The Kobalt Dossier

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Ben looked away for the moment, then back at her. “You’re right, of course. I don’t belong out here.” He straightened his back. “But I’m here now, and there’s something I need to tell you.”

  She nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “Leonard Pine took me aside just before we boarded. It may seem trivial compared to what’s ahead of us, but not to Leonard Pine. He has a wayward sister, young and wild. Sadly, he learned that she followed Jon and joined Omega as a fierce fighter. Her name is Helene, but she now goes by Hel, the Norse goddess of death, which, I believe, tells us all we need to know about her. Nevertheless, she is beloved by Leonard, and now she’s his only living sibling. He asked us to spare her. If we could bring her back to him, he would be most grateful.” Ben looked pale and drawn. “He said we’ll know her by the necklace with a gold cross he gave her.”

  “Noted.” She searched Ben’s face. “Anything else?”

  Ben shook his head.

  She squeezed his shoulder. “For what it’s worth I’m not sorry you’re here with me.”

  He gripped her arm briefly, before turning away, a smile nowhere in evidence.

  48

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  The low sky over Moscow pressed down like an iron on a shirt. A late afternoon on the sixteenth of May, the military airfield was quiet, almost sleepy. The air was utterly still, not a breath of wind anywhere. Thick clouds were the color of mercury. Though it would be at least five hours until sunset, a peculiar twilight had settled over the city. The air was difficult to breathe, as if much of the oxygen had been sucked up into the glowering sky.

  The SVR vehicle was waiting for them on the edge of the tarmac. The driver who, Kobalt noted in passing, was a female, held the door open, nodding to them deferentially as they climbed in.

  As they drove off, Zherov gave the driver his home address.

  “Too many days in the same clothes,” he said as he settled back in the seat. “I need a long hot shower, a half-bottle of vodka, then a new outfit.”

  Kobalt checked her watch. “Fine. I’ll need you by five though. I’ll text you the address.”

  Then she turned her attention to the driver. The rearview mirror showed a thin strip of skin around gray eyes as pale, almost, as water. She was a blonde with skin almost as pale as her eyes. Clearly a desk jockey, Kobalt thought.

  “Driver, what’s your name?”

  “Kata Romanovna, Colonel.”

  Kobalt was not used to being addressed by her rank. “Okay, Kata Romanovna, please find out where Minister Darko Vladimirovich Kusnetsov will be in one hour and take me there.”

  “At once, Colonel,” the driver confirmed.

  Kobalt saw Kata reach for her mobile and press a button. The tinted bulletproof glass privacy screen slid up, cutting them off from the front of the SUV.

  Zherov was already frowning. “I don’t like this idea of going to see Minister Kusnetsov.”

  “You don’t like it because you weren’t in on the decision.”

  “Okay, you and Lyudmila worked something out between you. You won’t tell me what that is, and, yes, that pisses me off. But I tell you, I still don’t trust her. No matter what you say or what she tells you, we don’t know her real motivations.”

  “I think I do, Anton.”

  He grunted, crossing his arms over his chest. “Even if you do—which is a big ‘if’—it’s still an extremely dangerous course to take.”

  Kobalt stared out the window as raindrops began to slide down the glass. A hundred tiny eyes staring at her. “Maybe, but at this point it’s the only course.”

  Zherov shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “To tell you the truth, I don’t like the idea of us coming back to Moscow at all. I mean, why take the chance? We have Ermi Çelik’s money, away from here we had our freedom.”

  Kobalt turned back to him. “That freedom is illusory, Anton. Do you really want to be like Lyudmila, always on the run, not knowing when a Zaslon hit team might be around the next corner?” She shook her head. “That life’s not for me.”

  He stared at her wordlessly. He wasn’t about to contradict her, but he was still fuming inside as they crossed the Ring Road.

  “Don’t be angry, Anton. There’s too much hard work—dangerous work—for us ahead.” She smiled. “Right up your street.”

  He stared up at the roof of the SUV, then back at her. “Why the hell did she take you off the boat in the middle of the night?”

  Kobalt let a moment’s silence pass. Then, “This woman who you so don’t trust took me to meet my parents.”

  “What?” Zherov was openmouthed. “Your parents were American. They died when you were a kid.”

  “As it happens, no. The American couple adopted me and my sister.” She nodded at his astonished expression. “That’s right, both of us—Evan and I—are Russian. Galina and Maxim Chernyshevsky. They’re dead, Anton, buried in the family plot in a cemetery outside Constanta. Our lineage goes back to Romania. That’s why she took the yacht there. It was important that I have closure on a secret I knew since I was very little. Until that moment, I had no idea who my birth parents were.”

  “I …” He choked. Whatever he was going to say seemed stuck inside him.

  “Turns out I’m one of you. Shocking, isn’t it? That’s what you were going to say.”

  He looked stunned. “Or something like it, anyway. I mean, ‘tchyo za ga’lima?” What the fuck?

  She laughed at his complete consternation.

  “Give me a minute, or three. Please.” He was struggling with this new reality. “I don’t … I couldn’t have imagined such a thing.”

  “This was a gift Lyudmila gave me. A precious gift. You understand?”

  He nodded, lost in thought for some time. “Perhaps I’ve misjudged her.”

  “The only way forward is to accept what is in front of you.”

  “In any case …” He sighed deeply, closed his eyes. “I’ll tell you what I want out of this … a reward for this life. A big one.”

  “And you’ll have it. Now you know you will.”

  He nodded. “You know what? I’m thinking of a wide, crescent beach on a tiny Thai or Indonesian island, lying back in a hammock, listening to the surf and the palm fronds clatter in the onshore breeze.”

  “When we retire,” she said with a certain amount of cynicism.

  “Sure, sure,” he answered, choosing to ignore her tone.

  “Anton.”

  He opened his eyes.

  “The next few hours will be as delicate as they are crucial. I need to know I can count on you.”

  A laugh and a nod. “Always, boss. I told you that.”

  Reaching out, she squeezed his shoulder. “Good man.”

  “A guy can dream, can’t he?”

  Kobalt thought about this. “Sometimes,” she said, “dreaming is all that makes life livable.”

  Moments later, having bypassed the teeming traffic using the clear lane reserved for government eminences and foreign dignitaries, they reached Zherov’s apartment building. The driver pulled over to the curb and stopped. She slid out, opened the curbside rear door for him.

  “See you at five,” Zherov said. “Whatever you have up your sleeve, good luck.”

  Kobalt nodded absently, her mind already on the options for penetrating Minister Kusnetsov’s day-to-day defenses without raising an alarm. It all depended on where he would be twenty minutes from now, and whether that place would be advantageous to her. Her preference was to get to him while he was out of the office. Less interference and levels of security to go through, not to mention less officious personnel to get past. This close to the finish line she was impatient for action.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Zherov trotting up the steps to the building’s front door.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kata draw a pistol, take a shooter’s stance, and fire a bullet into Zherov’s back.

  49

  CARPATHIAN MOUNTAINS, ROMANIA


  Lyudmila was waiting for them as the copter landed in the center of an open field. She and Evan had been in almost constant touch since Lyudmila arrived here, in what in Roman times had once been the Kingdom of Dacia, before it was conquered and became a province of the far-flung Empire. Dacia had a storied history, being conquered by the Huns long after the Empire fell, then the Lombards, and, finally, in 791, by Charlemagne’s army. That was when the Slavic people arrived. Later, much of Dacia became known as Transylvania, the high, toothed mountains forbidding, the legends even more so.

  The sky was a pellucid blue directly above them, even though shadows thrown across the open space were growing long spider legs. The air was crisp and clean. Even at this time of year snow glimmered on the higher peaks like trapped moonlight.

  The moment she saw Evan exiting, Lyudmila waved her over. Evan scuttled forward under the slowing rotors, standing up straight well outside their radius. Ben followed but was smart enough to busy himself with shouldering the two khaki duffels containing the equipment, selected by Evan and her father and loaded into the helicopter.

  “Thank you,” Evan said when she came up to her. “Thank you for finding my birth parents and for leading me step-by-step to them.”

  Lyudmila smiled, placed her palm against Evan’s cheek. Now the circle is closed, she thought. They, each of them, have the closure they needed. And both of them are shielded from the full truth. Kobalt thinks her birth parents are dead. Evan thinks her sister is dead. Now their worlds will never collide. They will never face the dreadful reality of rending each other limb from limb to avenge deep-seated betrayals.

  Evan brought her up to date on what she and Ben had learned from her parents and from Leonard Pine.

  Lyudmila nodded. “I know what Leonard knows,” she said. “He’s one of mine. As for the rest, it’s both illuminating and terrifying. Your sister Ana is completely out of control. She must be stopped. There’s no alternative. What she has planned for your niece and nephew is unspeakable. It must not happen.”

  “There’s something else,” Evan said. “I think we’re on a deadline and it’s tonight at midnight.”

  They both looked at her as if she had grown another head.

  Lyudmila came out of shock first. “Explain, please.”

  “From what my parents told me, Ana is obsessed with Noah and the Flood, which started on the seventeenth of the month. Today is the sixteenth.”

  “We’re going to head out before nightfall.” Lyudmila squinted up at the lowering sky. The wind had picked up, thick with moisture. “Heavy weather coming our way. That will lower visibility, at least.”

  Ben dropped the duffels and, kneeling, zipped one open. “How far are we from the Omega citadel?”

  Lyudmila produced a Samsung Note from her backpack, fired it up. The GPS took a moment to sync with the appropriate satellite signal, then, “Here we are.” She pointed to a spot on the topographical interface she overlaid on the Google Earth map. Her fingertip moved roughly northeast. “And here is the citadel.”

  She swiped right, revealing a close-up photo of the castle. It stretched itself skyward within a heavily forested glen. In the background, mountain peaks crowded out the sky. There was a central tower crowned by a kind of brightly lit open-air hall. The rock on which the castle had been built climbed halfway up this tower, making the citadel seem as if it had risen from inside the earth itself. To the right was a circular turret with a long, sloping conical roof not unlike a cartoon dunce cap. On the left, a smaller conical roof was anchored by another brown-brick turret. Lyudmila glanced at Evan before swiping right again, bringing up a rear view of the citadel.

  “You can’t see it for the trees,” Evan’s forefinger stabbed out, “but according to my father, right here close to the stone wall a small stream runs more or less across the castle’s back. At the base of the rock wall, there’s an outlet for a storm drain.”

  Ben glanced up from the photo to Evan. “Are you proposing we gain access to the citadel by crawling through what must be centuries of muck?”

  “You and Lyudmila,” Evan said. “A diversion is required.”

  “With all this brush around we could start a fire,” Ben suggested.

  Evan shook her head. “Not with the kids inside.”

  Lyudmila swiped the screen, stowed away the Note in her backpack. “Anyway, Evan has a better idea.”

  “While you and Lyudmila get in through the channel in back,” Evan said to Ben, “I’ll be going in the front door.”

  Ben huffed. “You’ll be doing what now?”

  “Listen, Ana is expecting Bobbi. I have suspected all along that’s one reason she took Wendy and Michael.”

  “Which means she doesn’t know Bobbi’s dead,” Lyudmila said.

  “Right.” Evan nodded. “Just as Rebecca and Konstantin don’t know that Bobbi, their Robin, is dead.” She exchanged a meaningful glance with Lyudmila, her eyes expressing an understanding and gratitude that needed no words. Lyudmila inclined her head ever so slightly.

  Evan continued. “We know why she wants them, we know in all likelihood she’ll start experimenting on them at one minute after midnight.”

  “So …” Lyudmila prompted.

  “I’m going to give her precisely what she expects, what she wants: my sister Bobbi, her sister Robin,” Evan replied.

  “Excuse me,” Ben broke in, “but we don’t know why she wants Robin.”

  “And we won’t know until she and I are together.” Evan’s eyes were alight with the prospect of the confrontation. “The point is, Ben, my appearance should allow you two enough time to infiltrate the citadel and get the kids out.”

  “I think you’re nuts,” Ben said. “And that’s a professional opinion.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Yeah, we all get mucked up, grab the kids, and get the hell out of there.”

  “Too risky. In a firefight, Wendy and Michael are vulnerable.”

  “All of us together makes no sense,” Lyudmila said. “If we run into trouble, it’s—”

  “No, no. Hell no.” Ben waved away her words, but his eyes were on Evan. “I know what this is all about. It’s personal, Evan. You want the chance to confront your sister, to be the one who takes her down.”

  A strained silence ensued. Just the wind in the treetops, a birdsong, the whirring of insects. They could almost hear the last of the sunlight as it slanted across their grim faces.

  “Family,” Lyudmila said softly, breaking the tension. “You can’t fight it, Ben. It’s a losing battle.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he said, a little too quickly.

  “Think of Zoe,” Evan said. “Think how you would feel if someone abducted her. Ben, Wendy and Michael are my family. I’m not going to—”

  “What if she shoots you dead,” Ben interrupted her. “The moment she sees you.”

  Evan shook her head. “She won’t do that.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Family,” Lyudmila repeated. “Ana will be curious. She’ll need to talk with a sister she’s never met, a sister from a lifestyle totally alien to her. Ana won’t harm her.”

  “At first.” Ben’s eyes narrowed. “Can you even guarantee that?”

  “Nothing in life is guaranteed,” Evan said. “Especially with the lives we lead.”

  “So …” Lyudmila said.

  “We go.” Evan and Lyudmila started out.

  “Wait,” Ben said. “What happens after we get Wendy and Michael?”

  Evan turned back to him as Lyudmila tapped her backpack. “We blow that fucker into kingdom come.”

  50

  FIRING LINE

  As Zherov pitched onto his face, the car’s door locks clicked down and stayed down. Kobalt scrambled over the backseat, blocking out the shock, her own survival at the forefront. Whipping around, she threw herself against the glass partition, to no avail. All the glass was bulletproof. What good would her hitting it do? Still, human nature. Thrashi
ng, she watched the driver slide behind the wheel, put the SUV in gear, and zoom out into traffic. In New York, that maneuver would have presaged a blare of horns and shouted invective. Here, in Moscow, there was nary a sound. No citizen would dare raise a protest against an official government vehicle, no matter how dangerously it was being driven.

  She was weaponless, having left them all on the plane. There was no way she was going to be received by the head of the FSB while she was weaponized. But she did have her mobile. Without thinking, she was about to punch in Zherov’s speed-dial number, then, finger hovering over the keyboard, realized, with a gut contraction, that Zherov was bleeding out on the front steps of his apartment building. She tried to call emergency services instead, but she had no signal. With a string of juicy expletives, she thought about Dima. She was in an SVR vehicle whose driver knew precisely when her plane was landing. Another inside job, like her betrayal at the Omega compound in Odessa? At the knife shop in Istanbul? It seemed the most logical explanation. She shook her head. It astonished her how things could get so shitty, so quickly.

  She tried to communicate with the driver—the chance of her real name being Kata Romanovna was next to nil. The intra-vehicular communication system was working perfectly well, but the driver remained mute as a Trappist nun. Nevertheless, Kobalt kept at it.

  “Where are we going?” she demanded, and then in an even more commanding tone, “Where are you taking me, Kata?”

  “There is a time and place for everything.”

  Finally a response. “Where is it, then, our destination?”

  The driver smirked at her in the rearview mirror. It was at that moment Kobalt noticed the ring with its enormous square-cut emerald. She took another look at the driver with the incongruous ring that must have cost a fortune, assuming the emerald was real and not paste. The mystery deepened. Not only did she not know who this woman was, she now could not imagine who she was working for.