The Kobalt Dossier

by Eric Van Lustbader

  And then, starting when she was eleven, the texts began—unsigned—short but cogent, and she knew they were from a Russian source—or maybe sources, she couldn’t tell. She hoped they were from a variety of sources because then she would have a family—a real family—for already she had pulled away from her sister, seeing nothing of a compatible nature in her. The culmination of these contacts came when she was four months from her seventeenth birthday: a face-to-face rendezvous, at last! In Copenhagen. Evan had already planned the trip to Sumatra. She was forced to beg her older sister to tack on several days in the capital of Denmark. She hated doing that, but she had kept her mind on the outcome, on the in-the-flesh meeting. She was so excited she could hardly stand it. Of course, Evan misinterpreted her enthusiasm as being for Sumatra, which suited her just fine.

  Brushing away the past like so many strands of a spiderweb, she turned her mind to more recent events. To Zherov. To making sure he was her man. Money, power, ideology, sex, or if you will, blackmail—these were the traditional coins used to turn an enemy agent.

  There had to be a better way to recruit someone, she thought, than using blackmail, intimidation, or money. Blackmail bought you fear, fear caused hesitation in your recruit; hesitation in the field is what got someone killed. Intimidation bought you resentment, which made your recruit vulnerable to being turned. And money—well, money bought you nothing at all. There was always an opposition agent willing to pay your recruit more.

  Nevertheless, blackmail, intimidation, and money were the currencies Dima used to bind his field agents to him. Dima was old-school. That didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous; the opposite, in fact, was true. What it did mean, however, was that he had vulnerabilities one could take advantage of, if you were both bold and clever. Kobalt had devised a better method, a way to bind Zherov’s loyalty to her until death did them part.

  These were Kobalt’s thoughts as she and Zherov made their way toward the Omega compound at 4:20 in the morning.

  The compound inhabited an area of the city more run-down than most and far away from the ritzy—or what passed for ritzy in Odessa—strip bordering the Black Sea. This was to be expected. In July and August that seafront strip would be buzzing with Muscovites and tourists from as far as away as Tallinn. But now it had minimal traffic, which meant that the area where the compound crouched like a cur in a cardboard box had virtually no traffic at all. This necessitated that Kobalt and Zherov arrive on foot, furtively and silently as foxes. They followed the geometric pattern the blue shadows threw along the narrow sidewalks.

  Before leaving their suite, Kobalt had unlocked her briefcase and chosen the weapons she wanted, stowing them away in the numerous pockets of her suit jacket. By this time, it was clear to Zherov that she had her wardrobe custom made to her exacting specifications. It amused him to imagine the SVR support and document directorate having a field day working on such iconoclastic clothing.

  The compound itself was walled off and distanced from its neighbors on all sides by a perimeter layer of unused and dilapidated warehouses, bought up at rock-bottom prices by Omega. No one else had any use for them.

  Access to the compound was through the warehouse on the eastern front. A door of a size to admit one person at a time was inset into a much larger door, this one big enough to accommodate a tractor-trailer or a couple of buses side by side. The lock on the smaller door wasn’t strong enough to give Kobalt much of a pause. Inside, they found the cavernous space completely empty. Dark streaks of dried oil stained the unsealed concrete floor. At the far end, a narrow staircase led up to a small office with windows to overlook the main floor. A light shone through one of the windows.

  She signaled to Zherov, but he had already snapped the Scorpion’s stock in place and had it at the ready. Pistol out, he moved across the floor. Halfway across, Zherov, according to plan, hung back to cover her while she light-footed it the rest of the way, ascended the staircase, and opened the door to the office. She waited a full thirty seconds before she ventured inside.

  A desk, an old wooden chair, three steel-cased filing cabinets with their drawers open and empty were all that the office held. No sign of a human or even of human habitation. She signaled an all clear to Zherov as she stepped out and came back down to the warehouse floor.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Zherov whispered. “Along with the report of your debriefing I also read your recommendation of sending a Zaslon team in to terminate the residents. But it never was acted upon.”

  Kobalt grunted. “Dima dismissed the recommendation. He told me that the current environment, with talk of a Russian takeover of Ukraine, made a raid on Ukrainian soil out of the question.”

  They moved on, slowly and silently.

  Where is everyone? Zherov mouthed.

  She shrugged, but her furrowed brow conveyed more than words could have.

  She led him to the exit along the right-hand wall, and via a wooden loading dock they entered the compound proper. Again, there was not a soul in sight.

  “Okay,” he said in a more normal voice, “this can’t be right.”

  “And yet it is.” At a fast jog, she led him across the open space and into the compound’s main building—the place she had not been allowed to enter when she was here the first time. From what they could immediately see of the two large main spaces, this building, like the warehouse, had also been cleared out, stripped of every last vestige of Omega, including logs, records, dossiers—anything at all pertaining to the group.

  “They’re gone,” he said, stating the obvious. He turned around to see Kobalt squatting beside a number of dark smears not unlike the old oil stains they’d found in the warehouse. She had switched on her flashlight app, was running the beam this way and that over them.

  Zherov joined her on his haunches. “Found something?”

  “This isn’t oil, old or otherwise,” she said. “It’s blood.”

  “They didn’t go quietly?”

  “Or there was a purge, brought on perhaps by a schism within Omega.”

  He looked around. “If that’s the case, where are the bodies?”

  She stood up and he with her. “They could have taken them with them.”

  “Dissidents?” Zherov shrugged. “I wouldn’t bother.”

  Kobalt nodded. “Neither would I.”

  Because she had never been inside the main building, she had no idea of its interior layout. They began to explore. Beyond the two larger main spaces was a warren of rooms, clearly used for sleeping, meetings, or storage. They were all empty. At the end of a hallway was a door down to what appeared to be a basement. The two of them gave each other a significant glance, then started down. The steps were concrete, crumbling at the edges. As Kobalt’s flash played over them, the dark stains became more pronounced.

  It became colder and colder—the damp was deep, seeping into their bones through their clothes. It was a long way down to the basement floor. They did not, however, need to descend all the way. Three-quarters of the way down, the beam of light picked out dazzling reflections that at first blinded them. They moved much more cautiously down the steps until they could see a pane of thick glass from floor to ceiling, stretching to either wall. It was sealed at every edge. Behind the glass they saw corpses, over a dozen of them, sprawled grotesquely, as if, standing just where they were now, the perpetrators had somehow killed the people without giving them a second thought.

  “Most of them have been shot,” Zherov said, “but not all of them.”

  He was right, and now a dreadful chill invaded Kobalt’s body. As Zherov began to move downward, she grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t take a step nearer.”

  “What?” He turned to stare at her. “Why not? We’ve got to find out how they were killed.”

  “Look closer, Anton. They’re on medical tables. Their reproductive organs have been removed. In other cases—there, one or two—strange-looking organs have been sutured in.


  “When I was here before, the services invariably focused on the Book of Genesis, and most specifically on the figure of Noah, and God’s pact with him. It seems more than likely that Omega’s ultimate mission is to create a new world—the Paradise on earth God promised him after the flood.” She tilted her head toward the wall of glass. “If that’s the case, we can intuit from this that they mean to do it in much the same way as the Nazi doctors tried.”

  “They’re insane. I mean certifiable,” Zherov said. “That’s the reality we’re facing.”

  *

  They retreated back up the stairs. When they reached the hallway, they smelled food cooking. A door to the left of the one they had just emerged from opened onto a short corridor.

  Kobalt pointed toward it. “I guess the kitchens, and probably beyond that the mess hall.”

  Zherov nodded, moved ahead of her, Scorpion at the ready.

  They found her in front of a wood-fired stove, stirring a pot set on one of the rings. Kobalt came up to Zherov, pushed the Scorpion down to his side.

  “Marta?”

  The woman turned as Kobalt came into view. “Alina Kravets. But I doubt that’s your real name.” A smile, swiftly fading. “After what I heard about you, I never thought I’d see you again.” When she caught sight of Zherov, she laughed. “Is this your backup? Doesn’t matter, you’re too late.” She shook her head. “Omega is gone. It’s a new, far more militant cadre than anything you knew when you were here.”

  “Why are you still here?”

  There were dark circles under Marta’s eyes and in them a haunted look. “Where should I go?” She shook her head, and Kobalt could see the dark bruises on her neck. “I have nowhere else.” She turned back to her stirring.

  “How did you stay alive?”

  She stretched up her neck, exposing the full extent of the bruising. “I killed one of them. Then I hid in the woodpile, curled up, quiet as a fetus. No one found me. She had important work to perform, which she did. Then they left. I could hear the roar of the trucks from where I was hiding. I waited a long time after that, to make sure they were all gone and not coming back.” She made a face of extreme distaste. “I made the mistake of looking at the remains after they left.”

  She shuddered. “The stuff of nightmares.”

  Zherov had backed up. He was standing in the doorway to the short corridor, Scorpion cradled in the crook of his left arm, a loyal sentinel.

  The kitchen table was no more than a cutting board held at waist height by four rough-hewn wooden legs. They sat on rickety wooden stools that seemed at any moment ready to come apart. Marta poured them tea she had brewed. It was Russian Caravan, stale, black, and bitter as sin. Taking his cue from Kobalt’s expression, Zherov did not leave his post to fetch his glass.

  “You said ‘she,’ Marta. That she had important work to do. Do you mean the woman who came with her entourage the day I fled? Can you tell me anything about her?”

  Marta’s hands closed around her glass. “Did you see her? Did you see Ana?”

  “Just a glimpse,” Kobalt said. Ana, she thought.

  “Strange woman.” Marta took a sip of the tea without wincing. “All she did was pass by me at a moderate distance, but the impression she made on me is stamped into my memory, especially because she was no more than twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight, breathtakingly young to have such ultimate power.” She paused a moment, as if arranging her thoughts, then went on. “She brought some people with her—scientists or butchers—depending on your point of view. They stayed ten days. You saw for yourselves the obscene horror they left behind.”

  Kobalt waited for the other woman to go on. She considered taking another sip of the hot, caustic tea, then thought better of it. After a moment, she urged Marta to continue. “Marta. How was this woman, this Ana, strange?”

  Marta gave a grunt. “Easier to say how wasn’t she strange. She was tall, I remember that vividly. And she spoke with a deep voice—almost a man’s voice. And it had a commanding tone, a kind of—I don’t know—a bewitching note. It was enticing, captivating. And I’ll tell you that the upper echelon that coalesced around her that day were certainly captives—her captives. I got the distinct impression they would do what she wanted when she wanted them to do it.”

  Kobalt vividly recalled Ana’s gait—not a woman’s walk nor a man’s stride. It was something else altogether, something she had never seen before. “She sounds formidable.”

  Kobalt pushed her glass away. “Marta, do you know where Omega went?”

  She shook her head. “But somewhere far away. Maybe Romania somewhere in the Carpathians? I seem to recall something to that effect. But my mind is a little muzzy.”

  Kobalt leaned forward, careful not to upset the table. “Do you know where in the Carpathians?”

  Marta shook her head. “If I did know, Ana would have hunted me down. I wouldn’t be alive now.”

  27

  KÖLN, GERMANY

  Evan wasted no more time watching Otto scrambling up the iron stairs and onto a narrow iron catwalk that led to another one higher up. The woman had taken off her shoes, the better to run. Evan now held one of them in her hand. She waited, muscles tense, trying to clear her mind of everything except what she had to do. She had had only seconds to think about it, but the simple fact was clear: she wasn’t going to leave Ben. It was unthinkable. She’d never be able to live with herself again. She thought about Ben now, but every time she did so, her mind went back to the night they had spent making love while the German rain beat down against the roof of the building in which they had holed up. She remembered every single detail: her animal cries, his hands sweeping along her skin, his mouth on hers, her mouth on him, her legs drawing up, gripping his hips. And then, afterward, the dripping of the faucet in the kitchen, the squeak of a mouse, the tiny insect sounds outside as the rain subsided. The utter peace of lying in his arms. The rest of the world had fallen away. It might have existed outside their bolt-hole, but at that moment she wasn’t even sure of that. They might have slept, or not. Try as she might she could never remember. Then dawn had slid in through the rotted blinds, and with it a new smell …

  The rank smell of Blue Eyes struck Evan like a wall. She was hidden at the top of the stairs. She was ready. He reached the top of the staircase, all his senses alert. It was the PB she saw first, the ugly snout of the silencer, a weasel scenting its prey. Now! She swung around, oriented herself to him, and drove the stiletto heel of Otto’s shoe through his left eye, through the jelly of the vitreous humor. He took a reflexive step back, and she saw that he had taken off his half-burned clothes. Bare to the waist, she could see the Russian prison tattoos. With bared teeth and rage fueling her, she jammed the heel in farther, past the ocular orbit. How deep it went, she never did discover. With a violent shove, she sent him plummeting down the stairs.

  It was only when his head smacked into the bottom like a sack of wet cement that she saw Ben standing there, peering up at her.

  *

  There was a large and unsightly hole in the back of Manacle’s head, like a pink and red mushroom flowering out, leaving its mass over three seats. Ben stepped over the mess, ran down the right-side aisle, leapt over the charcoaled curtain, wisps of smoke still rising from it as if it were a gigantic cake just pulled from the oven. He sprinted to the front of the theater, following the path Evan had taken. His mind was solely on her. Yet his trained eyes noted there was not another soul in sight. What other patrons had been in attendance had fled. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the authorities drew up in front of the theater. They had to be gone before that happened, and leaving through the front entrance was out of the question.

  He saw the tattoos on the man with the high heel through his eye before he looked up to see Evan standing at the top. Eight-pointed stars on each shoulder, signifying he was a commander, a knife going through the top of his torso, signifying he had been an assassin for hire in prison. He had continued his profession upo
n release.

  Vaulting over the murderer, he rushed up the stairs. They embraced, but it was an awkward gesture, as if both of them were pulling away at the same time they came together. Awkward and brief. Once safely at arm’s length, they studied each other, checking for injuries, not the least of which was the egg-shaped swelling on his forehead from Manacle’s head-butt. Ben won that one, if winning was the right term.

  As she led him up to the second catwalk, through a metal door and into a narrow maintenance passageway, through another metal door that led out to the loge where, she hoped, Otto was waiting, Ben said, “Both our attackers were Russians, ex-cons for hire. Does that ring a bell?”

  Evan searched through the memory files in her mind but could come up with nothing. When she shook her head, he said, “I’d like to remind you that your contact, who set up this meet with Otto Vimpel …”

  “Her name’s Ottavia.”

  “Okay, but back to your original contact: Russian, FSB or SVR. Am I correct?”

  “Ex-SVR,” Evan admitted. And because she knew where this was going, “Also ex-Politburo.”

  “Lovely.” Ben rolled his eyes. “And you don’t think your contact set us up?”

  She was about to answer when from below came a hellish commotion.

  “The authorities have arrived,” Ben said. “We’ve got to get out of here. Where’s Ottavia?”

  Evan pointed. “This way.” They passed through the loge and climbed the inner staircase up to the balcony. Voices echoed, shouts were raised as the bloody burned mayhem in the orchestra was discovered. The police would have no idea what happened or why, but it wouldn’t take them long to find the armed Russian with the prison tattoos and the stiletto heel through his eye and come up the staircase hunting for the perpetrators.