Ten minutes later, Farrell had arranged everything. After giving Jason a code to tell Maze, he told him to wait. The FBI would return his computers and more importantly, hers, with no information lost. A half hour after the information exchange began Farrell called back and checked with Jason on speaker phone.
“Has your friend gotten the location?” he wanted to know, and motioned for Harry to hand him the pad and pencil that sat on his night table. He grabbed the pencil and laboriously printed out the address. “You’re sure of this?” His voice sounded urgent.
“She’s sure,” his friend’s voice come over the line. “Maze got the address, no sweat.”
“Good,” Farrell responded. “Sit tight, kid, and all will be well.”
Well, at least I’m not the only being called kid, Harry thought.
After ringing off, Farrell twisted his body around, giving a slight grunt of pain as he did so, and handed over the paper. “This is the address, kid. Go to the airport now. It’s late, so there won’t be any traffic. The driver is waiting for you downstairs. Good luck.”
Slowly, he lay back on the bed, groaning as he did so. “Wish I could go with you,” he murmured.
Anastasia touched him briefly on the shoulder as she went to the door. “We’ll be back soon.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Downstairs, the driver, a short, stocky unsmiling man, waited for them outside a black sedan with the motor running. If he felt any shock over Anastasia’s appearance, he didn’t show it. Getting in, he immediately took off, and soon they were on the highway.
Farrell had been wrong about the traffic, though. He hadn’t figured on the police presence, as the word on Harry and Anastasia’s innocence hadn’t been passed. This...might be trouble. “What are you going to do?” Harry asked.
Up ahead, a police officer was waving a flashlight and directing traffic. “Keep your mouth shut,” the agent ordered. “Crouch down and hide your heads. I’ll handle this.”
Moving into one of the stop-and-check spaces, the agent opened his window, flashed the badge, and said that he had clearance. “I’ve got a lead on the escapees’ whereabouts.”
Waving him onwards, the agent roared off down the highway, and then slowed down. “What’s going on?” Harry said.
“Accident,” the agent grunted. He looked at his watch. “I can take an off-ramp and use a different route.” Cutting over to the off-ramp, he moved into another lane and sped up.
Harry glanced at the sky, which was now dark, and wondered if the plane and authorization to Russia would come through. It all seemed perfect—on paper. Still, paper theories and real life rarely coincided...
Anastasia suddenly sat up in her seat. “What...what’s that up ahead?”
It was Lyudmila, standing in the center of the highway. Although it was dark and she had dark fur, her white teeth gleamed, as did her eyes, a brilliant yellow full of rage and vengeance.
The agent pulled out his pistol and fired, but she leapt aside, twisting her body sharply this way and that to avoid the bullets. As they sped past, she let out a high, shrill whistle.
“What in the hell?” the agent yelled, his cool demeanor gone. Keeping one hand on the wheel, with the other he quickly ejected the spent clip in his pistol and shoved in a fresh one. “What in the hell was that?”
“The enemy,” Anastasia said, tensing for action. “She must have tracked us here.”
Tracking or no, they had another problem, and Harry noticed it sat pawing the road dead ahead. It was Piotr, gearing himself up for a charge. The driver also saw him, sped up even faster by stomping his foot on the pedal, and maintained his collision course with the charging rhino-boar. “Shoot him!” Harry yelled out.
Pulling out his pistol, the agent leaned out the window and fired once, twice, and then again, but while the bullets entered the rampaging Piotr’s body, they didn’t slow him down for an instant.
With a feeling of inevitability settling over him, Harry grabbed Anastasia and they braced for the impact. It came as no surprise when it happened. He saw the creature smash into the car, felt the shock, heard the awful rending sound of metal being torn and crushed and mangled, and then knew nothing more.
Chapter Twelve: Showdown
When knocked out, the victim is supposed to enter a world of darkness with no movement or sensation at first, although dreams sometimes intrude. Harry’s state of unconsciousness began with a series of flashing lights and pain from an unspecified source. He felt someone lift him and toss him onto a hard surface. Whatever he’d been thrown into, it was moving, and moving fast.
Coming to for the briefest of moments, he heard the sound of the wind roaring in his ears. Movement, too—he was moving, or rather, something was moving, and he was in it.
The loud, droning sound of engines filled his ears...this had to be a cargo plane. He turned his head to the right. Wooden crates, boxes, and duffel bags filled his immediate point of view. They all had Russian writing on them. Great, he was on a transport plane, and in a macabre moment, he wondered if this plane was safe. Russian commercial air service had one of the worst safety records in the world.
Moment of grim humor over, he twisted his head to the left, and his girlfriend’s prostrate body lay there limp and unresponsive. “Anastasia, are you okay?” he whispered, trying to fight down a wave of nausea and pain. She didn’t answer, and then the face of Lyudmila got in the way. “Where am...?” he started to say.
“He’s coming around,” she said and motioned to someone.
Another voice, rough, heavy, with an accent, took over. It didn’t take a genius to know who was talking. “I see to that.”
A heavy fist descended on his temple, stars flashed, and then Harry descended back into the well of darkness. His last thought before the blackness took over was that he wanted to be the one—for once—to do the knocking out.
Hours later—he figured the time it took from New York to Russia to be roughly twelve hours—Harry woke up and saw a tarmac. On one side, he saw a forest, sparsely treed and covered in snow. On the other lay a vast network of ruined structures, a massive factory complex of pipes, scattered rocks and brick and metal. Every building left standing sported rusted white pipes. They looked entirely abandoned and in a severe state of disrepair.
“Welcome to the Ukraine, Chernobyl,” Lyudmila told him, and added, entirely without irony, “Welcome to my world.”
Her rough hand grasped his shoulder and propelled him through the cabin and down the steps to the concrete. He tripped on the third step from the bottom and sprawled into a light coating of snow. It was cold, with a harsh wind whipping around, and he shivered.
Piotr walked down the stairs with Anastasia slung over his shoulder. “My head still hurt,” he announced in the direction of his girlfriend. “My body hurt, too. I must see Grushenko. He will help me, yes? Doctor will come soon?”
“Soon, my darling, soon,” she reassured him, caressing his features with her hand. He nodded and stood motionless, awaiting orders. Lyudmila swiveled her gaze to Harry and asked, “What do you think?”
What could he think? From what he’d read in the papers and on the Internet, this had been the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power. Thousands had been exposed to the radiation from the ruptured reactor, along with contamination to the water supply. The total number of thyroid cancer cases in and around this area was expected to reach at least five thousand by year’s end, if not more. “The place looks deserted,” was all he could get out at first.
A mild hmmphing sound came from his female captor. “It is,” she said. “We are near Pripyat, which is close to the northern border of Belarus. After the disaster almost thirty years ago, the entire town was evacuated, although not right away. Many people got sick, many died...” she spoke in a monotone... “And many more will most likely die. This is the legacy of the old government before glasnost.”
Harry said nothing. He felt a massive wave of pity as he stood in this ruin
ed, sick, and twisted version of what had once been a thriving industrial area. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people had died. More would probably die of radiation poisoning in the future. Was this what Grushenko’s research had been for? If the Russians knew, if this Grushenko character was a scientist, then why hadn’t he worked on a cure?
It wouldn’t do any good to ask Lyudmila any of those questions. Either she didn’t know or she didn’t care. Still, he did have something he needed to ask. “Is any radiation still here?”
Lyudmila shook her head. “If you are wondering are there any health risks? Then essentially the answer is no. Unless you drink the water or eat the food, and I assure you, that there will be no food or water given to you. I was told that the exclusion zone was thirty kilometers, although that has been expanded. While there is still some radioactive waste around, my physiology is immune to it. As for you, you will not be here long enough to worry about it. Neither will your whore of a girlfriend.”
This thing was really beginning to bother him, her and her supposed superiority. “Go to hell,” he said defiantly.
She seemed to find his sudden burst of courage amusing as she gave him a smirk and then began to chuckle. The chuckle soon turned into a bout of full-scale laughter, but only she seemed to find his attitude amusing. Piotr stared stupidly and Harry said nothing at all. Abruptly, Lyudmila’s good humor stopped and she snapped her fingers. “Move,” she commanded, and they set off.
Walking through the silent air, Harry felt as if the ghosts of Chernobyl were talking to him. Whispers of people begging for help. Radiation—burned individuals, mothers, fathers and children, pleading for someone to come to their aid. Their silent cries asked why their own government had abandoned them.
Imagination—it had to be his imagination. What wasn’t imagination, though, was the devastation of the area, the isolation, and the utter sense of hopelessness as well as helplessness that this place held as its legacy.
They kept walking through the empty area, and neither Lyudmila nor Piotr said a word until they reached a relatively undamaged building. Dirty white, it had five floors, and while every single window had been broken, this one sported a different look. Relatively new panes of steel lined the windows, sealing off all the holes.
As for the rest of the immediate outside area, glass and shards of graphite and smashed concrete littered the ground. Lyudmila ordered him to halt. “Turn around,” she said with an evil grin. Harry knew what was coming next, steeled his nerve, and spun around. A massive right paw greeted him.
Waking up later on, he found himself in a cell. Broken floor, a shattered ceramic toilet, four walls and an iron door comprised his new home. Russian lettering was on the wall. There was no window, and the door was solid iron with no peephole. A tiny vent on the ceiling hissed out warm air. The warmth inside the enclosure made the smell of blood, feces and urine, and other odors, none of which was pleasant, much more intense.
Where had they taken Anastasia? Perhaps this was the laboratory—or a jail. Getting to his feet, he moved stiffly and painfully at first, but he pushed the pain to the back of his mind. Pacing back and forth, he knew that they’d come for him soon, and then maybe he’d get some answers.
In a flash of sudden fear, he also knew what would happen after that, and while he didn’t relish dying, he steeled his nerve. Death was never a pleasant prospect, but without his girlfriend, then life wasn’t really worth living.
The sounds of footsteps approaching made him turn around. With a creak of its hinges, the door opened, and Lyudmila stood there, alone and unarmed. “Are you feeling more awake now? So sorry for Piotr hitting you, but it was necessary.”
In a sudden switch in character, she threw up her arms as if trying to excuse her compatriot’s demented behavior. “He is so stupid! I tell him, not the head. The head is the most important place. But does he listen? Nyet, he is without brains.”
She rambled on in Russian and then motioned for him to follow her. Her character then switched back to its usual imperious version. “We are going to have a meeting now. Come with me. Please do not try to fight. I am twice as strong as you are and much faster. Your girlfriend is well, by the way. See, I did not call her a whore this time.”
Letting her insult pass, Harry demanded, “Where is she?”
A raspy and unpleasant chuckle came from his captor. “You are not one to ask questions. We ask questions and you answer. Come.”
She led him down a hallway. It was heated, but that didn’t take away his sense of discomfort or fear. Harry had landed in the lair of the enemy, and they were not the welcoming type. “Is this a hospital?” he asked.
“You are close,” she said. “This used to be a mental hospital.”
Harry forced himself to smile. “It’s missing two of its inmates,” he commented, and for his reward, he received a sharp smack on his cheek.
“I will enjoy killing you later on,” she said in a voice laden with menace, and pointed ahead. They went through a series of corridors with dim yellow bulbs flickering overhead. After taking three flights of stairs to the very bottom of the structure, she stopped outside another heavy iron door. “You go in there. You have questions, da? Your questions will be answered.”
Harry had half a mind to tell her to stuff herself and her so-called superior, arrogant attitude, but he didn’t think she’d appreciate it, and he also didn’t feel like getting smacked again. She opened the door and dutifully he entered, expecting to see an army of other transgenic monsters the like of Piotr or Ivan.
Instead, he saw only a tall and spindly man of indeterminate age with a shock of blond hair and a narrow, pinched sallow face sitting down in front of a laptop computer. He was smoking a cigarette, an inch of ash hanging from the tip. “You’re Grushenko?” Harry asked.
“I am,” the man answered, stubbing his cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray. “And you are Harry Goldman,” he added, getting up from his position and offering a somewhat strained smile of tobacco stained teeth. “We finally meet. My predecessor told me much about you and your father’s work.”
He spoke in almost perfect unaccented English, and had a low, quiet voice. Quiet or not, this man was very, very dangerous. He was the one who had created monsters. He had created death.
As for predecessor, he meant Nurmelev. “I suppose you were close friends,” Harry said, keeping his sarcasm to a minimum. “You guys room together?”
The man shook his head, grabbed another cigarette from a crumpled pack on the desk and lit up. Blowing out a plume of smoke, he said, “To be honest, Pavel and I did not meet very often, and we were not that close. Each of us lived in different areas of the country, and our communications were monitored by our superiors. Imagine that,” he stated in a most ironic tone, “Working for Russia and being monitored.”
“It’s your system.”
Grushenko nodded. “So it is. At any rate, Nurmelev and I exchanged information in person only a few times, but he was most enthusiastic about what transgenic DNA research could do. I am just as passionate about it.”
His hands fluttered a moment and he delicately balanced the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray before giving a slight bow. “Forgive my poor manners, please. I did not properly introduce myself. My full name is Anatoly Grigorevich Grushenko. I am also a doctor and a researcher. Welcome.”
“Why’d you make your hideout here?”
Grushenko offered a wintry smile. “This is Chernobyl, young Goldman. It is the perfect place in which to conduct experiments of...” he hesitated and then finished off...”This nature. The area, as you no doubt know, was abandoned years ago. My backers, men who believe in my vision, pulled the necessary strings. They supplied the materials which I use for my research.”
Nurmelev had mentioned ex-KGB, Spetznatz, rich industrialists and more. Perhaps even politicians were involved. “Did the politicians help you out, too?” Harry asked.
Grushenko offered a tiny shrug as if to say good business was w
here one found it. “There are many people who believe in what I do,” he finally said. “Sadly, though, there are many who do not, chiefly the government. One would think that they would support such a move, but politicians do not think beyond their constituencies or getting re-elected.”
“How decent of them,” Harry said, and this time he didn’t deign to hide his sarcasm. Of all places in such a large country, why did they end up here? He put the question to Grushenko.
The older man smoked the remainder of his cigarette before answering. “This is a place the authorities would be least likely to look. I live here year round. This place is shielded from radioactivity, never fear, and when one performs experiments, it is of little concern where they are done. While I apologize for the lack of beauty, science does not always have to be beautiful. It merely has to be effective.”
Suddenly, Harry’s stomach began to churn. This man had created Lyudmila, Piotr, and God knew how many more warped versions of people. “I suppose you’re going to tell me about the nobility of using science, aren’t you?” he asked.
His question earned him a laugh, but like the smile, it had no warmth in it. “No, I am a very practical man. I believe in using science to further one’s own ends, and I will do anything to achieve it. Please to sit down.”
He waved his hand to an old and rather unsteady looking chair. Harry gingerly took a seat, and Grushenko pulled his chair over to face him. “I will tell you about this place and what we are doing. I am telling you as you will never leave, and neither will your woman friend. But it is important to know why you are here.”
He leaned back, a meditative look on his face. “Although I never met your father, I knew from various reports on him that he was a pioneer in the field of transgenic research. Even though he confined his work to fruits and vegetables, it was nevertheless of prime importance. He showed that transposing genes was a simple and easy process. He also showed that they could be manipulated for multiple purposes. My predecessor knew of your father’s work.”
Rise of the Transgenics Page 19