Scorpion Trail

by Geoffrey Archer

  He knew of many, hungry scientists tempted to do the same as him, many who craved the dollars that would transform their lives. Some had resorted to the Mafia to find a market for their nuclear materials, but ended up being cheated.

  Kulikov had no need of intermediaries. He had access to the tons of plutonium removed from dismantled missiles, access to the American-financed plants where the cores were sliced to prevent reassembly. And, above all, he had the means and the skills to run his own sales operation.

  Most of his military career had been spent securing special weapons – nuclear and biological – protecting the sites where warheads were stored and where they were made.

  He’d befriended the young Iranian while assigned to the All-Union Research Institute for Experimental Physics near Gorky. Communism was meeting its nemesis at the time. The two men had debated revolutions and political corruption, topics they understood well.

  After Hamid returned home to Iran, they’d remained in touch, each thinking the other might be useful one day, even if at the time they didn’t know how.

  Kulikov lifted his heavy suitcase from the trolley and presented it to the check-in counter. Heavy because it contained a segment of plutonium the size of a thin wedge of cheese.

  Sweat chilled his upper lip. The next few minutes were dangerous. If the case was opened and examined he’d be in deep trouble.

  The clerk took his ticket and passport and tapped at the computer. The travel papers stated Kulikov was on an official visit to UNPROFOR headquarters in Zagreb. They’d cost him five hundred dollars.

  Full of angst, he watched the suitcase disappear. Would the idiots send it to the same place as him? Disastrous if they didn’t. Disastrous!

  He’d weighed the risks carefully, though. Putting the sample in his hand baggage would have meant greater danger. The X-rays at every airport, the searches. Hold-baggage would be safer; it was seldom checked.

  Unsmiling, the clerk thrust him the boarding pass. Kulikov joined the queue for passport control.

  Berlin

  Parking near Oranienburgerstrasse was hard in the early evening. A rash of arty cafés and restaurants had opened in the old Jewish quarter of east Berlin since unification. Dieter Konrad, alias Herr Dunkel, left the Mercedes half a kilometre away, and walked to the brothel.

  He nodded at the policeman guarding the synagogue. Neo-nazis had threatened bomb attacks. The papers that morning had reported gravestones defaced in a Jewish cemetery.

  At the junction where the road forked, the first whores were out. Early birds, dressed like fantasy creatures. Huge blonde wigs, thigh-length, black leather boots, flesh-coloured tights, topped by crotch-hugging briefs and lurid bomber jackets. They stood in the road, offering themselves to passing cars.

  ‘Guten abend mein Herr!’ one of them called to Konrad, her voice like a caress. ‘Möchten Sie ein schönes Geschäft mit mir machen?’

  So open, so blatant, the offer to ‘do business’. He ignored her. In communist times they’d have been jailed for this. Prostitution had had to lurk underground in those days, in the backstreets nearby. A small, criminal community open to exploitation. Particularly by people like him.

  He looked the part for this area – a man on his own, in a raincoat. Not very tall, a little overweight and a face with withdrawn, watchful eyes, hiding behind spectacles. An average punter. Even the stick-on moustache would draw little attention here. The whores were used to men with hair that wasn’t their own.

  He turned left off the main street, past a couple of cafés and then right to where the small neon sign winked above a doorway. He pressed a bell and the door clicked open automatically.

  It was an ordinary apartment building, this entrance and staircase serving four floors. Two flats on each of the upper floors, two rooms per flat, twelve girls altogether, he reckoned.

  The ‘madame’ whose name Gisela had given him emerged from a ground floor doorway and welcomed him with a handshake. Heavily coated with cosmetics, she looked in her sixties. Too old for work, she’d moved into management.

  ‘Herr Dunkel! You’re back again, so soon.’

  She led him into her plush living room, all soft sofas and walls adorned with pornographic paintings.

  ‘You want Karina I suppose?’ she asked. ‘She’s a little busy just now. You’ll wait?’

  ‘There’s somewhere private?’

  Last time he’d been shown to a lounge where customers sat, avoiding each other’s gaze until the girl of their choice came free. To be avoided at all cost. He wanted as few witnesses as possible.

  ‘You can wait here if you like, until . . .’ The sound of the door-buzzer stopped her. ‘Perhaps not. Come.’

  She led him along a short passageway to a bedroom that smelled of Chanel.

  ‘This is my own room. You won’t be disturbed,’ she smiled, touching him softly on the lapel.

  ‘Thank you. I’m a shy man.’

  She nodded understandingly.

  ‘I hope that Karina is . . . everything you expected? I think her talents were what you were looking for.’

  ‘First impressions were good,’ Konrad nodded. ‘For the rest . . . we’ll see.’

  ‘She won’t be long. I’ll let her know someone’s waiting. There’s a little green light in her room which I can switch on from down here.’

  She waddled back along the corridor.

  Konrad’s pulse raced. The girl upstairs had better not let him down. Time was running out.

  Ten minutes passed, broken occasionally by the sound of the door, and by footsteps on the stairs. Then suddenly a petite, pale face with straight black hair like a doll’s poked round the bedroom door.

  ‘So, it’s you.’ She didn’t smile. ‘I thought it would be. Come with me.’

  Karina led the way up the main staircase. A low-cut, white Lycra slip clung to her torso, stretched taut by the nipples of her big, firm breasts. Her disproportionately narrow hips were sheathed in an absurdly small skirt made of shiny red plastic. Konrad was mesmerized by the outline of her cherry-like buttocks as she minced in front of him.

  The room was small and the air stale. A large four-poster bed took up most of the space. There was a dressing table with a flat-backed hairbrush, and a curtained opening led to a bathroom.

  Karina closed the door and spun round to face him. Her painted lips smiled, but her eyes didn’t. Communism might be dead, but she had a lingering fear of the Horch und Guck – the ‘listen and look’, as the Stasi were known.

  ‘So,’ Konrad began. ‘Do you have it?’

  The girl was so young, the bed so blatant, he wasn’t here for sex but felt a tightening in his trousers none the less.

  ‘Jawohl! But it wasn’t easy. And it will cost you more, darling.’ Her voice had the huskiness of a heavy smoker.

  ‘We agreed a price,’ he snapped. ‘One thousand marks.’

  ‘It’s not enough, mein Lieber! It took time. I lost business here, finding the right type for you.’

  Her nut-brown eyes were as hard as pebbles, but he could see she was scared of him.

  Konrad seethed. They always did this, these creatures from the gutter. Cheating was a habit.

  ‘Let me see it.’

  ‘Let me see your money first. Two thousand marks!’

  ‘No way, you bitch! No way I’ll pay you that much. One thousand, or I’ll go elsewhere!’

  She could see he was bluffing, see too from his mushy eyes that he wanted more from her than he’d said.

  ‘Fifteen hundred then, and I’ll suck you for free.’

  He flinched at her crudeness.

  ‘Ach, show it to me and stop wasting my time,’ he growled.

  ‘Money on the table . . .’ she insisted.

  Petulantly he took an envelope from his coat pocket and slapped it onto the bed.

  ‘There’s a thousand in there. We’ll see about the rest.’

  Karina fixed him with her eye. She’d decided before-hand to make him sweat if she could.
Slowly she undid the zipper on her skirt, while humming ‘the Stripper’. Konrad swallowed.

  With the waistband of her skirt loosened, she slipped her fingers down the front of her black panties, retrieved the slim booklet she’d concealed there and held it out to him.

  Konrad took the passport. It felt warm.

  Rzeczpospolita Polska was marked in gold on the grubby, blue cover. It was creased as if its owner had kept it in a back trouser pocket.

  Konrad opened it. Marek Gruszka was the name next to the photograph inside. Born 1962 in Wroclaw. It looked perfect but he wasn’t going to let her know that. He frowned.

  ‘It’s good, yes?’ she asked anxiously. ‘It’s what you wanted. What you told me.’

  Konrad fingered the document, held it up to the light and ran a finger-nail round the edge of the plastic covered photograph.

  ‘The man was here in this room when you took it?’ he asked disparagingly.

  ‘Course not. I don’t nick stuff here. I’d be out on my ear. Anyway, the punters would know where to find me. I’d get my pretty face slashed.’

  She moved close to him and put her hands on his shoulders.

  ‘And you wouldn’t want that, would you darling?’

  She pressed her naked midriff against him. She could tell he was almost hard. Konrad pushed her away.

  ‘Where then? Where did you get it?’

  Scowling, she pulled up her zip again.

  ‘What’s it to you? I got what you wanted, didn’t I?’

  He grabbed her wrist.

  ‘Just tell me!’

  She winced at the harshness of his grip.

  ‘The Tiergarten, of course. That’s where the Poles go. They park up between the Grosser Stern and the Brandenburg. Some like to do it in the bushes. This one had a bed in the cab of his truck. Two nights I hung around there. Scheiss kalt! I was about to give up and find somewhere warm, when this trailer truck pulled in. The bloke wound down the window, sitting in his bloody shirt sleeves with the heater turned full up. I was so cold I’d have paid him to get in.

  ‘In his shirt sleeves, with his jacket hung up next to him. And that little sweetheart poking out of a pocket.’

  She pointed at the passport, then screwed up her face with distaste.

  ‘Dirty bastard. Stank like a butcher’s shop. And thirty marks was all he was going to pay. I said he could have hand relief or nothing.’

  Her small mouth widened into a smile again.

  ‘But I made it a bit special! Took my knickers off and laid them on his face while I tossed him off. So when I grabbed his passport, he couldn’t see!’

  Her description of the act shrivelled Konrad’s tumescence.

  ‘All right. I’ll give you another two hundred,’ he snapped, eager to be away from this place. He stuffed the passport in an inside pocket.

  ‘No way! I missed two nights in this cosy hole to get it. That’s worth a thousand at least. And don’t you try and sneak off.’ She darted to the bedside and held her finger over a bell-push. ‘There’s a bloke as big as a wardrobe who will be waiting for you at the bottom of the stairs.’

  ‘Arschloch!’ he snarled.

  Konrad was beaten. He extracted his wallet and counted out five hundred marks. The girl took it and then checked the contents of the envelope on the bed. All correct.

  ‘A pleasure doing business with you,’ she said, moving close to him again. ‘Sure there’s nothing else you want?’

  She fingered his genitals.

  Her flesh seemed to emanate warmth; her perfume tantalized his senses. Then Konrad thought of her in that truck on the Tiergarten.

  ‘Aufwiedersehen, Fräulein Karina.’

  He shook her hand. An automatic gesture, but one he instantly regretted. As he descended the stairs he wiped his palm on his coat.

  Fifteen

  Zenica, Bosnia

  THE POWER WAS on at the International Hotel in Zenica. Lorna hurried to get things done before it blacked out again. Since returning from the village of Duba, she’d hardly stopped shaking.

  Her bedroom window faced southwest, as she’d requested. She opened the glass and positioned a bedside table under the ledge. No obstructions. A clear view to the Atlantic sky.

  The evening air made her shiver and she put her anorak back on.

  She placed the digital satphone on the table, unfolded the flat antenna and adjusted it for elevation and azimuth. Luckily there were no tower blocks in the way.

  She powered up the equipment, fine-tuned it for signal strength, then connected the modem lead from her portable computer and switched on.

  ‘This is where I start praying . . .’ she muttered, not too hot on technology.

  Laurence Machin, the computer-wizard who’d founded CareNet had coached her in how to use the equipment, but would she remember it right?

  The screen of the portable flickered and flashed as the software loaded, then settled on the ‘Cityscape’ navigator software. She clicked on the ‘dial’ button with the mouse.

  ‘If this works it’ll be a miracle,’ she whispered.

  The modem purred and bleeped, then the screen prompted her for her log-in name and password.

  ‘Wow. I sure am getting the breaks today . . .’ she grinned.

  From the Internet menu she picked , then . Another menu appeared. She chose the item .

  She was now connected to the electronic bulletin board used by Machin as a ‘hyperspace’ adoption agency.

  She typed ‘ADD’, then the screen cleared for her message.

  Urgently seeking foster home, 12-year-old Vildana from central Bosnia. This child must be evacuatedfor her own safety. Badly scarred mentally, after seeing her family murdered, and with a mild physical handicap, she will need extensive psychiatric therapy and medical attention.

  This one’s a real ‘toughie’; the girl is in bad need of an ‘angel’. If there’s one out there, please reply to this as soon as possible. For legal reasons, adoption cannot be entered into immediately, but it can be a long-term intention.

  Next she switched to e-mail and sent a longer, more detailed message to Machin himself, explaining how she was planning to get the girl out of Bosnia.

  There were no messages in her own box, so she logged off.

  That was it. Thirty million people could now read her words, people in what Machin termed ‘the grade one market’ of academics and businessmen who used the Internet. Just the sort of people who had the drive and the financial resources to make the adoption of problem children viable. In theory.

  Lorna powered down the equipment. So impersonal this idea of computerized child adoption. What she’d fired into the ether wasn’t key-strokes. It was a life.

  She folded the antenna and closed the window.

  God, it was cold! She removed her boots and lay on the bed, her legs under the blankets, shoulders propped against a pillow. She’d keep the anorak on until the room warmed up again.

  Across the room on the dressing table sat her Nikon. Inside it was Alex – a picture of him at least. With his arm round her. Just like old times.

  She still found it hard to believe. The beard had thrown her. She’d never liked facial hair. Soon get him to sha . . .

  Hell! Slow down!

  She’d been vilifying the man for two decades, how could she even consider a new relationship with him? Didn’t know anything about him any more. He’d said he’d been hiding. Where? Married? Kids?

  She closed her eyes, trying to visualize him in that house near Vitez. Half-a-dozen in his team, she guessed. Drivers, organizers, a mechanic and a translator. Probably with their own generators and satcoms. You’d need that sort of set-up to function long-term in Bosnia.

  The translator could be a girl. Maybe he desired her. Maybe they were lovers even . . .

  She opened her eyes wide to stop the racetrack of her mind. Fate had brought Alex back to her for one purpose and one purpose only – to get Vildana out of
Bosnia.

  The cookhouse was crowded. Alex and McFee squeezed in amongst shaven-headed French soldiers who’d stopped for an evening meal on their way to Sarajevo.

  Alex hadn’t mentioned Vildana again. He planned to wait until later when the Scotsman had a few whiskies inside him. McFee looked tense and thoughtful, his mind elsewhere. He kept glancing over his shoulder.

  ‘Bloody great this apple dappy,’ Alex remarked, spooning in the sticky pudding.

  ‘Oh aye. But it makes you droop, that stuff,’ McFee joked absently. He had eaten little that evening.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he went on. ‘I’ve an idea. Why don’t you go to the P.Info briefing on your own? I’ll wander round the camp a bit and see if I can pick up a bit o’ gossip. Always useful.’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’ It wasn’t gossip McFee planned to pick up, Alex reckoned.

  They took their trays to the bin.

  ‘See you later, then, eh?’ McFee said, out in the darkened Warrior park, expecting Alex to head straight for the Press Office.

  ‘I’m going to take a leak first.’

  His feet crunched across the hardcore to the white portakabins which accommodated the soldiers. The floor of the toilet was mud-stained and wet.

  He headed back into the darkness, annoyed at having left his torch at the house. He paused to let his eyes adjust. To his right, pans clattered in the cookhouse, to his left, a diesel Land Rover rattled past.

  He set off again, once his eyes could make out the boards that would get him safely through the mud on the camp perimeter. Had to hurry or he’d be late. The planks passed between rows of containers. From somewhere amongst them he heard hushed voices arguing. A woman, then McFee.

  The man’s a sex junkie, Alex thought. He squelched into deep mud.

  ‘Shit!

  His boots were caked. Reaching the tarmac at last, he stamped and scraped until his feet felt lighter again. At the door to P.Info he paused to wipe off the remains of the slime. On the way in a corporal was inspecting the journalists’ feet.

  ‘You’re a house-proud lot,’ Alex remarked.

  ‘So would you be if you lived in this ‘ouse,’ the soldier replied.