by Saul Herzog
She’d woken the proprietor of the hotel by banging on the door with her fists for fifteen minutes. He was an old man, and he answered the door in a thick robe and slippers. Eventually, after she’d agreed to pay double the usual rate, he’d allowed her to check-in.
As she followed him up the stairs and along the narrow corridor, she got the impression she was the only guest.
She stared up at the ceiling. A light brown stain was forming in the plaster around the light fixture. She tried not to think about what might be causing it and got out of the bed. She went to the window, bringing the blanket with her, draping it over her shoulders like a cape.
She couldn’t have imagined a gloomier scene.
The street was paved, but barely, and thick, brown water filled the potholes. Mud ran down the sides of the street, and two tractors with massive tires slowly chugged past the hotel with drivers who looked like they’d been dressed by the costume department of a period movie of the Russian revolution.
A man stepped out of the house across the street, looked directly up at her window, and a sudden shiver ran down her spine.
The expression on his face wasn’t friendly. This area was almost entirely Russian, ethnically speaking. Most of the people hated the government in Riga, and she didn’t think her fancy city manners and government badge were going to win her many friends.
She would go to the police station, speak to the officer who’d witnessed the crash, and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
That was the plan.
She did a quick scan of the room for the coffeemaker before accepting that there was none. Then she got into the shower, which was ice cold, and scrubbed her skin as vigorously as if she was in a delousing shed.
She dressed in the same clothes she’d worn the day before, and as she pulled on her expensive, leather ankle boots, she realized that she was about to ruin them beyond recognition.
She went down to the dining room, where the proprietor’s wife served her a plate of rye bread with butter and boiled eggs.
There was a coffee urn on the sideboard, and she poured herself a cup.
She saw no other guest.
She finished her breakfast, left the hotel, and went straight to the police station. It was close enough that she didn’t need her car, but far enough to do the predicted damage to her boots.
She told herself she’d be out of the village in an hour.
The police station was a drab, concrete, Soviet-era structure with square windows overlooking a narrow porch. It reminded her of the sheriff’s office in a western movie. She pushed open the front door, and a bell chimed above her head.
In front of her was a receptionist’s desk, and behind it on the wall was a utilitarian-looking clock. It reminded her of her school days, and she checked her watch to see if it was set correctly. It was. A large leatherbound logbook with dates and notes scrawled on its pages was open on the desk, and next to it was a computer with an old, cathode-ray monitor.
No one was at the desk, and Agata leaned over to peek the papers and computer screen.
“Can I help you?” a stern voice said from behind her.
She turned to see a middle-aged woman in a buttoned-up, high-necked blouse, and gray skirt bearing down on her.
“I called yesterday,” Agata said.
“A lot of people called yesterday.”
Agata smiled thinly. They both knew this wasn’t the kind of place where the phone exactly rang off the hook.
“I called from State Police in Riga.”
“So you’re the national security officer?” the woman asked skeptically.
“Yes, I am,” Agata said. “And you are?”
“I’m Jana,” the woman said. “I run the office here.”
Agata reached into her pocket for her notebook and flicked it open.
“I’m going to need to speak to Baskin,” she said, scanning the notes. “Officer Guntis Baskin.”
“Of course,” the woman said, glancing at the clock. “He eats breakfast at the diner down the street. He’ll be there until eight-thirty.”
“Down the street?”
“You’re welcome to wait here,” Jana said, and she managed to say it in a way that convinced Agata that another traipse through the mud was worth the effort.
The restaurant wasn’t difficult to find. It had a single gas pump out front, and in the window was a neon sign advertising state lottery tickets. Below the sign, about two dozen dead flies lay scattered on the plastic ledge inside the glass.
Agata entered, and another overhead bell chimed.
A dog was roused by the commotion and tried to come at her. An old man, sitting in a booth by the window, yanked the dog back by the leash.
The man was smoking, and the ashtray in front of him was full to the point of overflowing.
There were a few other men spread around the room. All seated separately. They were devouring big plates of breakfast or smoking and sipping coffee. Four wore heavy, forestry overalls and large, tan-colored boots with black rubber soles.
The fifth wore the uniform of a police officer.
He was sitting at the counter, and his ass was so wide it sagged over the sides of the stool like a pair of saddlebags.
Agata walked over and sat next to him.
He was about fifty-years-old and had a fork in one hand, a piece of sausage dangling from it precariously, and a lit cigarette in the other.
“Don’t tell me you’re eating and smoking at the same time,” Agata said.
He turned slowly and looked her over, head to toe. “You’re the girl from Riga,” he said.
“And you passed detective school.”
He pushed the piece of sausage into his mouth and looked at her again. “You’re funny.”
Agata took out her notebook again and glanced at it. “You’re Baskin,” she said.
He nodded and signaled to the waitress to bring over an extra cup of coffee.
“Thank you,” Agata said.
He nodded again.
She took a sip off the coffee, which was passable, and said, “So, I’m just going to jump right in, if that’s okay.”
“Shoot away,” Baskin said.
“You filed a report yesterday about a plane crash. Did you see it personally, or someone reported it back to you?”
“I never said it was a crash,” Baskin said.
He was spreading jam on his toast, taking great care to get it into all the corners.
“What was it then?”
He looked at her knowingly, then raised his hand and flicked out all his fingers at the same time in the manner of an explosion.
“Poof,” he said.
“An explosion?”
He nodded again.
“Why didn’t you put that in the report?”
“I thought I did.”
“You said, a plane when down.”
“It did go down.”
“Baskin,” Agata said, dropping her voice, “was that plane shot down?”
Baskin sucked through his teeth and leaned back, stretching. He looked around the room, and Agata looked up for the first time.
Every set of eyes in the place was fixed on her.
“Well?” she said. “I hope you didn’t get me to come all the way out here just to…” she mimicked the little explosion he’d made with his fingers, and said, “…poof.”
He looked around the room for support.
She fixed him in her gaze. “Well?” she said, her tone insistent.
“I didn’t get you to come out here at all,” he said.
“But I’m here, Baskin. Because of the report you filed. Why bother writing it if you didn’t want me to come?”
He sighed. “Look,” he said. “Around here, we’ve kind of just learned to take things as they come. You know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean,” he said, “maybe it was shot down. Maybe it crashed. I can’t say for certain.”
<
br /> “You can’t say?”
He did that thing again with the fingers. “Poof.”
Agata was getting frustrated. “What is that? Poof, like a magic trick? Like it disappeared?”
“Look,” Baskin said, “I just know what I saw, and to be honest with you, I thought someone in Riga would have had the sense to send more guys.”
“More guys than just me?” Agata said. “Well, I’m sorry to have disappointed you.”
“What if it was shot down?” he said, “What then? What are you going to do about it? Write it in your notebook?”
Agata was beginning to worry. She’d been holding out hope that some sort of mechanical issue, or pilot error, had brought down the plane. From what Baskin was saying, however obliquely, it seemed like that wasn’t the case. She was no aeronautics engineer, but an explosion in the sky didn’t sound like a common mechanical issue for a forty-year-old crop-duster.
“Is there something you’re not saying to me?” Agata said, clearing her throat.
The men at the other tables weren’t menacing, exactly, but they weren’t smiling either. And they were making absolutely zero effort to hide the fact that they were listening to every word of the conversation.
“Look,” she said, raising her voice to them. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just need to know what happened.”
It was the old man with the dog who spoke. He spoke in a thin, raspy voice, like his vocal cords had been left out to dry in the sun.
“Perhaps if you’d come a little sooner,” he wheezed.
“Sooner?” Agata said. “This only happened yesterday.”
“And this morning,” the old man said, “the monitoring units on our side of the border started pulling out of their positions.”
“What?” Agata said, rising to her feet.
The old man nodded. So did the others.
“That makes no sense,” Agata said. “Those units are permanently positioned. They’d never pull back, unless…”
“Unless what?” one of the lumberjacks said.
Agata shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “It just makes no sense. They wouldn’t do that. Not for any reason.”
“That’s what I said,” the old man said, and then he turned to the lumberjacks. “But these men saw it with their own eyes.”
“When?” Agata said.
“This morning,” a lumberjack said. “Before dawn.”
“Did they tell you anything?” Agata said.
“They said they got orders.”
“But their orders are to monitor the border.”
“Well, their orders now are to monitor the border in another sector.”
Agata slumped back onto her seat. She looked at the cup of coffee. There was a chip in the enamel, and the rough ceramic had turned brown from wear.
She pulled her phone from her pocket and was about to call Kuzis when she remembered she had no signal.
“I’m sure they know what they’re doing,” she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt.
“Well,” Baskin said, slapping some bills on the counter. “I’ve done my part.”
“Your part?”
“I told you what I saw.”
“You’ve been pretty vague, Baskin,” Agata said.
“Maybe if the army wasn’t pulling out,” the old man said, “people’s memories would be a little clearer.”
6
Agata drove out to the area where Baskin said the plane came down.
She’d asked him to accompany her, but he was, in his words, otherwise engaged. He’d warned her not to go out there either, but at this point, she was constitutionally incapable of backing down.
She had to know what was going on.
She tried one last time to call Kuzis before leaving the village, but her phone was still without signal.
It was raining again and, ahead of her, a smokestack from a small factory rose up above the trees like a waypoint. Its red brick walls and metal-rimmed windows reminded her of factories from a century ago.
After the factory, there was a small cluster of houses with hay bales piled next to them. She saw no people, but there were cows, and they stared at her vacantly as she passed.
Baskin had given her detailed directions, and after passing the factory and houses, she broke off from the road onto a forestry track that brought her eastward, closer to the border. She had to be careful. Those tracks crisscrossed back and forth, and if you didn’t know exactly where you were, you were likely to inadvertently cross the frontier.
Doing so was dangerous.
She drove along the track slowly, careful not to damage her car or get it stuck in the deep ruts of mud. A metal sign with two bullet holes in it told her she was entering the border region and that it was a criminal offense to cross the border other than at an authorized crossing.
A little further on, there was another sign. This one had a picture of a soldier holding a rifle and the word ‘Danger’ written on it in Latvian.
She checked her coat for her State Police credentials and put the badge on the dashboard.
She had the GPS programmed with some coordinates Baskin had come up with. They were his best guess at the exact position he’d seen the plane go down, and she was less than half a mile from the red dot on the screen.
The road forked, and she didn’t know which branch to take. She was long past the point where her standard-issue Mercedes GPS package still showed details.
She took the right fork, and when it forked again, she took the right again. It looked from the GPS as if she was veering closer and closer to the spot she was aiming for.
When she was about as close as she thought possible, she stopped the car.
She could see now what he’d meant about not being able to find the crash site. The forest was very dense, and the track was a sodden, muddy mess. She was lucky she’d made it this far without getting stuck. She’d be luckier still if she managed to get back out.
She opened the window and listened to the sounds of the forest.
It was eerily still, and a chilly mist rose from the ground like steam from a winter lake.
The ground sloped upward on both sides of the track, and ahead, the terrain only seemed to get softer and muddier.
The drizzle of rain that had been falling all morning had stopped.
She stepped out of the car and checked her service pistol, a Glock 17. It was loaded, and she unlocked the safety.
Wolf attacks were rare but not unheard of in those parts, but it wasn’t wolves she was afraid of.
She went to the back of the vehicle and opened the trunk. There was a plastic case, and she opened it, removing a pair of binoculars and one of those old GPS units hikers used to use before phones became ubiquitous.
She put both in her jacket and began making her way further up the track. She wasn’t sure what she could hope to find. The plane could be twenty meters away in the trees and she wouldn’t have seen it. But she wasn’t ready to go back to Riga. She had to find something concrete to show Kuzis.
Whoever had reassigned the monitoring units needed to be told what was going on, and those people didn’t listen to the likes of Agata unless she had something concrete she could show them.
She walked on carefully, stopping every ten yards or so to listen. She’d never been a lover of the wilderness, and her proximity to the Russian border made every snap of a twig, every creak of a tree, even more sinister.
From a small crest in the road, she could make out an opening in the trees off the path to her right. She left the road and pushed through branches that seemed to claw at her cashmere coat as if intentionally trying to wreck it. When she reached the clearing, she saw that it was actually another, narrower track. In the mud were fresh tire marks.
They looked like they’d been made by a fat-tired motocross bike.
She followed the path in the direction that, to the best of her bearings, went eastward. It brought her uphill, and just beyond the next ridg
e, she saw a small, wood-framed structure.
It was like a carport, with open walls and a flat roof. Camouflage netting had been spread across the top to hide it from above, and inside were wooden skids with large crates on them.
Agata immediately dropped to one knee and drew her pistol. She listened. Apart from the sounds of the forest, she heard nothing.
She watched the structure for about ten minutes and saw no sign of movement.
She looked back in the direction she’d come.
This was crazy.
She had no business being out there alone. She hadn’t even ensured Kuzis knew where she was.
Anything could happen to her out there, and it would be days before he came looking.
The structure could belong to anyone.
Drug traffickers.
Human traffickers.
Poachers.
But something told her it belonged to the Russian military.
She looked back down the path in the direction she’d come from. She knew that the smart thing would be to go back to the car and get the hell out of there.
But she couldn’t do that.
She had to know what was going on.
Cautiously, she made her way down the slope toward the structure. She tried to open the first crate. It was nailed shut. She looked around for something to pry it with. There were some six-inch nails that had been used to erect the structure, and she managed to get one of them in under the pine lid of the crate. Using a rock as a hammer, she hit the nail and slowly managed to pry open the lid.
Inside the crate, there were smaller wooden boxes, and stenciled faintly on top of each in Cyrillic script were the words:
Advance Provisions Department
Military Technical Academy
Saint Petersburg
Russia
She lifted one of the boxes out of the crate and pried off the lid. It contained 5.45 x 39mm rifle cartridges, the most common cartridge used in the Russian military. It was used for the AK-74, as well as the newer AK-12.
She checked the next crate, again prying open the lid with a nail and rock, and sure enough, it contained dozens of the new AK-12 assault rifles.