Deliver Us From Evil

by David Baldacci

  “Keep in mind that Huber killed a few hundred thousand people and got away with it for over sixty years.”

  “I read the same briefing papers you did, Whit.”

  He looked put off. “Well, maybe you need to take some time off then. Recharge.”

  “I am recharged. Only took that long flight and a couple of drinks to do it. Colonel Huber is extinguished from my memory.”

  Whit grinned. “You sure you’re not going mental on me?”

  “No, but thanks for asking. So who’s here?”

  “Usual suspects.”

  She checked her watch. “Early start?”

  “New job, everyone gets a bit giddy.”

  “Including me.”

  “You really sure about that?”

  “Don’t be a prat. Just get me the damn coffee.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  REGGIE WALKED through passages smelling of mildew until she reached a set of wooden double doors with lavish burned-in engravings of books on each. She tugged one door open and passed through into the library. It had three walls of books and sliding ladders running on tarnished brass rails to reach them. A fourth wall was lined with old photos and portraits of men and women long dead. The room was anchored by a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace, one of the few in the house that worked properly. And even this one tended to belch smoke into the room with regularity. She took a moment to warm herself in front of the flames before turning to look at the people seated around the large Spanish-style table with turned legs that sat in the center of the room.

  Reggie nodded to each of them, all older than she except for Dominic, who looked well-rested at the other end of the table. Her gaze then settled on the elderly man who sat at the head of the table. Miles Mallory’s outfit was tweed on tweed with elbow patches, crooked bow tie, a wrinkled shirt with one edge of a collar pointing to the ceiling, sensible blunt-toed shoes, and socks that failed to cover the man’s chubby, hairless shins. He had a massive head circled by a rim of grizzled gray hair that had not seen the barber’s shears in months. His beard, however, was neatly trimmed and matched the color of his hair except for a creamy patch the size of a penny near his chin. The eyes were green and probing, the spectacles covering them thick and black, the jowls heavy, the mouth small and petulant, the teeth tobacco-stained and uniformly leaning on their neighbors. He held a small curved pipe in his right hand and was busily packing it with his most noxious tobacco concoction, which would soon permeate the room and forcibly remove most of the oxygen.

  “You look excited, Professor Mallory,” said Reggie pleasantly.

  “I have already done so with young Dominic, but may I be the first to congratulate you on your excellent work in Argentina?”

  “You could be, but I beat you to it, Prof,” said Whit as he came into the room and handed Reggie a cup of coffee so hot the vapors were still visible though the kitchen was about a mile from the library.

  “Ah, well,” said Mallory good-naturedly. “Let me be the second, then.”

  Reggie took a sip of the coffee. She never felt comfortable talking about what she had done, even with people who’d helped her do it. Yet killing someone who had slaughtered so many did not draw the typical human emotions. To her and everyone sitting at the table their targets had forfeited any rights they had by their heinous acts. They might as well have been discussing the killing of a rabid dog. But perhaps, Reggie thought, that would be an unfair comparison.

  For the dog.

  “Thank you. But unfortunately, I’m sure Herr Huber will still rest in peace.”

  Mallory said stiffly, “I doubt very much if the colonel is resting comfortably at this moment. The flames, I’m very certain, do hurt.”

  “If you say so; theology was never my strong point.” She settled in a chair. “But Huber is now history. So we move on.”

  “Yes,” said Mallory eagerly. “Yes. Exactly. Now we move on.”

  Whit grinned wryly. “Then let’s see if we can ride the monster one more time without getting our bloody selves trampled.”

  Mallory nodded at the slim, fair-haired woman seated to his immediate right. “Liza, if you would be so kind.” She passed around manila folders bulging with copies of documents and held together with multiple blood-red rubber bands.

  “You know, Prof,” said Whit. “All this can go on a portable USB stick and from there onto our laptops. It’s a lot more convenient than toting all this around in my car.”

  “Laptops can be lost or compromised. Or even stolen. ‘Hacked,’ I believe, is the precise term,” replied Mallory with a trace of indignation, but also with the slightly insecure look of someone to whom computers remained an enigma.

  Whit held up the folder. “Well, bloody paper can be nicked pretty easily too, particularly ten kilos of the stuff.”

  “Now, let’s get down to business,” said Mallory brusquely, ignoring this comment. He held up a photo of an older man in his sixties with a long nose, a shaved head, and an expression that summoned only one reaction: fear.

  “Evan Waller,” said Mallory. “Believed to be born in Canada sixty-three years ago, but that is incorrect. His public reputation is that of a legitimate businessman. But—”

  Whit spoke up. “But his private rep is what?” He took the pistol from its holster and laid it on the table.

  If Mallory was annoyed that Whit had interrupted him or placed the gun within view, he didn’t show it. In fact his eyes gleamed as he said, “Evan Waller is actually Fedir Kuchin.”

  As he looked around the room and there was no discernible reaction from the group, disappointment replaced his glee. “Ukrainian born, he served in the military and then in the national secret police that reported directly to the KGB.” When even this revelation did not generate any comment he added sharply, “Have none of you heard of the Holodomor?” He looked at the opposite end of the table. “Dominic, surely at university you must have,” he said imploringly.

  Dominic shook his head, his expression pained at having failed the older man.

  Reggie spoke up. “Holodomor is Ukrainian for ‘death by hunger.’ Stalin killed nearly ten million Ukrainians in the early 1930s through mass starvation. That included nearly a third of the nation’s children.”

  “How the hell did he manage that?” asked a disgusted Whit.

  Mallory answered. “Stalin sent in troops and secret police and they took all livestock, poultry, food, seeds, and tools, with particular emphasis on the Dnieper River region, long known as the breadbasket of Europe. Then he sealed the borders to prevent escape and replenishment of the stolen articles, and also to stop the news from getting out to the rest of the world. No Internet back then, of course. Entire towns starved to death; nearly a quarter of the rural population of the country perished in less than two years.”

  “Stalin rivaled Hitler in the atrocity department,” said Liza Kent pointedly. In her late forties, she looked very old-fashioned in her long skirt, clunky shoes, and white blouse with a frilly collar. Her light blonde hair, interlaced with strands of silver, was very fine and cut to her shoulders, but she wore it back in a tight bun. Her face had no memorable features and she kept a penetrating pair of amber eyes mostly hidden behind thick lenses housed in very conservative frames. She would blend nicely into virtually any crowd. In reality, she had served with British intelligence for a dozen years, ran high-level counterintelligence ops on three continents, and had a Romanian-manufactured rifle bullet perilously near her spine. This injury had forced her premature retirement on a modest government pension. She’d quickly tired of puttering around her small garden before joining the professor.

  “Why did he do it?” asked Dominic.

  “You ask why Stalin killed?” snapped Mallory. “Why does a snake bite? Or why does a great white shark devour its prey with nearly inconceivable savagery? It was simply what he did, on a larger scale than almost anyone before or since. A madman.”

  “But Stalin was also a madman with a motive,” i
nterjected Reggie. She looked around the table. “He was trying to wipe out Ukrainian nationalism. And also to prevent the farmers from resisting collectivization of agriculture. It is said that there is not one Ukrainian living today who did not lose a family member through the Holodomor.”

  Mallory smiled appreciatively. “You are an excellent student of history, Reggie.”

  She gave him a stony gaze. “Not history, Professor. Horror.”

  Whit looked confused. “Am I missing something? Because all that happened as you said in the 1930s. If he’s only sixty-three, Waller, or this Fedir Kuchin bloke, wasn’t even alive back then.”

  Mallory made a steeple with his hands. “Do you think simply because Stalin died that the genocide stopped, Beckham? The communist regime persisted for several more decades after the monster breathed his last.”

  “And that’s where Fedir Kuchin comes in?” said Reggie quietly.

  Mallory leaned back, nodding. “He joined the army at a young age and rose relatively quickly. Being uncommonly bright and unflinchingly ruthless, he was fast-tracked early on for intelligence work, ending up in the secret police, where he rose to a position of despotic power. This was around when the Red Army was meeting both its match and downfall in Afghanistan. In addition, other Soviet satellite countries, like Poland, were making a hard push for liberation and would continue to do so up until the fall of the communists. Kuchin received orders directly from the Kremlin to do all in his power to crush any opposition. While his superiors largely reaped the historical credit, he became, in essence, the man in the field who would keep Kiev in line with Moscow. And he very nearly succeeded.”

  “How?” asked Whit.

  In answer Mallory opened his file folder and motioned for the others to do the same. “Read the first report and then look at the series of pictures accompanying it. If that doesn’t answer your query I’m afraid nothing will suffice.”

  For several long minutes the room was silent, except for a few gasps whenever someone encountered the photos. Reggie finally closed the folder, her hand shaking a bit as she did so. She had faced many monsters that stood on two legs, and yet their depth of pure evil still managed to astonish and even unnerve her at times. She was afraid that if the day came when it didn’t, she would have lost all trace of her humanity. Some days she worried she already had.

  “His own version of the Holodomor,” commented Whit in a subdued voice. “Only he used aerial poisons, toxins placed into water supplies, and thousands of people at a time forced into pits where they were burned alive. The foul bastard.”

  “And Kuchin carried out the sterilization of thousands of young girls,” added Reggie in a hushed tone, the spiderweb of lines around her eyes deepening as she said this. “So they could never bear males who might fight against the Soviets.”

  Mallory tapped the file. “On top of a hundred other such atrocities. As is often the case with cunning men like this, Kuchin saw the fall coming long before his superiors. He falsified his death and fled to Asia, from there to Australia, and then on to Canada, where he built a new life with forged documents and a charisma that managed to conceal his underlying sadistic nature. The world thinks he’s a legitimate and highly successful businessman, instead of the mass murderer and war criminal that he actually is. It took three full years to piece this file together.”

  “And where is he now?” asked Reggie, her gaze holding on one photo she’d slipped from the file. It depicted the remains of an unearthed mass grave where the skeletons were small because they were all children.

  Mallory puffed his pipe to life and a pungent cloud of smoke rose above his head. “This summer he will be traveling on holiday to Provence—to the village of Gordes, to be more specific.”

  “Then I wonder what it will feel like,” said Reggie to no one in particular.

  “What will what feel like, Reg?” asked Whit curiously.

  She looked once more at the photo of the small bones. “To die in such a beautiful place as Provence, of course.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  THE LONG MEETING had ended, the morning had given way to dusk, but Reggie still had work to do. She slipped outside of the dilapidated mansion and took a few moments to study the grounds in the dwindling light. Ever since the headquarters of Miles Mallory’s organization had been established here, Reggie had read up on the history of the place. Originally a feudal castle had stood on the footprint where the mansion did now. The surrounding lands had been the fiefdom of the wealthy lord of the manor, who ruled his people encased in a suit of armor, ready at a moment’s notice to cleave in a skull or two if necessary with his battle-axe.

  Later, the castle had fallen and in its place the mansion had risen. The fiefdoms had dissolved and the squires had replaced armor and mace with the threat of debtor’s prison if the farmers renting their lands did not pay their bills. The property had remained in the same family for many generations, finally descending to distant cousins of the original owners whose income had never approached the level necessary to maintain the estate. During the two world wars Harrowsfield—Reggie had never discovered a definitive account of where the name came from—was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers. After that it lay abandoned for several decades until the government had been compelled to take it over and make minimal repairs. Mallory had discovered the place and finagled the use of it. To the outside world it was merely an informal gathering place for eccentric academics whose work was as esoteric as it was innocuous.

  Reggie passed by columns of ragged English boxwoods, their urine odor sweeping over her. Even though it was very late in the spring, a chilly breeze nudged at her back as she trudged along. She zipped up her worn leather jacket, which had belonged to her older brother. Though he’d only been twelve at the time of his death, he had been over six feet tall and the jacket enveloped her, even as his death had shattered her. She still felt emotionally brittle, like a pane of cracked glass that would disintegrate with the very next impact.

  After a walk of a quarter mile she pushed open the door of what had once been the estate’s greenhouse. The smell of peat and mulch and rotting plants still drifted into her nostrils even though there had been no gardener or gardening here for decades. She passed by broken glass and loose boards that had dropped from the ceiling. Shadows were cast in all directions as the sun continued its descent into the English countryside. The chilly breeze turned still colder as it was funneled through the small openings in the windows and the walls, fluttering spiderwebs and rustling the disintegrating remnants of a horticulturist’s paradise.

  Reggie reached the set of double doors set at an angle into the corner of the structure. She inserted her key in the heavy padlock, tugged open the doors, and pulled the chain on the bare light bulb set just inside the revealed space. A moment later the passage she stepped down into became dimly illuminated and smelled strongly of damp soil, making her feel slightly sick. She touched dirt, walked downward at a twenty-degree angle for another fifteen paces where the tunnel leveled out. She had no idea who’d carved it out of the earth or why, but it did come in handy now.

  She reached the end of the passage where a number of mattresses had been placed on end and positioned front-to-back. A small table was set against a dirt sidewall. On the table was a stack of paper and a small battery-powered fan. She picked up the top sheet and, using a clip, fastened it to a cord that hung between the two sidewalls of the tunnel. Next to the stack were a number of ear mufflers and safety goggles. She slipped a pair of mufflers around her neck, where they dangled loosely, and put on the protective eyewear.

  On the sheet of paper was the blackened image of a man with black rings running around it. She paced off thirty feet, turned, took out her pistol from its belt holster, checked the load, slipped the ear mufflers on, assumed her preferred firing stance, took aim, and triggered off her full mag. There was very little ventilation down here and the acrid burn of the ordnance was immediately absorbed into her nostrils. Bits of
dirt dislodged by the gun’s discharge fell from between cracks in the weathered boards forming the tunnel’s beamed ceiling. She coughed, whipped the air with her hand to clear the smoke and dust, and walked forward to examine her marksmanship, pausing for a moment to turn on the fan. It lazily oscillated back and forth, but took its time in clearing away the haze. So much for first-class shooting facilities.

  Seven of her eleven rounds were placed where she wanted them, in the torso. All would have hit vital organs if the target had been real. Two shots were in the head, also where she had aimed. One round had fallen outside a proper kill zone by a millimeter. The last shot had missed by an unacceptable margin.

  She replaced the target with a fresh one, reloaded, and did it again. Ten out of eleven. She did it again. Eleven for eleven. She did it once more. Nine out of eleven. Despite the efforts of the fan, the tunnel was now heavy with the smoke and her lungs felt congested.

  “Bloody hell,” she barked, as she hacked and whipped the murky haze with her hand. Reggie figured she could blame the last few misses on not being able to actually breathe or even see the damn target. She trudged back down the tunnel wishing that they could have a proper gun range, but the tunnel was the only place where the sound of the shots wouldn’t carry to a pair of ears that might in turn contact the local constabulary. Doddering academics were not supposed to have penchants for firearms. She was surprised to see Whit standing by the doors leading back into the greenhouse.

  “Reckoned you’d be down here. How’s your aim?” he said.

  “Bloody awful.” She closed the double doors and locked them.

  He leaned against a glass-topped storage cabinet that had once been used to hold seedlings. In the deepening chill his breath came out as small vapor. “Well, don’t get your knickers in a knot. Your choice of weapon isn’t often a gun. You’re more the knife and pillow gal. I’m the nine-millimeter man.”

  She frowned at his bluntness. “You really can be an idiot sometimes, Whit.”

  “I’m not making light of it. But you’re wound tighter than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “Then you need to get out more. I’m actually pretty laid-back.”

  “So what do you think about this Fedir Kuchin bloke?”

  “I think we’ll be seeing him in Provence soon enough.”

  “Little close on the planning end. I’d prefer some more time.”

  She shrugged. “The way the professor tells it, the viper doesn’t come out in the open very often. This may be our only chance.”

  “Your cover has to be top-notch. This guy has the resources to check deep.”