by Thomas Waite
Lana returned to her office, telling Jensen to get everything he could on Lisko and Dernov. She briefed him about the latter, adding, “I know it’s not much.”
“It’s a start.”
“Or a dead end. That’s what worries me more than them going after me—that they’re burning up our time so they can burn down Antarctica.”
But in the next thirty minutes she found emails between a clinic and Dr. Kublakov about six-year old Alexandra, with all of the girl’s medical records attached to the last message. If this were a sting—and Lana still couldn’t rule that out—it was certainly growing more elaborate all the time. But that’s how stings work, she cautioned herself.
She also found passport photos of the mother and daughter, smiling when she saw that they really looked like two peas from a very cute pod. But what heightened Lana’s interest was learning that Galina had been a regional director for Greenpeace. She confirmed it was the same woman with the organization’s staff photos from two years ago. The confirmation didn’t rule out a sting, but it made the likelihood at least marginally smaller.
Lana’s phone rang. She took a steadying breath, then saw it was Emma. “Mom, how could they do that to the world? Why?” She was crying. “All those scientists are dead. People are freaking out. They’ve got another bomb all ready to go. Are you going to stop them? This is crazy.”
“Everybody is trying very hard,” Lana answered obliquely, as always.
“Mom, you have to stop them.” Emma, as always, ignored her mother’s attempt to distance herself from any intelligence work. “Did you hear about Miami? And that subway in New York? That was so horrible. Can you imagine being in one of those cars when that happened?” Emma was crying so hard that she had trouble talking.
“Do you have your keys, and are you with Esme?” Lana knew that Emma was staying with Tanesa. She wanted to get her and Tanesa’s family out of Anacostia before it succumbed to flooding.
“Yes on both counts,” Emma said.
“Please let me speak to her.”
“Sure, but I need to talk to you about—”
“I’m so sorry to interrupt, Emma, but this is urgent.”
Tanesa’s mom got on the phone. “Emma said you needed to speak to me.”
“Yes, thank you. Anacostia is going to flood. I’d like your family and Emma to relocate to our house. I know that’s asking a lot, but I have access to projected flooding in the District, and you’ll be in the middle of it.”
“Wow, that’s a lot to take in. I was worried about that. You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“I have my sister and her family two blocks over.”
“Our house is big, too big. Have her come, too.”
“She has four kids.”
“Good, we’ll have plenty of company,” Lana said without pause. “We’re all in this together.”
“We’ll bring all the food we’ve got.”
“Good idea. But traffic is going to be horrible. Is your gas tank full?”
“Topped off two days ago, and I haven’t done anything but food shop since.”
“Great, but you must hurry, Esme.” Lana glanced at her watch. “May I say good-bye to Emma?”
“She’s right here. And I want to thank you, Lana.”
“Are you kidding, the thanks are all mine.” Lana couldn’t begin to express the gratitude she felt toward Tanesa and her mom. Emma had grown up so wonderfully in their presence, which only made Lana feel, once again, inept as a parent.
“Mom, it was better last year when the grid went down.” Emma was no longer crying. “At least I was doing something.”
“And you did it with incredible courage.”
“Now I can’t stop anything. I feel like an idiot crying.”
“Emma Elkins, you are not an idiot. Is your dad there?” Speaking of . . . Lana let that thought trail off unfinished.
“Him?” Emma said indignantly. “He’s all upset because his new rental is flooded and he’s not sure he’ll get his deposit back. I just want him to go home.”
“Emma, all of you—and that’s going to have to include him—are going to head to our house. Right—”
Lana had another call coming in. The call, she thought. “Em, I have to go.”
“Mom! I have to talk to you.”
“If you want me to try to stop this, I have to take another call. I love you.”
“Bye.” Her daughter hung up.
Lana brought up the call. “Hello?”
No voice greeted her. Thirty seconds passed. Lana watched them go by on her watch. It felt like the longest silence she’d ever experienced on a phone. It was as if the caller were still debating whether to speak to her. Finally, Lana said, “I have a daughter, too.”
She heard a breath and then a woman said, “I know. That is why I am talking to you.”
CHAPTER 16
OLEG KNEW HE SHOULD have been celebrating. Numero Uno hacker had scored a hit on Antarctica. The whole world was in chaos. And Russia was doing very well. He could tell the Russian President was doing all he could not to gloat. Like he was winking at Oleg right through the TV when he said the greatest country in the world had long been prepared for the worst. “The weaker nations,” the President didn’t specify, “did not take proper precautions.” The President had shaken his head wearily and added, “Very sad.”
Uno, of all people, was complaining, saying he’d wanted to knock out the biggest glacier and send all of it sliding into the sea. But then it would have been game over. You needed to leave something on the table in any negotiation. If the Arctic nations didn’t capitulate now, Oleg could use a second Trident II. “It can’t always be instant gratification,” he’d told Uno.
Definitely not instant gratification for Oleg. Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov was dead. Not possible, had been his first thought. Sergey was a police thug, covered in tattoos of snakes and barbed wire and guns. Sergey was a killer. He definitely wasn’t supposed to die. Oleg dispatched him to “dispose” of Galina and whatever else he found in her car—whiny kid, toys, everything. Get rid of it all. Like used tissue—or nasty feminine product. But she had disappeared and left Sergey dumped by the side of the road like refuse. Bullet in his belly. And Oleg was left at his workstation in his penthouse, staring at his monitor and phone and wondering where Galina was. She was number one, too. Number one suspect, he thought.
What kind of person does that to man of the law, Galina?
Oleg would have bet a casino full of cash that PP, his despicable money-grubbing father, had given her millions of rubles because why else would she have gone to him and then—poof—vanished?
Why?
Oleg knew. Because she needed that money. She’d been badgering him for it, whining all the time: Give me money, Oleg. Give me money. But she’d never said it was so she could leave.
She and PP and his lame-brained brother—never had that term held greater meaning—had been up to murder.
Galina girl—No, Galina bitch—hadn’t even had the basic human decency to answer his texts. Calls? Didn’t even pick up.
I give her pretty dresses, fancy underpants, special videos to make her moist, and crazy guy sex, and she can’t even stay in touch? What are friends for?
Worse—yes, worse—she had shut off an app he’d secreted onto her device that had recorded her geolocation, which had then uploaded to an Internet server that sent him the data.
Where’s the trust? Not even for the people closest to you?
Very sad, like the President said.
He could not abide this kind of betrayal because surely she must be in cahoots—how he loved that uniquely American word—with some coldhearted people to kill with a gut shot and a ballpoint pen?
A police officer—nobody Oleg knew—had found Sergey’s body on the shoulder of a highway. Minutes
later, Oleg had a medical examiner on the case. Body not even cool. The ME reported the bullet missed the splenic artery, but a Bic pen tore it up like a wood router.
“How do you know it was a Bic?” Oleg had demanded. Very good forensics, he figured.
“It said so right on the side,” the ME replied, “where you click it. The pen was still stuck up in there.”
So absurd. So Russian.
And so very bad of Galina to bring some guy along to do her dirty work.
Oleg stewed in front of his screens. He wanted to kill Dr. Kublakov. If the oncologist had agreed to care for Alexandra, no way would Galina have left. She would have been in her apartment, not going to PP’s for help. And Volkov would have been able to visit her in the comfort of her own home. In fact, if Kublakov weren’t caring for the spawn of high-ranking government officials, Oleg would have had him dropped into the Baltic from thirty thousand feet this very day.
Instead, Oleg had to go see PP to try to find out what was really going on with Galina.
He took the elevator to the lobby, brushing past the wheel beast and his crippled girlfriend. Stalkers!
The girlfriend called him a gandon—condom—and said, “We’re getting you evicted.”
He stopped and stared at the two of them, lined up like they were ready for a race. “You think so. How about I really do buy the building and throw you out? You think I’m kidding? I’ll make sure you live in a box on the street.”
He used the stairs to rush down to the garage. He definitely felt better, glad to have gotten that off his chest. Honesty is the best policy. Good for his health, too. Blood pressure got too high if he didn’t express his innermost feelings. Hadn’t Galina always said, “Oleg, you have to let me know how you feel. It’s a better way to live.”
Look what that touchy-feely shit got him. She left without a word. No good-bye kiss. No good-bye sex.
What had happened at PP’s? That was the mystery.
He called the old bastard as he scurried to his Maserati. “I’m coming over,” he announced when the ex-husband of six women picked up. “We need to have a talk.” Oleg thought he sounded impressively sinister.
“We do,” PP replied simply, which unnerved Oleg slightly.
Not much, really, he assured himself.
What a terrible father PP was. Oleg vowed to be a much better dad. He would sire only sons and bring them up strong. And no dumb beasts like Dmitri.
Can you imagine raising one of them? He shuddered at the thought.
Oleg motored out of Moscow, keeping to the speed limits until he made it past the city’s outer ring of suburbs. Then he raced past the poor peasants in the countryside. He could almost smell them. Not like Galina’s lavender scent, that was for sure. Stink bombs.
The gate to PP’s mansion opened and Oleg gunned his engine, racing down the long driveway, narrowly missing a calico cat that always gave him the evil eye. One day he’d squash that creature, crush him right under his wheels. He’d been trying for at least a year. Quick little devil feet.
No parking elevator for him today. He pulled up by the front door. Would have left the Maserati running, too, if PP hadn’t freaked out last month and threatened to slash the tires if Oleg ever did that again. “It’s patriotic,” Oleg had tried to reason with the old man. “Burn gas, oil, and don’t worry. The planet will be fine for your grandchildren.”
PP was always saying that we had to think about the rug rats. Not those words exactly, but the thrust of his thinking ran in that direction. No wonder Galina liked him.
Actually, it was Oleg taking care of the future, quietly contracting with Russia’s biggest construction firms on secret projects to build AAC plants near nuclear generating stations and hydropower plants. Everything hush-hush, from commissioning designs to wiring money. Scores of AAC plants would rise soon, the pride of Russia, the country that would save the world—what was left of it, anyway.
PP opened the door himself.
“What happened?” Oleg demanded. “She was here. She left. I know that. Now I can’t reach her.”
“Come in, my son. I have long wondered about that question, too. What happened?” PP shook his head. In sorrow? That was what Oleg thought. Well, get over it old man.
But it wasn’t sorrow at all.
Galina headed to Sochi. So many tourists went there, even now, thanks to the Olympics, that she believed she could get lost in all the fresh faces. But she would have to spend the night in Voronezh. She found photos on Airbnb of a seventeenth-century monastery that provided a few rooms for “sincere guests.”
She was plenty sincere in wanting to stay there, thinking that nobody would ever look for her in a monastery.
Galina and Alexandra arrived just before dawn. The monastery appeared to have been carved out of solid rock.
She led her daughter, bleary from sleep and sickness, to the entrance, and knocked on a thick wooden door. No one answered.
“It’s early,” she explained to Alexandra.
She leaned her shoulder against the heavy door and pushed it open. They started down a wide walkway. Statues of religious figures, saints, Galina presumed, perched on stone shelves built into the walls. A reliquary with bones and scraps of clothing appeared behind a small square window.
They heard the murmur of chants as a woman in a nun’s habit walked toward them. She asked if they needed help.
“I wonder if we could take a room for the morning. We are weary travelers,” Galina said, falling into a strange speech pattern for reasons she could not explain, except for the stone walls and floor and ceiling. They seemed to demand obeisance to another era. She was too tired to resist.
The nun studied her, then looked at Alexandra. “You are both troubled in your own ways, aren’t you?” she said. Galina had to choke down tears. Again, she didn’t know why. She nodded.
“Will two small beds suffice?” the nun asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
The nun asked for a modest sum, slipping the rubles into a compact leather pouch that hung next to a rosary with a large silver cross. The transaction completed, she led them to the cloister.
Their room was at the end of a narrow hallway. The nun lit a candle on a corner table. It was the only light but for the sun slowly graying the sky.
The sister bid them adieu, backing out of the room with a genial smile.
“Mommy, are we going to eat?” Alexandra asked. “I’m hungry.”
Galina thought her daughter would want to sleep, but it had been a long night with no stops.
“I’ll go ask them for food,” Galina said.
Alexandra tugged her sleeve and pointed to a Bakelite phone, black as the blankets that covered the two small beds.
The woman who answered said she would bring them bread and cheese and butter.
In fewer than five minutes the humble provisions arrived, along with hard-boiled eggs and cold water in a gray ceramic pitcher that might have been as old as the monastery.
Galina thanked the initiate who had brought them the platter.
“How much do we owe you?” she asked the young woman, who shook her head and left quickly.
The chanting increased in volume. Galina realized they must be close to the chapel.
Alexandra picked up a crust of bread. She dropped it on the table. It was so stale it bounced. But she snatched it up at once and broke off the end, chewing it with difficulty. She had lost most of her baby teeth and had the whitest niblets coming in. But perhaps they weren’t quite up to the task of tackling stale chunks of bread.
“The cheese might be easier,” Galina advised. “Or you could dip the bread in water.”
“That’s okay, Mom. It’s really good bread.”
It was good. They ate slowly, deliberately, with no distractions, only the mesmerizing chanting. Amid such peace, Galina found it diff
icult to comprehend that the world had been plunged into such extreme turmoil. It was even harder for her to believe that Oleg had masterminded the devastation.
When she’d met him at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology seven years ago, she’d taken him for just another handsome, bright young man. And when he’d recruited her to track down the AAC technology—“For the betterment of all humankind,” he’d claimed—she’d been thrilled to take such a daring step to help clean up the atmosphere. She’d hacked scores of emails and articles by scientists before she’d found the startling revelations in a math professor’s computer files at MIT.
Now, she felt her own soul needed saving for the role she’d played. Turning over the math professor’s data to Oleg had led him to Professor Ahearn, and that had resulted in his murder, along with the shooting death of his tortured wife. Their children were now orphans. She looked at Alexandra and could have wept. The notion of penance came to her at almost the same moment she thought of the brief conversation she’d had with a woman who also said she had a daughter. They’d both been circumspect on the phone.
And look at where you’ve ended up, Galina said to herself. She had a strong suspicion the woman was an operative, and almost certainly American. They had great pediatric hospitals there. But that step could get Galina killed or imprisoned for life.
Still, she had the woman’s number. And they had agreed to talk again.
When they finished eating, Alexandra took her mother’s hand. “Come with me. We should go and see them.”
They walked down a stone corridor toward the sound of the chanting. It grew louder, but never harsh.
Entering the rear of the chapel, they saw two dozen nuns seated in hand-carved pews that probably hadn’t been moved in centuries. The women’s voices affected Galina. She filled with emotion as she and Alexandra sat in the last pew, kneeling moments later when the nuns shifted forward.
Galina prayed for her daughter. A new chant insinuated itself into her consciousness, and she joined in. So did Alexandra.
