The Kobalt Dossier

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “No!” she cried. “No! Ana!”

  And there was Ben, the CZ 75 he had taken from Brush Cut aimed squarely at where Ana had stood. Evan smelled the cordite of the discharge. She wrapped her arms around her sister, taking great, shuddering breaths. “No more! For the love of God, Ben, leave her be.”

  But it was too late. The bullet had punctured Ana’s heart, and she lay heavy against Evan, unmoving, unbreathing. Lifeless as a marionette whose strings have been cut.

  58

  EXIT STRATEGY

  Wendy and Michael lay on adjacent operating tables, still, pale as effigies. But they were alive and, as far as Evan could tell, unharmed. They looked so peaceful, like a sleeping princess and prince. Evan, rushing to them, extended a hand. She could not help touching them, as if to make sure they were real, not a figment of her imagination. Then she bent, kissing each on their forehead, inhaling their sweet exhalations.

  “They’re sedated,” she said to Ben, who stood just off her right shoulder. Lyudmila stood in the doorway, all her senses alert to any sign of movement near them.

  “That’s a mercy,” Ben said, looking at the rolling cart laden with scalpels, forceps, scissors, clamps, retractors, needles, sutures, and a gleaming fleet of strange-looking implements he had never seen before—in short, a horrifyingly large suite of surgical instruments laid out with the utmost precision.

  Evan’s eyes filled with tears as she said, “My dear ones. How beautiful they are, Ben. How innocent.”

  “Possibly not as innocent as they once were.”

  She shrugged away his words, not allowing her thoughts to head in that direction yet. “Let’s get them out of here. I don’t want them waking up in the surgery.”

  She carried Wendy, and Ben, stoically ignoring the pain it caused him, lifted Michael into his arms. The three adults were all too aware of what they’d suffered since they’d entered the citadel, but by unspoken agreement no one asked or offered one word about their injuries. They were hyper-focused on the children, what they might have gone through, as well as getting them out of this stone labyrinth as quickly as they could.

  “Ben,” she said, as they moved through the corridors.

  “We dealt with the immediate threat,” he replied, correctly reading her thoughts. “There were, I think, ten, and how many more are still here neither of us can even guess. All we know is that since the last attack we haven’t seen anyone still alive.”

  The rooms were large as ballrooms, as ornate as the corridors were stark—fireplaces massive enough to roast a pair of boars or an adult deer, sculpted mantels, corbelled ceilings, cornices depicting various hunting scenes, above which were painted, incongruously, angels, cherubs, and seraphim cavorting in pink and pale-blue skies.

  Lyudmila led the way, having memorized the paths through which she and Ben, after a number of wrong turns, had at last made their way to Evan. They encountered no one; the place was eerily silent. When they approached the entryway beyond which was the massive front door they understood why.

  “At least a dozen of them,” Lyudmila whispered, shrinking back around the corner where the others stood. “Maybe more.”

  “We’ll never make it past them,” Ben husked.

  “O ye of little faith.” Lyudmila palmed her mobile. Glancing up at Evan, she said, “Ready?” When Evan nodded, she input three numbers on the keypad. “Sixty seconds,” she said, pocketing her mobile.

  “Prepare yourself, protect Michael at all costs,” she said to Ben, her voice hoarse and strained from her near strangling at her sister’s hands. Her neck felt terribly abraded, swollen. “In fifty seconds all hell is going to break loose.”

  “What’s going to happen?” he asked.

  Lyudmila grinned. “Our exit strategy.”

  “Countdown,” Evan said. “Forty seconds.”

  Lyudmila briefly turned back to her. “The children?”

  “Golden slumbers,” she murmured, and kissed the top of Wendy’s head.

  Precisely thirty-five seconds later, the packets of C-4 in Lyudmila’s backpack, lying abandoned but not forgotten in the corridors below where they stood, exploded with a titanic series of blasts that shook the entire citadel from its very foundations. The prayer warriors blocking their way scattered like fish frightened by an oncoming orca.

  “Move!” Lyudmila cried. “Now!”

  Around the corner they ran, Lyudmila spraying whoever was foolish enough to remain.

  As she hauled open the heavy wooden door a fantastic whoosh! billowed up through the citadel. As the fire ate through the C-4 containers, the heat that radiated from the thermite Lyudmila had added to the explosive was like a blast furnace, even at this distance. Walls shook, then crumbled as the thermite fire ate through everything.

  They were out the door, running as fast as they could through the pattering of the rain, the distant rumble of thunder moving off to the west, through the courtyard and past the walls, for the cover of the thick underbrush, beyond which was the sanctuary of the forest. Behind them fireballs ripped through the various roofs of the citadel, exposing the fire to even more oxygen, feeding it incessantly. Nothing and no one inside could possibly survive such a conflagration. The ground shook beneath them to the deep rumblings of ceilings collapsing, walls blowing out, massive timbers cracking, turning orange-red, then white as a blank sheet of paper.

  “Down!” Evan cried in her cracked voice.

  Just in time. The force of the blast-furnace wall of air rushed over their bent backs as they crouched. The thickets around them flattened, then blackened, dying on the spot. The sky was crimson and charcoal. The air stank of twisted metal, disintegrated mortar, ash, and cinders. Then the sickly-sweet stench of incinerated human flesh befouled the superheated air, making them gag. A sleet of ash, charred wooden fragments turned missiles, white-hot metal spikes, tore the night apart.

  Evan was in the lead, then Ben, with Lyudmila as rear guard, though there seemed little need. With a thunderous roar, another fireball rose, igniting the night sky, showering another load of flaming debris several hundred feet into the air. The wet ground shifted under them, loose rocks tumbling under their running feet, sliding away. Ben stumbled, fell to his knees, cradling Michael to keep his head from hitting the dirt.

  He crouched there, trying to catch his breath as rain and flaming debris fell on all of them. His head throbbed and his lacerated back was blistered with agonizing pain. Ahead, unaware, Evan was sending a text to the clinic’s helicopter. But Lyudmila ran, helped Ben back on his feet.

  “Maybe I should take him,” she offered.

  He was about to answer her when he heard a sharp crack. A moment of shock when he felt nothing, then a blinding pain engulfed his left hip. He went down, turned to see Hel framed in the wide opening of the high ivied courtyard walls, her face a bloody mess, aiming another shot at him. But Lyudmila was too quick for her. She squeezed off a fusillade from her machine gun and Hel was blown backward onto the courtyard’s cobbled center, vanishing into the inferno billowing from the castle’s blown-out door.

  “Evan!” Lyudmila, kneeling beside Ben, called. “Evan!” She had taken Michael from him. He was flat on his back. Blood seeped from the wound in his hip.

  Evan rushed up, gently moved Wendy so she was slung securely over her left shoulder, and then lowered herself to one knee by Ben’s side. She gently palpated the area of the wound. Ben groaned through gritted teeth. “I think the pelvic bone is shattered.”

  “The copter will be here within minutes. There’s a stretcher on board.”

  Lyudmila nodded, her hand on Ben shoulder. “Hang in there,” she said to him.

  Evan, so many emotions chasing each other through her mind, felt all coherent thought abandon her. Ben. Her eyes locked on his and when she smiled, he returned it.

  59

  AFTERMATH I

  SCHNELLER PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC, GERMANY

  The copter pilot radioed ahead to the clinic as soon as they were all inside.
Evan and Lyudmila got Ben settled and, raiding the copter’s well-provisioned first aid kit, did what they could to make him safe and comfortable for the long trip back to Germany. By that time, Wendy and Michael were awake, though still groggy. They clung to Evan like limpets, refusing to let her go, even for an instant.

  “Aunt Evan, is it really you?” they cried, as if waking from a disturbing and deeply felt nightmare. “You sound different.”

  Evan touched her throat, still tender. The working over Ana had given her had affected her vocal cords, perhaps permanently. Her voice was a bit lower, rich and smoky. Her sister’s mark on her.

  Kostya was ready for them. He quickly tended to Ben’s back, then left him in the care of the orthopedic surgeon who had driven from Köln the moment Kostya had called him. Then he gave the children thorough physical exams, and pronounced them unharmed and in good health. Which was all Evan cared about. And Ben. Of course, Ben. Then the children were put to bed, and finally Kostya turned his doctor’s skills to Evan’s injuries.

  Evan had asked the grandparents not to introduce themselves—as far as Wendy and Michael were concerned the doctor who examined them was just that: a doctor. This was hardest on Rebecca who was anxious to see them, talk to them, hold them, but as Evan rightly pointed out they needed time to adjust to being freed, to being with her—to just being. But Rebecca’s anxiety needed an object, and so she had hovered like a wraith over Kostya’s shoulder as he fussed over Evan’s wounds, making sure there was no serious physical damage to her neck and throat. As he had gently spread salve on her wrists and ankles.

  “She actually had you strapped to an operating table?” Rebecca said, after Evan had recounted in detail everything that happened at the Omega citadel.

  Evan could see that Rebecca was trying hard to hold it together, but her terror over the thought of Evan being in such grave danger, a nightmare scenario she must have played out in her mind ever since the three of them had taken off in the clinic’s copter, still danced behind her eyes like hobgoblins. When Evan finally told them that Ana was dead, Kostya had no discernable reaction; Rebecca sighed with relief and the hobgoblins began to still.

  “Death. Death is all I see,” had been her prediction, Evan thought. She hadn’t been wrong.

  *

  “I wasn’t scared at all! I knew you would come!” Michael said the next morning. “You’re like a superhero!”

  “Wonder Woman,” Wendy said.

  “Batman!” Michael cried.

  Wendy rolled her eyes. “Batman’s a guy, silly.”

  Evan laughed. “It’s just me, Aunt Evan.”

  “Superhero enough for us!” they shouted in tandem.

  They were in Kostya’s study, Evan, Lyudmila, and the children. Ben was being prepped for surgery later in the afternoon. The study was a cozy room full of books and oversized furniture, with drinks and all manner of food on a low table in front of the long sofa, served by Leonard Pine.

  Wendy had gone silent while Michael continued to rabbit on excitedly, and now she abruptly burst into tears. After holding her emotions in check for the entire time of their incarceration in order to be strong for her brother, finally understanding that their ordeal was over, that everything would, indeed, be okay, the dam burst and the terror, anxiety, and the rage spilled out in a torrent.

  Michael saw his sister break down and, of course, he began to cry, too, his reasons more confused and amorphous.

  Evan gathered them into her arms, held them as they sobbed and sobbed. Over their heads, she glanced at Lyudmila, shook her head sadly. After what the children had been through, these extreme mood swings were to be expected, Kostya had told her. Perfectly normal. The point was to react normally to them.

  “Now, listen, my darlings,” she said as she held them at arm’s length and looked into their tear-streaked faces, “I would so like to have something to eat—I’m starving! You must be too. So let’s eat.” She grinned like a loon, teasing laughter out of them. “And later some Coke, as a special treat, yeah?”

  “Yay!” They nodded enthusiastically.

  Evan gestured. “And this is Lyudmila. She was with us on the helicopter, remember?”

  At this, Wendy wiped her eyes, staring. “Lyudmila,” she said. “Does that mean you’re Russian?”

  “It does, indeed.” Though Lyudmila smiled at both of them, Wendy cringed away, burying her head in Evan’s side. She’d overheard enough stories about what her Aunt Evan did and who was the enemy to be scared all over again.

  Lyudmila, intuiting Wendy’s distress, said, “But I’m a White Russian, isn’t that so, Aunt Evan?”

  Evan nodded. “Indeed it is.” She turned Wendy around to face Lyudmila. “Lyudmila is my friend. My very good friend. She helped me and Ben rescue you. Remember?”

  Wendy knuckled her eyes for a moment, then opened them wide. Lyudmila was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, feeding Michael, oblivious to his sister’s angst, bits of food, which he devoured like a tiny trencherman.

  Now Lyudmila turned again to Wendy, her smile as broad as the room. “Wendy, will you allow me to tell you a joke? It’s a Russian joke, but I think you’ll like it.”

  When Wendy nodded after a brief hesitation, Lyudmila said, “Okay, ready? Why do Russian spies always walk around in threes?” When Wendy shrugged, she said, “One can read, one can write, and the third keeps an eye on the two intellectuals.” It took a moment, but then Wendy burst out laughing, and Evan saw Bobbi as she had been when they were children, before the hatred, the betrayal, the pain.

  60

  AFTERMATH II

  MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION

  “Prognosis?” The newly anointed Kata Romanovna, director of Zaslon, said. Kobalt was getting used to her new name, responded to it without a hitch or hesitation.

  “He’s making good progress,” said the attending physician, a pulmonologist. He was a blond man with the face like a ship’s prow. Kata thought he was lucky to spend most of his working days behind a mask. “The good news is the bullet missed his spine. He was shot in the upper-right quadrant. The bullet fractured his scapula and went right on into chest muscle, which was dense enough to stop the bullet.” He shrugged. “We had a hell of a time repairing his scapula and when we went in, we found a collapsed lung.” He checked his pager. “Rehab will be a long, painful process, but on the bright side he’s in exceptionally good shape.” He checked his pager again. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”

  Kata had been speaking to the doctor outside the door to Zherov’s room. The corridor was like any other hospital corridor, filled with the susurrus of lowered voices, the squeaking of nurses’ shoes against linoleum, the hushed click-clack of carts and gurneys passing by. All these she ignored. It was the smell that got her—the sickly-sweet miasma of antiseptic, anxiety, sickness, and death.

  Without another thought she pushed through the door. A single room befitting his rank. The hospital bed was against the right-hand wall, near the window that looked out on the vast car park. Zherov was under the covers, lying on his left side, hooked up to a series of beeping machines checking heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen level, and the like. Tubes ran from hanging plastic sacks into the backs of his hands. Painkillers, probably.

  “Hey, you,” she said, approaching him with a smile.

  “Hey yourself.” His smile was brighter than hers, but then he’d had nothing to smile about since he was shot. “What’s new?”

  He was thinner than the last time she had seen him, paler. “Your beard, for one thing.”

  “I think it makes me look distinguished.” He winced as he tried to move himself up on the pillow.

  “You in a lot of pain?”

  “Define a lot.”

  As she went to the closet, ripped plastic film off a pillow, he said, “Omega?”

  “Defunct, according to reports. Their headquarters in the Carpathians went up in a series of fireballs visible for miles around.” Which meant that Lyudmila had made good on her pr
omise. She had expected nothing less. But since they’d parted in Romania, she hadn’t heard from her. She didn’t know whether to be angry or worried.

  “All right then.” He frowned. “You find out who shot me?”

  “She’s dead,” Kata grinned. “I shoved a cattle prod down her gullet.”

  “Ingenious.”

  She laughed lightly. “I took it off her.”

  “Fly on the wall,” he said wistfully.

  She nodded. “You would have liked what you saw.”

  “I bet.”

  “Anton.” Her demeanor grew serious as she drew a chair up beside him. She offered the pillow, but he shook his head, so she kept it on her lap as she sat. “Turns out Baev’s adjutant was the one who ratted me out to Omega.”

  “Stands to reason he’s the one who got to Ermi, too.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And what happened to him?” he asked. “The adjutant, I mean.”

  “Ilya Gurin?” She shrugged. “He came to a bad end. Had his throat slit.”

  “Oh.”

  She stood up, placed the pillow on the chair seat, and went to stand by the window. Through the blinds she could see the sun spinning dizzily off the windshields of the vehicles.

  “There’s only one thing wrong with the theory that Gurin ratted me out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sure. Gurin didn’t have access to the Kobalt dossier. He couldn’t have known about my Omega remit, let alone how to contact them in Odessa.” She waited a beat, but when he didn’t say anything she continued. “Another thing. Gurin had no idea we were in Istanbul. How could he? Even Dima didn’t know.”

  She turned. “But you did, Zherov. You were with me when we met Ermi, and you yourself told me you had seen the Kobalt dossier, so you knew all about my Omega remit.”

  “Me? But … but why would I do such a thing?”