“Take everything,” he told her, getting out and grabbing his backpack from the trunk. “We’re leaving the car here. Use your hat to wipe everything down.”
They went over everything they had touched, stopping when anyone was near to make sure they weren’t seen doing it. He had Iryna put her Ushanka hat back on with a scarf over the lower part of her face so no one would recognize her. When they were finished, he locked the car and they walked into the mall.
Most of the stores and cafés were still open. On the second floor, they found a beauty supply and wig store. They went in and bought some things, then went shopping for clothes. When they were finished, they stopped in a café where Scorpion checked for rental apartments on his laptop. They found one not far from the mall and Iryna called. By the time they left the mall pulling new carry-ons, she was wearing a curly-haired redheaded wig and steel-rim glasses under her Ushanka hat. Scorpion wore a suit under a new overcoat and a peaked Cossack-style fur hat. He carried his old clothes, including the bloody jacket, in a plastic bag.
The snow was still falling.
“You think there’ll be a flight tonight?” she asked.
“Not in this,” he said, indicating the snow.
They walked on side streets near the mall. Scorpion left the bag of old clothes in a trash bin behind an apartment house. He dropped the BMW keys along with his Michael Kilbane passport and press pass torn into pieces in a sewer opening. They walked to the rental apartment in the snow.
The rental was in a Soviet-style brick apartment building on Stalevarov Street, just a block from Lenina Prospekt. The apartment concierge met them at the front door. He was a fat balding man in a Metalist Kharkov soccer sweatshirt. He showed them an apartment on the fifth floor, the living room window looking down at a lone street lamp in the snow-empty street. It was four hundred hryvnia a night. Scorpion told him they’d take it for a week for 2,500 hryvnia.
The concierge asked for their identity cards.
“No identity cards, no questions, no militsiyu,” Scorpion said. He added an additional two thousand hryvnia to the money he held out.
Iryna said something to the man in Ukrainian and he nodded, a smirk on his face as he took the money. After he left, she told Scorpion, “I told him we were both married to other people. I don’t think we’re the first to use this place for sex. That—and the money.”
“He didn’t seem to recognize you,” Scorpion said.
“The wig,” she said, taking it off along with the glasses. “But I still need something in case I have to get rid of the wig,” she added, sitting in front of a mirror, a towel wrapped around her neck. She took out a scissors she’d bought in the beauty supply store and began cutting her hair. Scorpion watched her, then checked for cargo flights to Kyiv on his laptop. There was an old-fashioned TV in the living room. He turned it on.
They found a news channel. Kozhanovskiy and Gorobets had accused each other of staging the assassination to win the election. Gorobets demanded a postponement so the Svoboda party could select another candidate. Open fighting had broken out between the Chorni Povyazky and Kozhanovskiy supporters in every major city in Ukraine. A female reporter interviewed a Black Armband who stared menacingly into the camera and said that if they found Iryna Shevchenko or the foreigner before the militsiyu did, they’d know what to do to them. For a moment Iryna stopped working. She and Scorpion looked at each other in the mirror.
Scorpion helped cut her hair in the back. When she was done, the change was incredible. She had a short pixie cut and bangs slanting sideways across her forehead, which made her look almost completely different and yet unbelievably sexy.
“I feel naked. It’s not too awful, is it?” she asked.
He had never seen anyone so beautiful. The world had shrunk to just two of them. Everything that had happened, the stadium, the shootings in the tunnel, their desperate escape, seemed to come together like a thunderclap. He couldn’t stop himself, was no longer in control. He grabbed her and kissed her hard. She kissed him back hungrily and they staggered toward the bed. They pulled at each other’s clothes and bodies. It was as if they couldn’t get enough of each other. It was like madness. They tumbled onto the bed naked and she grabbed at his hips, pulling him into her. Even inside her, he couldn’t get enough of her. When they finished, they lay there, gasping.
“Gospadi, what was that?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“What do we do?” she asked, her eyes reflecting the light from the living room.
“I don’t know that either,” unable to take his eyes off her. In the middle of this mission with the whole world against them, this was crazy, he told himself.
“You have to tell me something,” she said. “Anything. I can’t keep going with somebody whose name changes by the minute, who might disappear forever any second. Do you have a code name or something?”
He hesitated. “Scorpion,” he said finally.
“It’s horrible,” she said, making a face.
“I chose it.”
“Why?” She lit a cigarette and lay on one elbow, watching him.
“When I was a boy, the man who became the closest thing I ever had to a father used to call me ‘Little Scorpion,’ ” he said.
“I don’t understand. Why would he say such a thing?”
Scorpion thought about his real father lying facedown in the sand, of the Saar raiders, the “wolves” of the Arabian desert, who had killed his father and tried to kill him too, and how Sheikh Zaid had saved him and, when the sheikh tried to touch his dead father, he had stabbed the sheikh with his Boy Scout knife. That’s when Sheikh Zaid had called him Little Scorpion for the first time.
“Long story,” Scorpion said now. He became aware of the news announcer’s voice from the TV in the living room. “What’s he saying?” he asked.
“The Russians are moving large numbers of troops and tanks to the Ukrainian border. I can’t believe this,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette. “Maybe the snow will slow them down.”
“Maybe,” he said.
That night he dreamt about Arabia. He was in Sheikh Zaid’s tent, sitting by the fire at night, the way it was when he was a child. He was telling Sheikh Zaid he had found a woman. The sheikh told him that before he could marry he first had to find out who he was, the same question Iryna kept asking. He couldn’t tell her, he told the sheikh. Someone, some thing, had been pursuing him since Yemen. The tent grew dark. He could no longer see Sheikh Zaid. His enemies were getting closer; he could feel them right behind him in the darkness. He started to turn around . . .
He awoke suddenly in the middle of the night reaching for the Glock under his pillow. The apartment was freezing cold. Iryna lay next to him. Even asleep she was unbelievably beautiful. She looked like she was dreaming; perhaps of snow slowing the Russian troops. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. After washing his hands in ice-cold water, he went to the window. It was covered over with frost. He rubbed a circle on the window with his hand and peered out.
The street was white with snow and empty under the streetlight.
It had stopped snowing.
Chapter Twenty
Metrograd
Kyiv, Ukraine
They flew to Kyiv from Zaporozhye on a cargo flight, no questions asked, thanks to bribes all around. While they waited in a shedlike area to board, they watched a female news commentator on a TV behind a counter. Iryna translated in a whisper.
The United States and Britain had called for a special meeting of the UN Security Council to deal with the crisis. In Brussels, the foreign ministers of the NATO countries were meeting in emergency session. Satellite reports indicated that Russia had moved four tank divisions of the Second Guards Tank Army plus three infantry divisions to the border area near Kharkov. Kozhanovskiy had called on the United States and the Western powers to honor their NATO treaty obligations to Ukraine. Oleksandr Gorobets, speaking for the Svoboda party, declared that the election must be delay
ed for a month to allow Svoboda to choose another candidate.
There had been more street fighting in Kyiv. The streets close to Khreshchatyk Avenue and around the Pechersk district were filled with roaming packs of Black Armbands. Kozhanovskiy’s supporters had begun to form what they called “Citizens Militsiyu” to defend themselves. Someone had bombed the Central Synagogue of Kyiv on Shchekovitzkaya Street. Two people, a woman and a nine-year-old boy, were killed. In Dnipropetrovsk, police were conducting a house-to-house search for Iryna Shevchenko and the foreigner, Michael Kilbane, wanted for questioning in the killing of presidential candidate Yuriy Cherkesov.
Iryna was translating it for Scorpion when the flight company manager they had bribed signaled for them to board the plane. They sat behind the crew in the cockpit, facing each other on fold-down jump seats. She was in her blond wig, glasses, and Ushanka hat; he, with a two-day stubble, in his overcoat and peaked Cossack hat.
The aging Antonov turboprop shuddered as it climbed into the frigid air. It dipped and rattled over the snow-covered landscape. The noise of the engines was so loud, Scorpion thought they could risk talking.
Iryna leaned toward him and whispered in his ear. “It’s happening. Everything we feared,” her breath visible in the cold air.
He nodded.
“How can I stop it? How can anyone?” she said, biting her lip.
“Somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble to frame us. We need to find them.”
“Any idea who?”
“Yes,” Scorpion said grimly.
The flight got them back to Kyiv in an hour. They passed through the Boryspil Airport cargo area the same way they had gotten through the Zaporozhye terminal—with bribes passed in handshakes. Once inside the terminal building, they separated, staying in contact by cell phone as they stayed alert for anyone who might be watching them. Scorpion used his hand to shield part of his face from security cameras while walking toward the street, saying, “Tak, tak”—Yes, yes—in Ukrainian into the cell phone, because he knew they were looking for a foreigner. He spotted two men, both in overcoats, by the exit doors.
“Ni, Dmitri,” he said to his cell phone as he walked by them. Outside on the street, he waited in the queue for a taxi, pretending to talk and meanwhile watching for Iryna. The two men in overcoats watched her walk by, their eyes following her. One of them said something and they started after her.
Scorpion called Iryna on his cell phone as he got into a taxicab. Calling her “Nadia,” the cover name they’d agreed on for her, he told her to take a different taxi and tell the driver to follow his cab, then told his driver to take him into Kyiv. Through the rear window he saw Iryna get into the next taxi and spotted the two men who followed her running toward a sedan parked behind the taxi queue.
Scorpion’s taxi headed to the Boryspilske Shosye Highway to Kyiv, Iryna’s taxi four cars behind his. Looking through the rear window again, he saw the sedan following in traffic. His taxi got on a highway heading west, four lanes in each direction, cleared of snow.
Why didn’t they try to take them at the airport? he wondered. Maybe they weren’t sure it was Iryna, or wanted to see if they could tie them to Kozhanovskiy and destroy the opposition altogether. Either way, he knew they had to lose the tails. He told the driver to take him to the Metrograd, the big shopping mall downtown in Lva Tolstoho Square.
They drove past block after block of apartment houses on Kyiv’s Left Bank. Scorpion’s cell phone rang. It was “Nadia.” He told her he had to do some shopping at the Metrograd, and she said she would meet him in the tennis store in the sports section of the mall and hung up. The taxi drove across the bridge to the Right Bank, then turned up along the river before cutting over toward downtown. He was thinking what a beautiful city Kyiv was, in spite of everything, with its gold-domed churches and parks covered in snow, when he saw a man’s body sprawled on the sidewalk. No one stopped. People scurried past, giving a wide berth to the body.
Scorpion checked the rear window again. The sedan had moved right behind Iryna’s taxi. His taxi stopped at the entrance to the mall. He went inside and down the escalator to the lower underground floor. The mall was modern, bright with goods and shiny windows, and filled with people shopping in spite of the crisis. But there was an air of unease; people were looking around suspiciously, not talking much or in whispers.
He went into a department store, and after checking to make sure no one was watching, went out another door and through the mall, crossing from one underground hallway to another. He stopped in an electronics store to buy four new disposable cell phones and an iPod Nano with a radio, then went to the tennis store in a section of the mall devoted to exclusively to sports and called Iryna’s cell phone.
“Are you clear of them?” he said in English. “Pretend you’re talking to a boyfriend.”
“Nyet, glupyi chelovek,” she said in Russian. No, you silly man.
“Go into a store with multiple exits. Duck behind something so they lose sight of you. Go out one of the exits. I’ll wait,” he said, pretending to inspect tennis racquets while he activated and programmed the new cell phones.
A few minutes later she walked into the tennis store. He pretended not to know her and checked the mall to make sure she hadn’t been followed. It looked like she’d lost them. Motioning her to follow, they went out of that store and into a ski store.
“What are we doing?” she whispered, checking ski jumpers in a rack.
“We’ve got to get you a new ID,” he said.
He told her to go into a dressing room, and a moment later followed. Once inside, he took her photo with his cell phone camera, first with the blond wig on, then in her new pixie cut. They took the escalator down to the Metro station under Tolstoho Square and switched subway trains twice to make sure they weren’t followed.
“Who were they?” she asked, watching the doors as they pulled into a station.
“SBU, militsiyu, politsii, Syndikat blatnoi, the Chorni Povyazky, take your pick. The only one not after us is the Salvation Army.”
“Is this how it’s going to be?”
“If we’re lucky.”
“Gospadi,” she said, half to herself. “What next?”
“I need an Internet café. Also a place to stay. Someplace where they won’t ask questions.”
“I can do that,” she said.
He nodded. “If they think we’re in Kyiv, they’ll probably be looking on the Right Bank, so make it someplace on the Left Bank. Here.” He handed her one of the new cell phones. “Use this. We’ll dump the ones we’re using.”
“Get off at the next stop, Vokzalna,” she said.
“Why?”
“There’s a twenty-four-hour Internet café on Chokolovsky Avenue.”
The café was full despite the cold weather and dangerous streets. Many were young people tweeting about demonstrations and what was happening. Scorpion paid a young man who looked like a student a hundred hryvnia for his seat at a desktop computer facing the wall. A few minutes later Iryna got a computer too.
Glancing around to make sure no one was looking, he inserted the flash drive and loaded the NSA software onto the computer. He logged onto the NSA server and began reading the translated transcripts of the calls made by Oleg Gabrilov since he had last checked. Thanks to his bugs, the NSA had all of Gabrilov’s calls, from the embassy, from his apartment, and from his cell phone. There was a single phone number that Gabrilov had called once a day; the first time, after he’d made his call to Alyona’s cell phone following Scorpion’s visit. A transcript of another call caught his attention. Gabrilov had said: “They’ve taken the bait.”
The SVR was running something, probably the frame for the Cherkesov killing, Scorpion thought. But why would the SVR want to assassinate Cherkesov, Russia’s biggest ally in Ukraine? And how would Gabrilov know that he and Iryna had taken the bait about Pyatov? What was happening at the time? Scorpion checked the date and time of the call. And then it hit him.
Things were spiraling out of control. And what the hell did the Chinese have to do with it? He needed to get to Shaefer. He plugged earphones and a minimicrophone into the computer and Skype’d Shaefer’s BlackBerry. It was a private BlackBerry, not in Shaefer’s name, and that the Company didn’t know about. On the third ring, someone picked up.
“Cine este?” Shaefer said in Romanian over sounds of a conversation in the background.
“It’s FOBE. Can you talk?” Scorpion said in English.
“Un moment,” Shaefer said, and Scorpion heard him say something to someone in Romanian. When he came back on the line, the background sounds were quiet. “Are you out of your mind!? I shouldn’t talk to you! I shouldn’t know you!”
“We were set up,” Scorpion whispered.
“Who gives a crap? Have you any idea how hot you are? You are so PNG you don’t exist!” CIA-speak for persona non grata.
“I need a drop.”
“Don’t you get it? If I wanted to—which I don’t—I can’t come near you with a ten-foot pole.”
“What about FOBE?” Scorpion said. What he and Shaefer had been through together in Forward Operating Base Echo had to trump anything coming down the Company’s chain of command. They were foxhole buddies. Shaefer was one of the good guys.
“You’re out past Pluto, amigo. This is a bridge too far.”
Scorpion Winter Page 12