Jonathan sprang out of bed, forgetting his injury and a second later feeling horrendous pain rip through his shoulder. “Jesus!”
“Hurry,” Alexandre said, his gestures frantic, his eyes spearing Jonathan with anxiety.
“What’s going on?”
Alexandre didn’t have time to answer. A loud knock at the door rumbled through the house, followed by an equally loud male voice shouting in Russian. The knocking became louder.
“What’s he saying?” Jonathan asked as he slid into his pants.
Alexandre’s gaze was serious. “Security services.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I have to answer,” Alexandre said as he quickly turned around. “Stay in your room. Maybe even hide in the closet.” He closed the door, and Jonathan heard him walk away.
Jonathan threw on a sweater and shoes and tied his shoelaces, his apprehension mounting rapidly. Despite what Alexandre had suggested, he slipped out to the foyer and spotted his Russian host opening the front door half way. There were at least two voices other than his host’s, and all Jonathan saw was Alexandre’s back, the rest of him hidden behind the open door. The men spoke politely, it seemed. Jonathan didn’t know what to do, so he cautiously went to Alexandre’s side.
Alexandre turned, a scornful expression contorting his face. “You...you should have stayed inside. I just told them that you were not here.”
“Oh,” Jonathan said, feeling rather stupid.
Alexandre shook his head and said a few words with the two husky men facing him, though judging from their demeanor, the tone was now quite different.
Undercover cops? Jonathan asked himself, wondering if they were armed under their winter parkas.
Alexandre leaned into Jonathan and said, “They want you to go with them.”
“Who are they?”
“They say they are from the Interior Ministry.”
“Why do they want me to go with them?”
Alexandre shrugged his shoulders. “They have questions to ask you.”
“Tell them you are my lawyer, and that you will contact them to schedule an appointment.”
“They want you to go alone, and right away.”
“Are they arresting me?”
“I don’t think so.”
Jonathan glanced at a black BMW 7-Series idling in front of the house. At that moment the tinted rear window lowered, and a passenger’s face came into view. It was Mariya. She leaned her head out and shouted in English, “Let’s go.” The window shut as quickly as it had opened.
Jonathan wasn’t keen to obey her, but the two refrigerator-sized men facing him would likely not take no for an answer. He grabbed his coat on the rack and patted Alexandre on the back. “I hope this won’t be as bad as it seems.”
“Who is she?” Alexandre asked.
“It’s her.”
Alexandre’s jaw just about dropped off his face. “You’re right; this isn’t good.”
Jonathan replied by shrugging his shoulders. He brusquely pushed his way between her two goons and marched straight to the car. Mariya moved to the other side as Jonathan opened the car door.
“Where are we going?” Jonathan asked as he dropped into the hard leather seat, wondering if he wasn’t making a huge mistake by going so willingly.
She didn’t answer. Her eyes hinted at something mischievous. She signaled to her comrades to hurry.
Jonathan, nervously examining her every move, felt a sudden rush of air as one of her bodyguards slammed the door shut behind him. “Did Yuri not show up for work today?” he asked, hoping a little humor might help.
“It’s his day off,” she said, mockingly. “He’s not very happy, you know. Being tied up and having socks shoved in your mouth is the not kind of thing a former Spetsnaz would enjoy.”
“Spetsnaz?”
“Russian special forces.”
“Oh,” Jonathan said, now feeling rather fortunate that Yuri hadn’t fought back and dismembered him when he’d had the chance.
Mariya laughed. “Lucky for you, he’s not here.”
Jonathan could not agree with her more. But it was a small comfort in an otherwise bleak situation. He held on to a faint hope that Alexandre would pull something out of his ass and miraculously rescue him—with a magical legal proclamation, or better yet, a machine gun or rocket launcher. Anything with authority. A get-outta-jail card, Russian style. Anything to save him from this situation he’d gotten himself into. But it was a faint hope. The way Alexandre just stood there on his porch like a potted plant was an indication to Jonathan that he was now on his own.
Jonathan lowered his window and waved at Alexandre as if to say he’d be back by dinner, although he secretly feared that he’d return in a coffin. He leaned back in his seat, as Alexandre gave him a lazy wave of the hand. Evidently, camaraderie has its limits.
Jonathan’s heart sank the moment Mariya’s hired bulldogs crawled into the front seat. The motor growled as the vehicle edged out of the snow-covered driveway. There was nothing Jonathan could do now but go along for the ride and hope to gain a clue or two along the way and to return alive and unharmed.
They drove out onto the rural road that linked the dacha to the outside world. It was then that Jonathan remembered Alexandre’s words. “No one will find you here,” he’d assured him. “My place isn’t even on the map.”
It is certainly on Mariya’s map, Jonathan now thought irritably. It might as well have had a neon sign on the roof, blinking the words “Come get me—I’m a dumb-ass American who has confided in my Russian lawyer.” He began to wonder whether Alexandre had turned him in.
Mariya pulled her hair back over her ears and turned to Jonathan, but she said nothing. She checked her watch and crossed her slender legs, her right thigh emerging from the generous slit of her skirt.
“Where are we going?” Jonathan asked again.
“You’ll see,” she answered, reaching into her large purse by her feet. She wore a thin skirt and sparkly high-heeled black shoes—mind-boggling, given that there was about two inches of snow outside. As she leaned forward, her low-cut blouse revealed her small, shapely breasts. No bra. Her dark, pronounced nipples caught Jonathan’s eye. She continued to rummage through her belongings and then pulled something out, her hand wrapped tightly around whatever it was.
The driver turned onto another road. They were traveling rather fast, well above what Jonathan imagined was the speed limit.
“You see this?” she asked, opening her hand flat to expose the object—a plastic test-tube containing a yellowish substance. “Guess what this is.”
Jonathan wasn’t in the mood to be quizzed. He was now persuaded that she had let him go yesterday to find out who had been helping him. The likelihood that this lunatic would let him go again was looking rather slim, and so he wasn’t about to cooperate. “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
“You should care,” she said, holding up the vial between her index finger and thumb.
Jonathan glanced at the vial again. The contents appeared to be a powder rather than a liquid.
“Give up?” Mariya asked with a raised brow. “Francisella tularensis—spores derived from the weaponized Schu-4 strain developed in our labs at Biopreparat in the mid-’80s.” She continued to hold the thing at eye-level, her slim, pale fingers and bright red fingernails offering a bizarre contrast to the yellow toxic contents of the tube.
Sensuality and epidemic annihilation, Jonathan thought. Tantalizing, if it weren’t so deadly serious.
“What is Biopreparat?”
“You mean was. The Ministry of Health created a large number of facilities disguised as civilian biotechnology research centers, but they manufactured some of the most advanced bioweapons ever conceived.”
“But that was illegal, wasn’t it?”
Mariya chuckled. “Of course. Just because our two countries signed the Biological Weapons Convention in the early ’70s didn’t mean we would actually abide by it. Y
ou were the dumb ones who stopped your bioweapons development.”
Jonathan realized that he shouldn’t have been surprised. With people like Mariya roaming the planet, there was no appetite for treaties and the rule of law.
“Don’t act so shocked. Your military still found ways around the treaty. You still conducted research at places like Fort Detrick—so-called defensive programs. Let’s not fool ourselves. Just because you call it defensive, doesn’t mean you couldn’t quickly turn to large scale manufacturing if you wanted to.” Her eyes shifted again to the vial in her hand. “Aren’t you amazed at the power of this object?”
“Your instruments of death don’t impress me,” Jonathan said. “I only want to find my brother and bring him home, even if only his remains.”
Mariya frowned. “This is not a weapon of death, but rather one of surrender.”
Jonathan’s gaze swept over her with measured curiosity. “What do you mean?”
Mariya’s eyes were fixed on the vial. “Isn’t it incredible? There’s enough here to infect five thousand people. “And not always kill them, mind you; just to incapacitate them for weeks and months. It’s always been an optimal strategy to injure rather than to kill. An enemy is better destabilized if a large part of its army or population is diseased rather than dead.” She then smiled.
Jonathan listened as if she had gone completely off the deep end. Only she hadn’t. She was somewhat sane, clever, and, thus, dangerous.
“I tell you, this is one of the most sophisticated weapons ever produced.”
“That’s despicable,” Jonathan declared.
She blew out a breath. “It was the perfect weapon to use for isolated attacks, because it would be difficult to trace it back to us. Tularemia is a naturally occurring disease, with several hundred cases in North America and Europe every year, usually from infected animals, like rabbits and squirrels.”
“You mean isolated attacks as in assassinations?”
She tilted her head a bit and fielded a tortured smile. “Discreet targeting, but also group infections or mass contamination—you name it.”
A shudder of revulsion went through Jonathan. He was upset by her casual attitude even more than the information. He wondered if he’d live to tell anyone about this.
Mariya took a pack of cigarettes from the back pocket of the driver’s seat. “Want one?”
Jonathan looked at her with growing suspicion. “No, thanks. They’re probably laced with cyanide.”
She shook her head, lowered her window and lit up. She then returned the vial to the depths of her purse. “We all played this game. Your side and mine. Your secret laboratories, just like ours, produced bacteria and viruses designed for the most ruthless of conflicts, while also endangering the entire human race.”
Jonathan chuckled. “I suppose you were better at it, huh?”
“Perhaps,” she replied with a hint of pride.
Jonathan shook his head in dismay. “What a wonderful contribution to humanity.”
“The night comrade Yakovlev met with the Americans, he gave them nearly our entire stock of this strain. Someone at your embassy here offered to pay him nearly two-hundred thousand dollars for the inventory, and to fly him out of the country and help him settle in Canada under a new name.”
“What a surprise,” Jonathan murmured. The word “embassy” had a wholly different meaning after his run-ins with Frank Corrigan and the thugs near the Radisson. “Who was it?”
“I wish I knew. He worked through intermediaries—whom we promptly expelled.”
Jonathan pulled in a deep breath and looked out the window. “What if I told you the man’s name?”
She exhaled a plume of smoke and smiled as if he were being ridiculous. “Then you will earn my good graces.”
“Does this mean you will kill me more mercifully than otherwise?” Jonathan asked jokingly, but hoping that it was within the realm of reality.
Her gaze at Jonathan was painted with skepticism. “Well, name him.”
“He goes by C.J.”
“C.J. Raynes?”
“Yep.”
“Uh-huh,” Mariya said, taking another drag of her cigarette. “But he’s a legal attaché, I think. I’ve never heard of him going beyond the scope of his work. How do you know this?”
“He tried to kill me.”
“So, explain what you said to me yesterday—that my plan was compromised. I want to know everything now. You have ten minutes left to tell me.”
“Or else what?” Jonathan asked. “You will kill me?”
Mariya grinned.
Jonathan suspected that she extracted pleasure from the uncertainty over his fate and reluctantly accepted that he had no bargaining power whatsoever. It was time to tell her what he knew and hope for the best. He recounted what Dupree, the submariner cook, had said: the submarine surfacing; the orders to shoot down their own aircraft; the fireball in mid-air. And she listened, intently, without comment, until he was completely done.
“Someone obviously tipped them off,” Mariya concurred, her look pensive. “What other reason could there be?”
“What do you mean?”
“We rigged the shipment to explode about twenty hours after the flight took off. It was our way of bringing the American operation into the open—by contaminating an area in your country.”
Jonathan now understood. “To create a public outcry. Yes...that’s clever, very clever indeed...and horrible for the innocent.”
Mariya raised her chin. “There were no innocents, not in the Cold War,” she hit back, sounding nearly angry. “Taxpayers and generals were equally supportive of our adversarial games.”
An entire minute passed with only the noise of the car slicing through the air.
“You’re not lying to me, are you?” she asked, extinguishing her cigarette in the door ashtray. “About C.J. and the rest of what you said, right?”
“I swear I’ve been truthful from the beginning,” he replied, his hand patting his chest. “So you could have been a little nicer to me all along.”
“I’m not nice,” she whipped back. “I will be nice when I’m dead. Until then, I will remain a guardian of my country, a tough woman.”
You mean a cold-hearted bitch, Jonathan thought, almost saying it out loud. But then again, there was something about her clever self-confidence that he admired.
The car was now traveling over a wide four lane highway, possibly the MKOD, the city’s ring road.
“Could you please tell me where we are headed?” Jonathan asked.
“You will live through it, don’t worry.”
How reassuring.
She checked her watch.
The long stretch of blacktop road was lined on one side by a huge forest; on the other, by vast fields dotted with small wooden farmhouses.
“You too were there, at the airfield,” Jonathan said coolly.
It was a surprise she didn’t hide well. Her eyes widened, her stare an obvious sign she was deciphering how on earth Jonathan could have known this.
“I also know about the farm,” Jonathan added, feeling a surging confidence that he now harbored something of value.
“Don’t point the finger at me,” she protested. She cocked her head back, her chin raised. “We all play our roles. I only did what was necessary to protect my country. Besides, who knows what you Americans would have done with our weapons?”
“Maybe we simply wanted them out of your hands,” Jonathan suggested, “which would certainly make our planet a little safer, eh?”
“Ridiculous,” she snapped back, waving her hand dismissively. “We were enemies then, and we are enemies now; it’s just that we’ve now learned to make money together. And as enemies, we must always stay alert, remain divisive and plan for the worst. Without people like me, there would be no Russia left. You would have destroyed us long ago.”
Jonathan had never followed the machinations of the Cold War, nor its aftermath. It never had a tangible impact on h
is life in New Orleans. The superpower clashes had all seemed so distant, so pedantic, with no apparent value to his existence until that very moment, when all Mariya had shared with him had collided with what he’d learned since his discovery in Gotland. The Cold War’s ghosts had found him and changed his life and his family’s. He gazed at Mariya with disgust. Hers was the kind of paranoia that probably perpetuated the conflict, when reasonable minds would have long put an end to it. “Have you ever thought that you, and people like you, may have been the problem all along? With your pathetic thirst for mischief—your games that ruin the lives of ordinary people, like my brother.”
She jabbed her finger into Jonathan’s chest. “Your brother was no ordinary person if he was on that plane. Have you asked yourself the real question? What was your brother doing there—sightseeing?”
She had a point, but Jonathan wasn’t about to concede anything. “Without your despicable weapons of terror, he would never have been there in the first place. He was a translator, for God’s sake. Only useful because he spoke your language. Nothing else. He was a gentle, young man who’d planned to work for the UN after leaving the military, and he never harmed anyone.”
“Rubbish,” she said, hastily pushing another cigarette out of her pack. “He was a spy, a thief for hire, except that he wore a uniform to justify his actions.”
“No worse than you, my dear.”
“You...you Americans,” she whipped back, now sounding angry, “you think you are so above us, yet you’ve done the same things, sometimes with different methods, but nevertheless, equally vicious.”
The man in the front passenger seat glanced over his shoulder to assess the growing war of words behind him.
“You simply can’t admit it, can you?” Jonathan asked.“Admit what?”
Jonathan felt that sliver of admiration for her evaporate as he realized that she lacked the courage to admit the obvious. “If the explosion had occurred as planned, thousands of innocent people would have been infected. All the—”
“Not true!” she barked, interrupting him. “It would have happened at an air base somewhere in Utah or Arizona. Only a few people in the vicinity would have been infected—just enough to cause an uproar.”
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