer,” the woman demanded, leaning as far back in the chair as the handcuffs would allow. She glared at Victor, showing no sign that her long night had broken her spirit.
“No lawyers today,” he answered. “You’ll just have to deal with me.” He smiled, trying to put her at ease, but she did not return the smile. He dropped his eyes back to the dossier. The notes ended, followed by a sheaf of pages with technical jargon. At first Victor thought Peter must have accidentally mixed those pages in with the notes about Sophia. Then he realized their inclusion was meant to make the dossier look bulkier, as if they knew far more about her than they did.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.
“Why would we do that?”
“You’re working for that sociopath, aren’t you? The one who left me in here all night?”
Victor raised his eyes. “What makes you think he’s a sociopath?”
“You’re a sociopath, too. Do you know what Kerovia does to kidnappers?”
Victor decided to redirect the conversation. He pushed the dossier aside and rested his arms on the table. “Listen, Sophia. I want to help you.”
“Bullshit.”
“But before I can help you, you have to help me.”
She tipped her head back and laughed—a scornful, mocking sound like crows taking flight from a tree.
“You Americans and your court dramas,” she said. “What’s the next part? You explain how you have all the leverage and I have none?”
Victor felt heat prickling along the nape of his neck, causing the hairs to stand. “Well, do you?” he asked, not quite as evenly as he had intended.
“Sure I do,” she answered. “I have everything you need, but you have nothing I need.”
“What about freedom?”
She laughed softly, but it was bitter this time, tinged by fear. “You really think you can give me that?”
“Of course we can. Tell us what we want to know, and I’ll personally see to it that you walk out of here unharmed.”
“And just what is it you want to know? You still haven’t told me.”
Victor clenched his teeth. She was making a fool of him. He wanted to stand up and storm out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him, but that would be childish. It would also reward her mockery.
“Just tell us what you were working on in that laboratory,” he said.
“And then I go free?”
“Yes.”
“You will personally escort me out of here?”
“Yes.”
“And where will you take me? What town? Will you fly me back to Poland?”
Victor took a slow, steadying breath. “I won’t go with you personally, but—”
“No.” She shook her head. “If you want what I know, you’ll have to show me two airplane tickets, one with my name and one with yours.”
“Okay. Two tickets to Poland.” He glanced at the camera. “In the meantime, why don’t we—”
“Not Poland. The United States. I want to go to the United States.”
Victor stared at her, trying to follow her reasoning. “The United States?” he repeated.
She nodded.
“Why? What about your husband, Marcus? Should we get a ticket for him, too?” he asked, imitating the sa
me mocking tone she’d used on him. She did not seem to be listening any more, however. She was staring at the blank wall, her shoulders slightly hunched now. Her lips slowly parted to reveal the flat fronts of her upper teeth.
Victor glanced at the camera again. None of this was going as he had imagined in his head. Maybe her long night had broken her spirit more than she’d let on.
Victor cleared his throat. “We know about the payments,” he said. “Nichibotsu Enterprises has been funneling money to pay for your work. Whatever you’re doing, I’m guessing it’s illegal. You should come clean while you still can.”
She nodded absently, the motion as minimal as seaweed bobbing in a gentle tide.
Watching her, Victor felt his anger dissolve to pity. This is torture, he thought, keeping her here like this. Yes, yes it was, and as soon as she told him what he wanted to know, he would make sure she got a cheeseburger and a glass of water and a soft bed so she could catch up on her sleep. He couldn’t condone this type of treatment, but why waste this opportunity when she appeared so close to breaking?
If he could not appeal to her self-preservation, maybe he could appeal to her humanity.
“I’m assuming you heard about Prievska,” he began, changing course again. “Thousands were injured by the gas, hundreds killed. I saw the raw footage myself—the half-clothed children dead in the street, blood leaking from their eyes and noses.”
He folded his hands together. “You don’t strike me as the type of person to help murder innocents. You wouldn’t do that, would you? I want nothing more than to cross your name off the list, but before I can do that I need to know what you were doing in that laboratory. Maybe it was perfectly innocent. Maybe I have no reason to be suspicious. If that’s the case, what do you have to hide? Why not just tell the truth?”
Slowly, as if the movement required a great deal of concentration, she shifted her gaze to Victor’s face. “And the truth will set me free?”
He blinked. “Absolutely.”
“And what if the truth is dangerous?” she whispered. “What if the truth will destroy your life?” Her eyes were wide, and the whites seemed to glow in the glare of the fluorescent lights. For the first time since speaking with her, Victor thought she was no longer putting on a false face. This was her true face, and the truth of it was that she was terrified.
He hesitated. For a fraction of a second, he worried what consequences might follow if she talked. Was she in danger? Would Nichibotsu send people after her if she talked? Was that why she didn’t want to go back to Lublin—because she feared her husband was being watched? Or, worse yet, he was already dead?
Staring into her eyes, reading her fear as clearly as a billboard on the highway, he wanted to reach across the table and take her hand and tell her everything would be okay. But he needed her to be afraid. He needed her to feel that Victor and Peter were the only two people in the world who could protect her.
He said, “What if the truth will save lives?” It was a shot in the dark, since he didn’t know what Nichibotsu was working on, but as soon as he’d said the words, he knew they had hit home. She winced and looked away. She stared at the wall for a long time - longer than before - and then swallowed hard.
“Nichibotsu was paying us to design a virus,” she said softly.
“A virus? What kind? What were all those insects for?”
Another long silence followed. Then, as if breaking from a trance, she stirred and returned her attention to Victor.
“Have you ever heard of CCD?” she asked.
“You mean the CDC?”
She shook her head. “CCD. Colony Collapse Disorder. It refers to the disappearance of honey bees from their colonies. They just fly off and never return. It’s been happening with increasing frequency since the ‘70s. There are numerous theories on the causes of CCD - agricultural pesticides, parasitic mites, even climate change - but no one knows for sure why the honey bee is disappearing.”
She paused, letting the implication of her words sink in. She seemed to be able to talk more freely now that they were in familiar territory.
“CCD,” Victor repeated thoughtfully. “What does this have to do with a virus?”
“We…were engineering a virus that would accelerate the process. Wipe out the honey bee altogether.” She paused and bit her lip. “The particular strain we were developing, if finished, would have been capable of crossing to other species of pollinators as well, I believe. Particularly the bumblebee.”
“Good God,” Victor murmured, recalling the insects he’d seen inside plastic boxes in the laboratory: beetles, moths, ants, wasps, mosquitoes. He now realized what they had in common: They were all pollinators.
“I never believed it would be released,” she said quickly. “I thought it was, you know, a matter of scientific curiosity, discovering what was possible in case—”
“Bullshit,” Victor said. “You did it for the money.”
She took a shaky breath as a single tear dropped from her eyelashes. “It wasn’t meant to cause any real harm. I swear, I wasn’t going to finish the work.” She fell silent, perhaps sensing the foolishness of her own words.
“So someone wants to kill the bees,” Victor mused. “But why? Wouldn’t other pollinators just take over?”
She shook her head. “There are other types of pollinators, sure—even the wind is a pollinator for some plants. But bees play a crucial role in the ecosystem. The honey bee alone is responsible for pollinating nearly a third of the world’s food. Without the honey bee, we would lose the majority of our fruits and many of our vegetables. Not to mention the domino effect. Without honey bees we would not have clover, alfalfa, and other plants used for raising cattle, which would impact the production of beef, milk, cheese, and other dairy products.
“The effects would be negligible at first,” she continued, as if reciting a thesis. “But given time, and without preparation for such a loss, the damage would already be done by the time scientists discovered what was happening. They would study the bees, sure, and maybe they would eventually create a cure, but by then—”
“By then it would be too late,” Victor interrupted. “By then there’d be food shortages, panic. The world would go into a severe depression.”
“Worse than that,” she said softly. “Think of the millions living hand-to-mouth, relying on their gardens and their crop fields. As the virus spread, a third of those plants would disappear. With proper foresight, most countries could adjust. But taken by surprise, the effects would be…catastrophic.”
Victor, who had always imagined the end of civilization would come with a giant mushroom cloud, now imagined nation-wide devastation of another kind: crops dying off after one year, never to return; plants necessary for the nourishment of wildlife disappearing, leading to a decline in the populations of deer, bears, and other large mammals; farming and hunting communities losing the only way of life they had known for generations. A stable society might be able to ride out the change and adjust, perhaps developing a cure for the virus or pollinating plants by hand, a method already in use in parts of rural China. But a single incident - a police officer, say, firing into a crowd of protesters - might be enough to throw the country into anarchy. After all, if the government could not provide food for everyone, what good did it serve?
“There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” he said. “Who would want to do this? It’s not like one part of the world would be safe while the rest suffered. Everyone would suffer. What kind of monster would do that?”
“Someone who wants to watch the world burn,” she answered.
___
“You caught all that?” Victor asked.
Peter nodded, not speaking. They were standing in a small room with several monitors connected to security camera feeds. On the desk beside the camera showing Sophia’s room lay a pad of yellow foolscap paper. Peter had filled a few pages in English. Victor noticed two words written in capital letters and circled: “CCD” and “
POLLINATORS.”
“It seems you were right when you said this wasn’t related to Prievska,” Victor said, still shocked by what Sophia had revealed. Peter, however, looked even more shaken. He was pale, and the fine lines of his face - the commas around his mouth, the crow’s feet by his eyes - seemed deeper than before, like channels of water cut through stone.
“I had my suspicions,” Peter began, “but this…” He trailed off, frowning at the floor. It was as if his mind had retreated to a private sanctuary where he could examine his thoughts in private. Victor did not mind. He did not think there was much to be said right then.
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