The Huguenot Thief

by L. K. CLEMENT

  Kate gasped and looked up at Bunin in shock. Adam was dead? He had died while Atay was driving her from the Charleston airport to the private strip in Summerville. She felt sick and willed herself not to vomit. Why would anyone want to murder Adam? If Jack didn’t get her texts, then Adam’s death meant that no one knew where she was—unless her boss had told someone else at the college. Oh, God, why had she not left more information in her voice mail to Jack? Her head began to throb and she could not hold her hands still.

  She pushed the paper aside and turned away from Bunin. The carpet on the wall filled her view—a leopard and a fawn in a vignette so finely woven as to appear a painting, the predator in mid-pounce, the fawn forever to remain in peril as it tried to escape. She turned and in a calmer voice asked, “Who are you really, and why do you want me to remain here? Dr. Atay, please, will you explain to this man what our agreement was?”

  Atay was also looking at the carpet now, his face blotchy, his jaws clenched. He did not reply.

  Bunin moved his bulky body closer to the table and put his cigar down on Atay’s breakfast plate. “You must find the reliquaries that are documented in the scrolls, the ones that the Byzantines call pseudos. I want to know where they all are now. Once you complete that work, we will send you back to Charleston.”

  “Are you crazy? Why? Dr. Atay, please tell me what is going on!” His eyes finally moved away from the carpet. In his eyes, she saw the same wide-eyed look the weaver had so skillfully manifested in the fawn, a look of terror and resignation.

  “Dr. Strong, Dr. Atay cannot help you. If indeed this work will take months, you will want to begin right away.”

  Her last memory of that day was the smell of an acrid liquid and a hand covering her face.

  One Month Later

  Istanbul

  Chapter 7

  “Anton, exactly what is it that you want?” asked Dr. Zora Vulkov. She paced the dining room in the castle, waiting on the big man to answer. Anton sat eating a steak, watching her.

  She had met Anton in 1981 at the newly formed and deceptively named Institute of Ultra-Pure Biochemical Preparations, located in Leningrad, the USSR’s premier center for weapon-focusing biotechnology research. Zora arrived with her newly minted PhD, and the idealism of a twenty-five-year-old communist educated in state schools since the age of twelve. She and Anton were members of a team creating an aerosolized delivery device for antibiotics. Ostensibly, this was so Mother Russia could ensure her citizens received immediate treatment in the event of a biological attack by the United States.

  Zora hadn’t been so sure the work she did was for defensive use only, but the nagging of her conscience became subservient to her drive to be better than her peers, all of whom had grown up as the pampered children of Communist Party members. Zora, the daughter of a butcher, had pretended to be as dull as the other children that had lived in her small village, her days endless and bleak. Nevertheless, sometime after taking a nationwide test at twelve, a limousine with a dour matron in the back seat arrived at her family’s wooden shack. Without ceremony, the woman announced to her parents their daughter was to be educated in a state school. This was not the traumatic separation of a sensitive child from her loving parents; it was the rescue of a curious puppy from a cage of decrepit hounds. She had never seen her family again and did not think of them, but had never thought of herself as anyone other than a peasant, albeit a lucky one.

  Zora had tried to exorcise her conscience in arguments with Anton. He believed if the United States was going to study biological weapons then the USSR had to as well. She would retort that someone had to take the moral high road and stop the proliferation. Their arguments, happily witnessed by the other, more reticent member of their team, always ended in vodka shots. She reassured herself that her expertise in aerosolizing biological materials might one day actually be used for the treatment of terrible diseases such as Ebola.

  Eventually, there were signs of change. Citizens marched in the streets of Poland and East Germany, wanting freedom of the press, and freedom to travel. By the time 500,000 people converged in East Berlin in November 1989 to tear down the Berlin Wall, Zora knew that the country known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more. Zora remembered watching the fall of the wall on CNN with her colleagues, all lifelong and dedicated communists, in stunned silence, all of them aware that watching the pirated signal could land them in the gulag.

  During the eighteen months that followed, as the USSR headed towards breakup, many of the lab workers, biologists, doctors, and security people simply walked away from the lab. Security became intermittent. Supplies weren’t replenished. The remaining workers, including Zora, carried on as best they could. Finally, soldiers arrived and destroyed the lab records, telling those who remained that the Institute was now closed.

  Zora could have stayed in Russia, as Anton had, but she decided to focus herself in a manner diametrically opposed to the clandestine work she had done for ten years. She joined Health Workers for Africa, HWA, and moved to Cameroon. Each night for a year, after dealing with ailments long conquered by the West, she had cried herself to sleep. Finally, she stopped crying, and became useful to the people she grew to love, people so like the ones in her childhood village. That they returned her affection was apparent from the number of little girls named Zora running around in the nearby villages. Until Bunin called, Zora had been living an anonymous and quiet life treating diseases the jungle spit at its human inhabitants at an unceasing pace. The promise of a donation to HWA had lured her to Istanbul.

  Zora said again, “Why did you ask me to come here?”

  “Patience, Zora. While I finish eating, enjoy the view,” Anton waved at the terraced doors.

  She watched as Anton ate his meal so slowly she became irritated. “Anton, really, please just tell me why you called me. Your request was very mysterious.”

  “Did you not like the plane I sent?” He grinned at her.

  Zora smiled back in spite of her pique. She knew that the sleek prop plane touching down on a dirt strip near her clinic would be the talk of the surrounding villages for months.

  “Sit down, Zora. I will explain.” He had never been a handsome man, but for a man in his seventies, he exuded strength and power. She responded to him as though he was still her boss, and sat down, preparing a cup of coffee from the silver tray left on the table.

  “Where exactly are we in Istanbul?” After the prop plane had landed, a helicopter had brought her to the castle, arriving late at night. She had seen nothing of her surroundings until this morning.

  “We are an hour outside of Istanbul.” After cutting another piece of steak, while he was still chewing, he said, “Do you know what I have been doing since I last saw you?”

  “I don’t have access to the Internet where I am, so no, I do not know what you have been doing. I presume you are rich.” Zora waved her hand around the room.

  “After the fall of the USSR, I was able to keep the Institute’s best researchers from leaving Russia. We formed a company to see if we could make money as capitalistic researchers.” He grinned. “We succeeded. My company is private, not well known outside of the Russian government. It is called New Institute of Biochemical Manufacturing. Some get the joke, most do not.” He laughed, and lit a cigarette. “Do you mind?”

  “I do mind.” She waved the smoke away from her. “If you must smoke, let’s go outside.” She got up from the table and plodded to the terrace, conscious that her shabby pantsuit exhibited her poverty.

  When she turned, he was watching her. “Zora, you look good. Not a day older than the last time I saw you when I took you to the airport.” He walked to the railing of the terrace.

  Zora snorted. She was short, with a round face and body, and stubby legs. Her years in the jungle had turned her skin leathery, and because of the interminable heat, she kept her gray wiry hair short. She looked
like what she was—a Russian peasant. “Anton, please.”

  He puffed on his cigarette, and said, “I am richer than I could have ever imagined. New Institute has done very well in the pharmaceutical world. We use the results of our old research—the good research, not the lethal,” he said, laughing, “and apply those results to new problems, such as how to apply polio immunizations from the air. I do much work for the government.” Anton spread his arms wide. “I am a powerful man,” he bellowed, competing with the sounds of the ocean below them.

  “Did you bring me here to brag? You promised me a donation.”

  “Oh, I will make a donation, as I promised you when I called, but first I need your specific expertise,” he said, his arms on the railing.

  Zora joined him at the railing, leaned her back on it, and looked up at the castle’s three towers. “Anton, what expertise could I possibly have that would be of use to you? I patch up broken bones, stitch wounds, and deliver babies. I try to keep up with research on infectious diseases, but whatever expertise I had is obsolete now. You know that.”

  Anton was silent for a moment. “How many lives could you save with one hundred million dollars?”

  She felt irritated now, like a dog whose owner kept the toy just out of reach. “Don’t play with me, Anton.”

  “Zora, I am not playing. If you help me with my problem, I will donate all you need to your organization. No conditions.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and gave it to her.

  Zora unfolded the paper. It was a check written to HWA for an amount equivalent to twenty years of their current budget. Could Anton be serious? A hundred million was a significant sum, even for someone worth billions. This donation would not be without strings, but her mind immediately filled with visions of what HWA could do with this much money. She might even be able to hire private security to protect the clinic and villagers from the roving bands of Islamic terrorists called Boko Haram. She thought how terrified the inhabitants near the clinic were, and how helpless HWA was to protect them. All she had was an old pistol and thirty bullets. If Boko Haram attacked, the soldiers would murder the clinic workers and the adults, and the girls would be taken as sexual slaves, the boys as soldiers. She shuddered.

  “What do you want, Anton?”

  He resumed smoking his cigarette, gazing at the ocean below. “Do you remember the targeting work we did? How to distribute a disease so it looked natural?”

  “Of course I remember. Our government wanted us to target Americans. You also remember that when we told them it was impossible to give the plague to U.S. citizens without eventually infecting our citizens, they didn’t believe us.”

  That idea had been only one of many the politicians brought to the Institute. The rest of the scientists let Zora take the role of chief educator, as she dumbed down the scientific details such that the politicians understood the impossibility of their requests. Sometimes she was successful in dissuading them, sometimes not.

  “My company has been studying various ancient diseases.”

  She looked at him, Bunin silent while he lit another cigarette. “Why? Russia is out of the bioterrorism business, isn’t it?”

  He suddenly blurted, “If we can create a disease that will result in a thirty-five percent reduction in population in the Middle East, the Russian government will pay my company ten billion dollars. That is, if we make it look entirely natural.”

  Zora laughed. “Another impossible demand by ignorant politicians. Not much has changed, has it? Anyway, why would Russia do this?”

  She watched Anton try to control himself. She knew the clench of his jaw and hunching of his back presaged a tantrum. She had seen it many times in the laboratory. To her surprise, he spoke calmly.

  “Russia has been trying to influence the Middle East for years. It has been a farce. First, we went into Afghanistan, now we are trying to control Syria. The government is tired of living next to a mass of people that hate anyone who isn’t a certain kind of Muslim.”

  Anton stepped back from the railing, spread his hands and then clenched his right fist, the cigarette sticking out like a weapon, pointing it at her. “At the end of WWI, Russia had Constantinople in its hand, and the traitorous British yanked it away. We would have tamed that region. Now, the countries the English imbeciles created by drawing outlines on a map are going to destroy the rest of the world. Pakistan has nukes, and others will too, no matter that so-called treaty with Iran.”

  He leaned his face closer to her. “When thirty-five percent of the Middle East population is dead, Russia will march in. We will control the oil. We will make the Middle East Christian again. We will save this area from the barbarians who live there now.” He stepped back from her a few steps and shot the cuffs of his jacket. “And the rest of the world will thank us.”

  Zora leaned back against the railing, her hands gripping the rail, the hard metal pressing against her back. Anton’s words assaulted her, and even though he was now ten feet away, she felt that the force of his controlled anger might fling

  her over the metal barrier to the crashing surf below. Was he serious?

  Anton crushed his cigarette with his foot on the stone terrace. “Zora, I apologize for my explosion. I am frustrated. Russia has been working in the Middle East for years, trying to support leaders that will provide stability.” He paused.

  “We have failed. The area is corrupt, ruled by despots who hoard resources, and control by fear and intimidation. Terrorist groups are killing those who will not convert to Islam, and the governments of that area do nothing to stop them. The bombing of a Russian jet by the Islamists has finally spurred our government to act.”

  Zora waited for Anton’s breathing to slow, her own mind racing, thinking of how Boko Haram extremists were threatening Africa. She walked past him and returned inside, putting her head in her hands. She heard him come in and sit down opposite her.

  Zora lifted her head. “It’s not possible to do this without the world knowing it was Russia.”

  “The USSR and the United States have studied potential bioweapons for years. We know the lab each strain came from. Finding an unknown microbe is the answer. My researchers have been looking at various sources for an unknown microbe, like frozen mummies from Siberia. We didn’t find anything. Then I received a copy of a document found in a monastery in Russia. It’s a confession of a sort. The letter was from a Greek Orthodox monk who described how he had inserted diseased material into reliquaries after the Fourth Crusade.”

  “What? When Christians attacked Constantinople?”

  “Yes. After the crusaders sacked the city in 1203, they gathered all the reliquaries and took them to the Monastery of Pantocrator. Apparently, this monk poisoned many reliquaries right under the nose of the Crusaders, not only with blood, but also with skin from a dead cow, and scabs from what he called a pox victim.”

  That sounded like smallpox. Zora felt a tremor in her body.

  “I asked my scientists if reviving a microbe sealed into a reliquary, not exposed to the elements for eight hundred years, was even feasible. They initially said it was not, but we obtained a sealed reliquary from a Russian church, opened it in our secure lab, and one of the lab technicians found an intact piece of DNA.”

  “Why would you want to replicate a germ that old? If you want to commit genocide, you know there are better candidates.” In spite of herself, Zora began to feel engaged, as if she were back at the Biopreparat, debating the best way to annihilate the United States with germs.

  “I need something that will look entirely natural, like anthrax. We will stage the germ in an area where the Islamists have destroyed ancient remains and graves, and the resulting epidemic will be blamed on them. Spreading whatever we find, if we find something, is the problem. That is why I need you.”

  This story might be believed, she knew. Anthrax had lived in the open ground for at lea
st fifty years. How long could it last in a sealed container?

  He said, “I believe I am close to finding the reliquaries the monk referenced in his letter. Two years ago, archaeologists found codices in an underground city in eastern Turkey. They describe Christian relics the Byzantines used in their diplomatic efforts. Dr. Kemal Atay of the Istanbul Museum was leading the project. When his people were too slow in completing the translations of the parchments, he went to his uncle to seek help, a Russian Orthodox Patriarch who happens to be a friend of mine. Atay thought his uncle would have access to better experts in Ancient Greek.”

  He lit another cigarette and put the match in the silver sugar bowl.

  “Atay’s uncle sent me photographs of the parchment with the translations. He meant it as a joke, to show me that even a thousand years ago the idea of biological warfare was around. From the translations that Atay’s people did, the codices describe exactly which reliquaries the priest poisoned, and provide more details on the disease agent he put in each reliquary.”

  Anton began to play with the cream container on the table.

  “I discussed this potential opportunity with certain Russian representatives. That is when they made the offer. The government is serious. They want this cesspool of an area decimated, but it must look natural, not engineered.”

  Zora said, “Anton, Russia will be vilified for hundreds of years.”

  “I’m telling you, no one will know it was us. Reliquaries have the perfect contents to facilitate this research—blood, teeth, bone marrow, and saliva. We will culture whatever we find. The contagion will appear perfectly natural, an ancient scourge unearthed by the indiscriminate looting of archeological sites by terrorists.”