by Ross Sidor
She sat slowly up, disorientated and dazed from the blow to her head. Avery reached a hand out and pulled her up onto her feet. Her balance was off, and he steadied her. She had a bleeding scrape where her forehead struck the pavement and the shocked, haunted expression of someone who had just stared up helplessly at the business end of a gun in the hand of an apathetic killer while her life flashed before her eyes.
Keeping a hand on her back, Avery directed her toward the Siena. He helped her inside and walked around to slip in behind the wheel. He keyed the ignition, put the car in gear, and peeled out.
Only once they had safely put some distance between them and Shabany, Avery asked Aleksa if she was all right. He wasn’t being nice. He needed to need if she’d be able to hold herself together for a while longer. If she wasn’t, then he needed to think about leaving her behind.
“I…I don’t know…” He knew she wasn’t referring to the head wound. She’d taken a box of tissues from the glove box, and pressed a wad tightly against the cut. “I was attacked once, in Moscow, but this is different. Those men back there on the street were going to kill me. If they’d been a little faster or had a third man, I’d be…If I hadn’t met you tonight, I’d have been at the apartment with Yuri when they came…It doesn’t seem real. I’m meant to be dead right now…”
Her voice trailed off. Avery heard her hyperventilating. He lowered her window a couple inches. “Look at me. Focus on breathing. Don’t think about all the shit that might have been. You’ll just fuck yourself up even worse. It’s over now, and you’re alive. That’s all that matters.”
After a couple minutes, Aleksa got her breathing under control. She raised her window and wrapped her arms around herself. She shivered and stared vacantly through the windshield, through the wipers, at the street ahead. Avery knew she would have nightmares about this moment for the rest of her life. Christ, this was the last thing he needed to deal with now. He turned on the heat full blast for her.
“Where are we going?” Aleksa finally asked.
“We’ll stay at the Sputnik tonight and figure something out from there. Do the Belarusian authorities know you were staying with Yuri?”
“No. I falsified my visa application and contact form.”
“Good. If we’re lucky, we won’t have the police and KGB looking for you once they discover Yuri’s body. Those guys back there were mafiya”
“We should leave Belarus immediately,” Aleksa said.
“And go where? It might not be safe for you to go back to Russia either.”
“I have friends in the West, Russian expatriates.”
“You do what you need to do, but I’m not leaving yet.”
“Why not? Are you crazy?”
“I can’t leave now. I need to track the HEU shipment. If we lose track of it, there’s going to be a lot bigger problems for everyone.”
“I don’t understand. Can’t you go to your embassy?”
“Not exactly,” Avery said. If he went to the embassy, the chief of station would be more interested in what Avery was doing on his turf than he would be in the HEU delivery.
Near the city center, after making a thorough dry clean run, Avery abandoned the Siena. They walked a couple blocks before hailing a cab to take them the rest of the way to the Sputnik. There, they walked around to the rear stairwell door. When he’d left earlier, Avery had stuck a doorstop in the doorway to prevent the door from locking behind him, and they went inside and proceeded to his room, undetected by the hotel staff.
Avery proceeded cautiously into the room, and then carefully examined it, making sure everything was exactly how he’d left it and that there were no signs of visitors while he was away.
Aleksa took a long shower and changed into clean clothing, while Avery made her hot tea.
“You should try to get some sleep,” he told her. He sat at the little desk with the Glock and spare magazines laid out in front of him. “I’ll keep watch.”
She looked at him as if he’d just sprouted a third eye. “How can I possibly sleep after what happened?”
“Then don’t.” Avery shrugged. He wasn’t going to worry about it. “Tell me how Yuri knew about the uranium deal.”
“He had a source in Belarus’s Institute for Power and Nuclear Research, in Sosny. This man mentioned to Yuri the deal with Russia, and Yuri had him press for more information. We were supposed to see this man tomorrow morning. He thinks he may have details on the flight schedule by then. I know the delivery will be soon. This afternoon, a GlobeEx Ilyushin arrived from Moscow. That’s the official aircraft that will deliver the uranium to Russia. Litvin is going to split the stockpile and divert a portion to Tajikistan. I’ve checked flight records, and there’s also an outbound GlobeEx jet to Ayni tomorrow.”
“We need to see this man as soon as possible. Do you have any way of contacting him? If these people have Yuri’s laptop and phone, they may identify his sources and track them down.”
“Yuri arranged the contact,” Aleksa said. “There’s nothing I can do, and no way for me to reach him. Besides, Yuri was careful about protecting his sources. I don’t believe he’d save names in his files.”
“Let’s hope not,” Avery replied. They would have to take the risk and show up at the meet tomorrow. “So what’s your story? Why are you doing all this? There must be easier ways to make a living in Russia.”
Avery asked because he was genuinely curious, and he also wanted her to talk and focus on something other than the attack and Yuri’s corpse.
Aleksa Denisova was thirty-four years old. Estonian by birth, she was from Perm, in what was then called the Russian Federative Soviet Republic, where her grandparents had emigrated to shortly after World War II.
She’d never wed and had no children. Her only time for men had been during her time at university. After that, the few men who attempted courtship were quickly put off by her constant travelling and the demands of her work, not to mention the numerous death threats she received from gangsters. She maintained only a small, trusted circle of people she called friends. She’d devoted most of the last decade of her life, the time when others found spouses and started families, to her work. She didn’t strive for fame and success, but she was driven and dedicated and possessed a sense of purpose that had been instilled in her early in life.
Her father had been a Red Army officer. She’d never really gotten to know him. In 1987, when Aleksa was barely five years old, an American-supplied Stinger missile brought down his helicopter in Afghanistan. A few handwritten letters to her from her father and photographs of him—always in uniform—were all that she had left of him. Her memories of him were only the distant memories of a young child and perpetually faded and grew hazier through the passage of time.
Nine years later, Aleksa’s older brother, was conscripted into the army of the new Russian Federation and ambushed by Chechen separatists while on patrol in Grozny. He was pulled out of his burning armored vehicle and decapitated. Her brother came to her mind with greater clarity than their dad. As was often the case with siblings, they’d played together as children and fought with one another in their teenage years. A day didn’t go by where she didn’t think of him and wonder where he would be now and what type of man he might have become.
Her mother died a year later of alcohol poisoning, from an extreme intake of vodka over a three day binge, leaving twenty year old Aleksa, who was then preparing to go to university abroad, completely alone in the world.
Aleksa left Russia the first chance she got and studied journalism and writing at the University of Buckingham in Britain. Shortly after graduation, she went to work for Reuters, taking assignments in the former Soviet republics. She returned to Russia in 2008 when Boris Gorshkov, a well-known Russian opposition journalist and her closest friend, started his own newspaper investigating corruption at the highest levels of the Russian Federation. In the process the paper made powerful enemies, including corrupt government officials, oligarchs, and organiz
ed crime bosses.
Two years ago, Boris Gorshkov was killed in an alley behind a Moscow bar. He was shot three times in the head at close range. There had been neither signs of a struggle nor a search of his body, and his wallet and personal belongings were all left untouched. But local police classified the crime as a mugging. A Moscow Militia lieutenant later sought out Aleksa and told her, on condition of anonymity, that an FSB captain had pressured the militia lieutenant’s department into not pursuing the investigation and that FSB was to take over as a matter of state security.
Boris’ younger brother, Grigory, took over as editor-in-chief of the paper, which has since gone mostly digital. Aleksa remained onboard as its chief national correspondent. She still thought of Boris constantly. She’d held onto this idealistic notion of finding his killer and seeing him brought to justice, but as years passed, that seemed increasingly unlikely.
Like Boris, Aleksa too had been the victim of a supposed mugging. Less than a year after his death, she was ambushed outside her apartment by two men. They beat her and put her in the hospital with a concussion, broken nose, three broken ribs, and a head wound requiring seven stitches. She has found her apartment burglarized and wired for audio surveillance and had her laptop computer, with all of her files, stolen. Her e-mail accounts have been hacked. She’s found her name placed on terrorist no-fly watch lists, and she’s received anonymous death threats.
It was the risks that came with engaging in the practice of independent journalism in Russia.
Within the last year alone, there had been over forty assaults against Russian journalists. Ten were murdered. Each of them had covered corruption from the lowest to highest levels of the Russian government. An oligarch bribing government officials for gas contracts. A company owned by a mayor’s brother removing trees in a local forest to build new roads. Only when an incident is widely publicized by international media will the police investigate. A few hit men with mafia connections have been arrested, but never the people at the top who contracted the hit men. New legislation with safeguards to protect journalists is proposed but never passed by the Duma.
Aleksa and her colleagues were now banned from government press conferences. Public affairs departments from government agencies were prohibited from speaking to anyone from her organization and other banned news services. The FSB formed a special unit to investigate and catch government employees providing information to reporters in an effort to dry up their sources.
European newspapers and television networks continued to offer Aleksa positions and frequently turned to her as a source inside Russia. They offered Aleksa her choice of assignments and competitive salary, but she continued to decline. She held no idealistic delusions about her work and changing Russia. She never regarded herself as an activist or liberal crusader, but she would maintain that above all else she was a loyal friend.
She stayed in Russia only for Boris and the others, and continued the work they had believed in and died for. She thought to do otherwise was to turn her back on them and abandon them simply because it became convenient and safer to do so. She thought that perhaps she would accept a job with the BBC or The International Herald Tribune and move west and find a man only after Boris Gorshkov’s killers were identified, prosecuted, and sentenced.
“What about you, Nick? Is that even your name?”
“Yeah.”
But no one ever called him that. Through school, the army, and the Agency, he’d always just been Avery.
He gave Aleksa the condensed version and explained how his mother had died when he was seven—he never really knew her—and he joined the army immediately after high school, to get away from his abusive, alcoholic father. He never saw his dad since. After three years in the army, he passed Ranger selection.
When she pressed him about relationships, he told Aleksa about how in Afghanistan, waiting to assault an al-Qaeda stronghold, he’d received a letter from his fiancé—a girl he’d known since high school—calling off the wedding and ending their relationship. She’d met someone else, a med student with a condo, BMW, high earning potential, and who was there for her. Avery hated her and never spoke to her again.
After three tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, he left the army to work as an independent security contractor. He omitted the part about CIA, but he thought Aleksa was smart enough to have it figured out.
It was a strange conversation, because it was the first time in years he’d spoken to anyone, let alone a woman, about himself. He didn’t like the feeling of opening up to someone, and he already regretted this conversation, but at least it kept her mind off what happened tonight and seemed to calm her down.
“Thank you, Nick.”
Aleksa was in the bed, under the blanket. Avery still sat at the desk, five feet away.
“For what?”
“What do you think? For everything you did tonight. Just for being there.”
Fuck. “Try to get some sleep.”
TWENTY-ONE
Sosny
Belarus’s Institute for Power and Nuclear Research is located in Sosny, a suburb about twenty miles outside of Minsk. This is where Belarus housed its first nuclear reactor, which was shut down after the Cold War and was no longer operational. With help from Russia and Iran, Lukashenko intended to re-start the reactor and build nuclear power plants. The first reactor, currently under construction, is supposed to go online in 2016, the second in 2018. Western intelligence agencies had little doubt that the plants will be used to develop bombs and allow Belarus to re-claim its status as a nuclear power. Belarus, with a small inventory of SS-25 Topol missiles they hadn’t returned to Russia after the Cold War, already possessed a delivery system for warheads.
Avery thought that within a couple years, it’d be the North Korean nuclear crisis all over again, this time in Europe. At least by then, he’d be too old to be doing this shit any longer.
Avery and Aleksa arrived in Sosny at 10:00AM in a rental car, a Volvo he’d picked up at the airport. He drove this time, wanting to be the one behind the wheel in case a situation arose requiring tactical defensive driving. He’d left her alone at the hotel when he picked up the car. She’d insisted on going with him, but if the mafiya used their connections to have the police and KGB looking for her, the airport was the last place she should be.
When he returned for her at the hotel, two hours later, he found her curled up in a ball on the floor, behind the bed, sobbing and shaking, but she thankfully snapped out of it quickly, overcome with relief when she saw him, as if she hadn’t expected him to come back at all. She was still shaken up from what had happened last night, barely twelve hours ago, and she hadn’t slept well, waking up every hour or two from vivid nightmares reliving the attack. Avery didn’t tell her that she’d probably be messed up for a long time and would probably need professional help to deal with it. Once, in her sleep, she was badly shaking and crying out, and Avery had to gently wake her up and calm her down.
Avery would be relieved when they parted ways.
Other than the first time he saw someone die violently, a buddy in the army, Avery had never reacted that way toward violence again. After Mike Gomez bled out in Avery’s arms, aboard a Black Hawk, Avery had simply decided that this wasn’t something he wanted to deal with, and he put up brick walls in his mind and secured everything behind it. He just hoped the walls stayed intact.
Yuri’s contact was a nuclear technician named Vasil Romanchuk. Fifty-six years old, a functioning alcoholic, his time at the research facility went back to the Cold War days. He’d helped Yuri, coming forward with what he knew of the uranium transfer, only because he’d become increasingly suspicious that he was being set up to take the blame. If anything went wrong with the HEU deal, or word of it became public, he suspected the KGB would show up at his home to arrest him for selling weapons grade material to the Krasnaya Mafiya. Then he’d probably be killed quietly in prison, and the Belarusian government would have covered up its involvement in the
affair.
The institute itself was a sprawling complex consisting of several low-laying compounds and two silos occupying a large plot of land with clean, freshly paved streets and lush, well-maintained lawn. There was a heavier uniformed police presence around the premises, Avery observed as he drove south on Mullovsoye Road, along the northeastern length of the facility’s perimeter, surveying the target along the way.
“That building is where the HEU is stored,” Aleksa said. She pointed to a large warehouse sitting behind a high fence, with a guard booth and barrier at the street entrance. Avery could make out a uniformed security officer checking the credentials of a car that had just pulled up.
“Where are you supposed to meet the contact?” Avery asked.
Aleksa directed him to a street café three blocks away. There were other restaurants and stores nearby, and she said that it was an area where staff and students from the nuclear institute regularly came on their breaks, and there’d be nothing suspicious about Romanchuk leaving work to come here.
“What’s the contact look like?”
“He’s short, overweight, bald, and has a mustache and glasses. And he’s always pale, because he rarely sees the sun. He’s either inside here working or at home drinking until he passes out.”
“I’m going to take a walk and have a look around. Litvin’s thugs or the police may be looking out for you, and we don’t know if Yuri compromised the meet before he died.”
Avery didn’t need to mention that Yuri’s killers would have tortured him and put him through hell before finally killing him. He had to assume that the Ukrainian reporter had revealed everything he knew.
“But Vasil doesn’t know you,” Aleksa protested. “He’ll never talk to you. You’ll scare him off. Besides, he doesn’t speak English.”
“I’m only going to check for surveillance and see if he’s even here,” Avery said. “If he is, and it’s clear, I’ll come get you, and you’ll talk to him.”
