The Boy Who Glowed in the Dark (The Nadia Tesla Series Book 3)

by Orest Stelmach

  “And you didn’t see anyone?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Extraordinary.” Simeonovich sounded like an Englishman. Native Russians who spoke fluent English often did so with a British flair. That England was held in the highest cultural regard across the former Soviet Union undoubtedly contributed to this.

  He turned to his driver and spoke in rapid-fire Russian. He told him to inform the men in the other cars that there were two other interested parties. One was a group of Russians. Based on their actions in Japan, they were armed, trained, and serious. There was no reason to suspect they had any idea Nadia was in Ukraine. The second might be one or more men who favored the use of boomerangs. Their ethnic origin was unclear.

  The driver said, “Unclear but certain.”

  Simeonovich grunted in agreement.

  “What does that mean?” Nadia said.

  “Boomerangs are used to herd reindeer in Siberia,” Simeonovich said. “Your angel is most likely Siberian. Quite possibly a Yakut from the Yakutia Republic. They are great herders. Experts with the boomerang.”

  Nadia glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. “You’re from Siberia, too? Chukotka, wasn’t it?”

  Simeonovich crinkled his brow as though amused by her implication he might know the angel. “Yes. Chukotka is near Yakutia. I’m sure this man and I would have been practically neighbors, if it weren’t for the fact that Yakutia is the world’s largest subnational territory, and only slightly smaller than India.”

  “Point taken,” Nadia said. “Now tell me why you think I might not want you to take me to see Ksenia Melnik?”

  “Because she’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Robbery-homicide.”

  Nadia felt deflated. Her best lead gone. “That’s a bit coincidental, don’t you think?”

  He shrugged. “Who’s to say? Such acts of violence are not uncommon. A delivery man sees something valuable. A break-in follows. These criminals are not the smartest men in the library. They assume the woman is gone, but in fact she’s still there.”

  “Wait,” Nadia said. “She had a son. Bobby told me so. His name is—”

  “Denys. Denys Melnik. We’re going to go have a chat with him now.”

  Nadia checked her watch. “It’s only 5:20 a.m.”

  “He’s an early riser.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because we’re going to wake him up.”

  CHAPTER 30

  THEY DROVE TO Kyiv. A winding road revealed cobblestone streets, old mansions, and monuments. Nadia recognized Podil, the oldest part of Kyiv. She remembered her dinner at the River Palace, Simmy’s private club. The circumstances had been equally daunting. Bobby had been facing life in prison on a murder charge. Simmy had hired her to analyze a company for him and she couldn’t refuse. She’d needed the money. At the same time, it created an opportunity for her to go back to Chornobyl and unravel the mystery behind the murder charge. But as ominous as the prospect of Bobby at Rikers Island jail had been at the time, this was even worse. At least there was a rule of law in America, even in one of its more notorious jails. In Russia, anything could happen. There was no roll call for inmates in the morning. Bobby could vanish if the wrong people found out he was following Genesis II.

  They arrived at a Victorian home on a hilltop above the River Dnipro.

  “How old is he?” Nadia said.

  “Nineteen.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He’s going to inherit the equivalent of 210,000 dollars from his mother’s death, and her generous pension. He’s set for a few decades. He can live in her apartment and pursue his dream of making it to the PHL.”

  “PHL?”

  “Ukrainian Professional Hockey League,” Simmy said.

  Nadia’s head snapped toward him. “Hockey?”

  “Very popular in Ukraine and Russia. Thousands of boys play as children in hope of making the pros. I know your boy Bobby is an accomplished player. I wouldn’t be quick to draw any conclusions just because this kid plays amateur hockey.”

  “I wasn’t drawing any conclusions. Just noting the coincidence. Both boys hung around Arkady Shatan. Both play hockey.”

  Simmy shrugged.

  “What else?”

  “There’s no record of Denys Melnik being treated for radiation illness.”

  “You’re sure?” Nadia said.

  “Yes. The records have been computerized. One of my team analyzed them earlier this morning.”

  “Even if he wasn’t treated, he hung around the office, and he was his mother’s son. She could have talked. He might know more than he’s willing to share. Or, he might not be willing to share what he knows.”

  “He’ll share what he knows,” Simmy said. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  Simmy’s confidence buoyed Nadia’s spirits. For the first time since she’d met Bobby two years ago and endured a harrowing trip back to the States with him, she had a powerful, resourceful man at her side. Not that Johnny wasn’t resourceful. But Simmy was rich. There was resourcefulness, and then there were resources. There was no substitute for the latter when one needed to extract information and travel quickly across a continent.

  Nadia started to get out of the car, but Simmy pulled her back in.

  “My men will make sure he’s awake and dressed properly.” He winked. “They’ll even put a pot of coffee on. Then we can go inside in a civilized manner.”

  Ten minutes later they sat in a parlor facing a frazzled teenager in a t-shirt and warm-up pants. Denys sat in a dining room chair that had been placed in front of a sofa. Slippers covered his otherwise bare feet. That was interesting, Nadia thought, because it suggested a certain amount of finesse on the part of Simmy’s crew. Did the boy slip them on, or did they insist he sit before them with feet covered? He’d appeared more irritated than afraid when Nadia and Simmy walked in, at least until he saw the oligarch’s face. Then his expression turned to one of awe and disbelief.

  Simmy stretched his palm out toward the sofa. “May we sit down?”

  The boy nodded, jaw agape.

  Nadia and Simmy sat on the sofa. The two men who’d come in first stayed in the kitchen. The smell of coffee wafted into Nadia’s nostrils. She sniffed twice to make sure she wasn’t imagining it. She wasn’t. They really were making coffee.

  “Please accept our condolences on the loss of your mother,” Nadia said. “Sorry to disturb you so early in the morning, but we have some urgent questions we need to ask you.”

  “I told the cops everything I know,” Denys said. “Have you talked to them?”

  His eyes darted in Simmy’s direction. He swallowed as though he were nervous, leaving little doubt that he wasn’t speaking the truth. Nadia knew when someone was lying to her from years of interrogating financial executives.

  Obviously Nadia hadn’t spoken to the police. She prepared to give him a vague answer, one that would encourage him to re-hash everything he’d told them. But Simmy interrupted her.

  “I’ve talked to the cops,” he said.

  Nadia shot him a look of surprise.

  He gave her a stoic look in return, and smiled at Denys. “Let me tell you what they told me.”

  Simmy described the night of the burglary and murder. The most interesting part of the story was Denys’s insistence that he hid in his bedroom closet during the entire event. He told the cops he shut the door behind him, put his headphones on, cranked up the music, and didn’t hear a thing. Nadia knew from experience that the Kyiv police had more cases than they could investigate. It wasn’t surprising to her that they neither had the time nor the inclination to challenge his story. As she watched him try to stay impassive while Simmy spoke, Nadia strongly suspected he knew more than he’d told the cops. His breathing was too shallow, his pallor too s
tark. There was something else about his appearance that struck her as notable, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Was that accurate?” Simmy said, when he was done.

  “Pretty much,” Denys said.

  “Now tell us the rest,” Nadia said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tell us the rest,” Nadia said. “Tell us what you didn’t tell the police.”

  Alarm registered on Denys’s face.

  “You might make it in the PHL,” Simmy said, “but you’ll never make it as a poker player. Do you want some coffee?”

  One of the two men had poked his head in from the kitchen. He held a steaming pot of coffee in his hand.

  “No,” Denys said.

  “No, you won’t make it in the PHL?” Simmy said.

  The kid frowned. “No. I mean no I don’t want any coffee.”

  Simmy nodded at his man. “He’ll have some. Bring three cups.” He turned to the kid and dropped his chin for emphasis. “I have some connections in the PHL.”

  Denys laughed. “Yeah. That’s what the other guy said.”

  Simmy frowned. “Other guy?”

  “What other guy?” Nadia said.

  “The guy who said he knew Wayne Gretzky and pretended to be a scout.”

  “The Wayne Gretzky?” Nadia said.

  A wise-ass smile spread across Denys’s lips. “Is there another?”

  Simmy cleared his throat just a touch slower than one normally might have for emphasis. But when he spoke his tone was relaxed, his pitch even. “Please watch your manners, son.”

  Denys zipped his lips and turned eggplant. Evidently he realized that pissing off an oligarch wasn’t conducive to rapid career enhancement.

  “This man who pretended to be a scout . . . he asked you the same questions?” Nadia said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What was his name?” Nadia said.

  “He said his name was Max Karl. But when I asked around, no one’s ever heard of a scout by that name.”

  “Max Karl,” Nadia said, speaking to herself but out loud. “Karl Max. Karl Marx.”

  “What did this imposter look like?” Simmy said. “Other than a communist.” Simmy glanced at Nadia with an amused look. “Obviously he must be a communist.”

  Denys described a man most Americans would have considered to have Eskimo features. That was a bogus word used by Americans to describe the Inuit and Yupik people of the polar region in Alaska and Siberia. Nadia knew this from her unplanned trip to Alaska last year. Given this man had spoken Russian, he was most likely Siberian.

  Nadia glanced at Simmy. She knew they were both thinking the same thing.

  The boomerang. Siberian reindeer herders used boomerangs. The man who’d thrown the boomerang and saved her was the same man who’d pretended to be a hockey scout. The angel had paid Denys a visit.

  “And what did you tell him?” Nadia said.

  Denys told them that after he heard the men come into the apartment, he hid in the closet without his headphones. He heard cajoling, shouting, and muffled voices. He only heard one sentence clearly. It was followed by the sound of a muted gunshot.

  Nadia repeated what he’d heard. “‘You’ll find what you’re looking for in Fukushima, Japan.’ That’s what your mother said?”

  “Yes.”

  That would explain how the angel had known to go to Fukushima, but it didn’t account for his timely arrival right when Nadia needed him to be there. Nor did it explain his motives. Nadia got so caught up in this discovery it took her a minute to realize that Denys Melnik did not appear to be grieving. There were no signs of tearstains on his cheeks. No hint of a sleepless night.

  “We’re sorry to disturb you at such a difficult time,” Nadia said. “I’m sure you’re still hurting.”

  Denys shrugged. “Yeah, sure. She was my mother, right?” He glanced at Simmy again and wet his lips. “But life goes on. Don’t worry about it. Ask away.”

  Once again Nadia had the strange sensation that she was missing something. Something right in front of her nose. “What else did you tell the other guy?” she said.

  Denys hesitated. Glanced at Simmy.

  Simmy didn’t hesitate. He knew a transaction was in the works. “I really do have connections in the hockey world.” Simmy pulled out a business card and handed it to him. “And this is my real name. And my word is good.”

  Denys told them about a photograph his mother had once shown him in an antique book. Nadia asked him if they could have a look at the book. He nodded at an empty bookcase. The men had stolen her collectible books, presumably to make the murder look like a robbery. Denys said the photo depicted six men and one woman in the Siberian mountains. They were called the Zaroff Seven and they wore a certain type of gold ring. One of the men who’d killed his mother had been wearing such a ring. Denys had seen it through the crack in the door to his room before hiding in his closet.

  Nadia’s blood pressure rose. She and her brother had an encounter with two members of the Zaroff Seven in Chornobyl’s Zone of Exclusion a month ago, when she’d gone to Ukraine to investigate the backstory behind the murder charge against Bobby in New York. They’d tried to kill her, but ended up dying in a fire themselves. Those men had worn similar rings.

  Simmy sat stoic through the discussion of the Zaroff Seven. She wondered how much he knew about them, if he was intimately familiar with their story. Now the Zaroff Seven knew about the formula. What else could they have been looking for in Japan if not Genesis II? If they knew about the formula, they knew about Bobby.

  The men brought a tray of coffee and sugar cookies. Simmy rubbed his hands with delight. Twelve hours ago she’d been in Japan. Now two polite men who looked as though they could rip a man’s head off with their bare hands, while apologizing with the utmost decorum for doing so, were serving her coffee in a kid’s house. A kid whose mother had just been murdered. And Simmy was completely unaffected by what was happening around him.

  He munched on a cookie and sipped his coffee. Glanced at Nadia and tapped his watch. “I know,” he said. “We better take the cookies to go.”

  Simmy extended his hand to Denys. As the kid shook it, Nadia followed the trail of red from his cheeks to his Adam’s apple. And then she saw it. The object that had stirred her senses. She must have caught a glimpse of it a few times but remained so focused on extracting the necessary information from Denys that it had escaped her attention.

  A thin gold necklace hung around his neck. A bump protruded beneath his v-neck t-shirt. When he leaned over to shake Simmy’s hand, the object attached to the necklace popped in and out of sight.

  It was a gold locket, identical to the one Bobby’s father had given him on his deathbed, the one that contained half the formula for a radiation countermeasure.

  As soon as she realized what it was, Nadia knew she could not and would not leave the apartment without it.

  CHAPTER 31

  BOBBY CLOSED HIS eyes and willed the stinky man with the baritone voice to go away. It was a silly thought, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He was physically and emotionally exhausted. He couldn’t handle any more problems. He wanted to be left alone.

  But the man kept kicking the leg of his chair, pushing Bobby toward the window, inch by inch. The man had been sitting at a long table with eleven other Russians. Bobby had heard them toast the Japanese carmakers so he suspected they were the car dealers. This man was one of them.

  Two possibilities dawned on Bobby. First, the man was mistaken. Second, he knew Bobby’s true identity, and they’d met in Ukraine. If the latter was the case, there was only one place where they could have met. Used car dealers were scavengers, like the ones who had once foraged the vehicle graveyards of Chornobyl for spare parts. Either way he wasn’t going to get away pretending to be asleep.

  The car dealer boo
ted his chair again. The force of the kick vibrated through Bobby’s body.

  “Turn around and answer me, boy,” he said. “Don’t make me ask you again.”

  Bobby rose to his feet, pretended to cower against the wall, and faced the car dealer. Bobby’s hat covered his shorn ears. His comfort mask hid his nose and lips. He recognized the car dealer as soon as he saw him. Three years had passed since he’d last sold him some engine parts from an ambulance buried deep in Chornobyl’s mechanical graveyard. He hadn’t aged well. He’d lost ten pounds of muscle mass and gained twice that amount around his waist. His sunken cheeks suggested his drinking and smoking were quickly sucking all the life out of him.

  The car dealer was the scavenger of scavengers. He relied on others to do the dirty work and profited by knowing the end buyers. Getting rid of him would require some effort and guile, otherwise Bobby would be exposed as a runaway from Ukraine living under an assumed identity. With that realization, a rush of adrenaline stiffened Bobby’s nerves. For the first time in over twenty-four hours, he was awake and alert.

  “Why are you kicking me?” he said in English. “Who are you and what do you want from me?”

  The car dealer reeked of nicotine and body odor. He narrowed his eyes as though he couldn’t believe whom he was seeing. A flicker of recognition flashed in his face.

  “Take that mask off.” Still speaking Russian.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Take it off.”

  “What are you saying? I don’t speak Russian. English. Only English.”

  The car dealer reached out to grab the mask.

  Bobby stepped back to the window. “Leave me alone or I’ll scream for help. I will.”

  “Take that mask off or I’m going to rip that hat off your head.”

  Bobby enunciated slowly as though he were exasperated with their supposed language barrier. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I’m going to rip that hat off your head so your disgusting half-ears are there for everyone to see. And then everyone will see you for the human scum that you are, and whatever con you have going will be over before you can collect.”