by Trevor Scott
MacCarty slowly related his story. How they were both sick of continental breakfasts and wanted something they were both used to. When he was done, he admitted it would be nice to get back to Portland, with or without a firm contract. He said that he had eaten only one egg, but Swanson had cleared his plate.
Jake considered that. Why would someone deliberately poison these two? Someone obviously knew who he was, and perhaps even what he was doing. Did they think MacCarty and Swanson were actually working with him? It’s possible. Or maybe it was unrelated. Maybe someone didn’t want those two opening a plant in the Ukraine.
“Who have you been dealing with on opening your plant here?” Jake asked.
MacCarty’s eyes wandered toward Swanson in the other bed. “A man named Victor Petrov. He works with the Agricultural Ministry here in Odessa. We were to talk today with him one last time before signing the deal. I guess he’ll have to come here now.” His eyes drifted up.
“I can arrange it if you like,” Jake said, glancing back at Quinn. “But right now you need rest.”
He nodded his head.
As the two of them were walking down the third floor corridor, buzzers went off and nurses started running toward the room with MacCarty and Swanson. Jake tried to get back in the room, but they closed the door.
●
Outside, back in the car, Quinn sat behind the wheel staring straight ahead. “Swanson did eat much more than MacCarty,” Quinn said. “Perhaps MacCarty will pull through.”
Jake shook his head. “I don’t think so. The only difference between the two of them was when they’d die, not if. MacCarty’s system is trying desperately to fight the inevitable, but he’s only delaying death. I’ve seen how they look before. The moment I saw Swanson I knew he was dead, just waiting for the monitor to confirm it. MacCarty will look like that within three or four hours. I’ll bet on it. It was ricin. Twenty-five thousand times as toxic as strychnine. It takes less than two micrograms to kill an adult.”
“What about an anecdote?” Quinn asked.
“No good. It consists of glycoprotein bands that divide into two peptide chains that attack the cells. One chain binds the ricin to the cell’s surface and allows the other chain to enter. The white blood cells go crazy trying to get rid of the poison. Death follows due to toxemia. Plus, it’s almost impossible to trace in a postmortem, even if you know what you’re looking for.”
“Jesus Christ. How do you know all this?”
Jake was drifting off, thinking about his two employers suffering in the hospital. Swanson was already gone. Sure he had been a pain in the ass, but he didn’t deserve to die like that. And MacCarty. What would Jake say to his family when the bodies were returned to Portland. They’d want answers, and he wasn’t currently in a position to explain their deaths. When he realized Quinn was staring at him, he said, “What was that?”
“How do you know so much about poisons?” Quinn asked.
“College. University of Oregon. My first two years I was a bio-chemistry major. Then I switched to geopolitics.”
“Why?”
He had only revealed that to his closest friends. But it wasn’t a secret, really. “I don’t know. I had enough for a minor and almost enough for a major in bio-chemistry, but then I had second thoughts about hiding myself in some lab after graduation, only coming out to go to and from work. I think it would have driven me nuts after a few years. So I said the hell with it. Decided to look at various peoples of the world. I continued that by joining the Air Force after graduation.”
“Intel right?”
“Yeah. Human Intelligence. But I also had a decent computer background, so they used me for that also. I was in Germany when my boss found out I had a substantial background in bio-chemistry. They were looking for people to work on a verification team in the former Soviet republics during their drawdown of chemical and biological weapons. He asked me if I’d like to be on the team, and I said yes. I didn’t know at the time they’d ask us to go all over the place. Turkey. Iraq. You name it, I went there.”
Quinn looked at Jake. “Where to?”
“Let’s go see if we can track down Petra Kovarik,” Jake said. “You said she had an old friend in Odessa.”
“That’s what I heard.” Quinn started the car and pulled out into light traffic.
16
DURANGO, MEXICO
The tin roof on the ramshackle house was getting pelted by a pre-dawn rainstorm. Back when the former DEA had a more formidable presence in Latin America, they had seized the tiny house off Mexican Highway 40 from a group of marijuana growers. The drug dealers wouldn’t need the place while serving ten to twenty years in a Mexican prison.
The two CIA officers had taken the Cypriot captain and his three mates to this place on the orders of the Mexico City station chief, who had simply relayed the message from Langley. The orders were immaterial, really, because Steve Nelsen was leading the investigation and had already planned on his special form of “suspect awareness,” as he called it.
Ricardo Garcia was in a back room with the Cypriot, asking questions and trying to soften him for what he knew would be an interesting interrogation. At least from what he had heard about Nelsen in a few days. It didn’t take long for rumors to spread.
Two former DEA agents, who now worked in the criminal intervention department of the CIA, and also two former FBI special agents, working in that same department, stood around the periphery of the main room, their guns hanging prominently from leather holsters under their arms. In the old days, it would have been cooperation by three agencies that none of them had seen before. Now all six of the men were part of the CIA. Nelsen didn’t like it one bit, even though he was in charge.
The three young seamen had been separated and interrogated. They spoke very little English, and only one of the CIA officers, Nelsen, could understand the Turkish. Nelsen spoke Turkish, Arabic, Spanish and Italian. None of the seamen knew a thing, Nelsen was sure. Answers from them had come easy, with only a few initial smacks across the head. They had been hired in Famagusta, Cyprus late one night after getting drunk with the captain, who had continued to buy them drinks. The next morning they had found themselves below decks on the fishing boat, pitching heavily, as they steamed through the Mediterranean. They had all come to fear the captain, and knew they were stuck. He would have knocked them over the head and thrown them to the sharks if they had rebelled. They were unanimous on that point.
Garcia pulled the Cypriot captain into the room, and strapped him to a wooden chair with leather belts. The remaining agents surrounded him to intimidate him. Nelsen was sure the captain knew something. Nelsen’s men had found an abandoned skiff five miles up the coast from Novillero. There were four sets of footprints in the sand leading to truck tracks. Someone had carried something heavy, since their footprints were so deep, and their steps shifted sideways at short intervals.
Nelsen had asked Langley to run the captain’s name through the Agency database. Just a few minutes ago he received a fax with the information. He sat across the small room now reading the curled pages.
The captain was really Atik Aziz. The name he had given was one of many aliases. He was fifty-two. Had been a captain in the Turkish marines when he took part in the invasion of Northern Cyprus in 1974. He had continued to fight there, helping set up an independent state through brutal suppression of anyone who opposed him. When the independent Turkish Cypriot government became more moderate over ten years ago, Aziz set out on his own to make his fortune. But by then he had left behind more bodies than any of his peers. Old habits were hard to break, Nelsen noticed in the report. Aziz was used by the highest bidder to ferry terrorists from Lebanon to strike the Israeli coast. He ran arms for the Palestinians from Syria. Aziz was a new-age pirate, and he looked the part with long, disheveled black hair, streaked with gray, and his scruffy face. His jeans and cotton jacket were frazzled, and his deck boots scuffed beyond repair. But more than the external was wrong with this man.
He seemed to have this knowing radiance that emerged from a turned up smirk that exposed crooked yellow teeth. Nelsen would soon wipe that from him.
Nelsen rose from the wooden chair across the room and ripped off his jacket. His thick muscles rippled through his T-shirt as he adjusted his pants on his hips and checked for his 9mm under his left arm. He slowly approached the Cypriot, his eyes centered directly on the pirate’s ugly scowl. He knew how to play the game. Intimidation. Make the guy feel like his next breath depended on him.
Stopping a few feet from the Cypriot, Nelsen stretched his six-four frame, and then cracked his knuckles. He was a tall, imposing figure.
Rain smashed against the roof overhead.
“Where’s the weapon, Aziz?” Nelsen asked with a deep snarl. He wasn’t only big, but he could act with the best of them. Not even agents who knew him could tell if he was really pissed off, or simply playing the game.
The Cypriot gave him a bewildered look, as if he didn’t understand English.
Nelsen looked at his partner, Garcia, who shrugged. Nelsen grabbed the man’s hair, raising him and the chair from the ground, the leather straps cinched tightly across his chest. The man screamed. Nelsen dropped him and then pinched and twisted his left ear.
“Listen you fucking little terrorist,” Nelsen said in Turkish. “I’ll start ripping pieces from your body if you don’t start talking. I want to know who hired you? Who has the weapon? Where’s the weapon now? And what these men plan on doing with the weapon.”
There was pain on the Cypriot’s face as sweat appeared on his forehead. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man answered in broken English.
Nelsen tightened his jaw. “So, the briefing was right. You do speak English.”
“Who are you?” the man asked.
Nelsen let the man’s ear go, and then slapped him across the head. “I ask the questions, fuckhead.” He paused to let Aziz feel the pain. “Now. Which question do you want to take first? How about, where’s the weapon?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Nelsen smacked him again. “Wrong answer. Try again.”
The man looked at Nelsen sideways with his eyes, as if to say that he’d kill him if he got the chance. “I was never told that. That was not my job.”
“And what was your job, exactly?”
“Delivery,” the Cypriot said softly.
“I believe that,” Nelsen said. “You’ve done such a good job for the Syrians in the past. Did the Syrians hire you?”
The man shook his head swiftly. “I don’t know.”
“Bullshit! You don’t know who wired a hundred thousand dollars into two separate Swiss accounts?”
This riled Aziz. He shifted his eyes away quickly. Then, realizing he’d opened himself up, he slowly turned his gaze back to the American. “I never ask names. Deals are worked through middle men.”
“So you simply take the money and do as you’re told.” Nelsen went to hit the man, and pulled up short. The man flinched backward. Nelsen smiled inside. He had been trained to intimidate through psychology, and his size had given him a great advantage.
The other officers in the room had been silent, their faces grave with concern. It was a carefully planned game, and they all knew the rules.
Nelsen pulled a pair of pliers from his back pocket. They were shiny and new with sharp teeth. He clamped them open and closed a few times to make sure they worked fine, then he slowly lowered them toward the man’s crotch. He stopped for a moment six inches away from his penis, and imagined how it must have been shrinking to hide between the man’s legs.
“I suppose you’d like to keep that one piece of equipment,” Nelsen said smiling.
The Cypriot shifted his eyes downward, the sweat on his forehead bubbling out. “Please, I don’t know anything else,” he pleaded desperately.
Nelsen moved the pliers closer. “Give me the names of the men you picked up at Johnston Atoll.”
“I don’t know them.”
“Bullshit! You spent seven days on the Pacific with those men, and you never caught their names?”
The man thought hard, keeping an eye on the pliers. “They only used single names,” he forced out.
“First or last names would be nice.”
Although there was a tape covering the entire interrogation, one of the former FBI agents pulled out a notebook and prepared to write.
“Go ahead,” Nelsen said.
The man shifted in his chair and looked around the room. “They’ll kill me, you know.”
Nelsen knew that was a possibility, and didn’t really give a shit. The man helped terrorists escape with over a hundred nerve gas bomblets. Maybe he deserved to die. “Let’s hear the names.”
“Mahabad,” the man said slowly, deliberately, as if the words themselves would kill him. “Ragga. Baskale. Ruwanduz.”
Nelsen looked at the officer taking down the names, and he indicated he had them written down. Something wasn’t right with the names. “What nationality? Are they Turks?”
The man didn’t answer.
Nelsen clamped down on Aziz’s trousers and started pulling upward. “Answer.”
“Various,” the man screeched in a higher pitch. “I didn’t understand their language.”
He didn’t understand, but he knew. Nelsen was sure. “Who were they?”
The man refused to answer.
Nelsen reached down deeper into the man’s crotch, grabbed something soft, and clamped down lightly.
Aziz screamed. “They were Kurds. They were Kurds.”
Nelsen let up. “Kurds?” He thought for a moment. What in the hell were Kurds doing in the North Pacific? And now in Mexico? What did they want with the nerve gas? He had a feeling Aziz, the Cypriot, would remember a little more than he was telling, but it would take time to get the answers. Nelsen knew he had one advantage. He had softened him. Opened him up. Answers always came easier after that.
17
ODESSA, UKRAINE
Jake and Quinn had no problem finding the apartment where they suspected Petra Kovarik was staying. It was a tiny place off of Sverdlova Street, not far from the train station.
Quinn parked Tully’s Volga against the curb, shut down the sputtering engine, and hesitated for a moment, looking up at the five-story brick building.
It was a hundred-year-old building that hadn’t seen many improvements since it first opened. Jake guessed it might have been a decent address at one time, but time had decayed it like acid slowly dripping on metal.
Jake thought of similarities this building had to Petra’s own apartment building. This time he hoped he had gotten there first. He had been beaten to Tvchenko’s place, almost paying with his life, and someone had gotten to Petra’s place first also. Both times he had been directed to the apartments by Tully O’Neill, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Well, that wasn’t true. Someone could have set off the bomb at Tvchenko’s a minute earlier.
Jake got out and headed up the stairs, with Quinn right behind him.
On the ride from the Odessa Polyklinik, Quinn had explained that Petra might be staying with Helena Yurichenko, a violinist with the Odessa Symphony Orchestra. She and Petra had been best friends while growing up in a small town outside of Kiev. Petra had gone on to the university to study bio-chemistry, and Helena had studied at the conservatory as a musician. Helena Yurichenko had lived in Odessa for nearly nine years. At first she had lived like a queen with the support of the great Soviet Union, but then came the split, and the money became more scarce. She was barely making it now, Jake could tell.
The inside of the building was in worse disrepair than the outside. Plaster was chipped from the walls in the corridor and the stairwell. The wooden railing needed varnish. It wouldn’t take too much, but the place definitely needed a sprucing up.
Jake grabbed Quinn’s arm, stopping him. “Hang on, Quinn. Let’s take it easy. It seems like every apartment I’ve entered in Odessa, s
omeone’s tried to cut my stay short.”
“I don’t think anyone knows about Helena,” Quinn said.
“If we do, someone else might.”
Quinn was thinking it over.
“By the way, how did you find out about Helena?”
Quinn started up the stairs, but Jake pulled him to a halt. “I want an answer,” Jake said.
“That’s right. You’re in charge.”
“You got a problem with that?”
“I read the message.”
“And?”
“It’s bullshit. You’re not even with the Agency.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Is that an order?” He whispered loudly.
“I think maybe I kicked you too hard yesterday,” Jake said. Or maybe not hard enough, he thought.
They stared each other down for a moment in the subdued light of the stairway.
“I finally remembered,” Quinn said. He let out a deep breath and shook his head. “I was such an idiot. A month ago, just after Petra came down from Kiev, I went to the symphony. Rimsky-Korsakov. The Russian Easter Overture. Anyway, I met Petra there. Just happened to sit next to her. She pointed out Helena to me. Said she knew her and had been friends with her since they were kids. She only told me her first name, and I didn’t even remember that until this morning. I had to track down her address through the locals. I’ve got a few contacts.”
Jake considered this. “Great. Let’s see what she knows.”
Jake stepped past Quinn up the stairs.
As they rounded the stairs from the second to the third floors, the sound of a violin echoed down to them. Getting closer, Jake felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle from the beauty of a soft Vivaldi concerto. The sound became louder as they reached room 302.
Quinn looked at Jake, as if wondering whether he should knock on the door and disturb such a luscious, dynamic tone. Jake couldn’t imagine any neighbor complaining about the noise, for it was such a mesmerizing and overpowering sound.
When she stopped playing, Jake quickly knocked. He couldn’t hear if someone had moved to answer the door, so he started to knock again, when the door opened a few inches, bared by a metal security stop.