The First Order

by Jeff Abbott

  “Unproven, though,” Dezhin said.

  “But once inside the body, the alpha emitters destroy cells. Rapidly. First the cells that regenerate the fastest: the digestive tract, bone marrow, hair. Baldness and agony first and then the rest of the body is eaten away. Death, in a matter of days or weeks. But that can point to many poisons, yes? Thallium. Radium. But polonium’s alpha particles do not set off radiation detectors, so it can be a mobile poison. It can go across borders. It can destroy a body from inside but its emitters cannot penetrate glass or paper.”

  “I don’t need to hear of its virtues. Just take it and go.”

  “Useful in the powering of satellites. Producing it normally would require a nuclear reactor, set up to bombard the element bismuth with neutrons. As you noted, it is rare: Only a hundred milligrams a year are produced, worldwide. Which is why polonium-210 always seems to point back to a nuclear facility as a source. Not a research and development station like this one.”

  Dezhin waited.

  “Let’s sit here long enough to let me complete my presentation,” Judge said. He opened his tablet computer, set it on its built-in stand, and removed the stylus from its holder. He tapped on the screen and the two men sat, in silence, the fake Powerpoint presentation on Jean-Claude Cerf’s tablet playing, slide by slide. Dezhin kept checking his watch. Judge kept the stylus in his hand. They stared at each other, not at the slides. And when it was done, Judge put the glass vial of “eyedrops” back in his bag.

  He stood. “Our business is concluded.”

  “It would be better if you spent the night, for appearances’ sake. I have reserved a room at a hotel here for you. Vladimir will take you there.”

  A trap. He was certain of it. They wanted him dead so they could take back the money and return the polonium to the inventory. Judge had no intention of staying where he was under Dezhin’s power. “Unfortunately I have just received word that my poor mother back in Belgium is seriously ill. I must leave immediately. It was nice to see you again, Dr. Dezhin. We will not see each other again. Enjoy your retirement.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Dezhin said.

  The door opened and before Vladimir could step through Judge had thumbed the cap off the tablet computer’s stylus and had it at Dezhin’s throat. “Basically it’s a plastic stiletto. Sharpened to a needle point. Doesn’t alert X-ray or metal detectors. Now. Vladimir. Go stand in the corner, or I open up his carotid.” Judge’s hand was steady at Dezhin’s throat. “I do that, then we’re all in trouble, we’re all in jail.”

  Vladimir’s massive hand was in a fist. He glanced at Dezhin.

  “Do…do as he says.”

  “Drop the car keys on his desk. I’ll drive myself back to the airport.”

  Vladimir obeyed. He stood in the corner, hands on the wall, back to the other two men.

  “Now. Bol’shoy chelovek may be gone, but I have friends in Russia. And if I do not make it to the airport without interference, they will come here. You will not see them coming and they will slip into this forbidden city with no difficulty. They will kill you both. I don’t think I can be clearer. Be happy with the million dollars I’ve paid you.”

  He saw Vladimir’s heavy shoulders stiffen.

  “I suggest you share fairly with Vladimir here,” Judge said.

  Dezhin managed the barest of nods. “Go, then. Just go.”

  Judge drove himself back to Yemelyanovo Airport in Krasnoyarsk. He parked Vladimir’s Mercedes in a lot and left the keys under the mat. The fact the two idiots had thought of betraying him was deeply unsettling, and if he hadn’t been cautious enough to have a weapon hidden…he might well never have left the forbidden city. He got on the last flight that would make it back to Moscow in time for him to jump on a redeye back to JFK.

  He had the polonium; now he needed to penetrate the circle. He studied, on his smartphone, a story from a frothy lifestyle blog. Stefan Varro and Katya Kirova, the children of billionaire oligarchs, had been photographed leaving a nightclub in the Virgin Islands. The Kirov superyacht, Svetlana, had been sailing, over the past few days, from Puerto Rico to the British Virgin Islands and now to Nassau.

  He would trade the cold of Siberia for the warmth of the Bahamas. But first he had to finish his final preparations. He would go to Miami.

  17

  Fremont

  THE DOOR SWUNG open. Mila stepped inside. Sam blinked at her in shock.

  Mila held Ahmad’s pesh-kabz and she used it, wordlessly, to cut Sam’s ropes.

  Then she went back outside and dragged an unconscious Ahmad and the young man inside the building. She tied them with plastic cuffs on their wrists and their feet. Nur-Ali was maybe twenty, wearing an Ohlone College T-shirt. The young man started to rouse, and she wrapped tape around his head, over his ears, eyes, and mouth, leaving his nostrils free. She carefully cut a slice in the tape over his mouth.

  Then she came to Sam and set down the pesh-kabz.

  “Let me see the damage,” she said by way of hello, in the cool tone of one not bothered by blood. “The cuts are not deep. Here.” She took cloth from a locker in the corner and wrapped it around his waist, stanching the blood. The incision wasn’t as long as it had felt while Ahmad was making it. “I can bandage that up.”

  He tried not to shiver in relief as Mila helped him to his feet.

  “I Tasered both the boy and him with his own weapon,” she said, before Sam asked.

  Sam sat on the concrete floor and she bandaged him with a first aid kit she found in the shed. “You need stitches, but that will hold for now.”

  He nodded.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I tracked your phone and your credit card. Forgive me.”

  “Forgiven,” he said, relieved.

  “Your friend is waking up,” Mila said. “I’ll question him. I’m not quite as…emotionally involved as you are. Hand me that knife. It’s well-balanced. Lovely grip.”

  In short order Ahmad was in the chair Sam had sat in, newly tied with fresh rope.

  Mila and Sam stood in front of him.

  “Happy Plants.” Mila leaned down toward Ahmad. “Look at me.”

  He looked at her, with fear in his face, mistaking in his fear her Moldovan accent for a Russian one, recoiling, thinking she was Russian and so Sam was indeed from the Russian he feared.

  His scarred lip twisted, like he meant to spit in her face, and she said, “Sam’s a decent person. I’m not him. I am more like…you. I have had a very bad couple of days. I feel angry at the world. This is your bad luck. Do you understand me?”

  He nodded.

  “Answer me truthfully and you will get to hold on to your fake life here. But if you lie to me”—and her voice became a warm whisper, her mouth close to his ear—“the boy, how old is he?”

  Ahmad writhed, trying to see Nur-Ali a few feet away on the floor. “Leave my stepson alone. He’s only twenty. He knows nothing. Please.”

  Sam knew Mila had no intention of taking the knife to Nur-Ali. But Mila kept her voice cold. “So even a monster like you cares about something…”

  “Please, I have said nothing about the Big Man to the Americans. Nothing!”

  “We are not with the Big Man,” Mila said. “All right? We’re not. We want to know the truth of what happened with Zalmay and his friend. Just tell us and I won’t hurt you or the boy. Lie to me and I’ll cut you worse than you did my friend.”

  Ahmad kept his gaze on his family knife. “Zalmay recruited me. He wanted to know about the smuggling networks, how product was moved out of the country. There are still smuggling rings moving product into Russia, and then the Russian ends of the smuggling rings were desperate to get all their product out of the country. The Taliban, sometimes they manipulate the heroin price when their funds get short. They shut off availability and the price skyrockets for a time. Then Russians want all their product out and headed for the markets. I was a fixer of sorts, for the Russians—when they needed work done in the A
fghan villages, when they needed a spy, when they needed to know what the Taliban were doing about price. Because they’re in business together, but they hate each other. So I was on three payrolls: Taliban, Russian, CIA. I worked with a Russian, they called him the Big Man. Bol’shoy chelovek.”

  “What was his real name?” Mila asked.

  “I don’t know. He was a big man, physically, too.” Ahmad wet his lips. “Rumor was he was very high in the KGB once. He used his contacts and his skills from intelligence work to get millions in heroin out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and into Russia. Then it could move on to Eastern Europe, Japan, even America.”

  “Why would Zalmay care about a heroin runner?” Mila asked.

  “People said that the Big Man had ties to the Russian government. Highest level.”

  “Morozov? Why would the Russian president be involved in running heroin? He has plenty of other sources of revenue.”

  “I don’t know…It’s still millions of dollars’ worth of product. Maybe he wanted money the government and his friends didn’t know about. Who knows why a crazy Russian does anything?”

  They were silent for several seconds. “This Big Man captured Zalmay?” Sam asked.

  “Zalmay tried to recruit a man who worked for the Big Man as an informant. He and his relief-worker friend were grabbed while out on a survey trip to a village. The Big Man had them brought to a place in the mountains…an abandoned village. And there was a man who was the caretaker of the place; when it wasn’t being used, he made fake execution videos there to sell on the streets in Waziristan and elsewhere.”

  “Mirjan Shah,” Sam said.

  He nodded. “They questioned them. I was so scared Zalmay would say I was his informant. But he did not. He insisted the blond American wasn’t CIA. Then…I don’t know why, maybe a joke, the Big Man made the blond American fight for his life, for sport. Not expecting he would win. He was a relief worker; everyone knows they cannot fight. The boss told one of the Russians to fight him, and he gave them each a pesh-kabz. The Russian did not take the American seriously. They fought very hard, surrounded by the screaming men who were betting on them, throwing money on the ground. The American knew how to fight, how to wield a knife. He looked crazy. He chased the Russian into one of the buildings and the men followed. He wounded the Russian in the shoulder, then—I had never seen anything like this—he put the knife’s edge against another man’s throat, took his gun. He emptied the gun into the Russian, into the wall behind him. Then he lowered his weapons, walked to the Big Man, and handed them to him.”

  Sam could hardly breathe.

  “Then the American said to the Big Man, I could be useful to you.” Ahmad’s twisted, scarred lip shaped into a smirk. “The Big Man took the crazy American into another building, they talked, then he said that they would shoot one of Mirjan’s videos. To explain why the men were dead. The crazy American was going to come with us. Join us. The American had ideas on how to get the heroin out. How to avoid the CIA. Like maybe he knew how to work the system because of Zalmay. He would help them. In exchange for his life. So they made the video with his death faked on it, using Mirjan’s equipment. They called themselves a name. Brothers of the Mountain. Make it look like holy warriors, not smugglers. They didn’t want anyone to know they were Russians. It took them a few times. They took the crazy American with them, on to Russia. That was the last I heard of him. He was supposed to be dead, so I said he was dead. If I said he wasn’t, the Magpie would have said, find out where he is. They would have wanted revenge on them all for killing Zalmay. Put me at risk to find out. No. Not my job. I was just relieved not to be exposed as one of Zalmay’s agents.”

  “What was the name of the Russian my brother killed?” Sam asked suddenly.

  “They called him Anton,” he said quietly. “Bol’shoy chelovek, he wanted a new attack dog; he got him in the American. It was like—when two people who need each other find each other.”

  Danny had grown up on the streets of the world’s disaster zones, and he’d learned everything from knife fighting to lock picking to con games, the same Sam had. A deal to survive, and Anton and Zalmay’s lives were the price. The whole history of what he believed about his brother…“Didn’t he try to save Zalmay?”

  “There was no saving Zalmay,” Ahmad said. “I suppose your brother could only save himself. I wasn’t there when they shot the video, but the Big Man cut Zalmay’s throat himself, so I heard. It would be his style. I heard from the men who were there that it took them a few takes to film it, because the Big Man had to practice his Pashto when he spoke, with a mask on, at the beginning. He couldn’t speak it with a hint of a Russian accent. When he had it right, they kept filming and then he killed Zalmay and then faked the American’s death.”

  “The Big Man. Where can I find him? What’s his real name?”

  “You’re really not from the Russians?”

  “No. I told you. No.”

  “Sergei. I heard Anton call him Sergei when he was arguing with him not to make him fight the American. It was the only time I heard his name used. And the next time the CIA reached out to me—and that was that old woman, the Magpie, talking to the few of Zalmay’s people still alive—I told them I wanted out. I told them about some of the so-called Brothers who’d stayed behind and said they had Taliban ties and so they got killed by drone missiles. That was enough to get a ticket here.” He stopped. “But I said nothing about Russians or bol’shoy chelovek. The CIA would give me a new life for giving up terrorists. Why complicate it by talking about Russian drug runners or crazy Americans?” He managed to shrug.

  “Give me a description of Sergei.”

  “Tall, around six-four. Powerful build. Light brown hair, blue eyes. Cold eyes. Nothing special about his face. No scars.”

  “Did you keep a picture of him?”

  “A picture? No! I’ve told you what I know.”

  Sergei. The Magpie had mentioned a Sergei. Belinsky, who had been a fixer and private security consultant for the Morozov brothers and who’d watched a DVD of the fake execution back in his security offices in Moscow. Sam searched on his smartphone, found a picture of Sergei Belinsky from the news coverage when the man had been blown to bits by a Chechen car bomb in Moscow. He showed the picture on the screen to Ahmad. “That him?”

  Ahmad nodded once and then looked away.

  Mila glanced at Sam. We’ve gotten all we can out of this one, her expression seemed to say.

  Ahmad looked at them both. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No,” Sam said. “We’re not.”

  “I don’t care what you do to him. Whatever gets us to your brother fastest.” Mila dropped the knife and walked out of the storage building.

  Sam knelt before him. “Good news: I’m not going to tell your enemies where to find you. Bad news: If I ever see you again I’ll lie to my CIA friends that you were the one who sold Zalmay to the criminals. And they will believe me.”

  His eyes widened. “But I didn’t…”

  “If you make a move against me, or her, or you go to the police, I’ll tell that lie and this nursery will be under new management and you’ll be dead. And that CIA 201 file on you will be shredded and burned.”

  Sam went to the table, still stanching the blood flow. He wrapped his shredded shirt around him and picked up the pesh-kabz from the floor. He thought of the Afghan Basti, outside Islamabad, the two men he killed there in order to survive.

  Then he cut Ahmad free. Ahmad stood, slowly, the ropes falling away from him.

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice sounding stunned. He stepped away from Sam and hurried toward his stepson.

  “What does Nur-Ali think you are?”

  “Whatever I pretend to be.” Ahmad knelt by the unconscious young man, gently took off the hood, and began untying him.

  It was a question and answer for Sam’s own family.

  What does he think you are? What I pretend to be.

  Sam walked out, flingin
g the pesh-kabz aside.

  Mila took him to an emergency room, where they told a story of a mugging gone wrong. The police were called. A statement was made. Sam was singularly unhelpful and confused about his attacker. The doctor patched up his back and told him he was lucky. Sam took the prescribed antibiotics and refused to stay in the hospital.

  “Airport,” he said. “We can take the redeye back to New York.”

  They made the flight right before the doors shut. They’d gotten tickets in first class and Mila told Sam to sit by the window in case he wanted to sleep.

  Sam closed his eyes. If he thought too much about what Ahmad said—his brother killing an unarmed Russian, giving up a life with his parents and Sam to go with this murderous smuggler Sergei, who had connections at the highest level in Russia—he would lose it. The anesthetic from the cut’s treatment felt like it was wearing off. He swallowed one of the painkillers. He needed sleep to heal. He had to stay healthy; he had to stay moving forward.

  Don’t think, do. Don’t wonder what he is. Just find him.

  Sergei was dead, and if Sergei trained Danny, turned him into a weapon, what had he been doing since Sergei died? But Sam still had a lead in New York: Avril Claybourne, the artist who had watched the DVD of his execution, which had sent an electronic ping back to Mirjan Shah that he had reported to the Magpie. He’d see what this artist, this Avril Claybourne, knew.

  He glanced at Mila, who sat with eyes closed, breathing deeply, calming herself.

  “Thank you,” he said to Mila, quietly. “You saved my life.”