Jaq investigated the breakfast room. Grand, high windows and billowing white curtains, but the food on offer looked tired and unappetising: instant coffee and long-life milk; limp, fatty bacon; sausages too pink to contain much meat; scrambled eggs polymerised to rubber; bread like cotton wool; croissants that stuck to the roof of your mouth – you didn’t need to try them to know. Instead she wandered out into the street, straight over to the watermelon stall.
‘Dober den.’ Jaq handed over a note in exchange for a slice of watermelon. As she bit into the flesh, a warm burst of sweet juice dribbled down her chin. The old woman handed her a paper napkin before counting out the change in hryvnia: Odine, dva, tree, cheteerye, piyat, shist, sim . . .
The meeting point for the tour was a hotel in the centre of the city, an American-designed steel and glass building towering over the zigzag of tiered Soviet blocks. Inside, it looked like any other business hotel anywhere in the world. A high-ceilinged atrium with bright lights and carpeted floor, men in suits coming and going. A group of people in more casual dress gravitated to a man with a clipboard: order from chaos. She observed him for a moment. Medium height, slight build, light brown hair, mid-thirties? He looked up, scanning the atrium, fixing on her approach. Warm, intelligent eyes.
‘Is this the Chernobyl tour group?’ she asked.
‘Chornobyl.’ He smiled. ‘Chernobyl is the Russian name. In Ukrainian it’s Chornobyl.’ He ruffled through the papers on his clipboard and found the form with her photograph. ‘Ms da Silva?’
‘Just Jaq, please.’
They shook hands. His grip was warm and firm.
‘My name is Petr. I am your guide. Your passport, please.’
As Jaq swivelled to reach into her backpack, she caught a sudden movement from the corner of her eye. A man hurried towards the lift behind her, his face turned away. Something about his purposeful stride was familiar. As the lift doors opened, he pushed his way in before the occupants could leave. She waited for him to turn and face the lobby; but he remained with his back to her until the lift doors closed. Who did she know in Kiev?
No one.
Petr interrupted her train of thought, introducing her to the rest of the party and inviting them all to board the coach, thirteen ill-assorted tourists: a cheerful American couple and their sullen adult daughter, two silent Norwegians laden with filming equipment, a group of four French students, a Chinese couple and a pale, red-haired English hippy.
The modern coach sped through nondescript suburbs, row after row of concrete blocks of flats, following the line of the River Dnieper to the north and into the zone of compulsory resettlement.
The forbidden zone.
Jaq rested her head against the window. Ironic. Approaching the contaminated land with a bus full of strangers, she’d never felt safer. Over the last few weeks, escaping from Slovenia, surviving Belarus and preparing for the Ukraine, she expected the police to catch up with her. The zone of alienation around the Chornobyl power plant was the last place anyone would be looking. For the first time in days, she could relax. Jaq slumped back and closed her eyes.
Wednesday 1 June, Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine
The punishment cell in the complex stank of blood and piss and shit. Boris didn’t know what was worse, the smell of his own blood and piss and shit, or the knowledge that it mingled with effluvia from others tortured here before him. All feeling had gone from his hands, wrists, arms and shoulders, stretched by his body weight dangling from the manacles.
For the first time in days, his mind was clear. Yet now he almost wished for the hallucinations to return. Anything was preferable to reality. He groaned as a creak of hinges and crack of light announced Mario’s return. The short, square man standing in the doorway held a filleting knife against a whetstone. The blade gleamed in the dim light, sparks flying from the edge, illuminating his swarthy face long before he flicked the light switch. Not a man, but a monster.
Mario lowered the chain hoist until Boris’s feet touched the filthy prison floor. He ran the flat side of the knife across Boris’s cheek, turning it at the last minute to nick his nose. ‘You know the punishment for failure?’
‘I can explain.’ It took enormous effort, but Boris kept his voice calm and even. ‘Don’t kill me.’
Mario smiled. ‘By the time I have finished, you’ll be begging me to kill you.’
‘No.’ Boris took a deep breath. ‘You need me.’
Mario laughed. ‘No one is indispensable. Least of all an assassin who fails to deliver.’
That stung almost as much as the cut to his nose. Boris was a chemist. The other stuff was more of a hobby. He swallowed hard. ‘To find the tracker, I need Silver alive. That’s why I didn’t kill her.’
Would Mario swallow the excuse? The idea had come to him afterwards, escaping from the mess in Kranjskabel. Why do all the hard work himself? Why not let Silver do it for him?
Mario paused. His eyes glinted. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She’ll find the tracker for us.’
‘And when she does?’
‘I’ll take it from her.’
Mario laughed, a long, slow sneer. ‘Your track record with Silver isn’t great. The Spider will send someone else.’
Boris sighed and closed his eyes. ‘This job requires finesse.’ If she could outwit him, surely she could outwit anyone? ‘You need me.’
‘Indeed. We have a little testing programme planned for you.’
More nerve agents. Boris the human guinea pig.
‘Wait.’ He swung round, thinking fast. ‘You need me to unlock the tracker. To disable it. I’m the only one who knows how. Otherwise you’ll send out a beacon to all the enforcement agencies in the West, and they’ll wipe you out.’
The lie stopped Mario in his tracks.
‘Did you tell The Spider?’
‘I didn’t get the chance.’ Not before being served the Moscow Mule with added kick.
Mario hesitated. ‘What if she doesn’t find it?’
‘She’ll find it.’ Boris sent up a silent prayer that it would be so. Don’t let me down, Silver.
Mario sheathed the knife.
‘Wait here,’ he said.
Like he had a choice.
Wednesday 1 June, Kiev, Ukraine
‘Everybody out!’
Jaq woke with a jump, disorientated, confused. The purr of the diesel engine died away with a final wheeze and splutter. Outside, a white two-storey building stood sentinel over a red barrier. She could just make out the sign: She mouthed the letters, like breaking a code, Dityatki. The first checkpoint. The edge of the thirty-kilometre exclusion area.
She had the key. Now to unlock the secret. A secret worth killing for. A lurch in her stomach spread into a shiver across her shoulders.
Descending from the bus, the group waited in two lines to have their bags and papers checked. Jaq chose the shorter queue, but it didn’t seem to be moving. The strident tones of the Americans echoed through the hall. The French students switched to the other line and Jaq moved to the front where she could see the American girl involved in a tug of war with a Ukrainian security guard, each with a strap of her satchel.
Petr rushed forward. ‘No food or drink allowed.’
‘That’s not fair!’ The American girl stamped her foot.
‘We’re coming back this way,’ Petr said. ‘You can leave your bag in one of the lockers.’
Lockers. Could it be this easy? Jaq moved to shadow them.
‘Wait, please.’
The guard pointed at Jaq’s bag. She opened it and the guard waved her through. She followed Petr to a small anteroom filled with banks of modern lockers. All with combination locks. Not a single keyhole.
Damn.
‘Totally ridiculous,’ snarled the girl as she unpacked three cans of Diet Coke, two bags of crisps, an open packet of chocolate chip cookies and a family-size box of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. ‘I’m not eating any of their stupid food. Why can’t I bring my
own?’
‘Because this is a contaminated zone. Radioactive particles could settle on your snacks,’ Jaq said. ‘And if you ingest radionuclides, it will make you very sick indeed. First you vomit, then your hair falls out.’
Petr flashed her a grateful smile.
‘Who asked you?’ The girl slammed the locker door and flounced back to the queue.
The group passed through the security fence and a bus drew up. Unlike the modern Pullman coach from Kiev, the tour bus had seen better days. The windows were covered in fine red dust, and splashes of mud fanned out from the wheel arches. As she stepped inside, the smell made Jaq recoil: a mix of body odour, cigarette smoke and spilled diesel. She sat near the front and closed her eyes. Deep breaths.
‘Your attention, please!’ Petr stood at the front of the bus and clapped his hands. ‘We are going to show you a video.’
The TV screen flickered into life and music blared into the bus.
‘On the night of April 26, 1986, an explosion destroyed Reactor Number Four of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. Thanks to the bravery of the engineers, firemen and liquidators, a complete reactor meltdown was avoided. More than 100,000 people were evacuated. Work on partially constructed Reactors Five and Six was halted. The other reactors – One, Two and Three – continued to operate until the year 2000, when they were also shut down. This area will continue to be contaminated for 200,000 years.’
‘Is it safe?’ the American girl asked, glancing across at Jaq.
‘Don’t worry, it’s safe,’ her father replied. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t let us in.’
Safe? What is safe? The bitter irony of the Chernobyl accident – it happened during a safety test.
Jaq taught undergraduate courses on safety at Teesside University as a visiting industrial lecturer. Chernobyl was a case study. In the rush to meet energy targets, the safety tests due to be completed before start-up were bypassed. The safety engineers insisted the tests were carried out anyway. On a live plant.
Nuclear fission – the splitting of atoms – produces heat. The heat is used to make steam. The steam is used to drive turbines to create electricity. The electricity is also used to pump the cooling water required to control the reaction. During a reactor shutdown, water is still required, but the electricity to run the pumps is lost. So backup diesel generators start automatically. Tests on Reactor Four showed that the backup system took over sixty seconds to reach the required power. Far too long for the reactor core to remain without cooling.
Someone had the bright idea that the combination of steam turbines coasting down and diesel turbines winding up might provide enough power to run the emergency cooling pumps, elegantly bridging the power gap.
Previous tests had proved unsuccessful, but a fourth test was scheduled for 25 April 1986, in advance of a planned shutdown on Reactor Four.
To allow the test to be repeated if it failed the first time, most of the reactor emergency shutdown systems were disabled.
Brilliant.
Like airplane pilots ordered to experiment with the engines in flight.
Jaq closed her eyes and sighed.
The video continued.
‘The core is still active, and the original sarcophagus is crumbling. We are building a new shelter for Reactor Four: the New Safe Confinement. Height 100 metres, 165 metres long and 260 metres wide, it weighs 30,000 tonnes. It will have a lifetime of more than 100 years.’
At the Leliv checkpoint, the edge of the ten-kilometre exclusion area, they halted for another security check and safety briefing. Jaq stood and stared out at the cranes around the New Safe Confinement towering over the trees, ready to build an arch big enough to cover St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tees Transporter Bridge with room to spare.
Back on the bus, Petr reinforced the safety instructions, his voice calm and steady, woven with gravitas. Don’t eat or drink anything unless given to you at the final stop. Don’t touch anything. Don’t put anything down on the ground, don’t pick anything up. Do not, repeat do not, take anything from the zone.
Was he staring directly at her? Jaq waited until he’d turned away, then allowed her hand to stray to her neck. The key hung on a ribbon, nestling unobtrusively between her breasts, warm from her skin. Her fingers stroked the shaft – one curved edge and one flat – and followed the grooves cut into the metal. The texture changed at the top where a triangular hole opened out and the ribbon was threaded through. Smooth, polished metal, with the maker’s name engraved beside an embossed circle and the number. A number she had memorised: 12016834.
The zone of alienation was 2,600 square kilometres. How could she search an area so vast? How to find the right locker for this key?
Wednesday 1 June, Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine
Petr handed out yellow boxes, about the size of a mobile phone but thicker and heavier. ‘We are now entering the ten-kilometre exclusion area. Wear this personal dosimeter at all times. Switch it on like this.’ He held one up and demonstrated. ‘Test it like this.’ Throughout the minibus the sound of bleeping rang out.
The Chinese couple whispered behind her.
Petr continued. ‘Your personal dosimeters are set to alarm when they detect higher than normal background radiation.’ He smiled. ‘When the alarm goes off, do not worry. If you follow my rules, your total radiation exposure today should be less than you would be exposed to flying from here to America.’
The red-haired woman leant across the aisle towards Jaq. ‘That’s why I never fly,’ she said. ‘I’m Megan, by the way.’ She extended a hand. The smell of patchouli made Jaq queasy; she turned her head away as she shook hands. Her stomach rumbled and lurched for the rest of the drive. When the bus stopped and the door opened, she was the first one out.
The ghost town of Pripyat stood in the sunshine, block after block of flats, all deserted and eerily silent. Unchanged for almost thirty years, the town remained frozen in time. Petr led the group along Lenin Street to the main square, pointing out the Palace of Culture, the Polissya hotel and a vast supermarket, still stocked with tins, packets and boxes from 1986. A Ferris wheel, listing at a slight angle, towered over what had once been an amusement park.
Jaq ignored the cramps in her stomach and followed the group into the old sports centre, marvelling at the Olympic-sized swimming pool, now a huge void surrounded by broken tiles and windows.
Swimming pool. Changing rooms. Locker room. Where? Jaq looked around and spotted two openings at the far end of the pool. Each had a tiled square footbath. One for men and one for women. Jaq fell behind as the tour group exited to the gymnasium. She crunched over broken glass and tiles and slipped through the nearest of the two openings, ducking under a fallen beam. This area, away from the official tour route, was far more dilapidated and she moved carefully, looking up to see daylight where the ceiling had fallen in. The separating wall had crumbled. From the women’s area, identifiable by the lack of urinals, she could see into the men’s. Both had toilets, showers, benches and . . . yes! . . . banks and banks of lockers.
The wrong type.
Rusting metal doors with three horizontal vents, and simple locks opened by a tiny flat key. Nothing that matched the monster key around her neck. Heavier and heavier, it dragged her down as she walked past each row, checking every locker, until finally after six hundred she had to admit defeat. Hopeless. Why had she come? The stomach pains were becoming more insistent. More frequent cramps. Damn it. She couldn’t afford to be ill. She gritted her teeth and hurried back to rejoin the group milling around in the gymnasium. Petr scrutinised her face and raised an eyebrow.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked.
She nodded. If only he knew how far from okay things really were. Could she show him the key? Risk asking him where to find the locker it opened? And try to explain how she had come by it?
‘Keep up, I’d rather not lose you.’ He held her gaze for a little longer than was comfortable. Did he suspect something, or was he flirting? His voice so war
m, his eyes so kind. Another time, another place, she might have explored that tenderness. Right now, she had enough on her plate. She looked away.
They made their way through deserted residential streets. An eerie silence, a post-apocalyptic hush. Unsettling.
‘Creepsville,’ the American girl said. ‘I’m not going any further.’
Her father frowned. ‘Don’t you want to see where Svetlana grew up?’
‘Boring.’ The girl sniffed and snapped on her headphones.
Jaq turned to the American woman. ‘You lived here?’
‘I was born in Pripyat.’ She had no accent, but she spoke slowly as if it caused her some pain. ‘My parents worked at the power plant. We were evacuated the day after the accident. They said it was temporary, but . . .’ Her voice trailed away for a moment.
‘This is the first time she’s been back,’ the American man said. ‘I’m Brad, by the way.’ He held out a hand and Jaq shook it. ‘This is my daughter, Pip,’ he indicated the sulky girl, ‘and my wife, Svetlana. I wanted to share this moment with her.’ He kissed his wife on the lips, and his daughter made a disgusted face.
Jaq walked on, leaving them to their private moment, but Svetlana caught up with her.
‘There.’ Svetlana pointed. ‘That’s where we lived.’
She indicated a featureless concrete block of flats, shading her eyes as she counted up to the eleventh floor. ‘My mother loved it here,’ she said. ‘We had space to live. A bedroom each. A modern kitchen: a big fridge, a washing machine, endless hot water. The shops were full of things: meat and vegetables and fruit. No queues. And outside,’ she swept a hand across the tangled overgrowth, ‘parks with roses. Roses everywhere. My mother loved roses.’
‘Let’s go see.’ Brad moved towards the block of flats.
The Chemical Detective Page 21